This Pale Blue Speck
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Recessional RUDYARD KIPLING, 1897
There is no end of evidence to back up Aristotle’s claim that man is a social animal. The very essence of the human is sociality. We learn from each other, depend on each other, love each other, loathe each other. We emulate, kill one another, enslave one another, engross ourselves in one another. We are so damn social that we scarcely pay attention to anything that falls outside the sphere of human interaction. We’re far more interested in our neighbor than we are in the origins of the universe, or the astonishing life of plants, or the planetary migrations of birds. What matters to us is the human story. Anything else is hard to get worked up about. Even Nature, it seems, only matters in as much as it has become a picturesque backdrop for our social media feeds. Witness the explosion of popularity of undeveloped spaces ever since hashtag culture became a thing.
The French philosopher Jean-Clause Guise once famously quipped to a friend entreating him to enjoy the natural scenery on their drive off the Aegean coast of Turkey, “la nature n’est que le decor de notre tragedie”, “Nature is but the setting of our tragedy.”
Those of you who’ve ever seen an ancient Greek amphitheater know that this was literally the case for Greek tragedies. These open-air amphitheaters were built in the most spectacular natural settings, usually in full view of the sea and the surrounding mountains. The fact that nature remained an impassive backdrop to the human sufferings enacted on stage, no doubt added to the tragic effect of the performances.
By the same token, this would have been part of the consolation, too. Knowing that the decor was permanent. That it has been there before you, and would be there after you, more or less unchanged. In those days, people used to believe that the setting had little, if anything, to do with the pity and terrors of our dramas.
Many people still believe this. But it’s unclear how much longer we can go on deluding ourselves. It’s becoming obvious that our human tragedies are no longer confined to the stage of history. They’ve begun to convulse the decor itself. In fact, now that we’re approaching the denouement, it turns out that the setting was what the story was all about in the first place. Who would have ever thought so.
In his poetics Aristotle speaks of the moment of anagnorisis, of recognition, as the climactic turning point of classical tragedy. There is every reason to believe that in the history of our relations to the Earth, we are at such a turning point. The symptoms of our ecological ills are evident to everyone: infernal wildfires devouring huge swathes of wild lands, floods of biblical scale, acid rain, smog, mountains of garbage, beaches awash in sewage, mass extinctions, ozone depletion, toxic substances in our drinking water, virtually continuous famine along the southern fringe of the African Sahara.
Scientists have for decades been warning the world at large of a global scale biological event on the scale of COVID. Now they caution us of the almost certitude that another pandemic will happen-within our lifetimes. COVID was merely the first convulsive spasm of a dying biosphere in the form of the pandemic that shocked and, at least for a moment, crippled the human world. Humanity stood in awe as that briefest of respite afforded incredible scenes of wild animals so used to being fugitive breathing freely at last and being able to move about without the constant terror of man looming.
But the temptation to go “back to normal” is so great, so seemingly innocent that the very forces that have brought the natural world to such a precipitous state of decline are likely to try to spin back up and lure us back into catatonic complacency. At least until the next inevitable crisis hits.
Lost among the endless drone about global warming and climate change is the destabilizing of the delicately balanced, and rather exceptional, set of conditions that make human life -as well as other life as we know it-possible. We pay a lot of attention to the symptoms, but we don't pay enough attention to the underlying disease. The climate has always changed, and the earth has always adapted. But the post-industrial systems of capitalist exploitation and extraction that now stretch their arms around every corner of the globe -from the tropical forests of Borneo and Java to the tundras of the Yukon to the deserts of Mongolia-have led to a steady deterioration of the life support systems of the planet, resulting in a constant lowering of the Earth’s carrying capacity. The Earth has become sick. Most of us have seen firsthand the stark lessons of the pandemic: that those with underlying conditions are the most susceptible to extraneous shocks. This may well be the first time the Earth has had to deal with a change of climate under such compromised, degraded health.
As long as humanity, and in particular, I’m referring to the first world, especially America, continues on its trajectory of mass consumption, resource depletion, and habitat destruction, there is little to suggest that we aren’t simply risking the lives of our children and future generations in order to continue living the lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed. The ethics of this seem dubious at best, and scandalous at worst.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his “Critique of Pure Reason” introduces the idea of the categorical imperative as a criterion for judging your moral actions. Basically, what would happen if what I’m about to do, everyone were to do that thing?
If we materialize the idea that if all 8 billion of us enjoyed the average American lifestyle: in other words, if all 8 billion of us owned a car, had a fridge, heating, air conditioning, traveled in airplanes, received piles of junk mail, took vacations in desirable locations, ate hamburgers made of beef grown on pastures irrigated by rapidly depleting aquifers of groundwater, and shopped in sprawling shopping malls, or otherwise one-click delivered by an overworked, underpaid, disposable wage-laborer in a fossil fuel-burning, congestion-increasing vehicle from a network of vast, mega-warehouses that have popped up over the the husk of Middle America like mushrooms from a decaying deadfall.
In other words, even the things that we take for granted as not very excessive or extreme, we cannot universalize this standard of consumption around the planet. And therefore we have to also turn a little bit of light on ourselves, and ask ourselves whether what we take as almost a God-given right to a certain standard of life actually belongs to a kind of aristocratic first world class of people that can’t actually be opened up to the rest of the world, or even our own grandchildren.
We’ve come to a point that even the term “natural disaster” is a misnomer, because in many cases it's a social disaster which creates the conditions for a natural disaster. Nature has been drawn into the vortex of human action, and all of a sudden there comes this terrifying revelation: that its downfall is a distinct possibility. All of a sudden the storyline has shifted. And we’re in an altogether different drama now. One where the setting threatens to collapse and bury the stage in a pile of rubble. Le decor de notre tragedie is turning into la tragedie de notre decor.