Nathan Robinson

30 Years Hence

Excerpt from the Current Affairs of 2049… by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs. Jan. 1, 2019.

In my notes this morning, I discovered something strange. A scrap of writing, one seemingly produced by me, but one that I am sure I have never written. It is in my voice, it thinks the way I think, but I had nothing to do with it. It’s hard to take it at face value, because that would require believing the impossible—that it is, as it says, from the Current Affairs of 2049, a ghost of New Year’s future. I am a rationalist, and I do not believe in time travel or parapsychology or cryptozoology, so it is very difficult for me to accept that somehow I will write this piece in 30 years, and it will somehow flutter back to me now. There are paradoxes involved. Besides, it reads more like a somewhat didactic and clumsy attempt at prophecy from present-day me than a genuine temporally displaced artifact. And yet I know, as well as I know anything, that I didn’t write it, have never seen it.

Perhaps you should read the fragment for yourself and see:


Today, looking back at everything I wrote from 2019 onwards, I still think I was pretty perceptive, given the climate of the time. What’s difficult for people to understand, what I can’t even really understand myself, is how everyone—including me—could have been oblivious to so much that was so obvious. I know everyone my age (I am 59) has dealt with the question—even if younger people haven’t asked it explicitly, we’ve all thought it.

Actually, we weren’t even unaware. We knew everything, because we made jokes about it. But we didn’t follow through the implications of what we were saying. There was nobody there to say “Right, but it’s not a joke, is it?” or “And so if that’s true, do you see where it leads? What are you doing standing here?” Is that all we needed—someone to point out that reality is real, that you can’t simultaneously accept something is true and act as if it isn’t? I don’t know what we needed. If you asked a Berliner of a certain era, I doubt they’d have a good answer either.

I’ve been looking through old newspapers and I think one of the main problems was that we didn’t actually have the language to talk about what was happening. The headlines would say “Amazon Seeks To Enter East Asian Markets” or “Deregulation Push At Agency Accelerates.” Everything was reported—the usual criticism of media, that it ignores the facts, was not actually true. If you look at the archives, what you see is something far creepier. It was all there on the printed page, it was just “normalized” to the point where nobody could understand it even as they looked directly at it. The phrase “hiding in plain sight” comes to mind. At one point, I swear to God, the New York Times front page ran a photo across five columns showing George H.W. Bush’s funeral (George H.W. Bush was an insignificant president from the early ’90s, best known for a senseless overseas military action and a pattern of sexual misconduct; the New York Times was a newspaper), with a one-column article squeezed next to it: “Emissions Surge, Hastening Perils Across the Globe.” Oh yes, the perils. Did you see the perils in the paper this morning, dear?

But as I say, it wasn’t just insufficient attention. It was also language itself. Maybe people would have had a better grasp of what was happening if it had been framed more explicitly. “Amazon Enters East Asian Markets” should have been “Amazon Amasses Power Over More Nations, Narrowing Opportunities For Resistance.” But I don’t know, even then people probably would have just watched passively. The newspaper can say “Act Now Or Wolves Will Eat Your Children” and most readers will still just read the paper, go to work, and perhaps make a pessimistic remark to someone. We literally watched people burn alive. “Raising awareness” was a slogan for a while, one that makes me laugh now.

2020 was unfortunate. Usually people treat 2024 as the major event, for obvious reasons. But we all knew 2024 was coming the moment 2020 happened. That sounds strange today, I know, given the mainstream historical interpretation—2020 as a “return to normalcy” after the brief, regrettable detour into Trumpian madness, before the unexpected “backlash” that came in ‘24. There was never any “return,” though. The same conditions were there as had been there for years. The Democrats squeaked into office, but it wasn’t as if they knew how to stop the unfolding forces of history. In fact, personally I think they hastened the ultimate consolidation of power, because by being just “not bad” enough, what had been a thriving opposition movement was sapped of its vitality.

