Living/Dying in the Capitalocene

The term Anthropocene is increasingly being recognized as a proper term to depict the current geological era, replacing the long-used term Holocene, the era that began some 11,650 years ago. This new term was helpfully explained in an article about two new movies that opened last week.*

Theologian Joerg Rieger, however, thinks there is a more accurate term to use for the present age, and he writes about that in his new book.

Joerg Rieger is a professor of theology at Vanderbilt University. He was born in Germany and will celebrate his 60^th birthday next week. An ordained Methodist minister, Rieger had already authored/edited 20 books when he joined the faculty at Vanderbilt in 2016. 

Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity (2022) is the title of Rieger’s significant new book. Since I am also writing a review of it,** I asked GPT chat for help. Here is how they described the book:

Theology in the Capitalocene by Joerg Rieger is an important and thought-provoking book that offers a critical examination of the intersection of theology and capitalism in the context of the Anthropocene era.

Rieger’s book is not a quick read nor is it easy to digest all of his salient emphases. One criticism I have of his valuable book is the overabundance of references to other scholarly works.

This would be an excellent book for doctoral students writing their dissertations on related issues. But it may be overwhelming for the general public. And even I, who finished a doctoral dissertation over fifty-five years ago (though in a far different field), found his book challenging.

Here are some of Rieger’s main emphases that are worth serious consideration, and I am grateful to him for introducing each of these.

* Emphasis on the importance, and neglect of serious consideration of, “unpaid reproductive labor” that is directly linked to discrimination against women.

* Emphasis on the distinction between power and privilege. This has ramifications that are often overlooked.

* Emphasis on class as a societal structure rather than “classism,” which is largely based on stereotypes.

* Emphasis on “deep solidarity.” I have long thought that solidarity is something that we who are privileged, to whatever degree, can choose out of loving concern by becoming allies of those who are “underprivileged.”

While there may be reason to retain some of that emphasis, Rieger stresses that solidarity is a fact that needs to be acknowledged rather than something chosen in an over/under relationship.

All of these, as well as his prevalent emphasis on ecological concerns, are related to the pernicious power of capitalism in the present world.

My main criticism of Rieger’s book is his apparent belief that the serious ecological predicament facing the world today is a problem that can be solved. His position contrasts with what I have written over the past eighteen months about overshoot and the collapse of civilization.

Most scholars who are currently university professors and embrace deep ecological concerns hold the same position that Rieger does. The following words spoken in the 1930s are still quite relevant and true today: 

I can certainly understand why one in Rieger’s position would not want to publicly talk about the possible “end of the world as we know it” in a decade or two. If they believed that to be true, most high school students would likely decide that there would be no use going to college.

Rieger does show considerable compassion for the people who are suffering now because of capitalism as well as for the natural world that is being ravaged by the forces of capitalism, and I appreciate that concern.

Still, there needs to be more awareness that we who are now living in the Capitalocene era will soon be seeing massive numbers of people (and non-human life) dying in this present age because of the ever-expanding predicament produced by capitalism.

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* See “‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ tell the same terrifying story,” an intriguing July 19 opinion piece in The Washington Post.

** Last month I received a free Kindle copy of Rieger’s book by promising to write a blog article and/or review of it. The promise was made to Mike Morrell, who operates “Speakeasy,” a website that offers “quality books in exchange for candid reviews.” Here is the link to the rather long review I have written, subject to further revision. Among other things, that review amplifies the too-brief treatment of Rieger’s emphases given above. 

Remembering Rachmaninoff

On March 15, I posted a blog article about this year’s Oscar winners. Today’s post is related to Geoffrey Rush, who won the best actor Oscar for his role as pianist David Helfgott in the 1996 movie Shine.

Seeing that movie was my first real awareness of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3, which was composed in the summer of 1909. Popularly known as Rach 3, it has been called one of the most difficult piano pieces ever composed. 

A small part of the score for Rach 3

Many of you know the importance of bifocals. I wore bifocal eyeglasses for many years and was happy for the ability they gave me to see things both close at hand and in the distance clearly.

It is perhaps even more important to have bifocal vision/understanding of life/reality. Over the last fifteen months, I have read and written much about what some call TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it). That is an extremely sad and depressing topic.

It is not necessary or healthy, though, to think only about the inevitable future. Daily we need to use the near vision “lenses” to see and enjoy the present. There are many ways to do that, and classical music has long been meaningful to me, regularly bringing joy to my life.

This week I have been enjoying the splendid musical compositions of Rachmaninoff, particularly his piano concertos and his captivating choral music.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was born 150 years ago today (on April 1, 1873) in Russia, and he died on March 28, 1943, (80 years ago) in California. It is fitting to remember him and his productive life, which lasted four days short of seventy years.

