The Metaphysics of Climate Change

The issue of climate change is of a class of problem that lies outside and beyond that mirrored surface and cognitive (or conceptual) limit through which humanity in gestalt reflexively defines and narratively self-validates itself. It is for this reason and in many ways a metaphysical problem.

Culture and ideology is biased towards systemic self-propagation at a symbolically abstract level which endlessly crushes the facts of intelligence, of material and existential necessity. Can informed imagination percolate through political systems to invoke Global organisational metamorphosis before a quite probable retreat into atavistic neuroses? Not, that is, that we have ever really left our basal instincts and animal aggression sequestered very far away from the current moving moment.

There are things beyond the intelligible boundaries of the cognitive logic and cultural grammars within which we live. Those things are the necessary inversion and epistemological impossibility of non-existence and existential emptiness. From this side, in fact – the only side, we can never know what is beyond, we can never structure intelligible statements about the unknown.

Climate science is demonstrable and provably consequential beyond a threshold of the suspension of disbelief but the reality and the immensity that it represents is so vast, so challenging that by admitting this into our lexicon as fact, we must utterly deconstruct and disassemble that meager island of self and fragile archipelago of humanity to acknowledge the full gravity of this situation. Beyond internet trolls and the wilful misdirection of various partisan ideological or commercial self-interests, observe how raising the issue of Climate Change in public places (online) is generally a red rag to a bull and invokes all manner of tin-foil hat wearing clowns to materialise out of the shadows and spout seven colours of nonsense. It is as though they are unconsciously aware of the seriousness of this situation and when faced wih the possibility that their world and all of its complex meanings may fade away like castles made of sand surrendering to a rusing tide, their own response is to unceremoniously place a bucket on their head and run around slinging mud at all and sundry.

Like a deer caught in the headlights, an entire planetary civilisation is frozen; entranced and transfixed by the single most monumental faux pas (short of global thermonuclear armageddon) that has ever, EVER, existed. The aggregate entropy of our own troubled civilisation has returned to haunt us and as if it were not already obvious enough – the true measure of the industrial and the information revolutions is not measured in commercial gain; the true measure is that dawning realisation that information – like energy – is entangled with entropy and ignorance in much the same way that electric and magnetic fields are entangled in (and as) light.

Darkness necessarily follows light, ignorance follows information, entropy follows energy; but what follows sentience and planetary civilisation if we extinguish ourselves right here and right now?