It could have gone the other way, I am still convinced of that. I am not a fatalist or determinist. People make choices, those choices matter. I try not to have regrets, but I keep wondering whether there was something I could have said or done in 2020. Could the “language prison” have been broken out of? I don’t even know today how one could have done it. After all, there was plenty of talk about the “death of democracy” or the “concentration of wealth and power.” They were talking about them at Davos, for God’s sake. (Davos was a conference in which wealthy people pretended to care about others in order to convince themselves they weren’t going to Hell.) Words, words, words, it was all just words. Nobody actually knew what “democracy” meant. Power was consolidating around them, and we were still talking about “regulatory policy.” Everyone still assumed they’d always have the vote.

It all happened in Brazil first, of course. Everyone should have been watching that carefully, since it played out almost exactly as it would here a few years later. Of course, you-know-who made Bolsonaro look like Nelson Mandela. But nobody here could place Brazil on a map. (A map was a way of showing how things looked.)

People were expecting one big Event, and in some ways 2024 was that. But it was mostly frog-in-a-saucepan stuff. We got used to it. Oh, some days the air fills with smoke. That’s just what happens. Then your children grow up never knowing anything different, and eventually there’s nobody around who can even remember that it was once otherwise.

I sometimes insist I wasn’t surprised by anything. But I know that I was, I remember the feeling. A few things truly shocked me, such as how complete the destruction of knowledge could be. “Once something is on the internet it never goes away” is literally a thing I heard people say. No, it can all go away. Every bit of it can be taken. The central lesson, the thing I’d try to impart if I had a chance to go back and shout at my younger self, is how easily things that seem solid can vanish. I remember looking at my mantelpiece and actually thinking “This cannot go away, you will still be here no matter what.” (I liked to talk to objects in those days.) Well, so much for that. No matter what!

I’ll admit, the end of the magazine came as a shock. We had been doing so well. But people’s incomes dried up, and they weren’t spending them on magazines. Besides, there was no way for anyone to access it. With traffic to “fake news” blocked, and anything independent being automatically filtered as “fake,” you couldn’t even tell people you were silenced. The revenue collapsed within six months, the enterprise couldn’t even be sold off. (I got a few hundred bucks for the velvet office chairs.)

I think it’s just very hard to believe that things really can go away until the moment that they do. You don’t know what you take for granted. I just assumed I would live in a world with butterflies, and that they would always be around. (Butterflies were a type of pretty insect. Imagine if the cockroaches had little Persian carpets for wings.) I saw pigeons as a nuisance. I didn’t conceive of the idea that one day I could wake up in a city without birds. The expression is: You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry. And you don’t miss your well until your water reaches the rooftops. Everything had seemed so solid, and by the time I knew how much I loved it, it was gone and I was screaming at no one to please let me have it back. God, I miss birds.

I haven’t talked about the personal losses. My family, my books, my city. In part, I just don’t want to think about it. But also, I have suffered less than almost anybody else. I still write, albeit only for my notes now. With a billion dead, how can I complain?

If my 2019 self was sitting here in my bunker, I wonder if there is anything I could tell him. Not “enjoy it while it lasts,” surely. I could give lessons in how power works: You need to be careful, because it will wrap itself around your neck and only reveal itself when it’s too late to resist. That’s certainly what Amazon did. We all realized what they had done, half a second too late. Call it the “oh, shit” moment. I can’t believe we called them “corporations” and “managers” really. There were so many euphemisms. We lived in a world strung together entirely from euphemisms, one that had almost nothing to do with what was happening or would happen.

I can still feel what it was like on New Year’s Eve, as 2019 began, on my balcony in the French Quarter. (That was a main neighborhood of New Orleans.) I wasn’t naive. Something felt wrong, I could see that even though everyone was drunk and happy in the streets below, there was a sense of it being temporary, of having a few more good parties while there was still time. The waters were rising, but I just stood there. Should I have shouted? Built a raft? Joined a militia? Christ, I don’t know.

OR

Another scrap from the future… Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs. Jan. 3, 2019.

Recently I discovered a piece of writing I don’t remember producing. I am still not ready to believe that it came from the future, because I am a sensible person and that is a ridiculous thing to believe. I just don’t know where it came from. Today, I found a second piece of writing. I cannot be sure whether I simply overlooked it the first time, or whether it has appeared since. It, too, appears to be written by me, yet the authors of the two documents cannot possibly be the same.