For decades I have considered Tchaikovsky (1840~93) to be in the top three of my favorite classical composers. More recently I have increasingly come to appreciate the music of Rachmaninoff, who was a great admirer of Tchaikovsky.*¹

Tchaikovsky, in fact, was a father figure and a mentor for Rachmaninoff when he was a student, and the older composer cheered for his young mentee from his box seat at the younger man’s concerts.

There are 45 numbered “works” of Rachmaninoff (according to this website), and 39 of those were composed in Russia before he permanently left his birth country in 1917 because of the Bolshevik revolution and the confiscation of his relative’s summer estate in Ivanovka that he loved so much.*²

Early in 1915, not long before the end of the world as he knew it in Russia, Rachmaninoff composed All-Night Vigil (or Vespers), Op. 37, a beautiful choral a cappella work. According to Chat GPT, that composition, part of which Rachmaninoff requested to be sung at his funeral, is

one of the greatest achievements of Russian sacred music. In fact, Rachmaninoff once said, "I have never written anything more religious, more Russian, or more honest than the Vespers."

(I learned about this choral work in my research for this blog article, and I have greatly enjoyed hearing/seeing it sung on YouTube.)

This year there have been several memorial concerts in appreciative remembrance of Rachmaninoff. One of the most amazing concerts was performed by Yuja Wang at Carnegie Hall on January 28. (Here is the link to a news article about that concert that lasted 3½ hours.)

Several weeks ago, June and I happened upon a YouTube video of Wang (born in Beijing in 1987) and were impressed with her skill at the piano. It was truly amazing that she could play everything Rachmaninoff wrote for piano and orchestra, including Rach 3, in that Jan. 28 concert.

Last year, Yunchan Lim, an 18-year-old South Korean man, won the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, and next month he makes his New York Philharmonic debut, playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, which the promotional flyer says is “considered the Everest for pianists.”*³

Enjoying great music is just one of many ways to savor the present and to experience joy/peace now in spite of the dire predictions of what will likely happen this century because of the current ecological crisis.

Let’s keep making good use of our bifocal lenses!

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*¹ I found it interesting that on a list of “the best Russian composers of all time” (see here), Tchaikovsky was number one, followed by Rachmaninoff as number two.

*² In 2016, BBC produced “The Joy of Rachmaninoff,” and it includes a rather lengthy segment about Rachmaninoff at Ivanovka. If you have the time and interest, you may want to watch that engaging documentary here on YouTube.

*³ Here and here are links to Wang’s and Lim’s performing Rach 3, the latter at the Van Cliburn competition last year. 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

As many of you know, I have seven grandchildren. The oldest celebrated her 38^th birthday in January, so I have been a grandfather for 38 years now. In 2022, two of my granddaughters became mothers, so now I also have two precious great-grandchildren, the first born a year ago last month.

I have been thinking about my grandchildren in a new way because of reading two books written to or for grandchildren. Those books are closely related to my January 28 blog post.

Larry R. Rasmussen’s book The Planet You Inherit was published last year. Its subtitle is Letters to My Grandchildren When Uncertainty’s a Sure Thing. I had the privilege of writing a review of that book for The Englewood Review of Books, and you can read that review here.

Rasmussen (b. 1939) is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics, emeritus, at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Among his published books are Earth Community, Earth Ethics (1996) and Earth Honoring Faith (2013).

It is no surprise that the letters written to Eduardo and Martin Rasmussen Villegas (b. 2015 and 2018), his two grandchildren, are primarily related to his many years of ecotheological teaching and writing.

While the letters clearly express the writer’s love for his two young grandsons, it will likely be 2035 and beyond before they will be able to comprehend the meaning and significance of those letters.

Maybe, though, the writer’s intention was to say important things to us adults who read those letters now, as well as to Eduardo and Martin, who will be reading them much later.

One of Rasmussen’s most important letters is titled “Responsible by Degrees,” written in August 2020. There he broached the possibility of “widespread civilizational collapse”—and asserts that “we know we must put an end to a growing, extractive economy running on ecological deficits.”

Rasmussen, though, has hopeful views about humanity’s ability to confront the current and coming ecological crisis effectively, and those views need to be pondered thoughtfully.

Still, this challenging book written for the author’s young grandsons needs to be balanced with careful consideration of more realistic views about what is most likely to occur in Eduardo’s and Martin’s lifetime.

William Ophuls’s Apologies to the Grandchildren is a 2018 book of essays, the first one bearing the same title as the book, which does give a more realistic and less hopeful view of the current ecological crisis.

(I first learned of Ophuls, born in 1934 and with a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1973, from the video by Michael Dowd that I introduced in my January 28^th blog post linked to above).

Ophuls begins his essay with stark words: ”Civilization is, by its very nature, a long-running Ponzi scheme. It lives by robbing nature and borrowing from the future, exploiting its hinterland until there is nothing left to exploit, after which it implodes.”

