The Next Great Transformation is inevitable. We live in a world that is changing, and that change is accelerating and increasingly undeniable, despite the efforts of the fossil-fuel and related industrial, financial and media elites to cover up the hard facts of climate science and economic failure in a shroud of denial. The direction of that change is not entirely clear, but it does not look good. Yet humans may be able to play a role in salvaging civilization from planetary disaster, if we can see what confronts us.
The nature and direction of the Next Great Transformation is not inevitable, though the evidence is increasingly troubling. But it may reach a tragic tipping point if humanity does not change the collective direction of its own behavior and do so rapidly. It is difficult to imagine such massive reorganization of humanity. Nevertheless, such a transformation of the way we live is a matter of survival. It may only be possible if we quickly revise our collective way of thinking and act upon what is thereby revealed.
Robert Jensen has presented an unusual assessment of apocalyptic thinking, entirely unlike the vision of the magical thinkers who see themselves as the “chosen” ones and expect a cataclysmic “apocalypse” any time now, in which all non-believers will be destroyed and the chosen few – which somehow always include these magical thinkers – will be saved and ushered into a new miraculous reality as the world crashes in upon the rest of us. These conclusions typically come out of revelatory imaginations and twisted readings of biblical scripture. Such fantasies are entirely at odds with Jensen’s understanding of apocalypse.
An apocalypse in the original Greek and Latin meanings of both terms, apocalypse and revelation, is an uncovering of hidden reality, a new understanding revealed, allowing hope through knowledge. The realities of climate disruption will be, without any scientific doubt, revealed to us all in the severity of the damage they cause, including the disruption of economic, political, and social systems which have been so dependent on fossil-fuel energy consumption. It is now only a matter of how extreme and rapid the catastrophic change will be and whether humans will be able to do anything about it. As a result of the elite’s cover up of this burgeoning reality, the whole culture has been corrupted by an imposed inability to acknowledge that, as Jensen puts it, “a large scale human presence on the planet at this level of consumption is impossible.”[1]
The falsifications of the fossil-fuel economic ideology will be uncovered as the economy breaks down from the consequences of its own dreamlike assumptions. Such revelations are inevitable as the old economic, political, and social systems collapse under the ecological stresses they have produced. The kind of apocalyptic thinking that Robert Jensen advocates would allow us to focus on uncovering the realities the elites do so much to deny. That would accelerate public awareness of the otherwise inevitable acceleration of global warming, so that humans could attempt to undo some of the anthropogenic climate disruption we continue to unwittingly cause. Because of the lag between cause and effect, we will experience the damage due to global warming we have already caused; the big question is whether we will take it to the point of no return, to the collapse of civilization.
Whether Jensen’s kind of apocalyptic thinking can take hold and sufficiently reveal the urgency of his call to action soon enough for widespread human action to mitigate – not just adapt to – anthropogenic climate disruption is uncertain. But the only hope is to do everything possible to have sufficient impact to constrain the accelerating feedback loops that are rushing us to the wrong tipping point. What is most urgent now is to achieve a cultural tipping point resulting from a new awareness that will require us to mobilize humanity to prevent the planet from becoming uninhabitable.
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[1] Robert Jensen, “A Call to Action.” Transcript of speech in Austin, Texas: Alternative Radio (24 February 2013).
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 