Part IV - Living through crisis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2024
Summary
Travis Holloway notes how people “talk casually about the end of the world”. We can distinguish an apocalyptic version of the end of the world from the more modest idea of the end of the world as we know it (or, more modestly still, as we want it). The West certainly finds itself at the end of Fukuyama's end of history, rudely awakened from a complacent belief in the inevitability of a global liberal democratic order. We are in a time of crisis, but still struggle to come up with fruitful ways to think and live our way through it.
“The Anthropocene” has emerged as the most potent western crisis narrative. As Dipesh Chakrabarty (as well as thinkers from many non-western traditions) has noted, we no longer live in a human world shaped by human agency; rather, we have always been geological, we have always been planetary. How long before this idea takes root in the western mind?
Living through crisis promises new forms of collectivity and solidarity: we are all in this together. Holloway considers the Anthropocene narrative to offer “a poetics that collectivizes and politicizes us”. A less optimistic interpretation is that our common Anthropocene inheritance will be little more than increasingly egalitarian exposure to forms of toxicity.
We must be careful when we talk of crises. As Kyle Whyte points out, perceived crises have historically precipitated kneejerk responses that betray ethics and justice. Furthermore, the presumption that the Anthropocene crisis is unprecedented blinds us to the lessons that Indigenous peoples have learned in responding to massive anthropogenic environmental change perpetrated by colonial regimes.
Modernity has been a permanent crisis for various populations, including Indigenous people, Black people in the United States, and non-human creatures. Part of what it means to live through crisis is to realize that some things will never change.
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- What Matters MostConversations on the Art of Living, pp. 171 - 172Publisher: Agenda PublishingPrint publication year: 2023