The Age of Extinction vs a New Enlightenment

Why Our Democracies Are Failing at Fighting for the Future — And How To Shock Them Back to Life

Image Credit: Robin Loznak, follow him here and here

You don’t have to look very hard to see that our side — the side of democracy and civilization — is losing the battle for the future, and losing it badly. The wave of fanaticism and rage that’s swept the world is so bad that its happiest country, Finland, elected the “true Finns,” which is about cruelty and fear and hate, not…happiness and peace and prosperity. Meanwhile, in America, the headlines are — yet again — all about Donald Trump, every day, all day.

How do we fight the battle for the future? Can we? Is it a foregone conclusion that we’ll lose? While all of the above was happening, a far more important story began to be told — one that barely made the news.

A young 22 year old woman sued her state — in America, no less — for…the constitutional right to a livable planet, a healthy environment, call it what you will. In fact, she was joined by others. The plaintiffs in the case — 16 of them — are as young as five years old.

Rikki Held, the 22-year-old named plaintiff in the lawsuit, testified about the impacts the climate crisis has had on her family’s ranch outside Broadus, in the south-east corner of the state. She grew up on the ranch, helping raise livestock and build fences. But she’s seen dramatic changes on the ranch since she was a young child.

“Some of the impacts are just with wildfires, drought, flooding, more extreme weather events such as windstorm and hail, changes in wildlife behavior,” she said.”

Think for a moment about how brave that is. These are kids. When I was 22? I was making disco and playing it at nightclubs. I was most definitely not out there trying to…take on Extinction.

What is all this really about? Let me put it like this: don’t we have a Mother Right — to Life? As in, don’t our other rights — expression, movement, privacy, etcetera — depend first on that? And if we do, isn’t, well, the Extinction we see now unfolding around us a grave violation of it? This is a case about a battle that’s just beginning. A Mother Right — Against Extinction.

Remember those orange skies over Manhattan? How you could smell Canada burning from Fifth Avenue? That was just a few days ago. This case is about all that — and more.

Now. The judge already isn’t sympathetic. He’s talking down to the courageous young people who brought this case forth like they were fools to be condescended to. But who’s the fool? After all, what the judge seems to be ignoring is the…brutal reality of “climate change,” aka Extinction. Places like Montana are squarely in its crosshairs. Nowhere isn’t — but regions with agrarian economies? LOL — good luck with that in a age of megafires and megafloods and system meltdown.

These kids are forging the future. I really mean that. If you feel a sense of — doom!! — reading my essays, take heart, because here’s a good thing. Let’s discuss it, in detail now.

Why is our side losing? And here I don’t mean “left” or “center,” I just mean “everyone who’s not a Trumpist, Brexiter, nationalist, lunatic, maniac, on the fringe of the far right, which has seized control of everything from global politics to economics to communication to social norms themselves.” Why?

The answer to that, from a formal perspective, is very simple. Eerily simple. Simple in a damning way.

What is the other side about — the autocratic one? Well, it’s about erasing rights. Just ripping them up, burning them, shredding them. Take Ron DeSantis’ Florida, which is probably the most familiar example by now. What…rights…are really…left? Books are banned — there goes expression. Can’t say gay — there goes speech. Teachers and kids are criminalized — there goes association. Parents can’t tell their kids it’s OK to be whomever they really are — there goes privacy. I could keep going. If Florida seems like a laboratory for 21st century fascism, that’s because…it is.

America’s media foolishly calls these “culture wars,” but it’s not about culture at all. It’s about social and political existence. It’s about the theft of agency. If I say to you, you don’t have the rights of association, privacy, expression, movement, intimacy anymore — that’s not about, LOL, some kind of cultural thing. We’re not debating Sartre or bickering over Picasso. I’m being annihilated as a social and political agent, dehumanized, made into an unperson. And that approach is spreading across America. State after state is adopting the DeSantis playbook.

This is what autocracy is. The erasure of rights. It is how autocracy crumbles democracy from within — and we’re seeing it happen. Not just in America, but across the globe. The other example I often use is Brexit. In a nationalist mania, a hysterical fervor of rage and hate of historic proportions…Brits took away…their own rights…to live and work in the EU. LOL — that’s something most of the world would kill for. And now there they are, regretting it sorely. But it’s too late — the autocrats won, and they’re laughing all the way to the bank.