It feels embarrassingly apropos to admit, but my favorite movie is Children of Men, a mostly miserable and overwrought movie about a world in which humanity suddenly and inexplicably finds it has a 100% infertility rate. No new babies are being born. The human race will only last as long as the last survivor of the current human stock.
But it’s not about the day the world becomes infertile. It’s about the world 18 years after that day. Children of Men is unique for capturing, better than any other film I can think of, the sense of a world that has not been granted a quick death, but which nonetheless knows that it’s dying-slowly, painfully, quietly. Not dying in an Independence Day kind of way, with a straightforward external threat which must be mobilized against and which threatens to end the human race with a bang. Rather, we are presented with a slow, plodding, miserable death; a death without glory, and without any apparent reason. People die of all the usual old causes, and there’s nobody to blame. It’s not that something will come and destroy what’s here, but that nothing new will come in its place.
Children of Men is about a world we are rapidly growing into: one in which knowledge that the end is near is palpable, at the very surface of daily life, yet it’s coming just gradually enough that you can almost forget about it for a few moments at a time. Then the awful truth dawns on you all over again, and you get a sudden desire for a stiff drink. The world becomes bereft not only of hope, but also of meaning. People go to work more out of habit than ambition. Suicide rates skyrocket (in Children of Men, commercials for government-provided assisted suicide kits populate the background). Antidepressants are as common as tylenol. The state no longer attempts to hide its rough edges-one passes refugees in cages as a regular occurence on one’s daily commute. Beyond a few enclaves insulated by geographic and economic good fortune, the world is falling apart-not merely destabilizing, but decivilizing, and public sentiment towards those trying to escape the carnage has long passed the realm of uneasy acceptance. Sound familiar?
Obviously I don’t like this movie simply because it’s grim (really, I promise), or even because it’s so well made-and it is nearly flawless, from acting, to writing, to cinematography, to score, to what have you. If this movie doesn’t make you cry, you’re made of porcelain.
The reason Children of Men is so good is that it lingers on the quiet, daily role hope plays. In the absence of hope, people are not people anymore. The ends which drive our actions are just that-ends, by definition located somewhere in the future. We hope for the Second Coming, we hope to get our Master’s, we hope to stay healthy, we hope to draw our retirement, and at least most of us hope to have children-to raise them, to watch them become adults, and eventually to have kids of their own. You don’t even have to be there for it-many a person has happily died in the confidence that they have secured a happy future for their loved ones. You can access meaning in the present moment, perhaps, but it’s not complete meaning. For that, we look to the future, where the justification for all our struggle lies. Children of Men dwells on what we look like without even a conceptual future, and with desperately little left to love.
And the world Children of Men depicts-well, it’s not far off the mark from the world we’ll soon be inhabiting. Are inhabiting, though it’s not quite so obvious yet, at least if you’re in the right places to miss it. We are not looking at a future where hope is meaningless or survival impossible, but we are looking at one where things will be increasingly more precarious, where we will be surrounded by a world that is getting smaller, less wealthy, less healthy, and by nearly every measure less habitable.
Where our politics has failed has been in our inability to think about these coming cataclysms-and yes, there’s more than one-in honest, objective terms. We’ve favored nurturing our own political narratives over truth. We’ve favored wasting our efforts on fantasies to temporarily preserve a sense of normalcy, rather than preparing for ugly realities. Indeed, it is the very persistent fact that human nature is so immune to sober analysis of facts that has made these crises so obviously unavoidable.
Progressive Climate Denialism
The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report contains an FAQ sheet which makes the following statement:
The focus of our new report is on solutions. It highlights the importance of fundamental changes in society at the same time as conserving, restoring and safeguarding nature in order to meet the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. It is clear now that minor, marginal, reactive or incremental changes won’t be sufficient. In addition to technological and economic changes, shifts in most aspects of society are required to overcome limits to adaptation, build resilience, reduce climate risk to tolerable levels, guarantee inclusive, equitable and just development and achieve societal goals without leaving anyone behind.
The message from the scientific community has subtly shifted over the decades: we can mitigate the dangers of climate catastrophe-a world of 1.5°C of warming by 2100 is feasible and manageable, if unlikely. But whereas we once imagined that we had time to do this gradually, assuming that the survivial of the biosphere would be generally recognized as a worthy policy priority, we are now at a juncture where we can only stave off total disaster it if we make fundamental changes to the global economy, and we do so immediately. We are told that all is not hopeless, but such prognostications are always made with the strawman implication that we’ve been misled into despair because we believe solving the climate crisis is technically impossible. As best I can tell from a layman’s perspective, it isn’t-but all signs certainly suggest that it is both socially and politically impossible.
