None of This is Normal
The Boiling Planet. The Pandemic. The Dying Planet. The Collapse. The Fascism. None of This is Remotely Normal.
“It’s not.” My wife, the doctor, said it, her eye flashing. Anger? Disappointment? Maybe both.
“It’s not what?” I asked. I’d been half-listening, the way husbands do, absent-minded, a dozen things running through my head.
“Normal.” She rolled her eyes.
I thought about it for a moment. She was — as she usually is — exactly right.
One of the creepiest trends in the world today is what you might call the normalisation of catastrophe. We’re in a deeply strange place. The world around us faces a staggering number of worst-case scenarios, all coming true at once. Planet boiling? Check. Pandemic? Fresh wave of it? Check, check. Megadrought, megafire, megaflood? The litany of catastrophe is almost Biblical — not just in its fury, but in its sheer range, how many there are, simultaneously.
And yet, human beings being what they are, our minds altogether too malleable and adaptable, our institutions lulling us into a false sense of comfort, seem to have normalised all this. Let me continue with my example.
My wife was talking about Britain’s Covid numbers. They’re exploding, all over again, thanks to a government whose indifference and stupidity verges on the stuff of epic tragedy, comedy, or both. And yet, by now, don’t many of us have a routine that goes something like this? “Oh, the Covid numbers were what? So many thousand a day?” Shrug. What can you do? I guess this just is how it is now.
Covid’s a perfect example of the normalisation of catastrophe. It feels like it’s been an eternity, though it’s only been eighteen months and change. And yet by now many of us are used to this strange ritual. The daily numbers, creeping up here, creeping down there. A fresh wave arrives. How many people were vaccinated? Maybe we even run a quick little mental calculation, if we’re sharp, brave, aware of the facts. Here’s how the exponent of the pandemic is rising today.
Just another day in paradise.
My wife was correct to say that we’ve normalised it. And that normalising it — catastrophe — is wrong. It’s profoundly abnormal.To live through this age, an era like this.
Why do I say that? I think most of us grossly, grossly, underestimate — even now — just how incredibly, staggeringly abnormal this age already is. That’s not surprising, because, well, the media has failed us badly, never really informing us well of basic facts, let alone their implications. Our politicians exploit all the chaos for power, instead of leading us through the deadly rapids.
Our institutions profiteer off our misery and death and ignorance. So it’s hardly a surprise that most of us underestimate how abnormal the age we’re in now really is — even if, knowing it on some instinctive level, frightened out of our goddamned wits, we turn to fundamentalist religion, fanaticism, weird fringe movements, regress and nostalgically long for a bygone age, wed ourselves to supremacism, have the American panic response of buying guns, believing Jesus meant “go forth and deny your neighbour healthcare,” and hating immigrants. We might not know it, but it’s impossible to deny, deep down in our lizard brains: this age feels a whole lot like the end of the goddamned world.
So let’s do a quick run through of how deeply abnormal this age really is.
How many times has life on planet earth been annihilated? Not as in “come to a complete end,” but as in “suffered a cataclysmic mass extinction that wiped much of it out”? Science has an answer to that question. Six times. Including now. We’re in deep history’s sixth great mass extinction. But the first five were hundreds of millions of year ago. We’re the first humans to live through a mass extinction, ever, period.
Because, of course, we caused it. The bees and fish and insects and mammals aren’t dying off because a giant meteor hit the earth. They’re dying off because our way of life is incredibly greedy, violent, ignorant, and stupid. Joaquin Phoenix put it best: “To animals, we’re the Nazis.” He’s not wrong.
That’s one measure of how abnormal this age is. We’re the first humans ever to experience something like a mass extinction. No wonder we don’t know how to cope with it. Do you grieve for a dying planet? Do you lament? Do you go crazy? Are you crazy one, for thinking this is a horrific tragedy — or is everyone else, more or less, for sleepwalking to the mega-mall and pretending it’s not happening? What the hell do you do?
Here’s another measure of how abnormal this age is. The last time was this hot, consistently, was about three million years ago. In between now and then, we had periods of fluctuating temperatures that reached “this hot,” but it also got very, very cold. These were the little Ice Ages — and their melts. But this hot — sustained over time? You have to go back three million years.
