Embracing Pessimism amidst Collapse: An Interview with Roy Scranton
Roy Scranton is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he is Director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative. Author of the novels War Porn (2016) and I ♥ Oklahoma! (2019), as well as Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature (2019), Scranton entered the debate over the philosophical implications of anthropogenic climate change with his meditation Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (2015), which was followed by We’re Doomed. Now What?: Essays on War and Climate Change (2018). His most recent contribution to the topic is Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, which appears in August 2025 with Stanford University Press.
Roy Scranton’s newest book Impasse appears in August 2025.
Impasse asserts that ethical pessimism is the philosophical framework most relevant to contemporary life as climate tipping points keep passing and global civilization’s sustainability becomes increasingly doubtful. Ethical pessimism, Scranton argues, dispels what he calls the “Myth of Progress”—this distinct characteristic of the liberal modernity that is increasingly in decline worldwide. The Myth of Progress paralyzes citizens with the promise that if they just hold on today, if they just wait, tomorrow will be better. The sooner the Myth of Progress disperses, the better, claims Scranton, as then people can accept, and get on with their day-to-day efforts to persevere in, the increasingly catastrophic Now of anthropogenic climate change and the related cascade of social, political, economic, and environmental crises.
Robert Savino Oventile: 2025 began with the U.S. federal government exiting the Paris Agreement (again), committing to increased fossil fuel production, and moving to dismantle federal government infrastructures that do or support climate science and are useful in preparing for or recovering from climate and other catastrophes. As your previous works have underscored, since the 1992 United Nations Rio Earth Summit, which established the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the U.S. Congress and the federal administration have never pursued anything like an adequate response to anthropogenic climate change, that is, adequate for the current planetary-scale ecological emergency. But is the word “adequate” even applicable to climate policy as Impasse understands the situation? Is the fact that climate change will sooner or later overwhelm state capacity (regardless of administration) an aspect of the impasse your book contemplates? How would you introduce this impasse to potential readers of your book?
Roy Scranton: Despite our best efforts to conceptualize our moment as the Anthropocene or the polycrisis or what have you, what is currently happening exceeds our capacity to make sense of it. That is one of the key arguments of the book, and it is why I use the term “impasse.” The issue is not so much chronic global policy failure in the face of climate change, but rather a fundamental inability to comprehend not only the unprecedented planetary state change we have initiated, but also our own civilization.
The impasse I am writing about is the impasse of progress, or progressive modernity, which as I see it has three main aspects. The first aspect is the contradiction posed by the role of scientific rationality in modern society, or put more simply, the limits of reason. We know so much and are capable of such truly astonishing feats, but we are fundamentally irrational and self-deluding tribal primates–with big brains, yes, but not galaxy brains. We can identify, predict, and explain in great detail a complex global phenomenon like climate change and yet be utterly incapable of responding in any kind of rational way.
The ideology of progress tells us we can overcome such limits through education, science, and judgment, but the problem is reason itself. We can only make sense of reality through the filters and frames that make reality sensible. We can only comprehend the universe through the concepts, metaphors, biases, heuristics, and metaphysical presuppositions that make the universe comprehensible. We privilege certain forms of reason as if they transcended human subjectivity, which is like claiming to know the mind of God, but we cannot bootstrap ourselves out of our limited viewpoint. So this is one aspect of our impasse, which is that the more rationality progresses, the more vulnerable we are to our own irrationality.
The second aspect of our impasse is the contradiction of social complexity. Increasing social complexity increases aggregate energy consumption. A problem arises, like climate change, like COVID, so we develop new institutions and practices and committees to deal with it, all of which have start-up costs and maintenance costs and costs associated with integrating them into other institutions and practices, and which then like any bureaucratic institution develop a kind of autonomous inertia. According to Joseph Tainter’s theory of collapse, which I find persuasive, when the costs of maintaining social complexity begin to outweigh the advantages that complexity provides, societies adapt through simplification.[1] Rapid simplification is what we tend to call collapse.
