Letting down Humanity...: death

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Donnerstag, 7. November 2024

Denial, Anger and Trump

Anyone taking notice of the state of our world sees that it is dying. For illustration visit the daily summary of Climate and economy, the Arctic News-Blog or Eliot-Jacobson's Climate Casino – Watching the World Go Bye.

In a similar way the undisputed American hegemony since 1945 seems to go the way of all empires as described by Sir John Glubb Pascha in his short and brilliant essay The Fate of Empires (1976): This way leads from pioneers and conquests to power and safety which then facilitates production and commerce and leads to affluence, luxury, influx of foreigners, dissent, defensiveness, walls, decadence and frivolity. Sir John predicted an US decay already in 1976.

Sir John Glubb Pascha with soldiers of the Arab legion in Ramallah 1946

Its true that the US meanwhile succeeded to squeeze out some ephemeral energy independence by fracking, but this will not last. And China with its long term view and the help of his many autocratic allies builds now a competing empire, gobbling up all the resources it can reach. The involvement of North Korean troops in the Ukraine war would not have happende without the explicit consent of China. In Ukraine we have a war by proxy between the West and the Eastern powers. For Europe without Trump this war will not be sustainable.

To summarise we have a dying US-empire in a dying world.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross landmark work "On death and dying" described the reactions of patients with fatal disease. I know all these reactions from my work as a physician, their order may be changed or they may be combined, but basically the description holds true:

The first reaction is often denial.
If denial does not work anymore it is followed by anger and aggression against fate and against the people wo bring the bad message. As a physician its important not to take this personally.
Then comes the phase of bargaining, of attempted flight into miraculous solutions, may it be herbal medicine or the consultation of charlatans.
If unsuccessful this is followed by depression.
In the best case the process ends in peaceful acceptance.

A dying world and a dying empire will probably induce similar reactions. We had a lot of the two first phases: 40 years of denial of the climate catastrophe and a lot of anger against Greta Thunberg and other messengers.

Comes the phase of bargaining where patients will believe anyone pretending to have solutions, even charlatans: In case this is Donald Trump while California is burning.

From this we can predict, that depression will follow. What form could it take? The world economy is a dead man keeping walking under the weight of a 300 trillion debt by creating even more debt in the optimistic belief that all this will finally work out. Depression will put an end to optimism and this will lead to a global economic crisis. This will be a crisis of belief, which even Trump, the orange Jesus will be unable to solve.

Donnerstag, 5. November 2020

Not his Death

(Translation of the story "Nicht sein Tod" from "Begegnungen mit dem Leibhaftigen", Tredition 2016)

The bell rang at the door of the former medical practice. Two younger people were outside, a man and a woman. Somebody had collapsed on the street, they asked for the doctor. The doctor was retired, but he was still living here.

What follows in the next section took place within 30 seconds: The old doctor went out through the front yard onto the sidewalk. There was a small group of people standing around someone who was lying on the ground, face down, a small figure in a shabby suit. A trail of fluid ran from his trousers against the gutter. He had probably lost urine, perhaps in an epileptic seizure. Or he was in cardiac arrest. The doctor knelt down, turned the face of the person towards him, it was a little bluish. Then a grip in his trouser pockets, he found a purse with an identity card, born in 1923. It was 2010, so the man was 87 years old. At this age, street-resuscitation does not make sense in the event of cardiac arrest. Even if successful, people are almost always permanently impaired and require long term care. One should leave them alone. Still, the doctor wanted to know what was going on, looked for the pulse on the wrists, on the neck, it had no pulse anywhere. Cardiac arrest. He got up again, turned to the bystanders and explained – as a kind old Uncle Doctor - that this was cardiac arrest. That the man was 87 years old. And that at this age resuscitation made no sense because the results were practically always catastrophic.

The siren of an ambulance sounded very softly through the air, someone had already called with the handy. The doctor still wanted to say that it would be better to give the old man his rest, so it would be a beautiful and painless death. But the siren was loud now and the ambulance was already turning into the side street, bright yellow, highly polished and flashing blue, approaching quickly and then coming to a sharp stop next to our group of people.

