This is part 21 of a series on writing climate change for fiction.
When I started this series, I casually reckoned that tragedy might be a good fit for climate change. I mean, look at it...
Then I read Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival, where he argues that tragedy is the root of all ecological evil and the one true eco-genre is comedy. That baby kangaroo is crying because of tragedy!
We’ll come back to comedy another day. Here we’ll try and figure out what the hell is going on with tragedy, if it fits climate change, or if it really is just the worst.
Why Tragedy is the Worst
For starters, climate change is a collective catastrophe, whereas a classic tragedy is about individuals. We have a straight up genre problem.
The classic idea of tragedy is of a single noble individual who through some tragic flaw brings disaster upon themselves. Evil people f*&%ing up the world doesn’t quite fit this pattern. Within the story of climate change we have many people who are innocent victims, outright villains, or mere apathetic bystanders. The whole mess is tragic. But is anyone in this mess truly tragic?
Maybe. We’ll get back to that. This is a side issue though.
Much more importantly, we have a problem with heroes again. This is similar to what we had with epic, but with a twist. Tragic heroes are much like epic heroes, only things went bad. Real bad. (Yes, buddy, she’s your mother.)
According to Meeker, these tragic heroes are just the worst.
Tragedy is death cult material.
Anti-life.
The tragic hero presents an egotistical, grandiose, and anthropocentric view of life. He lives in conflict with the metaphysical forces of fate, has the inner nobility to be equal to the challenge, and then he is destroyed. He is the kind of person who dies for his beliefs, when he could’ve chosen to live.
Ah me! Woe is me!
Think about it: Oedipus literally gouges his eyes out just because he f*^%ed his mother.
That’s not exactly a life-affirming response to having made a mistake (Oedipus? Have you considered therapy? I know a guy...). Presumably the disgrace is sufficiently horrifying that literally tearing his own eyes out feels about right.
Meeker contrasts this tragic hero with the comic hero.
No comic hero would ever pluck his own eyes out. Hell no! Are you mad?
The comic hero values life over humiliation. Therefore the comic hero is willing to consider all manner of crazy hi-jinks to keep on living, including lying about everything and continuing to f*^% his own mother (We made it work so far? Babe?).
Tragedy has a melodramatic death wish. Comedy wants to live.
Scale this up to society as a whole and you get the seeds of ecological destruction. A society that believes in tragic heroes is anti-life. That then is roughly the argument for why tragedy is the root of all evil and we should all become comedians.
Case closed?
Not so fast.
But Wait! Is Tragedy Actually Great?
According to English professor Manya Lempert’s article Climate Tragedy, the one true climate genre is in fact…
Tragedy.
According to Lempert, this rejection of tragedy is all just a tragic misunderstanding. Blame Aristotle.
Our conception of tragedy as being about a noble individual who self-implodes due to some innocent flaw comes from Aristotle. Hence the idea that tragedy is about grandiose death-n-glory twats is also on Aristotle.
Maybe Aristotle was wrong?
For example, what about Cassandra? Cursed to prophecy the future and never be believed. She is literally always right.
Unless you focus on pissing off a rapey Apollo as a fatal flaw, Cassandra’s real tragic experience exists primarily in the world around her, not within. Everyone around her is screwing up. But not her. She’s always right. If there is any tragic figure who fits the climate change story, surely it is Cassandra.
Under this model, the message of tragedy then becomes something more like this:
We cannot undo violence with violence, nor end oppression with oppression, nor overcome fanatics with fanaticism, nor steady chaos with chaos. Tragedy shows us how power goes wrong. Tragedy shows us what happens when we overstep the cosmic limits – that is hubris. Social ills fall as burdens on the individual, and the individual is thus destroyed. Tragedy forces us to confront those unfortunates, destroyed by fate, that we might otherwise scorn or reject.
“In our madness, we push back the eternal limits, and at once dark Furies swoop down upon us to destroy. Nemesis, goddess of moderation, not of vengeance, is watching. She chastises, ruthlessly, all those who go beyond the limit.” – Camus, Helen’s Exile
The ultimate origin then of climate change is the belief we can break the laws of physics, become masters of the universe, become gods. Invincible. Omnipotent. Immortal. This is our supreme hubris, now on the cusp of a tragic failing.
The tragic spirit then is the willingness to look directly at the painful and constrained realities of our existence.
The tragic hero does not succumb to despair or naive escapism, but confronts things as they are. Maybe it really is bad enough to rip your eyes out? Oedipus is making the truth of his life literal in that moment. He was blind, so he blinds himself. That’s the moment when he sees most clearly.
Ah me! Woe is me!
Climate Tragedies
What do we make of all this?
