CHAPTER 1

Imagining the End

A PERSONAL JOURNEY

Staring at Catastrophe

It is my profound belief that humanity is on a suicidal course, headedstraight for catastrophe. I speak of catastrophe in the singular, not to designatea single event, but a whole system of disruptions, discontinuities,and basic structural changes that are the consequence of exceeding criticalthresholds. Feeding on one another and growing in strength, the calamitieswe are witnessing today herald an age of unprecedented violence. Myheart sinks when I think of the future that awaits my children and theirown children. Anyone who hopes that the present century will escape thehorrors of the previous one will already have forgotten the inconceivablebrutality of that gruesome September day in 2001. There is a widespreadexpectation that science and technology will come to our rescue, as theyhave always done in the past. When I was a child, we were taught in schoolthat the misfortunes of humanity were all due to the fact that scientificprogress had not been accompanied by a comparable advance in moralwisdom. Science is pure and noble, but human beings are still weigheddown by evil and sin. The naiveté of this lesson beggars belief.

I owe to Ivan Illich, that great critic of industrial society and oneof my mentors, the insight that humanity has always had to be on itsguard against three types of threat, and not simply the two that immediatelycome to mind: the brute force of nature and the brutality ofhuman beings—the earthquakes that reduce glorious cities to rubbleand the barbarism that massacres, mutilates, and rapes their inhabitantsin time of war. By learning more about nature, human beings havepartially succeeded in taming it; by better understanding the mechanismsof hatred and vengeance, they have come to see that it is possibleto live in peace with their enemies, and in this way to build lastingcivilizations.

But there is a third front on which it is much more difficult to fight,for here the enemy is ourselves. We do not recognize this enemy, though ithas our own features. Sometimes we suppose it to be the agent of a malignand treacherous Nature, sometimes of a malevolent and vengeful Nemesis.Yet the evil that besieges us from this direction is a consequence of our ownfaculty of action, which is to say our ability to irreversibly set in motion processesthat are liable to turn against us, with lethal effect. As a great admirerof the work of Hannah Arendt, Illich was well aware that this faculty operatesfirst of all upon human beings. Words and deeds, separately or in combination,create stories for which no single person can claim authorship,and that sometimes end in tragedy. It is from the primordial experience ofaction acquiring autonomy in relation to the intentions of actors that notonly the idea of the sacred, but also religion, tragic drama, and politics—somany real and symbolic systems that serve to set limits to the capacity toact—were born. The wholly novel character of modern societies foundedon science and technology derives from the fact that they are capable ofunleashing irreversible processes in and on nature itself.

Fifty years ago, with extraordinary prescience, Arendt analyzed thistransformation of action in her major work, The Human Condition. Thedroughts, hurricanes, and tsunamis we are now witnessing—and indeedthe weather itself (which has always served as a metonym for nature)—areincreasingly the products of our behavior. We will not have made them,in the sense of fabrication, for this activity (called poiesis by the Greeks),unlike action (praxis), has not only a beginning but also an end, in bothsenses of the word: goal and terminus. Instead they will be the unanticipatedresults of a sequence of events that we have initiated, often withoutknowing it or intending it.

One of the chief threats weighing upon the future of mankind, it iscommonly said, is the energy crisis. The crisis is real: our civilization isfounded on the proliferation of mechanical devices designed to satisfy ourmany needs, and soon there will not be enough fuel to keep them going.But in fact there is no energy shortage; indeed, the very phrase ought tobe banned—as energetically as possible! It is quite true, of course, thatfossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) are nearing exhaustion, and that they will havedisappeared well before the end of the century if emerging powers suchas China, India, and Brazil persist in blithely following the same path ofdevelopment we have chosen. It is also true that alternative energies arenot yet at hand. Dark clouds can already be seen gathering on the horizon,portents of a merciless war between the great commercial nations, whichcan be counted on to fight one another with desperate ferocity for possessionof the last barrel of oil and the last ton of coal. Increasing pressureon prices, amplified by a major financial crisis, may well degenerate intowidespread panic. Libertarian and other conservative economists, placingtheir faith in the efficiency of market mechanisms they trust to makewhatever substitutions are necessary, discount the prospect of catastrophe:new reserves, as though by a miracle, will rapidly grow in number, forit will now be profitable to mine deposits that are not easily accessible,both on land and beneath the sea; energies that used not to be economicalto produce, such as solar energy and biofuels, will suddenly becomeeconomical, and so on.

But this faith merely conceals the extreme gravity of the threatposed by climate change. Allow me to cite a figure that every citizenof the world, every person in a position to decide policy, even at a verymodest level, ought to know and reflect upon. The technical advisorsto the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) cannot sayprecisely what the average rise in global temperature will be betweennow and the end of the century. They do know, however, that halfof this uncertainty results from an unknown, namely, which policiesfor reducing greenhouse-gas emissions will be adopted in the comingyears and decades. This situation presents an interesting case of circularcausation from the philosopher's point of view, since the policiesthat are adopted will themselves depend upon the way in which theseriousness of the threat is analyzed—and this analysis depends inpart on the uncertainty that hampers...