It's the end of the world (as we know it)

This essay is not about the science of climatology. It is about the mythology of global warming. As a concept, anthropogenic global warming has been around for over 100 years, but only in the last two decades has it seized the popular imagination with alarming dominance.

The reasons are widely debated, but it is reasonable to say that, at least over the last ten years, public anxiety has heated more observably than the planet. To put it another way, we are seemingly in the midst of a social crisis, while the environmental cataclysm, real or imagined, is located in the future. This public reaction is examined here through the realm of mythology.

What does the dominant current perception of the impact of global warming reveal about humanity’s imaginative understanding of ourselves in the world? What is its function? What meaning does it uphold?

The imagery of violent storms, drought, famine, disease, and floods is undeniably apocalyptic. (Laurie Oakes used the word to describe the content of the Garnaut report.) Such events are God’s traditional means of wiping out the Etch-a-sketches of worlds he no longer favours. The biblical God could be destructive at times, but He’d start over again with Noah, for example, and an ark full of animals.

Psychologist James Hillman, in his dialogue with writer Michael Ventura, We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the world’s getting worse (1992), argues that:

The Apocalypse is the myth of our culture, it’s the book of our culture, it’s the last  chapter of the holy book, of the writ. And what it is is the destruction of the entire world…That’s a literal interpretation of the Apocalypse. But suppose you take it not  literally but imaginatively. Then it is just the last chapter of the Bible … It’s the end of  [that] story. The Bible is over, not the world.

Imaginatively then, rather than literally, the global warming apocalypse is a myth about the end of a story, about the “climate” changing.

If that sounds like the metaphor is simply the wrong way round, it is worth considering how much the meteorological climate has actually changed in the last century compared to the social and cultural transformation that has occurred. In the 20th century humankind went from approximately 1.5 billion in number to 6 billion; took flight from the earth into space; and following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the wiring of the world wide web, moved closer than ever towards global community. As best as it can be measured, the temperature rose about 0.6 degrees.

The 20th century also saw its share of metaphysical climate change. When Svante Arrhenius published his paper introducing the concept of global warming, in 1896, it was a mere 14 years after Nietzsche first famously wrote, “God is dead”. Nietzsche feared the consequences of this, unless God could be replaced by a suitable alternative. Seeking to replace him with Superman-kind was arguably his madness. Not too long after that, the world experienced the first of many 20th century events that foretold the Apocalypse, in the form of The Great War. There followed, among others, the bombing of Guernica, World War II, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the “Apocalypse, Now” of Vietnam, and the Cold War “Whoops, Apocalypse!”

“Called or not, the Gods will be present”, were the words mythologist and analytical psychologist, Carl Jung, had inscribed over the door to his practice. He understood the centrality of myth in human experience, and that the absence of sustaining myths in times of change and fear can, unfortunately, call forth the most destructive madness of all: delusions of human omnipotence. Sigmund Freud saw them too, busy in the unconscious.

It comes as no surprise that two psychiatrists recently reported in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry the first case of what might be called paranoid climate change delusion. A young man admitted to the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne was experiencing visions of apocalyptic events, and the delusion that because of climate change, drinking water could lead to the death of millions of people within days.

Such a terrifying scenario is the logical endpoint of environmental fundamentalism, and was foreshadowed in Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral, where the main character’s daughter ends up sitting almost catatonically in an empty room, a hollow corpse, afraid to breathe for fear of disturbing the “microbes”.

In times of social upheaval, there seem to be three dominant myths that are called upon.

The first is the one that has sustained humankind for millennia: God in his various guises, omnipotent, unchanging and infinite. Just keep your hands inside the vehicle and put your faith in Him.

The other two do not necessarily negate the first, but are in greater competition. They are the progressive “Futurama” myth of reason, science and technology, that has us soaring onwards and upwards to infinity and beyond, versus a belief that we have already gone too far, that we need to return to some imagined Eden.

The tension between these two seems to hinge, at least in part, on the question of whether humans, and all that we do, are viewed as part of nature, or somehow outside it. When the apes started using tools, was it the first step out of the garden that lead us inexorably to the stars, as suggested in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or are we just a very successful animal?

Ventura believes we are part of nature:

We’re not these nature aliens fucking up nature, we are something that’s happening … To nature as a whole there’s no big difference if the catastrophic changes come through ice or an asteroid or humanity. … It’s when you mistake the end of the culture for the end of the story that you get incredibly depressed. “Everything is ending.” But everything isn’t ending, it’s just this civilization that’s ending. Nature isn’t ending either. Even in a worst-case scenario, nature is changing one balance for another, and it’s unlikely that balance won’t include humanity.

