Take a step back, take a step forward
Keith Kahn-Harris points out that denial, the slasher flick baddie of Global warming debates, is related to the mind protecting itself from things it can’t cope with. So why not take the taboos, the worse case scenarios, and explore the positives in them? Surely that is a way to open up things a bit.
So yes, maybe it is a good thing if, over the next few hundred years, the vast majority of life on earth goes extinct. Just think, if humanity survives this crisis, and goes on to colonize other planets, what a problem that would be for those other planets,and those that live on them.
We don’t have a great track record, what with colonialism and environmental destruction, so maybe we will have saved the universe at large from a terrible fate. Besides, if you take a giant step back you can see it is all futile anyway: Lives will come and go, planets will live and die, and eventually stars, including our own, will burn out. The rest is just not worth getting too upset about, or is it?
Well that is where an objectivist stance takes you. Because I am thinking about the world as if my and others feelings, responses and relationships were not a part of the ‘real world.’ Thus people become passing trends, life and death becomes the ticking of the clock, and people’s lived experience becomes invisible. As Kahn points out, this is where value-free, exclusively fact-based thinking will take you: It invokes no response, because it has very little to do with the world of responses and human feeling.
Thus it is unemotional and de-polticised, and tends us towards a detachment and disengagement that is not a coherent response to the human tragedies that can be found between the lines. So we are indeed at the limits of enlightenment thinking: We cannot merely study the statistics any more - There are real lives, pains and sorrows on the line.
In the tropics, those lives are in danger right now: Food production in India is already falling due to climate change. More discussion of how we (collectively) should respond, is what we need. The irony of the situation is that if we do not start to respond to climate change morally and emotionally, we are more likely to end up doing too little too late, thus saving the universe from a terrible fate.