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We're Doomed. Now What?: Essays on War and Climate Change
The time we've been thrown into is one of alarming and bewildering change--the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe. Now what? We're Doomed, Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss, from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation. Whether writing about sailing through the melting Arctic, preparing for Houston's next big storm, watching
357 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 17, 2018
86 people are currently reading
649 people want to read
About the author
Roy Scranton
12 books119 followersRoy Scranton is the author of Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress (Stanford University Press, 2025), I ♥ Oklahoma! (Soho Press, 2019), Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2019), We’re Doomed. Now What? (Soho Press, 2018), War Porn (Soho Press, 2016), and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights, 2015). He has written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation, the New Republic, The Baffler, Yale Review, Emergence, Boston Review, and elsewhere, and he co-edited What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate & Reinvent Our Future (Unnamed Press, 2017) and Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (Da Capo, 2013).
His essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University, and he has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
His essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University, and he has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews
May 19, 2018
Roy Scranton is an interesting person. A teenage reprobate, full of angst and protest, he drifted from one low level job to another, eventually coming back to live in his mother’s basement. A stint in the army that took him to Iraq both straightened him out and screwed him up. He came back to become a scholar, intensely well read, citing all kinds of obscure references and dropping a lot of names, even just long lists of them, but totally consumed by war. It is all on evidence in We’re Doomed. Now What?
It begins with a series of perceptive essays on the environment. “We need to learn to let our current civilization die, to accept our mortality and practice humility,” he says. He visits Greenland where he finds it is losing about 300 billion tons of ice every year. This alone will raise sea levels more than 20 feet. “We find ourselves less than human, lacking even the dumb instinct for survival we see in the way plants will bend toward the sun.”
Those first essays are powerful. But from there, things get confusing. Scranton spends over a hundred pages reliving his army stint in Iraq, and revisits, on behalf of Rolling Stone, to discover how corrupt and messed up their elections are. He then pivots to the Soviet Union and how much it sacrificed in World War II, then to Seymour Hersh’s article claiming the Osama Bin Laden trackdown was a fraud. He also draws parallels and connections between police shooting blacks and American wars and warriors. You might notice the book on the environment and climate change has completely disappeared.
So despite the title, this is not a book on the environment. It is a cathartic collection of disparate essays from 2010-1018, demonstrating Scranton’s erudition and ability to research. But everything is suffused with soldiering and war. He blames the USA for Iraq and Afghanistan’s “ongoing human suffering almost incomprehensible in its meaninglessness. “ At times it is profound, but it is often PTSD on display.
David Wineberg
It begins with a series of perceptive essays on the environment. “We need to learn to let our current civilization die, to accept our mortality and practice humility,” he says. He visits Greenland where he finds it is losing about 300 billion tons of ice every year. This alone will raise sea levels more than 20 feet. “We find ourselves less than human, lacking even the dumb instinct for survival we see in the way plants will bend toward the sun.”
Those first essays are powerful. But from there, things get confusing. Scranton spends over a hundred pages reliving his army stint in Iraq, and revisits, on behalf of Rolling Stone, to discover how corrupt and messed up their elections are. He then pivots to the Soviet Union and how much it sacrificed in World War II, then to Seymour Hersh’s article claiming the Osama Bin Laden trackdown was a fraud. He also draws parallels and connections between police shooting blacks and American wars and warriors. You might notice the book on the environment and climate change has completely disappeared.
So despite the title, this is not a book on the environment. It is a cathartic collection of disparate essays from 2010-1018, demonstrating Scranton’s erudition and ability to research. But everything is suffused with soldiering and war. He blames the USA for Iraq and Afghanistan’s “ongoing human suffering almost incomprehensible in its meaninglessness. “ At times it is profound, but it is often PTSD on display.
David Wineberg
September 19, 2019
[I wrote this in May after finishing the book, then I decided that I sounded intemperate, so I took down the review. But I just read Jonathan Safran Foer disagree with Scranton on the same point in We Are the Weather, so I'll put my review back up. Foer doesn't say he hates Scranton like I do, of course, and he's more articulate in his critique than I was. This was just my immediate response:]]
I had a certain admiration for Roy Scranton based on his previous manifesto, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. I thought it was challenging and surprising, tough-minded. Now I basically hate him. He comes across as angry, pretentious, self-serving and self-aggrandizing. I especially despised the discussion in which he pretends to consider - purely, it turns out, for rhetorical effect - the recognized ways that first-world humans can ameliorate climate change, then he glibly explains why he can't do them: eat a plant-based diet (it makes him feel weak and cranky!); don't fly (but he has friends all over the country, and he's a rock-star writer!); downsize to one car per family and/or use public transportation (he can't because, you know: work, and friends, and a lifestyle to maintain, not to mention all those annoying strangers!); don't have kids, or have one fewer child (but it's the human imperative and he really wanted to have a child, and it's his right!). He then says that none of that will do any good and they're just kind of hard for him - so he will choose to participate in life fully, which means eating factory-farmed meat and driving and flying (he actually says all this) and let his daughter deal with the consequences later. This is all followed by some terrible attempts at nature imagery. Now I see Scranton's imperative to "learn how to die in the Anthropocene" in a new light - he means suck it up and give in - we have fucked it all up anyway. But enjoy yourself while you're here. Just don't get in the way of Roy Scranton and his family.
I had a certain admiration for Roy Scranton based on his previous manifesto, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. I thought it was challenging and surprising, tough-minded. Now I basically hate him. He comes across as angry, pretentious, self-serving and self-aggrandizing. I especially despised the discussion in which he pretends to consider - purely, it turns out, for rhetorical effect - the recognized ways that first-world humans can ameliorate climate change, then he glibly explains why he can't do them: eat a plant-based diet (it makes him feel weak and cranky!); don't fly (but he has friends all over the country, and he's a rock-star writer!); downsize to one car per family and/or use public transportation (he can't because, you know: work, and friends, and a lifestyle to maintain, not to mention all those annoying strangers!); don't have kids, or have one fewer child (but it's the human imperative and he really wanted to have a child, and it's his right!). He then says that none of that will do any good and they're just kind of hard for him - so he will choose to participate in life fully, which means eating factory-farmed meat and driving and flying (he actually says all this) and let his daughter deal with the consequences later. This is all followed by some terrible attempts at nature imagery. Now I see Scranton's imperative to "learn how to die in the Anthropocene" in a new light - he means suck it up and give in - we have fucked it all up anyway. But enjoy yourself while you're here. Just don't get in the way of Roy Scranton and his family.
August 8, 2018
There is a lot of good in this book, it just needed to be written by someone else. Roy Scranton (and most of humanity) is part of the reason why we're doomed. He knows how bad the systems within the machine that is killing our planet. Like eating meat, traveling (air travel specifically), and consumerism all of which he still participates in. So, why should a person read a book about how bad it is and specifically: NOW WHAT? When the author himself can't even sacrifice his personal preferences for the greater good of the planet. It's hard to live outside Capitalism, nearly impossible in the US; but that doesn't mean you just shrug and eat a steak, fly across the country or world for a "story." So I don't expect an author who is infallible, perfection isn't human. However, doing the least amount of harm should be what an author of a book like this should at the minimum be doing and he can't manage. He admits his faults, that's why the book got two stars instead of one.