The contradiction here is that the more we work to address problems like climate change or AI or racism, the more complexity we add to the system, the more energy we consume, and the more strain we put on existing units, eventually to the point where more and more people opt for simplification, whether at the individual level or as a matter of policy. If Tainter is right, there is no way out of this except finding more cheap energy, like solar and wind, which, as we have seen, do not actually replace carbon-based energy but add to it, thus adding more complexity, facilitating even more complexity, and ultimately making the problem worse. The increasing complexity of our civilization is causing problems for which our only solution is more complexity.
Now—and this is the third aspect of our impasse—every civilization in history has hit a limit in terms of its complexity and consumption before it either simplified or was taken over. Today we are talking about a global civilization, unique in human history, uniquely complex, with a uniquely high level of consumption, facing uniquely global challenges. Can this astonishing civilization somehow continue to grow indefinitely? That is what progress tells us. But the planet we live on is a closed system, and the human ecological niche fairly narrow. Do these limits and boundaries matter? As I discuss in the book, I think the empirical evidence points to yes.
RSO: Would it be correct to say that the impasse involves both historical contingencies and features of existence that are permanent, or at least for all practical purposes permanent?
RS: That’s right. Humans are not gods, and prior to the eighteenth century, apocalyptic megalomania was restricted to isolated tyrants and cults. First off, as Charles Taylor explains, the social relationship between order and chaos was more balanced. We accepted irrationality, suffering, evil, and death as fundamental if regrettable parts of existence. Second, human social organization was never global in scope. But with the development of Baconian rationality into progressivism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with the emergence of global European empires, particularly the British, we go from the idea that knowledge is power to the idea that we can eradicate suffering, inequality, and death through the proper application of reason, which is what people like William Godwin and Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet thought. When we get the confluence of colonialist extraction and progressivist idealism in the British and American empires, Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden,” we have really jumped the shark.
Humans are mortal creatures with particular biological and cognitive affordances. Until the last two centuries, these for all practical purposes permanent limits were just part of life. Today, they threaten disaster precisely because of the historical contingencies that have brought us to human global dominance and anthropogenic planetary transformation. The Promethean faith that we can overcome all limits plus easily accessible carbon stocks, technical rationality, and the “guns, germs, and steel” that facilitated European imperialism have brought us at last not only against the limits of the human ecological niche, but against the very limits of human habitation on Earth.
RSO: A topic important to Impasse is “The Great Simplification.” What is that, and how does it relate to the notion of “collapse”? In the U.S., is the current rollback and sometimes elimination of federal government departments and agencies a sign of “simplification”? Should we understand these rollbacks and eliminations, consciously or not, as an attempt to set in motion (what you call the pipedream of) “managed simplification,” perhaps analogous to a building’s controlled demolition?
RS: Social collapse is best understood as rapid simplification: complexity is shed, eliminated, and abandoned in a kind of adaptive way. But can we do that intentionally, as a society? Maybe. But given the current level of social complexity, there is no way it would not be painful and messy. Furthermore, in the past, even when a large regional or international civilization collapsed, there were still other civilizations and even non-urban, unintegrated social groups around, so the negative effects were limited. Today, we are talking about an interconnected global civilization in which some nations have nuclear weapons, and our development and energy consumption have effects on the entire planet. So who knows?
We can understand degrowth as a leftist theory of intentional simplification, but as hard as it is to imagine a national program of intentional degrowth in the United States, imagining one for the whole world seems patently absurd. And what the Trump administration seems to be doing with the federal government and tariffs might be seen as another kind of intentional simplification, though with different goals. I am interested in both approaches, though I am fundamentally skeptical. The attack by the current administration on the federal government itself and as well on the institutions of modern civil society (such as academia) seems political, that is, a targeted destruction of enemy strongholds with the intention of rebuilding new strongholds on their ashes, one faction of technocrats wiping out another in order to take over the state apparatus, in which case any simplification would be merely temporary and local. But another point I make repeatedly in the book is that we do not actually know what we are doing or why. Musk may think he is doing one thing with DOGE but actually be doing another. The hive mind might be opting for simplification and using Musk as its agent. A bloodied Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt may have been the world-soul on a podium. Who can say? The problem is that not only do we not know what we are doing, we cannot even really comprehend the world we live in. We think we do—we would be insane not to—but we do not.
