Is it just me? – Anger in the Anthropocene

Every day, new horrors. And you can choose not to read things you can do nothing about. But then you wouldn’t read much would you? (1) You’d disappear into reading all the Shakespeare you never read/saw or read/saw but have completely forgotten because you’re older than Methuselah. To choose an example entirely at random.

Every day, new horrors. A livestreamed (livescreamed?) genocide in Palestine. A livestreamed creation of the infrastructure of actual fascism in the United States (and nobody mentions that defeating Hitler and those millions and millions who loved him required 26 million dead Soviet citizens, and the industrial might of the United States) and a deathstreamed litany of over-heating the Mediterranean and algal blooms in South Australia.

Besides terror and despair, I feel … anger (2). Yes, anger (3)

Actually, I am going to drag that second one up from the footnotes because a) it matters b) who reads footnotes anyhows?

“Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”

The beauty (from its perspective) of our system is that we are in – as someone I used to have time for called it – ‘agentic deadlock’, meaning if you blame governments, they say “talk to the corporations” and if you blame corporations they say “talk to the governments.” And if you blame civil society they say “blame governments and corporations.”

Mostly, I feel anger at the people I went to school and university with. Not, for the most part, individuals (though a couple, yes), but the TYPE of people they are.

They are not terribly bright, not terribly reflective – that is not rewarded, and is actively selected against. They think they are terribly bright, terribly practical. They have learnt the price of everything and the value of nothing, and anything that can’t be reduced to a number on a spreadsheet does not, in their final analysis, matter. They have contempt for anyone who has not made the same adjustments (they don’t like the word compromises) as them, and think of them as dreamers as losers, but never as people with principles and backbones.

And they have doomed our species – albeit hairless murder apes with opposable thumbs and two millimetres of cerebral cortex – along with almost all the other species, to, well, likely extinction.

It didn’t need to be like this. If “they” had taken the “greenhouse effect” seriously in the late 1980s, then it might have been possible to flatten the emissions curve. Annual reductions of carbon dioxide emissions of 1 per cent per year would have been doable. Yes, the low-hanging fruit would have been plucked, but in the time we were doing that, we could have been tackling the more obdurate issues. Energy efficiency, renewable energy, technology transfer – these didn’t HAVE to be empty words. Instead, we went with The Market Will Provide, Technology Will Provide and anyone who thinks otherwise is a luddite who doesn’t realise the Soviet Union has collapsed and they should get with the program of Progress.

And of course, every accusation a confession/when you point a finger you point three back at yourself.

We didn’t try hard enough, smart enough. We didn’t build institutions (in both senses – organisations and norms) that could contend with the forces of complacency, inertia and, well, the oil-soaked flood that we call Western civilisation. We failed to understand and mitigate (hah) the inevitable frustrations and id-based undertow of social movements, we failed to compensate for the circular firing-squads, we failed to draw in wider civil society organisations. Perhaps that failure was inevitable, but we didn’t try hard or smart enough. As per Adric in Earthshock (obscure Doctor Who reference) “now we’ll never know if we were right.”

“We” – who came of age in the 1980s – will not suffer the worst of it. One way or another we will be gone before the shit properly hits the fan. I look at kids forty or fifty years younger than me, and I think about what they face (some of them know it. Others live in blissful ignorance, but that is not sustainable, and is not, indeed, going to be sustained).

Footnotes

(1) All these people who say it’s “not too late” and that I am a “defeatist doomer” can a) do one and b) explain to me why repeating the same failed tactics of the last (checks notes) 50 plus years will lead to different outcomes. Because I never hear all these people chiding about “giving up” proposing we do anything DIFFERENT, or even analysing past failures (beyond blaming powerful opponents like the oil companies and their cognitive goonsquad). I just hear and see them tussling for prominence within the old failed structures. To the Anthropocene (i.e. hell) with them.

(2) Yes I know the Buddhist line about hate (anger?) being like drinking poison and expecting the subject of your hate/anger to be the one who dies.

(3) Yes, I also know the Aristotle line – “Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”