I look forward to an author that can help guide people (readers) to a life that lives on the edges of our current society not just in protest but an example of how we can live differently and happily while doing less harm to the only planet we have to live on.
I look forward to an author that can help guide people (readers) to a life that lives on the edges of our current society not just in protest but an example of how we can live differently and happily while doing less harm to the only planet we have to live on.
April 1, 2019
"The greatest peril in life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls," an Inuk named Invaluardjuk told Danish anthropologist Knud Rasmussen a century ago. "All the creatures that we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, like we have, souls that do not perish with the body, and which must therefore be propitiated lest they should revenge themselves on us."
This book was worthwhile, but uneven, and the concluding piece, "Raising a Daughter in a Doomed World" is half-baked and fuzzy-headed to such an extent that it practically undermines everything else in the book. He writes, "As for not having a child, of course nobody needs to have children. It just happens to be the strongest drive humans have, the fundamental organizing principle of every human culture and the sine qua non of a meaningful human world, since it alone makes possible the persistence of human meaning through time. My partner and I didn't need to have a child, but without one, our lives felt like they lacked something important." This passage--like most of the essay--is weakly justifying and rationalizing, and more importantly not true. Lots of people do not feel that drive. They have other, stronger ones. And as an organizing principle of culture, it's been pretty evil and oppressive to the earth, non-human life, and especially human women. Plus, there are at least a thousand other ways for meaning to persist through time than simply reproducing one's human DNA and sending it forward into the future.
This book was worthwhile, but uneven, and the concluding piece, "Raising a Daughter in a Doomed World" is half-baked and fuzzy-headed to such an extent that it practically undermines everything else in the book. He writes, "As for not having a child, of course nobody needs to have children. It just happens to be the strongest drive humans have, the fundamental organizing principle of every human culture and the sine qua non of a meaningful human world, since it alone makes possible the persistence of human meaning through time. My partner and I didn't need to have a child, but without one, our lives felt like they lacked something important." This passage--like most of the essay--is weakly justifying and rationalizing, and more importantly not true. Lots of people do not feel that drive. They have other, stronger ones. And as an organizing principle of culture, it's been pretty evil and oppressive to the earth, non-human life, and especially human women. Plus, there are at least a thousand other ways for meaning to persist through time than simply reproducing one's human DNA and sending it forward into the future.
August 1, 2018
Was too bad to finish.
March 4, 2020
**95th Climate Book**
(I read only the sections on climate change; the sections on war and violence I skimmed, but too quickly to comment on it)
I'm giving up on Roy Scranton.
He writes beautifully. It's lyrical and well-constructed. However, if this book were written by a woman, it would be called histrionic. These essays are beautifully written explorations of Scranton's feelings of doom, and a select few cherry-picked facts to support that feeling, all cobbled together with duct tape and chicken wire to support a program of inaction.
Example 1: Repeated statements that "we have already exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures." Except that we haven't, so what is he talking about? He is talking about specific months that have exceeded 1.5C. You can't compare a specific month with a pre-industrial average of all seasons! Our current average exceedance is around 1C, which is very bad, and we're likely to get to 1.5C sometime this century--we certainly will if we don't act strenuously. But this ... error? oversight? ... is significant, because the 1.5C threshold is the "civilization falls apart" threshold.
Example 2: Later, in an essay that I think is about the anthropocene as a term but also borderline incoherent, he engaged in an extended defence of an early 20th century scientist with a history of scientific hoaxes named Chambers because he gave a talk in 1945 with "anthropocene" in the title. He also describes an experiment conducted in the 1920s by Chambers, in which he hired oilmen to drill into the earth's crust so he could fire a gun into it, to test his theory that the earth was a living organism (seems right in line with earlier 'gentlemen-naturalists' who would go on voyages to 'unexplored' locations and think, "What a pretty bird! Let me kill a bunch of them so I can take them home and sell them to museums!" and ended up driving these treasured species to extinction). The experiment ended in an explosion and three deaths, but, says Scranton, what if this proves that Chambers was right and the earth killed them in self-defence? (!!!) His evidence? Diary entries on the event from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author and strong believer in the paranormal. Not that Doyle's biases are mentioned in Scranton's text.
The entire book is a confusion of his feelings with facts. He feels doomed; therefore, we are doomed; he feels action is pointless; therefore, there is no point; here are some carefully selected part-facts in support of those feelings; the rest of the facts are swept under the rug; he then performs lyrical acrobats on top of the rug-lumps in an effort to flatten them/distract readers; then he cries. He does not need book contracts. He needs therapy.
(I read only the sections on climate change; the sections on war and violence I skimmed, but too quickly to comment on it)
I'm giving up on Roy Scranton.
He writes beautifully. It's lyrical and well-constructed. However, if this book were written by a woman, it would be called histrionic. These essays are beautifully written explorations of Scranton's feelings of doom, and a select few cherry-picked facts to support that feeling, all cobbled together with duct tape and chicken wire to support a program of inaction.
Example 1: Repeated statements that "we have already exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures." Except that we haven't, so what is he talking about? He is talking about specific months that have exceeded 1.5C. You can't compare a specific month with a pre-industrial average of all seasons! Our current average exceedance is around 1C, which is very bad, and we're likely to get to 1.5C sometime this century--we certainly will if we don't act strenuously. But this ... error? oversight? ... is significant, because the 1.5C threshold is the "civilization falls apart" threshold.
Example 2: Later, in an essay that I think is about the anthropocene as a term but also borderline incoherent, he engaged in an extended defence of an early 20th century scientist with a history of scientific hoaxes named Chambers because he gave a talk in 1945 with "anthropocene" in the title. He also describes an experiment conducted in the 1920s by Chambers, in which he hired oilmen to drill into the earth's crust so he could fire a gun into it, to test his theory that the earth was a living organism (seems right in line with earlier 'gentlemen-naturalists' who would go on voyages to 'unexplored' locations and think, "What a pretty bird! Let me kill a bunch of them so I can take them home and sell them to museums!" and ended up driving these treasured species to extinction). The experiment ended in an explosion and three deaths, but, says Scranton, what if this proves that Chambers was right and the earth killed them in self-defence? (!!!) His evidence? Diary entries on the event from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author and strong believer in the paranormal. Not that Doyle's biases are mentioned in Scranton's text.
The entire book is a confusion of his feelings with facts. He feels doomed; therefore, we are doomed; he feels action is pointless; therefore, there is no point; here are some carefully selected part-facts in support of those feelings; the rest of the facts are swept under the rug; he then performs lyrical acrobats on top of the rug-lumps in an effort to flatten them/distract readers; then he cries. He does not need book contracts. He needs therapy.
January 21, 2021
I find the antipathy for this book here on GR bemusing. Is it because Scranton refuses to engage in the performative virtue-signaling expected with regard to climate change and war? That he complicates the stories we tell ourselves about these subjects? At any rate, a gorgeous, disturbing, thought-provoking collection of essays--especially those acknowledging the evil (yes, there is no other word for it) we did to Iraq, as well as comparing and contrasting the US and Russia.
