Confluence of Horrors

You’ve seen it repeatedly in movies: A nineteenth century locomotive speeding merrily along in the bright sunshine, its passengers and cargo following blissfully. Suddenly, as the train rounds a bend, the complacent engineer spots an obstruction on the track dead ahead. But this is no ordinary obstruction. Not merely a fallen tree but several. Piled unnaturally high. The engineer reacts. Yes. But what else does he do? What else can he do? The audience knows what the engineer doesn’t know, that there are other dangers lurking about. The mood in the theater tenses as moviegoers begin to suspect that there are yet other, as yet unrealized problems the camera hasn’t scoped.

Are we the engineer, the passengers or the moviegoers? The producer, screenwriter, director, camera operator and crew? Or all of the above? If there are any safe bets in this scenario, it’s the latter. With that in mind we must pull back for a drone’s eye view. What we see is disturbing: Other obstructions of different kinds further along the route, rickety bridges, hairpin curves, sheer inclines, perilous descents, bottomless ravines and — immediately — robbers lurking nearby plotting ambush, while in the distance, an impenetrable fog wherein waits who knows what. At this critical realization, the moviegoer is forced to identify simultaneously with the frantic engineer and the passengers, implicitly understanding that the plot, if any, has been swept away and the writer, director and crew, if any, have vanished, placing the audience aboard the train, bereft of their momentary omniscience and simply terrified in their incapacity.

Voila, the polycrisis upon us, a gradual unfoldment, not of one but potentially infinite and not successive but confluent horrors. Complicating this situation even more is the fact that all of this will play out through two different levels of confluence, one as a complex of physically combining and recombining natural forces and the other as a panoply of internal confluences of knowledge, fear, wonderment, intellect and primal urges unique to each individual. None of these internal, mental, egoistic elements should be construed as benign. Turbulence portends within as well as without. Yet more critical is the fact that the myriad combinations on both the physical and the psychical levels are not predictable. To say that they are not “as yet” predictable would imply the expectation of future mastery of knowledge that will ever elude. Algorithms will prove of faint effect in the outer world of uproarious flux and none inner, the most neglected sphere of turbulence to come.

Popular focus on climate change has been so overwhelming that it subsumes attention that might otherwise have recognized the larger scope of catastrophe. What can be inferred from present knowledge about climate change may serve as something of a template and to that extent it is instructive as long as it is acknowledged to be a subset of many separate factors. Beneath the umbrella of climate change are numerous elements that many have been reluctant to find related but that have slowly reached general agreement if no more than at a base level where the empirical fact of warming can hardly be denied. Some of the reticent remainders, for example, are even beginning to understand that climate change has an impact on species including their distribution across the globe and their very continuance. The next faltering step, to comprehend how these developments are threads of a complex web where one strand builds upon another, becomes not an end within itself but simply a more varied model of what happens when one force is unleashed upon another. Outcomes are beginning to be unavoidably visible, not only in the world of plants and “lower” animals, but also among people forced to adapt or perish in increasing heat. Unfortunately, most Americans see categories and categorize victims with the consequent loss of connection at a time when personal reassessment of association with each of these categories is becoming increasingly important. We continue to grapple with mundane matters at the expense of understanding holistic interrelations, continuously refining categories into subcategories to the exclusion of their relations and ultimate importance to ourselves. And when we raise our heads, it is for consolation in the possibility of finding an escape route through the expansion of technology where we have seen progress in the past and reckon possibility of it in the near future, extending this with typical hubris to belief in the level by level mastery of the world when, in fact, the complexity of our situation is not merely a matter of orders of emphasis or even orders of magnitude, or even orders of complexity itself, but orders of the confluence of all of these and more: ourselves and our already unruly minds.

If we can admit that what is happening in the world, aspect upon aspect, effect upon effect, is also happening within ourselves, we stand a chance for — not ever redemption — but perhaps a degree of mitigation. Alas, this is unlikely more than a vain hope, that unceasing aspiration of humanity against all evidence to the contrary, that same hope that surely there must be a god to save us just as there always has been a god to condemn us. Inevitability is soon upon us and inevitability, of whatever constituency, is indisputable, offering no place to hide, our minds least of all, ultimately shattering all cherished illusions to the point of clarity that chaos presents, not in understanding, let alone the ability to manipulate it, but simply exists as the empirical outcome of our folly. For when the mind is drawn into a mess of confluences, not merely overlapping but interacting confluences, and not just a proverbial mind of man but billions of minds of men, any pretense of unity on any level is fractured and humanity must then contend with escalating and thoroughly unpredictable confluences of its own manufacture, confronting these with those equally dynamic but untethered forces of the natural world. No mulligan is possible. There is no redo key. The train cannot back up and switch to a different track. The signal was missed. Wrong choices were made in the ancient past that meant that reactions to outcomes were necessary long ago along a way that was already lost. Presently, mitigating decisions are possible but only if we abandon current mindsets, something that most are unwilling to acknowledge as necessary. And these mindsets are far more complicated than a decision to change from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Greed is self-consuming. It demands consumption of the present moment then figures out how best to consume the next moment based on the circumstances of that moment which means it is self-perpetuating even as it eats itself. Its transitions are not a matter of if or even when but which before another and with what consequence with cascading consequences impacting each other thereby making precise prediction impossible.

Stress is obvious in all integrations among natural elements, human elements and within individuals making it difficult to achieve collective agency. We must get past the idea that the separate chambers of individualism can affect a rescue. Concrete collective measures call faintly but urgently from what is becoming a swirl of chaos but even if any are heeded they carry the caveat imprinted on all of nature that periodic course corrections are required. And there is a final warning: demands of the physical world impinge on the idealist reality cherished for so long by so many. Ultimately, the mind is in the same illusory universe as a rock.

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