Peacock's Tail
Overcoming despair in the Anthropocene
Anger is the most effective emotion for spurring people to act against climate change, according to a recent paper published in the journal Global Environmental Change. The highest levels of environmental engagement are found in subjects who are angry at people—either individually, or the human species in general. This is good in that it tells us that properly directed outrage is effective; but it’s bad because it means we’re acting for the wrong reasons. Is it healthy if you defend the natural world not for its own sake, but because you hate humanity?
In Stealing Worlds, Sura Neelin’s father is an environmental activist. He gets into it because of his passionate love for nature; but gradually that changes:
“He started out as an idealist,” Marj says, “and got tangled up in the politics of it all. When I met him, he’d completely lost his way. He was bound and determined to save the world, but he never went out in it anymore. He had this office in Flint, and he spent all his time on the Internet, campaigning. I knew him for six months before we took a walk in the park! There was a time when he had a personal relationship with the natural world. But he’d forgotten all about it, forgotten that it was what he was trying to save. He wasn’t fighting for anything, anymore. He just fought against things.”
One of the reasons I started this newsletter was because I’m deeply worried that the glorious natural world that surrounds us has become a pawn in political battles between human partisans—that many people who defend nature do it not because they love it but because they hate someone or something else. If that’s what’s going on, then nature could suffer the fate of a pawn.
In a recent post, The Science Fiction of the 1900s, I said, “At some level, we recognize that we’re working to build a future we no longer believe in. It’s our parents’ future, it’s not ours.” There are a lot of reasons for that fundamental change, but one I didn’t touch on strongly enough at the time is global warming. Global warming, and its symptom of climate change have rendered the aspirational futures of the previous generations impossible. Imperceptibly, our civilization has shifted from one that was running toward a bright future, to one that is running away from a dark one. There is no way out of the box we’re in; we can’t even escape to the stars, because we will never find a world as perfectly fitted for us as our homeworld. There will never be a human born offworld who will not wonder what would be like to stand atop a mountain peak at dawn, go night swimming in the Caribbean sea, or watch a murmuration of starlings dance above their head.
There are no realistic visions of the near future in which Earth’s ecological crises do not get worse. Even if we reverse global warming, we’ve already lost so much. The last few human generations have driven at least 1400 bird species to extinction. Wherever you live, your skies are much quieter than they were for previous generations. There are also 40% fewer bugs in the trees and bushes in your area than there were even thirty years ago.
How can we not be angry?
But how can anger propel us into a joyful, creative, future—a world better than the one we’ve inherited? And how can any motivation that’s just about us—about humanity—help us promote Earth’s rich pageant of continual creation? Humanism has made existence better for billions of people, but no ethos that places human beings at the center of existence can solve what I call the ‘fox guarding the henhouse' problem of humanity trying to preserve the natural world while simultaneously exploiting it. For this we need a posthumanist ethics.
The Angel of History
The bare fact of the harm we’ve already committed creates a seemingly insoluble dilemma for anyone wanting to be optimistic. You either have to lie to yourself—taking refuge in the triumphalist visions of the Science Fiction of the 1900s; or go into denial about the depth of the crisis; or you must be truthful about it. If you are truthful, then when you look in the mirror you’ll find Walter Benjamin’s terrible Angel of History staring back:
His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
For Benjamin, the storm blowing from Paradise is called Progress. For our generation, its name is Global Warming. We’re caught in a cyclone of change, which is happening to quickly for us to react. We learn that species are endangered too late to save them. We discover the side-effects of progressive projects too late—after generations of shoreline snag clearance, dredging, and other interventions intended to improve the flow of the Mississippi River, fish populations have declined 25%. That’s just one example of a global phenomenon; for instance, the Aral Sea has completely dried up.
If the best we can ever hope to do is fix the damage we’ve already caused, what do we have to look forward to? We may get the job done, but fixing is not the same as building. Our children know this; they are already different than us.
In the movie Tomorrowland, Britt Robertson and George Clooney try to save the world by rekindling people’s hope. The message of the movie is that we can fix our problems if we regain the spirit of adventurous optimism society had in the mid-twentieth century. Essentially, believe again in the future of the 1900s. But this is an optimism that doesn’t admit that we screwed up. It’s imagining a future that whistles past the graveyard of those 1400 missing birds. Sure, Britt and George set out to fix the mistakes of the past, but they do it by retreating into the very mindset of the generation that made those mistakes.
No, if we are to create a truly 21st-century optimism, it can’t be done with some Frankensteinian jolt that restarts the heart of Progress. It’s too late to put Progress back on track. Progress is not our younger generations’ lived experience. There are many reasons for this as I’ve said, such as the global mass-theft of all of our wages that started in the late 1970s and was locked in by Reagan and Thatcher. Some problems, like that one, can be addressed politically. What I called the ‘bare fact’ of the mass extinction we are currently driving, cannot. We can’t achieve genuine optimism by avoiding the nihilistic horror of this extinction event; instead, we have to confront it head-on. We have to find a way to become the Angel of History yet still look forward to the future.