October 5, 2019
Roy Scranton “We’re Doomed. Now What?” Essays on War and Climate Change is frankly a misnomer there is nothing in this about climate change I bought this book thinking that I really would appreciate someone giving me a philosophical foundation for dealing with my feelings about the Climate changing so rapidly that it’s going to result in a mass extinction of life on this planet. Well you shouldn’t believe a book just by it’s cover this one is about the Author Roy Scranton and his personal experience in his journey into the heart of darkness of US imperial overreach by way of his choice to volunteer for the Army and to fight in Iraq. The whole book is about this and how he lost his romantic illusions and because the anti-liberal intellectual very smart guy but his emotionally intelligence seems bit stunted and his narcissism is rather large. So I didn’t like this book for those reasons and I’m still pissed about the bait and switch cover that was going after me as a reader based of my fear of climate change and then presented a PHD thesis critiquing America’s war culture. Nice Thesis but has nothing to do with the title or with climate change. I will give credit where credit is due page 243 when he starts talking about the word tragoidia, or goat song, well that was a story I’ve never heard before and was worthwhile I certainly wouldn’t have bought a book just to have a good comparative ethnology of where the term scapegoat came from, but it’s an example of some decent scholarship that appears here and there in this book just too little and too much a disjointed potpourri of thoughts observations and stories about Slavery and racism and Russia and political correctness I can very well see this author with a MAGA hat on, feeling greatly aggrieved because he wasn’t given tenure and some more progressive person was, and I shouldn’t be feeling like that because I should be thinking about how at this time in the Anthropocene what I and the culture I’m part of needs to do and what direction we need to move in in order to fucking continue to survive as a species, and the War in the Gulf in 2004 and everything that flowed out of that catastrophe has nothing to say about that. So two stars for this book thank you for your service but I can’t recommend this book.
May 27, 2019
The title and cover of the paperback do this book a disservice. Perhaps the author had little or no say and the publisher thought it would sell better to package a book of essays largely drawn on the author's experiences serving in the US Army in Iraq during wartime as a book about climate change and war.
Unlike books by Michael Klare or others who write about resource wars, Scranton's book says little (not nothing, but little) about how climate change has or could lead to wars. And nothing at all matching the cover image of a first-world city appearing to be swamped by storms from sea-level rise.
Indeed, essays at the beginning and end are about climate change and merge some thoughtful perspectives from both the author's own experience and his readings in literature and critical theory. I understand it's a collection of essays. But the chapters often seem to have little in common except the author's name.
Readers who are military veterans may especially appreciate Scranton's discussion of controversies inside the veterans-lit community of writers, though I started to lose the thread at times. More interesting for me as a general reader were his insights on the psychology of soldiers at war and in peacetime and how that psychology connects to bigger trends in American culture.
Unlike books by Michael Klare or others who write about resource wars, Scranton's book says little (not nothing, but little) about how climate change has or could lead to wars. And nothing at all matching the cover image of a first-world city appearing to be swamped by storms from sea-level rise.
Indeed, essays at the beginning and end are about climate change and merge some thoughtful perspectives from both the author's own experience and his readings in literature and critical theory. I understand it's a collection of essays. But the chapters often seem to have little in common except the author's name.
Readers who are military veterans may especially appreciate Scranton's discussion of controversies inside the veterans-lit community of writers, though I started to lose the thread at times. More interesting for me as a general reader were his insights on the psychology of soldiers at war and in peacetime and how that psychology connects to bigger trends in American culture.
July 19, 2022
oof. ooooooof. suffered thru this one. i was so deeply touched by NYT piece "learning to die in the Anthropocene" but i just do not give a what about this man's personal narrative. do not judge a book by its title, bc the content of this book is about his personal experiences, feelings and opinions. given that we are on a dying planet, i can not recommend you use your limited time of relative peace & stability on this dudes boring personal thoughts.
January 20, 2019
Solid grouping of essays. Meditations on imperialism and the wars in Iraq were surprising.
November 28, 2021
I don't even know where to start with this book. It grabbed me with the first paragraph and didn't let go. I kept finding phrases and quotes I wanted to write down. Roy Scranton's use of language is poetic and powerful. And then he got to the essays on war, and when he picked up his grenade launcher in Baghdad, he started dropping f-bombs everywhere and I seriously considered not finishing the book. But then he'd say something so glimmering with truth it felt like being slapped, and I'd keep reading. I don't think I've reacted to a book this strongly before. It was both brilliant and brutal. He has so much truth to speak. But it's a harsh read, so be forewarned. The final essay on what to do summarizes it all succinctly: Connect with community. Do the one thing that matters and not the fifteen that don't. Learn how to die. And ultimately, the message is this: live and feel this life deeply, because it's all you get.
January 12, 2019
Svag tvåa. För mycket självbiografi och för lite teori.
August 7, 2019
2.5 stars. Audiobook. Reader okay.
The first essay felt like the author was channeling David Foster Wallace at his most incoherently esoteric. I almost gave up but one of the beauties of essays is you move on to the next.
I liked most of the rest of the essays though there were some dull spots so dull I've already forgotten why.
I liked his war essays especially perspective of being in the military in Iraq and what he learned. Like some of my contemporaries who experienced Vietnam he came out with problems to deal with and a very different view. He also aptly pointed out how the U.S. has long been a country with a culture of problem solving by violence both domestically and internationally.
The last essay had some annoying features mostly because it seemed like an apology for not making changes because they are hard and now he has a kid so needs to cling to the affluent middle class lifestyle we are so addicted to in the west especially the US.
I ended up feeling as though we will careen into destruction. Everyday we seem to be moving closer as those who strive for change are outnumbered and outweighed by those who either deny what is going on just care about getting what they want at the expense of others. I'm old so I don't think I will be here for the final extinction but I won't give up trying to live with less impact and some mindfulness as I have for the last 45 years.
The first essay felt like the author was channeling David Foster Wallace at his most incoherently esoteric. I almost gave up but one of the beauties of essays is you move on to the next.
I liked most of the rest of the essays though there were some dull spots so dull I've already forgotten why.
I liked his war essays especially perspective of being in the military in Iraq and what he learned. Like some of my contemporaries who experienced Vietnam he came out with problems to deal with and a very different view. He also aptly pointed out how the U.S. has long been a country with a culture of problem solving by violence both domestically and internationally.
The last essay had some annoying features mostly because it seemed like an apology for not making changes because they are hard and now he has a kid so needs to cling to the affluent middle class lifestyle we are so addicted to in the west especially the US.
I ended up feeling as though we will careen into destruction. Everyday we seem to be moving closer as those who strive for change are outnumbered and outweighed by those who either deny what is going on just care about getting what they want at the expense of others. I'm old so I don't think I will be here for the final extinction but I won't give up trying to live with less impact and some mindfulness as I have for the last 45 years.
August 31, 2018
After reading this interview with Scranton from Guernica (https://www.guernicamag.com/roy-scran...), I felt a powerful kinship to the author on several levels; however, after reading this collection of "essays" (which feel more like posts from an educated, millennial-ish blog feed soaked in narcissism and sprinkled liberally with nihilism), I had a powerful attraction to this mild ecological diatribe (5 stars), but also felt an equally powerful aversion to its quick descent into a long and boring Iraq War memoir (been there, and done that--3 stars). I had thought this would be more scholarly, but since Scranton likes the reader to know what he is not (including a scholar or philosopher), I guess I shouldn't be too hard on him. He's raking in the bucks as best he can and using his Warholian 15 minutes of notoriety well.