Sometimes I think about just how close we came to ruining everything. I don’t mean to become a “you kids don’t know how bad we had it” type, especially because I never had it bad myself, but I do believe it’s important to note just how far we’ve come and what it took to get there. It’s hard to believe today, but about thirty years ago people were literally asking whether human civilization should go extinct. Some talked about an impending apocalypse. There was a quite serious notion that we were heading for some kind of large-scale catastrophe, the rise of fascism or the total destruction of the planet. And the truth is, we were.

I don’t know how to get someone to understand, if they didn’t live through it, just how perilous that single moment truly was. The Trump era may seem comical to you, a bit of historical madness like the reign of Caligula, but for those of us who were young then and thinking about our futures, it was horrifying. The planet was heating, authoritarians were coming to power, and there were thousands of nuclear weapons poised to fire at any time. Day-to-day life had its charms, but there was a sense that the good things could not last, because things were beginning to spiral out of control.

What’s interesting to me now is not just how dangerous it was but how quickly we managed to reverse course. Historical change, it turns out, can be rapid in any direction. The Nazis can go from fringe clowns to terrifying rulers within a decade. But so, too, did we build something more beautiful than anything I could have envisioned when I was in my late 20s. Wandering through the world today, I cannot believe it is the same place I once knew. It seems so familiar, but it is so magnificent, so warm, so verdant and friendly. Sometimes people my age and older (I am 59) are asked what it was like to live through the development of the internet. The answer: I barely noticed. It wasn’t a change that mattered, compared to what happened after. I don’t think young people (oh no, I’m about to say I don’t think young people appreciate, what have I become?) appreciate the full extent of what has taken place. I used to worry, back when it seemed a real possibility, that when butterflies disappeared, after a few generations people would forget what they were even missing. Now the whole damn world is butterflies, and the problem is reversed.

I don’t know if you’ve ever looked back at previous generations’ predictions of what the future would be like. They’re often richly amusing. But what’s striking about the time when I grew up is that people had almost stopped imagining. Our films and literature, when they imagined the future, could only turn dystopian. Yet even more creative generations could never have foreseen what actually transpired. Only Star Trek came close (and even they eventually gave up), but life today doesn’t feel like living on the Enterprise. For one thing, everything is so green, so teeming with life of all kinds. I think in order to understand the bleakness of 2019 you have to look at a photo like this:

What strikes us now about this picture is that it is so dead. Quite literally. Nothing in the picture, except a shadow of a person, is alive. It is like being on top of a mountain, or in space, but without the view. Imagine what it was like to see places like this everywhere, to have the whole world being turned into it. Today a photo like this makes us squirm—we recoil at the lack of warmth, decoration, beauty. The blankness of the walls, the utilitarian design. But this was an almost universal aesthetic. Whenever a new building was put up, it would almost always look like this. Is it any wonder that we felt “futureless”?

The rediscovery of life changed everything, and I mean everything. In the early part of this century, before 2020, “environmentalism” had a kind of fringe vibe to it. To be “green” was to have a pet cause, and I literally remember thinking that I hated the color green and I wished the “hippie-ish” associations of environmentalism would go away. I associated it with “urban gardens” with people toiling in dirt to raise a small handful of tomatoes. I’m ashamed that I never saw that with a simple adjustment, it could turn from something pitifully marginal to something all-encompassing and powerful. We did not need “urban gardens.” We needed The Urban Garden, a city of flowers. I think it’s just that phrases like “harmony with nature” had become cliches, their associations had dried up. Do you know that they didn’t even teach plant identification in schools? The miracle of life had ceased to be miraculous. “Nature” was seen as distinct from civilization. Even conservationists reinforced this totally erroneous framework: they wanted to “conserve” the natural world from the encroachment of humanity. You can see why we were heading towards planetary destruction! If you look at the “environment” as something separate from “us,” it will not seem necessary to cultivate or care about it.

