Overview of Key Elements of Quinn’s Analysis

Dr. Ari Santas

Why We are Angry and Paranoid of Impending Doom

A quick image search for ‘Apocalypse’ shows a rich array of depictions from a full spectrum of ideological standpoints. The preoccupation is pandemic. We seem to be preoccupied with talk of impending doom. In my generation, it was a fear of a nuclear holocaust that was always buzzing around the background of our thinking. Today, we have a more diverse and rich set of worries about the fate of the planet. The news media, in their mad efforts to capture our attention, have seemingly become fixated on these possibilities and the controversies surrounding them.Most recently, it was the Mayan Calendar end-times prophesy. People gave up their belongings and put great deals of personal energy into getting their lives in order before the final judgment of the apocalypse. Prior to that, we had the Y2K scare with the coming of the new millennium. It seems there’s always a good reason in the mind of the public to fear that we may be heading for the end of it all.

And yet, environmentalists and scientists have often been branded as alarmist—derided as a species of “Chicken Little”

Worse, they’ve been accused of perpetrating hoaxes in order to scare the public into unreasonably regulating businesses (in their innocent attempts to secure profit)

“man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

--Senator James Inhofe (2003)

It’s as if on some level, we all know that there is something terribly wrong with the world, but we really don’t know how to talk about it on the same level. Scientists, with their specialized knowledge, are marginalized in the popular mind. They seem aloof and strange, often speaking a different language than the rest of us, speaking of remote entities populating a universe that our minds do not inhabit. Given this estrangement, it is no wonder that their warning calls about our destructive policy and practice are readily dismissed, whether it’s Rachel Carson’s critique of our pesticide addiction, or Erlich and Erlich’s forewarnings of a population explosion, or the contemporary call to rapidly shift our energy policies away from the fossil fuels so woven into our daily lives.

Many environmentalist and scientists respond with contempt, not only for the energy lobby and its allies, but for the masses—those who are hypnotized by the soothing reassurance that everything is just fine, keep on living that life of excess; you deserve it. Reflecting on these features of our thinking, I cannot help but think of the irony. It’s as if we shift back and forth, as a public, from mass fear of impending doom, brought down upon us for not living right, to angry denial that we could possibly be bringing about calamitous consequences from our addiction to excess.

But the evidence is mounting; and it is becoming more and more clear--to even the non-specialists--that we face a crisis. I can tell you that since I began teaching about this issue 20 years ago, the attitude, at least among college students, about our environmental impact has evolved. Yet this does not mean people are generally more active in changing how they live. First we have to get angry and find someone to blame--preferably someone else. It’s as if we have to go through Kubler Ross’s stages of grief before we can muster the will to move into the new lives we will have to lead. Like the heralds of the apocalypse, we become condemners of humanity: we all deserve to die. It’s easier to indict human nature than change one’s behavior.

Cultural Assumptions

Novelist Daniel Quinn argues that the apocalyptic tendency is a function of our disconnect from nature. He also contends that the wholesale condemnation of humanity is a natural consequence of our adoption of a way of life that is fundamentally flawed (not human nature itself).

The problem is that we embarked on a civilizational journey thousands of years ago which is doomed to failure. Quinn suggests that we are angry because we feel powerless, and that we feel powerless because we are living lives in which we are charged with a duty impossible to dispense. We think we are somehow different than the rest of creation, that we are destined to own it and control it for our own sake, and that we don’t have to play by the same rules required of all other living things. The past few hundred years have shattered this illusion: we are not at the center of the universe; and we cannot do whatever we want on the planet without enduring some consequences.

A Parable

Quinn tells us that it’s not human nature that’s the problem, but a particular type of culture bringing us to the crises that we now face. To illustrate, he offers a parable…

  • Quinn likens our civilizational journey to the failed first attempts at human flight
  • We knew and understood a relevant law—that of gravity, but had no clue about the laws of aero-dynamics
  • Similarly, we know that all living things die, but we do not understand the laws of how to live in the world
  • Quinn further contends that as we start to see there may be a problem, since we think it’s our job to rule the planet, are disinclined to believe we got it wrong…
  • The first response is to continue what we’ve always done and that will solve the problem

Old habits die hard; and institutions die even harder. They want to live, and they want to do what they’ve always done. Individuals in such a system will resist the idea that what they’ve always done and have always been told to do is wrong—especially if they’ve been well rewarded by that system. Oil was a miracle fuel, as was DDT a miracle answer to the malaria epidemic, and cocaine was a wonderful additive stimulant in Coca-Cola (“for a quick lift, drink coke”). But large scale use of each of these in time brought their drawbacks into sharp relief. Even T. Boone Pickens said, “I’ve been an oilman my whole life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of.”

Doomed to Crash

So we are in the environmental age and the era of sustainability. Whether one accepts the complicated arguments of the climate scientist, the logic of sustainability is inescapable. Non-renewable resources will run out sooner or later, and our use of them is accelerating. That by itself is reason to change our habits. Running a global economy based on growth, in a supporting system that is finite, must of necessity lead to a crash! To think otherwise is insane.

What Next?

Quinn further suggests that the failed attempts are likely to continue and the survivors are likely to rebuild their ill-designed machines and go at it again. Similarly, survivors of past failed civilizations have picked up and started again and again on the same unsound principles. Quinn contends that changing one’s practices requires a shift in attitude. He calls this shift “adopting adifferent story” about who we are and our place on the planet. If we do not change the main principle of our story, nothing will change. “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.”Quinn suggests that there is such a principle and it is a simple peace-keeping law that limits competitive behavior in all living things.

The Peace-Keeping Law

The peacekeeping law, followed by all creatures and all peoples before and outside of what we call civilization is this:

  • You can compete like all other creatures on the planet, but you may not wage war
  • Acts of conquest, dominion, exploitation all violate this law
  • They all assume that there is an owner of the realm
  • The world does not belong to humans; we belong to the world

Quinn doesn’t suggest this slogan as a feel-good sentiment to be recited around your hippie friends at some campfire. It serves as a warning: we are not in control. Violators of this law will become extinct. And it serves as a reminder: The problem is not human nature, but a failed human experiment in dominion. Quinn argues that we must give up on the idea that we are the rulers of the planet, that it was made for us, and that we are supposed to conquer it. We must adopt an earlier story from human history that we belong to the earth and that we are to find a way to live in it with the rest of creation. This is not simply a feel-good slogan; it is a warning. We are not flying; we are in free fall.