There are better books describing the futility of hope in the Anthropocene, and why. Embrace the nihilism and enjoy what time you have on Gaia. Nothing will save humanity from the grim future it has wrought, but if delusions are your candy, eat them up with mindless glee.
There are better books describing the futility of hope in the Anthropocene, and why. Embrace the nihilism and enjoy what time you have on Gaia. Nothing will save humanity from the grim future it has wrought, but if delusions are your candy, eat them up with mindless glee.
March 18, 2019
Really not what I expected from the title. As other reviewers note, the environmental/global warming content is only the first 80 or so pages.
I thought those essays were quite strong, but my progress bogged to a halt during the lengthy section about war (specifically, Iraq). It wasn't bad, just very long, and frankly disinterested me to the point where it was a chore to slog through.
Then it veered into literary criticism, which was surprising, but actually quite good. "The Trauma Hero" in particular was a very strong critique of "the soldier" and gave me number of additional works to check out.
I also appreciated the final two pieces which felt decidedly more personal. The dissection of endless content overload in "What is Thinking Good For?" was extremely poignant. It covered so many things I've thought about modern thought, opinion, and how we "understand" in the internet age.
I'll admit this was not an easy read as Scranton drops lots of names and can get quite academic, but I'm glad I stuck it out. Now to get back to more timely reading...
I thought those essays were quite strong, but my progress bogged to a halt during the lengthy section about war (specifically, Iraq). It wasn't bad, just very long, and frankly disinterested me to the point where it was a chore to slog through.
Then it veered into literary criticism, which was surprising, but actually quite good. "The Trauma Hero" in particular was a very strong critique of "the soldier" and gave me number of additional works to check out.
I also appreciated the final two pieces which felt decidedly more personal. The dissection of endless content overload in "What is Thinking Good For?" was extremely poignant. It covered so many things I've thought about modern thought, opinion, and how we "understand" in the internet age.
I'll admit this was not an easy read as Scranton drops lots of names and can get quite academic, but I'm glad I stuck it out. Now to get back to more timely reading...
July 25, 2018
I picked up this book mostly for the essays on climate change, but those are not even a third of the book. Instead I was engulfed in a series of essays on war, violence, and the society that perpetuates it as unavoidable in the name of progress. Some parts of essays felt repetitive, unnecessarily elevated, or were literature reviews that i needed to read 7 other pieces to understand. However, I felt as though I have learned a lot through this book. I am glad I read it.
March 26, 2019
A scrapbook. Really appreciated some of the pieces. Others felt more like something out of a box of lost and found.
May 12, 2019
I loved the essay about living and being a parent in the wake of Climate Change. I also liked the ones about war and being a vet. Many of the essays had too much literary criticism for my taste.
January 15, 2021
In a collection of riveting, arresting essays on “the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it,” Roy Scranton lays bare the horrific juncture at which our species finds itself.
“The situation [...] is more dire than any other moment in human history, and we simply cannot wait until we become perfect bodhisattvas or perfect environmentalists before we respond. We must act now, as flawed, failed, flailing selves. At the same time, the situation we find ourselves in is beyond our power to change. The planet will get warmer. The ice caps will melt. The seas will rise. The global, fossil-fueled, consumer capitalist civilization we live in will come to an end.”
But this isn’t just a tract on climate change, or a factual examination of “the human species as a geological force,” it’s a hard cold look at human nature, the types of culture and civilization we build, and more specifically a searching inventory of the heart of the American experience in these latter years. Scranton doesn’t claim any scientific laureates or great seat of expertise, yet he seems more than capable of assembling and analyzing data, constructing solid arguments, and weaving them into highly personalized narratives:
“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 most 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.”
A central concept of Scranton’s thesis is “the idea of the Anthropocene [epoch],” a proposed geological epoch which charts the era of our species’ impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems:
“In the middle of the twentieth century, Homo sapiens sapiens began to shape the geological processes of the Earth so profoundly that it inadvertently transformed the global cycles of warming and heating caused by the planet’s orbit around the sun, and will continue to do so for a hundred thousand years or more, in ways that will be readable in the geological record millions of years in the future. No one intended this, and we seem to be incapable of preventing it. This is the deep meaning of the Anthropocene, the meaning we can usually only look at in flashes, peeking between primate fingers.”
He has reason to be alarmed and alarmist:
“In the almost eighty years since [1940], the human species has burst the boundary conditions for sustainable life on Earth through what some scientists call the ‘Great Acceleration,’ an unprecedented spike in socioeconomic and earth systems trends - everything from carbon dioxide emissions, surface temperatures, and tropical forest loss to fertilizer consumption, water use, and population (from approximately 2.3 billion in 1940 to 7.6 billion today).”
Scranton has honed his writing skills through years of frontline experience working his strange and storied way through the backroads and odd jobs of America, dropping out and re-enrolling and failing out of college; working as a short-order cook; a time in various causes and protest movements; random journeys intended as sources for literary fodder but proving to be more bruising and real than perhaps intended; a harrowing four year term in the military. His prose reflects the brutal experience of endless drafts, relentless rewrites, and countless unpublished works, along with a deep reflective imagination and a contemplative mind:
“The motivating enigma of the Anthropocene is the human as echinoderm, a geological agent, mortal flesh as immortal rock. Over eons, starfish and sea urchin skeletons recompose into limestone, just as stegosaurus recomposes into Brent crude, becoming geology: we have not only joined the ranks of such geoforms, but surpassed them. The planet as a whole is one giant, heaving, nature-machine made of countless smaller nature-machines, itself participating in an even larger solar nature-machine, one part of the Milky Way galaxy nature-machine, itself a tiny part of the universe nature-machine, which may itself be but a tiny piece of the multiverse nature-machine. We don’t know how it all works. We don’t know whether it has a beginning or an end, or whether it just keeps pumping, infinitely, expanding and contracting, an eternally beating god-heart, a nature-machine that builds itself for itself, for no reason, for nothing, meaning nothing, a howling wilderness machine, wolves all the way down.”
What a masterful paragraph, winding up the intensity to end on that crazy phrase, “wolves all the way down.” You feel like you’re in the hands of a master wordsmith while reading this book.
From climate and the future of our civilization, Scranton pivots to a treatise on America’s bloody history:
“Hadn’t I read about the campaigns against the Cherokee, Nez Percé, and Sioux, the long war against Philippine independence, and the horrors of Vietnam? My grandfather served on a Swift Boat in the Mekong Delta, thought he never talked about it; hadn’t trying to fill in his silence taught me about fee-fire zones, My Lai, and hospitals full of napalmed orphans? The bloody track of American history, from slavery to genocide to empire, is plain for all to see. But reckoning with the violence itself was the appeal: I thought I could confront our dark side, just like Luke Skywalker, and come away enlightened.”
But there was no redemptive enlightenment waiting awaiting him on the streets of Baghdad, just carnage and confusion, and seeds of doubt that would grow thick and thorny, bitter and piercing, as the years passed.
“Looking out over Baghdad on the Fourth of July, I saw the truth that story obscured and inverted: I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.
