Doom
Or: dealing with what we refuse to
We could avoid catastrophe by changing course.
Or catastrophe could destroy and we will band together to rebuild.
Or catastrophe could wipe most of us out and a few will survive.
Or there will be a total collapse and humans will become extinct.
These are the four options Brian McLaren lays out in Life After Doom. In a word: Avoid, Rebirth, Survive, Die.
There are other factors, of course, like time, commitment, and the drastic decline in the use of fossil fuels. But what McLaren lays out is not a matter of convincing you that climate change is real, nor does he marshal the evidence one would need to charm another. He wants to name what the future holds so that we face it. Otherwise we won’t.
McLaren then invites the reader to live in their own skin — to observe how these four options for our future make us feel. And as I reread the book, hoping this time to record my thoughts and emotions and experiences of it, I had to laugh because feel isn’t something I always allow myself to do. I suspect more than a few others might be the same way.
It isn’t that we don’t feel — but something more like not registering that I have a body at all. That I am not a person with a body moving through space, but a brain isolated from even its circulatory system — accepting stimuli as objective truth and synthesizing that into a theoretical framework. In other words, I read about the four options and nod, “makes sense.”
This, however, is a kind of avoidance, too. Avoidance of the things I was feeling as I read it the first time and now the second. As I write about it, too. Three encounters with the material, to speak to the slight quickening of breath and the numbness that surrounds my memory. Memory of the initiatives in high school to bring recycling to my home town and trips to recycling centers in other towns many years later. Of teaching our children to respect our environment and my own attempts to minimize travel by combustion engine. And I think it was David Wallace-Wells who wrote that the old adage “think global, act local” is too small and too contrived. We must think and act global and local. Because we cannot afford for each of us to pretend we isn’t as important as me.
And when I think about the scope, of the multitude of ways people avoid the truth and manufacture frustration, I feel that growing sense of overwhelm which manifests as excess stimulation for my eyes, in the tangle of sounds, like the music flowing through my noise-cancelling headphones clashing with the ambient music in the coffee shop. I receive it as a sensory clash, which brings fear: tired eyes, forehead sweat, resistance, pressure to avoid crying. Things we are taught to avoid, to train our minds to not acknowledge. And we call that “maturity” and the result of this “rational.”
Jonathan Haidt, in his oft-quoted work, The Righteous Mind, describes this in the image of an elephant and its rider.* He suggests that humans aren’t rational creatures at all. That our rational selves are like the rider sitting on top of an elephant that is our emotions. We appear rational as long as we seek to go in the same direction as our emotions (the elephant). But ultimately, we’re going to go where the elephant wants to go, not where we, the rider, intend to go.
Our emotions drive our actions far more than our rational arguments. In fact, they are far more likely to drive our rational arguments than be driven by them! This is why conspiracy theories work — and why so many of us get frustrated with those who think Q drops are more real than climate change. We emote more than we discern.
There is reason then, that McLaren wants us to get in touch with our emotions. To check in with them and account for them. They are what drive us. Much like the impulse toward compromise and moderation is a peacemaking tendency — a form of conflict avoidance — rather than an altruistic attempt to collaborate on a common outcome which serves the needs of the people. No, most of the time it’s our bodies getting scared that Mom and Dad are fighting and we just want it to stop. And then we use that same rationale to avoid the heavy-lifting of addressing the common conditions and permanent solutions that bring peace to war-torn regions, dramatic redistribution of resources to protect vulnerable communities, and make dramatic transformations of our economies and daily practices as a global people to dramatically reduce our carbon production. Our need to “think rationally” actually directs us toward avoidance rather than toward solving our greatest problems.
This means that people like me in particular: academically-inclined, cis-gendered white men who live in the United States who are taught to be the paragons of rational thinking are the biggest obstacle to solving the problem, not the heroes we were trained to be. Because we have been taught to utilize the greatest tool we have to avoid solving the world’s greatest problem.
This is also why “Mind Your Mind” is such a good mantra. I must remind myself to remember my mind — how it works and seeks to avoid, rationalize and argue. And what it so often longs to do is feel. Feel the deep sadness of loss. Of worrying about the health and future of my kids and the decisions politicians are making today that will lead to years of struggling for them. Decisions which may make college impossible and dreams unattainable. And the anger that rises within me. Anger at the injustice and the cruelty and sheer stupidity of it all. Anger that doesn’t blind me to a “higher” thinking, but which reveals what matters.
And I think about the possibility we have to avoid cultural collapse and the extinction of our species as a project, like life itself, that has goals and milestones and times of celebration and sorrow. A life that has all of the highs of ecstatic joy and lows of mourning, despondent and inconsolable. And this gives a kind of hope, built not of desperation but of curiosity and wisdom — that we too often treat our emotional lives like the interior characters in Pixar’s Inside Out, particularly Joy, who thinks she alone should be in charge. She, alone, is the key emotion to living a good life. That, if Sadness were to take control, we would fail. Joy seeks to never allow her person, Riley, to feel sadness at all — a response that speaks not only to the pre-teen experience but to American culture itself. Our reluctance to embrace sadness when it is the appropriate emotion — that cowardly act of avoidance means we struggle to understand the virtue of mourning or the growth that comes from accepting the end of something we love does not mean we end or that we shall never love something again.
I’m afraid of climate and cultural collapse. And my heart goes to the millions of climate refugees already seeking to be saved from regions of the globe becoming uninhabitable. And I am increasingly angry at the demonization of immigrants and the indifference of leaders toward the increasing challenges climate change is creating. I’m feeling a lot of things.
But let us first come to realize that the volume isn’t the problem. It is our avoidance that prevents us from growing which sets us onto the wrong path. But it is never too late for our hearts to find the right path and take it.
Be well,
Drew
*NOTE: I find this part of Haidt’s work incredibly compelling. The rest of the book, which theorizes that observable differences between liberals and conservatives are based on their respective relationship to moral frameworks, to be deeply flawed — to the point of making two-thirds of the book (ironically) infuriating and nearly unreadable.
Daring Read: Life After Doom
This is a reflection from my journaling as I read Life After Doom by Brian McLaren; a book that starts at the end and then talks about after. If you want to join with me, read along (I wrote up the schedule here). Or join the weekly Zoom check-in or in-person office hours for those who live local (or want to visit!).
On the Podcast
Check out my podcast, which you can find in any podcast app.
In the most recent episode, I suggest that the idea that something being called “controversial” doesn’t necessarily mean that it actually is. And who benefits from this lazy label. You can also catch it on YouTube.
Over on the blog
I explore the tendency of the powerful to kill prophets (talk about the pinnacle of avoidance)!
Here is a sermon for Sunday about why I don’t like calling it The Temptation — because there are forces seeking to tempt us.
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