RSO: As the multifold impasse becomes starker and ever less avoidable, ethical pessimism, you argue, emerges as a viable, realistic, and compassionate stance. Rather than as a vice, Impasse defines pessimism as a virtue individuals should cultivate to lead ethical existences. What are a few of the misapprehensions about pessimism that you seek to dispel to show pessimism’s importance for ethics?
RS: Let me say first of all, it is not their fault. Humans have a very strong, very clear bias toward optimism. We think we are smarter than we are, we think people like us more than they do, we think things are going to turn out better than they will, we think things will take less time than they do, we even tend to remember things turning out better than they did. In addition, American culture is fervently optimistic, from its founding as a shining city on a hill to the conquest of the frontier to late twentieth-century global hegemony and into the age of the internet and Silicon Valley. Especially since World War II, a global cataclysm from which the U.S. emerged relatively unscathed and utterly triumphant, America has been the land of optimism. It suffuses our politics and culture like a saccharine, stupefying drug. The stereotype of the arrogant, ignorant, grinning American abstracts a key element of our character, especially among the ruling class, which is our unshakable faith in progress. From this viewpoint, pessimism is a form of heresy or treason.
The usual charges laid against pessimism are that it is nihilistic, fatalistic, and paralyzing. But this is not criticism so much as slander. Such claims do not even pretend to represent actual thinking but are rather blatant attempts to dismiss pessimism’s discomfiting skepticism without ever having to consider it.
In the book, I discuss pessimism as a topic of psychological research, as a philosophical problem, and as a specific concept that emerges in the eighteenth century as a reaction to the new philosophical optimism in European culture, but we can say that essentially, pessimism is a recognition of human suffering as a core aspect of our existence. Pessimism rejects the idea that suffering can be eradicated, justified, rationalized, or explained away. For the pessimist, human suffering is real.
The conflation between pessimism and nihilism is mistaken. Pessimists are pessimists because they believe that suffering matters, that there is a reality beyond human consciousness, and that these things deserve consideration and respect. As to the question of action, pessimism in no way precludes action; indeed, I believe it fosters a greater sense of responsibility. If you are being optimistic, you can assume things will work out or that someone else will take care of the situation. But a pessimist recognizes that we may just have to do it ourselves. In the book, I cite social science research that backs this up, specifically with regard to climate change: optimistic messaging seems to foster complacency, while pessimistic messaging correlates with an increased sense of agency.[2] The more pessimistic the messaging, the more people seem to feel compelled to do something about it. And perhaps even more importantly, pessimism helps us both make better decisions about what actions to take and be more realistic in our expectations about the results. For these reasons, not only is pessimism more ethical than optimism, but it reveals optimism as ethically empty, if not nihilistic. While pessimism is grounded in the recognition of suffering as an ineradicable and defining characteristic of the human condition, programmatic optimism sees human suffering as something to be eliminated, if not today, then in the future. This is a profoundly totalitarian perspective.
RSO: The pervasive question Impasse poses is: amidst the crises happening now that are on track to worsen as global warming increases, how might one live ethically? The book asks a plethora of related questions. Indeed, Impasse reads to me ultimately more as a book of questions than of answers. Does that seem right, that the book ushers the reader into a space of questioning? If so, how would you characterize that space?
RS: One of the hardest things to live with and internalize about our moment is its wholly unprecedented character. We have changed the Earth more radically in the last eighty years than has ever happened in the entire existence of human beings on the planet, and at the same time we have quadrupled the global human population, from 2 billion to 8 billion, a level of population density never before seen in our species. Never before in the life of the planet has so much carbon been moved from the Earth into the atmosphere so quickly. Never before have novel forms of toxic and nuclear waste, chemical waste, plastic waste, man-made diseases, genetic experiments, and so on been spread across the biosphere, from the ocean depths to the Sahara to the Arctic. And none of the forms of wisdom, insight, ethics, and knowledge that humans developed and carried on from Gilgamesh and Moses and Confucious to the early twentieth century were capable of coping with the planetary nature of human agency in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
There is no map for this territory. We are incapable of comprehending what is happening or where we are headed. The impasse is too complex, too interconnected, too big, and too far beyond anything in our collective history and experience. Our scientific models only give us a vague outline, at best, of what is coming. So anyone who tells you they know something or that they have answers either does not understand the way science works, does not understand the scope of the problem, or has decided at some level to privilege fantasy over reality, perhaps out of sentimental voluntarism, or maybe because they are committed to a particular faith or ideology. So you are absolutely right: Impasse is not a book of answers but of questions. And I am not just interested in asking questions, but in pushing back on a lot of the answers that we have been offered. Even more so, I would say it is a deeply critical book, in the Socratic and Kantian tradition. I am interested in what we can know and what we cannot know, and how those limits impinge on our decision-making in a time of crisis.