Did it really take going to Baghdad to learn this?”
Scranton’s searing gaze carries a different weight than, say, a pacifist scientist or an anti-war protestor, because after years of failed literary pursuits and haphazard living, the events of 9/11 crystallized into a decision to enlist. Scranton approaches the war not as an outsider critical of its intents or aims, or as some sanctimonious politician waving the blunt flag of patriotism, but as man who served a year in Iraq and who also had the capacity to seek whatever grand strategy underpinned the entire effort. What he began to see there was troubling:
“After Fallujah fell, though, I found myself beginning to think that either we hadn’t, in fact, done our job, or that the job we’d actually been sent to do was so reprehensible that even if we were successful, there was no way I’d want to claim it. What if the US military hadn’t been sent to Iraq to create a democracy, stabilize a failed state, or even establish a bastion of secular capitalism in the Middle East, as we’d been repeatedly told, but rather to oversee the sectarian partition of a sovereign nation, install a weak authoritarian ruler whose regime would be justified by carefully stage-managed elections, and turn Iraq into a cockpit for regional sectarian and political bloodletting? What if the main US interest wasn’t regional stability but rather regional instability, with just enough infrastructure in place to keep oil flowing out and American-made weapons flowing in? This was undoubtedly what US policy had accomplished, through countless deliberate decisions over many years, and what if it hadn’t been a mistaken - what if it had been intentional?”
He had been hoping to be able to accept some narrative that Americans were the peacemakers and nation builders he had understood them to be from his history lessons, from his knowledge of the recent past. He had “naively supposed” that after victory in Iraq “things would settle down” and “combat missions would transition to stability-and-support operations” and “re-building.”
“We would move out into the communities. The US occupations in Germany, Japan, and Korea were the most prominent examples I had of how it might have worked, but the more recent American military intervention in the Balkans seemed a plausible model as well. These operations were all within living memory and continued to have material, concrete historical existence.”
But it “wasn’t as simple as all that.” In a powerful summation of the American Century seen through the eyes and felt through the flesh of an individual American soldier, Scranton ruminates that “the past doesn’t fall away but lives on in your flesh, in your habits, in the synaptic weave that makes consciousness out of electrical pulses and meat.” While he left Iraq in 2004 and served two more years in the army, the “year in Iraq made me who I became after, as did my four years in the army, no matter how I felt about it.” And similarly, the eight years of US occupation of Iraq “shaped what America is, whether we want to remember those years or not.” It’s quite a memory lane.
“Shock and Awe, WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, abandoned soccer fields, Fallujah, Tal Afar, Karbala, Asaib Ahl-al-Haq, the Jaish al-Mahdi, the Green Zone, Sadr City, Shah, the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf, the Samarra mosque, al Qaeda in Iraq, and the millions of lives we uprooted, left unguarded, destroyed, and abandoned are all a part of us now. We made them part of America, American identity and American history - Iraq has become flesh of our flesh, Baghdad blood of our blood. We can pretend to forget, try to rub out the image in the mirror, but we can’t change what we’ve done.”
Scranton recounts his frustrated re-entry into American society, fuming at the adolescent men playing kick-ball in McCarren Park in Williamsburg, a symbol for all the absent-minded carelessness of a nation bent on blind environmental destruction, living on the spoils of America’s bloody march to empire. For a time he flirts with the anti-war protest movement, but even there he finds no home.
“Still I marched with them. We walked up Park Avenue and down Lexington to the United Nations, where people had set up tables at Dag Hammerskjöld Plaza. It was a nice walk on a beautiful day, and by the time we got to the end, I was sick of it, sick of the sanctimonious do-gooders cheering on the sidelines and their empty slogans, sick of how many different issues were piggy-backing on my war, from legalizing marijuana to freeing Tibet, and sick of talking to Jen and José, who had no right to call themselves ‘Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans.’”
Unable to truly connect with the chaotic jumbled rabble of the protestors, he recalls an earlier protest that taught him harsh lessons about how easily such demonstrations and movements were shut down, contained, neutralized:
“We were stymied from the start. The first problem was that our ‘free speech zone’ was nowhere near the auditorium where Bush was speaking - you could almost see it over there, a half mile or so away, well past the police and fences. The second problem was that the police had us well in hand. We were cold, wet, and disorganized; they had horses, riot gear, and a plan. They kept us cordoned in a small rectangle near an intersection, and our docility in being herded was as notable as our agitation in chanting ‘Democracy!’”
Scranton is a stranger in a strange land, unable even to find evidence that “serious thought” has any value in our modern age.
“It sometimes seems as if the only socially valued forms of intellectual labor are the production of ideology (‘think tanks’), the production of attention (‘think pieces’), and the production of reproducible consumer objects (i.e., books, not necessarily for reading but for discussing, ideally big books with simple arguments that can be repeated ad nauseam across multiple platforms - think Steven Pinker or Malcolm Gladwell). Producing knowledge about the world is still compensated, if not as well as producing opinions, but when it comes to serious thought the situation seems bleak. Yes, ‘critical thinking’ is still spoken of as a value in the humanities wing of the educational industry, even thought it’s under profound attack across the culture and even if critique has by and large devolved into a set of rote gestures, but the arduous liberation of consciousness from dogma and self-imposed ignorance is as unwelcome today as it was in Socrates’s Athens. And even if you do find solid journalism, beautiful writing, profound analysis, or edifying thought, what do you do with it? Read it, tweet it, then move on to the next, and the next, and the next? A stream of language passes into you through a screen then back out through another screen, and can you even say it touched you? Were you even there? Or was it just a monetary shudder of the hive?”
For all that, like Yeats in his later poem “Circus Animals Desertion,” where he laments the gradual decline of his physical form and the fading of inspiration yet still produces a work of devastating genius in the middle of his lament, Scranton has produced a work of intensely serious thought, couched in beautiful writing and profound analysis. A pre-eulogy to the Anthropocene.
“The situation [...] is more dire than any other moment in human history, and we simply cannot wait until we become perfect bodhisattvas or perfect environmentalists before we respond. We must act now, as flawed, failed, flailing selves. At the same time, the situation we find ourselves in is beyond our power to change. The planet will get warmer. The ice caps will melt. The seas will rise. The global, fossil-fueled, consumer capitalist civilization we live in will come to an end.”
But this isn’t just a tract on climate change, or a factual examination of “the human species as a geological force,” it’s a hard cold look at human nature, the types of culture and civilization we build, and more specifically a searching inventory of the heart of the American experience in these latter years. Scranton doesn’t claim any scientific laureates or great seat of expertise, yet he seems more than capable of assembling and analyzing data, constructing solid arguments, and weaving them into highly personalized narratives:
“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 most 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.”
A central concept of Scranton’s thesis is “the idea of the Anthropocene [epoch],” a proposed geological epoch which charts the era of our species’ impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems:
“In the middle of the twentieth century, Homo sapiens sapiens began to shape the geological processes of the Earth so profoundly that it inadvertently transformed the global cycles of warming and heating caused by the planet’s orbit around the sun, and will continue to do so for a hundred thousand years or more, in ways that will be readable in the geological record millions of years in the future. No one intended this, and we seem to be incapable of preventing it. This is the deep meaning of the Anthropocene, the meaning we can usually only look at in flashes, peeking between primate fingers.”
