by John Ambrosio
While it is a global phenomenon, people in the U.S., Europe, and other liberal democracies are living in the midst of a polycrisis, in a confluence of the intersecting and overlapping crises of rising authoritarianism and far-right populism, worsening climate and ecological disaster, the increasing likelihood of nuclear war, and the rapid development of unregulated generative A.I. Given this, how can people live with the unbearable knowledge of these threats, and with the overwhelming fear, uncertainty, and insecurity it necessarily produces?
Authoritarianism and neofascism are on the rise in liberal democracies around the world, propelled by mass migration, extreme wealth and income inequality, economic precarity, political polarization, and rapid cultural and demographic change.
The climate and ecological crisis is fueled by increasing global carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions, the overexploitation of natural resources, and rapid biodiversity loss. The planet will likely exceed an average annual temperature of 1.5C above preindustrial times in a few years, which scientists have repeatedly warned will significantly worsen the already severe floods, droughts, wildfires, and extreme heat linked to global warming and may trigger feedback loops and breach tipping points that could lead to uncontrolled global warming.
According to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which has been set at 85 seconds to midnight, the likelihood of nuclear war has never been greater than today. Some of the reasons for this include the Russia-Ukraine war; the conflict between India and Pakistan; the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran; North Korea and China increasing their nuclear arsenals; the expiration of nuclear arms control agreements between the U.S. and Russia; U.S. plans for a new missile defense system; the increase in global average temperature and deadly weather events fueled by climate change; and the increasing sophistication of generative A.I. to produce new weapons and disinformation campaigns. To this we might add the breakdown of the post-war international order.
The rapid rise of unregulated generative A.I. has led to the proliferation of huge data centers that consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, the primary aim of which is to increase productivity by automating entry- and mid-level jobs, which could potentially put millions of people out of work, making them superfluous to the economy. The surge in demand for electricity to run the data centers has led to the reopening of previously shuttered power plants that burn fossil fuels, and to the construction of new ones, which will worsen global warming. As noted above, A.I. is being used to create new autonomous weapons systems and will supercharge disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining national cohesion and political stability in the U.S. and elsewhere. The huge spending on data centers has inflated a stock market bubble that will eventually burst, especially if future profit expectations are undermined by freely-available Chinese A.I. models that are nearly as good, or as good, as those produced by Silicon Valley.
So, there is clearly a lot to worry about. We can begin by acknowledging that these threats have produced widespread and deep-seated feelings of fear, anxiety, and existential dread. Naturally, people want to turn away from overwhelming feelings of fear and helplessness, to retreat into whatever diversions or rationalizations allow them to feel safe and secure, that enable them to maintain their emotional and psychological well-being and go on with and enjoy their everyday lives. While it is almost impossible to not know about these threats in the digital age, at least on some elementary level, it may also be unbearable to live with this knowledge, in which case people typically choose to willfully ignore what they cannot tolerate knowing. As Upton Sinclair famously quipped: “it’s difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
In his review of Mark Lilla’s book, Ignorance and Bliss: On Not Wanting to Know, Robert Pogue Harrison highlights T.S. Eliot’s observation that “humankind cannot bear very much reality,” nor Harrison adds, “can it bear much truth.” Humans have a remarkable capacity to willfully ignore realities and truths that threaten their identities, core values and beliefs, sense of belonging, and physical and economic security. As Harris explains:
Just as our sensory organs filter out all but a fraction of what surrounds us, our minds deflect from consciousness a great deal of what we can bear only in small measures. Our ability to ignore, repress, and deny is matched only by our ability to believe the unbelievable and to give chimeric notions the power to found religions, nations, and institutions.
In other words, human beings have an enormous capacity for denial and self-deception, for blocking out what we do not want to know. Of course, this does not make whatever we do not want to know disappear, but enables us to sublimate our fears and anxieties, to encase ourselves in a kind of mental cocoon, to live behind a psychological shield that protects us from thinking about what we fear, but which nevertheless affects our everyday lives.
In his history of the rise and fall of the Roman empire, Edward Gibbon believed that “the great constant of history was “self-delusion: the willful inability of people to recognize how much the habits, rituals, and laws they took for granted had slowly changed—until it was too late to bend them back into shape.” The same could be said about the U.S. today, as the social, cultural, and legal norms that once guided collective behavior and undergirded liberal democracy have slowly eroded over time until they have become largely unrecognizable.
