Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk see a way to save humanity from a climate catastrophe in ... escape to Mars. That sounds fantastic. Like the series, moreover, recently there was one with a similar story. - It's just that it is a game for the richest 1 percent, who is largely the perpetrator of the climate crisis himself - says bitterly Maciej Jakubowiak, author of the book “Last People. Inventing the end of the world. "
In subsequent pages, Jakubowiak wades through the maze of novels, films, series, video games, memes, media reports, and scenes from everyday life, passing scenarios of a climate catastrophe, technological phobias, and demographic fears, and images of war along the way. For people who are passionate about the end - and there are many, as the author proves because it is an immanent part of our personality - his book can be a compendium of apocalyptic knowledge and a source of many interesting discoveries. For everyone, it should be a warning that ignoring the next signals of danger may end tragically, especially since we had fun at the end of the world.
It turns out that the end of the world can be great entertainment and even a very profitable business. After all, stories about the destruction of the Earth as a result of an alien invasion, a zombie attack, a machine revolt, an approaching asteroid, another crazy experiment by scientists, or, on the contrary, failure to listen to their warnings, e.g. about a new dangerous disease or simply a nuclear war, accompany us every day. We read about them in books, watch them on cinema screens, and follow the fate of the heroes of the series living in a post-apocalyptic reality. While eating popcorn with gusto. We are not afraid, because we know that every movie or book has its end, and we can leave this collapsing world at any time and move to reality, which in this case is more friendly.
Maciej Jakubowiak tries to investigate the nature of this unusual need to liquidate the world. He asks: where did we get it from and what is it for? At the same time, it shows that taming the end has dulled our senses to some dangerous degree. As a result, we either do not even see this real catastrophe approaching with each day of inactivity, or we do not take it seriously. Treating like all the earlier unfulfilled prophecies of the apocalypse. After all, how do you worry about a climate catastrophe when one generation has already experienced the millennium bug, the prophecy of Nostradamus, the prophecy of Harold Camping, or the end of the Mayan calendar?
However, this time the threat is actually real. Only the chance of annihilation of the world as a result of nuclear attacks from the Cold War was more real. The difference is that that end was easy to imagine and understand, and this modern end is too long, distant, and too difficult for us, and at the same time each of us - although not equally - adds a brick to it every day, which blurs responsibility.
We live in a world as if taken out of a blockbuster movie scenario. A multitude of scientists warns that a catastrophe is imminent. It shows calculations, and alarms politicians and the media. And people do not believe them anyway, because how can you believe at the end of the world. - But the one related to the climate catastrophe today is no longer a cinematic fiction - argues Maciej Jakubowiak.
What will be the real end of our world?
This is what the book is about. Actually, it is about those ends of the world that we talk a little bit about, because we are still afraid of them. The ones we know from books and disaster movies about hordes of zombies attacking humanity or asteroids destroying the Earth, we have already worked well. They are tame, so we are not afraid of them. It doesn't bother anyone.
Thanks to culture, we got used to the end of the world. Usually, when we talk about something, it ceases to be so threatening. Are we not afraid of a real threat because of this?
We have been telling stories about the end of the world for thousands of years. They basically look the same, we just put our different fears into them. Climatic, technological, demographic, and recently new forms of war that we cannot even understand. We put these complicated things into a known pattern and suddenly everything becomes clear: this is the end of the world. Thanks to this, reality ceases to be so terrible.
The end of the world is a very popular theme in culture. Still, it is strange that we like to scare ourselves that we are about to become extinct.
We like it because it's great entertainment, thanks to which we can imagine that everything we know, our whole world suddenly turns upside down, explodes, disappears. And at the same time, we know it's just fun. Moreover, the vast majority of it also serves to convince us of the authors' view that as soon as the democratic order of things collapses, demons, violence, cannibalism, totalitarianism and all other terrible things will emerge from people. These are self-fulfilling prophecies about what will happen when we let go of social blockages. We have been scaring them for ages. Recently, however - and this is why I wrote this book - more and more people are no longer taking the end of the world stories as a joke. We started talking seriously about the ends of the world. Do you remember the millennium bug?
Everyone was talking about it, in the media and people were a bit scared, but in fact, we were joking with our friends that our computers would crash and we would not play on New Year's Eve. These fears arose before 2000 and were immediately served in an atmosphere of lackluster. Because who cares about computers when most people are unfamiliar with them? Sure, there were some millennial sects, but no one really believed it. It was similar later, for example before 2012, when the time was about to run out according to the Mayan calendar. The books and movies that told about it were completely absurd. But now that has changed.
Serious people treating reality rationally began to talk about the end of the world. There are threatening headlines, and scientists publish alarming reports, including about the climate catastrophe. Suddenly it was no longer to laugh. So I started to wonder what it was like with these end-of-the-world stories that never came true because humanity still exists and the world does. But I had one more motivation to deal with this topic, a less tangible one. More and more, I talked to people who seemed to be the last people. People who no longer care about anything. They had no special needs or great ambitions. They wanted to stretch their relatively quiet life to the end, finding little joys along the way. In a world that convinces us that at every step there is so much to do, know, and achieve, it turns out that there are people who let go, as if they are at peace with what awaits us. This contrasted with the dominant narrative in capitalism that you have to try hard and run all the time.
And now scientists are warning that it is this forward run that brings us closer to the downward slope. Recently, scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released new data on the climate catastrophe that our planet has already warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius and that we will reach or exceed 1.5 degrees in the next decade or two. The media took note of it, and it was loud for one or two days. And it died down. What is happening does not seem to reach us.
