Embracing Limits With Ecospheric Grace
In this episode with Robert Jensen, retired journalism professor, prolific author, and life-long social and environmental justice advocate, we discuss his latest book An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity that he co-authored with his colleague and elder, and The Land Institute’s co-founder Wes Jackson. Against the backdrop of cascading ecological and social crises of subjugation of people and nature under the dominion of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and anthropocentrism, we engage in a humbling dialogue about what it would mean for us to grapple with difficult questions and to consciously embrace limits, as a pathway to a more graceful and meaningful co-existence with one another and with Nature.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Robert Jensen 0:00
In the book, near the end, we recount a particularly meaningful conversation I had where Wes was out for a walk. And he was looking at the plants and the animals all around him. And he called me up and he said, Why is this not enough? Right? Why is all of this incredible beauty and diversity that is there waiting for us, why is this not enough? Why do we need theme parks and Las Vegas and cruise ships? Why do we need that? Why is this not enough? And of course for Wes it is enough. It's been enough for him his whole life. And that question stuck with me. Why is this not enough?
Alan Ware 0:32
Those wise words are from Robert Jensen, retired journalism professor and author of multiple books addressing varied topics from pornography, to patriarchy, to white privilege. In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast we'll be discussing Robert’s latest book, co- authored with The Land Institute's co-founder Wes Jackson, titled An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity.
Nandita Bajaj 1:05
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:27
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, a nonprofit that collaborates with experts and other organizations to educate about the impacts of human overpopulation and overconsumption on the planet, people, and animals. And before we move on to today's guests, we've got some listener feedback. And we received this one from Alexandria Paul in California in response to our last episode with Bill Ryerson of the Population Media Center. She says, ‘Loved, loved, loved your show with Bill Ryerson. He's an amazing man. And it was great learning about the history of the Sabido method and how Population Media Center is so successfully applying it all around the world. Keep up the great work.’
Nandita Bajaj 2:09
Well, Alexandra is of course no stranger to our work as she had her own excellent interview with us back in June of last year. You can find her podcast, episode number 62, on our website. Alexandra also was part of the first cohort of students who completed my online graduate course on pronatalism and overpopulation last year, which by the way is an online course and is open to anyone around the world. You can see the show notes for further information on how you can enroll. Well thank you so much for your feedback, Alexandra, and for all of the amazing work you are doing for the planet. If you have feedback or guest recommendations to share, write to us using the contact form on our site, or you can email us at podcast at populationbalance.org.
Alan Ware 02:58
And now on to today's guest. Robert Jensen is an emeritus professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas in Austin and a founding member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. Jensen is the co-author with Wes Jackson of an Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity, published by the University of Notre Dame Press in fall 2022. In his writing and teaching, Jensen draws on a variety of critical approaches to media and power. Much of his work has analyzed pornography and the radical feminist critique of sexuality and men's violence. And he has also addressed questions of race through a critique of white privilege and institutionalized racism. Jensen's recent work has focused on the ecological crises. Jensen has written a dozen books and his three most recent ones include: The Restless and Relentless Mind of West Jackson: Searching for Sustainability in 2021, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men in 2017, and Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully, 2015. Jensen also writes for popular medium, both alternative and mainstream. His opinion and analytic pieces on such subjects as foreign policy, politics, economics and ecology have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and websites all over the world. And now on to our discussion.
Nandita Bajaj 04:22
Good morning, Robert. It's really great to have you in our virtual studio today. Welcome to our podcast.
Robert Jensen 04:28
Well, thanks for having me. I only wish we could be in person, of course.
Nandita Bajaj 04:32
Likewise, after reading your book and listening to some of your podcasts, Alan and I even commented that we could spend a few hours just picking your brain and having great conversations over a nice drink somewhere.
Robert Jensen 04:44
Well, I always have a lot to talk about, but that's mainly because I'm just getting old. The drinks might be necessary to make it go down easier.
Nandita Bajaj 04:52
Well, we've got so much to ask you today, but we'll start with the first question. Your latest book co-authored with Wes Jackson, titled An Inconvenient Apocalypse, caught our attention, and that's what we'll be exploring with you today. But after learning more, we are so fascinated with your work on social justice issues, including the critique of pornography, masculinity, and patriarchy within the framework of radical feminism. You've also done work on privilege and institutional racism. And you most recently wrote a book on ecology dedicated to your co-author and elder Wes Jackson, titled the Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson. It's clear we're going to be having you back to touch on many of those works. But can you briefly share how your special partnership with Wes Jackson began? And then how this new book that you've both co-authored came to be?
Robert Jensen 05:48
Yeah, well, that story goes back more than thirty years now. In my twenties, I was a mediocre newspaper journalist struggling to build a career, and I decided to go back to graduate school when I was thirty years old and pursue a teaching career. And I was lucky to meet a lot of incredible people back then - this was 1988. One was a very dear friend of mine named Jim Koplin, who, after he died, I actually wrote a book about him, he was so important, called Plain Radical. But Jim was my sort of entry into a lot of these radical political movements, as well as the kind of deeper critique of the ecological crises. So my friend Jim handed me one of Wes's his books more than thirty years ago, and said, "If we're going to be friends, you need to read this." He understood the importance of Wes's framework for analyzing the ecological crises. So I've known Wes's his work long before I knew him. About a dozen years ago, I had a chance to go to Prairie Festival, which was and still is the annual event at the Land Institute that Wes co-founded. And we met. And then when we both retired from our day jobs about five years ago, we started actively collaborating. So I was deeply influenced by Wes's work before I met him, and then much to my surprise, got a chance to work with him. And it's been a delightful partnership ever since.