In other words, you have to cross a geo-biological boundary. You enter another geological age — the Pliocene. But human beings did not exist then. When did human beings arrive on the scene? Just about 300,000 years ago.
That’s how abnormal this age is. So abnormal that in geo-biological terms, human beings hadn’t arrived on the shores of a planet this hot yet, and wouldn’t for another 2.7 million years, because they probably couldn’t have survived for very long.
Think about that. I mean really take a second to try to process it. It’s a thought that should haunt you, as in, you can’t process it easily or simply. It haunts me. I think about it all the time. I haven’t nearly “processed” it, which is to say, come to grips with it, grasped it, felt it, weighed it. It’s that enormous and startling — to think that we’ve made the planet hotter than it’s been in three million years, so hot that we human beings probably couldn’t have survived on that planet to begin with.
Let me give you one final example. How many people are already dead from extreme temperatures and Covid — in the last year or so alone? Go ahead and guess, though if you’re a regular reader, you already know. If you don’t already, I mean it, guess. Now double your guess. You’re still probably off — way off.
The answer is ten million people. And that’s certainly an undercount, as even scientists and statisticians across fields will agree. The true number is probably easily double that. Still, just think about it. Ten million are already dead from Covid and extreme temperatures: four million from the pandemic, and about six from overheating.
Ten million people in one year.
How abnormal is that? It’s approaching the scale of a World War. Ten million people don’t drop dead just like that in a normal year, from what economists call “exogenous shock” — meaning external factor. Those are excess deaths — just the tip of the iceberg, really, because they don’t count the excess fully yet, which is why scientists and statisticians will readily admit they’re underestimates. By comparison, around 100,000 people — maybe 150,000 — died at Hiroshima.
Ten million, by comparison? This age of catastrophe is already at the equivalent of dropping 100 nuclear bombs on planet earth.
“Climate change,” aka global overheating — funny how we all now use the euphemism “climate change,” which was invented by an American Republican strategist— and Covid have already had a death toll at the level of dropping 100 nuclear bombs on the planet. Just in the last twelve months.
That’s another measure of how abnormal this age is. Did you grow up with 100 being dropped on the planet? Of course not. None of us did. But here we are. We are now in the equivalent of a World War — a nuclear one. That’s how bad this age of catastrophe already is.
And of course that’s just a beginning. The global mean temperature’s only risen by one degree. Two? It’s going to kill probably ten times as many. Three? One hundred. Four? Shudder, let’s not go there. Now we’re talking not six million, but 60 million, 600 million. Covid’s not even the big one, epidemiologists will tell you. Four million? Try 40, or 400. That’s a billion people.
That’s where we’re heading. It’s hard to stomach. It leaves a bitter taste in the mouth and the stomach churning. It should.
This is not normal. It’s profoundly abnormal. The age we live in. Geologically, we’ve rewound millions of years. Biologically, humans couldn’t have thrived on this planet. We’re already in the equivlanet a World War — the equivalent of a nuclear one — with nature, death toll in the tens of millions and skyrocketing.
No wonder fascism’s breaking out. No wonder nation after nation — from America to Britain and beyond — is simply collapsing. And no wonder the human race appears to be losing its mind, its bearings, its sanity. Call it a Great Undoing if you like.
You’ve been inured to it, how utterly, profoundly, explosively abnormal this age is, because our media is idiotic, our politicians are venal fools. Because our economy is designed to profit off your ignorance, indifference, and hate. Keeping you a “consumer” instead of a thinking, sane, enlightened person is priority number one, which is why nobody much tells you simple facts and asks you to think hard thoughts. You’re surrounded with moronic distractions — reality TV, Kardashians, fake friends, the pornification of everything, including yourself, reduction to object, desire, greed — so you don’t ever think. Feel. Know. Grow.
But you are going to have to. If, that is, you want to be one of the ones who has a fighting chance of not being turned into a brain-dead zombie trying to eat someone else’s brain while the world goes to hell in a designer handbag. That choice, I guess, is yours.
Umair
July 2021