The Morrow Project, Chapter 2: Is the World coming to an End?

Is the wrong question. It's too vague as it stands. One obvious answer is Yes, it is. That is, the World (as experienced by any individual component of it)is in a constant flux, changing by the day, hour, minute. Some of these changes are cyclical, and some linear, the difference being that cycles repeat patterns (if not exact details) and lines do not; there is no going back.

Let's try to be more precise then: Is the World as we (humans) presently experience it in the process of entering a state of change which is linear, not part of a 'natural' cycle, irreversible?  And let's be more detailed; here, we are talking about 'the World' as a shared experience of a large system or set of systems which currently persist, whether these are natural, social or commercial. Furthermore, does this imply that the World and its systems as we experience it/them are coming to an end?

According to many observers, the answer to this question is also Yes. There is no shortage of evidence that the Twenty-first Century World is different in substantial ways to what came before, and contains within itself the seeds of a transformation to yet more changes in the years to come. According to some, and within the underlying anxiety and guilt of many, these transformations will be sufficiently dramatic to mean that the World as it is to be experienced by our descendants is likely to be very different to the World we know. In this sense, quite possibly, we can say that the World that we know is coming to an end.

Are we ,  then, one of the 'last generations' of 'civilised' humankind? In terms with which some will be familiar, are we living at the 'End of Days', not necessarily in a religious or moral sense, but also perhaps in a practical one?

Well, let's be clear; every generation is the last of its kind, and the first of its kind. Certain key stages in human social development stand out - for example the Fourteenth Century, during which plague and famine possibly halved the global population (the Sixth to Eighth century is probably also, arguably, another such period). Was this the end of the World? It marks a watershed - before and after this period, the World as lived in by us changed. But the World did not, as such, come to an end. It became something new.

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries also stand out. The Agricultural, Industrial and Scientific revolutions combined to create a whole new set of conditions, in the residue of which we now live. Does the present period of human society stand out as such a period of radical change? Or, more extremely, are we now at a stage where we actually are threatening our collective survival, our present state of civilisation, and heading for a spectacular collapse, on a scale previously experienced in those earlier periods?

This final question, then, is probably the 'interesting' matter for us, as one generation struggling with its own expectations and responsibilites. For there is one way in which we 'modern' people differ from those which preceded us. Before the 1800s, it was clear that radical and dramatically negative large scale changes were the consequence of outside forces, the Deus ex Machina, Fate. Since then, living a a World of science, medicine and large-scale agriculture, we have been relatively immune, collectively, to these (so far). Since the 1940s, we have also lived in a World where we are uniquely conscious of a new phenomenon - our capacity to destroy ourselves and our world through our own actions and choices. And this is where the matter of responsibility comes in, for we now live lives which contain an awareness that the 'End of Days' is more likely to be in our hands than from any outside force. As such, we bear a responsibility for our decisions about how we live, and what we do, which did not previously exist on a global scale.

So, the next chapters of the Project will start addressing this last question: through our relationship with the World (our home), it's natural systems, the biosphere, the atmosphere, the oceans and land, are we setting the conditions for a new 'collapse' of human society? This is not a simple question, and will take a lot of working out. So, here's a spoiler; simple observation suggests that the World as we know it is due for another dramatic set of changes, probably stimulated by our own actions, but we still have choices about the nature of these changes...

The Morrow Project, chapter one

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Santayana.

Which is my introduction to this morning's subject, the History of the Apocalypse. Hopefully, you can see the marker for what it is; the early parts of the Morrow project are to map out the context in which we consider the idea of impending doom, vis a vis Catastrophic Climate Change. Once we can make sense of why we might have an inclination towards apparent nihilism, it then becomes possible to place present-day concerns over the impacts of a changing climate into a space from where we can puzzle out an attitude, or approach to the future.