Nandita Bajaj 07:04
Well, it's no surprise how special that partnership is. It's clear in the way you write about him, and you speak about him. But then also how incredible to have mentor be a co-author with you on a book.
Robert Jensen 07:17
I'm old enough to remember when the the line for young people was, "Don't trust anybody over thirty." And then you grow up and you get past thirty yourself, and then you realize that there's no guarantee that older people have wisdom. I think there's a difference between older people and elders. And I consider Wes an elder, someone who, even at the age of eighty-six today, continues to struggle, to understand, to challenge himself. And that's a source of not only great intellectual engagement, but as Wes would say, a source of endless amusement as well.
Nandita Bajaj 07:47
Right. That was actually quite admirable when we were reading your book, just the way you're both grappling with all of these different issues, and social and political movements. And one of my favorite statements from you was, "We're contrarians, but we're not writing about this just for the sake of controversy," which many people might argue that, you know, why would you write something in this realm if you didn't have to? It's filled with controversies and myths.
Robert Jensen 08:15
Yeah, I think Wes and I wrote this book out of a sense of obligation. You know, we're both comfortable, stable, we have work we like. There was no reason we had to go challenging people. And not only people that are on the political right, the "drill, baby drill" people who want to keep pumping the fossil fuels. Challenging that political perspective is not particularly difficult. But we also write about things that challenge our friends on the progressive side of the political fence as well. But we felt it was an obligation to do so - that when people are quiet about difficult things, somebody needs to raise a voice. And of course, there are lots of people doing this, but we wanted to add our own perspective.
Alan Ware 08:54
And you and Wes right at the top, you press to what you call two simple points, challenging points. Quote, "First, we should expect dramatic change in the high energy, high technology system that now dominates everywhere, even if not everyone has equal access to the fruits of that system. And second, that change is likely in a matter of decades, rather than in some far off science fiction future. Big changes coming sooner than any society is ready for." And that big change, as stated in the title of your book, is an inconvenient apocalypse. So we'll ask right at the outset, what do you mean by the term apocalyptic and why are you apocalyptic?
Robert Jensen 09:33
Yeah, that's an important point because in pop culture, the word apocalypse has become synonymous with the end of the world, usually connected to the Christian Book of Revelation fantasies about a rapture where some people rise up and some people burn. Let's be clear, that's not what we're talking about. We're going back to the original definition of apocalypse, which is from the Greek revelation from the Latin and it means not the end of the world - it means an unveiling, a coming into clarity, a new understanding of the nature of the world around you. And we think that's what's needed. We all need to press ourselves to come to that clarity. There is a sense, however, though, that we are talking about the end of something. Not the end of the world, as Wes always likes to say, you know, the planet is going to be fine when we're gone. We're just one more species that comes and goes extinct eventually. So not the end of the world. But the end of the systems that currently structure the human world. That means, you know, large nation-states with hundreds of millions of people, it means capitalism in its current corporate globalized form, or in any form, it means a lot of ending to systems that have not, in the end, served the larger living world well, and haven't even served most people very well. So we are talking about endings and coming to terms with ending. But the thrust of the book is about that attempt to come to clarity. Now, Wes and I don't say we've got the final answer on everything. The book is really, I think, more about struggling to deal with, as Wes has always said, "Questions that go beyond the available answers. Questions that we don't have answers for right now."
Alan Ware 11:02
So that apocalypse is, I think you mentioned it's an unveiling, right? So it'd be an unveiling of how this high energy, high tech system cannot persist with eight billion people at a high consumption level and an unveiling of what will be possible in a downscaled future.
Robert Jensen 11:20
Yeah. And that's where the challenge, not only to the more conservative forces in the world, but to progressive forces as well. A lot of my lefty friends, and I make it clear, I come from the political left, believe that some combination of renewable energy sources solar, wind, whatever, and innovations like electric vehicles are somehow going to allow the basic level of aggregate consumption we have right now to continue. And we just don't think that's possible. If you look, for instance, at the Green New Deal in the US was the focus of progressive organizing for a while around ecological policy. The Green New Deal doesn't talk about the need to limit either the number of human beings or the amount we consume. Implicitly, it says we can keep living this way. And even expand this, you know, general affluent lifestyle to more and more people on the planet with the right tinkering with renewable energy and technology. And Wes and I believe that that is a dangerous claim. And so the unveiling is to come to terms with why that is really not where we want to put our energies in the future.
Alan Ware 12:21
Right, that green growth is an oxymoron or has no future.
