The first of my six essays are now published by Amazon as a book, entitled Everything and Nothing: Essays on Climate Change and Cultural Transformation.
The first of my six essays are now published by Amazon as a book, entitled Everything and Nothing: Essays on Climate Change and Cultural Transformation.
‘Climate Change and the Perennial Spirit’, is the eighteenth and final chapter of this book, The Timeless Axis: climate change and cultural transformation, and is now posted here. I hope also to follow it by publishing the actual book.
When studying English Civil War tracts years ago as a young research student in the British Museum reading-room in London, where Marx wrote Das Kapital, I used to marvel at the extent of the library’s vast collection of books. But I would also often think about its destruction - and all the knowledge it embodied - in the event of a nuclear holocaust. At that time the Cold War dominated international affairs and nuclear war, we knew, was tantamount to “omnicide” - the annihilation of all life. How did one make sense of this, I wondered: that the several millennia of human history mirrored on the Library’s shelves - the apparent pinnacle, as I then saw it, of four and a half billion years of the Earth’s evolution - could be obliterated in a matter of hours. It was beyond comprehension - though to the millenarian movements I was studying it might have been no surprise.
We have lived with the possibility of annihilation by nuclear war for half a century. The development of the atom bomb was no accident but a logical consequence of our atomising scientific culture. A nuclear holocaust, the spectre of which points to the disintegration at the heart of our Western civilisation, would spell our instant, rather than our gradual, extinction, but, apart from drawing back from such a holocaust, it is debatable whether we have learnt what we need to from it. Perhaps this is because the “end of history”, whether it comes from nuclear war or environmental collapse, defies our ability to give it any meaning other than annihilation. The “nothingness” of the modern age is simply an empty nothingness, beyond our comprehension or imagination.
The Sixth Extinction is the title of a book published in 1995 by the paleo- anthropologist, Richard Leakey and the award-winning science writer, Roger Lewin. They subtitled their book, Biodiversity and its Survival. They pointed out that over the last 530 million years there have been five mass extinctions of species, the fourth 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared. Their book was at once a celebration of the biodiversity of animal and plant life on our planet – Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful” – and a severe warning, backed up by analysis of the science, that we may now be on the verge of a sixth extinction, caused this time, not by an asteroid collision, but by ourselves. Human beings, they contended – “with their relentless expansion and limitless appetites” – are now able to exert as much influence on life around the world as the calamity that caused the last great extinction.
Eschatology is the study of last things. It is where myth and history intersect. At a mythical level the tension is between cosmic order and chaos. Chaos has come to be interpreted by us as disorder but, as “the primeval void”, it is thought to be the very ground of being, the formlessness out of which form emerges, the primordial source of order rather than its opposite. At an historical level the mythical processes of death and rebirth are located in particular events, whether geological or human - geological as the various mass extinctions that have punctuated the Earth’s four billion-year history, human as the collapse and rebirth of civilisations.
Europe may have considered itself enlightened in 1900 but the outbreak of war fourteen years later soon dispelled that illusion. The 20th century that followed saw death on an unimaginable scale, so well-developed was the technology for killing and so savage were the political and economic conflicts. One recent historian described it as “the Age of Hatred”, a continual war that raged – in hot and cold forms - for 100 years. Yet though people became well acquainted with death in numerical terms they became estranged from it in any meaningful sense...
Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920. There were two other significant texts on death published in that decade. The more well-known one was the famous chapter on “Being-Towards -Death” in Heidegger’s great work of existential philosophy, Being and Time. Heidegger, regarded by many, not without controversy, as the pre-eminent philosopher of the modern age, opens Being and Time with a quotation - in Greek - from Plato’s The Sophist…
Montaigne held - following the ancients – that to philosophise is to learn how to die. But, as some of our greatest poets testify, our fear of death often gets the better of us. It famously terrified Leo Tolstoy. After finishing War and Peace he was on his way to look at a new home he wanted to buy with the proceeds from his novel. Putting up one evening in an inn in a place called Arzamas he had a nightmare that night in which he was visited by the spirit of death.
