A convenient untruth
Charting the rise of environmental "declinism"
BY Andrew Potter
Illustration by Peter Mitchell
One of the most disturbing aspects of the growing concern over climate change is the giddy delight with which some members of the left await the coming global catastrophe. Of course they don’t admit to being delighted. Instead, they claim to be extremely upset about the prospect of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, drought, flooding, crop failure, species extinction and so on. But let’s be honest, listening to a global warming hysteric rhyme off the terrible and inevitable consequences of driving to work or buying a Big Mac is to hear someone in the rapture of a geo-pornographic fantasy.
Let us call these people “declinists,” and their animating philosophy “declinism.” What motivates declinism is an attitude so pessimistic that it is almost theological: not only are things worse than they used to be, but they’re getting worse with every passing year. Furthermore, the declinist believes that the various strategies that are usually proposed for making things better—the promotion of liberal democracy, technological development and economic growth—cannot be the solution to our problems, since they are actually the cause. That is, it is the principles that underwrite modernity itself that are the problem. As the declinist sees it, the rights-based politics of liberal individualism, combined with the free-market economy, have served to undermine local attachments and communitarian feelings, leading us to seek meaning in shallow consumerism and mindless entertainments.
That is why climate change is the ultimate declinist wet dream. Sure, there is a long tradition of declinist hobby horses, including overpopulation, the exhaustion of natural resources and the industrial poisoning of the land and the sea, but climate change is the rug that pulls the whole room together. From cars and consumerism to mass travel, fast food and inexpensive lighting, declinism gathers up everything the left dislikes about contemporary society and puts it all in the dock facing the same charge: it is causing the planet to heat up. Thanks then to the imagined horrors of climate change, declinism transforms what is essentially an aesthetic preference for live entertainment over television, locally grown produce over fast food and the ability to walk to work instead of commuting in a car into a lifestyle choice of world-historical importance.
The way the logic of it works out, the declinist wins no matter what happens. We either adopt more energy-efficient, lowimpact, “human scale” lifestyles, or the atmosphere will heat up, the economy will collapse and we’ll be forcibly thrown back into a subsistence economy. Fate, as the great Canadian pessimist George Grant once wrote, leads the willing and drives the unwilling, and we’re headed for a 12th-century economy whether we like it or not. It’s a future that the high priest of declinism, James Howard Kunstler (author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency), can hardly wait for. While he spent his entire career fighting a losing intellectual battle against the car culture of suburbia, global warming has given him renewed faith in the ability of humanity to destroy itself through consumption. As he wrote recently, “let the gloating begin.”
There is no point in arguing with declinism, because it is not a set of empirical propositions but an ideology. Over the past hundred years, life got steadily better by almost any conceivable measure. Life expectancy rose while infant mortality dropped; the air quality of our cities improved, our food got cheaper and more nutritious, and the workplace became safer as wages steadily climbed. If you have any question as to the arrow of progress, ask yourself one question: Given a choice, when would you rather have been born, 1900 or 2000?
Declinism is both a sin and a betrayal. It is a sin because it displays an utter lack of faith in humanity, believing that we will inevitably abuse the gifts of freedom, knowledge and power and become the agents of our own destruction. It is a betrayal of modernity and of the liberal ideals that have breathed life and hope into human progress for the past four hundred years. In its resentment of modernity, the declinist left finds itself in agreement with a broad spectrum of Islamofascists, evangelical nuts and tinfoil-hat anarchists, who equally fear the globalized future and pray for a return to a glorious but thoroughly imaginary past. If it takes a global catastrophe to get us there, so much the better.
They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows. But when it comes to the politics of declinism, the sleeping arrangements are positively perverted.
