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Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization by Roy Scranton
newlynova's review against another edition
4.0
read for a class on religion, philosophy, & climate change.
great writing! very depressing. stalwart defense of the value of history, art, and literature in the face of imminent societal collapse. felt like it could’ve been a really long essay, though, rather than a book.
4(ish)
great writing! very depressing. stalwart defense of the value of history, art, and literature in the face of imminent societal collapse. felt like it could’ve been a really long essay, though, rather than a book.
4(ish)
perrydimes's review against another edition
1.0
Arthur C. Clarke's lesser known Fifth Law: sufficiently tenured philosophy is indistinguishable from pablum.
This book started out fine enough with a brief but informative history of humanity's relationship to the climate and the politics of energy and quickly descended into banality. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood, but I could not physically helping myself from rolling my eyes at sentences such as:
"No longer individual subjects of discrete objects, we have become vibrations, channelers, tweeters, and followers."
The fourth chapter is where this very short book begins to lose its way. Scranton meditates on the ancient roots and inevitability of human violence, jumping audaciously from labor disputes and ancient poetry to the alienation wrought by social media to his experience as a veteran in Iraq (a fact that is only brought up sporadically, connected tenuously to some platitude or other about the darkness in the heart of humanity and/or the hope hidden within, and then discarded). Still, I more or less get it: it's important to cultivate mindfulness in the face of social upheaval, to keep our most atavistic impulses at a distance. Not very thematically relevant, and a bit overdone, but perhaps forgivable. The fifth chapter (titled "A New Enlightenment"), however, absolutely does not stick the landing.
This book is titled "Learning To Die In the Anthropocene". To perhaps uncharitably simplify its central message, this book is telling us that the solution (to the extent that one exists) to staring down the futility and horror of the end of civilization as we know it is to study the humanities. Our duty is to take a broader perspective, to remember and prepare to be forgotten, and to preserve our "cultural technology" (I detest this phrase; it somehow reeks of JSTOR and watery Folgers in a faculty lounge). I don't find this message to be particularly inspiring. It doesn't help that the latter two chapters of this book rush to name drop philosophers and quote them at length without analysis like a term paper due tomorrow. Flowery language about the infinitude of the cosmos, the ephemeral nature of humanity, the nihilism of the universe -- I don't know, man, it just doesn't do anything for me anymore. Maybe I've just grown tired of this point of view. Or maybe anyone with a sufficiently rebellious adolescence could come to the same conclusions. Maybe the meaninglessness of individual existence loses all its profundity on paper, especially manifested as mediocre prose poetry, and you'd be better off keeping it to yourself. And the upshot, vague resolutions to rethink our relationship to history, or humanity, or the environment, are a dime a dozen. These sorts of books circulate in a small niche for a few years and disappear without making a dent, and honestly, despite my affinity for the humanities and tolerance for the abstract (despite what this review might show) I think that's about what they deserve.
This isn't a book about climate change, or a particularly enlightening guide to dealing with it. It's a confused, tepid rallying cry for the moribund academic intellectual class maybe, or possibly a grotesque half-baked chimera of Carl Sagan and Philosophy 101. In any case, I didn't find it profound at all, at least not at this point in my life. Why did I read this book??
This book started out fine enough with a brief but informative history of humanity's relationship to the climate and the politics of energy and quickly descended into banality. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood, but I could not physically helping myself from rolling my eyes at sentences such as:
"No longer individual subjects of discrete objects, we have become vibrations, channelers, tweeters, and followers."
The fourth chapter is where this very short book begins to lose its way. Scranton meditates on the ancient roots and inevitability of human violence, jumping audaciously from labor disputes and ancient poetry to the alienation wrought by social media to his experience as a veteran in Iraq (a fact that is only brought up sporadically, connected tenuously to some platitude or other about the darkness in the heart of humanity and/or the hope hidden within, and then discarded). Still, I more or less get it: it's important to cultivate mindfulness in the face of social upheaval, to keep our most atavistic impulses at a distance. Not very thematically relevant, and a bit overdone, but perhaps forgivable. The fifth chapter (titled "A New Enlightenment"), however, absolutely does not stick the landing.
This book is titled "Learning To Die In the Anthropocene". To perhaps uncharitably simplify its central message, this book is telling us that the solution (to the extent that one exists) to staring down the futility and horror of the end of civilization as we know it is to study the humanities. Our duty is to take a broader perspective, to remember and prepare to be forgotten, and to preserve our "cultural technology" (I detest this phrase; it somehow reeks of JSTOR and watery Folgers in a faculty lounge). I don't find this message to be particularly inspiring. It doesn't help that the latter two chapters of this book rush to name drop philosophers and quote them at length without analysis like a term paper due tomorrow. Flowery language about the infinitude of the cosmos, the ephemeral nature of humanity, the nihilism of the universe -- I don't know, man, it just doesn't do anything for me anymore. Maybe I've just grown tired of this point of view. Or maybe anyone with a sufficiently rebellious adolescence could come to the same conclusions. Maybe the meaninglessness of individual existence loses all its profundity on paper, especially manifested as mediocre prose poetry, and you'd be better off keeping it to yourself. And the upshot, vague resolutions to rethink our relationship to history, or humanity, or the environment, are a dime a dozen. These sorts of books circulate in a small niche for a few years and disappear without making a dent, and honestly, despite my affinity for the humanities and tolerance for the abstract (despite what this review might show) I think that's about what they deserve.
