by Matt Sitman
William Deresiewicz laments that we can’t seem to leave behind our “messianic impulse”:
There is always some one, or some thing, that is just about to save us from ourselves. Of late the leading candidate has been the Web. It’s going to unleash a flood of innovation. It’s going to usher in a golden age of creativity. It’s going to transform our politics. WikiLeaks; the cult of Aaron Swartz; the collected works of Thomas Friedman; the belief that a legion of Joyces and Dylans, freed from the shackles of the culture industry, is about to spring forth—all these are signs of technological messianism in its latest form.
Blaming this tendency on “the little child in each of us” who still expects our parents to “swoop down and lift us up from our troubles and fears,” he connects it to our inaction in the face of climate change:
It isn’t God who’s going to end the world; it’s us. And we’re not going to end the world; we’re ending it. I grew up in the shadow of nuclear war. Then, at least, we were properly panicked. We had seen what the warheads could do, and a sudden stroke of annihilation was all too easy to conceive. But this—a slow extinction that’s already underway—we don’t seem psychologically equipped to come to terms with. The feeling has to linger, even among the most rational, that somehow, something is going to rescue us. That’s the only explanation I can think of for the lethargy, the apathy, the stunned catatonia of our response, the fact that we aren’t all running shrieking, every hour, in the streets.
Related Dish coverage of religion and climate change here and here.
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