The Precipice

Again and again and yet again we imagine ourselves at the precipice: we must change our ways, today, this very hour, or else we’ll really have to face the consequences. We see ourselves at the cliff’s edge, trembling with anxiety, our toes kicking stones into the abyss. We summon all our inner resources. We will ourselves to action. This is it, we say. It’s now or never.

Then something catches our attention. Dinner. Twitter. Soccer. Trump. Before we know it, life pulls us back into its comforting ebb and flow. We recognize a missed opportunity, in some vague sense, the nagging tingle of having passed a decision by, but tell ourselves “next time.” The sun will rise again tomorrow and then, refreshed, we can begin our struggle anew. We may not have fully faced the crisis, it’s true, but of course that can only mean that the real crisis hasn’t yet arrived, because if it had, we would face it. We still have a chance. The fight goes on.

In 1988, Dr. James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies, testified before the United States Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, telling them, with all the qualifications empiricism makes for its claims, that evidence of anthropogenic global warming was very strong and, furthermore, warning them that continuing to emit greenhouse gases by burning fossil fuels at then current rates would lead to significant and dangerous changes in the Earth’s climate, including rising sea levels, increased temperatures, and drought.1 Hansen was not the first to warn of the danger, but his warning was clear and reported widely. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established that same year by the United Nations, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change a few years later. In December 1997, the Annex I parties of the UNFCCC adopted the Kyoto Protocol, committing the industrialized nations of the world, including the United States, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to “a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” That treaty, however, was never ratified by the Senate before which Hansen had testified. Indeed, that body voted unanimously to oppose signing the Kyoto Protocol, passing in July 1997 the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which argued that such an agreement “would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States.”

The failures in the past two decades to adopt binding global policies to slow or stop greenhouse gas emissions, including the Copenhagen Accord and the Paris Agreement, betray to all concerned the manifest impotence of the UNFCCC in the face of national ambition and corporate greed. No doubt future historians, such as the Chinese scholar imagined by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their book The Collapse of Western Civilization, will look back on these decades of lugubrious folly with the same confusion and regret with which historians today look back at Europe’s successive capitulations to Nazi aggression in the 1930s.

We imagine ourselves at the precipice, again and again and yet again, then return to business as usual, the status quo of buying and selling, driving, flying, we’ll have the Wagyu beef, we’ll have the pork belly, we’ll turn up the heat or the lights or the AC, we have a conference to go to, we have business in Palo Alto, Dubai, Cambridge. We imagine each new shock is the real crisis, and a few months later convince ourselves that the fight still goes on.

Between 1988 and 2014, annual global carbon dioxide emissions increased from 21.8 billion metric tons to 36.1 billion metric tons.2 Estimates since then show emissions only increasing, though not as quickly as they had in the past.3 Thinking this slowdown in emissions growth is cause for celebration would be a mistake. The truth is, we’re almost certainly already over the cliff. Each day brings new evidence that we’ve already missed the decisive moment, passed by the sudden crisis, left behind that revolutionary turning point when everything could have changed. We live today in the fall, in the aftertime of human progress and Western civilization, in the long dim days of decline and collapse and retrenchment and violence and confusion and sorrow and endless, depthless, unassuageable human suffering. We live today in the Anthropocene.

Several years ago, I hiked from France into Spain following a trail through the Pyrenees used by refugees fleeing the Nazis after the fall of France. I was interested in one refugee in particular, a German-Jewish essayist, critic, and litterateur named Walter Benjamin. He’s best known today for his seminal analysis of the relationship between politics and aesthetics in mass media culture, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; he was known to a few of his contemporaries in his time and is known to many readers today as a writer of strange, elusive, and rebarbatively brilliant essays on literature, culture, and history. Hannah Arendt, who knew Benjamin personally, wrote in her introduction to the 1968 collection of his essays in English translation, Illuminations:

 

To describe adequately his work and him as an author within our usual framework of reference, one would have to make a great many negative statements, such as: his erudition was great, but he was no scholar; his subject matter comprised texts and their interpretation, but he was no philologist; he was greatly attracted not by religion but by theology and the theological type of interpretation for which the text itself is sacred, but he was no theologian and he was not particularly interested in the Bible; he was a born writer, but his greatest ambition was to produce a work consisting entirely of quotations . . . he reviewed books and wrote a number of essays on living and dead writers, but he was no literary critic . . . he thought poetically, but he was neither a poet nor a philosopher.4

 

Benjamin was, and remains, sui generis: while he is usually grouped among the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, with whom he associated in the 1920s and ’30s, he never quite fit in with their rigorous sociological Marxism, and when the members of the Institute fled Europe for the United States, Benjamin stayed behind. Benjamin founded no school of thought, he cannot be emulated or followed, and yet he endures as a model of intellectual life in the modern world.