The most striking changes in my lifetime have been in the way people think about things. Animals, as you know, were still eaten, with everyone just uncomfortably pretending that the moral problem didn’t exist. The presence of wild animals in day-to-day life today is still striking to me. In the old “gated communities” every trace of wilderness was violently extinguished. Now the presence of animal life is seen as the mark of a place’s vitality. (Today I had to shoo a toucan from my windowsill.) If you wanted to go from one country to another, you had to bring a “passport,” an absurdly elaborate identification document issued by a bureaucratic agency, and the “borders” between countries were militarized and patrolled. How refreshing it is today to look at a map and see countries defined as general areas rather than fixed territories. (One of the most bizarre things in old newspapers is seeing countries referred to as if they were people—“China Goes To The Moon” and the like. Seeing countries as individuals made it easier for us to see ourselves as being in competition with them. Is China gaining on “us”? When of course, we are all one big “us.”) I suppose I should mention the prison system, another feature of life that was taken as a given. Or the gap in wealth between black people and white people. Endless justifications for these things were put forward. You wouldn’t believe how cruel and indifferent to the fate of others some people could be.

There are countless aspects of everyday existence that were almost unthinkable then. Today, when you visit a branch of the GHS, you barely think about it. You find the nearest clinic in whatever country to happen to be in, make an appointment, go, and leave. That is not how it used to go. The idea of a “Global Health Service” would have seemed insane. For one thing, the idea of “world government” and even the word “global” itself had negative connotations. Today we might rejoice in our interconnectedness, but when our governments were dysfunctional, it was very easy to argue that more “government” would be doubly dysfunctional. So healthcare was a patchwork, and it was expensive. You literally had people begging not to be put in an ambulance because they knew they’d receive a huge bill afterwards! You had to find a doctor who would “take your insurance” (healthcare was covered through insurance plans) and even then it could be unaffordable. I remember that when I was in my late 20s, people had to do “crowd funding” campaigns to raise money for their medication. Sometimes they didn’t raise enough money, in which case they might die.

Part of me wishes everyone could relive that era for a day, so they’d know why what we have is special. When I stroll through the city to work, across rope bridges, through gardens, sometimes I find myself near tears. “Who are we that we can be so cruel?” I used to ask. Today, it’s “Who are we that we could build something so incredible?” Perhaps it’s not surprising at all. We were gifted a paradise, and all we needed to do was learn to love it, to manage it correctly and not kill each other. Should have been easy. But it wasn’t.

That’s something I really want to emphasize, not because I think we’ll ever find ourselves in the same position again, but because the people who made the changes happen deserve to have the scale of their achievement recognized. As I say, we were on a path to destruction. It took an immense burst of collective action to steer us away. If you asked me what the “key moment” was, I think it was probably when the Democratic Socialists of America resolved that every single member of the U.S. Congress would be a socialist within twelve years. Every single Congressional and state legislative district, without exception, had a young socialist running in the Democratic primaries. They were organized, and they began to win. The Sanders presidency, like Corbyn’s tenure as prime minister, accelerated the transition into overdrive. A few small victories that began to meaningfully impact people’s lives (such as the Jubilee), then a consensus was built around democratic socialism, from which there was no going back. The adoption of that principle was key, though: Never have an election, at any level, without a socialist candidate running.

It wasn’t just electoral, of course. The organization of workplaces and the development of the One Big Union helped tip the balance of power away from bosses and owners. Internationalism was critical—when the Democratic Socialists of America became the Democratic Socialists of the World, they were finally able to build the worldwide solidarity that was necessary to stop the infamous competitive “race to the bottom” among countries. The ethic of solidarity: it blossomed everywhere. God, it was a time. It felt like being shaken out of a stupor. Of course, the hard work was in actually figuring out the solutions. They took power easily, but avoiding disastrous experiments in social engineering required a commitment to “pragmatic radicalism,” a willingness to think hard about questions like “How do you stop capital flight?” (Capitalism encouraged sociopathy, actually necessitated it in many cases, and capitalists would rather destroy a country and countless lives than see a small bit of their power eroded.)

