Toward an Age of Certainty and Uncertainty

A preoccupation with the future survival and welfare of our species and how to accomplish this without abandoning our best qualities – or destroying all other species – has always been an important part of the humanistic ethos. To approach these questions specifically in terms of our needs, fears, hopes, strengths, vulnerabilities, barriers, tendencies, capacities, relationships and values would be, I suppose, to call oneself a humanistic psychologist. As someone who was not alive in the 1950s when the movement emerged on these shores, I often wonder what it would have been like to adjust overnight to the threat of nuclear annihilation even we grew disconnected from a nature that was steadily receding beneath suburban developments and shopping malls, re-sculpted in our own image. I might have appreciated contemporaries like Erich Fromm or Rollo May who could speak directly to existential anxieties of the era in uncompromising, yet affirmative, tones. May (himself no Pollyanna) stated in an interview toward the end of his life: “If our world survives the nuclear threat — and I believe it will…we will move into a new age, when the emphasis…will be on truth, on joy, on understanding, on beauty.”

Will it still happen? Can it still happen? Today, we have not just estranged ourselves from nature, we have estranged nature, and the anxiety that grips us is the anxiety of knowing, as much as not knowing. In the decades since the giant “What If?” first dominated the collective imagination, framed by a mushroom cloud, this question has somehow been flipped to one premised on an inevitability: “If This……What Then??” Global warming, the Anthropocene and the ubiquitous refrain, “I guess we’re totally f**ked” are more than household expressions; they have etched themselves into the edges of our consciousness, quietly eroding expectations as semi-apocalyptic articlesopens in new window, reportsopens in new window and assessmentsopens in new window school us on our own demise. Yet, the more these concrete dimensions come into focus, the more difficult they are to envision.

There is the obvious practical matter of what to do and how to inspire people embedded in perverse and complex systems to do it. Yet we may not ultimately be able to avert or even attenuate these events, in which case the question is not what can be accomplished but what can be endured and even embraced; what we can lose without losing our humanity. And this is not a practical matter, but an existential one. So, as the Anthropocene unfolds, what is unfolding within ourselves? How do we square our humanistic values with a future whose conditions would not accommodate them, with a nature which would no longer have us? How do we bring individuals’ existential resources to bear on a situation whose dimensions extend so far beyond any individual? And what would it mean for our projects and commitments to believe, deep down, that the world can only get worse – and have the data to prove it? Any humanistic psychology worth its salt must address these questions if it is to play a constructive role in navigating the coming decades.

My tiny contribution is to offer some layman’s sketches of a particular set of psychological/psychospiritual stances toward the oncoming crisis. I call these the “four psychological horsemen of the apocalypse” for how they both over-anticipate, and overdetermine an apocalypse whose implications partly remain up to us. They are the attitudes that lie beyond denial, found among those who may fully acknowledge the Anthropocene, yet struggle to make meaning of it.

Resignation is the posture of defeat, a move to withdraw. Unlike acceptance which it often mimics, resignation is a little grudging, a little stoic. Most importantly, it is premature: a foreclosure on unrealized possibilities that passes itself off as realism (“Oh well, we had a good run of it…didn’t we?”).

Cynicism is, above all, relational; it means specifically giving up on people. Since the future must be created and sustained by people, this also means giving up on the future. But the cynic doesn’t resign so much as detach, refusing to participate (“We’ll never change…they’ll never change…what’s the point?”)

Apathy is characterized by absence: passivity (absence of action), indifference (absence of feeling) and oblivion (absence of awareness). To be apathetic is to wait and/or sleep, when both are untenable. (“This isn’t directly impacting me, so let others deal with it.”)

Despair is superordinate to these other three, less a distinct posture than an ontology. It embodies the sum psychological and spiritual toll of other attitudes which, together, would deny the possibility of a future that matters. One might even say that it is nothing more or less than the psychic experience of the Apocalypse.

Despair is of course a complex concept with its own intricate body of literature, and I would like to sidestep that philosophical baggage. I will simply note here, as many humanistic thinkers do, that the very extremity and immediacy of despair points to its status as a catalyst and even precondition for transformation. In May’s words, it “forces one to come to terms with one’s destiny…the great enemy of pretense.” Understood this way, despair over climate change is not so much about climate change per se as the pretense of business-as-usual in the face of these realities and worse, finding yourself trapped in this cycle of pretense, re-enacting it over and over again – and knowing it. This is what slowly crushes the soul. But the fact that your soul could be crushed is why we manage to hope at all.

Rilke suggested the only courage truly demanded of us is to “assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it.” Can we make enough room in our existence — willingly, with all the love and joy we can muster — for the catastrophic, the tragic, the life-altering, the world-shattering?

About the Author

Chris Schuck is part of the Planning Committee for the Psychology and the Other conference and an assistant editor for the new book series. He is also active in Div. 24 (Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology) and has been part of a research team in the University of Massachusetts-Boston counseling psychology department investigating institutional corruption in psychiatry and social justice issues surrounding mental health treatment.