Is catastrophe inevitable?

"[I]f we are to confront adequately the threat of (social or environmental) catastrophe, we need to break out of this "historical" notion of temporality: we have to introduce a new notion of time. Dupuy calls this the "time of a project", of a closed circuit between the past and the future: the future is causally produced by our acts in the past, while the way we act is determined by our anticipation of the future and our reaction to this anticipation:

The catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as destiny, for sure, but also as a contingent accident: it could not have taken place, even if, in futur antérieur [looking back from the future], it appears as necessary. ... if an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is not inevitable. It is thus the event's actualization - the fact that it takes place - which retroactively creates its necessity."

"If - accidentally - an event takes place, it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable: this, and not commonplaces on how underlying necessity expresses itself in and through the accidental play of appearances, is in nuce the Hegelian dialectic of contingency and necessity. In this sense, although we are determined by destiny, we are nonetheless free to choose our destiny. According to Dupuy, this is also how we should approach the ecological crisis: not to appraise "realistically" the possibilities of catastrophe, but to accept it as Destiny in the precise Hegelian sense - if the catastrophe happens, one can say that its occurrence was decided even before it took place. Destiny and free action (to block the "if") thus go hand in hand: at its most radical, freedom is the freedom to change one's Destiny.

"This, then, is how Dupuy proposes to confront the disaster: we should first perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities ("If we had done this and that, the calamity we are now experiencing would not have occurred!") upon which we then act today. We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny - and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past. Paradoxically, the only way to prevent the disaster is to accept it as inevitable. For Badiou too, the time of the fidelity to an event is the futur antérieur: overtaking oneself vis-à-vis the future, one acts now as if the future one wants to bring about were already here.

"What this means is that one should fearlessly rehabilitate the idea of preventative action (the "pre-emptive strike"), much abused in the "war on terror": if we postpone our action until we have full knowledge of the catastrophe, we will have acquired that knowledge only when it is too late. That is to say, the certainty on which an act relies is not a matter of knowledge, but a matter of belief: a true act is never a strategic intervention in a transparent situation of which we have full knowledge; on the contrary, the true act fills in the gap in our knowledge."

- Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 150-52.
Internal quote from Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Petite metaphysique des tsunami (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 19.

This somewhat dense passage is either nonsense, or very profound. It can be difficult to tell, and perhaps only hindsight will let us know for sure. But this is precisely Žižek's point: that we act (largely) in the dark, and certainly in the dark about whether future events are inevitable or not. A terminal diagnosis could prove to be wrong. But this doesn't mean we just write off such a diagnosis, no, we embrace it and feel the full weight of living under a death sentence, and then live as those who will be resurrected.
Images by HCS. The eagle-eyed may have notice that the young man attempting to prevent the apparently inevitable collapse in the second image is your truly, age 11.

Does it have to be this way?

A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse,
   and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
   the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
   the spirit of counsel and might,
   the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
   or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
   and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
   and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist,
   and faithfulness the belt around his loins.
The wolf shall live with the lamb,
   the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
   and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
   their young shall lie down together;
   and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
   and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
   on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
   as the waters cover the sea.

- Isaiah 11.1-9 (NRSV).

The claim that it doesn't have to be this way, that the seeming inevitability of the status quo is an illusion, is one I have made many times over the last few months. Sometimes, it has been a more or less impotent protest appended to the end of some piece of bad news as a flimsy barrier against a rising sense of despair. Some readers (especially my most faithful and critical one) have pointed out that there is a disconnect between the scale of the problems I've highlighted and the glimpses of responses I've put forward (for example here and here). The threats are formidable; the remedies feeble. It may not have to be this way, but it certainly seems like it is highly likely that it will be.

Nonetheless, I repeat my assertion that it doesn't have to be this way. Ultimately, this claim is not grounded in empirical observation of alternative ways of living, though they can help to fire the imagination and break free from the shackles of the all-too-obvious we associate with business as usual. Ultimately, this is a theological claim, a messianic expectation that depends upon the promise of God. Even when we cannot see any way forward and all options seem like dead ends, even then we must treat all apparent political and economic necessities as only apparent. And when there seems to be only one way forward, we should remain sceptical of the reasoning that forces our hand. To believe in God's future is to remain free from such necessities, it is to refuse to grant ultimate relevance to the hand of fate, or the market, or of might.

This is one of the effects of Christian faith upon the vision of our immediate future. By placing our immediate future against the backdrop of a messianic promise for the renewal of all things, it is not that the present sufferings become irrelevant. Indeed, in some ways, they become worse, because we can never make our peace with them as merely "one of those things". Instead, a hope that does not arise from the possibilities already apparent in our situation means that the present predicament can be seen with fresh eyes. This doesn't necessarily mean that an escape route will open up for those with the eyes of faith, but that even a road ending in a cross may be seen as worth walking.

What will future generations condemn us for?

A very interesting piece in the Washington Post by Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who notes first the fairly obvious point that perceptions of what is appropriate and good have shifted over the years, and are likely to continue to do so. Where the article becomes interesting is when he asks if there is any way of predicting which contemporary practices might be destined for future condemnation. He suggests three criteria:

"First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.

"Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, "We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?")

"And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they're complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn't think about what made those goods possible. That's why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks."

Appiah then goes on to suggest four possible sets of contemporary practices that our children or grandchildren may well find abhorrent: the prison system (he has his eyes especially on the US situation); industrial meat production; the institutionalisation of the elderly; and our ecologically destructive lifestyles.

I briefly considered this question myself towards the end of this post on morality as distraction, specifically focussing on the issue of whether the church is offering hostages to fortune through our current practices and attitudes.

Are there more examples you can think of that meet his three criteria? In your estimation, which one(s) is (are) most likely to see future shifts in judgement?
H/T Bryan.