Robert Jensen 12:24
Yeah. There are varying perspectives on this on the left, I don't want to lump everything into one. On the one hand, there's something like the Ecomodernist Manifesto, which, if you haven't read is, is good for a chuckle, in which they talk about decoupling - that somehow we're going to continue all of this material consumption, but it's going to be magically decoupled from the material world. I haven't quite figured out what that means yet. But they've got some, it's a kind of a modern day magic, I think is what it is. It's alchemy for the twenty-first century. And it will, I think, suffer the same fate as alchemy. On the other hand, there are progressive people really trying to deal with how to downsize, down-power a bit. But without the kind of disruption that Wes and I think, it's time that we just accept, is part of the human future. Of course, there are disruptions all around us, depending on where you live and the resources you have access to. So we don't want to pretend that everything's fine, but it's going to be bad in the future. Things are bad, and in some places really bad right now, but eventually something that deserves the term collapse is going to define existence for everybody everywhere, including the affluent. And so we want to be part of the conversation to start getting ready for that.
Nandita Bajaj 13:35
Yeah, it's very interesting, what you mentioned about the Green New Deal being inherently growthist in its framing. And I find it interesting that even the Sustainable Development Goals, which are seen as the gold standard for sustainability, have as one of their central pillars - sustained and inclusive economic growth. Meanwhile, a lot of the goals include things like: alleviating poverty, combating climate change, and addressing a range of other social and economic issues. But number one, population or family planning is not one of the goals. Number two, this kind of sustained green growth, like he just said, is kind of oxymoronic to think that you can address all of the other crises while continuing to work within the same economic framework.
Robert Jensen 14:23
Wes and I would would argue, as we do in the book, that all of this depends on a kind of technological fundamentalism. That's a phrase Wes has been using for about thirty years now. And what he means by it is that there's a kind of fundamentalist belief - that is a belief beyond evidence and reason - that we can solve all existing problems through the use of advanced technology. And what makes it particularly fundamentalist, I think, is it that point of view says we can even solve the problems caused by the use of previous technologies, which had unintended consequences, by new technologies. And that makes it a little crazy, quite frankly. We've invested in that technological fundamentalism for decades now, and we see the consequences of it. You know, we talk about the Green Revolution, that post World War Two movement to what people would have said improve agriculture around the world with these high tech, high energy products, new plants, new breeds. And it did, of course, increase yields dramatically, doubling, sometimes tripling yields, but it did it at the cost of ecological sustainability. It required a lot of petrochemicals, it required a lot of inputs that are expensive, it requires a lot of water. And so soil erosion continued, soil degradation continued, we got a temporary increase in yields, which everybody focused on without recognizing the long term ecological degradation. So the Green Revolution is part of that technological fundamentalism. And in the end, of course, it leaves us in some sense, in a more dire situation than we were to start.
Alan Ware 15:54
Right, you talk about, or Wes talks about promoting an ignorance-based worldview in light of that, right? That we're so ignorant when we start messing, especially with natural systems - that we understand so little, the complexity and the interconnection and relationships.
Robert Jensen 16:09
Wes would say that we're very clever more than we're smart.
Alan Ware 16:12
Right.
Robert Jensen 16:12
And of course, human history is full of incredible advances in human knowledge, especially during the scientific revolution. And I don't want to trivialize that. But Wes's invocation of an ignorance-based worldview, of course, isn't a call for everybody to be stupid. It's saying that, as you point out, our ignorance is always greater than our knowledge. The incredible complexity of the larger living world is really beyond human capacity to understand in great detail. We've learned a lot, but not nearly enough to control the consequences of our interventions. Just to give you an example, every time I meet a soil scientist, I asked him the same question, "I say, what do we know about what's going on in the soil? What can you tell me if I were to, you know, dig a square foot? How much of that reality can you really map?" And they say, "Maybe 5%." That maybe we know about 5% of what's going on in the soil.
Alan Ware 17:05
Wow.
Robert Jensen 17:05
We can't even map all of the organisms, we certainly don't know all of the interactions among those organisms. We tend to know something about what makes good soil, but to pretend we can control this larger living world and it's amazing complexity, is probably one of the most definitive examples of human hubris. And the consequences have been incredibly destructive, not just in the modern industrial fossil fuel era. But going back, Wes has, for a long time been pointing out the 10,000 year problem of agriculture, that the drawdown of the ecological capital of the planet didn't begin with the steam engine. It began with the domestication of plants and animals, which allowed human beings to capture an incredible surplus of the energy of the planet, but did so at a cost to ecosystems. So you know, one of the stories of history since agriculture is a story of people exhausting soils in one area, moving on to conquer another area. You know, this isn't a new phenomenon. So one of the things Wes has done, and we try and do in the book, is kind of extend the timeframe. It's easy to look at the current crises, both social and ecological, and point to things like capitalism, or the imperialism of the European nations, who for five-hundred years went about the business of subjugating and destroying much of the rest of the world. Okay, those are serious issues that we have to account for and we have to rectify the consequences of, but to understand the deeper problem requires us to go back further. What Wes would call the break with nature, when human beings started taking control of ecosystems in ways that turned out to be beyond our capacity to really manage. And that's one of the problems that people have a hard time facing today is, we're beyond the scope of our competence to manage the systems we have created. So do you double down and make more complex systems that are even harder to control? Or do you step back and try to think about a world of limits? That's one of the questions we pose.