Given this, it is not surprising, as Lilla insists, that the “will to ignorance has become virulent in our time.” That is, that our collective desire to willfully ignore what we do not want to know, in the face of inescapable knowledge, has become pervasive and is particularly dangerous in an era of polycrisis.
There is some truth to the adage that ignorance is bliss. While ignorance enables people to live within protective mental bubbles, to shield themselves from inconvenient and threatening truths and realities, it also makes them vulnerable to the vicissitudes and dangers of what they choose to willfully ignore. On the other hand, the unfettered pursuit of knowledge and truth may require that we give something up, that in refusing the innocence of not knowing and rejecting the compulsion to forget, we may jeopardize whatever happiness we may have in our lives.
Harris argues that “knowledge and truth will always remain precarious ideals, for they dispel illusions that in the past made life meaningful—hence bearable. We pursue truth at the risk of our own happiness.” That is, the refusal to look away, to dismiss or ignore the immense danger these threats represent, not only to ourselves, but potentially to everyone and everything we love and value, can diminish a kind of happiness that is conditional on our willingness to ignore and forget. Knowledge of these threats also brings with it a sense of responsibility to push back against the increasing possibility of barbarism and civilizational collapse.
Of course, happiness is a subjective experience partly conditioned by the particular social and historical context and conditions in which we live. This view assumes that achieving a measure of happiness is the primary purpose and aim of life, to feel content and satisfied with our lives, with what we have achieved or acquired, with what we have become, with the meaning and purpose we give to our lives. The U.S. Declaration of Independence stipulates the pursuit of happiness as the birthright of every American, despite the fact that, for some Americans, happiness was achieved by enslaving other people. One person’s happiness can be another person’s tyranny. The pursuit of individual happiness is also conditioned, in part, by the collective happiness of the society in which we live.
But is this true? What kind of happiness is a happiness that requires us to deny reality, to willfully ignore what is unbearable to know, to forget what is too uncomfortable or disturbing to remember? Is a happiness conditioned on willful ignorance and forgetting a kind of happiness worth pursuing? Is the Disneyfication of U.S. culture, the desire to return to the ignorance and innocence of childhood, a realistic or desirable goal? Is living in the “United States of amnesia,” as Gore Vidal put it, in a perpetual state of forgetting that the U.S. is an empire, rather than a nation, with hundreds of military bases around the world and an unbroken history of military interventions abroad, some of which overthrew democratic governments, a desirable and sustainable way of living in the world?
While Americans may have the luxury and privilege of forgetting, people who have been at the receiving end of our military interventions have long memories and have not forgotten what was done to them, as the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran clearly demonstrates. Have Americans been conditioned over many decades to deny reality in order to maintain a positive national identity, to sustain the “necessary illusion” that they are a good and generous people and nation? Has this conditioning made them more likely to extend the national habit of denial and forgetting to an awareness of existential crises?
Having the courage to acknowledge these threats, to accept them for what they are, is no easy task for anyone, especially given their global and existential nature. While the personal cost of willful ignorance is high, the social costs are likely catastrophic. We are watching our collective demise in real time, as if from a distance, as each new scientific study or news story on the worsening effects and quickening pace of global warming, the destructive potential of A.I. technology, the emergence of a new global arms race, and the electoral advance of far-right parties is normalized as just another marker on the road to disaster.
Why do the pleas and urgent calls for action of climate scientists, nuclear experts, political analysts, and A.I. entrepreneurs to address these threats go largely unheeded? While there are powerful economic and political interests that fiercely resist efforts to mitigate or eliminate these threats, the extreme fragmentation and siloing of news and information in a deeply polarized society means that many people either do not hear their repeated warnings or simply dismiss them as fake news.
While some people are caught up in an endless loop of doomscrolling, numbed and overwhelmed by the seemingly endless stream of bad news, while others remain willfully ignorant, a growing number of people, including scientists, activists, journalists, politicians, academics, and many others choose not to look away from the abyss and remain hopeful that humanity will find a way to survive these looming catastrophes. Not a kind of naïve hope that we will be saved by some divine or charismatic figure, but by the historical knowledge that humanity has always found a way to continue in the midst of existential threats. There have always been people who embrace radical hope, who recognize the enormity of the threats and what needs to be done, but find a kind of solace and strength in the fact that, along with others, they are taking a stand, doing the right thing in refusing to succumb to the forces of darkness.
