Christopher Nolan’s rendition of “The Odyssey” may lack psychological and mythological depth, but he makes some good points: a prime example is his honoring of Zeus’s sacred law, which demands that one treat the stranger with the same respect one would expect for oneself — or face dire consequences.
Many critics saw this as a metaphor for the erosion of moral values during Donald Trump’s reign. While that happened, I consider Trump not the cause but a symptom of a far graver malaise.
Casting out MAGA will not fix the problem because what we are undergoing is far more dire: we are experiencing the first rumblings of a complete collapse not only of America but of the modern world.
I’ve wrestled with this realization for a long time, but shied away from fully acknowledging it; that is, until I picked up Sarah Wilson’s bestseller: “I Eat the Stars.” Her argument is irrefutable. However, sadly, it is not the first time I have heard this story.
I was first told the truth long before, back in the 1990s, by an exceptional environmental scientist from New Hampshire. (More about her later.) But I deflected the thrust of her argument to protect my illusions — and, frankly, to avoid being labeled a far-out lunatic by my community of friends.
To protect my audience — as well as myself — from the terrible truth, I concocted a weaselly mantra of false hope: “Don’t worry; We will prevail, winning this climate crisis war by coming together in concerted action.”
But we obviously didn’t and, most likely, never will. Furthermore, even if we had, we still wouldn’t have solved the problem. To do so, we would have had to halt all economic growth 20 years ago, which, of course, is anathema to a capitalist society like ours.
Let’s face it, as human beings, we suck at being honest with ourselves, preferring to tell what we call “little white lies.” Even doctors, until recently, painted rosy pictures for their patients, even when they were in the final stages of dying.
Ernest Becker, a renowned cultural anthropologist, tells us that most human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death — that’s from his 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Denial of Death.”
According to Becker, our deep, instinctual terror of mortality is too overwhelming to bear. To function without constant panic, we construct cultural “hero systems” — such as religion, art and the pursuit of status — to convince ourselves that we are significant and symbolically immortal.
From the dawn of recorded history, we have, on repeated occasions, constructed complex empires, all in the service of pretending we are immortal. While agricultural societies tend to be long-lasting, empires are short-lived, usually lasting around 250 years, according to the British historian John Glubb.
The evidence is self-evident: the Roman and Mayan empires, the Xia and Han dynasties and the Minoan civilization. Every one of them collapsed. And they collapsed because they became too complicated.
Empires follow remarkably similar stages, according to Glubb. His research demonstrated that in every case, their rise and fall happened over seven stages. In the first couple of stages, societies innovate, conquer and become prosperous. In the mid-stages, as affluence builds and the dominating discourse switches to knowledge and discourse, it starts becoming secular and fixated on rights over collective needs. “Academic and political infighting tends to become rife by stage five, ‘the age of intellect.’ By the sixth and final stage, the ‘age of decadence,; all this growth, success, and intellectual infighting turns in on itself.”
Using historical analysis, Glubb was remarkably prescient in forecasting the state of our nation today. Another dead-on prediction came from one of our own: Donella Meadows, a prominent environmental scientist and writer who taught at Dartmouth for 29 years. She served on the Concord Monitor’s Board of Contributors at the same time I did, though, unfortunately, I never got to meet her because of her premature death.
Meadows was the lead author of “Limits to Growth,” a pathbreaking book that sold more than 30 million copies. In the 1992 sequel, “Beyond the Limits,” Meadows became our modern-day Paul Revere, warning that our global industrial system had exceeded the Earth’s ecological limits.
I intend to write more about this in my next column, but I don’t want to end this one on a note of doom and despair. As a therapist, I have observed countless times how denial drags a person down. Similarly, as a nation, we are being dragged down by the all-consuming nature of our denial, aided and abetted by charlatans like Trump. It is this blanket of denial that has shattered our self-confidence and depressed our ability to make crucial collective decisions, causing us instead to bicker among ourselves like children.
My purpose is not to preview a horror show but to offer what Wilson provides in her book: a space for my readers to confront their fears and anxieties about our uncertain future and to point them toward one rooted in truth, justice, creativity and community.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.