On letting go

ABSTRACT

Massively disruptive climate change, now inevitable, is the worst tragedy which human beings have yet brought on themselves. It is tragic in the full classical sense – a disaster entailed on the protagonist (here, humanity) by destructive weaknesses inherent in crucial strengths and virtues. There is thus no way of avoiding it by picking and choosing among our values, and its effects can neither be compensated for nor mitigated by prospective gains to offset against anticipated losses. But once we have discarded a strained and wilful last-ditch optimism, and recognised that we are not in control, we will still need to find genuine hope if we are to have any chance of coming through. This requires us to embrace the transformative power of tragic experience, letting go of values which we may hitherto have regarded as sacrosanct and welcoming the creative destruction of current assumptions and expectations as an affirmation of life.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• enlightenment
• hope
• optimism
• sustainability
• tragedy
• values

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Ch2, v3; from Chen (1989).

2. And not, I can now add, the Trump presidency – though this will certainly bring climate tragedy on us more swiftly and decisively, and also exemplifies in its own way the tragic crisis of Enlightenment values which I discuss below.

3. I have discussed this problem in detail in Foster (2008).

4. By we I mean, for the present: those capable of such thinking.

5. “Hector is dead and there’s a light in Troy;

We that look on but laugh in tragic joy” (‘The Gyres’ in Yeats 1967, 337).

6. At the close of all great tragic drama, nothing remotely to be described as an unqualified positive is ever asserted. (The reader is invited to test this claim against his or her own reading.)