Two paramedics, a middle-aged man and a younger blonde woman with an emergency kit jumped out, both athletic and in top form, both in sparkling yellow luminous vests. They quickly made sure that the phone was made from here, rushed to the man lying on the floor, grabbed the pulses that they couldn't find either. The young woman began pumping his chest to reanimate him. The old doctor would have liked to stop them, but they were in the uniform of law enforcement and all those standing by could not even know whether he was a doctor. So he kept quiet. The paramedic dragged the defibrillator on, while the woman continued to pump, he opened the shirt, exposed the chest and stuck the electrodes on. The screen showed no regular heart action, so the electric shock was delivered. After that, no effect. Another shock, now the screen showed a heart action again, irregular, but at least he had an irregular pulse and turned a little pink, but remained unconscious. The woman disappeared into the ambulance and came back with a stretcher and an infusion bottle. The old man was placed on the stretcher, the IV placed in a vein in his arm. Then the old man was carried to the ambulance by the two of them, the young woman stayed with the patient, the man quickly closed the rear door, gave a brief greeting, climbed into the driver's seat and away they roared with flashing lights and the siren got quieter and quieter. The whole haunt might have lasted three minutes.

Yes, this whole performance had been extremely professional and virtuosic. Such quality and speed can only be achieved with constant practice. At the same time, the staging had something synthetically unreal about it: the paramedics looked like shiny Lego men who functioned with their Lego ambulance in a perfect Lego world. Or like computer animations in those American films in which all surfaces are imitated so perfectly - virtual reality - and yet everything remains unreal.

For this perfect Lego world, this shabby old little man was the wrong object. He obviously had been independent so far. And now in very old age his life wanted to come to an end. His luck would have benn to meet a death that had everything one could want from death: sudden, peaceful, and painless.

But they took his death away, postponed his death into care dependency, to a nursing home. Was that what this man wanted? Would we have that wish? Does our health budget have enough money to pay for such idle pastimes?

If this old man were an isolated case it could be ignored. But he is not an isolated case. His case is the expression of a general philosophy. The old doctor remembers: At a young age he was trained in the internal medicine clinic, which was considered the best at the time in his country. The directive there read: "Every cardiac arrest has to reanimated because interns have to practice". The same directive applies to paramedics, whether this makes sense on the given object or not.

Nobody asks us…

Donnerstag, 15. August 2019

Letting down Humanity

(Translation of "Und was, wenn wir uns nicht retten können?" in this Blog, which first appeared in Journal 21, 15.8.2019. Updated 7.2.2022)

What is new is that everything accelerates: the ice melts faster than predicted. Its lack of reflection increases CO2-related warming by 20 or more percent (1). The sea warms up faster and rises faster (2) than predicted. Greenhouse gases continue to rise, global warming accelerates and the fatal self-boosting feedbacks by methane release and large-scale forest fires have only begun. Since spring 2019 hundreds of temperature records have been broken and we had the warmest months of January, Mai, June and July ever. We notice it ourselves: The summers get mercilessly warmer and warmer.

July temperatures (global) 1880-2019

The four apocalyptic horsemen are: Global Warming (3), which is occurring up to a hundred times faster than earlier warmings. The lack of water (4), which threatens one fourth of humanity. Species extinction (5) due to wasting and poisoning of habitats. And last but not least overpopulation (6), the root cause, which continues to increase. Each of these factors can be fatal on its own and they reinforce each other. E.g. the co-director of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Research Johan Rockström, an expert on the limits of the planet said that with global warming of 4 degrees (which is possible by 2100) he has difficulty to see how the earth could nourish eight billion of people or even half of that (7). And what will happen to the rest?

Viktor Vasnetsov (1887): The four apocalyptic horsemen

Many call for action, and many clash with those who deny the problems. But does that make sense? Is there any escape from this fourfold overkill?

For example, the American Roy Scranton experienced terror and state collapse as a soldier in the Iraq war. Back in the US, it dawned upon him that the same fate awaited the developed nations. He concluded that, just as the soldier must learn to die, in the Anthropocene we also have to learn to die, not just as individuals, but as a collective (8).

