"I don't know how to be human any more."
On a wretched December afternoon in 2015, as raindrops pattered a planetary threnody on grayed-out streets, five thousand activists gathered around Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, hoping to force world leaders to do something, anything, that would save the future. Ellie was there. But what she remembers most from that afternoon during the UN’s Climate Change Conference wasn’t what happened in the open, in front of cameras and under the sky. As they took the Metro together, activists commiserated, briefly, before the moment of struggle and the need to be brave, over just how hopeless it could sometimes feel. People talked about bafflement, rage, despair; the sense of having discovered a huge government conspiracy to wipe out the human race—but one that everybody knows about and nobody seems willing to stop.
Twenty meters beneath the Paris streets, the Metro became a cocoon, tight and terrified, in which a brief moment of honest release was possible. Eventually someone expressed the psychic toll in words that have stuck with Ellie since. It was a chance remark: “I don’t know how to be human any more.”
Climate change means, quite plausibly, the end of everything we now understand to constitute our humanity. If action isn’t taken soon, the Amazon rainforest will eventually burn down, the seas will fester into sludge that submerges the world’s great cities, the Antarctic Ice Sheet will fragment and wash away, acres of abundant green land will be taken over by arid desert. A 4-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures would, within a century, produce a world as different from the one we have now as ours is from that of the Ice Age. And any humans who survive this human-made chaos would be as remote from our current consciousness as we are from that of the first shamanists ten thousand years ago, who themselves survived on the edges of a remote and cold planet. Something about the magnitude of all this is shattering: most people try not to think about it too much because it’s unthinkable, in the same way that death is always unthinkable for the living. For the people who have to think about it—climate scientists, activists, and advocates—that looming catastrophe evokes a similar horror: the potential extinction of humanity in the future puts humanity into question now. (...)
An Empty World
Many of the climate scientists and activists we’ve spoken with casually talk of their work with a sense of mounting despair and hopelessness, a feeling we call political depression. We’re used to considering and treating depression as an internal, medical condition, something that can be put right with a few chemicals to keep the brain swimming in serotonin; in conceptualizing our more morose turns of mind, modern medicine hasn’t come too far from the ancient idea that a melancholy disposition arises from too much black bile in the body. But when depressives talk about their experiences, they describe depression in terms of a lost relationship to the world. The author Tim Lott writes that depression “is commonly described as being like viewing the world through a sheet of plate glass; it would be more accurate to say a sheet of thick, semi-opaque ice.” A woman going by the pseudonym of Marie-Ange, one of Julia Kristeva’s analysands, describes a world hollowed out and replaced by “a nothingness . . . like invisible, cosmic, crushing antimatter.” In other words, the inward condition of depression is nothing less than a psychic event horizon; the act of staring at a vast gaping absence—of hope, of a future, of the possibility of human life. The depressive peeks into the future that climate change generates. Walter Benjamin, trying to lay out the contours of melancholic experience, saw it there. “Something new emerged,” he wrote: “an empty world.”
Freud diagnoses melancholia as the result of a lost object—a thing, a person, a world—and the fracture of that loss repeats itself within the psyche. It’s the loss that comes first. We do not think of political depression as a personal disorder, the state of being depressed because of political events; rather it’s the interiorization of our objective powerlessness in the world. We all feel, vaguely, that our good intentions should matter, that we should have some power to affect the things around us for the better; political depression is the hopelessness that meets the determination to do something in a society whose systems and instruments are designed to frustrate our ability to act.
But it’s not that, like Kafka’s heroes, we’re facing a vast and inscrutable apparatus whose operation seems to make no sense, trembling in front of a machine. What’s unbearable is that it does make sense; it’s the same logic that governs every second of our lives.
At times, the climate movement has insisted on burying this crushing truth under a relentless optimism: the disaster can be averted, all that’s needed is the political will, and we simply have no time to luxuriate in feeling sad. And all this is true. But as activists have begun to acknowledge, there needs to be room for sadness. As the veteran activist Danni Paffard—arrested three times in climate protests, once narrowly avoiding prison after she shut down a runway on Heathrow Airport—puts it to us, “the climate movement has recognized that this is an existential problem and has created spaces for people to talk things through,” to exist within the sense of grief, to work with political depression instead of repressing it. After all, as the writer Andrew Solomon says, “a lot of the time, what [depressives] are expressing is not illness, but insight, and one comes to think what’s really extraordinary is that most of us know about those existential questions and they don’t distract us very much.” There’s a substantial literature on “depressive realism”—the suspicion that depressed people are actually right. In one 1979 study by Lauren B. Alloy and Lyn Y. Abramson, it was found that when compared to their nondepressed peers, depressed subjects’ “judgements of contingency were surprisingly accurate.’”