In his book, Life Ascending, the biochemist and popular science writer, Nick Lane, set out what for him are ‘the ten great inventions of evolution’. These begin with 1 the origin of life, the emergence of DNA, photosynthesis, and the complex cell, continue with the development of sex, movement, sight, and hot blood, and conclude with the inventions of consciousness and death.
In 1965 the Japanese philosopher, Nishitani Keiji, wrote an article, entitled “Science and Zen”, for the Asian journal, The Eastern Buddhist. In his article he suggested that modern science, in excluding teleology from the natural world, had “dealt a fatal blow to the whole of the teleological world view, which leads from the “life” of organic beings in the natural world, to the “soul” and ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ of man, and finally to the ‘divine or God’’’. In Nishitani’s view science had destroyed the old chain of being which gave pattern and coherence to the universe and had put nothing in its place.
The French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, wrote that Picasso, as a foremost artistic exemplar of modernity, “aggressively interrogated the universe”. Commenting on Apollinaire’s view the cultural historian, Peter Conrad, adds: “The universe has come to expect such testing inquisitions; it is regularly taken apart and pieced together in a revised form by its human inventors”. “Interrogating the universe” 1 might equally be the watchword of modern science.
Modern science has helped us to see how extraordinarily beautiful and infinitely complex the natural world is. But our knowledge of ourselves as a natural part of that world has not kept up with our scientific advances. We struggle to understand how we fit in. We may try to reach something in our selves beyond our merely “human nature’’ but see how too often we fall short.
It may seem strange, given the history of violence in the modern world, the extent of oppression and social injustice worldwide today, and the threat all species now face to their survival and well-being, that we think we could be happy. Freud was of the view that the happiness of the human race was not part of the plan for creation and declared famously that the most that could be hoped for was to convert “hysterical misery into common unhappiness”.
If ethics is, in Aristotle’s view, how we should live, and how we should live in the polis - “politics” - achieving “the Good” both personally and politically, then we seem to have lost our way ethically in this 21st century. This is the age of the Anthropocene when the Earth is warming alarmingly, the oceans are rising and species are becoming extinct at an unprecedented rate, constituting a climate and ecological emergency we are responsible for but seem to lack the will to turn around.
Like many of my generation when I was sixteen I had to choose what to study at school for ‘A’ level. It was difficult because I had enjoyed all subjects up till then. What I discovered was not only had I to choose only three but these three had to be selected according to one of two kinds of classification – arts or sciences. I was being inducted into what I only half realised were two separate cultural domains.
In the previous chapter I suggested ways in which science could begin to be self- critical and to recognise how, historically, it has come to pursue its progress independently of other value systems, in particular the human, ethical and aesthetic/ artistic domains. In short, how, in doing so, ideologically and practically, it has contributed to the split of “the two cultures”, as epitomised in the hostile debate between C.P. Snow and F. R. Leavis in Britain in the 1960s.
I have been watching over and again Professor Brian Cox’s inspired television series, “Wonders of the Universe”, transfixed, as we all are, by the revelations of current physics, chemistry and astronomy about the scale and simple, yet infinite complexity of the material universe. 1 I have always thought of the daytime sky as a roof which opens at night enabling us to see out, into the night sky, a mysterious and deep darkness which is also full of light.
In the previous chapter I referred to Shakespeare’s reference in Hamlet to art as “holding up the mirror to nature” and to Goethe’s understanding of the theory of mimesis, which is never merely imitation but points to something beyond appearance. In other words, through art, nature holds the mirror up to ourselves. Mirrors, in fact, have always held a fascination for us.
‘Climate change’, as I have tried to suggest throughout, is an umbrella term for the wider, existential crisis that we - and all life - are facing, as we enter the third decade of this 21st century. It includes, for instance, the physical planetary changes of biodiversity loss, deforestation, and ocean warming, which signal the mass extinction we are in the midst of, and responsible for. But it is also a crisis - and opportunity - for human consciousness.