As we saw with epic, while tragedy might have issues around heroes the form itself is famously powerful, and there is enough here that we probably can apply aspects of it to climate change. That sense of hubris as overstepping limits is very true to environmental issues. Meeker has a good point about comedy, but perhaps not strong enough to drop tragedy entirely.
So, where does tragedy apply to climate change?
Turns out a lot of people and situations roughly fit a tragic framing, more or less. We’ll go through a bunch here. You might find some suitably tragic inspiration.
Self-inflicted Doom
Climate change has plenty of people actively bringing about their own demise. That doom doesn’t always land directly upon themselves, but the outcome definitely was not what they were aiming for.
Here’s a few...
Self-inflicted Communism
A big part of the motivation behind climate denial was the desire to avoid big government. This will surely go down as one of the greatest ironies in history.
Had the world begun serious climate action in the 1970s or ‘80s the laissez-faire solutions might have worked. Forty years of carbon trading and technological investments might have put us in a position where fossil fuels were economically inefficient and a transition was taking place with minimal direct government intervention. We could’ve done that.
But we didn’t.
Why?
You guessed it: pro-laissez-faire climate denial!
Only now are we starting to pursue those market solutions. But these are too slow to be effective now. Massive government intervention is entirely plausible, necessary, and indeed likely as the chaos from climate impacts gets worse.
And, as a bonus, this egregious forty years of inaction means that much of today’s youth have become full on radicalized anti-capitalists.
Ah me!
Woe is me!
Self-Defeating Politicians
Imagine a politician. Entirely hypothetical.
This politician is great. Progressive. Charming. This politician makes promises to take radical action. Wow! We sure hope they win the election.
However…
…to get the power needed to fulfill those promises, this politician also makes certain other promises…
…like never taxing rich people, or in any way changing the status quo…
…thus ensuring that nothing will ever happen…
…and transforming their leadership from hopeful to tragic, by squandering every opportunity, and letting the country become significantly worse, paving the way for riots and fascism.
Imagine that, if you can. Hypothetically.
Self-defeating Activists
The lesbian punk scene has given us a wonderful phrase that definitely applies here.
Punk Damage: “n. the sordid underbelly of self limitation that comes directly from having come of age in a punk scene; often marked by an extreme distaste for the making or spending of even small amounts of money.”
This goes well beyond the punk scene, and applies to pretty much any values-based counter-cultural group, including evangelical Christians who give all their money to strangers, and… yes! … climate activists.
A lot of kids these days want to do something with their lives to help the climate. Woe is you, kid.
Ah me!
Here’s your life destroying options:
Become professionally qualified in a climate subject. Realize that if you could make money saving the world, it wouldn’t need saving. Become homeless.
Become a radical activist. Get arrested repeatedly. Take that damage. Discover you can’t achieve anything if you can’t even feed yourself, and you’re on a FBI watch-list.
Work within the system. Discover you spend most of your time engaged in activities that achieve good things in bad ways, reinforce the status quo, or directly undermine the entire reason you got into this.
Drop out of society. Live in a tree. Watch the world burn down around you. Discover you and the tree are also on fire.
Give up. Don’t give up. Repeat. Lose your mind. Repeat.
And the great tragedy...
If the people trying to do good fail, the world will get very bad indeed.
I’m still figuring out how to escape the multi-layer infinite mind-f*#% catch-22 that is trying to do good in a world that is only tangentially interested in its own survival. I’ll get back to you when I have the answer.
Hubris
Plenty of people have been ignoring reality thinking they can conquer the universe. Turns out this leads pretty directly to catastrophe…
Progress and Industrial Optimism
Now that global clinical depression is a thing, we forget just how optimistic people used to be.
And the ironic tragedy?
That optimism has lead directly to our current despair.
The belief in progress has been tied to carbon emissions since the dawn of the industrial revolution. But it likely reaches its most tragic in the 1950s. The world was emerging from the chaos of war. They were dreaming of a better world. They found their hopeful answer. They kicked off the Great Acceleration, committed the world to consumerism, launched us all onto a trajectory of massive carbon emissions.
Humanity would conquer the stars…
…and now the world is burning.
The End of History
The Neo-liberal era has boxed us into a form of society and belief which is utterly incapable of dealing with climate change appropriately. One of the greatest tragedies of climate change is that Neo-liberalism swept to power at precisely the moment when the world was first becoming aware of the problem of climate.
The moment when we could have acted.
The moment...
When we chose instead to leave it to technocrats and politicians, who wandered lost in the desert for forty years.
When we chose to believe billionaires might invent technological salvation, who instead put their money into clunky cyber-dystopias and joyrides on rockets (because humanity will still conquer the stars, especially while Earth burns).