No matter how much we sugarcoat the issue in our rhetoric, the obvious truth is that real action on climate change is predicated on politicians making enormous, in all likelihood untenable sacrifices. It involves the US taking drastic action to force not only its own states, but every country within its sphere of influence to take legislative steps to cut energy consumption. And, we have to be honest-it would require authoritarianism on a level not seen since the Second World War. How do you hope to convince Americans to stop buying beef, or driving pickup trucks, or flying? These are not the type of pronouncements any politician is willing to make-least of all one which has to appeal to an American electorate.
Slavoj Zizek, consistently one of the only figures on the left who seems to be able to see reality without a thick fog of dogma in the way, gives a laundry list of some of the changes which would need to be made, and explains the following:
All these things can — hopefully — be achieved only through strong and obligatory international cooperation, social control and regulation of agriculture and industry, changes in our basic eating habits (less beef), global health care, etc. Upon a closer look, it is clear that representative political democracy alone will not be sufficient for this task. A much stronger executive power capable of enforcing long-term commitments will have to be combined with local self-organizations of people, as well as with a strong international body capable of overriding the will of dissenting nations.
Uncommonly for Zizek, even he is being somewhat euphemistic here (not to mention uncharacteristically optimistic), but the idea is there: the political system of the green future is not liberal democracy, nor even social democracy, at least not in the short term. It is global domination by an executive power which can force its own population, and that of any country which doesn’t like it, to behave.
But, even if we wanted such an outcome, is it possible to bring it about? The US is, quite simply, a juggernaut many times more powerful than any other nation on earth-and yet, look at its track record of bringing foreign enemies to heel-how many American flags are flying in Iraq or Afghanistan $8 trillion dollars later? Contrast this observation with our current overseas troop presence, the majority of whom are stationed in Europe:
Not exactly a force for global domination, and Department of Defense data similarly shows that overall troop numbers have been dwindling for decades. In reality, as powerful as the US is, it can’t actually bend the entire world to its will. Even if it wanted to-which, by the way, it absolutely doesn’t. The US has made it abundantly clear that it is no longer interested in being the world’s chaperone anymore, and that is a bipartisan position.
But ask American Progressives who’s response to the climate crisis is the Green New Deal, and it’s safe to say you’re not going to hear much about the need to establish a global quasi-eco-dictatorship. And that’s perfectly understandable-no decent person with liberal instincts wants to advocate for such a thing. But what we have instead advocated is no more politically feasible. Actually, it’s not really clear what we’re supposed to be advocating, as the Green New Deal doesn’t actually exist as a document-it’s just something Progressives use to vaguely refer to the idea of responding to climate change with a huge public spending package geared towards drastically reducing carbon emissions. Whatever form these ideas may take, we can guarantee they will not be met with friendly eyes by almost anyone in Washington, anymore than they have since the term first became a policy buzzword.
It would appear that the world’s democracies can’t address the problem, and the world’s authoritarians certainly won’t. To be clear, this is not a reason to take no action. A world with 2°C of warming, while a terrifying prospect, is still considerably more desirable than a world with 4°C or 5°C of warming, and the best way to prevent the worst outcomes is through immediate carbon drawdowns as quickly as possible. But while we can’t forego political solutions, however hopeless they may be, we must wrap our heads not just around the world we would like to create, but the one we are almost certain to have foisted upon us. Progressive climate activism suffers from its own subtle form of climate denialism-in talking about avoiding a climate crisis, we are avoiding the harsh reality that while we can reasonably hope to mitigate it, we and our children will undoubtedly have to live with it, and it will impact our lives, and our politics, on every level. We must take account of the most likely scenarios, and plan accordingly.
Consider the issue of displacement. The political consequences of 6.8 million Syrian refugees (from a conflict itself exacerbated by climate stress) are still being felt across the developed world-now consider research estimating that, globally, between 750 million and 1.1 billion people live in the low elevation coastal zone (defined as between 1-10m above sea level in the cited study). Alongside these findings, a 2021 report by the Institute for Economics and Peace found the following:
There are 30 countries facing the highest levels of ecological threat, home to 1.26 billion people. They have both low socio-economic resilience and medium to extremely high catastrophic ecological threats.
In the press release for their 2020 report, IEP claimed that 1.2 billion people stood to be displaced by climate-related disasters by 2050 if they continue at their current rate. Most of these countries are clustered in the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia-in the words of a past and likely future American President, they’re what you might call “shithole countries.”
Any kind of research in this area is by nature messy and should be taken with a big grain of salt, but it shouldn’t be controversial to say that rising sea levels on the coasts and desertification inland, along with more regular and intense natural disasters in the forms of hurricanes and floods, will not only produce conflict over scarce resources and internal displacement within countries in these regions (itself fueling further ecological degradation), but will force many of their inhabitants to the relatively hospitable climates of Europe and North America.