Alan Ware 19:01
Yeah, I appreciate that you recognize those systems of the past 10,000 years have been the result of, as you say, the imperative of life to seek out energy-rich carbon, and that we have to come to terms of our carbon nature. And as you were just talking about, first we mined the soils, than we felled the forest. And then we went after coal, oil, natural gas, maximizing the extraction of all the carbon we can get our hands on. And then with our high cognitive capacity and our ability to cooperate and divide labor, we just increased the scale and the scope of the human enterprise. And I think you make it clear these temptations of dense energy that are just there, right, no matter what political economic system we have, capturing and using dense energy for comfort and pleasure is not a unique goal of imperialists and capitalists. And you gave a great example of a trench that you have for your well, fifty foot. If you did that by hand versus a backhoe, powered by fossil fuels, or you mentioned in some other podcast, a hole that you dug for a plumber, and you had to shovel it for hours.
Robert Jensen 20:09
Yeah, it was a very clear example of the benefits of fossil fuels. So, you know, to be clear, let's take modern consumer capitalism. It is exacerbating and accelerating the destruction of ecosystems. By using propaganda methods, I'm sorry, the polite term for propaganda is advertising and marketing. And of course, they do fuel this irrational consumption. But as you're pointing out, there's a lot of work that fossil fuels do that isn't about egregious consumption or craziness. It's about the fact that it does work for us, and not to make too much of it, but when you dig a hole five feet down to the frost line, six feet in diameter, so the plumber can repair a pipe, and that takes you eight hours, and you realize that a backhoe could have dug that in about twenty minutes, you realize the fossil fuels that created that backhoe and power that backhoe save you a strained back. So we try to take seriously the idea that two things can be true at the same time - that capitalism is a foundational problem, especially the irrational consumption of modern capitalism. But that it's also true that human beings are, as you point out, like every other organism, trying to maximize the amount of power, there's something called the maximum power principle in ecology, and that we're no different than other organisms. It doesn't mean we, at this point, can't make conscious choices to impose limits on ourselves. But we should recognize that if we are able to do that, we will be the first species in the history of the planet that consciously imposed limits on itself. Now other species overtax ecosystems and have limits forced on them through predation, disease, all sorts of things. But human beings are in an odd position of having to be the first species to choose limits. And that's a tough job. And so the reason to point all this out is not to let advertising, marketing, and corporate capitalism off the hook, it's to say that even if we were to create a more rational economic system, one that was aimed not at profit, but at human flourishing, we would still face some of these struggles. And if we're going to have a human future, or at least a decent human future, we're going to have to come to terms with this, and limits are at the center of this book. I've said, if you wanted to reduce this book to a bumper sticker, it would be: Fewer and Less. The human future is going to be fewer people consuming less energy and less resources. And if you can't come to terms with that, it seems to me you can't come to terms with reality.
Nandita Bajaj 22:34
Yeah, really well said. We would offer to take that on as our new tagline, but we have a similar one called Shrink Toward Abundance, which only goes to tell you we agree with fewer and less. And I know you started talking about soil, and that reminded me of our last conversation that we had with Eileen Crist, who also brought up soil as a perfect example of a living planet, the kind where you cannot make a distinction between the living and the nonliving. And that soil would not be present on a lifeless planet.
Robert Jensen 23:06
Yeah, no, that was another thing that it was something Wes said early in my reading of him that really affected me, that we make a distinction between living and dead. And the distinction, of course, means something. But Wes following a Canadian ecologist, the late Stan Rowe helped me understand that if you look inside our bodies, this was Stan Row's example, you'll see lots of things that in some sense are dead, you know, minerals, you know. But we think of the body as a living thing.
Nandita Bajaj 23:34
Right.
Robert Jensen 23:34
In a similar way, none of us would be alive if it weren't for lots of things that are dead in the way we think of that. And so, it isn't that in everyday life we can't distinguish between the living and the nonliving, it's to recognize that there is a fundamental connection between all things - not just between all living things, a lot of people say all living things are connected. Well, that's true enough.
Nandita Bajaj 23:55
Yes.
Robert Jensen 23:56
But so are all nonliving things connected with living things. And that means that in Wes's terms, we'd stop treating soil like dirt. You know, we wouldn't think of it as just dirt, as a nuisance. We would think of it as a living thing, even its nonliving components. And that kind of adjustment is really necessary. Now, you know, we're coming out of a modern scientific framework. And it's always important to recognize that other traditions have understood the world in this way for millennia. It doesn't mean that the insights from modern ecology aren't important. It's just that they aren't unique in some ways. So, you know, modern science has taught us a lot of things that are truly unique. I mean, the power of modern science to reveal how the larger living world works is pretty extraordinary. But some of these fundamental principles, of course, go back in many traditions in the pre-modern and pre-scientific era as well.
Alan Ware 24:44
Yes, if we could meld the Indigenous value of connection and relationship with as what Wes, I think, calls a renaissance of nature, of understanding of nature. So you have soil scientist who might know more than 5% of what's in the soil, but we direct so little of our attention and money and resources, time, to understanding natural processes. That there's a lot of room for Western science to learn more about nature. We'll never learn everything, we will have to, as you say, remain ignorant of most of it. But if we could push our understanding of nature combined with a value system that sees more interconnection and relationship, that would be a wonderful thing.
