Learning to Live in the Dark: Reading Arendt in the Time of Climate Change

This is such an excellent article. — Molly

  

Even in the darkest of times we have the right to 

expect some some illumination...
— Hannah Arendt

By Wen Stephenson

THE MINISTER that Sunday morning asked me what I most fear losing. For her, she said, as if embarrassed, confessing, it’s the seasons — the way we knew them when we were young, in our bones, the way our parents and their parents knew them. It was a rainy autumn day in New York City, October 2016, and water dripped from yellowing leaves.

For me, the answer came without hesitation, because I think about it all the time. Humanity, I told her. Friendship, solidarity, love of neighbor. That’s what I’m afraid of losing. Because what I fear most is what we’re capable of doing to each other, and of not doing for each other, when, as Hannah Arendt would say, the chips are down — when it’s dark outside, and we let the darkness in. Because, let there be no doubt, it’s getting very dark.

How dark? Put it this way: Some four-fifths of what used to be called the “permanent” sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean is now gone. The stability of the global climate system, as we know it, depends largely on the Arctic, warming at a rate no model projected, spiraling toward worst-case scenarios decades sooner than predicted. What was once unthinkable destruction is now all but guaranteed, first and foremost among the world’s poorest people, the majority of the human population.

In the face of this situation, even as waves of refugees fleeing drought and war destabilize Europe, a right-wing populist movement propels a quasi-fascist, science-denying demagogue to the presidency of the most powerful nation on Earth. Among his first acts is to name as Secretary of State the man who had only recently been chief executive of the largest oil and gas corporation on the planet — a corporation that has long understood the findings of climate scientists, yet has deceived the public and obstructed any serious response for decades, while pursuing plans to drill in the melted Arctic.

These are baseline facts, the actual conditions of the world in which we live. Two catastrophes, planetary and political, converge; humanity approaches geophysical and social tipping points unimagined by previous generations. With the victory of the carbon-industrial machine, it is now clear, we confront corporate and political forces not only racist in ideology but totalitarian in mindset and ambition, if not as yet in methods. Unless, as to methods, it can be argued that to ensure the suffering and death of countless innocent millions, by means of lies and the obstruction of urgent life-saving measures, marks some kind of epochal advance in the art of administrative mass murder.

There are no historical analogies to be drawn here, no comparisons. We live in the present. And yet no comparisons doesn’t mean no insights, no lessons to be sought. There are no borders in human history that are closed, no human experience walled off from an authentic human effort to understand. And yet I confess that when I try to make sense of this picture, to fit the facts we are facing, planetary and political — the true scale of the unprecedented crimes now unfolding — into any accepted category, I’m at a loss, the mind reels, and I reach for the past.     

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