The depressive is, first of all, one who refuses to forget. In Freud’s account, while mourning is the slow release of emotional ties to something that’s vanished, melancholia is a refusal to let go. It’s not just that climate change is depressing; the determination to stop it has to begin from a depressive conviction: to not just forget that so much has been lost and more is going every day—to keep close to memory. Or as Paffard puts it, “You need to hold what’s at stake in your head enough to remember why it’s important to take action.”
La-La Land
In April this year, the Australian marine biologist Jon Brodie made headlines with his widely publicized despair. In an unprecedented tide, severe coral bleaching had destroyed much of the Great Barrier Reef; for Brodie, what had once been a worst-case scenario took horrifying form. “We’ve given up,” he told the Guardian. “It’s been my life managing water quality, we’ve failed. Even though we’ve spent a lot of money, we’ve had no success.” Brodie had spent decades warning the Australian government—which also funds his efforts—that something like this would happen if serious action didn’t take place, and being repeatedly disappointed as politicians refused to listen.
What do you do after the worst has already happened? He sounds stoic over the phone when we speak to him, as if he’s not fully aware of just how awful everything he says really is. “If you want to see the coral reefs,” he tells us, “go now. It’s got some good bits, but you have to see them now, because they won’t look like that in ten years’ time.”
Hope is difficult. “I work with young people,” Brodie explains. “Even up until five years ago, I felt I could inspire them. But now I have PhD students—I have trouble giving them a feeling that they can still do something. We’re in an era of science denial.” It’s not the inevitability of climate change that’s depressing; rather, it’s precisely the realization that it can be prevented—together with the day-to-day reckoning with the pettiness of what stands in the way. “When I was younger,” Paffard tells us, “I would walk through the City of London and look at people living their everyday lives and think, ‘We’re all just continuing as though everything is normal, as though the world isn’t about to end.’ And that used to freak me out and make me angry. But now it just makes me sad . . . it’s the moments where you let yourself think about it when you get overwhelmed by it.”
For Brodie, political stupidities blend seamlessly into the apocalypse that they create.
When I contrast what we had eighteen years ago to the idiots [in government] today, I feel sad and angry. They keep positing coal as the solution to our energy needs. They’re living in la-la land. In the end, [biological] life will go on. Maybe humans will go on a bit longer, but the Earth will still be here. (...)
Brodie seeks to cope with the loss of the coral reefs by creating an ecosystem within his control: “There is a sense of loss, but I do other things to compensate. I live on a large piece of land and I am growing a forest on it, so that gives me a sense of satisfaction—there are birds and butterflies.” You step back; you find other things; the moments we still have. Faced with the vastness of climate change, people reach for what’s smaller. “I keep myself so busy,” Paffard says, “so I don’t think about it on an existential level.” Lewis, who notes that “it’s very hard to plan long term because we live in a capitalist economy,” and that “people hedge their bets by consuming now and worrying about the future later,” says he resorts to similar strategies of full cognitive immersion in the many shorter-term tasks at hand.
“People on the outside of science think we sit around all day worrying about these big questions, and we don’t. Scientists are thinking about where their next grant is going to come from. You find intellectual stimulation in your work without thinking about the big picture. Recently I caught myself thinking, when the El Niño happened over the last couple of years, which gave us abnormally high temperatures—brilliant! I get to see what abnormally high temperatures do to the tropical forests I’m studying.”
With this response, Lewis says, he shocked himself. There’s an impersonality to the processes that are destroying our planet. He even has a kind of sympathy for fossil-fuel lobbyists: what they do is evil, but it’s hard to separate from the evil that’s everywhere around us. “A lot of people go in trying to change it on the inside and then end up adopting the culture, and don’t change things. Because it’s very difficult . . . There’s all sorts of psychological tricks people play on themselves to allow them to do things that are incredibly antisocial.” It’s difficult for anyone to change things, and the prospects for substantive change can be as hard for government-funded scientists and battle-hardened campaigners as for anyone else. “Would I want to live like someone in Papua New Guinea to avoid climate change?” Brodie wonders. “Probably not.”
Political depression means staring into a vastness, but one without grandeur or the sublime, one that’s almost invisible. When we wake up with every morning, it’s just there, seeping into our bones. “I am amazed,” Paffard tells us, “by our inability to engage with things that are scary and bigger than us. It’s the minutiae that keep us going . . . it’s too big for us to hold in our minds.” What can we do? We’re only human.