Robert Jensen 25:21
And you know, for better or worse, for the better part of five-hundred years, the modern scientific worldview has set the agenda for the entire planet. And so we have no choice now. We're in a kind of ironic situation. We have to learn to better use science in combination with other insights, but better use science to address the problems that in some sense, the modern worldview and modern science helped create. It doesn't mean science is inherently bankrupt. It means that the original application of those scientific principles to various questions and problems led us to invent products, techniques, understandings, that went beyond our ability to control. And now we have to tame that. You know, but that's life, life is full of contradiction, irony, and conundrum. And that's just one of the many ones we face today.
Nandita Bajaj 26:10
Right. And you've had your own journey from working in more social justice issues previously, including privilege, power, and oppression work. And more recently, through the inspiration that you received from Wes into focusing on more human species-level conversation that has guided this book. What has that journey been like - your own coming to terms with our larger identity as Earthlings?
Robert Jensen 26:39
Well, you have to understand I'm slow. It takes me a while to work through things. So, you know, I mentioned I went back for graduate education when I was about thirty. I'm now sixty-four. And I've just been slowly making my way through these questions. The first issue I really grappled with was the question of patriarchy, institutionalized male dominance, through a critique of what I call the sexual exploitation industries: pornography, prostitution, all the ways that men buy and sell women's bodies for sexual pleasure. Well, that was my wake up call to realize that the world actually worked in more complex ways than I had been led to believe, that there were these deep patriarchal structures that influenced me in ways I had never understood. And so in a sense, the first door I opened to understand how power really operates within the human family was the feminist door. Well, if you pay attention to the way institutionalized male dominance works, it doesn't take you long to realize there's this phenomenon called white supremacy, and for five-hundred years it's been structuring the distribution of power and resources in the world. And so then I had to engage that. I ended up writing a book about that, too. And then roughly around the same time, it was hard not to recognize that the system of capitalism was creating profound inequality around the world. It wasn't accidental, it was the nature of the system. And that if we took seriously our commitments to equity, fairness, justice - it made me realize that was incompatible with capitalism. And then along the way, because I'm a US citizen, it was hard not to notice US was going around bombing a lot of folks in the world and paying other people to bomb and, and so the question of imperialism and militarism. I think those are the four big questions within the human family, the questions of: race and gender, the questions of economic inequality, and then global inequality enforced in various ways, including military power. Okay, so I spent a lot of time thinking about that. And in the background always was this larger question, not only of how human beings engage in domination and subordination practices within the human family, but the way the whole human family now, not every individual, of course, but the systems that the human family has created, are based on a domination/subordination dynamic over the larger living world. And so that was always out there, always part of my thinking. And I just have moved through all these. I guess you could say, I'm not smart enough to specialize in anything. So I just move through these issues and try and figure it out the way I best can. And I'm actually half serious about that. In academic life, to digress briefly, everybody wants to be the smartest person in the room. And I always knew I was not the smartest person in the room. I think I do have an ability to take complex issues and try to understand them and communicate that clearly. Which is what good teaching is. And I strove to be a good teacher. But that's been the sort of - the guidepost for me is not how do I come up with a new theory to explain everything to everybody, but how do I use all of this incredible work that has been done by other people, to try and put together a worldview that might be useful to ordinary people. So that's sort of a short summary of how I view my career. And as we face what my friend Jim Koplin called, "the multiple cascading crises of the world," you know, not just climate change, not just plastic pollution, not just soil erosion, but these multiple crises cascading in ways we can't predict. They unfold in ways we will not be able to predict. So as those cascading crises became unavoidable, you know, and in the last ten years, a lot of people, who for years wanted to avoid thinking about environmental questions, have been forced to. it just seemed that was the appropriate subject to take up in my own writing.
Nandita Bajaj 30:16
Well, I want to just quickly say that with Alan and I both being generalists, we are fans of other generalists, too. What advice do you have for others on how to engage in this necessary work of recognizing that there are social inequalities and there are all these hierarchical powers that are subjugating people based on all of their different identities. And yet, at the same time, there is a larger, collective, existential challenge that we all, as one human species, face. How do we do that?
