Robert MacNeil Christie, Author

As you may have noticed from prior posts here and/or from the Hopeful Realist Newsletter, I consider myself a ‘hopeful realist.’ The reason is twofold. First, neither optimism nor pessimism make any sense to me. I guide my thinking by what I know and do not know about the world. Since both optimism and pessimism are forms of fatalism, I have to reject them as both as flawed reflections of reality and as mistaken outlooks on the world. Neither is driven by facts. Both rely on emotional expectations, not any assessment of reality.

The Opportunities and Limits of Hope

Hope is not the same as optimism. It is based in reality, or at least my best assessment of what is real. I sometimes say, “As long as I am breathing I can have some hope, however small.” Well, I might have to add to that the qualification that my brain and some of my senses still work enough for me to be cognizant of the world around me and act either symbolically or physically in it.

That makes me think of Steven Hawking. Most of his bodily functions were out of his control for many years before he died. But his brain still worked rather well and with technical devises he could communicate is ideas on physics and other things with the rest of us, even without the ability to speak. His hope rested in his mind and the ability to communicate.

So, what do you need to retain some hope? That is not an easy question to answer if you still control most of your corporeal functions. For me, I intend to live in hope, however small, until my last breath. That is why, even though the evidence grows daily that we are not about to escape a lot of catastrophic consequences of climate chaos and ecological destruction brought on by human folly, I look to whatever actions we might still take to minimize the damage to both humans and every species left in the Earth System.

The Flaws of Fatalism

In regard to fatalism in the context of accelerating climate chaos, the latest public display of optimism to gain a lot of attention is the recently released book, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, by Hannah Richie. By clever cherry picking of data and intellectual sleight of hand, Richie paints an optimistic picture of easy ‘sustainability.’ She simply ignores the seemingly intractable predicaments involved in the climate destabilization and the ecological disasters that continue around us.

Richie plays to the fears of catastrophic societal collapse by offering a rationalization meant to justify the wild claim that industrial modernity can somehow go on without accommodating to the requirements of natural world in which we live. She does not directly say that, of course, but she rather directly implies that if we just take the right attitude and continue initiating the conventional alleged fixes—while retaining the global technosphere that continues to cause all the Earth System destabilization—our lives will hardly be disturbed. Her blind optimism in this context is highly unrealistic to say the least. In the planetary damage already done and accelerating as I write this, I can find no evidence for optimism, only for a fast fading hope without extreme intervention at the same level as the intervention that industrial civilization continues to impose on the Earth System.

We do have some basis for hope. We have multiple lines of action that we could take to mitigate the sources of much of the continuing destruction by the industrial-consumer global political economy. The system disruption is global; so must be the intervention. It is hard to imagine that hope being realized, since the tasks at hand are so huge and violate some of the most sacred illusions of industrial civilization: endless economic growth as the standard for human progress and all the false corollaries to that ‘root cause’ underlying the extreme global emergency we don’t want to face.

Of course, in this context it is quite easy to become a pessimist, a climate doomsayer, or just a simple nihilist. Some simply accept the collapse of industrial civilization as inevitable and therefore say something equivalent to, ‘I will just live large and ignore the whole thing.’ That may be even easier than techno-economic optimism; it takes a little less contemplation but has the same outcome: certain societal collapse.

What is ‘the Good Fight,’ or Is There One?

How do you want to live your life? Oh, more trips to the Big-Box store in a new SUV? Well, here I go again with the research evidence. Plenty of studies have shown that happiness increases with income from poverty up to about $100,000- per year of income, all other things being equal. In other words, people who are able to live comfortably are happier than those who must struggle from weekly paycheck to weekly paycheck and skip meals or other items of value in order to pay the rent. Beyond that, happiness depends on other things, mostly related to our relations with others.

There is good reason to believe that rich people are not as happy as those who have adapted to a moderate standard of living. Simply put, life is not all about money, but for many in the billionaire class, there is just never enough. They are, after all, the dominant members of the dominator class. Interestingly, among ordinary high-end consumers we hear of ‘shopping fatigue.’ A few even recognize the environmental absurdity of the regular overproduction of the latest designer styles, much of which only ends up as waste deposited in landfills. So, what’s it all about? Living a life detached from life-on-Earth is an artifact of the culture of domination and separation from our living Earth habitat—Gaia. Well, no Jeff Bezos, 417 feet of super yacht, remains unfulfilling.

Is there something else? Of course. That something else is, simply put, engagement…the engagement of living with others and the engagement of having purpose, other than ego gratification, a life as a member of the complex of living ecosystems that sustain us and the other species that still remain. Engagement offers an understanding of what the good fight is. In our times, that means fundamentally transforming the way we live by abandoning the so-called ‘consumer lifestyle’ and all that goes with it. But don’t get me wrong. This is not an individual fight. It is a matter of together overcoming the challenge to mobilize enough people to force our terminally flawed system to change.

But, really, we cannot do that without radically transforming society by replacing the high fossil-fuel energy consuming complex system called ‘industrial civilization’ with something very different. If there is to be a civilization that truly is ‘sustainable,’ it will be an ecological civilization. Try that on for a project with which to shape a meaningful life—the good fight. John Lewis had it right. We must make ‘good trouble.’

To retain enough hope to fight the good fight to forge a real future, we must engage with the reality we created, not the much more comfortable imaginary one we would prefer to believe is real. One of two new great transformations is upon us. However, we can choose to take action to make it the one we need, or we can passively accept the fate that we have thus far dealt ourselves—the impending collapse into global chaos.