On a wretched December afternoon in 2015, as raindrops pattered a planetary threnody on grayed-out streets, five thousand activists gathered around Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, hoping to force world leaders to do something, anything, that would save the future. Ellie was there. But what she remembers most from that afternoon during the UN’s Climate Change Conference wasn’t what happened in the open, in front of cameras and under the sky. As they took the Metro together, activists commiserated, briefly, before the moment of struggle and the need to be brave, over just how hopeless it could sometimes feel. People talked about bafflement, rage, despair; the sense of having discovered a huge government conspiracy to wipe out the human race—but one that everybody knows about and nobody seems willing to stop.
Twenty meters beneath the Paris streets, the Metro became a cocoon, tight and terrified, in which a brief moment of honest release was possible. Eventually someone expressed the psychic toll in words that have stuck with Ellie since. It was a chance remark: “I don’t know how to be human any more.”Climate change means, quite plausibly, the end of everything we now understand to constitute our humanity. If action isn’t taken soon, the Amazon rainforest will eventually burn down, the seas will fester into sludge that submerges the world’s great cities, the Antarctic Ice Sheet will fragment and wash away, acres of abundant green land will be taken over by arid desert. A 4-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures would, within a century, produce a world as different from the one we have now as ours is from that of the Ice Age. And any humans who survive this human-made chaos would be as remote from our current consciousness as we are from that of the first shamanists ten thousand years ago, who themselves survived on the edges of a remote and cold planet. Something about the magnitude of all this is shattering: most people try not to think about it too much because it’s unthinkable, in the same way that death is always unthinkable for the living. For the people who have to think about it—climate scientists, activists, and advocates—that looming catastrophe evokes a similar horror: the potential extinction of humanity in the future puts humanity into question now. (...)
An Empty World
Many of the climate scientists and activists we’ve spoken with casually talk of their work with a sense of mounting despair and hopelessness, a feeling we call political depression. We’re used to considering and treating depression as an internal, medical condition, something that can be put right with a few chemicals to keep the brain swimming in serotonin; in conceptualizing our more morose turns of mind, modern medicine hasn’t come too far from the ancient idea that a melancholy disposition arises from too much black bile in the body. But when depressives talk about their experiences, they describe depression in terms of a lost relationship to the world. The author Tim Lott writes that depression “is commonly described as being like viewing the world through a sheet of plate glass; it would be more accurate to say a sheet of thick, semi-opaque ice.” A woman going by the pseudonym of Marie-Ange, one of Julia Kristeva’s analysands, describes a world hollowed out and replaced by “a nothingness . . . like invisible, cosmic, crushing antimatter.” In other words, the inward condition of depression is nothing less than a psychic event horizon; the act of staring at a vast gaping absence—of hope, of a future, of the possibility of human life. The depressive peeks into the future that climate change generates. Walter Benjamin, trying to lay out the contours of melancholic experience, saw it there. “Something new emerged,” he wrote: “an empty world.”
Freud diagnoses melancholia as the result of a lost object—a thing, a person, a world—and the fracture of that loss repeats itself within the psyche. It’s the loss that comes first. We do not think of political depression as a personal disorder, the state of being depressed because of political events; rather it’s the interiorization of our objective powerlessness in the world. We all feel, vaguely, that our good intentions should matter, that we should have some power to affect the things around us for the better; political depression is the hopelessness that meets the determination to do something in a society whose systems and instruments are designed to frustrate our ability to act.
But it’s not that, like Kafka’s heroes, we’re facing a vast and inscrutable apparatus whose operation seems to make no sense, trembling in front of a machine. What’s unbearable is that it does make sense; it’s the same logic that governs every second of our lives.
At times, the climate movement has insisted on burying this crushing truth under a relentless optimism: the disaster can be averted, all that’s needed is the political will, and we simply have no time to luxuriate in feeling sad. And all this is true. But as activists have begun to acknowledge, there needs to be room for sadness. As the veteran activist Danni Paffard—arrested three times in climate protests, once narrowly avoiding prison after she shut down a runway on Heathrow Airport—puts it to us, “the climate movement has recognized that this is an existential problem and has created spaces for people to talk things through,” to exist within the sense of grief, to work with political depression instead of repressing it. After all, as the writer Andrew Solomon says, “a lot of the time, what [depressives] are expressing is not illness, but insight, and one comes to think what’s really extraordinary is that most of us know about those existential questions and they don’t distract us very much.” There’s a substantial literature on “depressive realism”—the suspicion that depressed people are actually right. In one 1979 study by Lauren B. Alloy and Lyn Y. Abramson, it was found that when compared to their nondepressed peers, depressed subjects’ “judgements of contingency were surprisingly accurate.’”