This is an interesting thing. At one point, scientists and climate activists were faced with a choice: either we continue to make balanced opinions or we pump up emotions. They could still speak in serious but boring language about the fact that, for example, some lands would be irreversibly desertified, knowing that it would rather be useless. Or they may have started to scare that the end of the world is near, and if we don't do anything about it, we will become extinct. Some scientists and activists have chosen to do so. Greta Thunberg, who has become the face of this kind of emotional warning, directly yelled at politicians in Davos, where she chaired a panel on the ecological apocalypse. And this rhetoric worked, it touched a lot of people.
It is an emotionally high-energy fuel that burns out quickly. After all, we have to live somehow. In fact, for thousands of years we have realized that threats about the end of the world never come true. So if someone is booming now, "If we don't do something, it will be the end of the world," then we probably get scared at first, but then we shrug our shoulders. Life goes on, every day we have our private, microscopic ends of the world to deal with.
It was the same in the pandemic. In the first lockdown, we were scared, hidden in our houses, and only the police were circling the empty streets, broadcasting messages telling us to remain locked. A few months later, with much higher infections, people didn't care that much anymore.
The first weeks of the pandemic were terrifying. These empty cities, no one in the streets. When you see something like this, you immediately have associations - you've seen scenes like this in movies, so you know how it will end. But such associations also help us to overcome our fear. Besides, when I was shopping in the store at the beginning of the pandemic, I would say goodbye to the salesman every time, saying, "Until next!" And he would reply: "If we live to be." At one point, we both started laughing about it.
During the Cold War, both the US and the Soviet Union authorities made it clear that they had weapons that could destroy humanity. It was a totally real threat. And what is important, it was also a solution unfortunately quite simple to imagine. Each visualized a Soviet or American general pressing the red button and causing a global catastrophe. The climate crisis is much more complicated, stretched over time, and the vision of the inevitable is postponed. Millions of people are responsible for the climate crisis, but the responsibility is blurred. Moreover, it all takes a long time. This is not a snap of your fingers. The process is so complex that we often don't understand it. If you look at the IPCC report, there are charts, difficult concepts, and alternative scenarios. What is this apocalypse in which instead of fire and destruction there are charts and tables?
There are options for the rescue. Over the years we have been made to believe that new technologies will solve the problem of climate catastrophe.
I hope it is not too late and that the new technologies will be useful for this, but today we know very well that they will not be enough to save us from the effects of the climate crisis. But in fact, this trend of thinking that new, breakthrough technology will appear, preferably in the form of a mobile application, and will save us, was so common that it was called technological solutionism.
It is a typical engineering belief that to solve the complex problems of mankind, all you need are the right tools and sufficient computing power. We slowly stop believing it.
Humanity is facing the complicated problem of global warming, temperatures are rising, and weather anomalies are making life difficult. Stout heads wondering what to do in this situation. And then an engineer from Silicon Valley comes and says: I have a solution, let's go to Mars.
That's why we stop believing it. Sure, we can see that Jeff Bezos has gone into space, but we also know that we ourselves will not get the taxi. This is a game for the richest 1 percent, maybe even a per mille, which is largely the cause of the climate crisis. That is why it is more and more often said that coping with the crisis requires serious transformations of the entire model of the functioning of societies and the economy. We have to let go of the ideology of continuous economic growth.
Technologies can play an important role here, but not the spectacular ones like billionaires' flights into space that the media is excited about. Rather, nuclear energy, renewable energy, and reducing emissions will be more important. These are rather unspectacular technologies, and the stories about building nuclear power plants do not suit our rescue visions. That is why we are so desperately looking for a hero who will come and deal with the climate crisis.
As in the movie "Armageddon" where Bruce Willis flew to drill a meteorite to blow it up and save mankind.
They're sending a guy who's doing oil wells to drill a hole and detonate this meteorite. And here it is the same: there is some villain, so there must be a good sheriff to fight him at high noon. Like in a western.
In the multitude of scientists who are signed to the IPCC reports. Maybe these documents are written in a difficult, complicated language, but they also show something fantastic. Already on the first page, we can see that there is not one author, one person who would know the answers to all questions, but there is a whole group, a team of people. It is also a lesson for us that you don't do anything yourself in life. And no one can handle the crisis alone, even if their names are Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Bill Gates.
Democracy, our greatest achievement, may fail us because it is a factor blocking the fight against climate catastrophe. In a democracy, we are simply not decisive, too arduous and slow, because in this system the majority has to be persuaded to make a decision, and on the one hand, it lasts, and on the other, it eliminates radical solutions.
So what? Do we need a dictator?
There are such fantasies. These are voices saying that in order to save humanity, you need to introduce a global dictatorship, e.g. on the Chinese model, because only in this way will we be able to make quick decisions. Democracy is great, it allows as many people as possible to live in acceptable conditions, but it cannot cope when you need to take bold action and fight a crisis urgently. Besides, not only climatic. Replace "climate" with "inequalities" and you will get a situation in the US or Poland, where inequality has dealt with democracy, driving up politicians who do not care much for democratic procedures.
But does a climate catastrophe or does this end of the world have to happen at all?
We have all the tools to prevent it, but through the strange combination of capitalism and technology, we are at a dull moment in history when we prefer to send billionaires into space instead of acting meaningfully. Even so, I hope mankind can get this mess under control. After all, she caused it herself.
No comments:
Post a Comment