He has reason to be alarmed and alarmist:
“In the almost eighty years since [1940], the human species has burst the boundary conditions for sustainable life on Earth through what some scientists call the ‘Great Acceleration,’ an unprecedented spike in socioeconomic and earth systems trends - everything from carbon dioxide emissions, surface temperatures, and tropical forest loss to fertilizer consumption, water use, and population (from approximately 2.3 billion in 1940 to 7.6 billion today).”
Scranton has honed his writing skills through years of frontline experience working his strange and storied way through the backroads and odd jobs of America, dropping out and re-enrolling and failing out of college; working as a short-order cook; a time in various causes and protest movements; random journeys intended as sources for literary fodder but proving to be more bruising and real than perhaps intended; a harrowing four year term in the military. His prose reflects the brutal experience of endless drafts, relentless rewrites, and countless unpublished works, along with a deep reflective imagination and a contemplative mind:
“The motivating enigma of the Anthropocene is the human as echinoderm, a geological agent, mortal flesh as immortal rock. Over eons, starfish and sea urchin skeletons recompose into limestone, just as stegosaurus recomposes into Brent crude, becoming geology: we have not only joined the ranks of such geoforms, but surpassed them. The planet as a whole is one giant, heaving, nature-machine made of countless smaller nature-machines, itself participating in an even larger solar nature-machine, one part of the Milky Way galaxy nature-machine, itself a tiny part of the universe nature-machine, which may itself be but a tiny piece of the multiverse nature-machine. We don’t know how it all works. We don’t know whether it has a beginning or an end, or whether it just keeps pumping, infinitely, expanding and contracting, an eternally beating god-heart, a nature-machine that builds itself for itself, for no reason, for nothing, meaning nothing, a howling wilderness machine, wolves all the way down.”
What a masterful paragraph, winding up the intensity to end on that crazy phrase, “wolves all the way down.” You feel like you’re in the hands of a master wordsmith while reading this book.
From climate and the future of our civilization, Scranton pivots to a treatise on America’s bloody history:
“Hadn’t I read about the campaigns against the Cherokee, Nez Percé, and Sioux, the long war against Philippine independence, and the horrors of Vietnam? My grandfather served on a Swift Boat in the Mekong Delta, thought he never talked about it; hadn’t trying to fill in his silence taught me about fee-fire zones, My Lai, and hospitals full of napalmed orphans? The bloody track of American history, from slavery to genocide to empire, is plain for all to see. But reckoning with the violence itself was the appeal: I thought I could confront our dark side, just like Luke Skywalker, and come away enlightened.”
But there was no redemptive enlightenment waiting awaiting him on the streets of Baghdad, just carnage and confusion, and seeds of doubt that would grow thick and thorny, bitter and piercing, as the years passed.
“Looking out over Baghdad on the Fourth of July, I saw the truth that story obscured and inverted: I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.
Did it really take going to Baghdad to learn this?”
Scranton’s searing gaze carries a different weight than, say, a pacifist scientist or an anti-war protestor, because after years of failed literary pursuits and haphazard living, the events of 9/11 crystallized into a decision to enlist. Scranton approaches the war not as an outsider critical of its intents or aims, or as some sanctimonious politician waving the blunt flag of patriotism, but as man who served a year in Iraq and who also had the capacity to seek whatever grand strategy underpinned the entire effort. What he began to see there was troubling:
“After Fallujah fell, though, I found myself beginning to think that either we hadn’t, in fact, done our job, or that the job we’d actually been sent to do was so reprehensible that even if we were successful, there was no way I’d want to claim it. What if the US military hadn’t been sent to Iraq to create a democracy, stabilize a failed state, or even establish a bastion of secular capitalism in the Middle East, as we’d been repeatedly told, but rather to oversee the sectarian partition of a sovereign nation, install a weak authoritarian ruler whose regime would be justified by carefully stage-managed elections, and turn Iraq into a cockpit for regional sectarian and political bloodletting? What if the main US interest wasn’t regional stability but rather regional instability, with just enough infrastructure in place to keep oil flowing out and American-made weapons flowing in? This was undoubtedly what US policy had accomplished, through countless deliberate decisions over many years, and what if it hadn’t been a mistaken - what if it had been intentional?”
He had been hoping to be able to accept some narrative that Americans were the peacemakers and nation builders he had understood them to be from his history lessons, from his knowledge of the recent past. He had “naively supposed” that after victory in Iraq “things would settle down” and “combat missions would transition to stability-and-support operations” and “re-building.”
“We would move out into the communities. The US occupations in Germany, Japan, and Korea were the most prominent examples I had of how it might have worked, but the more recent American military intervention in the Balkans seemed a plausible model as well. These operations were all within living memory and continued to have material, concrete historical existence.”
But it “wasn’t as simple as all that.” In a powerful summation of the American Century seen through the eyes and felt through the flesh of an individual American soldier, Scranton ruminates that “the past doesn’t fall away but lives on in your flesh, in your habits, in the synaptic weave that makes consciousness out of electrical pulses and meat.” While he left Iraq in 2004 and served two more years in the army, the “year in Iraq made me who I became after, as did my four years in the army, no matter how I felt about it.” And similarly, the eight years of US occupation of Iraq “shaped what America is, whether we want to remember those years or not.” It’s quite a memory lane.
“Shock and Awe, WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, abandoned soccer fields, Fallujah, Tal Afar, Karbala, Asaib Ahl-al-Haq, the Jaish al-Mahdi, the Green Zone, Sadr City, Shah, the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf, the Samarra mosque, al Qaeda in Iraq, and the millions of lives we uprooted, left unguarded, destroyed, and abandoned are all a part of us now. We made them part of America, American identity and American history - Iraq has become flesh of our flesh, Baghdad blood of our blood. We can pretend to forget, try to rub out the image in the mirror, but we can’t change what we’ve done.”
Scranton recounts his frustrated re-entry into American society, fuming at the adolescent men playing kick-ball in McCarren Park in Williamsburg, a symbol for all the absent-minded carelessness of a nation bent on blind environmental destruction, living on the spoils of America’s bloody march to empire. For a time he flirts with the anti-war protest movement, but even there he finds no home.
“Still I marched with them. We walked up Park Avenue and down Lexington to the United Nations, where people had set up tables at Dag Hammerskjöld Plaza. It was a nice walk on a beautiful day, and by the time we got to the end, I was sick of it, sick of the sanctimonious do-gooders cheering on the sidelines and their empty slogans, sick of how many different issues were piggy-backing on my war, from legalizing marijuana to freeing Tibet, and sick of talking to Jen and José, who had no right to call themselves ‘Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans.’”
Unable to truly connect with the chaotic jumbled rabble of the protestors, he recalls an earlier protest that taught him harsh lessons about how easily such demonstrations and movements were shut down, contained, neutralized:
“We were stymied from the start. The first problem was that our ‘free speech zone’ was nowhere near the auditorium where Bush was speaking - you could almost see it over there, a half mile or so away, well past the police and fences. The second problem was that the police had us well in hand. We were cold, wet, and disorganized; they had horses, riot gear, and a plan. They kept us cordoned in a small rectangle near an intersection, and our docility in being herded was as notable as our agitation in chanting ‘Democracy!’”