This isn't a book about climate change, or a particularly enlightening guide to dealing with it. It's a confused, tepid rallying cry for the moribund academic intellectual class maybe, or possibly a grotesque half-baked chimera of Carl Sagan and Philosophy 101. In any case, I didn't find it profound at all, at least not at this point in my life. Why did I read this book??
comradec's review against another edition
challenging
dark
hopeful
informative
reflective
4.25
Learning to die is about learning to live through the impending, but inevitable neoliberal capitalist hell coming for us. Contains a brutal but warranted account of what we have to look forward to with climate change and our newer technologies.
Scranton’s theory tied heavily into Donna Haraway’s ideas about staying with the trouble (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene) and Nicole Seymour’s concept of ironic environmentalism (Strange Natures, ch. 5 “Attack of the Queer Atomic Mutants”). Man, I love when theories collide and connect, LET ME FEEL THOSE SYNAPSES FIRING.
This is more of a short pamphlet type book, like 54ish pages.
dylanblok's review against another edition
I'm reading through Lithub's 365 Books to Start Your Climate Change Library, a reading list in four sections (Classics, Science, Fiction & Poetry, and Ideas). This book is #3 of Part 4: The Ideas and #9 overall.
This is a weird book. It starts off with an argument that the problem of climate change is not one that humans will be able to solve, due to the way that the current global system works:
And also points out limiting factors of alternative, renewable energy sources (wind/solar), as well as the problem of implementing & enforcing any sort of regulations on a global scale.
Says some stuff about how violence (or at least the threat of violence) has always been a central part of real social change. Talks about the "compulsion of strife," and how we react to causes of stress in the world (e.g. climate change) by either trying to do something with that stress or passing it on (retweeting, sharing, etc). Instead, Scranton suggests we should respond with "interruption," an idea he gets from Peter Sloterdijk, who is a philosopher, I guess:
And a few sentences later, writes this:
Which, ok. That is a sentence you decided to write.
But he says later in the book:
Which seems like a weird thing to say at the same time you're talking about autonomous philosopher interrupters or whatever.
But this is all kind of distracting from the main point of the book (I think) which is, unexpectedly, an argument for humanities education. He talks about Homer and the Epic of Gilgamesh and so on and how they are important examples of the preservation of human memory. His argument is best summed up near the end of the book:
This is an interesting idea that is not really developed that well throughout the rest of the book, which is spent instead touching on a bunch of different aspects of human life/society, sometimes seemingly contradictory aspects, without bothering to address the contradictions.
The book might have been better had it been longer - giving more time to some of the interesting ideas it brings up - or more focused - instead of trying to touch on a million things in just ~100 pages.
This is a weird book. It starts off with an argument that the problem of climate change is not one that humans will be able to solve, due to the way that the current global system works:
The problem is that global decarbonization is effectively irreconcilable with global capitalism. Capitalism needs to produce profit in order to spur investment. Profit requires growth. Global economic growth, even basic economic stability, depends on cheap efficient energy.
And also points out limiting factors of alternative, renewable energy sources (wind/solar), as well as the problem of implementing & enforcing any sort of regulations on a global scale.
Says some stuff about how violence (or at least the threat of violence) has always been a central part of real social change. Talks about the "compulsion of strife," and how we react to causes of stress in the world (e.g. climate change) by either trying to do something with that stress or passing it on (retweeting, sharing, etc). Instead, Scranton suggests we should respond with "interruption," an idea he gets from Peter Sloterdijk, who is a philosopher, I guess:
What Sloterdijk helps us see is that responding autonomously to social excitation means not reacting to it, not passing it on, but interrupting it, then either letting the excitation die or transforming it completely.
And a few sentences later, writes this:
While life beats its red rhythms and human swarms dance to the compulsion of strife, the interrupter practices dying.
Which, ok. That is a sentence you decided to write.
But he says later in the book:
Whether we survive or not, however, has already been laid out in the explosion of quantum energy that, more than thirteen billion years ago, began the chain of events and reactions that have led to this moment: me writing this page, you reading it.
Which seems like a weird thing to say at the same time you're talking about autonomous philosopher interrupters or whatever.
But this is all kind of distracting from the main point of the book (I think) which is, unexpectedly, an argument for humanities education. He talks about Homer and the Epic of Gilgamesh and so on and how they are important examples of the preservation of human memory. His argument is best summed up near the end of the book:
As biological and cultural diversity is threatened across the world by capitalist monoculture and mass extinction, we must build arks: not just biological arks, to carry forward endangered genetic data, but also cultural arks, to carry forward endangered wisdom.
This is an interesting idea that is not really developed that well throughout the rest of the book, which is spent instead touching on a bunch of different aspects of human life/society, sometimes seemingly contradictory aspects, without bothering to address the contradictions.
The book might have been better had it been longer - giving more time to some of the interesting ideas it brings up - or more focused - instead of trying to touch on a million things in just ~100 pages.
moodybookseller's review against another edition
5.0
May not deserve five stars, then again it may deserve ten, but the level that it works on in an inspirational capacity struck me deeply. I appreciate this author's valiant attempt, in such a short space, to take on the whole arc of humanity's cultural existence and show how it may be the only tool we have to face and, hopefully, overcome the threats facing Us.
"Know that through lucid knowledge
one sees in all creatures
a single, unchanging existence,
undivided within its divisions."
Krishna to Arjuna, on the eve of battle.
Bhagavad-Gita
"Know that through lucid knowledge
one sees in all creatures
a single, unchanging existence,
undivided within its divisions."
Krishna to Arjuna, on the eve of battle.
Bhagavad-Gita