If you go to see (or just read the rubbish about) Russell Crowe and Noah, you're following a popular and enduring trend in human society to consider the possibility of the End of Days. It sits very deeply in the Western cultural consciousness. It is, of course, a theme in parts of the Bible and, through the thousand year social/intellectual dominance of this particular religion, informs our development consciousness as individuals, whether we are aware of it or not.

But it is also there embedded in the Viking/Nordic consciousness, as Ragnarok, in Millenialist cults from the tenth, fourteenth, eighteenth centuries, on into the modern era. From the early Twentieth century, influenced no doubt by the horrors of the global conflicts into which we were plunged, and by the Cold War and Post-Existentialist modern, it reaches us first through late-period sects (such as the Jehovah's Witnesses), through Science Fiction, in examples too numerous to mention, and in contemporary Fantasy fiction. The End of Days is a sufficiently common and enduring theme to be able to confidently claim that it exists within our cultural identity, and thus within our individuality, like a toothache.

And our attitude towards this apparent apocalypse is interesting, for it is a qualified doom, not an unequivocal one. In most versions, since neo-Platonic times, possibly since Aquinas, we, the recipients of the wisdom of the Revelation, are excluded from the ranks of the doomed - we are the chosen, the few, the blessed. In personal imaginings of the catastrophic realignment of human existence on Earth, the question of whether I will be one of the few does not arise, it is taken as a given. We are the witness to the new, the post-apocalyptic World. This is, of course, counter-rational, since by definition, if 90% or so of the World's population is to die, the odds against a personal survival is quite small..

There's probably also a link to one of the fundamental premises of Christianity (and, implicitly, in some versions of Buddhism), that the reward for suffering in the present is a better, purer 'life' in the future. The power of this particular promise is obvious - your life may be crap now, but there is always hope. But in the adult awareness of our individual inefficability, a deus ex machina, an mighty outside force, is required to bring about the transformation, at least on a timescale that signifies within the self-aware mortal frame of normal human life.

Neither is such irrational hope confined to religion - it persists in a huge proportion of the Advertising, Marketing, consumption and social human activities that constitute a significant proportion of our daily input, wherein it addresses and promises to answer our everyday existential anxieties about power, control, desire, significance, and solve these if only we buy this, bet that, own this, use that...

In a similar way, the idea of a Global Catastrophe allows us to hope, in the abstract, that the problems and worries which beset us as individuals and as a society entire, a species, on this planet, our home, are capable of a solution. This is a dramatic and exclusive solution, but we are, ipso facto, the survivors, the new wave, the pioneers of the better tomorrow... and so we come to welcome what is in rational terms an appalling holocaust.

So, we seem to exist in Developed Society as entities for whom the tendency to worry and wonder about our collective future is a mirror for our anxieties about our survival and flourishing as individuals. In this, we follow another familiar neo-Platonic meme, the doctrine of Microcosm-macrocosm (As above, so below).

Here is a suggestion, then. When we speculate about tomorrow in terms of the imminent collapse of civilization, or a sudden transition to a Brave New World, what we are doing is transferring our uncomfortable awareness of our own mortality and our wish to signify onto the larger scale. This form of abstraction allows us to separate out our terror of death from our dream of persistence, and exist in a form of hopefulness, or optimism, in which we can beat death itself. Our imagining of the Apocalypse is an imagining of our immortality.

Next time: Chapter two; Is the world coming to an end?

Be loved.

Don’t stop (thinking about tomorrow)

The outlook for the future of humanity is not great at the moment. In the several years since I started taking a serious interest in this, including extensive academic research, substantial reading and study and direct engagement in online debate and discussion, not much has improved.

We have been strongly conscious of our collective ability to shape, transform, and in particular, damage our world and our societies, for at least fifty years. For much of this time, the focus of academic attention has been on Environmental ‘issues’ and the relationship between human exploitation of resources and ecosystems’ capacity to absorb this. More recently, the focus has shifted to the questions which arise from recent observations of the global warming of the planet’s ‘system’.