He continues by saying that civilization “generates a temporary and fictitious surplus that it uses to enrich and empower the few and to dispossess and dominate the many. Industrial civilization is the apotheosis and quintessence of this fatal course.”

He goes on to write these blunt words to the grandchildren, “A fortunate minority gains luxuries and freedoms galore, but only by slaughtering, poisoning, and exhausting creation. So we bequeath you a ruined planet that dooms you to a hardscrabble existence, or perhaps none at all” (p. 1)

What Can We Say/Do? While I would like to embrace Rasmussen’s hopeful view, I have become convinced by Ophuls and by Dowd—as well as by William Catton, whom I plan to introduce in later blog posts—that my grandchildren and their children will experience a world of increasing gloom.

Perhaps there is still time for necessary changes to be made, but that is doubtful—and there is little evidence to indicate that such changes will likely be made. Perhaps, sadly, little can realistically be done other than to offer deep apologies to the grandchildren.

Yet, surely, we can work toward pushing the impending collapse farther into the future and encourage the grandchildren to find ways to flourish now in the present, regardless of what looms in a future that, unfortunately, may not be as uncertain as Rasmussen thinks. 

"Memento Mori" for the World?

In this year’s first blog post, I wrote some about the ancient idea of memento mori. (If you didn’t see or don’t remember that, click here.) Now, referring to some of my most important posts from 2022, I am wondering whether memento mori can apply to the world, not just individual people. 

Once again, I am linking to significant ideas of Michael Dowd, by whom I have been significantly influenced.* In December of last year, he posted a new YouTube video titled “Sanity 101.” The full version (here) is over 90 minutes long; the “Cliff Notes” version (here) is 30 minutes.

At some point, I encourage you to listen to one or both of those videos, which have the subtitle, “Living Fully in an Age of Decline: Essential Wisdom for Hard Times.”

While still fully affirming the reality of overshoot and the collapse of what he calls TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it), his emphasis in this new video is “post doom, no gloom.”

Dowd’s main point is that we humans today should not deny what we find disturbing or frightening but fully accept reality. In his opinion, formed by extensive reading of scientists and informed thinkers, the predicament of overshoot and collapse of the world’s civilization is certainly real.

So, acceptance of reality means making the most of the present rather than holding on to hope of change for the better in the future. Accordingly, he speaks pointedly about hopium, that is, holding on to false hopes that prevents us from accepting reality.

Memento mori for us individuals means that we live as meaningfully and as purposefully as possible now, fully realizing that we will die at some point in the future.

Rightly understood, memento mori is not a morbid dwelling on our approaching death, whenever that may be, but a healthy emphasis on living life to the fullest today, and every day.

Perhaps this significant idea needs to be applied more broadly: since the collapse of the world as we know it is inevitable, we need to make our existence in this world now as meaningful as possible, living in this post-doom time with no gloom.

This is a fruitful way for us older people to think. But what about our grandchildren (a disturbing matter I plan to write about next month)?

In spite of all I have learned from Michael Dowd, I have a couple of lingering questions/criticisms of his central emphases.

1) He repeatedly talks about the collapse of more than 100 civilizations in the past, emphasizing that the current industrial civilization’s collapse will be similar to those. But it seems to me that his point would be made more strongly if he talked more clearly about the uniqueness of TEOTWAWKI.

None of the collapsed civilizations of the past were as global in scope as the impending collapse, which could—and likely will!—mean a “mass extinction.” According to National Geographic, there have been five mass extinctions in the history of the earth; the sixth has already started.**

The Nat Geo article says the sixth mass extinction may occur as soon as 2260; Dowd says it is most likely to occur in this century. so why, I wonder, does he repeatedly emphasize the collapse of human civilizations in the past 4,000 years, none of which, obviously, led to mass human extinction.

2) Dowd repetitively emphasizes the futile nature of all human efforts to prevent collapse. All current attempts to stem global warming are based on the belief—or at least the hope—that that activity can and will result in reversal of collapse. Dowd refers to all such efforts as hopium.

But even if all human actions are insufficient to deter mass extinction, which they probably are, surely that doesn’t mean that concerted efforts would not postpone that fate to some extent, and maybe even significantly.

Concern for my grandchildren and now for my two great-grandchildren, makes me want to do more to help push as far into the future as possible what might well be sure mass extinction.

If we take seriously memento mori as individuals, we still do what we can to postpone our death, which is sure to occur at some point.

Similarly, if we apply the concept of memento mori to the present world civilization, shouldn’t we wholeheartedly do all we can to delay the coming collapse/extinction for as long as possible?

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* Last year I mentioned Dowd in four blog posts; the first times are here and here.

**The last mass extinction occurred about 66 million years ago, long before the first civilization of homo sapiens, which began less than 4,500 years ago.