Now, if I go anywhere in the world, and if someone speaks against what we did, I challenge them. You don’t know anything, I tell them. It wasn’t your people, so you don’t care. But we know and we care. And there hasn’t been a heat wave like that since. One may come again, no doubt of that, but we did what we could. We did the right thing. I must admit, I sometimes shout at people if they deny that. I damn them to hell. Which is a place we in India have already seen. So I have no patience for people who object to what we did. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t seen it, and we have.
11
Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation.
In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts.
But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can’t be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it’s the different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus. That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve, and put to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming buzzing inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.
12
Bypassing the imaginary relationship part for a moment, what about the real situation? Unknowable, of course, as per above. But consider this aspect of it:
Recent extinctions include the Saudi gazelle, the Japanese sea lion, the Caribbean monk seal, the Christmas Island pipstrelle, the Bramble Cay melomys, the vaquita porpoise, the Alagoas foliage-gleaner, the cryptic treehunter, Spix’s macaw, the po’ouli, the northern white rhino, the mountain tapir, the Haitian solenodon, the giant otter, Attwater’s prairie chicken, the Spanish lynx, the Persian fallow deer, the Japanese crested ibis, the Arabian oryx, the snub-nosed monkey, the Ceylon elephant, the indris, Zanzibar’s red colobus, the mountain gorilla, the white-throated wallaby, the walia ibex, the aye-aye, the vicuna, the giant panda, the monkey-eating eagle, and an estimated two hundred more species of mammals, seven hundred species of birds, four hundred species of reptiles, six hundred species of amphibians, and four thousand species of plants.
The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, and thus the start of the Anthropocene in its clearest demarcation, which is to say, we are in a biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts. Also the mass extinction is one of the most obvious examples of things done by humans that cannot be undone, despite all the experimental de-extinction efforts, and the general robustness of life on Earth. Ocean acidification and deoxygenation are other examples of things done by humans that we can’t undo, and the relation between this ocean acidification/deoxygenation and the extinction event may soon become profound, in that the former may stupendously accelerate the latter.
Evolution itself will of course eventually refill all these emptied ecological niches with new species. The pre-existing plenitude of speciation will be restored in less than twenty million years.
13
Anytime he broke a sweat his heart would start racing, and soon enough he would be in the throes of a full-on panic attack. Pulse at 150 beats a minute or more. It didn’t matter that he knew he was safe, and that this panic reaction was to something that had happened long before. It didn’t matter that he lived outside Glasgow now, and had a job in a meat-processing plant that gave him access to refrigerated rooms where the temperature was kept just a few degrees above freezing. By the time an attack started it was too late; his body and mind would be plunged instantly into another terrible tornado of biochemicals, pounding through his arteries like crystal meth at its paranoid worst.
This was what people called post-traumatic stress disorder. He knew that, he had been told it many times. PTSD, the great affect of our time. As one of his therapists had once explained to him, one of the identifying characteristics of the disorder was that even when you knew it was happening to you, that didn’t stop it from happening. In that sense, the therapist admitted, the naming of it was useless. Diagnosis was necessary but not sufficient; and what might be sufficient wasn’t at all clear. There were differing opinions, differing outcomes. No treatment had been shown to be fully effective, and most were still largely experimental procedures.
Exposure to events like the event: no.
He had tried this on a visit to Kenya, out every day in temperatures that crept closer and closer to the unlivable. That had resulted in daily panic attacks, and he had curtailed the trip and gone back to Glasgow.
Virtual environments in which to explore aspects of the event: no. He had played video games that made him relive parts of the