It was hard and it was easy. It was hard in that it demanded a hell of a lot of hard work from people. It was easy in that once we “got the ball rolling,” the changes happened rapidly. Once you improve something, it’s hard to undo it, so once it was understood that a workplace needed to be democratic, democratic it was forever. Once the “green quotient” became law, it wasn’t going to be undone. Colleges knew there would be an outcry if they reimposed tuition fees, nobody was going to build another slaughterhouse once meat became both unnecessary and inefficient. You couldn’t build a wall between countries if you didn’t know where one ended and the next began, couldn’t build a prison if you didn’t have crimes. I am not saying the world today is perfect (I just had an argument with my neighbor about religion’s place in political life.) We have not reached “the end of history,” a silly notion. But of course there is a sense of excitement about where we are going next. We can approach the “Final Frontier” safe in the knowledge that when we encounter the beings of other planets, we will do so as comrades rather than conquerors (God forbid they are in the same vicious, self-destructive stage we ourselves were so recently).

I am starting to get a bit old, not that age means much now. (My doctor tells me that I could live for another 500 years, hopefully enough time to become good at drawing animals.) I am aware that by spending too much time talking about my memories, I may sound like a long-winded fogey. But I can’t help obsessing over that historic turning point in 2020, that incredible moment when everything suddenly began to feel different in the most wonderful way. The buildings became beautiful again, so much so they took your breath away. (I wouldn’t even quite know how to describe today’s buildings to a stranger. They look more like plants than human-made structures, as if Gaudi was commissioned to do a Garden of Eden.) The trees and animals were everywhere, like living in an Henri Rousseau painting. (Though personally I still prefer the library to a hiking trail!) The workweek was shortened, the militaries all disbanded. Guns became the curious artifact of a dysfunctional past. People wear costumes whenever they please, they have luxury without materialism. Mardi Gras used to only be celebrated in New Orleans, but look at it now! There are no more “museums,” just as there is no more “conservation,” because art and nature are everywhere rather than confined. Every school is gorgeous, with students learning everything from literature to animal husbandry. I am not telling you anything you don’t already know. But I swear to God the orange juice even tastes better!

Today, I look back on all of this and think: how differently it could have gone, and how fortunate we are that it didn’t. Or perhaps “fortune” had nothing to do with it. The people of that time had a choice, and we can all be grateful that they chose so well, did so much, bequeathed us the marvel that is today’s Earth.

Today

Instead of concluding that humans will inevitably destroy the world, why not just stop destroying it? Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs. Dec. 18, 2018.

Personally, I enjoy being alive. Not always, but most of the time. You might, too. I have always been of the opinion that—with some exceptions—death is bad and living is better. I like human beings, and while human civilization commits seemingly endless pointless atrocities, I think if we got our act together we could have quite a good thing going here on planet Earth.

In the New York Times, philosopher Todd May considers a question that has never really entered my mind: “Would human extinction be a tragedy?” May concludes that it would indeed be a tragedy, in the sense that we would lose the many fine things that come with being alive, but it might still on the whole be Good. There is nothing inconsistent about this, since we can believe that tragic outcomes are for the best (having to put down an injured horse, for instance). May believes that however unfortunate it may be, the world would be better off without us, because human beings are incorrigible assholes (my phrase, not his):

There is no other creature in nature whose predatory behavior is remotely as deep or as widespread as the behavior we display toward what the philosopher Christine Korsgaard aptly calls “our fellow creatures.”… Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it. This is happening through at least three means. First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems… Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwise be intact. Third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways. There is no reason to think that those practices are going to diminish any time soon. Humanity, then, is the source of devastation of the lives of conscious animals on a scale that is difficult to comprehend… [We are committing] a wrong whose elimination would likely require the elimination of the species.

May considers the question of whether the benefits of human civilization outweigh its cost to other species. He concludes that they clearly do not—our species’ creation of beautiful buildings and Abbey Road can hardly compensate for the destruction we cause. “There is just too much torment wreaked upon too many animals and too certain a prospect that this is going to continue and probably increase; it would overwhelm anything we might place on the other side of the ledger.” He is agnostic on the question of whether this means we should all kill ourselves (“One might ask here whether, given this view, it would also be a good thing for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering… I do not have a final answer to this question…”) but says that we should distinguish between future humans and present humans. So, perhaps we don’t need to kill ourselves, because that would inflict a lot of harm on presently-existing people, but we do have an obligation not to have children, because those children will probably despoil the earth and kill the coral reefs and eat a lot of pigs.