Ironically, this view takes a bigger picture of nature and balance than James Lovelock’s theoretical Gaia, which is more anthropocentric in placing humankind outside the picture as the disruptive species that must correct its own imbalance. Gaia seems to ignore the power of nature, as it is manifested in the human unconscious, a power that is attributed varying force over human behaviour according to theoretical perspective. Freud, essentially, saw it as all but absolute.

When it comes to nature as a whole, he might have suggested that while global warming may be a reality, anthropogenic global warming represents a fantasy that we are in control of it, just as a crying baby may believe it controls its mother’s breast. In terms of object relations, we may not be giving “Mother” the respect she deserves. If the earth’s estimated 4.5 billion year existence were represented by a journey from Melbourne to Sydney, the human species is a hitchhiker picked up in the last 30 metres or so; our century of global warming spans the better part of two centimetres. Is it really Mother Earth who is vulnerable? Or is it more a case, as is sometimes argued, of Western culture prolonging our infancy, an age when tyranny and omnipotent delusions are more than evident to parents and psychologists alike.

If apocalyptic global warming is a myth about the end of a story, what culture is coming to an end?

Certainly not the Christian one, if attention to the Pope’s recent visit is anything to go by. And it’s not the end of hi-story itself, as uttered by Francis Fukuyama, though it would be nice if more attention were paid to it. No, it would seem to be something more subtle and intrinsic: a constant “endingness” that is embedded in the heart of our progressive culture, and not just in so-called “planned obsolescence”.

For the pace of change in our world, compared to the relatively stable long-term civilisations of the past, can make it seem like the world as we know it is ending almost daily. It seems like just yesterday that Australia was the world’s sheep paddock, lucky but cringe-worthy, idly enjoying the pleasures of backyard barbecues and Tether Tennis. Now we have Wii, and are almost as likely to be chatting to someone on the other side of the globe as the other side of the fence.

Historically, cultural change has arrived mostly with the seismic clash of empires. Now we hardly have time to notice and grieve the passing of history. The biggest changes are occurring through the dissolution of boundaries in the global economy and the rapid pace of technological development in human communication. Significantly, the “tipping point” of these can both be flagged to events of late last century that coincided with the emergence of the spectre of global warming, namely the fall of the Berlin Wall and the wiring of the “global village”.

In the midst of such rapid change it is easy to feel that the ground is being taken from under us, forcing us to frantically seek out a mythology that can sustain us - sustainability, of course, being a catchword of the times. Says Ventura:

The word Panic comes from the great God Pan, the Disruptive One, the divine energy gone mad, the Pan who suddenly appears screaming and everybody goes crazy and runs away. That’s the “ic” of Pan-ic. And it’s not just that the civilization is dying. Nature as we know it seems to be dying too because the civilization is dying, which is an extraordinary thing … When Rome fell, nature didn’t give a damn …

To mistake these changes for the end of the story, and the end of nature, as Ventura and Hillman ultimately conclude, is “insane”. “Poo-tee-weet”, whistled the birds after the bombing of Dresden in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. So it goes.

It is interesting that as other physical sciences discover greater uncertainty and chaos, climate science is making claims to certainty, which doesn’t exist even in current measurements, let alone in imagined future scenarios. History suggests we should be wary of such certitude. In fact, if uncertainty is the only certainty, and change unchangeable, there is a case that these are the very rocks on which a sustainable alternative mythology could be built, which essentially translates to preparedness, adaptability and mitigation as our wisest paths. In mythology, creativity is born of chaos. And, after all, Chaos as a God is not that different from the Christian God. They both move in mysterious ways.

As I pause in writing this, my laptop screensaver comes to life. Suddenly, I am looking at our blue planet from above, floating gently across my screen. It dissolves into a close up of Jupiter, with one of its 63 moons silently disappearing into the shadowy half of its orbit. And now I am looking into deep space and words fail me. Incomprehensible distances, black holes, supernovas, unimaginable forces, unknown wonders. I feel less than miniscule. Yet, knowing my Desiderata (I have a version read by Leonard Nimoy), I understand that I am part of it.

The Apocalypse in the Bible is, of course, also the time of Revelation. I make no claims to revelatory truth, but I do wonder if the greatest revelation doesn’t become clearest in the moment of our own demise: that we are stardust and unto stardust we shall return. In the meantime, to quote the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, “Don’t panic”, and carry a good towel.