One way we can collectively push back against the anxiety, keep it at bay, is by contributing, in whatever way each of us can, to resisting the descent into social disorder and civilizational decline. As individuals, we have little choice but to carry on as if life will continue in some organized and sustainable way, as if our children will grow up in relatively stable societies and on a mostly livable planet. The alternative is unremitting despair and hopelessness, is giving up on the possibility of a future, of any future, is living life as if the world has already ended.
In trying to understand the international decline in birthrates, the “collective reluctance to procreate” in the U.S. and around the world, Anna Sussman writes that
what unites these disparate cultures, policy environments, and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline. The future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a time of spectacular uncertainty.
While it is prudent to be cognizant of what may lie ahead when planning for the future, young people today are living in a time of unremitting uncertainty and potential disaster. They are making important decisions, such as whether or not to have children, not based on what kind of family they want, but on their fear of the future, of not wanting to bring a child into a society and world that appears to be collapsing and perhaps descending into a kind of barbarism. This is a reasonable perspective, of not wanting to subject your child to the potential horrors that may await her or him. When I see young children today, I see the joy and openness in their faces and think: what will become of them when they grow up? What will the world look like and how will people live if society unravels and the planet becomes increasingly uninhabitable?
We often make the mistake of acting as if history moves in a progressive or linear fashion. While physics and chemistry are not subject to politics, we cannot anticipate with any accuracy what the future will hold, only extrapolate from present trends. While the most extreme projections of global warming are no longer considered likely, continuously rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere mean that increasingly higher global temperatures are already baked into the future and will likely persist for centuries or millennia. But we cannot know with certainty when global greenhouse gas emissions will plateau, whether climate breakdown will increase the likelihood of a nuclear conflict, if generative A.I. will actually eliminate millions of jobs or become a threat to the existence of humanity, or if liberal constitutional democracies will prevail over far-right populism. We simply cannot know these things.
A key question in the era of polycrisis is: how can people live with pervasive, unremitting, and overwhelming uncertainty? How can people carry on with their lives without embracing willful ignorance of these existential threats? How can individuals pursue our own version of happiness while living with this unbearable knowledge? How can people face this deeply disturbing and frightening reality while maintaining their mental and emotional well-being?
Of course, people have been living with tremendous uncertainty since before the dawn of the nuclear age, but the stakes today are even higher, and the overall possibility of global catastrophe has risen markedly. In the U.S., addressing these existential crises is complicated by extreme political polarization, by a federal government that no longer appears capable of confronting major problems, or even in meeting the basic needs of large parts of the population.
As Timothy Snyder has written in relation to rising authoritarianism: we must not obey in advance. That is, we must not act as if the fight for the future is already lost, but have the courage and fortitude to live as if we still believe in possible futures. Following Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist political theorist, the question today is: how do we reconcile pessimism of the intellect, given present trends, with optimism of the will? The antidote to utter despair is working together in solidarity with others to push back against the forces of mass extinction, steadfast in our commitment to persist, even in the face of repeated loses, overwhelming odds, and no guarantees of success. While fighting back may not generate a sense of happiness, it can provide a modicum of optimism that, together with many others, we are fighting to protect what and whom we love and value, and for a more humane society and livable planet.
In his 1784 essay, “What is Enlightenment?,” the philosopher Immanuel Kant implored individuals to have “the courage to use your own understanding without the guidance of another,” to end their “self-imposed immaturity,” their unwillingness to employ reason and think for themselves, to publicly share their thoughts and criticisms, to engage in argument that can lead to human progress. For him, human progress is conditioned on the ability of people to share their thoughts, to engage in public discussion and debate, to be open to changing what they think they know in light of new information and reasoned argument, which is a condition for democratic deliberation and the advance of scientific thought. But thinking for oneself is not a natural or innate capacity of human beings, or necessarily a socially valued or rewarded one, but is something we choose to do in dialogue with others.
All of the great social movements in U.S. history, such as the anti-slavery, civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights movements, emerged at a time and in a context in which the dead weight of history and culture, and the social and political forces arrayed against them, were seemingly impossible obstacles to overcome. Yet over time and with irrepressible persistence, they succeeded in making history. There are no iron laws or inevitable trajectories of history. History is literally what we make it. As others have said: We make the road by walking.
Of course, none of these existential issues can be solved by a single nation, but require a collective global response. While this is a daunting challenge, this kind of concerted global effort has happened before, and can happen again, if and when the conditions are right.
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