Scranton is a stranger in a strange land, unable even to find evidence that “serious thought” has any value in our modern age.
“It sometimes seems as if the only socially valued forms of intellectual labor are the production of ideology (‘think tanks’), the production of attention (‘think pieces’), and the production of reproducible consumer objects (i.e., books, not necessarily for reading but for discussing, ideally big books with simple arguments that can be repeated ad nauseam across multiple platforms - think Steven Pinker or Malcolm Gladwell). Producing knowledge about the world is still compensated, if not as well as producing opinions, but when it comes to serious thought the situation seems bleak. Yes, ‘critical thinking’ is still spoken of as a value in the humanities wing of the educational industry, even thought it’s under profound attack across the culture and even if critique has by and large devolved into a set of rote gestures, but the arduous liberation of consciousness from dogma and self-imposed ignorance is as unwelcome today as it was in Socrates’s Athens. And even if you do find solid journalism, beautiful writing, profound analysis, or edifying thought, what do you do with it? Read it, tweet it, then move on to the next, and the next, and the next? A stream of language passes into you through a screen then back out through another screen, and can you even say it touched you? Were you even there? Or was it just a monetary shudder of the hive?”
For all that, like Yeats in his later poem “Circus Animals Desertion,” where he laments the gradual decline of his physical form and the fading of inspiration yet still produces a work of devastating genius in the middle of his lament, Scranton has produced a work of intensely serious thought, couched in beautiful writing and profound analysis. A pre-eulogy to the Anthropocene.
January 25, 2021
Confession time. I didn’t really read Roy Scranton’s collection of essays, “We’re Doomed. Now What?” I cherry-picked some of the essays. Mostly the environmental ones. I’m just not interested in his musings on war (as beautifully written as they are). But what I read was bleak, compelling, and deeply moving. I will let parts of it speak for itself.
“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.’” (Pp. 74-75)
“It sometimes seems as if the only socially valued forms of intellectual labor are the production of ideology (‘think tanks’), the production of attention (‘think pieces’), and the production of reproducible consumer objects (i.e., books, not necessarily for reading but for discussing, ideally big books with simple arguments that can be repeated ad nausea across multiple platforms—think Steven Pinker or Malcolm Gladwell).” (Pp. 308)
“What is thinking good for today, among the millions of voices shouting to be heard, as we stumble and trip toward our doom? Not much, maybe nothing, maybe less. Certainly memory can help preserve the wisdom of the past and set the record straight, understanding can help us see our situation more clearly, and the two together can help us make sense of how we got to where we are. Questioning our accepted beliefs can reveal to us our hidden selves. Cultivating an awareness of our dependence on others, human and non-human alike, opens the way to compassion, humility, and joyful communion with all being. Practicing detachment vitiates desire an accommodates our souls to death. And finally, ultimately, deliberation slows and limits action. Pondering your situation keeps you from reacting to it, which is, in the end, the highest good thought can offer: doing less, doing nothing, being nothing more or less than we are—a gathering of dust and light, a universe—awake.”
“The choice we have to make isn’t whether or how to save ourselves but, as I said before, whether we’re willing to commit to living ethically in a broken world, in which human beings are dependent for collective survival on respecting the ecological limits of our planet.... First, we should organize locally and aggressively. This will not only connect us to our neighbors, but it’s also the most likely path to world socialist revolution....Second, and perhaps counter-intuitively, we need to do less....so much of what we do is unnecessary, unconsidered, and reactive that we live out our days distracted and drained and unfocused. Slow down. Do less. DO the one thing that matters, rather than the fifteen that don’t.... Finally we need to learn to die.... this self we cling to so fiercely is but an ephemeral moment, a transient emergence of self-conscious matter, a passing cloud of being.” (pp. 333-4)
“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.’” (Pp. 74-75)
“It sometimes seems as if the only socially valued forms of intellectual labor are the production of ideology (‘think tanks’), the production of attention (‘think pieces’), and the production of reproducible consumer objects (i.e., books, not necessarily for reading but for discussing, ideally big books with simple arguments that can be repeated ad nausea across multiple platforms—think Steven Pinker or Malcolm Gladwell).” (Pp. 308)
“What is thinking good for today, among the millions of voices shouting to be heard, as we stumble and trip toward our doom? Not much, maybe nothing, maybe less. Certainly memory can help preserve the wisdom of the past and set the record straight, understanding can help us see our situation more clearly, and the two together can help us make sense of how we got to where we are. Questioning our accepted beliefs can reveal to us our hidden selves. Cultivating an awareness of our dependence on others, human and non-human alike, opens the way to compassion, humility, and joyful communion with all being. Practicing detachment vitiates desire an accommodates our souls to death. And finally, ultimately, deliberation slows and limits action. Pondering your situation keeps you from reacting to it, which is, in the end, the highest good thought can offer: doing less, doing nothing, being nothing more or less than we are—a gathering of dust and light, a universe—awake.”
“The choice we have to make isn’t whether or how to save ourselves but, as I said before, whether we’re willing to commit to living ethically in a broken world, in which human beings are dependent for collective survival on respecting the ecological limits of our planet.... First, we should organize locally and aggressively. This will not only connect us to our neighbors, but it’s also the most likely path to world socialist revolution....Second, and perhaps counter-intuitively, we need to do less....so much of what we do is unnecessary, unconsidered, and reactive that we live out our days distracted and drained and unfocused. Slow down. Do less. DO the one thing that matters, rather than the fifteen that don’t.... Finally we need to learn to die.... this self we cling to so fiercely is but an ephemeral moment, a transient emergence of self-conscious matter, a passing cloud of being.” (pp. 333-4)
October 20, 2018
We need to learn to let our current civilization die, to accept our mortality, and to practice humility. We need to work together to transform a global order of meaning focused on accumulation into a new order of meaning that knows the value of limits, transience, and restraint. (8)
“Hopelessness is the limit and beginning of a new kind of hope. You have to keep going: not to achieve dreams of beautiful mountain top forests, but because life is more powerful than death. Hopelessness makes possible a new hope that is more modest, faith in the basic tissue of life that is stronger than any disaster. This is how humanity survives. This is the strength that keeps us going.” (Quoting Naseer Hassan, a 52-year-old Iraqi poet on pp. 148-9)
Scranton's Buddhist philosophy shines here, particularly in the "Now What?" aspects of his climate essays. (Live now, live less, and live consciously and humbly, BTW.) This is not standard apocalyptic climate change fare, but realistic, woke reflections that, while long on generalizations and short on specifics (the nature of the beast?), offer a path of hope and perhaps peace in the chaos of our future. The essays at the beginning and end were worth the whole book, although the essays on war as trauma were also insightful - and helpful.
Scranton does not connect climate change and war in the way I had thought he would, after I heard him connect the two in a Climate One joint interview with Matthew Fox (http://www.matthewfox.org/latest-talks/). This collection of essays spanning ten years or so seemed more disjointed, but far more hopeful - which is quite an accomplishment, given the dire subject matter.
