The Big Denial

Right now the Western US is beset by fires, the Midwest by drought and heat, the East by heat and hurricanes.  Each of these is accompanied by various manifestations of denial.  Some of that denial is due to shock and the wish that things were normal.  But some of it is truly pernicious.  It is the denial that rivets attention on delusions, such as everything that Trump and his AlwaysTrumpers blather, lie and obsess about, and therefore dominate news media attention.

The fires, the drought and heat that partly fed them, are in extent an effect of the climate crisis.  So of course are the hurricanes, the heat, the floods, and especially the growing violence of them all.  The climate crisis threatens planetary life and civilization.  But many, either sincerely or operationally, are in denial about the causes of these effects, that is, the climate crisis.  We have lost years, whole decades in confronting and addressing it, because of this denial.

 Related environmental threats include mass extinctions and poisoning of the oceans which may lead to their deaths.  There is significant denial about all of them.  In terms of numbers, three-fourths of the animals that existed on this planet when I was born are gone.  The human population has multiplied many times.  Yet these very real threats to the future of this planet are just not seriously discussed in practical terms..  They don't trend on Twitter and Tic Toc.   More importantly, there is no concerted effort to address them.

Another current threat to humanity is the pandemic.  A significant part of the American population is in enraged denial about even that.  These are no longer abstractions or predictions or happening far away.  Yet that denial is just as strong if not stronger.

I use this terminology of denial--which is both psychological and operational--because it logically and perhaps in all other ways follows from an even bigger form of denial.  This Big Denial is in fact the basis for the industrial age, and our current civilization.

This Big Denial is built into our economics, our worldview.  It is in many ways so basic that we cannot afford to confront it.  The Big Denial say that humanity can do everything in its power to the natural world and there will be no major consequences.

Our economics does not even recognize destroying nature and natural balances as a cost, except the costs of extraction or alteration, in machinery and man-hours.  Harm to nature's ability to replenish itself is considered an "externality" that conveniently doesn't figure into the cost/benefit analysis.

The industrial age considers nature in only two ways: as a source of resources, and as an amenity--a pretty place for sports and recreation and aesthetic landscapes.  Animal life is either industrialized for food and exploited in other ways, or kept for pets and zoos and cute videos.

The natural world is not respected for what it is.  That a virus can't be controlled is beyond understanding--because only humans have agency.  Yet human treatment of animals and other life is a prime cause of viruses deadly to humans.

Humanity's greatest achievement, it seems, is that it conquered nature.  But though it rid itself of many threats to human life--predators, illness-bearing insects etc.--in its high civilization, it also rid itself of reality.  We have built a global economy, partly on the exploitation of human labor (including slavery or very near it), largely on the destruction of life, land, trees, water, air and now the biosphere itself.  Most recently we've tried to eradicate time and space itself, with impossibly long and complex global supply lines that are currently falling apart due to a global pandemic.

We're probably at the bare beginning of a reckoning, an assertion of the real balance sheet.  It's going to be a long hard fight for human civilization to survive.  The dream that our civilization, with all its virtues and faults, could wise up enough to make a relatively smooth transition to a more realistically based civilization, I think is about over.  To avoid a great deal of tragedy, a majority will have to free itself of the Big Denial.  They'll have to overcome frenzied opposition of those possessed by it, and it won't be easy.  We all know that this American election is absolutely fateful.  But at best it is just the beginning.