Robert Jensen 30:52
Well, I think it goes back to one of the most foundational philosophical questions, which is, "What does it mean to live a good life?" And what the sort of radical political movements helped me understand was that holding on to unearned privilege and power does provide certain short-term material benefits. I'm a middle class white guy in the United States, I know what unearned privilege and power looks like. And of course, there are lots of ways in which that benefits me. But I think the important turn is to realize that if you grapple with why that unearned privilege and power exists, you not only will have to give things up, and you do have to give things up, it's important to give things up. But there is a kind of new sense of being alive that is out there. So, you know, my original work in feminism - at first, feminists seemed kind of scary to me, because I'd been socialized to believe they were going to take something away from me. Whatever feminists were, they were going to do something bad to me, right? And then I realized that feminism, especially the radical feminism that I was part of, it wasn't a threat to me, it was a gift. It was a way to help me deepen my own experience in the world, to break away to the degree I can, from some of the ways I was socialized to be a man. Okay, so I think what we have to do is deepen our sense of what it means to live a good life. Now, I don't want to be naive, I eat regular, I have a nice bed to sleep in and I'm very grateful for that. The material comforts of the world are not trivial, and people who don't have them are very well aware of that. But at some point, one has to realize that continuing to kind of hoard those material comforts comes at the cost of a deeper, richer, more meaningful experience. In my case, starting with feminism, realizing that I would never have the kind of relationships I wanted to have with women if I couldn't break away from this patriarchal training and masculinity. As a white person who grew up in a pretty much all white world up in North Dakota, I realized I had to let go of a lot of assumptions. And I had to challenge myself, or I was never going to connect to people of color and I would be deprived of all of those friendships. And so a lot of people say, "Well, it's so noble, if you're in a position of privilege, to engage in these activities." But in a way, I think it's selfish. I'm doing it for myself. I like to think I have principles that guide my action. But in the end, the motivation to lead a good life, if properly understood, from my point of view, provides even deeper motivation to engage in this kind of work.
Nandita Bajaj 33:14
You're saying that you came from a place of actually wanting to experience more relationships, more depth, more of life. And that aspiration allowed you to break through some of these hierarchical structures. That meant giving up some of the things, but it also brought a lot of other really valuable things.
Robert Jensen 33:33
I just remember I had an old friend, also deceased, named Abe Osheroff, who was a longtime radical. He had fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republic. That's how old Abe was. And Abe had lived this life of radical activism and given up a lot of things he could have had in material terms. But he said, you know, "The only thing, that if you give it away, you get more of is love." And that's a, you know, not a new observation, but here was his grisly, you know, eighty-year-old radical activist talking about love. And that was a big influence on me. I realized, oh, yeah, you give away love and you get more back, you give away material possessions, you have less. And so you know, we actually end the book, Wes and I, on this idea of love - the importance of love. And neither he or I are sentimental or romantic people particularly, but you know, this deeper sense of love is very important. And of course, if you do love, it means facing difficult realities. If you love someone, if you have a partner and you love that person, you don't avoid the difficult things, you you go toward them to deepen the relationship. And so we end the book with one of my favorite literary passages from Dostoyevsky, from The Brothers Karamazov, I threw that in partly so people would think I was really smart and read dense Russian novels. I don't read them that often. But the line in that passage, the character is explaining how it's hard to be alive sometimes. And he says, "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams." So this, you know, airy fairy notion of love that, you know, sometimes the poets sell us. That's all well and good, but love is tested through action. And love in action is very often a harsh and dreadful thing.
Nandita Bajaj 35:12
Right.
Robert Jensen 35:13
But that is also, I think, the deepest sense of love to be able to confront that. And so we end the book by saying, "In the end, that is what human beings have, we have love. It doesn't mean it's easy. Often it means, in fact, it's hard if you want to love honestly." But it's those kinds of insights from the poets, from the writers, from my radical activist colleagues that have really helped guide me. I mentioned this gentleman, Jim Koplin, who was so important in my life. I'll never forget, one day we were talking about some of these difficult ecological realities, and he said, "I've known this for a long time, I've been aware of this." He was an early, you know, student of these crises. And he said, "As a result, I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief." And he was not being glib, he meant it, yet he had a rich and full life. He was a gardener, he was a community activist, he was a great neighbor. He was a constant student, til his last day, of the complexity of life. And yet he lived with that sense of profound grief. Which was important to realize that you don't have to turn away from that harsh and dreadful reality to live a decent life, to live a happy life. You know, I also often quote the poet and novelist Wendell Berry, who's fairly well known in certain circles in the US, and is actually a personal friend of Wes's. And in one of Wendell's books, he talks about what he calls "the humanist state of grief and joy." That's where we live, the humanist state is grief and joy, that's, it's the way it's always been. And I think a deeper sense of grief today maybe is appropriate. But without recognizing that, there is no joy. And that's another one of these vexing aspects of being human. So the reason I talk so personally and talk about friends is because you can't really lecture people about this, you have to be willing to say out loud, this is what I'm trying to do. This is how I'm trying to live. And I've been lucky to have some great role models in that.
Alan Ware 37:02
So part of that grief and joy will be happening, and what you and Wes make clear will be an age of ongoing contraction. And that people need to distinguish needs from wants to a level that we haven't had to in recent decades in much of the world. So looking at the book, how you lay out four hard questions that we have to attend to, why don't we go through those four hard questions, and we'll dive into them more deeply as we go along?
