The Daily: 13 November 2024

So last week happened… It was not entirely a surprise; however, it still left most of us in a state of enraged shock for many days. But…

While Trump et al have terrifying new capacities for causing harm, we have survived this once and I’m pretty sure we will survive again. As people. I am not so sure the country will survive, not so much because of Trump, but because of what Trump signifies about the health of this system. Trump is a symptom of collapse, nothing more. But humans have survived civilizational collapse many, many times. In fact, the majority of civilized time has been spent recovering from collapse. Or idiotically starting the project all over again.

This time, starting over is probably not possible. The scope of destruction is too wide and the nature of the damages are too complex, toxic, and final. This round of extraction has created a global system that is completely inimical to life, and the living systems we depend upon for food, for shelter, for oxygen, for digestion, are dying. We have used up the one energy store that can power things on this scale, and that energy store takes hundreds of millions of years to regenerate. We have dug up all the easily mined resources and sucked all the nutrients out of the topsoil. On humans timescales these alterations are permanent. We have heated the planet to temperatures not seen since modern humans have existed, baking in at least six meters of sea-level rise and increasing numbers of strong storms. The geologic record from the last time it was this warm reveals a world without most of the existing coastal regions and storm deposits of epic scale. Also, that heating contributed to a plunge into the most recent ice age through deforestation and other mechanisms, many of which we are also causing directly through extraction. The future is not bright. It’s very hard to see how we’d be able to start this project all over again this time. It is more likely that we will go extinct than recreate another modern era.

I do not think we will go extinct, though we will certainly be altered as a species.

But this will happen over thousands, tens of thousands of years. For now we are settling into the long descent where everything will be breaking down and breaking apart for the next dozen generations. And the signature thing about timescales like this is that most of us will hardly perceive that it is happening. There will be local cataclysms. They will not appear to be linked except to people who are really paying attention which will be increasingly difficult as global communications falter. There will be death. But this population reduction will be largely silent. If you notice it at all, it will be that you are attending more funerals in your life than naming ceremonies and graduations. You will have more friends who have no children. You will wonder where all the laborers have gone. You will be concerned about property values when there are too few younger folk who are able to buy housing.

Does this sound familiar?

Diary entries from Late Antiquity read almost verbatim to the concerns of modern elites. Where are the slaves? Why do these plebs not want to work? Why is everything so expensive? History books focus on the barbarian hordes, because we understand stories of violence and because we prefer narratives of human dominance. We don’t like to believe that we are not in control. But Rome fell for exactly the same reasons modernity is faltering – it exceeded carrying capacity, which was dictated by the land, not by barbarians or emperors. Rome was not at the scale of modernity, so Rome’s ecological and economic overshoot did not take down the planet. But just like us Rome did not survive its own too much — and there was nothing Rome could do about that except accept the limits of reality.

And this was not a bad thing for most of the people who had been sucked into the Roman system. At all levels of society, people had materially better lives as Rome fell apart. They were healthier, happier and had more time and resources to create lives for themselves. There were fewer divisions between peoples. New communities flourished, producing art, architecture, literature and narratives, tools and systems. Not just new cultures but whole new forms of culture. The fall of Rome created the incubation period necessary to nearly everything about the Enlightenment and its offspring, modernity.

So while we face more terrifying material conditions and at a scale where not one place or people on this planet will be unaffected, there will be opportunity. I would argue that these edge space opportunities are already opening. And I believe the Trump phenomenon will open those rifts where creativity is possible all the wider.

Is this a good thing? Not in the present moment. But if there are others to look back, they might be able to see the trends that led to survival, perhaps even to new flourishing. Our descendants will come from those who are living in the edges spaces now — because those are the places that will adapt and succeed. So, in the long term, this is perhaps good… this may be the fall that will lead to the next Bright Ages…

Still, we live in the short term, and we are, all of us, materially worse off than we were last week. The enforced scarcity so that a few might still extract monetary wealth from this decadent system will be that much more unyielding. The true scarcity of resource depletion will be that much more accelerated. And there will be pain. For every body. But as things are shaping up, women will bear the most. Those who voted for this owe apology to their mothers, their wives and sisters, their daughters, especially their daughters who are now completely unsheltered and will live in this dangerous precarity for the rest of their lives. And I would not expect forgiveness… Your debt is too great.

you chose
to abandon care
to betray love
to abjure responsibility
you chose
to break trust
to break connection
to break bodies
you chose

in full consciousness
with full intent
knowing full well the consequences
you chose

and your children will discharge your debt

you chose

and when the hollow eyes
when the empty hands
direct baleful inquiry
you will remember
you chose

and no pardon will flow
no granted indulgence
to salve the late-sprung conscience
at the final door
you chose

you chose
to owe guerdon
greater than your life’s worth
you chose
to sacrifice
all that is worthy in life
you chose

and there will be no restitution

Wednesday Word

for 13 November 2024

restitution

What does that mean to you? How does it affect your life? You can respond below or just take it with you today. Think on it.

Even if you don’t choose to scribble, at least I’ve made you think about… restitution.

©Elizabeth Anker 2024