In the time that remains (or: a late style of thinking)

'There were the lonely fortified monasteries, like little arks floating and keeping the adventure of consciousness afloat. The brave souls, the monks and bishops who carried the soul and spirit of man, unbroken, unabated, undiminished over the howling flood of the Dark Ages.'

---Lawrence.

~~~ ~~ ~

In the time that remains, the last days, what possibility is there for sound thought, for thinking straight?

It is difficult to not believe that the frenetic attempts to store everything, make an accurate record of what we stood for-the vast citadels of the printed word, the genome project, the Eden centres, the clouds that would hold every image, every word we ever spoke-is in reality a sign that, deep down, there's a bleak acceptance that we're sunk, without the skills or even the desire, maybe, to carry on.

Not the barbarian hordes with their black flags but us, it was us all along, the modern-day nomads with no sense of home (this idea of nomads being homeless is itself a modern myth..(Hugh Brody))unleashing forces we would little understand.

Wasn't this the very idea of techne? How to control, manipulate, without understanding? From now on we would act in nature, and after me the deluge..

And didn't that sensibility (or lack of sensibility) ultimately derive from, or co-exist with, a view of nature as dead matter, pure extension, and a notion of a High, abstract God, a divine, transcendental power? Newton's God, as Blake might say. 

Force, power, mechanism..that's all that's left to us, the only rigour and objectivity we can imagine or muster; it's either that or the random play of an arbitrary will. From now on, life is either a mathematical discipline subject to cold, irrevocable laws or it is a realm of "pure" freedom, a game. 

What is state power but the administration of things? People and nature must become things, statistics (stat-istics)in order that the state harness their productive power. Creativity and innovation are just another form of energy to be tapped. Since we never studied history never was it understood that this very same power would escape us and, worse, turn (its) back on us. 

The Red Man had warned us, of course: What goes around, comes around.

And we're back to our old Gnosticism if we keep both views in mind simultaneously: the divine spark within resisting the prison it finds itself in. 

~~~

Discussions about the appropriate discount rate may not be the most salient feature of climate change. Certainly Stern-your old teacher-is correct to call it an "ethical parameter" (to think that mathematics is independent of us is part of the problem). But why should we care about future generations anyway and can we, given that so much of our thinking is concentrated on ourselves and the short-term? Capitalism, with its valorization of speed and its desire to break-up any continuous narrative, anything that reeks of durability, continuity, itself makes it harder for us to imagine the interests of future generations will be of any relevance since they're likely to be too different from us.

The problem of future generations may be analogous to our own relation to our future selves, as Hazlitt clearly saw. Without a sense of belonging to a "continuous moral community" (Baier)why should we bother?

To put it in Scheffler's terms: a desire for things to continue after we've gone, the sense of an 'afterlife', crucially depends on future generations furthering projects that we hold to be deer; on the other hand, can we really give consideration to the furthering of future generations' abstract or formal freedom to pursue whatever they want, or to their well-being without thinking of what the substance of that well-being might be?

In other words, do we want 'other words' and other worlds to carry on out of some vague and fuzzy sense of solidarity with the human species or in the hope that at least if someone survives there will be the possibility that someone amongst them might light the candle again (when the evidence of the last century, at least, makes you wonder whether it is such a good thing that humans survive..after all, soap was made out of human beings in the Camps).

Who or what will survive and what kind of institutions will develop out of the rubble? These are the kinds of questions people are seriously asking. From the economics point of view Weitzman may be correct: the most salient feature of climate change may be the uncertainty surrounding it (what an earlier IPCC called a "Cascade of uncerainity"), the "fat tails": we may simply not know what kinds of systems will emerge. There is, some say, a 5% of catastrophe. It ain't looking good. As Khayyam would say: in the time that remains: drink up!