Today, more than has been apparent before, we live in a time when people who think about the bigger issues and problems of society are aware that our Human world is at least partially dysfunctional. Though it is hard to place a number on this outside the realms of serious statistical (quantitative) research, and though observation bias is no doubt in play, since I tend to socialise with people who share my world-view, or at least my concerns, my best guess is that a substantial minority of Northern Europeans, and a slightly smaller but still significant minority of Americans, Canadians, Australians, Africans, Asians and Southern/Eastern Europeans, are both aware of at least some of the issues facing our species and others, and also concerned about them with respect to the future.

For some time I have been working to map out a vision of how the near future of Humanity might progress and so, given that there may be some interest, intend to present some of my guesses, along with the reasoning behind them, here over the next few posts. For my own reasons, I have named this the ‘Morrow Project’. It would be more than helpful, in this case, were some readers to offer contributions, in particular where they think my reasoning has gone astray, or where they are not clear about my meanings, so come on, folks, say your bit…

Coming up next on the blog, then, the Morrow Project, Episode 1…

Down-the-line class action risks increase cost of inertia on climate and environment

Not sure whether to frame this comment as an enquiry or a proposal, but it's a thought...

Looking at a range of phenomena: 

1. The tendency of political and corporate interests to focus on the economic costs and benefits of Environmental action/inaction
2. The unbelievable costs sustained by BP as a consequence of litigation following their gulf oil spill disaster
3. The intriguing mechanism used by James Morrow in his book (which I featured a couple of weeks ago) to draw attention to our present responsibility for future events

It occurs to me that at some time in the foreseeable future, the consequential damage to both individuals and social groups from CO2 - stimulated climate shifts, in the first instance, and environmentally unsustainable practices such as the deforestation of the Peruvian Amazon or the harsh exploitation via UK institutional funding of Borneo's habitats, in the second, will represents a material and measurable harm to substantial number of people (well, all of us, in effect).

It also occurs that there is therefore a quantifiable risk that corporate, or indeed governmental institutions responsible for decisions which permit the causes of these harms to occur, will be the subject of potentially vast law suits (possibly class actions) from potentially vast numbers of people whose utility will have been materially damaged.

So, it follows that, since I'm just an average Joe, at least some of the clever people who work for insurance companies, law firms, in Government and corporate social responsibility, will have already realised that at some point the s**t is going to hit the fan, and legal fingers will be pointed.

This implies that some of the institutions currently responsible for the most dramatic examples of Planet Abuse (maybe one day this will be taken as seriously as other forms of abuse) will face very big bills for the actions derived from their present decisions.

So, here is the question: is this risk (of expensive future litigation) factored in to the analysis of costs and benefits which are so popular amongst the political and corporate entities when climate/environmental indecision is 'justified'? If the answer to this is 'Yes', has anyone calculated the cost impact in real terms? If the answer is 'No', is this potentially another tool to use in the arsenal of those who wish to see action rather than words from those principally responsible for the Abuse of our Planet?

Finally, if this potential cost to Abusers is not already factored in to current analyses of envrionmental costs, isn't it about time that it was?

Not with a bang but with a whimper

Full of Good Intentions in response to helpful comments by Steve Bloom and William Connolley, I spent three hours this morning digesting Chapter 13 (draft) of the AR5 on Sea Level Rise.

What was most helpful about my critics' comments was that I had been reminded that if you want to say something useful, you have to stay up with the game. I've been out of the arena of GW and GW discussion for some time and have forgotten much and misremembered more. 

So, following my own personal interests and alert to my new-found ignorance, I chugged through the chapter with full intention of finding something to say and blogging it here. Which I probably will, later.

But in the interim I've been diverted by a sideline which I feel certainly deserves a mention. Thanks to dialogue on RealClimate (sidebar link) and via email, I got to thinking about one of the best books I have ever read. And I have read a lot of books.

It isn't a book about climate change or global warming. It isn't strictly science fiction, nor truly easily fitted into any particular genre, but it is profound, affecting, literate and relevant.