Robert Jensen 37:28
So the four hard questions are size, scale, scope and speed. By that, we simply mean what is the sustainable size of the human population? Which of course means also, at what level of consumption, you can't talk about population without talking about consumption. The second question is, what is the appropriate and workable scale of human societies, social organizations? The third is what is the scope of our competence to manage the high energy, high technology systems we've created? And the fourth question is, at what speed do we need to go to have a reasonable chance of success? And they're hard questions, because the answers are pretty grim. We don't know exactly what the sustainable size of the human population is. And we don't know exactly what level of consumption that would be. But we know it's a lot less than eight billion. That we have to, at least think, you know, and I would say a modest goal would be to think about half of that human population, four billion - maybe it's even half of that. Again, good ecologists I have read argue that the sustainable size of the human population is probably around two billion. Well, that's pretty dramatic. Just to make that point, my father was born in 1927. He's ninety-five, still alive. In 1927, the human population was two billion. So one person has lived through a doubling, and then a doubling again of the human population. That is unprecedented, and of course, it's only possible because of the temporary extraction of all that energy in fossil fuels. Okay, what level of consumption again, a lot less than most of us are currently consuming in the affluent world. That makes it hard because we don't know how to get to four billion or two billion. And we don't know how to put those limits on ourselves. Well, what about the appropriate scale of human social organization? Well, we have to remember that for about 99% of our evolutionary history as Homo, we lived in small gathering and hunting societies, band-level societies, probably no more than a hundred people. And now we live in the United States, in a nation-state with three-hundred and thirty million people, you know, cities of millions of people. That is not a workable scale of human social organization. How do we get to a smaller scale? Again, we may know we need to get there, but we don't know how to do it. The scope of our competence. We've talked at some length already about how we routinely overestimate our ability to control the high energy, high technology systems we create, and that that is starting to fall apart. We use the example of nuclear power, which is probably the most insane example of how we create systems beyond our ability to control, but that's only one. We also mentioned the Green Revolution earlier. So we have this problem of not knowing how to get to the appropriate size, the sustainable size of a population, not knowing how to get to a more workable scale of human organization, and not knowing how to dramatically pull back this hubris about the scope of our competence. Which means that the problem of speed is also central, because all of this has to happen faster than it currently is happening and faster than it may be possible for us to change. And that means that, as we said earlier, something like the term collapse is going to be appropriate, not only for regional or specific problems in places, but for the global human condition. And those are hard things to come to terms with. And again, I want to emphasize Wes, and I don't have a notebook to take off the shelf and to hand you - here is the playbook for these solutions. We don't have a clue any more than anybody else. But what we are pretty sure of is if we don't talk about things just because they are hard, we are not going to find solutions magically. The hard conversations are required for any hope of success.
Alan Ware 41:03
Are you encouraged at all by President of France, Macron, recently saying the era of abundance is over? That would seem like a very baby step.
Robert Jensen 41:12
Yeah, I would be more impressed if the rhetorical claim about the age of abundance being over was included some sort of proposal about how to impose limits.
Alan Ware 41:23
Right.
Robert Jensen 41:23
And how to make those limits shared, in other words, how to equalize the distribution of existing wealth. Now, there are ways to do that. Stan Cox, who's a colleague of Wes's at the Land Institute, has made a very, I think, sensible proposal for how to put a hard cap on the amount of carbon that we consume, and how to take that cap and lower it every year. You know, Stan, is a very bright guy, and he's outlined what he calls "Cap and Adapt." To cap the amount of energy we use and adapt with an eye toward fairness. It would include obviously, rationing. It's not enough for individually, for us to say, "Oh, well, we're gonna use less or consume less." These have to be collective solutions. Rationing is the appropriate term for that. So Stan's work - it's not that it's impossible to start sketching solutions, people are doing it, but they do require that we not avoid this question of limits. Limits on the number of people, limits on how much those people consume. And as we know, those are, in political terms right now, almost unspeakable. If I were to run for Congress, from my district here in New Mexico and stand up and say, "I promise, all of my constituents, that within five years, I will reduce your material lifestyle by half - you will consume half the energy you consume today." I have a feeling I'm not going to get out of the gate on that one. So it's just obvious that there's no political space right now to even talk about it. And I don't just mean on the political right, I mean, on the whole political spectrum at this point.
Alan Ware 42:50
So you are encouraged by notions of degrowth and some of the degrowth movement? Or do you think degrowth will probably not happen in a managed, democratic way, but that will happen involuntarily That we'll be degrowing, whether we want to or not?
Robert Jensen 43:05
Yeah, of course, as we said earlier, when a species outstrips the capacity of its ecosystems to sustain life, those limits are imposed through disease and predators and all sorts of things. And there's a likelihood that's part of the human future. I mean, I hate to say it, because that means human suffering. And I don't think any decent person can be glib about human suffering. We now know about the levels of that suffering around the world under current conditions, and the thought of increased human suffering is really, I think it outstrips our moral imaginations to understand, right? So we don't want to be glib, but if that is the future, we should start talking about it. So we impose limits on ourselves or the ecosphere imposes those limits on us. We don't know when that's going to happen. So far, we've evaded it by tapping into these carbon pools, especially coal, oil, and gas. But that is a temporary situation. It's not a permanent fix. And as Wes and I argue, as many people do, no combination of renewable energy sources is going to replace those fossil fuels. So starting to talk about degrowth, or Doughnut Economics, which is a great book that outlines a way to think about economics that is sustainable. I don't know which of those particular approaches might carry the day, but it doesn't matter. It matters that people are starting to talk about it. And that's the point we're at in human history. We're just trying to articulate the need to face those limits with no certainty about how to make it work.