Independently of him, the French Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens in their book "Comment tout peut s'éffondrer- Petit manuel de collapsologie à l'usage des générations présentes" (9) predict the collapse of civilization. Here is a summary interview in French (10).

Three personal experiences reinforce my concern: Prof. John Schellnhuber, the most prominent German climatologist omnipresent in the media who in public exudes a mild, solution-oriented optimism told us already 2017 in private that he no longer sees any way out of this trap for humanity.

And about 1973, that is shortly after the first report of the Club of Rome, I had a vivid dream. I stood on the edge of a medium-sized gravel pit, which was partially restored, that is, renatured. Down there among bushes, maybe a hundred yards away, was a small group of nude, quite green people, about three in number, mostly grownups, but not old. They did not notice me and said to each other "We are the last human beings". I felt that this was a meaningful, a so-called "big" dream, but rationally could not do much with it, and at best hypothetically linked it to the environmental situation. But after all, C.G. Jung used to quote a rabbi who had written: "The dream is its interpretation"...

My father, Markus Eduard Fierz (1912-2006), was a theoretical physicist "of the first hour", who knew Pauli, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, and worked and taught in Basel, Princeton, CERN and ETH. He had great intuition and was a virtuoso at so-called Fermi estimates, the estimation of sizes from inadequate information (The famous Fermi question was: "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?"). Later in life he became very concerned about the environment and from 1990 on predicted a general ecological collapse starting around 2020 saying that of course it was not possible to predict the year exactly, but once it started it would go downhill very quickly for mathematical-physical reasons. After failing to understand both dream and father for decades and years, I now realize both could end up being right.

I found the content and fate of an article (11) by Prof.Jem Bendell, the English university teacher of sustainability revealing: Based on a large literature review he argues that the environmental situation is out of control and irreversible. Already in the next decade, one would have to reckon with great crises, even with the beginning of the dissolution of civilization. This article was not accepted by a journal because it does not cite enough scholarly literature on collapse of civilisation (there is almost none) and because it could scare the readership.

Bendell, fed up with this academic correctness, published the article on the web, where it has been downloaded half a million times and translated into several languages. There, and in an interview with climatologist Wolfgang Knorr (12), he comes to the conclusion that even the scientists do not truthfully inform the public: All the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) up to 2020, written under the pressure of oil-producing nations, neglected the acceleration of global warming caused by multiple positive feedbacks. Therefore they are consistently too optimistic. To quote Bendell and Knorr: “Science is letting down humanity”.

In fact, the disaster perspective is concealed by everybody: Although scientists and some media have been warning us for fifty years, this happens regularly only in a piecemeal way, carefully and objectively weighed. Somebody is talking about dwindling glaciers, somebody else about the future of winter sports, someone dwells on insect extinction, another one is studying bees, there is talk about poison in rivers, or warnings about the temperatures in the cities, others are considering crop failures or exploring reasons for migration. They have the pieces in their hand, but, alas, lack the mental bond for the realization that it all comes down to a self-reinforcing global catastrophe. And therefore there is no urgent reference to our own destiny and the necessary alarm is not sounded. The only point the scientific community always agrees upon is the demand for further research and more money, which the politicians are only too happy to grant if only they can remain inactive.

Are the scientists afraid of their own courage? Are they afraid of loss of public esteem and public money, do they fear loss of media coverage, loss of reputation among colleagues when they talk the plain talk that would be appropriate, although it would hurt?

Incidentally, if refusing to call a spade a spade avoids arousing fright and depression in the addressees, this has the fatal consequence that they can continue to cling to their false hopes and pursue business as usual. Only fright and depression would pave the way for radical rethinking.

For a long time it was a mystery to me how even some of the most clever and highly educated politicians could claim that climate science is wrong. While writing this text I've come up with something: In my practical work as a doctor, I learned that one is almost always believed if one speaks up clearly, bluntly and directly. Could it be that such sceptics feel indistinctly but rightly that something is wrong with the scientific information and the IPCC reports, and that is why they do not believe them? To me this does not seem impossible.