RSO: I was reading the proofs of Impasse in the late afternoon of this past January 7. A couple of hours in, I shut my laptop because my partner and I decided to evacuate our residence due to the Eaton Fire.[3] Like hundreds of Altadena and Pasadena residents, we evacuated, not due to any official government notification, but because of the early alert posted on social media by a trusted local weather forecaster and climate activist, Edgar McGregor. When the fire started, my partner and I were among the many residents who largely relied on McGregor and each other to understand the situation, to make life-saving decisions, and to improvise an escape (“Our neighbors texted they are leaving.” “Do I have time to pack a belated ‘go bag’?” “Your sister can take us in, right?” “Get the cat carrier!”). All the Altadena residents who lost their lives lived in an area where official notification to evacuate only arrived nine hours after the fire, stoked by wind strengths close to a hurricane, began to render thousands of homes into ash.[4] How might Impasse speak to situations such as this one?
RS: That is a moving story. I am glad you and your partner made it out safe. Good thing you were not being optimistic! Reading that news story you sent me, it sounds like Edgar McGregor acted with what I would call ethical pessimism.[5] He could have assumed things would be okay or depended on government infrastructure, but he made an informed decision based on his knowledge and experience, considered the stakes, took the worst-case scenario into account, and acted accordingly to help others. Now I realize that this can sound a bit libertarian, which I am not. I wish we could depend on government infrastructure, public schools, democracy, all these things. But we cannot, and the main reason is simply because all these things are people, and people are fallible. But the second reason, unfortunately more and more relevant, is that these systems are too complex and under too much pressure, on top of being underfunded or corrupt or politicized or what have you. We saw this with COVID and we see it again with every climate disaster. With every shock, the system grows a little weaker, a little less plastic, a little closer to collapse.
We must consider and prepare for the worst, not because it is inevitable, but because it could happen. And we must prepare ourselves for the ethical demands that will be made on us when it does. It sounds like McGregor did just that.
RSO: Impasse sets out an impressive array of empirical evidence. Yet Impasse’s claim as to the validity of pessimism would hold independently of any specific empirical evidence (say, America’s failure to meet its Paris Agreement commitments) or of any given situation’s empirical outcome (for example, my residence survived the Eaton Fire). What features of your argumentation entail non-empirical claims? How are these claims articulating a philosophy as distinct from, say, a psychology or a sociology? Or would you say Impasse proceeds entirely in terms of the empirical?
RS: The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi used the term “empirical philosophy” to describe what he does, and I like that description.[6] It speaks to the traditions of American pragmatism, as well as to mid-century interdisciplinary thinkers working with philosophy and history and the social sciences, like Lewis Mumford.
I sort of address this, or at least attempt to, in the book, where I talk about the distinct kinds of knowledge claims I see the sciences and the humanities offering, as well as the epistemological problems we face in making sense of such claims. I also talk about it in the chapter on climate messaging and politics.
Fundamentally, we are caught in this instability between the symbolic and the real. Our efforts to make sense of reality must be grounded in the empirical: in experience, in the observation of phenomena, in evidence. Yet at the same time we are incapable of making sense of such evidence without narrative, conceptual, and metaphysical framing, without pre-empirical biases and heuristics and stories. So ultimately we are caught in this bind between the need to ground our arguments and interpretations in evidence and the fact that all our evidence is always already shaped and biased and often entangled in metaphysical commitments we may not even be aware of. I know scientists usually do science without philosophy, and I know philosophers usually do philosophy without any concern for empirical reality, but these are weaknesses of academic and technocratic specialization. Ideally, when we are philosophizing, we are drawing on actual empirical reality, and ideally scientists would do their work with a certain philosophical sense of its contingency and framing, but that is not really the norm in either case. As a scholar and writer, as someone who has done journalism and literary criticism and studied philosophy, the active dynamic between reality-as-such, insofar as we can apprehend it, and our experience of that reality is the most interesting place to think about any topic.