Part of Benjamin’s appeal, no doubt, is in the literary quality of his work, which is breathtaking, but I believe a more important aspect of his appeal lies in the seriousness of his situation, not only in the sense of his historical moment—the rise of fascism and end of nineteenth-century Europe—but also in his sensitivity and vulnerability to that moment, his lifelong struggle against pessimism and despair, his fatal courtship with total failure. In a few figures in every age, biography and history merge, and as a shadow fell across Europe in 1940, Benjamin wrote his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” offering the indelible image of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus as the angel of history, wings spread and mouth agape, being blown backward into the future:

 

Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them . . . This storm is what we call progress.5

 

A few months after writing this, Benjamin killed himself. He was buried where he died, in Portbou, Spain.

Following the trail Benjamin took when he had finally decided he could no longer stay in France, I started out before dawn in the sleepy beach town of Banyuls-sur-Mer, winding up through the vineyards in the hills around town then turning steeply into the mountains. I hiked all morning, up, up, up a rocky, winding path, which Benjamin had labored up in clunky shoes, with a bad heart, carrying a suitcase full of manuscript pages, wheezing and stopping often to catch his breath. At the summit, on the border between France and Spain, I tried to imagine myself in Benjamin’s place, fleeing the Nazis and what would become the Holocaust, one refugee in a stream of them, one refugee among thousands, millions, there on the border between two worlds, the fading, ghostly Europe of Baudelaire and Proust, and the new world of America and fascism.

It’s a tragic, romantic image: the historian pursued by history, on the verge of self-destruction. I struggled to understand Benjamin’s suicide, to think my way into it as I descended to Portbou then hiked back up to the cemetery on the cliffs above the town where Benjamin is buried, as I contemplated the memorial that artist Dani Karavan had created there to honor him: stairs going down a steel passage piercing the cliff, ending in a glass wall suspended, dizzyingly, above the crashing waves of the Mediterranean. Into the glass are etched these words:

 

It is a more arduous task to honour the memory of anonymous beings than that of famous persons. The construction of history is consecrated to the memory of those who have no name.

 

I strove to make sense of Benjamin’s decision, when he found out that the group of refugees he’d come with would be turned back across the border, to take a killing dose of morphine. I worked to imagine myself in the position of someone with no exit, no feeling that the future had anything to offer but more catastrophe, no sense of a chance for ease or relief or safety, no hope. I tried to imagine the moment of now or never.

The sun flared over the blue waters of the Mediterranean and far below, late season beachgoers swam and played in the waves. Teenagers flirted and teased each other. Children chased one another up and down the sand. I tried to concentrate, but my thoughts kept returning to lunch.

The moment passed. I had a sandwich. Life went on and I went back to Banyuls-sur-Mer, then Paris, then New York, and so on, but in a very important sense I’m still there in Portbou with Benjamin, because we’re all in Portbou with Benjamin. We are each of us the incarnation of the angel of history, our faces turned toward the catastrophe of the past, being blown backward into a future we didn’t choose.

I’m not a climate scientist. I’m not a Benjamin scholar. I’m not a professional philosopher. I’m a novelist and sometime journalist and an essayist. My scholarly training is in twentieth-century American literature, poetics, and intellectual history. My tools are historicism and close reading and dialectics and narrative, images and rhetoric and concepts. So what do I do? What do we do? What can mere words do for a doomed civilization?

The range of action seems narrow, and mostly ineffectual. Alerting people to the problem and educating broad audiences has proven ineffective against deliberately sown confusion, deep scientific ignorance, widespread apathy, and outright hostility. Naomi Klein makes a very important point in her book This Changes Everything, that those who are invested materially in fossil-fueled capitalism will also be invested ideologically in opposing public recognition of the scope of global climate change, since the threat, properly understood, would demand an immediate dismantling of the global economy and the overthrow of those who rule it. Warning people of the danger we face only seems to sow anxiety and fear, much like the jolt of the latest “Fox News Terror Alert,” and to provoke not restraint, but scapegoating and aggression.

