'Interstellar' and climate change grief therapy

be a lot cooler if you did

There’s an argument in certain schools of philosophy and literature that concludes like this: remain faithful to the Earth. For most of human history (or at least most of Western Judeo-Christian history), its proponents argue, people have seen this world as a precursor to the one that really matters. After your death, you receive judgement on your actions and head to the true world if your behavior was in accordance with the good. But if you really believe that, then you dismiss Earth as the false world of becoming. It’s at best a plane of adolescence or something. Nietzsche: “Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing.” Lynn White’s famous ecological thesis argued that Christianity was at the root of our historical mistreatment of life and living things. Man is elevated above the other animals because we’re created in God’s image, and the rest of creation is soulless matter to be manipulated according to our whims. So contemporary environmental writers beseech you: remain faithful to the Earth. In his posthumous essay collection, Barry Lopez wrote

In this trembling moment, with light armor under several  flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California, and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?

I really love that. And as far as personal philosophy goes, I think that it’s completely right. Trying to live in accordance with the morals of God led people to do things like whip themselves while reciting the 40 Psalms, and for as much as religious people like to say that non-believers have no morals, you can obviously justify some of the worst atrocities with the claim that they’re what God wants. And worse still, those beliefs can get people to throw their lives and their wellbeing away in a way that I think you would be hard-pressed to get an atheist to do. The Crusades started, after all, when Pope Urban II promised that anyone who fought to take back the Holy Land would get forgiveness for their earthly sins.

And you might even reasonably apply this to the endless deferment model of life: my life will start for real when I [start college, finish college, get married, get the perfect job, etcetera etcetera etcetera]. The real world isn’t on the other side of the perfect choice or opportunity, either. It’s what you’re doing right now. I graduated college last year. I’m 23. One of my friends said to me yesterday that maybe the reason why people our age keep saying they still feel like they’re kids or that they still feel like they’re in college is because at the end of the day, it isn’t so fundamentally different from real life. In one of my philosophy classes, someone said that their favorite philosopher was Peter Singer because he was relevant to the real world - which world would that be?, my professor replied. ‘Embrace fearlessly the burning world’ is in this sense more like a commitment to the life you have.

I struggle more with the ‘faith to the Earth’ portrait when it comes to the bigger picture. In Interstellar, there’s a famous scene where Matthew McConaughey’s character has to go in for a parent-teacher conference (if you haven’t watched it or don’t remember it, do). His daughter’s a great student, but she has this problem where she keeps getting in fights because she’s telling her classmates that people have been to the moon. The contemporary textbooks, in the days of Interstellar, have the corrected version of the story of the Apollo missions. What really happened, of course, was that they were faked by the US government to trick the Soviets into wasting billions of dollars building rockets. And there was a line from the teacher that really struck me the last time I watched it.

“We need to teach our kids about this planet, not tales of leaving it.”

(Matthew McConaughey says he thinks he’ll take his daughter out to her favorite baseball team’s game the next night when the teacher suggests he find some way to deal with it).

So what’s going on? The teacher is making the same move as Barry Lopez and the other environmentalists - it is imperative that we remain faithful to the Earth, they all say. But in Interstellar’s case, it’s an argument made in bad faith. (bad faith: advancing an argument you don’t actually believe, or behaving as though you hold values you do not. See: everything Donald Trump does with his mouth that isn’t breathing). It’s not true that humanity’s only conceivable future is this planet (and of course, in Interstellar, it’s the people who believe that Earth is just humanity’s cradle are the ones who save the day).

What happened? For two hundred thousand years you could be forgiven for thinking “one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever… and there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes). In 1969, that became a bad faith proposition. Insisting on faith to the Earth above all is, in a global sense, wrong. Maybe we’ll never make it and it’s too technically challenging for biological organisms to get anywhere interesting, or maybe we’ll end up there in some kind of weird posthuman future, but it is no longer impossible to conceive. Jean Luc-Marion writes in the kick-ass essay “Nothing is Impossible for God” (forgive the circular philosophical prose):

"There are no miracles" means, within the real exercise of my thought, that I give up on the least possibility. Consequently, should we in reverse fashion recognize in the formula "It's a real miracle" the acknowledgment of a possibility? When the tying goal is shot in the final minute, when the heart starts again contrary to all expectation or the deep coma lifts, when, against all odds, the ashes allow an ember to rekindle a kiss, what does my cry then hail? It does not pay tribute only or primarily to the saving event, but to the amazement over its realization at the very moment when I took it to be definitively impossible. What I call a miracle refers not to its effective occurrence but rather to the possibility within it of the very thing I know certainly to be impossible. I call "miracle" the possibility of what was formerly and certainly impossible, hence the real possibility-the possibility of the impossible.

The point is that the way we usually employ ‘possibility’ is more like ‘conceivability’ - we act as though things are impossible until they aren’t. When we say “there’s no chance” or “it’s over” when the Patriots are down by 20 with minutes left in the fourth quarter against the Falcons, it’s clear that there’s some path to victory. We do a bad job at parsing out “impossible” from “implausible.”

Returning to Interstellar, what seems to make the ‘faith to the Earth’ argument so repulsive there is that it performs the last-second victory in reverse. Technology really does push the boundaries of what we think is possible, and pretending otherwise looks like a lie in the service of some kind of narrow instrumental aim. Just because it would be expedient for us not to have been to the moon doesn’t mean we never went.

A lot of contemporary environmentalist discourse tends towards the apocalyptic. There are climate change grief counselors now. From the NYT: “Eco-anxiety, a concept introduced by young activists, has entered a mainstream vocabulary." On the other side, hardcore techno-utopians seem to think it climate change just barely constitutes a serious problem. The problem, on some counts, won’t be too little to go around, but too much. It’s a funny time when someone can publish an article titled ‘Moore’s Law for Everything’ advocating for legislation that will take effect in the near-term scenario when the national GDP has grown by 50% (and be taken seriously!) at the same time as The Overstory, Richard Powers’ ecology-heavy deforestation novel, wins the Pulitzer Prize.

As always, it’s tempting to recommend a middle course. Is it really so much to ask that we remain open to the fact that science and technology do seem to regularly deliver miracles (MIT and Nautilus reported that mind-reading became real recently to, as far as I have seen, approximately zero media coverage), but to also act like the place where we live matters? I wouldn’t want to get to the glorious transhuman future where we optimize the universe for fun or whatever if it means that we have to sacrifice the well-being of other living thing along the way. I’m nervous about middle paths, though.

It reminds me of a story from Orson Scott Card, who, for all his shortcomings, can write a hell of a science fiction novel. I’ll leave things off here.

A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife’s adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death.

The rabbi walks forward and stands besides the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. ‘Is there anyone here,’ he says to them, ‘who has not desired another man’s wife, another woman’s husband?’

They murmur and say, ‘We all know the desire. But, Rabbi none of us has acted on it.’

The rabbi says, ‘then kneel down and gives thanks that God made you strong.’ He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, ‘Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he’ll know I am his loyal servant.’ So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, ‘Which of you is without sin?’ Let him cast the first stone.’

The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Somebody, they think, I may be like this woman, and I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.

As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts sit high over the woman’s head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestone.

‘Nor am I without sin,’ he says to the people. ‘But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.’

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.