Parsing Out Dystopia: Befuddled by the Abyss

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he does not become a monster.  And if you gaze too long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” - Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future 

Over the past few months, I've watched a YouTube history channel about the fall of the great empires and civilizations.  Assyrian.  Egyptian.  Byzantine.  Indus.  Mayan.  All sorts of civilizations and empires have come and gone.  In watching these documentaries, I was more interested in what brought each new one about, how did each of these vast collection of societies emerge as a new power?  Ultimately, each one fell and it sometime seemed to me they fell for similar reasons.

Also over that same period of time, I watched a couple of Jordan Peterson videos that left me enraged at him without initially understanding why.  I respect the man immensely.  I even agree with most of what he is saying.  But there's a underlying attitude, and unspoken “obvious” assumption he is making, that irritated me, yet my thinking on this was unclear.  It was an emotional response.  Something about my sense of values.

In one of the videos, Peterson answers a rather naive question posed by an idealistic college student.  He is speaking before some college audience somewhere.  It is actually nice to see him getting out and touring again after his recent serious illness.  He is sharply dressed in skin tight slacks, definitely futuristic looking to go with the standard well-tailored tie and jacket.  The student rattles on with her question about if Peterson saw climate change as something that could bring people together.  As I said, it was a naive question.

And it was rambling.  So, when she finished Peterson sat for a moment in the silence of the hall and then simply answered “No.”  Scattered loud laughter and some applause ensued.  Well, it was a smart ass thing for him to do but it made for good theater and she did run-on with a yes/no question she never should have asked in the first place.

In a nutshell, Peterson does not believe global warming is as big an issue as some claim.  He thinks there are tougher, more important questions that need to be addressed.  He does not disclaim global warming is happening.  He entertains the notion “maybe it is a big problem” a couple of times during his 6-minute or so answer to the question.  But he points out that climate models are highly inaccurate to begin with and their errors are expounded the further out in time that you go.  

So, he asks, how do we even address the issue of climate change if we cannot accurately measure what we are doing?  Well, that's a bit disingenuous by Peterson.  Because we already have accurately measured quite a bit about what is going on right now.  More importantly, we have very accurate historical evidence going back more than 800,000 years on exactly what has happened to the global climate before (see graph above).  Peterson does not mention any of that.  Instead he claims: “We don't know what to do about it and nothing is really going to be done about it anyway.”  That is hubris.  

We know about climate change through vast eons of time.  We know precisely what has happened in the last 200 years and we know going back over 8,000 centuries.  We have a pretty damn good view of what happens as Co2 levels rise and fall.  We know about every temperature drop and when glaciers moved toward the equator.  We know about every warming period and the corresponding rise in sea level.  All this stuff has been fluctuating forever – but always in sync within 1,000 years and over periods of about 100,000 years from each glacial age to the next.  After some meditation, I realized that Peterson acts like global warming is a trivial fact, he disdains it and believes it is inseparably tainted with politics.  That is what triggered me.

Peterson goes on to discuss Germany's recent struggles with wind and solar as a shining example of how green energy is simply not going to give us the electricity we have come to expect in developed societies.  Apparently, nuclear energy is off the table (because of environmentalists).  We need coal plants to maintain our living standards in most parts of the world and most people expect living standards to continue to rise.  This is all true, in my mind.

Nothing will be done about climate change, because nothing can be done about climate change.  And no, by the way, it will not bring humanity together.  Peterson cites the work of Bjorn Lomborg as a more sensible way to think about climate change.  Here, respected world economists, some of them Nobel Prize winners, assembled teams to discuss human flourishing on the planet.  All these independent committees came back with action items. Climate change was not mentioned by anyone.  

Well, I find myself agreeing with Peterson that global warming is inevitable.  There's no stopping it now.  But I did not yet fully realize the implications of this until later in my investigations.  Clearly, Peterson does not think global warming will amount to much.  According to him, it would be better to take the money we are spending on solar and wind and invest it in feeding children in malnourished parts of the world.  Peterson suggests that maybe the addition of “ten million geniuses” to collective human brain power would be a good thing and solve problems like climate change.

