The Possibility of a Revolution
(This is part 6 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In The Ethics of Climate Insurgency I argued that an insurgency aimed at overthrowing the enemies of our children is not morally justified because it is unlikely that – in the present situation – such an insurgency can succeed. It may seem that that conclusion also makes a discussion of the possibility of some kind of revolution to avoid catastrophe and establish something like the Lesser Dystopia is moot, but that is not exactly the case for (at least) two reasons. Firstly, in considering the possibility of a revolution...
The Ethics of Climate Insurgency
(This is part 5 in the No Time for Utopia series.) Let’s say that you want to avoid the Mad-Maxian hell of societal collapse that climate change is making increasing likely, then how can and should you try to do that? You’d have an incredibly powerful and well-connected enemy, and just asking them to give up their short-term profits in order to save the planet isn’t likely to have any effect – at least, it hasn’t had any effect thus far. Then what? Very many different answers can be given to that last question, but I want to focus here...
The Lesser Dystopia
(This is part 3 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In On the Fragility of Civilization, I argued that due to the slowly compounding effects of an increasing number of relatively localized “natural” disasters caused (directly or indirectly) by climate change, a vicious circle of failing disaster management, economic decline, civil unrest, and hunger will trigger a cascade of collapsing societies, eventually leading to global societal collapse in roughly 25 to 30 years from now (give or take a half decade). The world during and after collapse will be very different from what most of us have ever experienced,...
Stages of the Anthropocene
preface (2022) There are major mistakes in the predictions and calculations involved in this article. For an attempt to come up with better predictions (and thus, an update of this article), see the SotA-R series. The model results presented in the last episode thereof, suggest 3°C to 5°C of average global warming. (Original post) — Climate scientists don’t often look at the distant future and when they do, their “predictions” are so vague that they hardly count as predictions at all. Most published work on climate change focuses on the current century. There are good reasons, for this, of course...
Fictionalism – or: Vaihinger, Scheffler, and Kübler-Ross at the End of the World
In 1911 the now almost forgotten German philosopher Hans Vaihinger published Die Philosophie des Als Ob (The Philosophy of ‘As if’) in which he argued for something approaching global fictionalism. In the preface to the second English edition of his book he wrote: The principle of Fictionalism . . . is as follows: “An idea whose theoretical untruth or incorrectness, and therewith its falsity, is admitted, is not for that reason practically valueless and useless; for such an idea, in spite of its theoretical nullity may have great practical importance.” Fictionalism is the view that claims in some area of...
Crisis and Inertia (5) – Derailing a Speeding Train
(This is part 5 in the “Crisis and Inertia” series.) In the first episode in this series I argued that societies and other social “objects” (cultures, beliefs, institutions, ideas, ideologies, and so forth) are as inert as physical objects. Social “objects” resist change – if they are moving in a certain direction, they resist a change in direction. The second notion in the tile of this series is “crisis”. A crisis is an event that changes a social object’s momentum – that is, it’s path, speed, or direction. Crises come in several kinds. A minor crisis produces a (nearly?) immeasurably...
You Are a Zombie
For reasons that are somewhat mysterious to me, zombie movies remain fairly popular. There has been a notable change in the genre, however. A few decades ago, zombie movies were probably best classified as a sub-genre of horror, while nowadays they seem to be a variety of disaster movie – particularly, a variety of end-of-the-world disaster movie. Picking up on this subtle, but telling genre shift, Brad Evans and Henry Giroux write in Disposable Futures, a book on the role of (depictions of) violence in contemporary society, that the zombie figure “speaks to a future in which survival fully colonizes...
Crisis and Inertia (1)
Physical objects resist any change in their position and state of motion. This is inertia, often defined as the physical principle that moving objects keep moving in a straight line with constant speed unless or until something stops them or changes their direction. Inertia doesn’t just apply to physical objects, however, but to social (and other kinds of) objects as well. Social structures and systems, or “institutions”, are as inert as physical objects. If an institution is moving in a certain direction, it will keep moving in that direction with more or less constant speed (which can be zero, of...