Disenchantment
Our other great battle is with disenchantment—essentially, the theft of divinity from our experience of the natural world. This experience of the meaninglessness of the natural world has a lot of causes, ranging from the mechanistic and materialistic atheism of 19th-century science to the increasing automation of life so starkly drawn in Fritz Lang’s classic movie, Metropolis. If people no longer believe in God, they still can’t turn to nature to find the divine, because for Western culture nature is by definition the opposite of divinity; it’s the realm of stupid coincidence and blind causality, utterly indifferent to us and devoid of magic. As Sura imagines it in Stealing Worlds,
Once there was a wilderness, and maybe she could have gone feral in it, a little ball of wildcat energy in the grasslands. All that’s gone now, the whole fucking planet is one big managed plot of land, a global city, and dotted among its towers and freeways, green spaces. … But it’s not countryside anymore … just a yard, like a thousand others. And the neighbors will never stop squabbling until they find a way to split it up.
Human achievement doesn’t count either. From William Blake’s “dark satanic mills” to the religious and fascist anti-rationalist movements of the early 20th century, we in the West developed a tradition of ambivalence if not outright antagonism to technological advancement. The linguistic turn and postmodern philosophy didn’t help, they just made it worse. Every new achievement somehow left behind a bitter taste of disappointment. Nowhere is this bitterness greater than with the discoveries of physics and the atom bomb they made possible. The Bomb is technology fully divorced from human or divine meaning. I grew up under the shadow of imminent nuclear war, and I like to think Millennials (if there are such things) don’t have the same existential demon squatting on their shoulders. Of course, now we have AI, which threatens (apparently) to replace us the way Henry Ford’s automobiles replaced the millions of horses living in European and American cities. (And what happened to all those horses?)
Science Fiction is not spared. Virginia Woolf, writing about H.G. Wells in 1919, said of SF that
If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one word materialists, we mean by it that they [Wells et al.] write of unimportant things: that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.
The literature of wonder is not wonderful at all, apparently. It glorifies the meaningless.
Adornment Theory
I’ve written about Speculative design and how I practice it as a way of challenging our preconceptions about the future. One of its main tools is fiction—not necessarily stories, but fictional constructs, such as future histories, ‘artifacts from the future’, and other experiential approaches. Unapocalyptic is an exercise in speculative design. That means it’s a safe space where we can play with ideas that we might not be able to rationally defend, cite precedents for, or put together into a coherent plotline. We use indefensible, sacrificial concepts to build a possibly shaky scaffold from which we can discover genuinely new ideas.
Taking this to heart, what would it mean to approach the dilemma of the Angel of History as a designer? Let’s give it a shot.
Our design for a posthumanist ethos of the 21st century will use the Angel rather than trying to deny him. We’ll start by doubling down on the meaninglessness of life. —No, I don’t mean your life, I mean life itself—biological organisms. Despite many attempts by philosophers, scientists, and pseudoscientists to find some grand purpose in evolution, there’s no evidence there is one. That includes humanity and our possible AI heirs. There’s a great book by Stephen J. Gould called Full House that explains how it can look like there’s a direction to natural selection—towards progressively more complex, cognitive beings—but that this is a statistical illusion. To use my favourite language, this apparent direction results from a single constraint, namely that there is a lower limit to how complex a life form can be. If species evolve into more or less complex forms at random, this constraint means they will still get progressively more complex. —Not because something is causing life to become more complex; but simply because the too-simple forms don’t reproduce.
Now consider the problem of disenchantment. In her books The Enchantment of Modern Life and Vibrant Matter, 21st-century philosopher Jane Bennett argues for an Enchanted Materialism. She counters the prevailing narrative of disenchantment with numerous examples of people finding the divine in the ordinary drudgery of human life, in our technologies, and in nature too, even on a planet that’s become just ‘a yard.’ We are all in love with both the human and the nonhuman world, she insists, and many other contemporary thinkers agree. Here’s a short reading list:
Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature
Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble
Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred
So yes, life’s complexity is entirely unnecessary and the peacock’s tail is a useless extravagance to everybody but the peahen. Yet magnificent antlers, brilliant wing patterns, fluorescent skin colours, bioluminescence, bizarre shapes and sizes, and all the bewildering frills and adornments that living beings come up with, don’t have to have a reason, any more than life as a whole does. If the new materialists are right, nothing in existence needs either human or divine approval to be worthy and awesome in its own right.
Using these ideas, we can prototype a philosophy, religion, or ethical practice I’ll call Adornment Theory or AT. Accepting that the myriad adornments and extravagances of life have no objective purpose, AT goes on to say that they nonetheless are pride embodied as active subjects in the world. The peacock is proud of his tail; we humans are proud of our intelligence and technology. I don’t need to justify that pride; each set of antlers or iridescent tail literally embodies it, so no more reason is needed. Life can be extravagant; it can create beauty. So it does.
Let’s get geophysical. From the perspective of the planet as a whole, life and even human consciousness are just dissipative systems that help maintain global thermodynamic equilibrium. Life is unnecessary to Earth; yet this planet has it.