Now this is a bait and switch.  I do not understand the logic behind this either/or.  You want to feed malnourished children and properly educated them?  OK.  Go for it.  But that is not comparable with addressing global warming.  Peterson (Lomborg too) wants to make you care about something totally unrelated to global warming as if that would somehow make it less of an issue.  Do both Jordan.  There's no reason not to do both.  

And why does Peterson think great economists are the best minds on the warming of the Earth anyway?  Isn't that a bit like the wolves reporting back on how well the chickens are doing?  Why does climate change apparently have so little an impact on human flourishing (Lomborg states that global warming won't substantially impact personal economic growth)?  It makes no sense unless he is throwing “economists” out there as a credential that privileges (he thinks) his perspective.  His argument is that since all these economic teams didn't mention global warming it isn't worth mentioning at all in terms of human flourishing.

On this point I was pissed and Peterson was wrong.  Humanity means nothing if you can't breathe the air.  Economists are among the least qualified people to espouse upon the climate of the Earth.  Economists do not understand ecosystems as anything other than resources.   Global warming is about ecosystems whereas humans deal in ego-systems.  Instead of the carbon cycle or the nitrogen cycle, humans live within economic cycles in order to flourish.  If Co2 is a problem we will just “clean it up.”

I agreed about the inevitability of global warming but I vehemently disagreed about how this will impact humanity and the world.  Peterson has his values fundamentally skewed.  In an earlier video he proclaimed that “The collapse of our values is a greater threat than climate change.”  This really pissed me off but I could not articulate exactly why at the time.  It was later that I suddenly recognized his somewhat neurotic disdain for global warming.  He says if we get our values properly realigned that issues like climate change will simply take care of themselves.

Now climate change and human values are connected, just not the way Peterson intends.  We value industrial society and all of its progeny and this is what exacerbates global warming to begin with.  While the impact of human values can unleash global warming, the warming of the Earth itself affects far more than human society and is beyond humanity's control.  And the problems of human society, our existential experience of the sacred, our need to consume goods and services, are trivial compared to the destruction of ecosystems.  This is what was bothering me.  Peterson was devaluing the ecosystems of the Earth for his “human values over ecology” whiny arrogance.

Near the end of one of the videos Peterson yaks on about how “apocalyptic” climate change gloom contributes to human depression.  He states: “I couldn't shake the suspicion, especially in relation to environmentalism, it's contaminated quite badly with historical shame and guilt and a profound anti-humanism.”  Then he tells us that our planet is not a “being in some sense.”  This insults the experience of my life all the way back to my days in high school reading Thoreau.  Peterson probably does not think much of the Gaia principle.

Not knowing precisely what to do and having no voice for my rage at Peterson, I decided to investigate Germany's renewable energy initiative for myself.  I discovered that Peterson was correct, there are tremendous challenges ahead.  Over the past twenty years, Germany has prided itself as being the global leader in the simultaneous phasing-in of solar and wind production and phasing-out of fossil fuel plants, mainly coal.  But the solar and wind contribution to the German electrical grid has been insufficient up to now.  

The weather patterns have changed.  Wind, once more prevalent in the north, has shifted southward leaving northern Germany's sole wind turbine manufacturer to go out of business and scrap all its metal.  Solar has been hampered by heavy snows which completely block the panels even on sunny days.  Coal plants that were scheduled to go off-line have remained online and are meeting more electrical demand than ever before.   

This made my heart sink.  I know that, personally, nuclear power is our best option. But, it isn't considered “green” even though historically, even with mishaps, it has been far greener than coal and oil.  So what else can we turn to if we are not going to cut back on the way we live our lives?  The entire world is addicted to electricity and gasoline; addicted to fossil fuels to a degree wind and solar simply show no sign of meeting.

Or do they?  Recently, a gigantic swath of southern Australia really and truly met its entire electricity demand with renewables, even if it was for only a single sunny day.  Just because Germany is having problems does not mean that wind and solar are irrelevant elsewhere.  Earlier, Peterson wanted the world to think that since Germany was not working out so well then green technologies themselves were not worth the effort.  Waste of time and money.  But that is a false argument and another example of Peterson's bullshit on this topic.  Maybe Germany needs nuclear (even though they probably won't go that route) but that doesn't negate the potential benefits from wind and solar for other parts of the world. Peterson uses Germany to dismiss the idea of renewable technology, which is absurd. (Or so I thought, but I'll come back to this feeling of absurdity again.)