I confess, I don’t find this subject nearly as interesting as May does, in part because—since I am not a philosopher—I tend to be concerned with questions that have actual consequences. If I conclude that the world would be better off without humanity, what am I supposed to do? Join a pro-extinction movement? Just decline to reproduce, an action with an essentially negligible effect on the future of humanity? I feel as if concluding that human beings shouldn’t exist is like concluding that flies shouldn’t exist. Should I kill a bunch of them? Should I launch an anti-fly campaign? Or perhaps meteorites, or earthquakes. Should they exist? Well, they do, and we’re just going to have to take their existence as a given and work within the constraints we have.

But there’s something far more disturbing to me about May’s piece. He thinks that the harm human beings inflict on the world cannot be stopped. It is inevitable. So long as we are here, we will continue to engage in these practices, so the question is whether or not we should be here. This is a little weird to me: To think that “stopping human beings from existing at all” is somehow more of a plausible option than “stopping factory farming and human-made climate change” means an extreme form of pessimism about the possibilities for changing our actions. As he says, the elimination of these wrongs “would likely require the elimination of the species.”

Respectfully, what the fuck? May says this as if it’s a given—there’s not a shred of argumentation offered. He thinks we’ll just nod and agree that it’s impossible to stop climate change, factory farming, and the destruction of ecosystems, that they will only come to an end if we commit civilizational suicide. I’m sorry, but that’s not the sort of proposition you can just state as an uncontroversial fact. Especially because these are all extremely recent phenomena—modern-day industrial animal farming began within the lifetimes of presently-living people. Human beings have been around for 200,000 years and it was only in the last few hundred that we set ourselves on the course toward destroying the earth and the mass destruction of other species’ habitats. Since we lived for many, many millennia without doing any of these things, why would we conclude that it’s totally impossible for us to live sustainably ever again, even with greater knowledge about how to do so than any previous generation of humans ever had?

This kind of pessimism is truly dangerous to me. Nobody should accept these assumptions. Why try to stop industrial animal farming if it would necessarily involve the destruction of humanity itself? The options are suicide or devastation. Since relatively few of us are going to benevolently commit suicide, no matter how persuasively the New York Times philosophy section may encourage it, guess we’ll have to resign ourselves to ruining the earth.

But this is ridiculous. These problems are caused by human actions, and human beings can change their actions. Nothing forces us to have our monstrous factory farm system, or to prize endless growth over sound environmental stewardship. I recently reviewed Jacy Reese’s The End of Animal Farming, which persuasively argues that we could completely end the slaughter of animals within a few hundred years. In the life of humankind, this is no time at all. If we could move toward a more socialistic global economy, one that didn’t ruin the planet for profit, we could stall climate change, too.

Of course, Frederic Jameson was right when he said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Todd May can’t even conceive of the end of capitalism—he sees only two possible futures, apocalypse now or apocalypse later. I am not surprised that the New York Times ran this bonkers argument without asking May to back up his assertion that a sustainable planet is impossible. After all, a sustainable planet would be a socialistic planet, and to the Times-mind socialism is impossible. Since liberalism has no solutions, it’s not wonder that liberals believe there are no solutions.

People who are alive right now—like me, and presumably you—are both fortunate and unfortunate. We are unfortunate in that we are on Earth at a time when the threats of climate change and global nuclear conflict mean “doom” can seem just around the corner. We are fortunate, however, in that we also happen to have showed up at a moment when it was possible to do something about it. At the moment, the world is still (relatively) at peace and the worst effects of climate change have still not yet set in. Scientists are warning that we only have a decade to act on climate change in order to mitigate its most severe consequences, but a decade is not nothing. It is the job of socialists, and really anyone who cares about their “fellow creatures,” not to fall into despair or conclude that “extinction is the only option.” Hopelessness is what conservatives want, and pessimism means death. Todd May’s thinking is dangerous, suicidal, wrong. Reject it. It’s not only depressing, it’s irrational. Laugh at it. Write it off. And join the fight to build a humane, decent, and nurturing civilization in which we live in harmony with other species. We have the technology, we have the brains. We just need the resolve. A better world is possible. Death is not the only option.