Within the humanities (or at least my corner of it), among serious work being done to think through our impasse, I also see critics who keep repeating the same moves again and again, theorists turning from empiricism and reasoned discourse to specious metaphysics and giddying gibberish; thinkers arguing against the idea of “humanity” as a category of thought, as if we were not in fact a species among other species, a species that happens to be killing off other species in a planet-wide mass extinction event; and literature scholars using the Anthropocene as a new way to talk about trees in Milton. I love trees. I love Milton. But is this the best we can do?

Almost nowhere is anybody grappling seriously with the implications of the catastrophe that is already happening, in which we already live, while everywhere people are trying to find ways to move forward. How do we move forward? We just need to keep moving forward. But where, where are we going? If we thought clearly about our situation for one moment, we would see the end of the passage down which we’re so intently “moving forward.” Here in our daily speech we find again the notion of progress to which our form of civilization remains addicted, the storm blowing us into the future, without which our conquering ideologies would be meaningless.

In my book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, I rely on Peter Sloterdijk for the concept of interruption. The idea, as Sloterdijk frames it, is to suspend our participation in stress-semantic chains. We are inescapably social animals: we rush along with our mass protests and our memes and our nationalism, moving forward, feeling it all together. The idea of interruption is not to resist this impulse or to react against it, but to sit with it. Meditate on it. Ponder it. Suspend our progress until we see where we’re going. Suspend our process until something else happens. In the moment of suspension, new possibility opens. This, I argue, is what we might learn in learning to die. By sitting with and meditating on and thinking deeply the idea of our death, as individuals and as a civilization, we open ourselves to the life we lead right now.

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin writes, “The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts we are developing here originate from similar considerations.” Part of Benjamin’s appeal, I think, is that his thoughts are so vividly conceived—Jetztzeit (now-time), the tiger’s leap, the angel of history, brushing history against the grain—that we think we know what they mean, we think we know what Benjamin means, at least roughly, at least in some sense. He’s talking about revolution and Messianism and how to think about the work we do as humanities scholars and litterateurs and essayists and thinkers and artists so that we might remain connected to some salvific impulse even while recognizing that history is made by the victors, that, in his famous phrase, “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

But I wonder if we have not misconstrued the thrust of the “Theses” and thus missed Benjamin’s deeper point. Recalling the feelings of isolation and pessimism with which he wrote these thoughts, hunted and harried and ill, thinking of him poised on the summit in the mountains between France and Spain, caught between two worlds, the “Theses” appear in a new light: they seem to argue that the work of the thinker is to stop time.

“A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition,” Benjamin writes, “but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.” Many have recognized, of course, the import of Benjamin’s argument here in historiographic terms, as methodology, for Benjamin is explicit about what that means. The historian, or properly speaking “the historical materialist,” seeks to free from the grip of the victorious enemy, who has subsumed all history into a universal history, the memory of anonymous beings, those who have no name, and even the dead, and does so by defying the forward momentum implicit in all teleology, even and especially those historical narratives that bring us to the present. “Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts,” he writes, “but their arrest as well.” It is through that arrest, that interruption, that a historical moment can become, in Benjamin’s view, “time filled by the presence of the now,” Jetztzeit.

But Benjamin is writing not only as a historical materialist, not only as a historian, but as a scholar, critic, philosopher, and litterateur, deeply concerned with justice yet also struggling, always, against a miasma of pessimism and despair, watching with horror the rise of fascism and the dissolution of everything he loved. He is writing as a humanist, a humanist witnessing the end of his world. It is only with this in mind, it seems to me, that we can begin to recognize the other way in which Benjamin understood the import of stopping time, which is as a form of resistance to the demand that we keep moving forward, and indeed perhaps the only ethical thought available to a thinker whose future is foreclosed, as is ours, by doom.

Benjamin’s theses thus suggest at once a model and a method for the work of the humanities in the Anthropocene, while still leaving open important practical questions yet to be addressed. For even if Benjamin’s historical materialism offers a kind of methodological analogue to the philosophical practice of learning to die, we remain nonetheless within the sequence of historical causality as much as we remain within the stress-semantic chains of daily life, and while the practice of thought or meditation might work to suspend or interrupt the latter, the practices by which we might suspend history itself have yet to be adequately articulated.

As we tumble over the precipice into the darkness, we realize that the light coming up from below is the sea rising to meet us. There is nothing between us and the abyss but a moment of suspended time, like a sheet of glass on which is etched an image drawn in words, a moment, a remembrance. [2018]