(continued from Friday, July 10 . . .)
. . . Fair enough. But from his unobjectionable epistemological premise, Scranton derives an ontology, which he describes as “Accepting unknowing”: Embracing the void. Recognizing the limits of human knowledge. Relinquishing our consoling fictions about the future. Acknowledging the transience of the present and seeing in the death of what is the birth of what will become . . . [a] commitment to a future existence which by definition cannot be described. . . . This quasi-Heideggerian, quasi-mystical cloud of unknowing & becoming “also remains committed to some future human existence, no matter what form that existence takes, no matter who that human is.” But at this point, the argument gets a little sketchy, to my mind — or falls back on a kind of existentialist, choose-your-own-adventure narrative. Ultimately, for Scranton, all narratives about the world are narratives about our own mortal selves. OK. How shall we then live? “There is no solution to the riddle of existence,” Scranton opines, and “no amount of sophistication can ultimately justify the suffering that is being. . . . All we have is compassion, patience, and the recognition that every possible human future begins with the end of what came before.” It’s true that we don’t know exactly what will transpire with the climate. We can’t say for certain how many hurricanes will hit the east coast by 2050. But we have a pretty goddam good idea that quite a few of them will. Anybody who’s read anything about the climate crisis knows pretty well what needs to happen in order to ensure that the human race has options in the future; and they know pretty well the kind of things that will happen if we don’t. On the level of human will, a cloud of unknowing can pretty easily become a fog of indecisiveness. The contemplation of it may be just as formalist as anything Kermode advocates. In a way, "Time" is the god-term here. The passage of time, the coming-into-being of the future, these forces unfold themselves apart from human will. All we have, at the end of the essay, is passive acceptance and hope in the face of what’s-going-to-happen. The one thing here that might give us any guidance is the "compassion and patience" part. To me, knowing in even sketchy outline what’s coming down the pike places an ethical demand on each of us. The current victims of climate chaos place ethical claims on us by their very existence or deaths. Maybe you respond to that claim by working for whatever mitigation is possible. Maybe you educate people on the links between racism, neoliberalism, and climate chaos. Maybe you work to adapt hydrological infrastructure and food supply chains to the new climatic realities. Maybe you just try to make yourself a stronger, better person, more compassionate towards and patient with the people around you, in the meantime. It’s the fact that we don’t have all the facts that makes any ethical action — or inaction — perilous. But perhaps the very existence of other people will prompt us to take that leap of faith.
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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. |