James Scott comes to this subject as a radical anti-statist, toward the end of a long career producing genuinely scintillating works of academic dissidence with titles like The Art of Not Being Governed, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, and Two Cheers for Anarchism. Harari’s is a stranger approach, but also more telling—a from-the-roots reconsideration of our collective faith in human progress, put forward and gobbled up in the midst of an ecological crisis of our own making. Harari has spoken movingly of the way his own coming out, as a gay man, has shaped his skepticism about human metanarratives as pervasive as heterosexuality and progress; and, though trained as a military historian, he has arrived in the spotlight of popular acclaim, praised by Bill Gates and Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, as a sort of expositor of myth. The central exposition is this: society is and always has been bound together by collective fictions, no less now than in earlier eras, with values like progress and rationality taking the place once held by religion and superstition. Harari is a historian, but his worldview grafts the pretense of science onto the philosophical skepticism familiar from contrarians as diverse as David Hume and John Gray. You could also name the whole line of French theorists, from Lyotard to Foucault and beyond.
“The story that has ruled our world in the past few decades is what we might call the Liberal Story,” Harari wrote in 2016, a month before the election of Donald Trump, in an essay that both basically predicted Trump’s election and outlined what it would mean to the world’s collective faith in the establishment. “It was a simple and attractive tale, but it is now collapsing, and so far no new story has emerged to fill the vacuum.”
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If you strip out the perception of progress from history, what is left?
From here, it is hard, if not impossible, to see clearly what will emerge from the clouds of uncertainty around global warming—what forms we allow climate change to take, let alone what those forms will do to us. But it will not take a worst-case warming to deliver ravages dramatic enough to shake the casual sense that as time marches forward, life improves ineluctably. Those ravages are likely to begin arriving quickly: new coastlines retreated from drowned cities; destabilized societies disgorging millions of refugees into neighboring ones already feeling the pinch of resource depletion; the last several hundred years, which many in the West saw as a simple line of progress and growing prosperity, rendered instead as a prelude to mass climate suffering. Exactly how we regard the shape of history in a time of climate change will be shaped by how much we do to avert that change and how much we let it remodel everything about our lives. In the meantime, possibilities fan out as extravagantly as the paint chips on a color wheel.
We still don’t know all that much about how humans before the arrival of agriculture, statehood, and “civilization” regarded the course of history—though it was a favorite pastime of early modern philosophers to imagine the inner lives of precivilized people, from “nasty, brutish, and short” to idyllic, carefree, unencumbered.
Another perspective, which offers another model of history, is the cyclical one: familiar from the harvest calendar, the Stoic Greek theory of ekpyrosis and the Chinese “dynastic cycle,” and appropriated for the modern era by thinkers as seemingly teleological as Friedrich Nietzsche, who made the cycles of time a moral parable with his “eternal recurrence”; Albert Einstein, who considered the possibility of a “cyclic” model of the universe; Arthur Schlesinger, who saw American history as alternating periods of “public purpose” and “private interest”; and Paul Michael Kennedy, in his circumspect history lesson for the end of the Cold War, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Perhaps Americans today see history as progressive only because we were raised in the time of its empire, having more or less borrowed the British perspective from the time of theirs.
But climate change isn’t likely to deliver a neat or complete return to a cyclical view of history, at least in the premodern sense—in part because there will be nothing neat, at all, about the era ushered in by warming. The likelier outcome is a much messier perspective, with teleology demoted from its position as an organizing, unifying theory, and, in its place, contradictory narratives running uncorralled, like animals unleashed from a cage and moving in all directions at once. But if the planet reaches three or four or five degrees of warming, the world will be convulsed with human suffering at such a scale—so many million refugees, half again as many wars, droughts and famines, and economic growth made impossible on so much of the planet—that its citizens will have difficulty regarding the recent past as a course of progress or even a phase in a cycle, or in fact anything but a true and substantial reversal.
The possibility that our grandchildren could be living forever among the ruins of a much wealthier and more peaceful world seems almost inconceivable from the vantage of the present day, so much do we still live within the propaganda of human progress and generational improvement. But of course it was a relatively common feature of human history before the advent of industrialization. It was the experience of the Egyptians after the invasion of the Sea Peoples and the Incas after Pizarro, the Mesopotamians after the Akkadian Empire, and the Chinese after the Tang Dynasty. It was—so famously that it grew into caricature, which then spawned decades of rhetorical critique—the experience of Europeans after the fall of Rome. But in this case, the dark ages would arrive within one generation of the light—close enough to touch, and share stories, and blame.
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This is what is meant when climate change is described as a revenge of time. “Man-made weather is never made in the present,” Andreas Malm writes in The Progress of This Storm, his powerful sketch of a political theory for a time of climate change. “Global warming is a result of actions in the past.”
It’s a tidy formulation, and one that vividly illustrates both the scale and the scope of the problem, which appears as the product of several long centuries of carbon-burning that also produced most of what we think of today as the comforting features of modern life. In that way, climate change does make us all prisoners of the Industrial Revolution, and suggests a carceral model of history—progress arrested by the consequences of past behavior. But while the climate crisis was engineered in the past, it was mostly in the recent past; and the degree to which it transforms the world of our grandchildren is being decided not in nineteenth-century Manchester but today and in the decades ahead.
Disorientingly, climate change will also send us hurtling forward into an uncharted future—so long forward, if it proceeds unchecked, and into such a distant future, that we can hardly imagine the scale. This is not the “techno-shock” first experienced by Victorians encountering an accelerating pace of progress and feeling overwhelmed by just how much was changing within a single lifetime—though we are now acquainting ourselves with that kind of change, as well. It is more like the overwhelming awe felt by those naturalists contemplating the ancient-beyond-ancient historical grandeur of the earth, and calling it deep time.
But climate change inverts the perspective—giving us not a deep time of permanence but a deep time of cascading, disorienting change, so deep that it mocks any pretense of permanence on the planet. Pleasure districts like Miami Beach, built just decades ago, will disappear, as will many of the military installations erected around the world since World War II to defend and secure the wealth that gave rise to them. Much older cities, like Amsterdam, are also under threat from flooding, with extraordinary infrastructure needed already today to keep them above water, infrastructure unavailable to defend the temples and villages of Bangladesh. Farmlands that had produced the same strains of grain or grapes for centuries or more will adapt, if they are lucky, to entirely new crops; in Sicily, the breadbasket of the ancient world, farmers are already turning to tropical fruits. Arctic ice that formed over millions of years will be unleashed as water, literally changing the face of the planet and remodeling shipping routes responsible for the very idea of globalization. And mass migrations will sever communities numbering in the millions—even tens of millions—from their ancestral homelands, which will disappear forever.