Of course, I was watching other content besides Peterson during this time.  His climate attitude was just this irritating thought that took up residence in the back of my mind.  Since I watched several episodes of Fall of Civilizations, YouTube's algorithm suggested, among a bunch of stuff that I disregarded, a lecture entitled “Collapse 101: The Inevitable Fruit of Progress” by Michael Dowd, someone I've never hear of.  (He gave some interesting TEDx talks in 2012 and 2014.)  So I gave it a try.

More than 88 civilizations and empires all over the world have come and gone in the last 3,000 or so years and they all failed in similar ways.  According to Dowd, they enjoy a period of intense flourishing and wealth generation.  Then they “overshoot” the capacity of the biosphere to support their flourishing and they crash.  The average lifespan for a particular civilization during all this time is about 4-5 centuries.  A few more, most less.  

The human race has already overshot the capacity for our ecosystems to support our flourishing.  According to history, our civilization will inevitably crash.  There will, by historic necessity, be a transformation of human flourishing just as there has been so many times over the past few thousand years.

Widening our scope to the past 800,000 years (see graph above) we can clearly see the rise and fall of Co2 levels associated with the heating and cooling of the Earth's environment.  Currently, according to Dowd, we are at a level of “effective” Co2 in the atmosphere that is significantly higher than at any time in the past seven or eight major glacial cycles.

Co2 and surface temperature are inseparable through time.  In pre-industrial times, Co2 always lagged behind temperature rise.  This leads climate skeptics to conclude there is no reason that Co2 will lead to a rise in temperature.  Can Co2 actually drive temperatures up?    That is a source of contention in the climate debates but the consensus among climatologists is that temperatures usually drive Co2 up but, at some point, Co2 contributes to the warming process as well.  

Perhaps global temperature cannot rise to the level of Co2 whenever Co2 leads.   How do we know?   It has never happened before.  Nevertheless, historically speaking, Co2 and temperature have eventually harmonized with one another.  Given how high the Co2 count already is (and the fact it is going to keep going even higher), temperatures could rise multiple degrees in a mere span of a few decades.  It is likely (Dowd says inevitable) that sometime in the next couple of hundred years (at most), the Earth will be hotter than at any time in almost a million years.

Abruptly, I found myself in the middle of doom environmentalism.  I had known about this perspective for decades but never took it seriously since I had read Dr. Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb back in high school.  Years later, I realized almost nothing predicted in that book actually happened when Ehrlich claimed it would.  It all seemed to be alarmist hysteria to me.  Later, while I studied Ken Wilber, I noted that he, too, was critical of environmentalism's “spiritual” aspects and how it was looking in the wrong direction (backward to nature) for the evolution of human consciousness.  Wilber seemed to confirm what I already thought at the time.

But I liked Dowd's smooth voice, expansive knowledge on the subjects of environmentalism and indigenous wisdom.  So I watched a few hours of his lectures.  Initially, I did not know what to make of it.  That present, historic, aberrational Co2 level was certainly a very bad number.  It had already happened.  If we all stopped “flourishing” tomorrow, the Earth will still heat-up dramatically in the coming decades because it is only now beginning to react to the collective damage industrial civilization belched into the air over the past two centuries.  We're screwed.  What's more, we have been screwed for a few decades now.  

If we were going to do something about global warming, we should have started addressing it before it was widely-accepted to even be a problem, back in the 1990's.  Long before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was ever conceived.  Dowd taught me a new term.  TEOTWAWKI.  The End Of The World As We Know It.  (There's a cool REM song - from 1987(!) - along those lines.)  Interestingly enough, no one has that term for a web site yet.  Maybe that in itself proves how wrong this perspective might be.

