Doomerism and Realism

Note: This is part one of a three-part post. For practical reasons I broke things up into sections of manageable size. Also see parts two and three.

This week may mark a turning point in the evolution of The Teeming Brain. Not that anyone besides me is counting, but tomorrow—June 13^th—will mark the first anniversary of the founding of this blog. Or actually it may already be the 13th in your time zone. So anyway, it’s a bloggish birthday. I’ve felt continually gratified at the amount of attention the project has received. As I type these words, the hit counter is approaching 40,000. The numbers have been aided, of course, by the fact that so many interested inquirers have come here for updates about the Holy Horrors anthology.

I created The Teeming Brain for two purposes: 1) To give me a place to talk about the ideas and issues that are dominating my attention at any given moment; 2) To talk about my ongoing writing and musical projects. As evidenced by the diversity of the topics I’ve addressed over the past 12 months, this dual purpose allows me a very wide latitude. Just take a look at the past posts. Or more immediately, take a look at my May 2007 reading log, which catalogs everything I read last month and thus amounts to a kind of atlas of my mental wanderings.

Somebody reading the list might reasonably conclude that I’m a doomer, a Chicken Little type who’s convinced the sky is falling and we’re all going to die horribly or wish we had. Obviously, such a person would be onto something. But that may be about change.

In a nutshell, I think my doomer days are limited. This aspect of my personality, and thus of The Teeming Brain, may have run its course or at least worn itself out for a while. A glance at the new reading log indicates why. I included even more excerpts from the articles and essays this time around than last time. As always, this is for my own reference, to remind me at a glance what a given piece of writing was about. But I noticed when I proofread it that the list seems distinctly biased. It paints an astonishing picture of Big Trouble, of a planetary civilization on its last legs, a global system about to implode on itself.   Of course the items on it are “cherry picked” from the wider literary and journalistic worlds. I could just as easily have turned my attention toward other matters that would have resulted in quite a different list with a different overall mood. So the doomsday focus says as much about me and my state of mind as it does about the world. And really, how much farther can one go down this path?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not denying that we’re presently living through the opening stage of an authentic, massive planetary crisis of epochal proportions. Because, in point of fact, we are. The crisis is multifaceted—ecological, cultural, economic, political, spiritual—and unprecedented in scope, owing to the unprecedented size and scope of our human civilization, and also the unprecedented size and scope of our ambitions and powers as amplified by advanced technology. I’ve begun characterizing it to myself as a matter of “dysfunction unbound,” of our age-old human tendencies toward selfishness, greed, personal ambition, laziness, cruelty, short-sightedness, xenophobia, and a host of other negative qualities being set free to attain previously unimagined heights of excess and destruction. Of course, our better natures and tendencies have been equally enabled, but it appears that, as has happened so often in the past, the worse has gained the upper hand and begun to dominate.

In other words, I think we’ve mounted a futuristic, global-wide riff on the ancient Tower of Babel theme, aided by a heady dose of Frankensteinian scientific/technological hubris (“the central myth of Western culture,” Theodore Roszak has said of Ms. Shelley’s great novel; the “first great myth of the industrial age,” Brian Aldiss has called it). But looking back over the objectified tracks of my thought life as chronicled in the 12-month history of this blog, I fear my focus on such things has grown shrill at times. And I may have finally worn myself out through sheer profligacy of emotion.

The Teeming Brain is a direct expression and reflection not only of my thoughts but of my mood, and presently I’m experiencing an involuntary reorientation in that area. Doomerism itself is more a matter of mood or mode than of actual content. So it’s not that I’m completely withdrawing my attention from typically doomerish matters, which I’m sure I’ll continue to monitor. Indeed, the new reading list I’m currently assembling for June already contains a generous helping of disaster. But I’m sensing a changed outlook, not in the direction of optimism but toward . . . something else. A softer grip on it all, maybe. A pullback of the sometimes shrill tone. A reigning in of the ranting. A disinvestment in personalizing and agonizing. A more fundamentally objective outlook that withdraws the sometimes angry and despairing tone in favor of simply seeing things as they are (insofar as such a thing is even possible). An outlook that allows for the possibility—which I’ve always held to in principle but sometimes abandoned in actual emotional practice—that the death throes of the current world order, which we’re probably witnessing in incipient form right now, aren’t ultimately a cause for despair. On the other side of the perfect storm of peak oil, global warming, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” the Fourth Turning, and the undoing of the Friedman-esque hallucinated global economy, there may lie a much more human and humane way of life.

