Pandemics, war, dolphins, civilization and the rewriting of our imaginations

“A world ends when its metaphor has died”

-Archibald MacLeish 

Path in the Fog, Claude Monet, 1887

1 August 2022 (Crete, Greece) – This past weekend, as I was packing for my return home to Crete for my annual 2-month escape from headlines and the social media firehose, I was flipping through Dylan Howard’s book on the history of COVID, one of several recent histories stuffed into my book satchel. Lord, how the pandemic bookshelf will just keep growing.

And I was re-reading a few bits of Charles Arthur’s brilliant new book, Social Warming, a brilliant analysis of modern social media and communication. Charles (we are long-time friends; first name basis) pretty much lays it out: how we actually know our primal instincts kick-in and keep us obsessed with stressful news – and social-media platfos are designed to keep us hooked. Yes, we all wish we could avoid “doomscrolling” or “doomsurfing” or whatever it’s called today, but it is a struggle.

In April 2020, Merriam-Webster added “doomscrolling” to its “Words We’re Watching” list, the same year Oxford English Dictionary named “doomscrolling” its word-of-the-year, noting finance reporter Karen Ho is widely credited with originating the term in October 2018 on Twitter but also noting the phenomenon itself actually predates the coining of the term.

In his COVID book, Dylan Howard summarizes the U.S. social media firehose over the 2+ years when it seemed the entire social conversation focused only on two topics: the pandemic and the protests to the pandemic. But, as he notes, the coronavirus didn’t break America. It simply revealed what was already broken. When it hit, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills – a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public – had gone untreated for years. Americans had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity — to shock Americans with the recognition that its entire society was in a “high-risk” category. And not just from COVID. It is hard to imagine how we would have experienced 9/11 in the era of Facebook and Twitter, but the pandemic provides a suggestive example.

Put that together with the war in Ukraine and it is not hard not to think that the world has come to a critical juncture, a point of possibly catastrophic collapse. Multiple simultaneous crises – many of epic proportions, an age of permacrisis – and you will raise doubts that liberal democracies can ever govern their way through them. In fact, it is vanishingly rare to hear anyone say otherwise.

I mean, my God – it was less than 30 years ago that scores of scholars, pundits, and political leaders were confidently proclaiming “the end of history”. These were folks that had not read Lewis Lapham, George Packer, and Daniel Rodgers who kept saying (and writing) “it never ended”. Those last 3 have been writing for years that we were going through not only geopolitical and economic dislocations but also historic technological dislocations. It would pose a mega-challenge to liberal democratic governance  – which, quite frankly, was an understatement. As history shows, the threat of chaos, uncertainty, weakness, and indeed ungovernability always favors the authoritarian, the man on horseback who promises stability, order, clarity – and through them, strength and greatness.

Over 10 years ago Daniel Rodgers laid out a broad hypothesis: the rise of the Internet would lead to the breakup of governments and nation-states, and the emergence of new competitors, thanks to the democratization of consumer choice and the demise of territorial boundaries as a constraint, just as had already begun happening in most private-sector businesses and industries. Rebellion against supranational organizations, sovereign citizen movements, the rise and eventual supremacy of individuated politics and party fracturing (and most every other feature of politics we have seen in the last decade) would flow logically from the consequences of the Internet’s emergence. As the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol unfolded live on television on 6 January 2021 Rodgers avoided a “I-told-you-so” moment to which he was rightly entitled. 

We are in fact living through technological change on the scale of the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution, but it is occurring in only a fraction of the time. What we are experiencing today – the breakdown of all existing authority, primarily but not exclusively governmental – is if not a predictable result, at least an unsurprising one. All of these other features are just the localized spikes on the longer sine wave of history.

And in the United Staes – oh, God, help them. There are not one but two Americas: Biden voters and Trump voters, city-dwellers and rural Americans, vaccine enthusiasts and anti-vaxxers, MSNBC habitués and Fox News loyalists, BLM cheerers-on and MAGA advocates – and, of course, blue states and red states. Everything in America passes through the filter of partisan allegiance, not just how you vote and what you watch and read but who you know, where you live, where you shop, what you say. “Hatred of the Other” and fear of being misidentified as a member of the opposite clique form the basis of America’s warring political cultures. If they have quibbles with their own side, partisans are sure about one thing: Evil is on the other side. In America, you demonize your enemies and demand purity from your friends. It has ceased to be a country of give-and-take. National fracture is not fun.

Yes. Perhaps too black and white. From the perspective of the historian, this is not a necessarily persuasive way of thinking about things. Those who bring such an approach to the analysis of contemporary politics typically draw accusations of cultivating a nihilistic bias in favor of an indefensible status quo, or of being a “useful idiot” for the other side.

Besides, as I have noted before, although I am no longer a U.S. citizen I find myself irrevocably tangled in America’s hopes, arrogance, and despair. Anti-American? That’s usually used by the American establishment to discredit and, not falsely – but shall we say inaccurately – define its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he or she will be judged before they are heard, and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride.

So how, then, did we come to this disruptive return on a global basis? Explanations abound, from the collapse of industrial economies and the post–Cold War order to the racist, nativist, and ultranationalist backlash these have produced; from the accompanying widespread revolt against institutions, elites, and other sources of authority to the social media business models and algorithms that exploit and exacerbate anger and division; from sophisticated methods of information warfare intended specifically to undercut confidence in truth or facts to the rise of authoritarian personalities in virtually every major country, all skilled in exploiting these developments. These are all perfectly good explanations. Indeed, they are interconnected and collectively help to explain our current state.

But as Occam’s razor tells us, the simplest explanation is often the best. And there is a far simpler explanation for why we find ourselves in this precarious state: The widespread breakdowns and failures of governance and authority we are experiencing are driven by, and largely explicable by, underlying changes in technology.

But that also means you need to deal with the lack of inherent ideological content in any given technology, because our technological realities consistently give metaphorical shape to our ideological constructs. So you really need to step back and think it all through. See what is really happening, or at least appears to be happening. Knee-jerk reactions need not apply.

Hence I opened this post with a quote from the poet Archibald MacLeish because we are at a moment of transition from a rupture in the old patterns of apprehending reality to the construction of a new metaphor when leadership and real thinking really matters most. Rupture can come with a whimper, in which a way of seeing the world finally succumbs to the entropy of the outmoded. Or it can come with a bang, such as a devastating war (read: Ukraine which will get separate treatment in a companion post). The daunting challenge, in either case, is how to convincingly frame the shifting spirit.

And so this summer I will return (finally) to my mega-piece in progress, “Ruminations aboard the Shipwreck Civilization”. It’ll be an e-book but it is taking an inordinate amount of time not only because of the volume of material to be consumed and footnoted and linked, but because of the design of the graphics.

I’ve been wrestling with all of this over the past 6 years. I have an enormous folder labeled “SHIPWRECK” into which I’ve shoved handwritten and typewritten notes, made in various states of intense reflection, disquietude, and hope. When I took the folder out this morning, spread across my kitchen table, alas its contents did not miraculously assemble themselves into the outline of an e-book – as the mountain of peas, beans, and grains sorted themselves out for Psyche in the Greek myth. But they did remind me how persistently certain realities and urgencies had been haunting me over a period of time. And while Psyche’s task was to separate legume from groat, millet grain from lentil , my task is different – it is rather a work of connection.

But that folder is exploding with content because much of what I write down is merely for my own sanity after event after event after event (after event) explodes across my screen. As more happens I feel we know less because each new fact, each new event makes us forget the earlier blast.

But before I disappear from your screens for a long bit, just a few thoughts and reflections.

Dolphins at play in Malta, April 2020

A few days after I posted the above video on Twitter and Linkedin it blew up: 844,000 hits on Twitter and 78,000 hits on Linkedin. Reuters interviewed me about the clip. The video was filmed by my cousin using an iPhone 11 Pro, off the coast of Gozo (a small island which is part of Malta) but dolphins also reappeared in even the (normally) very busy harbor near my home in Sliema, Malta.

As sea pollution levels dropped (no pleasure boats, no freighters, etc.), large numbers of dolphins returned to the waters around Malta after being absent for years.

Malta maintains a state-of-the-art marine park and research facility for dolphins and sea lions, as well as tropical birds and reptiles. The park has daily shows to give you a better understanding of their lives. Dolphin communication and behavior is extensively studied.

There have always been some “in-the-wild” dolphins around Malta but nothing like the number we were seeing. Just as we do here in Greece (my other home), dolphin movements are plotted based on GPS positions. We *guesstimate* a normal, nearby dolphin population of 50-60 but we rarely see that many. During the COVID lockdowns? We tracked about 150. 

I spoke with two Malta-based marine biologists about this phenomena. They explained that dolphins are incredibly sensitive to noise, the auditory cortex of their brains being highly developed. A dolphin auditory nerve is about twice the diameter of the human nerve. Because of this, dolphins are capable of detecting noise and traffic from a great distance. But underwater noise, generated by marine vessels, underwater excavations and construction or pile driving as well as acoustic surveys, can be detrimental to the mammals, causing disturbances which will alter their migratory pathways.

Malta’s harbors and other areas close to shore are populated with fish farms where dolphins would love to feast, but ship and boat traffic keeps them away. In 2020, they deemed it safe to come in and the biologists reported dolphin pods (groups) came in – not singular dolphins, because it is normally in a pod that will search for food. This comports with a similar event, also off the Gozo coast, a number of years ago. A massive storm swept the shoreline. Ship traffic halted for 3 days. The pods came in.

This species of dolphin inhabits warm and temperate seas and are found everywhere except for the Antarctic Circle and Arctic regions.

Many people on Twitter who watched the video asked me “how high can dolphins jump?!” Aquariums/marine parks train dolphins to jump anywhere from 15-30 ft above the water to put on a show for audiences. In-the-wild? The marine biologists tell me 20 ft jumps are average. And dolphins also jump sometimes for no practical aims whatsoever.

The same thing was happening near my home in Crete. As the pandemic has led to lockdowns, ship and boat traffic came (almost) to a standstill. Sea turtles ventured back into the harbors which are usually swamped with shipping traffic. In the video above you’ll see a loggerhead turtle, pretty common across the Crete shoreline.

So my wife and I self-isolated (in a way), getting off the grid, and returning to Crete to continue an ongoing project we started a number of years ago: volunteer work with a sea turtle research and conservation organization based in Chania which is on a mission to protect endangered sea turtles and their natural habitats. They offer a very unique learning experience to the volunteers who join their efforts, and promote public awareness. To achieve their goals, they operate a science-based research and conservation project in collaboration with local and national authorities. My wife and I volunteer as well as provide funding for their research efforts, and every year we sponsor two oceanography students who will spend part of their summer at the centre.

This year I return to pick-up where I left off, using the silence and space for thoughts to unfurl in whatever direction, undisturbed by the “real” world, focused on the subjects I noted above, replete with my paper notebooks and the joy of making lists and diagrams and flow-charts (with four different colored pens!!) and some (pathetic) illustrations. I wanted to use those notebooks … automatic error-correction is never the default … and go over and over the same material, adjusting, correcting, copying out, underlining, coloring . . . the way that tactile, childish and seemingly pointless activities always seem to force you to examine things in every detail, from every available point of view.

The aim is to return to my study of climate eschatology, that a warming Earth will radically change life as we know it, that we can’t change it, so let’s just face the adjustments we’ll need to make because we are doomed. Yes, a pessimistic view. I also want to finish my re-read of the work of Rachel Carson. While everybody knows Silent Spring, it’s her books and articles about the sea … exploring the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths … that deserve more attention. She was incredibly prescient about what was happening to the seas due to exploitation, and even more so about what she perceived was the growing “government assault on science and nature”.

And she wrote about our plundering of wildlands, disrupting established ecological niches, destroying life cycles. No, she did not write about novel diseases, such as Ebola, HIV, Marburg, and SARS, or human infectious diseases having a zoonotic origin. But she wrote about how humans do not operate within their ecosystems in the same way as other species, even other top-level predators. That we don’t have “an ecological niche” but that we dominate and alter the local ecosystems. That we are part of a massive biosphere … blundering into ecosystems we are part of but destroy.

And boy was she prescient. We have discovered that pandemics aren’t just for humans – they sweep through the plant world, too. As the planet warms, devastating diseases are being carried to new lands by the infrastructure of global capitalism, wreaking havoc on undefended crops and ecosystems.

Yeah, a tsunami of material to read. With a high level of complexity. But I want to grapple with it because the unprecedented uncertainty amid the coronavirus pandemic … especially the data … has decimated our carefully laid plans and unsettled our minds at equal pace. This coronavirus, with its health, social, scientific and economic impacts, has made the content production engine of this world go into overdrive, leaving most of us struggling within an infodemic. But I need to at least chip into the trove, even if just a small bit.

Because this disease is shape-shifting before our eyes. The most bedeviling confusion has arisen around the relationship of the disease to breathing, lung function, and oxygenation levels in the blood — typically, for a respiratory illness, a quite predictable relationship. It’s not unheard of, of course, for a disease to express itself in complicated or hard-to-parse ways, attacking or undermining the functioning of a variety of organs. And it’s common, as researchers and doctors scramble to map the shape of a new disease, for their understanding to evolve quite quickly. But the degree to which doctors and scientists are still feeling their way, as though blindfolded, toward a true picture of the disease cautions against any sense that things have stabilized, given that our knowledge of the disease hasn’t even stabilized.

Yes, other massive shocks will strike global civilization. But I suspect we’ll muck this up and not remember what worked/didn’t work. Coronavirus is not a dress rehearsal – it’s too deadly for that. But it is the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, will we be familiar with how they feel? Or will it all be forgotten?

In many ways, we’ve finally been forced into a “Big Think”. Let’s thank the dolphins. We’ve been lagging behind the times in which we live. The “Anthropocene”, the “Great Acceleration”, the “Age of Climate Change” – whatever in hell you want to call it – has shown how out of synch with the biosphere we’ve been, wasting our children’s hopes for a normal life, burning our ecological capital as if it were disposable income, wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair.

Fix it? Repair it? Eh, I’m a cynic. But at least we all seem to be thinking about it. We grasp the complexity of our civilization. We feel the reality, which is that the whole system is a technical improvisation that science and technology keeps from crashing down.

Kim Stanley, the science fiction writer, posted a long essay and I think he nails it, and I’ll close this post with him. He noted that people who study climate change talk about “the tragedy of the horizon.” The tragedy is that we don’t care enough about those future people, our descendants, who will have to fix, or just survive on, the planet we’re now wrecking. We like to think that they’ll be richer and smarter than we are and so able to handle their own problems in their own time. He writes:

But we’re creating problems that they’ll be unable to solve. You can’t fix extinctions, or ocean acidification, or melted permafrost, no matter how rich or smart you are. The fact that these problems will occur in the future lets us take a magical view of them. We go on exacerbating them, thinking—not that we think this, but the notion seems to underlie our thinking—that we will be dead before it gets too serious. The tragedy of the horizon is often something we encounter, without knowing it, when we buy and sell. The market is wrong; the prices are too low. Our way of life has environmental costs that aren’t included in what we pay, and those costs will be borne by our descendents. We are operating a multigenerational Ponzi scheme.

In my wild Imaginings I see geologists from a future civilization examining the layers of rock that are in the slow process of forming today. In the same way we examine the rock strata that formed as the dinosaurs died off. That civilization will see evidence of our sudden (in geological terms) impact on the planet – including fossilised plastics and layers both of carbon, from burning carbon fuels, and of radioactive particles, from nuclear testing and explosions – just as clearly as we see evidence of the dinosaurs’ rapid demise. We can already observe our layers forming today.

As to our societal and political fracture? As to understanding the complexity, the deep underlying themes in societal evolution? The structure, the perspective, the bias? Oh, I’m sure they’ll be consulting “Ruminations aboard the Shipwreck Civilization”.