The future is not decided
Image: Anna Wilson
“Never forget how alone we are not. The moss, the mountains, the redwood tree, the marigold, the mourning dove calling for her love’s return - are our allies. Every natural thing in this world is invested in the peace of this world. All that is good and gracious whispers, ‘we are with you’.”
Most evenings right now, as the light gets low, I hear an owl call. It's voice echoes across the valley and through our kitchen window. And then it calls again. And again. And then we hear another voice calling back. Two voices call, one and then the other. Closer and closer until it is quiet again. We assume their silence is because they found one another.
We have never seen these two particular owls but I love them. My body lights up from the inside out when I hear their voices. I love knowing they live here in the middle of this city with us. That their home is our home too. I read the news and the world feels bad. But then I hear these owls and for a moment, our precious world feels perfect.
When Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, announced that they were co-authoring a book we were very excited. When they shared that the title would be End Times Fascism, and the Fight for the Living World, we were still excited but also a little worried. It sounded bleak. I decided I wouldn't read it. I pay attention. I read the things they write about as part of my livelihood. I didn't think I needed to have more 'end times' vibes in my world. So I decided to leave it alone. I'd let Millie and Louise read it and let them tell me if I missed anything.
But once it was published I kept finding myself curious. Naomi and Astra are two writers and thinkers that I trust and I wanted to know what they were offering us. They are smart, not just intellectually but emotionally too. They would know the importance of offering their readers something that gave us places to work from, something that inspired or brought hope.
So I read it.
And I loved it. There is no perfect way to describe this moment in our human history, but I loved the clarity of their framing. Dividing the book into three main sections Naomi and Astra show the intersection and overlap between religious fundamentalists, Silicon Valley tech bros, and ethno-nationalists and how these (mostly men) for all their money and power seem to have given up on the world. Naomi and Astra show us how disconnected these men are from the life that sustains them and how little love they seem to have for our planet, our one beautiful earth. Their crazy amounts of money and the associated power that they have bought has left them floating alone on a different parallel space dreaming of other planets, or bunkers, or fortressed islands. In this book Naomi and Astra lay out so clearly the powers that are at the heart of the forces making the change we want feel so hard. They write:
"In short, we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the liveability of our shared world – on the beauty, its people, on our children, on other species. There is something treasonous in this. Treasonous not to an abstraction like a flat or a nation, for we are not nationalists. But treasonous to the unspoken pact made with the web of life that sustains us."
– Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor
What I loved most of all about End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, was how Naomi and Astra offer us a renewed sense of humanity; an alliance of people with the most common of causes, a fight for the living world built from those who love it here on this planet earth.
Naomi and Astra call us together to celebrate our love of here. To give this world we live in all our attention. They ask us to celebrate it, to notice it, to fight for it. They help us see with clarity just how deranging extreme wealth is and to notice the importance of disarming it.
They also helpfully ask this question:
"What would it take for the vast majority of our fellow humans to be satisfied enough with their lives that the end of the world lost much of its allure? Put a little differently, are there things that we can do, as a society, to help more people want to stay here, rooted in the living world?"
Clearly there are.
It seems at the moment that many of our leaders are listening far more to the wishes of the end-times billionaires, who have disdain for most of us and show no love for our planetary home, then they are to the people they represent. We hear the voice of artists and writers, musicians and film makers, sticking up for humanity, and the planet, but it is rare to hear other people questioning and challenging the power and right to determine our shared future that they seem to have granted themselves.
One of the few world leaders loudly questioning the power of the tech-bros, and also the claims of far right religious nationalists came as a surprise to me (as someone who is not a very big fan of the catholic church), Pope Leo. In his exploration of AI, Magnifica Humanitas: on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, he questions with passion and insight the inevitability of the tech billionaire's agenda for the rest of the world.
He reminds us that: “...technology is not simply a tool. When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency”. He led the call that Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein have also taken up in their book of the need to “disarm AI”. For him this means “discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern'“.
It is not inevitable that those with the most wealth should make the decisions over the future of our world.
This only happens if the rest of us let them.
I so deeply also loved Pope Leo’s celebration of the vulnerability and struggle involved in what it actually means to be human. He observes that:
"Our relationship to life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ – incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability – tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that our humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.”
Naomi and Astra show us that our planet and all of thus who want to stay here on earth are in trouble if we continue to let power and wealth coalesce and spiral together unchecked. They also convinced me that the tech bros and christian nationalists that are bent on ushering in the end of the world are wrong; “It's not the human story that is hitting the wall. Rather, it is the story that we have been trapped inside of. The one about how greed must be the engine of civilisation.”
Of course End Times Fascism is also not an easy read. Millie says she has a lot of 'WTF' written in the margins of her copy. There are many very hard and confronting things as you would expect from a book with that title. But there is also a kind of relief in seeing it written out so clearly.
At an event promoting the book, both Naomi and Astra talked about how much they didn't want to write and research parts of it, about how they didn't want to go into these hard places
But as Astra explained, ‘when you go into the dark your eyes adjust and the clarity you get can lead you to action’.
Both authors also talk a lot about the importance of doing the work together. Of reading and thinking and sense-making in community, of loving the world we are in with others who also love it.
Which is a huge part of the reason that we run Reading to reMAKE!
And this month, October, we'll be reading a couple of chapters from End Times Fascism and making space to talk about why we want to stay.
Naomi and Astra, and also Pope Leo, both help us do two things; see more clearly the sites of power that need challenging, and also remind us that the future is not decided. Things that feel like spiralling trajectories into a world we don’t want are not inevitable. As Astra and Naomi point out we can turn the spiral the other way:
"The fight against end times fascism is nothing less than a fight for life, and as that fight spirals up and out, it is drawing every species and every natural wonder into its widening arms. There is a tremendous sense of responsibility in that, and also power."
We have choices to make. But there are choices. There is no reason that we should allow the tech bros, with the fossil fuel giants on board delighted to have another reason to keep digging up oil and gas, decide the future for us all.
The future is far from inevitable. The owls are still here. So are whales. Tuna are back in large numbers in British waters for the first time in 60 years, leaping alongside dolphins as they fish in the waves. Platypus are swimming up waterways and the sky still turns that particularly beautiful shade of pink when the air is super cold, dancers are still choreographing incredible pieces to stun as all. There is even still ice. And snow. And waterfalls that freeze solid in the winter air.
I have no idea what it would be like not to love this world – I feel overwhelmed with the wonder of it all most days.
There is so much to love.
The future is not decided.
Anna, for Australia reMADE
Some other places you can get insight into End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
ABC Radio National Late Night Live interview with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor in conversation with Robert Reich