From his own website, I have borrowed the following:

Finalist, Nebula Award John Campbell Award Finalist BBC Critic's Choice (Best SF      Novel)

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS In 1995, George Paxton is an ordinary American living an ordinary life in an ordinary town. Content as a tombstone carver and family man, George lacks only one thing: a fashionable "scopas" survival suit--complete with sanitary facilities and a Colt.45--to protect his daughter in the event of nuclear war. Then, through a twist of fate, George secures the coveted suit, a deluxe golden model, for the price of a mere signature. Unfortunately, what he signs proves to be a diabolical pact affirming his complicity in the escalating arms race, and as the war that could never happen happens, George is whisked into the past and the future to face the consequences of his actions.

Morrow's own comment is most pertinent here:


At first blush, a critic might bracket This Is the Way the World Ends with other post-holocaust fiction. From Alas, Babylon through A Canticle for Leibowitz to Riddley Walker, this genre has commonly styled itself an avatar of hope. My goal lay elsewhere. I began with the assumption that most people would prefer to exercise hope before the warheads arrive. I wanted to speak for victims, not celebrate survivors.

Even the most elaborate nuclear exchange would probably fail to extinguish Homo sapiens. Some of us will muddle through. In This Is the Way the World Ends, though, I decided to use self-extinction as a metaphor for the legions who won't make it. It's all very well to valorize our species's undoubted resilience, but a mass grave is hardly a fit monument to such sentiments.

Reading Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth., I was particularly impressed by one line: "The right vantage point from which to view a holocaust is that of a corpse." It struck me that most nuclear-war fiction is really a kind of pornography, inviting us to identify with winners while the losers, the corpses, drop away. So how might a novelist assume the vantage point of the dead? Through recourse, I reasoned, to the tools of speculative fiction. Eventually I hit upon the conceit of "the unadmitted," the generations whose births were canceled by the extinction. I gave them flesh and a temporary lease on life.

Reprinted from SFWA Bulletin

How good is this book? Here are two critics' assessments:

"This Is the Way the World Ends begins where Dr. Strangelove ends. It is a tale told from the other side of the grave--quite literally from the point of view of the dead--and what makes it so wonderful is not merely that it is informed about how and why the world may end, but because throughout it remains a true tale, rich in narrative and moral complexity, magically inventive and comic ... This Is the Way the World Ends defies genre. It is science fiction the way Gulliver's Travels is science fiction, fantasy the way John Collier's Fancies and Goodnights is fantasy, satire in the way George Orwell's 1984 is satire. It is also profoundly and grimly comic in the way Thomas Berger's novels are comic. Which is only to say that This Is the Way the World Ends is a unique mix of science fiction, satire, fantasy, and comedy--a gorgeously crafted and insanely funny tale about mortal and ghostly matters. It is a fable for our times, yes, but (except in a few of the too-lengthy trial sections) rarely moralistic or heavy-handed ... James Morrow is an original--stylistically ingenious, savagely funny, always unpredictable. He has written a story of the way and the why of our dear and foolish world--its sources of life and of death--that is utterly dazzling and memorable."

Jay Neugeboren
Philadelphia Inquirer

"Add to this scenario great suspense, fast action, a complex and sympathetic protagonist, and unrestrained black comedy, and the result is a wonderfully surreal novel worthy of comparison with the best political satire of this century ... Everyone should read this book: pacifists, moderates, militarists, and especially the uncommitted."

John A. Zurlo
Forth Worth Star-Telegram


The relevance comes from transposition. Morrow places his protagonist in a position where he is judged by future generations, both living and never born (the 'future dead') for his shared complicity in failing to prevent disaster to befall the planet, for thinking of himself first and not considering the consequences of his choices.

I am sure an intelligent reader can draw the obvious comparisons for herself.

I don't need to advise you to read and digest. The process of reading alone will guarantee that you will think about lots of things, not least how brilliant Morrow is.Please, read the book.