Interrupting the Anthropocene
David R. Weiss – February 1, 2024

At less than five ounces (and barely 100 pages), Roy Scranton’s little book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2015), definitely punches above its weight.

And they’re gut punches. Four pages in he sums up the state of the world: “We’re fucked. The only questions are how soon and how badly.” (16) Now, a lot has changed since 2015, but much of it tilts toward “sooner” and “worse.” In 2024 it might be time to throw those two sentences into ALL CAPS and italics. Roy Scranton is not optimistic about our future, but there are some shining gems hiding beyond the title that, if hardly salvific, are going to feel good in your pocket a decade from now.

Epiphanies often occur in strange places. During his time as an Army private in Baghdad, Iraq in 2003, he experienced the debilitating stress of facing daily the threat of death. But it was there that he found unexpected power in the advice of an 18th century Samurai manual: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Each morning then, he paused to imagine getting killed in a flurry of ways. Then, as he began that day’s mission, he discovered, “I didn’t need to worry anymore because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive.” (21-22)

In Learning to Die Scranton suggests this is precisely the unsettling wisdom we need to embrace—collectively, as a culture—to have any chance of living into the future that’s headed our way. In his view (and mine), multiple and now unavoidable collapses are going to unmake our physical and social worlds in the coming decades. As he puts it, “Carbon-fueled capitalism has proven astoundingly virulent but also toxic, cannibalistic, and self-destructive. It is unsustainable, both in itself and as a response to catastrophic climate change.” (23)

We’re caught, Scranton says, in a most wicked problem. Here, “wicked” is not a moral term. It names problems that have multiple-and-entangled roots-and-solutions. Problems for which the causes are many, for which any singular “solution” is illusory, and for which any coordinated set of solutions is simply too complicated to be technically, socially, or politically realistic. The wicked problem we face is global-wide carbon-fueled capitalism. The climate crisis and a host of other ecological and socio-political crises are symptoms of this fundamental (and finally fatal) expression of human living. The “wicked” comes forward when we realize that (by now—because we’re so far into the game) every possible response—whether technological or political, and regardless of how “green” it is—will inevitably exacerbate other dimensions of the crises we face.

One particularly jarring face of this wicked problem is what Scranton calls “Carbon Politics.” He traces the way the shift from coal (much more labor intensive in production and transportation) to oil and gas largely eliminated the ability of labor to threaten any shutdown of energy production. With the political process itself distorted to favor monied interests and insulate politicians from popular outcry, Scranton argues that even large-scale protests have lost any real capacity to make meaningful change. That’s hard to hear.

I don’t think it’s necessarily a call to cease agitating for better policies. However, it is, at the very least, a sobering view that encourages stark self-critical reflection on which grassroots-citizen actions (if any) might bear real leverage in such a twisted political landscape. Absent such gritty strategic consideration, Scranton may be correct that despite the media coverage garnered by well-planned protests, they accomplish little more than to divert/disperse public energy while those who own the means of production—and a good share of the political process as well—keep up production and profits even while the planet creaks and groans.

Those creaks and groans, increasingly accompanied by outright screams of ecological anguish, announce the impending and inescapable death of carbon-fueled capitalism—and the civilization that is wholly entwined with it. Thankfully, humanity has lived—even thrived—under systems other than carbon-fueled capitalism. Our ancestors have shown that it’s possible. Still, if humanity survives this present unmaking of our world, we’ll do so on a planet altogether unknown: different from anything we or any of our earliest relatives encountered over the 200,000 years that Homo sapiens has been around. And that “we” that finds itself in an altogether unknown world?—that likely includes some of us, some of our family, and some of our friends … anyone “fortunate” enough to be around for the latter half of this century.

The challenge before us collectively—before our culture—is learning to die well as a civilization. To let go of this way of life, and the no longer sustainable (were they ever?) notions of identity, freedom, success, and progress, that went with it. And to do so while maintaining character, dignity, courage, and wisdom. While the various hard sciences might buy us a brief window of time (there is no way they can do more than this), learning to die is ultimately the business of the humanities: philosophy and the arts. These are the cultural traditions that have offered paths to meaning amid the tumult of the lived human experience. And meaning is what anchors character, dignity, courage, wisdom.

For Scranton this means it is imperative that we turn to the humanities—especially philosophy and literature—in order to fashion a self-reflective posture toward life that prizes depth of meaning in the face of finitude and mortality. This is what it means to “learn to die.” One of the ironies about this is that all you can do is practice—until you do, finally but just once, die. But if we do this learning well, if this persistent practice becomes our way of life, it is just possible that we might find that it allows us to live well into the Anthropocene. Into that altogether unknown world. Pulling out some of those shining gems from our pockets.

