Finding Alarm and Consolation About the Apocalypse in Two New Books

In recent years, Steven Pinker, Gregg Easterbrook and other authors have tried to tell us that the state of the world is, as one of Easterbrook’s titles has it, “better than it looks.”

Phooey.

Such optimists tell us to consider some heartening facts. Worldwide poverty has decreased; many diseases have been eradicated; the frequency of war has lessened, and its scale has shrunk. To say this is cold comfort is not to pine for mythical good old days. Yes, we’re happy to have anesthesia and Netflix and to not be conscripted quite so often into early deaths. But alongside those triumphs have grown some alarming and very unincremental potentialities, including the continued specter of nuclear war and large-scale terrorism; the disappearance of species; the rapid warming of the planet and melting of the icecaps; and the billions more energy-burning people scheduled to arrive on Earth in the next few decades, to name just a few.

In “We’re Doomed. Now What?,” Roy Scranton writes with angry passion about the various ways we fail to confront reality. “Right-wing denialists insist that climate change isn’t happening, or that it’s not caused by humans, or that the real problem is terrorism or refugees,” he writes, “while left-wing denialists insist that the problems are fixable, under our control, merely a matter of political will.”

One of Scranton’s previous books had the even less cheery title of “How to Die in the Anthropocene,” the Anthropocene being the era marked by “the advent of human beings as a geological force.” This new collection of essays, many of them previously published, covers some of the same dispiriting ground.

His raw concern about the environment is greater than his expertise. Perhaps because of this, his writing about the subject can be as overheated as the planet. One bit that (astonishingly) recurs goes like this: “God was rock in the beginning and rock is rock and rock is dead and space is dead and light is dead and life is dead, life rock and water and God, dead, dead light, dead heat, dead rock, dead space, dead rock, dead God.” Dead reader.

It’s Scranton’s pieces about war (an Army veteran, he served a 14-month deployment in Iraq) that best ground his philosophy, and his prose, in experience. He writes clearly and convincingly about the emotional, existential challenges that attracted him to war, and how he was changed by the time he returned home.

There are repetitions and a general bagginess to the essays, taken together, but Scranton at his best is an incisive dispenser of tough love.

The bad news in his book comes across loud and clear. But the answer to the question in the second half of his title is not really provided. He predicts increasing devastation, but has little to say about how we might realistically avoid it. He argues that the collective action needed to properly address global warming at this stage would require radical redistribution of wealth, the dissolution of nations and the establishment of one world government with a “monopoly on force.” Given both the scale and the totalitarianism of that blueprint — and the inconvenient fact that the opposite of political unity is happening all the time — even Scranton admits that he’s “pretty sure we’re going to keep fumbling along toward our doom.” One finishes his book with little hope.

But why hope? Another choice, philosophically speaking, is to steer into the skid — to go, as Jack Donaghy on “30 Rock” might recommend, “into the crevasse.” After all, people — and I’m looking at every last one of you, as well as straight into the mirror — are stupid and shortsighted, about matters small and large. Brilliant thinkers (all of them stupid in their own way, no doubt) have been saying this for centuries, well before the advent of human-fueled global warming; even before the geological appearance of Reddit.

Eugene Thacker has thrown a party for all of these eloquent cranks in “Infinite Resignation,” and he is an excellent host. The book, a collection of fragments that takes its title from Kierkegaard, is a survey of the pessimism and dark quips of the Danish philosopher and his ilk, combined with Thacker’s own aphoristic thoughts on the subject. The last third of the book is a series of short biographical essays about the “patron saints of pessimism.”

Thacker, a professor at the New School in New York City, is the author of many previous books, including a trilogy about the “horror of philosophy.” In the first volume of that series, he wrote, in a line Scranton would likely endorse, that it is “increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are a part.”

Thacker calls pessimism “the most adequate” and “the least helpful” of philosophies. He delineates two varieties of it: “The end is near” and “Will this never end?”

Werner Herzog would be ideally suited to narrate certain passages of this book. “Few sights are more awkward (or embarrassing) than that of human beings in nature,” Thacker writes. He finds self-help books not just “ineffectual” but “odorous.” Along those same lines, he expresses disappointment in Samuel Beckett for writing “Fail better,” the line of his most likely to be quoted by aspirational writers on social media. “The therapeutic function soon gets the better of us all,” Thacker laments.

“Infinite Resignation” is also a timely reminder, especially after reading Scranton’s hopes for a global takeover, that pessimists have always had a tough go organizing. The infighting about philosophical purity can be hilarious, for readers used to such bickering in 2018. Nietzsche wondered how much of a pessimist Schopenhauer could really be given that he played the flute.

In order to get the most from Thacker’s book, it’s probably best if you already agree with this sentiment of his: “There are writers who are so depressing it’s inspiring.” He quotes a lot of them. This book provides a metric ton of misery and a lot of company. Even if you already have a long shelf of these writers at home, your reading list will grow exponentially after finishing this compendium. (You’ll have to track down the pessimistic women out there on your own; Thacker hasn’t made room for them. Though it may also be true that this crabby brand of pessimism is a quality found mostly in perpetually adolescent men.)

And yet, the book is not exactly a defense of this school of thought. Thacker is pessimistic even about pessimism. He approvingly quotes the Scottish philosopher R.M. Wenley, who called it, among other things, the resort “of the knave, who knows just enough about life to deem himself able to laugh at it.”

The same blinkered inability to think long term that got us into this mess — whether you think the mess is global warming, continual war or just life itself — is perhaps our saving grace when it comes to emotionally coping. “Given projected increases in global population and projected decreases in resources, the human species could become extinct by the year 3000,” Thacker writes. “Next week, you have plans.”

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'We’re Doomed. Now What?

Essays on War and Climate Change'

By Roy Scranton

348 pages. Soho. Paper, $16.95.

'Infinite Resignation'

By Eugene Thacker

386 pages. Repeater. Paper, $17.95.