Not long ago, I read an essay by Roy Scranton (author of the essay — and later book — “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene”). This essay, “Beginning with the End,” was a very interesting meditation on western notions of time. Scranton begins by analyzing Frank Kermode’s 1967 book The Sense of an Ending, which examines the structure and implications of various narrative forms in novels, over the centuries. For Kermode, like Wallace Stevens, our stories about reality are always fictions, but sometimes they founder upon a reality that does not match up with them (a predicted end of the world on a date certain that comes and goes, for instance). Then one must construct a new story that accounts for the new reality.
While Scranton admires Kermode’s erudition and style, he faults the critic for not addressing the epistemological problems this framework presents. If all fictions are equally fictions, how does one choose between them? Whose interests does a particular eschatology serve? In other words, Scranton faults Kermode for his formalism — the tendency to assess these various fictions on purely structural or aesthetic grounds. Kermode, on Scranton’s account, himself abides by “a fiction of disinterested contemplation focused on the endlessly fascinating games we play with language at the expense of attending to the reality those games evolved to cope with.” From a cosmic point of view, all fictions look equal, but “we do not live our lives from a cosmic point of view.” But Scranton himself is not altogether immune from speaking from an olympian p.o.v.: . . . the world has already ended, over and over, for countless peoples and epochs. The world of paleolithic hunter-gatherers ended with the emergence of cities and agriculture. The world of Tang-dynasty China, in which Laozi and Confucius may have been contemporaries, ended too. So did the preliterate world of the eastern Mediterranean brought to life in Homer’s Iliad, long before Plato was himself witness to the end of the world that came after Homer’s, as literacy transformed Greek conceptions of being. The list continues. It’s hard to argue with Scranton’s meaning here: i.e., that every “world,” in the sense of a civilization or culture, comes to an end. There is nothing new under the sun. Especially if you're the sun. But it’s all well and good to contemplate the passing epochs of history disinterestedly — unless, of course, your own world is ending (or has ended already). Scanton has a reputation of being a doomer (cf. his recent book We’re Doomed — Now What?). But he’s not a prepper. How come? The fact of the matter is, as science tells us and prudent reflection confirms, we do not know the future. We do not know how quickly the planet will warm in our lifetimes. We do not know whether it’s too late to change. We do not know whether our civilization can survive the next century. We do not know how many species will eventually go extinct. We do not know how long the earth can sustain more than eight billion humans. We do not know when our cities will collapse. The list continues (it is an essay filled with lists — a “catalog essay,” if you will). Scranton concedes that it is likely, given the scientific data, that the planet is warming quickly, that our civilization will die, that many species are going and will go extinct, that the planet cannot sustain geometrical population increase indefinitely, that our cities will collapse, or that the hour is very very late. But the fact that we don’t have a time-line for these events is key, for him. “Utopian fictions,” from Murray Bookchin’s “social ecology” of the 1960s to “the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal,” are, for Scranton, “farcical daydreams against the coming chaos, popsicle-stick castles in a hurricane wind . . . .” Likewise, “our fictions of collapse, violence, and survival seem equally fictional, in their way: race wars, water wars, border wars, authoritarianism, pandemics, rising seas, abandoned cities—surely all this will come to pass, but in what forms we cannot possibly imagine.” It doesn’t matter that these occurrences are likely, within a generation or two. For Scranton, what is decisive is that we don’t have the details. You know the world will end, but you know not the day nor the hour. And what good is an end of the world if you can't predict it? Or can't describe what kind of plagues will descend or how many heads a particular beast possesses? Fuggedaboutit! (. . . to be continued Tuesday, July 14)
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |