'With climate change threatening the stability of our civilization, optimism is a meaningful survival strategy — the antidote to nihilism, which is a paralyzing state.' onesarahjones writes
Photo: Bryan R. Smith/AFP/Getty Images The planet is dying, and novelist Jonathan Franzen thinks it’s time to move on. “You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction,” he writes in a recent issue of The New Yorker. “Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.” But hope, as Franzen defines it, is a small and fragile thing. He endangers it further with his own pessimism.
Franzen is not the first person to tell the left that its dreams are too lofty for the world. It’s a familiar enough argument, applied not just to the Green New Deal but to any left-wing bid to avert disaster in the making. Extreme wealth inequality, for example, lacks the specific timetable of ecological collapse, but it is a global problem that brings us closer to social breakdown as it worsens.
Climate disaster is not a one-off, binary proposition. It occurs on a gradient, and so too will its consequences. Our actions will help determine the severity of our dystopia. We can blunt the effects of climate change, but the work will be difficult, and will be made more difficult by people like Franzen, who look toward the future and shrug. One cannot build a political movement on helplessness.
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