Stanford
Review by Walter Cummins
I wish Impasse had been written when my wife was still alive. The book would have provided so much information and so many ideas to illuminate our ongoing discussion of the doom we are all facing. After learning of yet another climate or political disaster, she would shake her head and say some version of “We’re done for. It’s over. The world isn’t going to survive,” and I’d respond with some version of “The planet will still be here—and the cockroaches.”
Roy Scranton declares that the big moral question for humanity is “how to live in a fragmenting, increasingly incomprehensible world of accelerating catastrophe.” But what does he mean by world? My wife seemed to be all-inclusive in her intellectual despair. I was trying to place limits on what would be over.
Scranton clarifies our quibble when he considers the different meanings of the term “world” people use. There’s a big difference between the world as planet Earth, a sphere with matter beneath our feet, and the world as the totality of our self-created human habitation. Scranton means the latter when he states, “The world as we know it seems to be coming to an end,” and I believe my wife would be satisfied with his explanation.
Defining that world from a human perspective is a great challenge, an impossible one. What has been called Spaceship Earth is “too big and complicated for anyone to comprehend, much less to explain.” What is the place of the human species in this complexity that houses us and that we fail to understand? We as beings are a mysterious conglomeration of “individual consciences, political agents, vectors of progress, biological organisms, and geological forces all at once.” And, as Scranton, documents in detail, we’ve made a mess of things. That’s what’s behind my wife’s certainty, one that I agree with.
Although Scranton specifies climate change in his title, he clarifies that its just one of a combination of circumstances that have made our situation so dire, why the civilization we think of as the world is doomed. He opens the book with a Preface based on a family visit to the remains of what had been a vast Chaco culture of northwestern New Mexico to remind his readers of the many civilizations that have disappeared in ruins, fates we should regard as a warning, a memento mori.
The collapse of a society, for Scranton, is not just the result of an external environmental cause but a culmination from the nature of the society itself, and that collapse is not an abrupt end, just a painfully slow process of waning. Climate change isn’t enough. It’s the unsustainable complexity of a society—especially one like ours—that makes it vulnerable to environmental stress. The Chaco did suffer a final long drought, but they had survived several previous droughts. This time they lacked the resources to survive.
In our time, climate change may also be considered a last straw: “And planetary warming is only one of the crises we face—including biodiversity loss, widespread deforestation, pervasive toxic pollution, unsustainable human development, disruptive technologies, and war—amidst indications that the global economy may be careening out of control.”
Scranton dismisses those who contend that human ingenuity will somehow come up with techniques and strategies that will get us out of this mess. For him, our only option is to find a way to live at a time of accelerating catastrophe. In one sense, that’s what most of us are doing, even those sitting back and counting on some sort of solution. We go on with our daily lives. And so do most of us who expect the worst. We share many enthusiasms and pleasures, only occasionally acknowledging the cloud of doom that hovers even when the sun is shining.
Scranton goes much further. He devotes the second part of Impasse to a detailed strategy for day-to-day living though a process our civilization won’t survive, especially a philosophy of skepticism. The impasse we face is the fact that the world as we know it is coming to an end with no indication of what we happen next, yet we have to wake up each day to function with the needs of the present and cope with the uncertainty of the future.
Several sections of the book work to disabuse readers of the lure of optimism—the myth of progress—and its claims of likely bettering for humans and the human condition. He considers our only real stance for coping in a desperate time to be the philosophy of pessimism, which does not deceive us with false hope. Starting with the debate between Leibnitz vs. Voltaire, he considers the positions of optimistic and pessimistic thinkers for the centuries since that dispute.
In fact, Impasse devotes much of its explication to referring to, comparing, and commenting on dozens of philosophic theories. The book is thick with references, which isn’t unusual for an academic work published by a university press. It can be said that Scranton has done his homework with 125 pages of notes and another 40 of selected references. He can’t be accused of making sweeping generalizations, at least not without marshalling a plethora of evidence to support his position and refute those who think otherwise.
His own analysis can be considered more subtle than others who argue for the coming of end times, including my wife and my own vague agreement. Our unhappy future is not going to culminate with a sudden bang but rather wind down with an extended whimper as with other once commanding civilizations reduced to collections of shards.
Take the Chaco culture, which a small number of people today even know once existed. But it did have a significant lifespan, influencing a vast region for over three centuries as a major center for trade, ceremonial activities, and astronomical observations. It built multi-storied great houses with hundreds of rooms using advanced masonry techniques, the largest structures ever constructed in North America to that point. By AD 1500 it became a significant economic and administrative center with widespread trade routes for which they built 400 miles of engineered roads. They enjoyed a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy. The Chicons mattered. Now their mainly forgotten legacy is the ruins Scranton visited and some existing cultural influence on present-day Pueblo peoples.
Similar achievements can be listed for other important cultures that once thrived throughout world history, some that can be seen as extensive ruins and others that are no more than fragments of buried implements excavated by archeologists and displayed under glass in museums. Their decline and disappearance was gradual, in some cases their ideas and traditions lingering among contemporary humans who have no idea where they came from.
Many people are optimists because they can’t conceive of a future in which our great cities, our elaborate communities, and our technological wonders wither into just another collection of relics. They count on human ingenuity to devise ways to overcome the threats we face and, for many, not even acknowledging the threats. Scranton wants us to face the inevitable with an ethical skepticism that is our best choice.
He finds at the heart of his concern that our assumption of progress is a delusion, that suffering cannot be eradicated, that while we can’t predict the details of what happens next, we should involve ourselves in life, live with compassion, and do what we can with an accepting pessimism:
Pessimism is characterized by the rejection of optimistic rationalization, disdain for escapism, contempt for scapegoating, and an insistence on human limits, which all emerge from the core recognition that to live is to suffer and cause suffering. The pessimist neither justifies the curse nor attempts to escape it, but confronts it, accepts her responsibility, and commits herself to living with it.
Now I wish my wife were here so that we could discuss Impasse, and I hope the notion of ethical pessimism would give her an articulated strategy to face the impending disaster our world faces. Without defining it, we did react to doom with a degree of ethical pessimism. Once our conversation about her sense of doom ended, she went on with her day and, I believe, lived by emphasizing compassion much more than despair.
For me, Scranton expanded a core belief I’ve lived with since I first read Camus decades ago. He even repeats the foundational question of The Myth of Sisyphus, whether the absurdity of life makes suicide a better choice for us. But Camus finds things to live for with defiant acceptance. His novel The Plague illustrates a group of people joining to fight the worst, with a premise that captures Scranton’s basic assumption about humans existing in our world: there will always be plagues. Our civilization survived that of World II. But remember approximately 90% of North America’s indigenous population (55-56 million) died by 1600 from European diseases after contact began in 1492. The best we can do is try to cope with plagues and see what happens.
