Guest post by Federico Tabellini
This article was originally
published last year on the Italian blog ‘Effetto Cassandra’. I repropose it here because I think the coronavirus crisis has made it somehow more
relevant. The current situation raises new questions: is this new crisis just another ‘small death’ on a much
wider scale? Or is it an opportunity to highlight the global ecological
crisis we’ve been ignoring for decades? If it’s the latter, will the lights turn
off once the emergency is over? Will the world return once more to blissful
ignorance?
Seneca used to say that death, real death, is a process lived day by day. Yet people deal with the real death only when its effects
come to a head – when the proverbial last straw breaks the camel’s back, and
the camel falls upon us with all its weight. Then, yes, we notice both the
straw and the camel. Until then, however – or perhaps we should say, until now –
the small deaths dominate our thoughts.
The difference between these small deaths and true death
lies in three factors: spatial proximity, temporal proximity, and speed of
execution. What's near worries us more than what's far, the present issues more than
the future ones, the event more than the process. Such is human nature. We are
biologically programmed to pay more attention to current events, the
forthcoming ordeal, the tragedy that we can experience first-hand. We mourn the
tree burning in the garden while the forest on the horizon is slowly eaten up
by parasites.
The media and the political sphere, instead of compensating
for this human weakness, inflate its effects. They concentrate on events
because events have a wider audience. They sell more. On the front page, the
terrible flood: 24 injured and 3 deaths. Facebook is grieving. The systematic
accumulation of plastic in the oceans that risks compromising entire ecosystems
forever? Page 15, after the sports section. On prime time, a special report on a local
earthquake: six deaths and tens of people injured. At 2 a.m. a documentary on
the sixth mass extinction: no meteorites this time, only pink apes with an insatiable
hunger.
But it’s not our fault if the true death is slow and
prosaic, boring, lacking dynamism. The media cannot be blamed if we struggle to
stifle a yawn while looking at it. There are some who’ve tried hard to make it
look more interesting. The most effective way is to transform it into an event:
capture it in a dramatic instant, when it’s more photogenic, and present it as
‘news’. We’ve all seen the best snapshots: Earth Day, the latest fruitless
international political meeting to fight climate change, Greta Thunberg. The
most politically active among us took a step further to reverse the decline:
they shared the news on Facebook. Unfortunately, their heroic efforts have yet
to change the world.
And then there are the modern stage democracies [1], which function
in more or less the same way. What matters here, again, is the audience.
Politicians who propose short-term sectorial solutions to ephemeral problems –
the small deaths – can reap rich rewards at the ballot box. Those who propose
systemic solutions to hinder the deterioration of the ecosystems – the real
death – are welcomed by a thunderous silence. The necessary complexity of such
solutions, after all, is difficult to explain to an electorate concentrated on
the here and now. It can’t be condensed into a TV interview, a tweet or a
Facebook post. The fact that those solutions require time intervals much longer
than those of a single political term to bear fruit doesn’t help, either.
Proposing and implementing long-term solutions is simply not politically profitable.
‘But those solutions would save billions of lives in the
coming centuries!’
Who cares? The men and women of the future cannot vote for
the political leaders of the present. So let’s muddle on with yawn-proof
marketing stunts! Preserving biodiversity in mountain areas? Useless, the most
you’ll get is some praise from a few animal-rights activists. Instead, save a
dog from a flooded area and tweet a picture with it. You too can become a
national hero!
And this is how the world dies, you know? Not gunned down
onstage, but one small piece at a time, far from the spotlights. In the meantime we, the pink
apes, jump from event to event, like mosquitoes chasing lights around a
Christmas tree. Imprisoned in the ephemeral. Absorbed in our little problems,
or maybe fleeing from stress, seeking refuge in a shelter of entertainment and
consumption. The camel is still standing, barely. For a few more years.
[1] The concept of ‘stage democracy’ and its profound
effects on the political agendas of the states are explored in my book ‘A Future History of the 21st Century: how we overcame the crisis of civilization’.
