Doubting Thomas Versus Armageddon

Two things happened this week that colour what I’m going to try to say.

As I type, the votes in our General Election are being counted. It’s a fun few days if you enjoy that kind of thing. Our Proportional Representation system means that second, third, fourth or even fifth-choice votes can often elect somebody. So it comes down to late night showdowns in large halls which end up with one person being hoisted awkwardly onto the shoulders of his new minions, while another person slinks miserably off towards the rear exit.

But, when all the interpersonal battling and general flim-flam is set aside, the story of this election seems to have been already written in the exit polls and in the faces of the people. The emerging headline is clear. ‘Nothing Will Change.’

So, that’s the first thing that happened.

The second thing that happened this week is that Sally Rooney wrote an article in the Irish Times on the subject of Climate Change. For some reason, the paywall let me through and I got to read it. You should too if you can. It got me thinking about Climate Change… and about General Elections… and about how nothing will change.

Two things... and here I am, typing.

In her article, Sally considers Climate Change and Elections together. She says, “ Voters concerned about the future of human life on Earth can still choose to support the few radical left-wing parties that are trying to understand the scale of the challenge, like People Before Profit here in Ireland. Equally, consumers who are worried about the climate can reduce their own impact on carbon emissions by cutting out flights, eating less or no meat, buying fewer unnecessary items, and so on. These are in no way meaningless gestures, but neither are they sufficient to bring the fossil-fuel establishment to its knees.”

It’s that end bit. We can stop eating meat, we can travel nowhere, we can be more mindful generally… and we should… we definitely should. But those things won’t save the planet. That’s the problem. I can do my bit, but my bit and your bit and all our bits together won’t come anywhere close to even starting to sort it out. It’s going to need something earth-shattering and massive to turn this around. And, in case you haven’t noticed, it just ain’t happening. I’m still typing, and the election results are rolling in as my fingers work. Nothing is changing. Nothing at all.

Allow me to make two diverse cultural references, draw one conclusion, and then shut up for this week.

First cultural reference: Doubting Thomas. You all know him, right? Or am I wrongly assuming you do because I exist in a somewhat Catholic world. In case you don’t know, when Jesus returned from being dead, he visited the apostles in a locked room, just to show them that he was back. Ten of them seemed quite chuffed about this, one of them was dead and the remainder, Thomas, was off somewhere else ‘doing a message’ as we say in Ireland. When he got back and heard the scoop, his response was something like the 33 AD equivalent of “Fuck no, I’m not buying any of that.” He announced that unless he could, among other things, see the piercings of the nails and place his hand inside the wound that Jesus got on the cross, he would not believe. That was Doubting Thomas. Jesus duly came back on another day. “Reach hither thy finger and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless.” Thomas came round pretty sharpish after all that prodding and poking.

I’m a writer. I listen, I eavesdrop, I overhear. And the word I hear on the street about Climate Change is the word of Doubting Thomas. What I hear goes something like this; Storms and hurricanes, we’ve had them forever; It’s all a load of bullshit; Global warming? We haven’t seen the sun all summer; It’s all talk, exactly like the Millenium Bug, keep us afraid, keep us in line. Of course that’s not all I hear. I hear the people who know the truth too, like Sally. But this is quite a lot of what I hear. Make no mistake. People are not getting the message that we are in trouble.

And, like they said in The X Files (that’s not the second cultural reference, it’s just a bonus one) “The Truth is Out There.’ You don’t have to look very hard to find the scientific evidence, to learn of the icecaps falling into the sea, to see the devastating weather on the news every other night. It’s not like we are not being told. So what’s the problem? The problem is twofold, as far as we the plain people are concerned. Firstly, we are simply not listening and secondly, and most crucially, like old Doubting Tom himself, we do not really believe.

This shouldn’t be surprising. We are finite creatures in many ways. And this is too damn big. Too big to believe. It is, almost literally, beyond our comprehension. Contemplating the actual end of the world as we know it is a little like contemplating eternity. We can go a certain distance with it, we can even get concerned about it. But if we push too far with our contemplation of it, our little minds will start to reel and stagger and we will have to go and sit in a quiet corner and think about something smaller instead.

Here’s my second cultural reference and I should warn you that if you’ve read this far and are hoping for some happy conclusion to all this then you should temper your expectations. I know what’s coming in this piece and it ain’t all that positive.

The second reference is the movie ‘Armageddon’ with Bruce Willis and God knows who else. It could be ‘Deep Impact’ just as easily. Both came out at the same time and both are on the same rough narrative. A big fuck-off asteroid is heading straight for us. What are we going to do? Bruce is sent off in a space shuttle to sort it all out (Yippee Kay Aye, Asteroid) or Robert Duvall is sent off, if you’re in the other movie. National differences are set aside for the planetary good. The whole world unites behind them. All that stuff.

But here’s the thing. In these movies, the world wasn’t simply looking skyward in terror because they were informed that there was a problem. They weren’t all focused on the incoming disaster because a bunch of scientists had written articles about it or because some old presidential candidate had made a documentary about it.

They were focused… and terrified… and united… because extremely bad shit had happened to them personally.

It wasn’t just about a big asteroid that’s still a million miles off. Nobody would have believed that. Nobody would have given a shit. To get everyone on board with the disaster, there had to be a bunch of awful precursors. Mini asteroids started taking out capital cities here and there. God knows why there were mini asperiods so far ahead of the big one or where they all came from. The movie just needed them. For the world to believably unite, there needed be no doubt whatsoever, in everybody’s heads, that really bad stuff was coming.

Any that’s the problem, as I see it anyway.

The plain people of the world are currently in considerable doubt that the end is nigh. Quite considerable doubt. And my fear is that the only thing that will focus the plain people of the world, on the strife that they genuinely in, is some super-colossal disaster.

Here’s one tiny, quite terrible, example to try to illustrate this large point.

In the early Eighties, Fire Regulations in Ireland needed updating. They got updated. But not before a nightclub burned down and killed forty-eight people. Need I say more?

If you have a heart, and I know you do, you will possibly say to yourself that the world is already inundated with the kind of super-colossal natural disasters that I think the sea-change will require. Look to Spain, for God’s sake, look to Haiti, Columbia, Costa Rica. Look anywhere. The portents are all there. And you’re right, of course, except you’re also wrong. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but it’s going to take something worse than that, something exponentially worse, before we as a planet sit up in terror and start to do, as one, the things we are going to need to do.

I told you there was no happy conclusion.

Except to say that this bleak outlook does not let us off the hook. We have to continue to do whatever we can to change our own personal ways, to change our own habits. At the very least, it will be good practice for the things we will be forced to do in the coming decades. But, most crucially of all, we need to find some way to turn up the volume on the Ecological narrative. 

And, if possible, we need to find a way to do it that doesn't involve another few million people getting killed.