“It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live looking into the future—sub species aeternitatis,” Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning.
I may be the only person who seeks out book recommendations from 1952 delivered to me from the omniscient wisdom of the YouTube algorithm. I did precisely that when I purchased an old 1st edition of Bertrand Russell’s New Hopes for a Changing World when something he said in the beginning of that interview struck a chord. He said something to the effect that over the course of my 80 years I have seen momentous changes both in the rise and fall of empires and the associated cataclysms and the transformation of daily life, but my hopes have remained unchanged and are in fact unchangeable. I did not appreciate it at the time I listened to the interview, but he was channeling the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, believing that we ought to act not from the present moment or have our loyalties directed to a particular group but to eternity and to humanity. The perspective of the eternal can make it possible to find eudonia in the discomfort inherent to living an engaged, examined life. But stoicism is not be conflated with self-flagellating postures. Russell argues that we should not lose sight of the fact that the principle value of the stoic orientation is to elevate the concerns of future generations, who will carry on the virtues of our collective accomplishments and preserve the critical cultural element of our humanity, above all else.
Russell was so perceptive that his narrative frame remains largely prescient, though it is mainly the dark cloud of climate, and not nuclear annihilation, that looms. That is not to say Russell did not understand the physics of climate change and that these non-specialist observations could form the philosophical basis of our current predicament. The passage on the consequences of the spread of “industrial techniques” around the globe indicates truly remarkable foresight:
“But the heat that we generate when we burn coal is not localized like the heat of the sun…It floats off into the atmosphere and becomes forever useless. There is no process in nature, and none imaginable to human ingenuity by which heat, once diffused can be re-concentrated, or by which when diffused, it can serve any human purpose.”
He goes on to characterize the “rape” of industrial man:
“Every day, many square miles of forest are turned into newspaper, but there is no known process by which newspaper can be turned into forest…All the astronomical and geological ages during which the materials which we find useful have been built up, contribute a moment’s blaze, a moment’s frivolous exuberance, but when his fireworks are finished, what will become of industrial man?”
Moreover, he anticipates the counterarguments from the techno-optimists of his day, clarifying that predicament is more tragic than can be allowed by optimism alone because technologies simply cannot transgress the second law of thermodynamics:
“I know that most people meet such considerations with a kind of facile optimism; they say ‘oh, the men of science are sure to think of some clever invention, and even if they don’t it will last my time.’ They feel like the proverbial Irishmen, “Why should I do anything for posterity, it has never done anything for me!’”
He clearly states that persuading more people to understand the virtues of acting for posterity is the motivation of the book:
“I cannot be content with a brief moment of riotous living followed by destitution, and however clever the scientists may be, there are some things that cannot be expected to achieve.”
Russell assumed that his contemporaries, who professed the notion that you can judge what man wants by his actions, were correct. Following that assumption, Western man’s decision to rush into oblivion suggests a bipolar affliction that results from radical uncertainty about the possibility of a future:
“Although our reason tells us we ought to shudder at the prospect [of catastrophe], there is another part that enjoys it, and so we have no firm will to avert misfortune and there is deep division in our souls between sane and insane parts. In quiet times the insane parts can slumber throughout the day and make only at night. But in times like ours, they invade our waking time as well, and all rational thinkings becomes pale and divorced from the will…uncertainty baulks the impulse of every irksome effort, and generates a tone of frivolous misery thought to be pleasure, which turns outward….Through this hatred it brings nearer the catastrophe which it dreads, caught in a tragic fate, as though, like characters in a Greek drama, they are blinded by some offended God.”
Through weaving these powerful images, he introduces the “perplexities” of the human predicament, which may have a technical cause, but can only be remedied by non-technical means that foster a happy state of affairs within social arrangements. This image Russell presents is worth pondering. To be honest, I have felt this bipolarity in my own thoughts. I will acknowledge that I have sadistically entertained the idea of true climate catastrophe, one that is broadly felt, because if American history is any guide, it can engender the sentiments and common cause with fellow citizens for productive action. Perhaps I am entirely mistaken and that the observations I saw of Houstoners crossing the artificial divisions American society foists on them were all a mirage. It may be the case that middle class citizens accustomed to the privileges of modern life will descend into every-man-for-himself barbarism if climate induced grid failures materialized for any significant duration of time.