RSO: Would you assert that your book’s claims about pessimism hold up not just for our fossil-fueled industrial society but also for prior historical periods? And: would these claims be relevant to Neanderthals, homo erectus, and homo habilis? If so, what might that imply? If not, why?
RS: I make a comment in passing that what we call pessimism, the ancients called wisdom. We do not think of Sophocles or William Shakespeare or the author of Deuteronomy as pessimists, but prior to the Enlightenment, most people understood that suffering was an essential part of life, and the idea that we might be able to do away with it in the long sweep of time would have seemed absurd. What redemption there may have been would have had to come from extra-human powers like the divine. This is Gottfried W. Leibniz’s theodicy, explaining and justifying the ways of God to man, rationalizing suffering in a form that gives us the first philosophical sense of optimism: that is, all your suffering will make sense in time.
So in that sense philosophical pessimism is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Philosophical pessimism is a reaction to philosophical optimism, particularly to Enlightenment progressivism. It is a skeptical and critical position that in itself would not have made sense before the emergence of the idea that reason can either justify or solve human suffering. If you look at Genesis or Gilgamesh or Aeschylus, there is no expectation that human beings are capable of explaining or eliminating evil. There may be reasons why bad things happen, but those reasons are not tractable to human will. I doubt homo habilis or Neanderthals were all that concerned with arguing for the omnipotence of human reason.
RSO: Impasse urges readers to drop the Myth of Progress yet to retain a commitment to the future without regard to any specific outcome. This would be a future distinct from progress but also distinct from any specific development whatsoever, an empty placeholder, or, as you write, apophatic. Does dropping the Myth of Progress and rendering the future apophatic imply abandoning the Republic of the United States, which, as a modern republic, is closely entangled with the Myth of Progress and advertises a specific goal for the future: its citizens’ liberty and equality? Or is holding the future open apophatically something only individuals do, while institutions unavoidably posit goals for the future, so any type of government, including a republic, inevitably shuts the door on apophatic futurity?
RS: This is a very tricky question. Because you’re right: the American Republic is a fundamentally progressivist project. It is impossible to imagine America without some kind of relation to a progressivist future. But our faith in the American Republic is not an empirical question. And I do not think American progressivism can cope well with systemic complexity or the problems posed by climate change. Frankly, I do not even think it can cope well with the fact of empire, which has always been a problem for America as a republic but became particularly difficult during and after the Spanish-American war. By the time we get to World War II, the idea that America is a republic at all and not in reality an empire is really doubtful. My previous scholarly book, Total Mobilization, takes up this question among other issues of America’s transition to a global empire, and how the tension between a kind of nationalist commitment to America and a kind of global imperial commitment to liberal capitalism was embodied in the figure of the traumatized soldier. That is a bit far afield from our discussion but the important thing is that the ideology of the republic, the creedal faith in America, is not necessarily based in any reality, nor do I think it responsive to the challenges we face.
That is all something of a preamble to say that, yes, fundamentally, the rejection of progressivism means a rejection of America as we traditionally understand it. The progressivist project has been fundamentally genocidal and racist and all those bad things, and there is no way for it to really escape that dynamic, because progress is always about being better than other people, whether those people are savages or slaves or deplorables or what have you. So I do not personally consider it a great loss, although there were some noble ideals there.
As to the bigger question about whether institutions themselves can be pessimistic, the sociologist Karen Cerulo wrote a remarkable book called Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst, where she looks specifically at two communities that institutionalize a kind of pessimistic thought, namely medical practitioners and computer information technicians. As professionals, these people are always looking for the worst-case scenario, always suspicious of latent problems, and always wrangling with suffering and complexity—definitely pessimists! And she identifies four characteristics these professional communities have in common: a service orientation, porous community boundaries, a formal knowledge base, and high levels of individual autonomy. Now could other institutions adopt this kind of model to internalize and institutionalize ethical pessimism? Maybe. But I’m not sure how that’s translatable to the republic at large.