When we chose to only pursue market-based and tax-neutral solutions, ruling out essential actions, and riddling all that we are doing with perversities and scams.
When we chose to create a society of extreme injustice, decay, and inequality, fully capable of destroying itself from internal forces alone, never mind climate change.
And all this came at the End of History.
Humanity had found its final form. Free-market Capitalist Democracy would endure forever.
Maybe.
Stupidly Rich
Where do the rich build their homes? Beachfront, with ocean views. Right?
Where are the places the climate change will destroy most violently?
Yeah...
While the poor do in general suffer the worst of these things, there’s also a peculiar stupidity to excess power. I call it the “Stupid-Rich Threshold”.
Beyond a certain level of wealth and power people become stupid, then they compensate for that stupidity with brute force power.
I first noticed this when researching super-yachts (as you do). I came across a video about the design of one particular fancy sci-fi looking yacht. Most yachts have white hulls. This one had a black hull. Why? Because black looks cool.
They had crossed the Stupid-Rich Threshold.
Most yachts have white hulls for a reason: heat management. If the interior foam within a composite hull overheats, the hull will literally explode, blowing a hole in the side, and sinking the goddamn boat.
But rich-bro wanted black. Cool. When you’re that rich your most idle whims are allowed to trump physics.
Which brings us to climate change.
Physics is about to get much more powerful than a hell of a lot of stupidly rich people’s money.
In fact this applies to our entire fossil fuel driven economy. Much of our actions are well over the Stupid-Rich Threshold, simply because we have excess power to burn. We risk falling apart spectacularly as we rediscover the true meaning of the word efficiency.
Watch out for some exploding super-yacht hulls, and collapsing industrial systems.
Fossil Fascism
Here’s one future that will get us all killed. We let the Nazis take power in an alliance with the fossil fuel industry.
Cool!
We drill baby drill, because oil is power. We put all that power into border security and genocide. We plunge the globe into the worst case scenario possible: extreme warming plus extreme geopolitical competition, leading to a high chance of total societal breakdown and global thermonuclear war.
Cool!
And we do all this to protect the White Race, who will definitely survive somehow.
Maybe.
Who knows?
Welcome to the climate denial end game. If the oil industry wants to keep going forever, this is what it’s going to take. Certain people are working very hard to make that dream a reality.
But why would anyone normal and sane let this happen?
Well, the world is becoming a very scary place. This is one of the places people go when they’re scared. That fear could backfire pretty bad.
Impossible Decisions
Climate change involves a lot of situations where all the choices are just terrible…
Short-term VS Long-term
In parts of the Middle East it now gets so hot that the only sensible thing to do is live with air conditioning turned up to the max all the time. That air conditioning is powered by oil. Burning that oil emits carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide is making the Middle East get hotter.
We are all doing things like this.
We survive today by destroying tomorrow.
The Tragedy of Terra Nullius
Climate change is often called a “Tragedy of the Commons”, but I find that entire concept to be a misnomer so I am renaming it. A real commons has a community.
Bob? What the f&*@ are you doing?
Oh, hey Pam! I’m just overgrazing the commons in accordance with my rational self-interest.
Like f&#$ you are. I’m telling your Mum.
The Tragedy of Terra Nullius, as I’m calling it, happens when that community got destroyed (oh, hi colonialism!) or was something that never had a community. Nobody is there. It’s Terra Nullius.
Next we need some reason for people to trash that thing out of rational self-interest (oh, hi capitalism!). That doesn’t just happen by accident.
The global atmosphere plus fossil fuel powered industry is precisely this kind of situation. Under the rules of the game, the winning move is to kill everyone and everything you’ve ever known.
Success!
A Generational Parental Misfire
Much as I hate generational labels, the terms Boomer and Millennial get thrown around a lot for a reason.
For most developed countries an historical dividing line shows up roughly between these two age groups. People born before the line have benefited most from the fossil fuel economy, produced the most emissions, contributed most to delaying climate action, and will live to see few if any serious climate impacts. Those born after the line have received the opposite. Little benefit, and a nightmare future.
The tragedy then is this: the Boomers are the Millennial’s parents.
Most parents love their kids. Most parents put in some amount of effort to secure a future for their kids. This means that in a thousand small ways a generation, in trying to build a future for their children, contributed to an unimaginable destruction of that future.
Getting ahead in a fossil fuel economy means getting wealth. That wealth is tied to emissions. Securing a future for your kids means getting wealth which means creating more emissions which means destroying your kids’ future. Millennials are no more immune to this trap than their parents were, only now the invisible has become painfully visible.
Millennials are angry for a reason.
Mutual Escalation: Protests VS Enforcement
It’s far from unheard of for law enforcement and protest movements to get stuck in a process of mutual escalation.
