Knot the End of the World

What Hannah Ritchie's book gets wrong, plus rocking out in Washington Square

I plan to turn more of my writerly attention to topics that fill me with tremendous joy and enthusiasm… such as particular works of art and whatever is going on in Washington Square Park these days. On a (lovely but eerie) warm, sunny, pre-Spring day last week, I walked with friends through Washington Square Park, encountering a wild human eruption that was amazing, overwhelming, to see, smell, and feel. 

Several improvisational bands concocted jubilant funk cacophonies, incorporating mouth-made yawps, fuzzy guitar riffs, and hard-driving drums, inciting multi-colored haired art students to dance with abandon. Since the pandemic, a mix of young and old eccentrics have set up booths around the central fountain, selling their paintings, home-made fashion, Ganga, and a plethora of odd old books and peculiar totemic things. Every ethnicity and the entire gender spectrum is welcome, and represented. 

New York City is in a phase where, I find, it shimmers with iridescent dragon-hues of creative possibility, a bit like a multi-million-minded caterpillar yearning to pupate. In Washington Square and other TAZs (see Hakim Bey), one senses another youth-culture revolution brewing — Beats, hippies, punks, Goths, queers, all blended into each other, melding, mutating. In the park, one feels a palpable freedom, a deepening collective awareness that this is, indeed, The Holy Moment we always anticipated. The Moment slowly unfurls, even as our world goes increasingly haywire. 

But that “going haywire” is, one senses, not a separate thing: it is, somehow, intrinsic to the possibility of collective awareness or liberation, when humanity comes to consciousness of itself, throwing off tyranny and oppression. Perhaps we need Putin brandishing nuclear weapons, Trump spewing vitriol, ecological disintegration, and all the rest of it, to bring about a proper “fuck it all” liberatory end-of-time Shiva dance. 

Washington Square on a Spring day is like a Burning Man for everyone: Anti-elitist, crazy, perpetually transforming, phenomenological. 

(Lest we forget: “Phenomenology, as a disclosure of the world, rests on itself, or rather provides its own foundation,” Merleau-Ponty reminds us. “If phenomenology was a movement before becoming a doctrine or a philosophical system, this was attributable neither to accident, nor to fraudulent intent. It is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry or Cézanne—by reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being.”)

But before I can go deeper into any kind of celebration — the festive vibes of this contemporary moment dance on the edge of doom, which makes for a confusing sort of jubilation — I have this irritating (like particles of grit trapped in the soft flesh of my oyster-brain) compulsion to review / dissect / put down a new book currently receiving vapid plaudits in the mainstream press: Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie, 31-year-old chief scientist for Oxford University’s Our World in Data. 

At Oxford, Ritchie pals around with feckless Effective Altruist William MacAskill (I gave What We Owe the Future, his book, a thumbs down here). She was recently promoted by Bill Gates on his podcast. Ritchie and MacAskill belong to a carefully cultivated Oxford intellectual mafia whose role is two-fold. First of all, they reassure the technocratic elite and Davos set that they are not just the Winners but also the good guys. Second, they persuade enough of the upper middle and middle-middle class to agree with this elite consensus. So there will be no ruckus – no mass defection nor revolution – as we go deeper down the drain. 

An interesting question (for me, anyway) is whether or not Hannah Ritchie knows she is intellectually dishonest or whether she truly believes what she writes in her book and says in podcasts, Ted talks, etcetera. I suppose the answer lies somewhere in between. I have a theory about Ivy League institutions and their UK equivalents: Their primary function is not to teach students how to uncover dangerous truths that might challenge society, but how to win status competitions.