“Hopelessness is the limit and beginning of a new kind of hope. You have to keep going: not to achieve dreams of beautiful mountain top forests, but because life is more powerful than death. Hopelessness makes possible a new hope that is more modest, faith in the basic tissue of life that is stronger than any disaster. This is how humanity survives. This is the strength that keeps us going.” (Quoting Naseer Hassan, a 52-year-old Iraqi poet on pp. 148-9)
Scranton's Buddhist philosophy shines here, particularly in the "Now What?" aspects of his climate essays. (Live now, live less, and live consciously and humbly, BTW.) This is not standard apocalyptic climate change fare, but realistic, woke reflections that, while long on generalizations and short on specifics (the nature of the beast?), offer a path of hope and perhaps peace in the chaos of our future. The essays at the beginning and end were worth the whole book, although the essays on war as trauma were also insightful - and helpful.
Scranton does not connect climate change and war in the way I had thought he would, after I heard him connect the two in a Climate One joint interview with Matthew Fox (http://www.matthewfox.org/latest-talks/). This collection of essays spanning ten years or so seemed more disjointed, but far more hopeful - which is quite an accomplishment, given the dire subject matter.
March 18, 2025
Superb, apart from a lengthy and unnecessary detour in the second half (before a perfect ending). Highly opinionated, one doesn't have to agree with what is said, but one can take great pleasure in how the excellent prose makes one THINK about what is said.
The negative reviews and low ratings are quite frankly indicative of why we won't make it as a species, as none of them make the slightest sense, if you ask me. There are claims of self-aggrandising regarding what is clearly self-depreciation, if one has any sarcasm detector at all. He even explicitly calls himself a hypocrite and bad environmentalist (and addresses why later in the book). Perhaps the audiobook is easier to parse, for every third sentence is dripping with sarcastic air quotes, as the narrator makes abundantly clear. Rarely have I wanted to quote so many well-crafted passages from a book.
The outlook regarding climate change and our fate is crystal clear for anyone paying half a heed to oceans of experts but denied by the general population in classic Denial of Death.
While one can hypothesise about how we might theoretically make it -- and he does, briefly -- any realistic assessment of the revolutionary global-wide paradigm shift in human consciousness necessary to even begin to address our species' greatest challenge utterly rules out any hope that we will, and so nihilistic attitudes are some of the most sane responses to the reality of our predicament.
But lest you think he doesn't despise his involvement in the Iraq War or reflect deeply upon the conundrums within both himself as a father and humanity as a whole, worry not, and read the book.
The negative reviews and low ratings are quite frankly indicative of why we won't make it as a species, as none of them make the slightest sense, if you ask me. There are claims of self-aggrandising regarding what is clearly self-depreciation, if one has any sarcasm detector at all. He even explicitly calls himself a hypocrite and bad environmentalist (and addresses why later in the book). Perhaps the audiobook is easier to parse, for every third sentence is dripping with sarcastic air quotes, as the narrator makes abundantly clear. Rarely have I wanted to quote so many well-crafted passages from a book.
The outlook regarding climate change and our fate is crystal clear for anyone paying half a heed to oceans of experts but denied by the general population in classic Denial of Death.
While one can hypothesise about how we might theoretically make it -- and he does, briefly -- any realistic assessment of the revolutionary global-wide paradigm shift in human consciousness necessary to even begin to address our species' greatest challenge utterly rules out any hope that we will, and so nihilistic attitudes are some of the most sane responses to the reality of our predicament.
But lest you think he doesn't despise his involvement in the Iraq War or reflect deeply upon the conundrums within both himself as a father and humanity as a whole, worry not, and read the book.
May 8, 2024
Lesson learned, don't judge a book by its title. I went in thinking "wry/gallows humor" and wow was I off base. Roy Scranton is an Iraq vet with a PhD in English from Princeton, and he writes about war and climate change in a dense and deeply philosophical way. Much of it is difficult -- sometimes mentally taxing, sometimes challenging subject matter, sometimes both -- to read, but the lucid moments are completely shattering: "Passengers board and disembark. Ships sail east and west. Planes fly in and out of Iqaluit, Sydney, Beijing, NYC. Traffic thickens and thins along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the lights along Manhattan turn off, turn on, as the coal-fired grid ebbs and surges. The stock market rises and falls, days turn into weeks, weeks turn into years, money changes hands, and carbon flows from under the earth into the sky. Ice melts into the sea, drop by drop. Another UN convention meets. Another election cycle begins. Another hottest summer ever passes."
April 26, 2019
Essay collections are one of my favorite books to read, but I listened to this book on Audible which was a different experience entirely. When you read a book of essays you can skip the ones you don't like, while listening to essays while driving and trying to skip any is just too much distraction. I respect Roy Scranton's intellect and his worldview, but this book is pretty gloomy. I also didn't like the essays on Iraji politics and elections, which I ended up skipping through after listening to 20 chapters. It's worth reading if you are interested on the state the world in in right now, and our culture's view of violence as redemptive.
December 28, 2019
Too much in the book is devoted to Scranton’s experience of and thoughts about the war. We get it; that’s his area and he’s a vet. But it’s very unclear what this all has to do with being doomed—climate change. Scranton’s tone in these essays also does him a disservice. He sometimes makes it sound like nobody’s ever really said the Iraq war was a pretty terrible idea until he came along. Another unpleasant feature of many of these essays is they seem like polished essays from grad school—lots, really lots of quotes and name dropping, some, but not much, truly original thought, and very little by way of proper argument.
July 7, 2020
This is a poorly written outlook by a inexperienced journalist (and I use that word lightly.) Scranton apparently got "woke" by taking a ecotourism trip to view glaciers and came back set on changing the world to agree with his world view.
The problem is that it is hyperbole, not science. He appears more interested in making a name for himself through yellow journalism (yes, I realize that is a term no longer used since all news had become opinion) than learning or sharing the facts.
His research is sophomoric and/or anecdotal. Move along - nothing to see here.
The problem is that it is hyperbole, not science. He appears more interested in making a name for himself through yellow journalism (yes, I realize that is a term no longer used since all news had become opinion) than learning or sharing the facts.
His research is sophomoric and/or anecdotal. Move along - nothing to see here.
June 29, 2024
The first four pages were good, to the point and coherent. Then when the author started quoting Nietzsche I knew I was doomed not to appreciate/enjoy this book. The chapter about the war in Iraq, four times as long as most of the other chapters, was there as if to say war is messed up more than the enviromental collapse that is coming. The book might have been titled "We're Doomed, Get Over It". The last chapter referencing Kant points out we really aren't very good thinkers, in that we can't put our knowledge of damage we do (are doing), into a preventative/remedial mode.
June 25, 2019
These essays are really well written, but they are in-your-face with regard to the current state of global climate change. Scranton tries hard to say he's not a nihilist, but the overall tone suggests otherwise. Still, it's the kind of reality check we all need to hear and his style is a mix of essay, philosophical debate, and literary description. I haven't been this mentally challenged in a while, and I mean that in a good way.
November 10, 2020
I am never going to finish this book. Every few months I try to read this again and fail because the book is so goddamn frustrating. As someone in this reviews said, Scranton here feels pretentious, self-serving and self-aggrandizing. Who is this essay collection for? Us? Theory bros? Gen Z activists? Parents? It's certainly not for me, and I'm not going to force myself to swallow this book.
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