This is a bad thing, but it could have a silver lining. As much as I hate to be the one to say it, Elon Musk isn’t wrong about at least one thing: it just so happens that almost all of the world’s developed countries are facing demographic collapse, and would likely benefit enormously from an influx of the much younger populations from these countries who are of working age. But how much of Europe’s aging population will view this as a mutually beneficial relationship (particularly as these populations inevitably lead to spikes in crime rates), and not an invasion of foreigners breeding the white race out of existence? Certainly the majority will fall into the former camp, but we’ve seen the growing influence the sentiment of the latter can have.
It’s certainly a safe bet that the coming decades will see climate and economy-driven political instability which, if history is any indication, will reliably produce a slide towards reactionary nationalism, and a consistently reduced standard of living for more or less everybody. The US is without a doubt one of the better countries to be in, however chaotic our politics-geographically isolated, large and still naturally abundant, with lots of land at latitudes which will remain relatively comfortable for most of the year. But life will still be harder-hotter, more impoverished, and likely under a less liberal political regime. The lavish consumerism of our era will flag as global trade breaks down and shipping costs rise precipitously. Commerce and technological development may stall as, in conditions of economic contraction and extreme unpredictability, interest rates will go up as lending becomes more and more inherently risky, with less and less potential return. The logic of credit, the lifeblood of the global economy, is dependent on economic growth-without it, there is simply no sense in making investments. And without investment money, new businesses don’t get started. This may not be true forever-it is entirely possible that we will find new ways to cope. But that will take time-probably several lifetimes.
In such circumstances, people will alter how they live. In ways, we can imagine this will be good. Likely, people will be forced to interact more and cooperate, as we see them do regularly in the wake of natural disasters-they will need each other for more than mere social validation, no longer being able to turn to the global economy to meet all their needs. Many won’t regardless, giving into the antisocial habits developed by decades of being raised by the internet and video games, and we could easily imagine these people retreating further and further into the fantasy world experienced on one of the only expanding markets-virtual reality.
Many won’t go that route, but the transition from lives as atomized individuals to members of real communities (even communities of necessity) can’t happen easily. To make such a transition, they will likely gravitate towards institutions which can provide a framework, an ideology that makes more sense in a world that is in every way more hostile. Religious faith will likely become more intense, but it won’t be religious faith as we’ve known it in the past, because many such followers will come to religion from the world of reflexively reactionary online demagogues. The obvious example is Jordan Peterson, but when I talk to many young men I’m also pointed to folks who are decidedly more lumpen in their Eastern European dictator style projection of male chauvinism-social media stars like Dave Portnoy, Dan Bilzerian, or most recently (and somehow more egregiously) Andrew Tate. Such “thought leaders” will likely attract even larger audiences and exercise even greater influence over their followers, and some will probably become full-fledged cult leaders (of course, this has already happened).
The need for a sense of place, a clear set of guidelines about right and wrong, and a source of meaning to justify an increasingly unpleasant life will quite readily guide many to parochial and reactionary forms of social organization. The reason I find the vibrancy of the communitarian right so particularly disturbing is that they have taken the instinctive aversions to neoliberal capitalism so many feel, and permeated them with old world ideas of the need for unquestioning religious faith, strong patriarchal authority, the right of the community to prescribe social roles for its members and rigidly enforce them-and even gone so far as to redefine freedom to fit this model of repressive social conformity.
They have succeeded in doing so because the left has failed-it lost track of the real world and the real people that inhabit it, to the extent it was ever really in touch with them to begin with. The fact that Patrick Deneen offers a critique of neoliberal capitalism more nuanced and resonant than anything I’ve read from the left is shameful. The right can steal the very subjects which should be gateways to the left because the left, so preoccupied with social pathology, the culture war, and a dead end electoral strategy, is no longer even capable of giving a critique of capitalism that the average working class person could either understand or sympathize with. We need to offer an alternative that is not soaked in academic newspeak, urban elitism, or 19th century jargon, one that centralizes the importance not just of the community, but of individual freedom within that community.
But we don’t just need communes to offer an alternative to wayward young people increasingly ideology shopping on the right-in the not that long-term, we will need them to survive, to cultivate a robust and healthy culture, and to stay sane. There is no problem the 21st century will throw at us that will be made worse by organizing together, and creating groups of trusted community members who we know we can rely on. We can’t begin this process soon enough. It’s unclear how bad the climate crisis will actually get, or whether it really will lead to the near-term extinction of the human race. For the moment, it is genuinely up in the air whether we will let things get to that point. But for now, we must assume that some recognizable remnant of modernity will poke its head out of its subterranean bunker several thousand years from now. We don’t need to kid ourselves to preserve hope. It may prove to be the only way to sustain it.