The depressive is, first of all, one who refuses to forget. In Freud’s account, while mourning is the slow release of emotional ties to something that’s vanished, melancholia is a refusal to let go. It’s not just that climate change is depressing; the determination to stop it has to begin from a depressive conviction: to not just forget that so much has been lost and more is going every day—to keep close to memory. Or as Paffard puts it, “You need to hold what’s at stake in your head enough to remember why it’s important to take action.”
La-La Land
In April this year, the Australian marine biologist Jon Brodie made headlines with his widely publicized despair. In an unprecedented tide, severe coral bleaching had destroyed much of the Great Barrier Reef; for Brodie, what had once been a worst-case scenario took horrifying form. “We’ve given up,” he told the Guardian. “It’s been my life managing water quality, we’ve failed. Even though we’ve spent a lot of money, we’ve had no success.” Brodie had spent decades warning the Australian government—which also funds his efforts—that something like this would happen if serious action didn’t take place, and being repeatedly disappointed as politicians refused to listen.
What do you do after the worst has already happened? He sounds stoic over the phone when we speak to him, as if he’s not fully aware of just how awful everything he says really is. “If you want to see the coral reefs,” he tells us, “go now. It’s got some good bits, but you have to see them now, because they won’t look like that in ten years’ time.”
Hope is difficult. “I work with young people,” Brodie explains. “Even up until five years ago, I felt I could inspire them. But now I have PhD students—I have trouble giving them a feeling that they can still do something. We’re in an era of science denial.” It’s not the inevitability of climate change that’s depressing; rather, it’s precisely the realization that it can be prevented—together with the day-to-day reckoning with the pettiness of what stands in the way. “When I was younger,” Paffard tells us, “I would walk through the City of London and look at people living their everyday lives and think, ‘We’re all just continuing as though everything is normal, as though the world isn’t about to end.’ And that used to freak me out and make me angry. But now it just makes me sad . . . it’s the moments where you let yourself think about it when you get overwhelmed by it.”
For Brodie, political stupidities blend seamlessly into the apocalypse that they create.
When I contrast what we had eighteen years ago to the idiots [in government] today, I feel sad and angry. They keep positing coal as the solution to our energy needs. They’re living in la-la land. In the end, [biological] life will go on. Maybe humans will go on a bit longer, but the Earth will still be here. (...)
Brodie seeks to cope with the loss of the coral reefs by creating an ecosystem within his control: “There is a sense of loss, but I do other things to compensate. I live on a large piece of land and I am growing a forest on it, so that gives me a sense of satisfaction—there are birds and butterflies.” You step back; you find other things; the moments we still have. Faced with the vastness of climate change, people reach for what’s smaller. “I keep myself so busy,” Paffard says, “so I don’t think about it on an existential level.” Lewis, who notes that “it’s very hard to plan long term because we live in a capitalist economy,” and that “people hedge their bets by consuming now and worrying about the future later,” says he resorts to similar strategies of full cognitive immersion in the many shorter-term tasks at hand.
“People on the outside of science think we sit around all day worrying about these big questions, and we don’t. Scientists are thinking about where their next grant is going to come from. You find intellectual stimulation in your work without thinking about the big picture. Recently I caught myself thinking, when the El Niño happened over the last couple of years, which gave us abnormally high temperatures—brilliant! I get to see what abnormally high temperatures do to the tropical forests I’m studying.”
With this response, Lewis says, he shocked himself. There’s an impersonality to the processes that are destroying our planet. He even has a kind of sympathy for fossil-fuel lobbyists: what they do is evil, but it’s hard to separate from the evil that’s everywhere around us. “A lot of people go in trying to change it on the inside and then end up adopting the culture, and don’t change things. Because it’s very difficult . . . There’s all sorts of psychological tricks people play on themselves to allow them to do things that are incredibly antisocial.” It’s difficult for anyone to change things, and the prospects for substantive change can be as hard for government-funded scientists and battle-hardened campaigners as for anyone else. “Would I want to live like someone in Papua New Guinea to avoid climate change?” Brodie wonders. “Probably not.”
Political depression means staring into a vastness, but one without grandeur or the sublime, one that’s almost invisible. When we wake up with every morning, it’s just there, seeping into our bones. “I am amazed,” Paffard tells us, “by our inability to engage with things that are scary and bigger than us. It’s the minutiae that keep us going . . . it’s too big for us to hold in our minds.” What can we do? We’re only human.
by Sam Kriss and Ellie Mae O'Hagan, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Jacob Magraw
