One of the advantages of writing a journal of the plague year in 2020 is that you’ve got a lot of plagues to choose from. Besides COVID-19, there’s the worldwide increase in authoritarians as heads of states, a malaise in our democratic institutions, climate distemper, a contagious economic depression, the quick-spreading paranoia of conspiracy theorists, and, worst of all, an epidemic of human incompetence.
I haven’t ranked them in order of importance. Any one of these plagues could, in a series of imaginable steps, result in human extinction before the end of the decade. If you can’t imagine human extinction, I’m here to help you with that.
1. COVID-19
This morning’s Johns Hopkins coronavirus map lists 9,220,933 U.S. cases of coronavirus and 231,077 deaths. World numbers tend to err on the low side, but they are listed as 46,688,370 cases and 1,202,605 deaths.
By itself, the coronavirus isn’t going to cause human extinction, but a number of its social side-effects—job losses, homelessness, mental illness, inequalities of wealth, refugees, nuclear war—could make it the trigger for a 2030 world without multicellular animals.
2. AUTHORITARIAN LEADERS
Off the top of my news feed, I can name a quick dozen: Erdogan in Turkey, Orban in Hungary, Assad in Syria, Xi in China, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Lukashenko in Belarus, al-Sisi in Egypt, Kim Jong-un in North Korea, Putin in Russia, Trump in the U.S. These are all people who have dismantled or are in the process of dismantling any constitutional obstructions to dictatorship. They have or are reaching for the power of life and death over the people they lead.
These people do not end well, because as Lord Acton observed, absolute power corrupts absolutely. A sad personal deterioration results from getting your way all the time. Authoritarians end up as emotional two-year-olds, surrounded by nursemaids who, out of fear of destructive tantrums, carefully control input to the leader’s sensorium.
Normally, reality tempers our worst impulses, but in the case of successful authoritarians, their reality isn’t allowed to temper anything. Saying no to authoritarians becomes a capital offense. Disapproving of them becomes a capital offense. Being out from under their control becomes a capital offense. Being a rival country with aims of its own becomes a capital offense, especially when nuclear weapons are involved.
3. MORBID DEMOCRACY
A partisan U.S. Supreme Court, a politicized U.S. Justice Department, gerrymandered congressional districts, dark money in politics, ministries of propaganda disguised as network news organizations, a decline in voters who take voting seriously, the creation of shadow governments in finance and markets, crony capitalism, and terrorist organizations cross-breeding with law enforcement: any one of these threatens to kill democracy around the world. All of them represent might making right, in violation of honesty, truth, and fair play. While this sort of thing can work for a brutal minority in the short run, it eventually creates a war of all against all, the state of nature that Thomas Hobbes described in Leviathan, one that created lives that were “nasty, brutish, and short.”
If you don’t make it to 2030 because of the nasty part, the brutish part, or the short part of that description, you might be the victim of erosion of consensual government by raw power. If you do make it to 2030, you probably will have made it that far by being a little nasty and brutish yourself.
4. CLIMATE DISTEMPER
I normally don’t care for angry and sullen adolescents. But Greta Thunberg’s shaming of governments and corporations and the climate scientists who aren’t climbing on the back of the Merrill Lynch bull and setting themselves on fire in protest of global climate policy is probably appropriate. As she notes, lots of old white guys with rigid behavioral patterns who are creating a hellish future are not going to have to live in that future. (A lot of old white guys with rigid behavioral patterns don’t believe her. They think they’re going to live forever, mainly because they’re rigid about not thinking about dying.)
But the climate scenario for 2030 looks like this: At where we are now—2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial global temperatures—a number of feedback loops kick off. Methane clathrates are already subliming and rising toward the ocean surface in the shallows of the East Siberian continental shelf. That will add another 1.1C to the global temp over the coming decade.
More industrial CO2 emissions will add another half-degree C. A lack of reflective snow and ice cover (early springs, late falls) will add 1.6 degrees C.
Extra water vapor in the atmosphere of our warming world will add 2.1C. Other feedbacks, such as the greenhouse effect of chlorofluorocarbons, will add another 0.3C.
Then, because the rising temperatures will have pretty much destroyed industrial civilization, all the sunlight-blocking dust and sulfur compounds and contrails and smoke that industrial civilization produces will go away. Non-polluted skies will add another 2.5C.
It all adds up to 10.1 degrees Celsius of warming. That’s 17.95 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was before humankind started burning coal. That might seem like a bearable change, but it’s a worldwide average, the result of a lot of blending of lethal extremes.
The folks who run the Arctic News blog, whose figures I’m using here, say that humans will go extinct with a 5.3 degree Fahrenheit rise, and most life on earth will be gone with a 9 degree rise. They also say the deadly thresholds will be reached by 2026, which will shock and disappoint a lot of us old white guys who were looking forward to 2030.
Check it out: https://arctic-news.blogspot.com.
Arctic News people are hard-core doomsters, but they practice the scientific method and that means they lie less than politicians. So even though they’re predicting a future that will undoubtedly include factors they haven’t taken into account, it’s worth looking at, if only so you’ll have an inkling of what Greta Thunberg is so pissed about.
