An Uncanny End
There is no precedence for the state of the world
This week, Syrian rebels have captured Aleppo as unrest sweeps the country; Georgians are clashing with police, protesting the government’s decision to delay the nation’s bid for EU membership; the French government faces a vote of no confidence; and, just hours ago, South Korea declared martial law.
And, while all of this was going on—and it really is the tip of the iceberg— do you know which articles Guardian readers are spending the most time on? Stories about football stars, Kate Winslet’s comments on body-shaming she suffered in the 90s, and a retired police dog.
Reading the news these days often feels uncanny. Whether it’s minute analysis of party politics which inflates the perceived power of political actors as their lack of imagination collapses the Overton window, or entire sections still devoted to sport, the “news” often feels surreal, like it’s detached from reality, floating through space and time, its echo chamber reverberating back at the present, creating the illusion that what once was still is.
I taught media literacy briefly in London. I remember showing to my students a cutting of an editorial written in the late 1930s by Germany’s top Jewish publication in which the opinion of the magazine was the threats of Hitler’s rising star were empty; there was no precedent for him to act on them. Therefore, the editors argued, there was nothing to fear.
As I write this, BBC journalists are interviewing political analysts asking about the precedents that may help us understand South Korea declaring martial law. The analysts are warning that there is no precedent for this case because the law was declared by a civilian—the President.
I remember one of my philosophy professors talking about “the end of history” a decade ago, a concept which suggests history is a progressive evolution of the human social system. For Hegel, it meant the realisation of a perfectly rational state. For Marx, it meant global communism. For the political scientist Fukuyama writing in the 90s, it meant the installation of liberal democracies in every government in the world.
It seems they were all right that history would, indeed, end. However, it looks like they got it wrong that it would end with the culmination of linear social progress towards global liberation.
There is no historical precedent for the state of the world today. We are facing down the barrel of the planet’s own instability while governments collapse and the press is mostly either muzzled or limp with incompetence.
Can you imagine, when we are all history, how the future will look upon our era? There will be (I hope) endless media literacy classes on how, even after governments declared climate emergencies, the national press still denied reality; there will be books written about how states threw climate protesters in jail at the behest of the industry who weaponised climate disinformation; there will undoubtedly be a documentary showing the real life version of each scene of Don’t Look Up.
They will write how we careered towards the end of the future.
It took me 75 years to discover Planet Critical and it's become an integral part of my world now - thanks. The discourses on climate survival, mitigation and resilience are all very illuminating, BUT it seems to be going on in another plane to the world we are living in right now, the talk of carbon reduction, plastic elimination, leaving fossil fuels in the ground are all highly endorsable themes, but none of this will be achievable with the world at war with itself.
We will never solve the climate crisis while nations are at war with nations whether in actual conflict or through proxy wars. The UK could lead the world by declaring itself militarily neutral, we can't afford a sustainable armed force on land sea or air, while we have so many poverty related issues at home, but by declaring humanitarian neutrality and converting our armed services into peacekeeping forces we could convince many other progressive nations to join together in bringing peace to our world. And through this we could begin to unite the people of the world to coalesce in the name of human survival and global peace.
Global survival depends on epoch making, fundamental, sustainable belief in the positivity of humanity over riding the manaical neo con belief in growth, subjugation of humanity, and capitalism.
My own somewhat odd reading practice of recent years has been to avoid any news stories headlined as about individuals (whether celebrities, politicians, sports people or otherwise). Hard to maintain sometimes, but it avoids a lot of the fluff and focuses one on events, processes, institutions and bigger picture things.
As to future history, it’s hard to imagine how future generations will view us, as it is largely dependent on how bad things get during the polycrisis and an unfolding era of disaster nationalisms and resource wars. If we muddle or luck through somehow, and avoid a nuclear conflict, I suspect the period will be judged as another abject lesson in civilizational collapse, missed opportunities, human fallibility, regression to barbarism, history repeating itself etc. (a Great Derangement, to cite Gosh, or a new age of endarkenment). Worst case scenario, though, I think human cultural memory will be so fragmentary in a denuded, impoverished and flooded world that there will be thousands of new myths, ideologies and stories to make sense of this earlier age (stories of when people walked on the moon or when the sky burned; plenty of examples from sci fi probably capture this pretty well).