This is my generation: crazy!
Preface G: (prefaces to books I probably won't have time to write)
What if a weapon was designed that would wipe out everybody older than 50 from the face of the West? (if this shocks you too much to read on: know it was designed so as to ensure the last week of the wiped-out lives was also the best week of their lives) Awful as this might seem - albeit not as awful as many a weapon not only already designed, but also effectively used - the alternative to using said weapon would be that, to name just the most consequential of this thought experiment’s consequences, many more people would die a horrible death because of the indiscriminate effects of climate change1. Look at it as a planetary trolley problem: either one generation dies a little early or every other generation will be decimated until there are no generations anymore2.
The ethicists among you will probably bluster at this crude use of consequentialist reasoning, but this book shows that this dilemma can only come up in such a purely calculating universe as is constructed by those believing in the purity of (their own) intentions. Latour is right: only the Moderns see themselves as the pinnacle of a blind evolution whose existence as a force that can reckon with them is passionately denied. My generation is the generation that thinks it ensures the future for all generations to come and simultaneously, therefore, views itself as the last generation. Nietzsche may have been crazy, but he was right in laughing crazily at the thought that some people would be crazy enough to believe that they are the last generation, the generation with a calling to protect their contribution to civilization3.
Back to the weapon’s effectiveness. Let’s look at the facts. First, we built our power on being white, looking for convenient reasons to exploit everybody looking - well - non-white. Second, we denied this exploitation ever happened with a vengeance (aren’t we ourselves all of a peasant or working class descent?), attributing (our/the) progress to the mere merit of our unmerry ways. Third, we ridiculed the possibility of perpetuum mobiles while firmly affirming there is no end to this our merry-go-round going round faster and faster (burning fuels and burning-ourselves-out in ways that fuel our sense of entitlement further still). Fourth, in outrunning everybody we previously exploited, we tipped the balance of the climate more than half a century ago (only to deny we did so until a couple of years ago, immediately denying everybody we exploited the chance to catch up to us ever). Fifth - and most dramatically - we use our longer (albeit mostly miserably outstressed) lives to vote such that our white privilege remains untaxed thus taxing everybody (and indeed every thing) else well beyond their breaking level. Ah this finest of our Western tools: democracy. To have one’s earth and eat it too! This is what the weapon, call it the cosmopolitical trolley weapon, corrects so as to have democracy and eat privilege too.
Maybe you think this is crass4 but these are the facts. As Stengers - when coining the word cosmopolitical - says: limiting the facts to what can be experimentally recreated is the scientific equivalent to fast food. Accepting this version of the factual is similar to the belief that any meal necessarily is a McMeal. The only menu from which proper science can - on this view - order is that of neo-Darwinistic narratives combined with (equally neo-)liberal capitalism. The result is a sugar high in which the ecomodernistic calculations compete in order to solve the mess that the previous sugar high created. “There Is No Alternative!”, these doom boomers shout, but to hurry headlong into the adoption of more experimentally validated technological innovation (or shorter: Nuke! Us! Up!). Complexities of science such as the indeterminacy at the foundation of their favorite science of physics, or of mathematics such as computational intractability of nonlinear systems with Earth as both the primordial and the ultimate example, are to be brushed aside5 as if they are just provisional results to be overcome by our ascent to quasi-Godlike knowledge. It simply doesn’t matter if scientists demonstrate Earth-as-we-live-it is going to pieces because such a thing is simply not on the menu!
This book links white old power voting to protect that power with viewing science as apolitical such that science can never meddle with that power. In splitting politics and science (is and ought, facts and values, emotion and reason, .…) only the politics of the West counts. Any further evolution is stopped as it threatens that hegemony. Too bad for science if it challenges the Western status quo because that science is political and therefore it cannot be science. Too bad for politics exposing science or technology as serving white power as that kind of politics is unscientific and therefore inadmissible in a true democracy of rational, autonomous subjects like ourselves. Such is the Catch-22 of the belief that the sky is no limit for us ¨galactically thinking¨people (think Star Wars instead of Star Trek, think Elon instead of Greta).
This is the idea behind cosmopolitical is: the cosmos is political. The idea we should, therefore can, control cosmological forces is a declaration of war against a cosmos of which - as Bohr held based on his quantum physics - we always remain part of. If our scientific questions are only inspired by the notion of control, the answers we get are idealized abstractions that fit our old religious dreams of being god-like immaterial beings able to transcend the concrete reality of non-ideal processes of friction. The perpetuum mobile of continuous growth where the sky is not even our limit defies the notion that we are in time. By not accepting we are made of time, we get educated as capitalist sociopaths for which everything is just a resource at our disposal. As we see in the everyday fact of global heating, only being able to imagine one possible future is an offense towards entropy. Ultimately this lack of imagination will lead entropy to burning us up, both literally and figuratively as climate change and burn-out are just complementary phenomena of splitting the cosmological atom of control and care.
This book is about contemplating a weapon such that we - old straight white people - don’t provoke the cosmos into designing it. Clinging to our Western order leads to a new chaos allowing entropy to start trying again, this time without us.
PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).
And when I say indiscriminate I mean it would end up causing the untimely and horrible death of mostly young people living in poor countries that were plundered by the colonial and industrial powers in the run-up to this hurrying like hell towards the tipping points of said climate change. The weapon, as this book will explain, can be seen as a form of justice both retroactively repairing and proactively protecting against the organized crime hiding behind ‘Western nation-state omerta’ .
This sentence is limited only to generations of humans, the carnage is already realized for many non-human generations that already ceased to exist. Their struggle for survival is the collateral damage to the energy footprint of the Western freedom to drive by four-by-four or pick-up truck to pick up friends (or just to show off peacock-style).
My generation is all about private ownership so it is logical we would privatize history too and own it - as if putting post close to modernity is the only sacrilege remaining after god’s happy demise.
Then again, how crass is it compared to those secular moralists fallen from both faith and Marcuse’s “Make Love not war” as they pontificate about the threat posed by too many (non-white) babies to society? Or how crass is it compared to those secular moralists falling back in line with the faithful because this stabilizes their white male privilege? Dawkinsians and Petersonians are molds coming with intellectual dampness.
Ironically, doom boomers get all worked up by AI’s progress towards The Singularity where it sci-fi-wise will wipe us out because McScience can only predict that more intelligent life will behave more like ourselves, without even giving a thought to the possibility of our own stupidity. The climate paradox of ecological optimism will be that strong AI will be needed to control climate change but that it likewise will lead to the extinction of the human race. One more zero-sum game showing how stupid zero-sum game theory is.
Credits: image by jesus-at-art, see here.