RSO: And then there is the university. Is not the modern university an institution of and modeled on a republic (the “academic senate,” the university “president”), both offering students an understanding of their majors and introducing them to the reasoning among citizens necessary for the progress of a republic? The modern university seems heavily invested in the Myth of Progress. Could a pessimistic university exist? How would students and professors know if their university has turned pessimistic? Rather than cultivating students’ republican citizenship, would a pessimistic university promote students’ critical distance from that citizenship, and not so as to reform it in some way, but to discard it?
RS: I see you saved the easiest questions for last. The history and composition of the modern university is complicated—I mean, it is an institution with medieval roots that is also deeply modern, went through a massive transformation after World War II, and then was radically transformed again under twenty-first century neoliberalism. Places like Princeton and Oxford still have a vestigial sense of ecclesiastical identity even as thoroughly modern universities. And of course the role of the intellectual, which is not exactly the same as an academic, is, we might say, that of a secularized cleric. In addition—though more in the humanities than in the sciences, not to speak of professional schools—there subsists a vitiated sense of a conservationist mission: part of the scholar’s vocation is to commune with the dead and keep them alive in our cultural memory. It is not pessimistic, but it is also not the same as the much more broadly progressivist and technocratic orientation of the corporate research university. But yes, generally speaking, the modern university is deeply progressivist. It may even be the progressivist institution par excellence, since the whole reason for its existence is, ostensibly, the improvement of society.
As for the idea that the university’s job is to train citizens in critical thinking so they can better participate in democracy, I have never found that persuasive. It is obviously something people believe, and it is a piece of cant that gets circulated in administrative paperwork and funding applications, but it has little to do with reality. If anything, the university trains students to become dutiful office workers. Universities are deeply hierarchical, undemocratic, opaque bureaucracies where both students and faculty are expected to be constantly busy, constantly producing more or less meaningless work, constantly filling out paperwork and submitting applications, constantly alert to status and scandal and vibe, all under the aegis of patently hollow ideals, draped in vacuous platitudes . . . all while extracting as much cash as possible, not only through student tuition but also through financial speculation, sporting events, housing, endless construction, etc.
I am not sure how the modern university could be reformed in any meaningful way, especially given the overwhelming and confounding range of problems the modern university faces, not just the ongoing counter-reformation being led by the Trump administration and activists on the right, but the deleterious effects of the ideological capture that counter-reformation is a backlash against, as well as administrative bloat, corporatization, the parlous state of the job market that students see themselves going into, the replacement of the humanities and sciences by business and computer science, the fact that students do not read, and of course artificial intelligence, which is being increasingly adopted by students and even faculty as a labor-saving device. The university as we know it will not look the same in ten years. How that relates to broader civilizational simplification and crisis is a complex problem that would require its own extensive analysis. And yet even if the prognosis is pretty grim, higher education is nevertheless a great behemoth, likely to survive in some form for a long time—at least I hope so, since it is the industry that provides my livelihood.
RSO: Impasse discusses and aligns itself with varieties of contemporary pessimistic thought, including Ecopessimism, pessimist strains in Posthumanism, and Afropessimism. In the lineage of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida may fall into the optimist camp and even overlap with the Myth of Progress, given how his later work articulates perfectibility notions such as “the democracy to come.”[7] However, drawing on Paul de Man’s work, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller shrug off optimism in two collaborative volumes addressing climate change, Theory and the Disappearing Future and Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols. These two books challenge the Myth of Progress, dismantle ideological evasions of the future’s apophatic withdrawal, situate the human in the rearview mirror, and insist on thinking and acting with the more dire climate scenarios in mind. Might this arguably pessimistic thread of climate thought be resonant with aspects of Impasse?
RS: Absolutely. I have found Colebrook’s work in particular to be helpful for a lot of the phenomena I discuss. And I take a lot of inspiration from the work of Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, and other Afropessimists. I want to take the opportunity to emphasize that the work I am doing in Impasse is not coming out of nowhere. I am building on the work of other people, many of them cited in the book, and I think what I am articulating as our “impasse” and as “ethical pessimism” resonates with a lot of the work other people are doing. My hope is that I have been able to synthesize and consolidate the research I have done and the research other people have done into a compact, legible, and persuasive position that might help move the conversation in a useful way. In particular, I am hoping that we can get past the unthinking and increasingly irrational commitment to solutionism and technological progress and really begin to come to terms with the radical transformation we are living through.
