This is certainly not how we had imagined things working out. The ancient Greek poet and playwright Sophocles (497–405 BCE) wrote a paean to the extraordinary capacity of humans to alter nature for the benefit of all its members. The poem praises our technological transformation of the “holy and inexhaustible” Earth, exulting in our wise and beneficent sway over everything from “lightboned birds” to the “sultry mountain bull” (Sophocles, 2007, 909). This sort of talk is fairly typical of our early self-conception as nature’s benevolent monarchs, but it endures even today.
Between the paean and the report lies some 2,500 years of continuous economic development, which towards the end morphed into breakneck hyper-industrial expansion powered by fossil fuels. Both documents express a form of shock, but shock can come in at least two varieties. The first is what we call wonder. It’s a mostly positive reaction to something strange or unexpected. The second is bewilderment, something scarier or at least less sure of its footing. Sophocles is expressing wonder, while the IPBES, in my view, is expressing bewilderment. Taken together, then, Sophocles (as well as the Book of Genesis) and the IPBES describe the historical arc of our relation to the non-human world over the last few millennia, an arc travelling from excitement to fear, wonder to bewilderment.
This book begins with a reflection on the bewilderment so many of us are experiencing because of climate change. Sophocles’ poem rings out with confidence in the human enterprise. Although it shows up relatively late in the Holocene, this is the cocksure self-assessment of humanity typical of that geological epoch. Since that time, an interglacial period beginning roughly 12,000 years ago, we humans have made a secure home for ourselves in an otherwise indifferent world, and we have done this by subduing the rest of the biosphere. In the process, we have made the world a familiar place.
By contrast, the IPBES report is a lament for a lost home. And not just any home, but our only home, the very same home identified in the poem. We have fouled our own nest so thoroughly that only what Watson calls “fundamental, structural change” can now save it. This is how I’m going to talk about bewilderment in this chapter. It is the feeling of unfamiliarity where we expect familiarity, the sense of homelessness where there should be a home, the idea that our own cleverness and plastic adaptability have set us adrift or banished us from our primal place of origin and belonging.
My task in this chapter is to convince you that this can be a fruitful way to think about life in the age of climate change, a transformative event set in the larger context of our brand new epoch, the Anthropocene. We are emerging from a period in which a stable climate has given us a very familiar world, one whose patterns and rhythms we have been allowed to take more or less for granted. What we are passing into is less clear, but it feels both weird and threatening.
There’s a much wider context of instability that must be explained as well. I’m talking about the instability of our values that comes with being denizens of the modern age. The mark of the modern, as we’ll see, is to be deprived of traditional sources of moral meaning without having any obvious substitutes for them. The result of this layered instability—modernity plus the climate crisis—is a world that is quintessentially uncanny. It is bound to bewilder us but, as I will argue, we should embrace this bewilderment as a form of existential therapy and a path to moral clarity.
Pierre and the pundits
In this part of the book I’m going to describe what it means to say that we have entered a new historical epoch or time, one marked essentially by crisis. But for the moment I’m mostly interested in how this feels to us. I want to investigate a particular, highly complex collective mood: bewilderment. To get a sense of what an analysis of this sort involves I’ll begin by contrasting my approach with others who are operating in the same conceptual field.
Yuval Noah Harari’s massively popular books, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2016) and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017), take us on whirlwind tours of the history of our species, all with a view to illuminating the contours of our tech-shaped world as well as the future that likely awaits us. Though he’s also not a trained historian, Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (2018) is in the same vein. The genre is proliferating (e.g., Shapiro, 2019; Cohen and Zenko, 2019). Let’s label these thinkers the pundits of the new age. They are remarkably sanguine about our times.
Because I think it is now essential for us to see the big-picture of our species’ relatively brief reign on this planet, the pundits perform an invaluable function. They are trying to enhance our historical self-understanding, and they get the story at least partly right. But it’s that ‘partly’ that nags at me. I came away from the books just mentioned feeling enlightened but also with the sense that something important was missing from them. One review of Pinker’s book notes that the view of our post-Enlightenment history Pinker gives us is from 30,000 feet (Potter, 2018).
It’s a relentless compilation of data, all designed to show that with respect to key markers of well-being—education levels, health, wealth, the spread of democratic institutions, etc.—we’re demonstrably better off now than at any point in the past history of our species. Pinker thinks he needs to say this because Enlightenment values of progress and reason have come under sustained attack of late, much of it taking the form of a pouty Left dystopianism.
I have no quarrel with Pinker’s basic claim, and in what follows I promise not to pout. Still, something is clearly missing here, something connected to the head-spinning elevation of Pinker’s analysis. Though it’s a slight over-simplification, reactions to Pinker’s book tend to fall into one of three camps. The first—think of Bill Gates, who loves Pinker’s books—says, ‘Yes, exactly, the Enlightenment project is sound, and we merely need to push fearlessly ahead with it to ensure an even brighter future.’ The second group contains the pouters I have just mentioned, those who think the Enlightenment project is a disaster, and has been from the start, mostly because it got entangled almost from the beginning with a heartless and overreaching capitalist economic system.
