Kenan Malik writes:

The kind of facile optimism that a figure such as Boris Johnson exudes is deeply obnoxious. It’s a way of avoiding the issues, of pretending that we can resolve our problems by not thinking deeply about them, but by simply asserting “we can do it”.

There is something equally objectionable about unthinking pessimism. About the insistence that a social problem is so beyond control that we cannot avoid catastrophe or so deeply rooted that it cannot be dug out. Yet this often seems to be the default setting for so many political discussions, from racism to the refugee crisis. And on no issue more so than climate change.

Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, has given “Advice to Young People as They Face Annihilation”. Describing social collapse after unchecked climate change, he warned in graphic terms that “this is what is going to happen to your generation”: “A gang of boys will break into your house demanding food. They will see your mother, your sister, your girlfriend and they will gang rape her on the kitchen table… They’ll take a cigarette and burn out your eyes with it… That is the reality of climate change.”

It’s difficult to know what such nihilistic despair is supposed to achieve or how imagining the world as a Mad Max film would make people more willing to take action. The novelist Jonathan Franzen insisted in the New Yorker magazine that people need to stop “denying reality” and tell “ourselves the truth” that climate change “can’t be solved”. “Every day, instead of thinking of breakfast,” he suggested, “they have to think about death.”

Not surprisingly, this sense of bleakness and futility has seeped into wider culture. A recent international survey of young people found that 75% believed “the future is frightening”, 56% thought “humanity is doomed” and 39% were “hesitant to have children”.

Climate change is a critical issue and one that will require considerable political will and social resolve to challenge. Hallam and Franzen and similar thinkers insist that only an apocalyptic vision will persuade people to take action. In reality, as the environmental journalist Hannah Ritchie has observed: “Once anger transitions into hopelessness, we struggle to achieve much at all.” Telling people that there is no future is hardly conducive to getting them to act to change it. [Continue reading…]