Trying to talk about something as fraught as the Anthropocene can seem like a fool’s errand, partly due to its intense unfamiliarity.
For the purposes of organization (and despite the built-in chaos that the Anthropocene so generously affords), this unfamiliarity can be helpfully understood as primarily twofold: Theoretical and Societal.
Theoretical Unfamiliarity
Theoretical familiarity is what we’re most accustomed to when we talk about humanistic interpretations of the Anthropocene. Simply put, the Anthropocene isn’t something that any of the most influential philosophers of Western society were concerned with. Historians and other skilled writers can harken back to the ideas of Adam Smith, John Locke and Rousseau in order to try and flesh out insights about deep time and man’s relationship with nature — but it’s not as if any of these foundational Western thinkers had any premonition of the concept, let alone how to interrogate, it in the context of modern culture and technology or what it means for the human condition as we exist today.
So when we read supposedly insightful, humanistic texts about the Anthropocene and their sagacity seems to operate in a vacuum far removed from the issues facing us today, we shouldn’t be surprised or disappointed that these thinkers don’t offer much in terms of how to meaningfully conceptualize the humanistic and ecological crises.
Of course, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t engage with these texts; as Jed Purdy and others have been so keen to demonstrate, their ideas are absolutely crucial for understanding how the intellectual tradition has developed over the years. And just as such ideas will remain critically important to the nature of human reason, they can also provide myriad insights for how to make sense of the Anthropocene, so long as we are equipped with translating their contents into modern language.
But that said, we should be mindful of their limitations. Since it seems unlikely these texts will be able to offer much in terms of concrete guidance—and their modes of reasoning may even seem dubious in light of their contributing to the Western ideals which have led to the Anthropocene—we should simply work toward engaging with these ideas in a way that makes sense in our technologically dominated age: an age when mediums, platforms, and even the nature of cognition are all changing so rapidly as to change the very nature of what it means to be human.
Which brings me to the second form of unfamiliarity: Societal
Societal Unfamiliarity
The thinkers who previously dealt with these kinds of ideas were immersed in a pre-Internet society that necessitated intense concentration and valued deep, wide-ranging humanistic scholarship. Needless to say, this setting bears little semblance to our modern condition. Today, it’s exceedingly difficult for many young people to sit and read a book for longer than a half hour, and the foundational texts on which Western society was built seem frustratingly distant in their application (that’s to say nothing about their language), and profoundly lacking the cultural context necessary to grapple with the nuances of the Anthropocene.
There’s no question that smartphones and social media have radically altered how we conceptualize ourselves in society, but what’s more critical for understanding the distinct unfamiliarity of the Anthropocene is that such technological developments are beginning to change the very nature of cognition as well. In the Enlightenment, influential thinkers birthed abstract ideas from physically available texts, interpersonal interactions, and analyses driven from periods of intense concentration. This sort of knowledge is a far cry from today: We have access to virtually any form of information at any moment, we are afforded the ability to communicate with anyone, and the always-on interconnectedness of the Information Age poses a formidable challenge to the sort of intense focus which bred Enlightenment insights, and seems intuitively necessary to derive insights about life in the Anthropocene.
In a sense, societal unfamiliarity in the face of the Anthropocene is a product of its own creation. Just as the Information Age (a necessary evolution in the advancement in civilization) is wrought with the societal issues of creative destruction, so too does the Anthropocene (an inexorable development in the history of mankind’s relationship with nature) entail a retooling of how we conceptualize ourselves in relation to technology, and how humanistic insights are to be gleaned at this crossroads.
Such a retooling would allow us to reap the benefits of technological ubiquity without falling victim to its pernicious capacities. It would allow us to engage at a level of depth that incorporates important philosophical ideas alongside modern culture in a way that’s meaningful and accessible.
The challenge: How to do so?
Bridging the Gap
On one level, the purpose of this blog is to be a first step in just that, by charting the evolution of the term Anthropocene in popular and theoretical discourse. Such a heady topic requires organization to understand the various ways in which we are collectively creating its meaning — and with the discourse changing so rapidly, a blog seems like a keenly appropriate medium (as opposed to a book, which is rendered immediately outdated by the time of its publishing.) Insofar as this blog is a resource and a reference in this sense, it will also host informational content related to the Anthropocene in order to help communicate the humanistic ideas associated with it and hopefully bolster interest in its Anthropocene-related inquiry.
Apart from that aim, however, this blog also aims to tie developments in emerging humanistic interpretations of the Anthropocene with related instances in popular culture, elucidating ways in which our culture is participating in meaning-making from different points on what might be thought of as a brow-spectrum. In this function, this blog is attempting to make discussion of the Anthropocene more familiar by incorporating its discussion into modern cultural phenomena.
By demonstrating how the contours of the Anthropocene are emerging in unexpected places—ones in which young people may bear the utmost familiarity with, in fact—a deep-seated goal of this blog is to open up inquiry into ideas related to the Anthropocene for a more inclusive audience, making it more familiar to a wider amount of people in order to define its meaning more vibrantly in the culture at large.
Because although the Western ideals which led to the Anthropocene were brought about by Enlightenment philsophers, the ideas which begin to shape the humanistic meaning of the Anthropocene will not emerge from mining these thinkers, or solely the modes of reasoning that they employed to reach their insights. New ideals will be bred from a combination of engaging with culture and society by using new, Internet-enabled modes of cognition alongside the old.
Enlightenment thinkers will simply serve as parallels for a future intellectual history.
Delving into that crossroads, taking a shot at retooling our faculties and building toward a more refined sense of culture — that’s part of what this blog is all about.