There's a lot more to doom environmentalism than I will allude to here.  I found myself open to the concept regardless of its overwhelming implications.  And it made me recall my natural affinity for the writings of Thoreau and certain Taoist teachings.  I am an accidental Taoist and this “don't screw with Mother Nature” stuff really resonates with me.  I thought about the 800,000 year chart and the cycles and considered: “That is the heartbeat of Tao.  What goes up must come down and visa-versa.  There's no stopping it.  It is natural.  It is a shadow of 'the Eternal Way.'”

Dowd mentions Martin Buber's great work I And Thou which I own and I read a couple of times years ago.  I thought Buber's consideration of the secular “I” and the sacred “Thou” was highly interesting.  Dowd echoes this claim in articulating his own personal belief system.  The ecology of the Earth has been made into an “it” by humanity and subjected “it” to human flourishing.  Dowd sees the ecological sphere as worthy of a “Thou” distinction, replacing the “it” that human industrialization inflicted upon it.  (Incidentally, this is close to what Heidegger felt was occurring with technology's enframing process upon human Being.)

It feels right to me to hold the Earth in a more reverent esteem.  It feels wrong to me to value everything in creation in terms of human flourishing.  It feels arrogant on our part.  I believe we are an arrogant species.  So, there was a lot running around in my head as I watched all this content considering doom environmentalism, Taoism, Peterson, global warming, my life values and the fall of past civilizations.

I needed to dig myself out of this doom and gloom.  What about Bjorn Lomborg, the man whose work Peterson so much admired?  Could he save the day?  I watched a couple of videos featuring his perspective and realized he was naturally in tune with a lot of what Steven Pinker wrote in Enlightenment Now.  By now, so many points of interest were coming together in this unexpected quest that my mind was becoming truly befuddled. 

According to Lomborg, global warming is happening but we can and will adapt to it.  We will suck Co2 out of the atmosphere, if necessary.  By 2100 there will be no poverty on Earth.  The amount of collective human wealth will be staggering.  Agriculture will explode in the coming years, adapting to climate change and mainly moving indoors.  Anyone who claims it's the end of the world is not only wrong, these fools make us work on the wrong things.  Expensive green energy disproportionately hurts the poor.  We should be helping people today out of poverty instead of trying to help people 75 years from now who will be much better off than we are.  

“If we can innovate some sort of green energy down below the price of fossil fuels we will have solved global warming.”  Current green initiatives look good on television but are not solid.  They have very little cost benefit.  We can't store solar and wind adequately.  Nuclear is green.  We should reconsider it as well.  We should not enter into global agreements that have historically made no difference anyway.  Instead, we should leverage the inherent dynamics of capitalism to focus on a diversity of research and development.  Our investments currently are not cost effective.  We don't know realistically how to get to carbon zero.  If we let capitalism work we will spend less money smarter and maximize innovation.
 

All that seemed so much more hopeful that I almost automatically gravitated toward it.  Almost.  The problem was that simply replacing fossil fuels with green energy will not stop global warming, as Lomborg claims.  As things already stand, Co2 levels will remain extraordinarily high for decades to come, regardless of what we do.  I experienced so much affinity for the eco-doom perspective that I was already truly conflicted when one evening I came across Planet of the Humans, a documentary produced by Michael Moore, which is available on YouTube.

The film is one person's story of concern for our environment and for human sustainability.  He decides to make a personal quest to discover the emergence of alternative energy sources, primarily wind, solar and biomass.  The long story short is wind and solar are unreliable, wasteful and still depend upon fossil fuels to even exist.  A wind mill, for example, only lasts about 20 years.  They are massive structures with a very heavy carbon footprint when constructed.  Without fossil fuels we could not even build wind mills.

Although many events and corporate operations have trumpeted in recent years that their particular whatever was accomplished using 100% renewable energy, it was all a lie.  Every one of them depended on fossil fuels for start-up and reliability.  After all this time, nothing of consequence is even close to going completely off the fossil fuel grid.  

Then there is biomass.  Burning wood chips is seen as a “green” way to produce electricity and it is more reliable than wind or solar.  But the amount of wood chips needed to generate the electricity to sustain human flourishing is more than can be gathered through truly “green” sources.  Instead, we are now destroying acres of woodlands to produce the chips to burn in the biomass plants.  We are literally burning more trees than ever in order to phase-out coal plants.  I kid you not.  This is madness and it shows how absurd “green” energy truly can be in reality.
 