5. CONTAGIOUS ECONOMIC DEPRESSION
Bob, who has been saving for a new Dodge 3500 dually with a Cummins turbodiesel, loses his job driving a potato truck when Farmer Jim can’t sell his potato crop to China because of new retaliatory tariffs put on agricultural products, in response to U.S. tariffs put on the cheap Chinese tools sold at the local Harbor Freight outlet. Susan, who sells Dodge trucks at the local dealership, is thereby one short of her monthly quota, and she gets told to clean out her desk and go back to her job as a waitress in her family’s breakfast restaurant. She would, except half the customers, who believe COVID-19 is a hoax and won’t socially distance, have run off the other half, who believe it’s real, and the restaurant is going out of business. Susan’s also got two kids under five, and since she lost her job she’s had to lay off Becca, her babysitter, who’s been studying while taking care of Susan’s kids and using her babysitting checks to help pay her tuition at the local community college. When Becca drops out of school, her literature class drops below a minimum and her adjunct instructor Paul loses one of the three classes he teaches at three different colleges. As a result, he defaults on the loan he took out to get his PhD. He also has a complete emotional breakdown, goes into a fugue state, and is found amnesiac and alcoholic, six months later, by his wife’s brother, a reserve policeman, who has tracked him to a homeless encampment outside of San Francisco.
In the meantime, Farmer Jim gets a relief check from the Federal Government, with which he buys a new Tesla, most of which is made in China but avoids tariffs by being assembled in the U.S. He wants to pay his good fortune forward, so he allows Bob, Susan, Susan’s family, Becca, Paul’s wife—newly a widow, due to Paul’s suicide—and her brother to glean potatoes from his fields. Everything’s going to be plowed under anyway next spring. Farmer Jim is glad to help those less fortunate than he is. If you ask him how the country’s doing, he will tell you it’s getting back on track and he’s doing his part. If you tell him he should have kept Joe on the payroll, he’d say, “Are you crazy? I can’t pay someone to drive truck when I’m having to give away potatoes.”
Capitalism: It’s all fun and games until almost everyone starves.
6. THE PARANOIA OF CONSPIRACY THEORISTS
The Deep State is controlling your thoughts. The Bush Family is really a collection of lizards in human suits. Joe Biden and Tom Hanks are pedophiles. The Denver Airport is the ceiling of an underground city the size of New York. Cattle mutilations are the work of Satanists who can fly. The moon is a giant alien starship (we have photographic proof). The moon is a hologram hiding Heaven. Elvis is headlining at Cactus Pete’s in Jackpot, Nevada. The Holocaust never happened (we have photographic proof).
Paranoia happens when psychic defense mechanisms get seriously out of whack. You’re still sane when you pretend that it’s really someone else who has something you hate in yourself, such as intolerance, a fantasy life that includes killing your enemies in slow and painful ways, a tendency toward lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. It’s normal, also, that as you get older and wiser, you begin to own the flaws you’ve pushed off onto other people. You come to understand that your vision of them is really a multifaceted mirror you’ve been looking into.
But paranoids double down on the idea that their problems are never internal. Reality goes out the window, and from there it’s a short cognitive leap to a world where the most outlandish schemes are believable, because what you see and hear and taste and feel are only cover-ups for what’s really happening. Paranoids, have, beneath their suspicion and hostility, a pathetic faith in whatever comes along that will allow them not to look inward.
The U.S. has become a paranoid country. If you see its projections onto the world and even onto its own citizens as a mirror image of itself, it’s also a pretty ugly country, one willing to harm its weak and vulnerable in order to avoid any kind of self-knowledge.
7. HUMAN INCOMPETENCE
I am a fan of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which concerns people who tend to devalue experts and overestimate their own abilities. It doesn’t matter if they’re talking about quantum physics or a Tchaikovsky concerto, they see themselves as just as good as the other guy, even if the other guy has put in ten thousand hours of practice and they haven’t. Dunning-Kruger seems to be the result of considerably widening the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that all men are created equal.
This would be fine, except that when you rely on the incompetent for skilled action, things go wrong. Then the amateur piano players and walk-on theoretical physicists and hold-my-beer politicians (and almost every other human being who comes to a job long on confidence and short on expertise) start kicking the piano, throwing wrenches at the particle accelerator, and calling out the National Guard to control protestors. Often enough, they ruin beyond repair the things that needed fixing.
The current mistrust of experts and scientists in this country looks to me like a way for more and more people to pretend to be competent when they aren’t. It results in a lot of people avoiding any situation where their skills would be tested, which means they foist jobs onto competent subordinates if they’ve got them. If they have already fired all the competent subordinates for insubordination, they don’t do anything at all. Or they push the big red button just to see what it’s connected to.
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I’ve listed seven plagues here. If you check out the Book of Exodus, you’ll find that Egypt, which had enslaved the Nation of Israel for four hundred years, experienced ten plagues before they decided to end their injustice. (Just so you know: Blood, Frogs, Lice, Flies, Dead Cows, Boils, Hail, Locusts, Darkness, and the Deaths of All Firstborn Children.)
Those four hundred years of slavery have some unpleasant resonances with our civilization’s treatment of the world’s poor, who do exist in a kind of slavery, even if it’s the slavery of seven years of payments on a pickup truck.
Tomorrow is election day, and if this country re-elects the current hard-hearted Pharaoh, I’m pretty sure we’re in for three more plagues. The contemporary analogs of locusts, darkness, and the deaths of firstborns are out there if you want to match them up. They’re going to be worse than what we’ve seen so far, and what we’ve seen so far looks like the end of us.