It’s unlikely than any of us living today will actually see this new way come to pass. We’re the ones who will endure the transitional time, which may be very rough indeed. We’re almost certainly living in a state of ecological overshoot right now, and the idea of deindustrialization and die-off is pretty scary. But in all honesty—and speaking in broad terms of ideal types, while recognizing that concrete realities are always more nuanced—the alternative to collapse may be a soulless Huxleyan/Bradburyan technotopia, the global concentration camp of absolute technological efficiency predicted by Jacques Ellul, in which the inmates mistake their slavery for freedom and are thus perpetually prevented from discovering the cause of their fundamental misery. Ellul, and also Roszak and other scholars who have thought and written in the same vein, have speculated about and predicted in real-world terms the advent of the very thing that Bradbury, Huxley, Orwell, and the other great dystopian novelists have explored in fictional form.

And even the novelists have seen the real world turn in the direction of their worst imaginings. In the years following the publication of Brave New World in 1932—the novel having been largely inspired by the anger and loathing Huxley felt when he first visited the United States in the 1920s and witnessed the garishness and vapidity of American culture—Huxley saw things move faster in the direction of his fictional vision than he had ever expected. “All things considered,” he wrote in 1946, “it looks as though Utopia [i.e., the dystopia described in his novel] were far closer to us than anyone, only fifteen years ago, could have imagined. Then, I projected it six hundred years into the future. Today it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us in a single century.” In the 1950s, in Brave New World Revisited, he said much the same thing.

Bradbury has also commented on the movement of the real world in the direction of his classic Fahrenheit 451. In 1998 he said, “Almost everything in Fahrenheit 451 has come about, one way or the other—the influence of television, the rise of local TV news, the neglect of education.” Even more recently—less than two weeks ago, in fact, in a story carried in L.A. Weekly—Bradbury pointed out how many of his fears have come true, at least in part, because of the rise of television. An extended quote seems appropriate:

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says [Fahrenheit 451] is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.

“Useless,” Bradbury says. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.”

. . . . As early as 1951, Bradbury presaged his fears about TV, in a letter about the dangers of radio, written to fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. Bradbury wrote that “Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’… This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people.”

He says the culprit in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state—it is the people. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, in which the government uses television screens to indoctrinate citizens, Bradbury envisioned television as an opiate. In the book, Bradbury refers to televisions as “walls” and its actors as “family,” a truth evident to anyone who has heard a recap of network shows in which a fan refers to the characters by first name, as if they were relatives or friends.

Not incidentally, in the last paragraph above Bradbury sounds much like another prominent observer of such trends, Neil Postman, who in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death posited the rise of this same type of democratically effected dystopia. Postman called this the Huxleyan scenario, as contrasted with the Orwellian scenario of fascism imposed from above by a despotic government. But he might as well have called it the Bradburyan scenario. And as readers of this blog may have come to recognize, I think Bradbury’s vision, minus the book burning, is scarifyingly close to where we’ve arrived these 54 years after the novel was first published.

So just how undoomerish do I sound right now? In point of fact, I have come to think the term “doomer”—which hails from the peak oil movement, where people who expect a full-on civilizational crash owing to the depletion of fossil fuel reserves are known as “doomers” while those who believe either that fossil fuels will last or that alternative energy sources will enable us to carry on business as usual are known as “cornucopians”—I have come, I say, to think the term “doomer” should be reserved for the emotional negativist mindset I described above. But then what should one call the other attitude, the one I’ve just been exploring? It’s coming to seem more and more that the factual side of doomerism, the part that simply observes current trends and conditions and draws apocalyptic sounding conclusions from them, is quite reasonable or at least not absurd. What else can you think in a cultural moment when a columnist for the by-God New York Times can write—in the Sunday edition, no less—“There will always be doomsayers, and fantasies about the end of human society are a staple of Hollywood and science fiction. But these days, a lot of smart people are seriously contemplating the looming destruction of human society, whether through a cascade of natural disasters, nuclear wars, uncontrolled terrorism, novel pandemics or, of course, climate change” (G. Pascal Zachary, “The Silver Lining to Impending Doom,” May 6, 2007)? In light of this, it might well be argued that doomerism minus the negative doom-and-gloom bias, and also minus the positive glee with which some of its converts regard the expected End of World as We Know It, is simply the new realism. And it can actually be held as a hopeful realism, since civilizational collapse is indeed one way — and, as I speculated above, perhaps the only way — to avoid something worse.

Whatever the case, I’ve had a fulfilling first year as I’ve applied myself to the project of divining my own thoughts via The Teeming Brain. Thanks for coming along for the ride. I look forward to seeing where things will lead during the year ahead.