Life is Earth’s peacock’s tail: a sign for all to see that this world is so rich, so overflowing with creativity that it can adorn itself with the most wildly beautiful, and even wildly powerful plumage.
From this vantage point, what the Angel of History is witnessing is not a ‘catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’ but rather a series of plays and scenes and costume changes, artworks scribbled into being and discarded instantly in favour of another, and symphonies that begin before the final note of the last one has ended. This looks like a catastrophe to the angel only because he sees the beauty that’s gone, not what is and what’s yet to be born.
The ethics of adornment say humanity is part of this creativity and always has been, and we are uniquely positioned to encourage and empower it even further. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. Taking this one stance toward our place in the natural world lets us drop guilt, blame, recrimination, and sorrow at what’s been lost and what we are continuing to lose. It replaces those negative motivations, which may be temporarily effective but will poison us in the long run, with a single, positive goal: to promote the diversity and overflowing generosity of Earthly life. It’s a stance that doesn’t force us to start with what we've lost, indeed with what we ourselves destroyed. Like life itself, it faces only the future, and its driving emotions are wonder, curiosity, creative desire, and hope. It is, in other words, the exact opposite of the Angel of History.
To life on Earth, the past does not exist. There is only now, and the future. If we emulate this perspective, it doesn’t make us indifferent to the current mass extinction, but it reverses our motivation, from grasping after what was and could be lost, to preserving what is and working to make the world a nursery for what’s to come. From fighting against, to fighting for.
We pledge to help the Earth achieve the greatest possible, most exuberant adornment of itself—not only for our heirs and for sentience, but for all life, however nonhuman. We will therefore fight any system, human or nonhuman, that reduces the variety and extravagance of Earthly life, and fight for any system that stands to increase it.
A Posthumanist Future
Having made our speculative design, we can do some worldbuilding with it, to write some of Woolf’s ‘trivial and transitory’ science fiction or develop scenarios for foresight clients.
The Korean Demilitarized Zone is a 250-kilometer stretch of land where no human has set foot in 70 years. In it, biodiversity is flourishing. Something similar has happened in Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone, where all of Europe’s large mammals can be found as well as over 200 species of birds. At Time’s Square in New York, you won’t find that diversity, but you’ll find a human and technical version of it that—from the point of view of, say, aliens—could be considered just as natural to the Earth as a rosebud. Imagine if we erased the line between the natural and the technological, not to privilege one or the other or to rule them, but to encourage both. Our descendant civilization might commit to E.O. Wilson’s Half Earth project not (primarily) to halt and reverse the ecological catastrophe we’ve caused, but as a replacement for Progress, an epic multi-generational effort worthwhile in its own right.
Imagine a spacefaring civilization built on AT. The usual trope of “spreading life throughout the universe” is silently humanist; we think and write stories based on the idea of interplanetary and interstellar civilization as our goal. But an AT-driven colonization effort wouldn’t privilege the spread of civilization, or even sentience, among the stars. We could write stories about a future where humans and their AI peers use the resources of this solar system, and eventually, those of other star systems, to build habitats far too vast or numerous for us ever to populate. If we built world-sized constructs such as Bishop Rings too fast for our population to naturally grow into them, we could either scale back our construction rate; or, we could mass-produce new populations, either human or AI, to populate them. But there’s a third option based on the position that we don’t have to be building these new worlds, or settling colonizable planets around other stars, for our own sake. Let nonhuman and even nonsentient life explode out into the universe, without us if necessary. Let our technologies do it if biology can’t, and let’s not worry about whether they’re sentient. Let us cast life into the universe with abandon, not caring if we share its journey. If this were a movie, it would flip the ending of Silent Running: from the forlorn and temporary salvation of a few trees, to a positive, existence-affirming greening of the universe for no better reason than to fan our peacock’s tail.
Thought Experiments and Design
Is Adornment Theory a real thing? Nah. It’s just a design. The reason I’m throwing it out there is to bring together the threads of the Unapocalyptic approach in an example. Those threads are:
Design, especially speculative design in the form of science fictions, projections and scenarios that may or may not come to pass, but don’t have to if they inspire people to think in new ways.
Reframing problems in such a way that design thinking can do its work.
Posthumanism—not transhumanism, but an ethos asserting that humanity is just a subset of life on Earth, no more or less special than any other species. I’ve been saying this for over twenty years now; just read Permanence (2002) for an example.
Earned optimism: acting in such a way that optimism becomes justifiable, rather than just being optimistic.
Looking to the present for answers, rather than to a past whose ideas got us into our current mess.
This post brings all those threads together. Hopefully, even if you don’t believe in Adornment, you can see that even in this dark and anxious time, it is possible to find—or rather make—an Ariadne’s thread to help us escape our self-built maze of uncertainties. Maybe it won’t be this one that works for you; you might have a better idea. But it’s possible to approach the future with a curious and innocent heart, and a generation energized by such a perspective could do what mine has failed to do—
And save the Earth.