Remember I wrote that I would come back to my prior feeling of absurdity at Peterson's argument against Germany's renewable experience?  Now that seemed like small potatoes compared to the absurdity of the global biomass industry.  It is a shining example of how we are all already living in dystopia.

Beyond this, the entire green energy industry and its primary advocates like the Sierra Club are completely indebted to investments and support provided by the oil, coal, and gas industry.  Across the board, green energy made a pact with fossil fuel corporations and its very existence depends upon consuming more natural resources leaving a trivial net-positive impact.

I felt like Frodo caught in Shelob's web in Tolkien's fantasy.  No matter how much I thrashed and squirmed I became more entangled until I could hardly move at all.  What started out as simple rage at Jordan Peterson's attitude about climate change ended up in complete hopelessness and confusion.  I did not know what to make of all this.  

Mistakenly, I thought I was looking into the abyss months ago entertaining my theory of how the enframing process would lead to valid virtual realities and other augmentations of human experience.  That seemed to me to be the cause of much human anger and fear expressed throughout the world today.  Human brains cannot rewire themselves fast enough to keep up with the consequences of technological change.  I still believe that to be the case.  But it turns out that it might not be the abyss I thought it was.  Perhaps we overshot the ability of ecology to support technology and human life.  Was this true?  I could not decide.  

Maybe Lomborg is right.  Global warming must be addressed but we are going about it all wrong and in any case the impact of such warming will be minimal on human flourishing.  That certainly seems like a sensible and hopeful view.  He believes we will innovate and adapt.  For example, he offers the possibility of growing algae on the vast surface of the ocean.  It would soak up Co2 and then we could harvest it and turn it into fuel to power our cars.  

That certainly would be innovative.  And human beings are best at innovating under challenging circumstances.  Consider the recent development of mRNA vaccines in answer to the global pandemic.  But beyond Lomborg's “don't worry, we'll figure something out, we always do,” he offers even less evidence that it would work on a grand scale than there is about the future prospects of wind and solar.  Lomborg assumes we will come up with something because humans are highly adaptive and have never before enjoyed such a technological dynamic.   That's true.  And even if industrial civilization does collapse, history teaches us another civilization will come along and thrive in its place.  So maybe the eco-doomers are completely wrong with their version of “the end of history.”

Except we have to always come back to that Co2 level being far, far, ridiculously higher than at any point in the last 800,000 years.  That is a weighty fact in the face of either Lomborg's economic viewpoint or Peterson's psychological viewpoint.  They don't see the urgency that I see.  Lomborg states, vaguely, “we will clean-up the atmosphere.”  Although we may very well adapt, human flourishing as we know it seems about to transform because we will have to adapt.  That is now beyond our control and it has me befuddled.

I believe technology is enframing humanity and is actually in control of its own future development.  I believe that the current levels of Co2 in the atmosphere are beyond those of any of the past seven or eight global warming periods.  I believe that temperatures will eventually rise at least partially up toward the exponential global Co2 level, making it hotter on Earth than at any time in the last 800,000 years - unless technology decides it can and will do something about it.  I believe that the Earth's ecosystems are sacred but that, due to enframing, this sanctity cannot be related to by most human beings anymore.  

I also believe that the first twenty-five years of “green energy” have been a terrible disappointment.  That, despite some local successes like southern Australia, a minor success in Germany, and maybe some other places here and there, “green energy” shows no signs of being able to ween itself off of fossil fuels.  Coal and oil are needed to build green stuff and to maintain reliability to the electrical grid.  I believe that being enframed limits the dynamics of how we can adapt (a drawback I had not previously considered).  Technology will march toward virtual reality while we burn forests in biomass plants so we can close down coal plants.  

So where does all that leave you and I?  It is all so confusing and absurd.  I honestly don't know if our ability to adapt can lead to serious mitigation of global warming.   I don't see any hope of the Earth's ecosystems sustaining the demands we place upon them because we see ecology as an “it” (resource, enframing) instead of as Buber's “Thou.”  Regardless of whether or not we can adapt, it makes me sad in the high Elven kind of sadness, carrying the weight of the world's change, that Tolkien explores so well.  