These dreams and nightmares have existed alongside each other for at least a year now, but I must say the dreams have always had precedence over the nightmares. Call it “facile optimism”, but I have to believe that a happy and sane social settlement, if it is appropriately articulated can prevent the slide into barbarism when the dark cloud of time and ignorance finally arrives at our doorstep. Proper articulation does not imply that any combination of cleverly devised words will do the trick, but rather an orientation that presumes the dignity of human motives over hostility:
“There is almost always a way of doing things without violence. The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, in spite of rivers of blood, did not achieve nearly so much towards economic equality as has been achieved in Britain in recent years…The teaching of hatred, however socially harmful [plutocrats] may be… always injects poison into the social system.”
While Russell skips over the history of Britain’s post-war social welfare settlement, reaching its apotheosis with the Beveridge plan, that happy settlement had antecedents dating back to the fights over the People’s budgets prior to WWI, which was not without the normal antagonisms to be expected when fundamental questions of distribution and political economy are being raised. After all, budgets simply outline the prerogatives of who can do what to whom. So antagonisms are to be expected in the initial instance, and that what we may be witnessing are the morbid symptoms that will eventually give way to a stable social and planetary settlement in roughly two decades. But instead of saving Britain from the ugly passions that were overwhelming continental Europe, we have the grand task of saving the world whilst doing our best to avert the same ancient passions.
If Russell’s commentary is to be taken at face value, the efforts to make people happy and content with themselves through security and liberal education is part of the same task as saving the world from existential threat. Any observer of American politics tired of the “symptoms versus disease” discussion of Trump’s rise and even uglier purity spiral to Qanon would immediately recognize this passage:
“When…it is found that [there is] practise of atrocious cruelties, it is necessary to concentrate on the first place upon the evil to be abolished. But this is not enough…It is necessary to probe deeper, to discover the sources of evil…In all such cases there will be found to be some distortion, some impediment to growth, something causing a deep inner discord in those who take pleasure in cruelty. And no reformer should be satisfied….until he has discovered how to create for the young a world in which such [cruel] things will not occur. This is a vast task, but is not beyond the possibilities of economics and psychology combined. The world could within a a couple generations {his hope was a half century, our timeline has been truncated to at most 20 years} be made to consist of men and women who are happy and sane, and because they are happy and sane, would be kindly in their impulses to others.”
The fundamental barrier to climbing that rope toward the happy and sane man that Russell envisions is that we are still stuck in a political system frozen in time at the inception of the French Revolution. Scarcity still envelopes the human psyche when new opportunities for leisure made possible by scientific technique should uplift man’s existence. He identifies two culprits 1) destructive envy that manufactures desires and 2) the force of habit where the myth-making rituals of bygone eras perpetuate beliefs of scarcity. Critically, both of these tendencies contrive the subjective experience of scarcity, ensuring that the political system remains frozen in time. I am not at all certain what the fault line of the new political discourse ought to be, reconstituted in a manner consistent with man’s condition in the post-industrial age. Perhaps it is eco-socialism or collapse favored by British leftists. But I prefer the philosopher Bruno Latour’s formulation of down-to-earth versus out-of-this-world because it is a narrative flip in the spirit of utopian realism. Down to Earth asks people to return home to those loyalties they value in their communities and surrounding environment, while the out-of-this-world gives the tall order of asking of atomized populations everywhere to ride the dizzying escalator of climate accelerationism untethered from the social fabric. As Dr. King so presciently advised, we can return home to where we belong and work to build on the marvelous foundation set on stone, or we can continue down the path that brings us nothing but bewilderment.
Just as Holly Jean Buck wrote this week on the left reclaiming freedom, the left should also reclaim the rhetoric of loyalty and familiarity. The upshot is that the group that is psychologically inclined to hold these values in high esteem may be even larger than those who uncritically embrace the idea of America as a bastion of “freedom”. Freedom, and its cousin openness to experience, are certainly noble virtues but not the natural inclination of the great majority of middle America and suburbia that activists must urgently win over. The conservative narrative turn I envision for climate discourse, one that incorporates Russell’s hope to make man sane so as he behaves in ways that align with his enlightened wants, is to tell people small is beautiful. Neoliberalism has created a web of winner-take-all markets but rob man of his soul and create a wilderness in its wake. Action ought to turn inward in certain key respects unrelated to the exchange of culture or ideas so as to not overwhelm from disconnection and plunder. However, those actions are not parochial in effect and serve no higher conservative purpose than to save humanity for future generations.
Grounded activists must also recognize that even as tragedy unfolds on a scale not seen since the great conflagrations Russell witnessed in the first half of the 20th century that people are resilient and hope will endure if we remain steadfastly committed to realizing it, “It will not be the end of the world; it will be a long illness, but not death, and it will be our duty, through whatever darkness and whatever sorrow, to keep hope alive…Men are slow to learn… But if they are to learn, if torture is to bring them sanity rather than madness it will be because some men preserved sanity and hope throughout.”