But there’s a third group, and this is the one that interests me the most. To get a sense of what this group is thinking, come back to that Pew survey cited in the Introduction. In all 26 countries surveyed a majority think that climate change poses the biggest threat to global stability. The average number responding this way is 69%. Perhaps most surprisingly, climate change tops the list even in places where you’d think other perceived threats would beat it. In France, which has a recent history of domestic terrorism, 83% believe that climate change is the most significant threat. In South Korea, whose citizens live with the very real threat of nuclear annihilation from the regime to the north, the number is 86%. Brazil is a country torn apart by inequality, extreme poverty and the rise of a quasi-fascistic political class, and yet these challenges would seem to pale in comparison to the threat of climate change, which 72% of Brazilians list as the biggest problem in the world.
By their nature, surveys cannot capture all the reasons underlying the answers people give to the questions posed to them. But think about the level of fear and trepidation regarding climate change this survey nevertheless does reveal. Assume for the sake of argument that many of the people who put climate change at the top of their list of worries also believe in progress and humanism. If this describes even half of them accurately, we’re still talking about almost 35% of the people on this planet.
These folks might insist that the IPBES is on to something really important in noting that fundamental, structural change is required for Pinker’s ideals to be fully realized. This is a possibility that never seems to occur to those sunny optimists in the first group. And so, my people—those in the third group—feel confused, threatened, creeped out and bewildered by the events they are living through. I applaud their stance and have written this book to help them achieve their own enlightenment now.
That’s Pinker, but what about Harari? The two Harari blockbusters, which taken together purport to encompass the whole past and likely future of our species, run to over 900 pages. And yet they contain a total of about 10 pages on climate change. Most of this consists in a string of bromides about how high atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses have become, how ineffective our political response to this has been and how most of the effects of climate change will be visited on the global poor. There’s nothing incorrect about this, but it can be found in a thousand other treatments. Harari underrepresents the full scope of the threat posed by climate change precisely because he banalizes it so thoroughly. How can someone writing a ‘history of tomorrow’—however ‘brief’—treat what is by far the most important problem of the near and medium future in such a cursory way?
We don’t need to dispense with these analyses, but they need supplementation. I want us to be much more serious about what crisis means than the pundits are. To do this, we need to descend from the statistical heights and put our feet on the ground. Improbable as it might at first seem, I think Tolstoy can help us get started on this. In War and Peace, Tolstoy is not just telling a rousing story about how the Napoleonic wars unfolded in Russia at the beginning of the 19th-century, through the eyes of a few noble families. He is also railing against the same blinkered overconfidence I see in some of the popular pundits of our day.
Tolstoy’s narrative is populated by a huge array of characters, many of whom share one important trait: they think they understand what is happening in Europe as Napoleon’s Grande Armée rolls ominously from West to East. Each character fastens on a pet theory of human nature or an allegedly superior knowledge of this or that military actor in order to proclaim with confidence that history’s got a discernable direction. The obvious problem, ruthlessly exposed by Tolstoy’s narrative, is that the proclamations contradict one another.
But there’s a deeper problem. Each of these characters interprets the world at war in a way that confirms what he or she had already believed about it. It’s a social world brimming with confirmation bias avant la lettre. As a result, nobody is ever genuinely surprised by what really happens, even though some pretty unexpected things transpire, like the burning of Moscow—“the sacred and ancient capital of Russia”—after the French troops enter it in early September, 1812.
The most glaring example of this tendency is Napoleon himself, whose very ordinariness in this sense would have infuriated the man himself. The moral seems to be that when it comes to large-scale historical events, like continental wars, we should be more open to admitting frankly that we don’t know what the hell is happening. Still, if Tolstoy were doing nothing more than describing the fog of war, the message would be a bit underwhelming. There’s much more going on in his narrative, in particular material that can help us make sense of our own representations of the climate crisis.
Let me elaborate on this by looking briefly at Tolstoy’s great anti-pundit, Piotr Kirillovich Bezuhov, aka Pierre. Pierre is a dreamy sensualist, at least in his youth (he hardens up a bit later in life). Superficially, what sets him apart from the novel’s endless parade of salon pundits is that he seems, most of the time, completely out-to-lunch. But this description conceals a more important difference. Although he becomes, in the course of time, one of Russia’s wealthiest men, Pierre has no fixed practical identity. His defining qualities are impulsivity, passivity and moral weakness.
Pierre bobs up and down like a cork in the stream of historical events. He fights a duel, gets drunk (often), marries a deceitful woman, falls in love with his best friend’s girl (whom he later marries after the friend dies in the war), befriends French officers, throttles a would-be rapist, saves a child from a burning building, joins the Freemasons, straps a bear to the back of a policeman and throws them both into the river, plots the assassination of Napoleon, spends a month in a shack as a prisoner of war and much more.
But Pierre does not exactly do any of these things so much as notice that they happen to him. He is perennially bewildered by the shape the world takes through him and around him. From the standpoint of the meaning of history, Pierre is the arch enemy of the pundits, but in spite of this—or perhaps because of it—he is also, somehow, tuned in to the real forces driving history forward. He experiences a worl...