Maybe Peterson is right.  Elevating the Earth to the status of a Being is confused and leads to human depression.  But, Peterson feels this is something we can simply grow wise about and, focusing on other concerns and certainly our own psychological demons, continue to flourish and adapt which is the essence of our humanity.  I don't agree.  I don't see anything definitive in Lomborg's take on global warming.  Just saying we'll adapt is a hope not a plan, not an empirical fact.  That we will conduct research is no guarantee of anything, is it?  And didn't every past civilization think it would continue to generate wealth forever?

At the same time, the eco-doomers believe we have to learn the ways of ingenious economics.  Anything that abuses the “grace limits” of the Earth will “overshoot” equilibrium and lead to collapse.  That sounds quaint but the truth is it isn't really fully human either.  To be human is to innovate in a chaotic variety of ways that do not consider grace limits.  Human innovation is grace unlimited, which the doomers say is impossible.  I'm not so sure about that.  

To be clear, the Earth is currently in a natural warming cycle.  The graphic up top indicates that we should be seeing warming temperatures now as a continuation of the natural ebb and flow of climate change.  So global warming is natural.  The problem we face is that, with the extraordinary amount of Co2 in the atmosphere, we are seeing a warming trend play out over a few decades instead of over the course of centuries, which is what normally happens.  While natural global warming still wrecks havoc on the environment (as do glacial periods), it usually occurs at a rate that allows the Earth's ecosystems more time to adapt.  

My brain is filled with conflicting ideas.  The only thing I'm certain of is that the world is destined to be a different place.  That difference is more complicated than the enframing process itself, which I should have noticed before.  Enframing is the technological resourcification of human Being.  The enframing process has already placed the Earth's ability to sustain life upon a precipice.  This is how the present is future-shifted.  The abyss is more massive and alarming than I realized.

Nietzsche was right.  I can feel the abyss staring back into me.  It feels like I stand at the foot of Cthulhu in Lovecraft's macabre universe and yet, I too am the monster.  I have unwittingly and carelessly contributed to global warming all my life.  But this does not make me worried or scared or even angry.  I don't feel any of Peterson's guilt or shame or inhumanity that he claims lie at the heart of environmentalism.  I cannot be guilty for something I did not feel or know was happening and which seemed perfectly fine in any case.  No.  I am confused and conflicted and more than a bit disoriented.  

Befuddled is an old word.  English speakers don't use it as often as they used to.  It is on its way out.  According the Merriam-Webster, befuddled means to be “utterly confused or puzzled: deeply perplexed.”  That is the best way to describe my feeling about all this stuff.  I respect all the different perspectives presented in this post, this written x-ray of my present mind.  I don't disdain any of them as much as Peterson disdains global warming, for example.  I neither privilege nor trivialize any of them.  That is why I am “deeply perplexed.”  They cannot all be valid claims.  

But the manner in which all these competing validity claims will express themselves within the world is unclear to me.  I think, somehow, we will find a way.  Temperatures will rise to record degrees by 2100 and about ten percent of the Earth's humans will have to relocate because their land will be underwater.  But, beyond that, it seems like I'm peering into a fog.  Large swaths of our ecosystems have been and are going extinct at an accelerating rate.  

I'm not a Lomborg optimist but the eco-doomers seem a tad neurotic when they discount the grand development of technology through human innovation. And I am certainly not a Peterson minimalist.  Climate change is going to grab you by the throat one day, Jordan.  You'll see.  Or maybe you won't.  Things probably won't really start heating up exponentially for another 30 years, so maybe both me and Peterson will be dead by then.    But that's no way to look at things – as an escape.  I am the monster without guilt and I know the heart of the abyss.  I just don't know what I'm going to do next, but I will think of something. 

Late note:  On the surface, Scotland seems to have a robust renewable energy program.  In fact, they have not only shut down their coal production, they recently blew-up their last coal plant as a symbolic act.  Let's hope the symbolism signals some real success.  But, I notice they use a lot of "wood-fired" biomass energy.  That worries me.  The number of tree burning plants in Scotland has quadrupled since 2014. Hmmm.