RSO: Who are some of the distinct audiences you seek to reach with Impasse?
RS: My previous work on climate change was taken up by a much broader audience than I ever expected, but while I am hoping that Impasse can speak broadly to the reading public, the most immediate audience I had in mind were other people involved in the conversation on climate change, from journalists and scholars to philosophers and scientists. This book is not conceived as a primer on climate change for people who do not know anything about it, or an attempt to convince people who dismiss the idea that climate change is a serious concern, but rather to point out some of the limits and contradictions in the ways those of us who talk about it talk about it, and offer what I hope might be a new framework for making sense of a situation that paradoxically transcends our capacities for sense-making. I recognize this may seem at some level absurd or self-defeating, but it is important for me to articulate my position. One of my main motivations for writing in general is to create an objective mechanism for addressing some problematic that I find cognitively or emotionally upsetting; to free myself from the grasp of some obsessive concern. With Impasse, I feel as if I have been able to do that to some degree, with some satisfaction, and can now hopefully turn my attention to other more enjoyable or immediate concerns than civilizational collapse and catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, which are massive, depressing phenomena I cannot really do anything about.
RSO: Thank you very much for taking the time to do this interview. A final question: do you have any upcoming projects for which readers should keep an eye out?
RS: Impasse is the product of the work I have been doing on climate change for more than ten years in the public sphere, in the academy, in writing, and in curricular efforts. My hope at this point is to be able to return to more literary projects and literary scholarship. I am interested in pursuing the question of worldhood explored in Impasse, perhaps returning to Mikhail Bakhtin and Martin Heidegger via the work of science fiction writers in the 1960s and 1970s like Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler. I am also interested in the German-Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas, whom I cite in Impasse and whose work has been important to me, but who is much less well known in America than he should be. He is a really interesting thinker whose work addresses bioethics, Gnosticism, Jewish theology, and fundamental ontology in interesting ways. He was a student of Heidegger’s and a close friend of Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Gershom Scholem. His book The Imperative of Responsibility was hugely important for the philosophical development of the German Green Party, so he is someone I am interested in working on.
I also have two novels that I am revising and hope to get out into the world: one a metaphysical thriller about a CIA attempt to infiltrate the collective unconscious, the other a dystopian cli-fi novel. And I have also been learning Biblical Hebrew as a consequence of having converted to Judaism, so I am interested in thinking about what Jewish theology might have to offer when it comes to thinking about philosophical pessimism and climate change. Finally, I am also working on a literary translation of Genesis, maybe for my own edification, maybe for publication, who knows. That all seems a bit down the road and maybe hopelessly optimistic; for now, my main concern is getting Impasse out there and trying to give it the best support I can in a challenging media environment. Thank you so much for taking the time to read the book and think about it and offer such insightful and challenging questions. It has been a pleasure.
Notes
[1] See Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies.
[2] See, for example, Morris et al., “Optimistic vs. Pessimistic Endings in Climate Change Appeals.”
[3] The climate-change-enhanced fire started in Eaton Canyon, adjacent to Altadena and Pasadena, California. See Barnes et al., “Climate Change Increased the Likelihood of Wildfire Disaster in Highly Exposed Los Angeles Area.”
[4] See Ortiz and Schuppe, “All 17 Deaths in Eaton Fire Were in a Zone Where Evacuation Orders Took Hours to Arrive.”
[5] See Hopkins, “How Two Words from a 24-Year-Old Pasadena Climate Specialist Saved Hundreds of Lives.”
[6] According to al-Gharbi, “many philosophical questions can be explored through empirical investigation rather than relying primarily (or exclusively) on logical arguments, counterfactuals, abstract models, or intuitions. Those theories which are testable should be tested—and at the very least, philosophical positions should be informed and constrained by empirical realities” (al-Gharbi, “Bio”).
[7] See Derrida, The Other Heading.
Works Cited
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