As a thinker and writer, I tend to practice what the French call bricolage: “The construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available.” I don’t have formal philosophic training — in fact, I was studying intellectual history as an undergraduate at Wesleyan, but dropped out before completing the degree. This is, I suspect, both a weakness and a strength. At the moment, I am researching frantically for a talk I will give next week at the Katapult Festival in Oslo, Norway. The vague subject of the talk is “futurism.” The conference includes many tech entrepreneurs and CEOS of start-ups, interested in sustainability and human rights issues.
My problem is that I don’t know what I think about the future right now. A few years ago, I was more certain. In How Soon Is Now (2016), I reviewed dire evidence about the ecological emergency; perspectives on exponential technology and regenerative design; ideas drawn from Gaia Theory, models of political philosophy, collective mysticism, and social change. Taking ideas from Hannah Arendt, Buckminster Fuller, Lynn Margolis, and Sri Aurobindo, among others, I assembled a proposal for how we might reinvent our civilization to handle the seemingly overwhelming crises facing us. I continue to think through these ideas from different angles, as time goes on.
Right now, I am reading Vaclav Smil’s latest, How the World Really Works. A salty realist, Smil is a materials scientist and energy expert, author of some forty books. His work is often touted by Bill Gates, among others. Smil’s last chapter, ‘Understanding the Future: Between Apocalypse and Singularity,” explores subjects I covered in earlier works.
Smil mocks the ongoing “intellectual duel between cornucopians and catastrophists.” In the early 1970s, catastrophists in The Club of Rome predicted overpopulation and civilization collapse. In the 1990s, peak oil doomsayers (Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, John Zerzan among them) projected “that declining oil extraction would not only bring about the collapse of modern economies but that it would return to a humanity to a lifestyle far below its preindustrial levels.” These things didn’t happen. Instead, we made food-production more efficient and found new sources of hydro-carbons.
But Smil similarly castigates techno-utopians such as Singularity booster Ray Kurzweil or Abundance author Steven Kotler, who promote a future of super-abundance: “Why should we fear anything — be it environmental, social, or economic threats—when by 2045, or perhaps even by 2030, our understanding (or rather the intelligence unleashed by the machines we have created) will know no bounds?”
While climate scientists issue apocalyptic warnings of “imminent near-infernal perdition,” Singularitarians promote “speed-of-light godlike omnipotence.” Smil believes we will have neither: “We do not have a civilization envisioned in the early 1970s—one of worsening planetary hunger or one energized by cost-free nuclear fission—and a generation from now we will not be either at the end of our evolutionary path or have a civilization transformed by the Singularity.” I appreciate his middle-ground perspective as a basis for analysis and argument.
Smil does not believe it will be possible to radically decarbonize the global energy supply in a few decades, or that new technologies (nuclear fusion, carbon capture) will suddenly change the game. “To conclude that we will be able to achieve decarbonization anytime soon, effectively and on the required scales, runs against all past evidence.” He focuses on constraints inherent in our built environment:
“The inertia of large, complex systems is due to their basic energetic and material demands—as well as the scale of their operations… the fundamentals of our lives will not change drastically in the coming 20 - 30 years… Steel, cement, ammonia and plastics will endure as the four material pillars of civilization; a major share of the world’s transportation will be still energized by refined liquid fuels (automotive gasoline and diesel, aviation kerosene, and diesel and fuel oil for shipping); grain fields will be cultivated by tractors pulling plows, harrows, seeders and fertilizer applicators and harvested by combines spilling the grains into trucks. High-rise apartment buildings will not be printed on site by gargantuan machines, and should we soon have another pandemic than the role of the much-touted artificial intelligence will most likely be as underwhelming as it was during the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.”
Arguing for persistence, humility, and acceptance of uncertainty, he writes: “Neither the evolution nor the history of our species is an ever-rising arrow, There are no predictable trajectories, no definable targets.” Our civilization gathers an increasing mass of knowledge. This creates more security in areas like health and food production. But it doesn’t eliminate or even, over the long term, mitigate existential risks.
Smil believes we became over-confident about the potential for disruptive technological because of the rapid proliferation of electronic gadgets—Smart phones – and social media over the last decades. But these tools plug into the enormous global power grid. They are not as disruptive as we think they are. I find it useful to integrate Smil’s materials-science perspective, to recognize how, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
I don’t know whether or not Smil, as a result of his particular intellectual constitution, downplays the severity of the ecological emergency and the urgent necessity for collective action. Increasingly, climate scientists protest publicly, getting arrested to raise awareness. They seem genuinely terrified by the evidence indicating an imminent breakdown of the Earth’s life-support systems. Some (check out Guy McPherson as one example) believe it is already too late to prevent civilizational collapse and even our extinction.
The Communist Hypothesis
The next set of ideas I want to look at in today’s work of intellectual bricolage come from the French philosopher Alain Badiou. Badiou is considered by many to be the last living exemplar of the post-War philosophic current in France that produced many intricate, seductive thinkers — Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etcetera — with a powerful, somewhat pernicious, influence on contemporary thought. One reason I find Badiou so interesting is that he offers a philosophical defense of Communism. His radical views shaped by May ’68 in Paris, he has even written supportively of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Maoism.
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