Pessimism is intellectually delicious
Apr. 26th, 2005 12:48 pmFrom openDemocracy found via grist: Ian McEwan writesLet's talk about climate change. It's a superb article, beautifully expressed. Here are some of my personal favourite quotes, but go read.
But also large and growing larger is the great rim of grime -- as though detached from an unwashed bathtub -- that hangs in the air as we head across the Alps into northern Italy, or the Thames basin, or Mexico City, Los Angeles, Beijing -- the list is long and growing. These giant concrete stains laced with steel, those catheters of ceaseless traffic filing towards the horizon -- the natural world can only shrink before them.
For we tend to be superstitious, hierarchical and self-interested, just when the moment requires us to be rational, even-handed and altruistic. We are shaped by our history and biology to frame our plans within the short term, within the scale of a single lifetime; and in democracies, governments and electorates collude in an even tighter cycle of promise and gratification.
... above all, we have our rationality, which finds it highest expression and formalisation in good science. The adjective is important.
Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient data or challenges to fundamental precepts.
Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating, if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue).
There are rss feeds for both Grist--gristmill_rss--and openDemocracy--
opendemocracy--that I've started following recently--each enlightening.