A protest leads to harsh enforcement, leads to a more radicalized protest, leads to even harsher enforcement. Push the cycle too far and people start getting shot, beaten to death, or blown up. For the most extreme outcome, refer to the smoking ruins of Syria.
Neither side wants this outcome, hence the tragedy.
So far climate activism has been firmly non-violent. With XR (and similar movements) we see a tactic of disruptive civil disobedience. The result is fairly mild disruptions, comparatively speaking, being met with fairly mild enforcement, again comparatively speaking – compared to just how extreme real civil disorder can get.
However, climate change has escalation built in.
This will get worse.
Climate protests will NEVER go away. Not until climate change ends, or we have a police state, or we disintegrate into civil wars. Protestors can hardly choose to de-escalate. Climate change is itself an escalating crisis. Instead they face choices over tactics.
Some are advocating greater moderation. They do not want violence. They want mass participation. But on the edges others are advocating (and doing) sabotage. Plenty of people are openly fantasizing about assassinations, coups, and guillotines. The state security apparatus is, in places, already becoming paranoid and ramping up their anti-protest powers.
Where does this all go?
Until global atmospheric CO2 starts going down at speed, the risk of protests getting caught in a cycle of mutual escalation seems very real. Indeed, it might have already begun.
Sunk Costs in a Slowly Sinking World
In geological terms, climate change is nightmarishly fast. In human terms, climate change is impossibly slow.
This slow-fast speed is having a tragic effect on our decision making, and it’s not going to stop. We could be at the beginning of a multi-century chain of bad decision making.
Imagine a coastal city.
After five hundred years of sea level rise this city will be gone. The correct long-term choice is to abandon the city.
But no one lives for five hundred years.
At no point along that five hundred years does it ever make sense to give up and accept fate. The flood hasn’t come yet.
Instead we might have something like this:
The city considers where flooding might happen in the next fifty years. Using their limited budget they choose some least cost measures, maybe building sea walls and doing a limited managed retreat. Meanwhile investment continues in the rest of the city.
In normal times that investment would be passed down to future generations (e.g. think how you can still visit Roman buildings built 2000 years ago). But this is not a normal times. Because of climate change, now, in another fifty years part of that inheritance will be destroyed by flooding.
Those flood defenses won’t be enough. Another part of the city will need to be surrendered. The limited budget will be checked again. New defenses will be built, looking out a few decades ahead.
And on it will go, for five hundred years, until the Earth system finally stabilizes (see Part 4).
If sea level rise happened all it once, no tragedy would occur. The decision would be simple. Everyone needs to leave now.
But a slow incremental change will inevitably lead to society constantly investing in things which will later be destroyed. Not doing so will be hard to avoid. We must live now, not in the future five hundred years from now.
Every generation will need to adapt to a temporary climate. Every generation will be cursing those that came before them.
Well That Sucks
Climate change is depressing. What more can I say?…
We Are Cassandra
Doomed to prophecy the future and never be believed. This has been the plight of climate science.
Scientists got caught up in a propaganda war by people with a lot of money and experience. You’re average scientist was in no way prepared for that. Their tragic flaw, if they had one, was to believe that doing the science was enough. Tell the truth and people will believe you, right? If people know the truth, they’ll do something, right?
This belief in “just telling the truth” extends to many climate activists too. So much focus has gone into raising awareness. So much awareness has been raised. Unfortunately this isn’t how political change happens. So it hasn’t worked.
The world’s Cassandra’s were unready to fight a political war. And they must win.
Least Responsible = Most Harmed (and vice versa)
The richer you are the more you are responsible for climate change. The poorer you are the more likely you will be harmed by climate change. This rule-of-thumb holds true from individuals up to nations.
The tragedy then is that those with the most power to act face the least direct incentive to do so. They are far more prone to believe this is a problem for elsewhere, for the distant future, that it can be easily solved, or that it won’t much matter. Meanwhile the poor lack power.
So that sucks.
A Sleeping Dragon
Despair is now the new frontier in the fight for the climate.
Climate change does require a mass movement to spark the political action needed for actual change. Climate change (and modern life) is also so depressing that a lot of people have just given up.
Despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Inaction serves the cause of those who would block change. If we weren’t so depressed we might not be so depressed.
So that sucks.
And this is a good place to end our look at tragedy.
About now people usually throw in hope. Fight despair with hope. Fight darkness with light. The darker it gets the brighter we go.
Tragedy can be an alternative to that hopeful approach. Forget the light. Learn to fight in the dark. Climate change is a tragedy. A lot of people are going to die. This was avoidable.
See the world as it is.
Next time we’ll continue exploring ways of writing climate, getting into comedy.
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