This is not a happy ending smuggled into an only seemingly tragic tale. No. Whatever life we might live as the Anthropocene unfolds (and not over the coming centuries, but over the coming decades and years) will be life on the ruins of carbon-fueled capitalism. But—if it is to be human life, life in which our humanity prevails rather than collapsing into barbaric savagery—we will need new stories to hold and fashion our humanity in that new (fractured, broken, wounded) world. All the great existential questions will need to be considered afresh. We will need to ask again what it means to be human … to live … to work … to love … to die … in that world. As human beings.

Learning to die well is a gift to a future that we may or may not see ourselves. In order to make that gift we’ll need to embrace, preserve, and plumb the multicultural wisdom of meaning-making from around the globe. Today. If we do, then tomorrow that same multicultural wisdom might help renew humanity with a humbler, more mortal self-understanding that could perhaps support a common life on the far side of that death.

Scranton’s perspective is certainly … austere. Isn’t there anything we can do today besides learning to die? Yes, but it isn’t something we can do instead of learning to die; it’s something we can practice alongside that other most essential learning. We can choose to interrupt. For me, this is the most insightful, provocative, challenging (and intellectually dense) idea in the whole book. (Sorry.)

Scranton places our capacity for symbolic meaning at the heart of what it means to be human. Language and math undergird the scientific learning and technological advances that gave us critical evolutionary advantages early on. Additionally, through the humanities, symbolic meaning has been foundational in allowing us to be human-across-time: to create notions of self-awareness and meaning that persist and extend from distant yesterdays into the ferment of present possibilities. Symbolic meaning allows us to explore both outer and inner worlds—and to make choices about how we will act. Lifting us above mere instinct and impulse, symbolic meaning is the seat of human agency.

Carried first by gestures, images, and rituals, then by written symbols, today symbolic meaning is also carried digitally across multiple media: television, computers, internet. And because of the extent to which digital devices now define our lives—what we know, how we know, and how we respond to that knowing—symbolic meaning has been made captive to the interests and impulses that drive our media. And with it, human agency.

Scranton likens the contemporary human community, so digitally networked as to be almost like a hive, abuzz with the movement of symbolic meaning: cognition and emotion. But powerful interests today, some of them discrete (owners, corporations, politicians, special interest groups), others structural (marketing, algorithms), have harnessed media—especially social media, but also entertainment and marketing media—to effectively set emotion above cognition. In effect, this reduces human agency to reactive feeling.

With social media echo chambers, algorithms, and incentives to “like” (or “hate”) and “share” posts on emotive impulse, it is as though we are (left, right, and center) largely self-contained bubbles of awareness being mutually massaged by all the emotional energy we channel. The images and messages that carry a significant portion of our symbolic meaning today no longer invite us into self-reflective awareness and thoughtful, ethical agency. Rather, they reach into our amygdala (lower brains) and stoke our feelings, diverting our energy and eliding our agency on a rush of emotion. We have been brought from Namaste, a Hindu greeting that roughly means, “The sacred in me recognizes and honors the sacred in you,” to “The lizard (brain) in me pokes and jabs the lizard (brain) in you.” Ouch.

Most of us are well aware that social media (as well as entertainment and marketing media) are more interested in monetizing us than connecting us. But Scranton suggests that perhaps their primary role today is to domesticate us—to keep our minds so awash with emotion that actual human agency is an afterthought that we humans never get to. We are, as it were, fiddles being fiddled by the media while Rome burns. Oof.

Unless we interrupt the echoes. Choose to PAUSE long enough to breathe, reflect, and only then act with intention. If you thought learning to die was going to be hard, just imagine noticing every “managed” emotion sent your way by all manner of media. From meme to rant, from ad to endless entertainment. (By “managed” I mean to distinguish media-driven emotion from authentic emotion that emerges from your own life.) Can any of us really afford to actually notice and consider all of this? Can any of us afford not to when every unaware reaction we make only further empowers the algorithms that disempower us? To even contemplate the daily practice of interruption is to become immediately aware of how domesticated our lives have become.

But that domestication has given us the Anthropocene. If we don’t interrupt it, we just add fuel to the fire. And the planet is already plenty hot. This means more (much more) than just PAUSING before you toss an emoji on a Facebook post or share a meme to affirm or antagonize others. But it is not less than this. It also means checking in with yourself as you channel surf and attending to the way ads affect you. It means feeling your feelings at a higher level than your lizard brain. Simply put—and now we’re right back to the humanities—it means humanizing yourself, reclaiming your agency. For the good of humanity and the wellbeing of the planet. And part of that means learning to die (well).

So, please, put this at the top of your “to do” list: Interrupting the Anthropocene. And then do it. 🙂

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.