We find this fragmented approach not only among scientists, but also among the worried and the Greens. These preach well-meant individual measures such as vegetarianism and renouncing plastic bags, but often fail to mention that this is never enough – they do not want to scare the voters after all. Only children and fools tell the truth and lead desperate crusades...

All of them are ignoring the population issue, but they are anyway overruled by the dull majorities that vote Trump, Bolsonaro, and Morrison into office, those politicians who basically already announce the end of civilization. Between these political poles lie the "healthy" middle of mindless consumer citizens, and the media, which question facts as opinions, as well as the jellyfish-like politicians who navigate according to the latest surveys. The result is an immobile crowd waiting in anesthetized wellness for disaster, like Christmas turkeys on their turkey farm. A physician managing a critical situation with such indifference would end up in court and jail for malpractice.

What is coming can already be seen in the Middle East with heat, drought, hunger, state disintegration, tyranny, epidemics, war and mass migration. This will gradually spread to other regions and to us. Particularly susceptible are complex systems such as large cities, major distributors, high culture, monetary value, banks, the financial casino, long-distance transport, old-age provision or legal security. The talk of human rights and climate justice will be left behind as mockery. We are caught in a suicidal culture and will perish with it.

Meanwhile, even the Secretary-General of the UN warns that we have only until 2020 to avoid the tipping point of the situation (13). And yet there is hardly any reaction. Protesters are imprisoned or expelled from the country. Therefore the next question arises: If we do not want to or cannot save ourselves, what then?

It means then the end of many nations, of many cultures, of human values (Menschlichkeit) in many places, of very many human beings and large parts of the living world, perhaps of humanity as a whole. Many old people are concerned with their individual end. In the Middle Ages, there was even the art of dying (Ars Moriendi), which prepared adepts for a good death and for the four last things - Death, Judgment, Heaven or Hell. But after all, mortals could console themselves with descendants, who continued their ideals, their skills, their culture and their genes. The death of civilization lacks this comfort. But somehow we have to translate the knowledge about the death of the individual into one about our collective dying.

Robert Bringhurst and his partner Jan Zwicky, two Canadian scientists, philosophers and poets, in their booklet "Learning to die - Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis" (14), believe that, even if a few people should survive the sixth mass extinction, our civilisation will not. And then nobody will know anymore about Plato, Bach or Rembrandt.

Bringhurst writes knowledgeable books about the myths and cultures of Native Americans (15). He describes how these natives understood themselves as part of a nature that cannot be dominated. This in contrast to the Western attitude that nature should be dominated as expressed in Genesis 1:28 "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth...", the attitude that is actually the cause of our predicament.

Zwicky asks what moral qualities we need at the end of our civilization. These are the qualities that have always been needed in life: knowledge and the awareness that our knowledge is limited, modesty, courage, self-control, justice, patience and mercy. Only with modesty can we get rid of the ego, which gives us the courage to look the facts into the eye. And compassion is needed for those who cannot face the facts. In any case, our own actions and those of others are but gestures in the air that disappear like music. Like the previous mass extinctions, the present one will leave some life behind which will give rise to other forms of life.

These highlights must suffice, but this booklet shows that you can view the whole problem quite otherwise than with rejection, panic, schedules for action or a raised index finger, namely with philosophical composure.

If the end of life of an individual is inevitable and consists only of suffering, whose meaning is difficult to see, then the question of euthanasia arises, and indeed it is sometimes practiced today. This question will also arise when societies perish in hunger, disease, plunder and mutual manslaughter. The idea is not new. In the end-time novel "On the Beach" (1957, 16), Nevil Shute lets the last survivors of nuclear war kill themselves with cyanide to escape these final stages.

It's also about how to shape the last hours: When the children of the orphanage run by Janusz Korczak (17) had to leave the Warsaw Ghetto, he tricked them into believing they were going on a countryside trip and dressed them as nicely as possible. Korczak went along and preceding the procession of twohundred children a boy played the violin - the Germans love music. Holding their little hands, adorned and singing, they moved to the cattle cars, which were to unload them in Treblinka for immediate gassing. Le style c'est l'homme.

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