Alan Ware 44:31
I think you mentioned the idea of a hundred flowers blooming, that we need a lot of different ideas and, and that because of the scale of the nation-state, might not be maintained, that the hundred flowers blooming need to be locally and decentralized.
Robert Jensen 44:46
Yeah, I don't quote Mao, Mao Zedong all that often. But that was one of his better lines. You know, in a particularly lucid moment, I suppose, he said, "In the absence of certainty," you know, "Let a hundred flowers bloom." That's where the term comes from. And it means that if you don't know the path to salvation, if I can't, brothers and sisters, tell you the right road, and I can't, then anybody who's trying to advance these goals, we should support them. So you know, sometimes, unfortunately, in political work, people get their preferred solution. And then they try to undermine or denigrate people who have different solutions. In this case, I think it's more important to say anybody who wants to think about limits, run with it, go for it, I don't know what's going to work, you don't know what's going to work, let's start throwing out ideas. And that doesn't mean you don't object when you think people are wrong. There's a capacity to both recognize your own limits, but also realize that, especially with moral questions, there are lines in the sand and you maintain them. But again, we've talked about this already about, it's hard being human. You know, we're just smart enough to get ourselves in a lot of trouble and not smart enough to figure out how to get out of it. And that means a lot of vexing questions. And I don't know if this is a normal trajectory. But the older I get, the more I realize how I don't have all the answers. But the more certain I am that the questions I want to ask are important. And that's been my own development. And I am now getting older, in increasingly rapid fashion.
Nandita Bajaj 46:17
And leaving us with really good questions to grapple with. You know, and just for the sake of our listeners, because we do work in the sustainable population advocacy space and have interviewed a lot of people who have proposed, you know, really smart solutions to stabilizing and then eventually reducing our population down to a much more sustainable number, whether it's one, two, or three billion, depending on the per capita consumption. Just like you're saying, people are so afraid to have these conversations because there is this idea that coercion has been the only way that has succeeded in sustainable population advocacy efforts. Yes, there's a history of coercion, we must take responsibility for all of the bad ways in which people have been subjugated for demographic goals, and especially people within marginalized communities, and are still continuing to be, not always population related, but for a lot of different reasons. But at the same time, there has been a tendency to conflate all types of family planning efforts with coercion. And that's completely untrue. We have so many examples where ethical empowering strategies were used to bring the total fertility rate down from an average of six to under three in ten to twenty years. There are lots of countries: Thailand, Iran, South Korea, Bangladesh, Morocco, just to name a few, and these strategies not only ended up reducing the population, which then took away the pressures that overpopulation was placing on resource scarcity and poverty and all of the other social issues that come with it. But it also actually ended up elevating a lot of women's reproductive autonomy by targeting family planning efforts. The other thing, of course, in our work that we look at that is often overlooked when people talk about coercion is the pervasive pronatalist forces that are prevalent throughout the world that compel women globally to have children, whether it's for political, economic, religious, nationalistic reasons that undermine reproductive self-determination. Just as egregious type of coercion as the other kind that has silenced the debate, but pronatalism, I think plays a role in continuing to dismiss this debate. We just want to bring to the fore, that there are a lot of great solutions that are being presented by experts, as you said, you know, you necessarily aren't proposing solutions, you're just opening conversation, but even one of our colleagues, Dr. Chris Tucker, who's the one who introduced us, he talks about how we know we have the tools to actually strategically get our population to three billion in the next one hundred years. It's more of the political will to actually get people access to information, education and empowerment. And so, just wanted to insert that comment in there, you know, to say, you're right, that we don't have overarching solutions that are coming from a framework that understands degrowth, that understands human rights, that understands ecological ethics, our connection to nature, but there are individuals who are kind of making connections and our job more and more is to bring these experts and help amalgamate those ideas.
Robert Jensen 49:48
I think there are ways to do that. The question is, is it possible within a timeframe available to us before these conditions we call collapse start to unfold more dramatically, and that there's no way to know that so you pursue the sensible projects you can, while you can. We talk about this in the book, people, especially people who look like me, that is white people, shy away from population debates. The history of debates about population control have often been racist. That is, there have been a lot of Europeans, white people, who fear population growth in the non-white world, who fear immigration that will somehow take away our lovely standard of living. And so I've had people say, "Well, are you aware that the population debate is often dominated by racists?" And I say, "Yes, I'm aware of that. But I'm not one." And so if we're afraid to talk about a difficult problem, because some nasty people have also talked about that problem in ways we don't like, well, then there's not much we can talk about in the world, because there's nasty people all over the place, saying nasty things. If we don't start talking about them, it's not going to get easier. I don't know why anybody would think that if we delay difficult conversations, when things get really stressful, it's somehow gonna be magically easy to deal with these? I mean, it's going to be only harder. But human beings, I don't know if you all have realized this, but we're not a terribly rational species. And I don't just mean, you know, my political opponents, I mean, me. You know, the non-rational aspects of our being are pronounced, and it doesn't take much self-reflection to realize how non-rational every one of us can be. And of course, we do have to deal with fear. Human fear is real, my fear, your fears, the fears of others. It makes it harder, but it doesn't make it impossible. I mean, we're having this conversation, and the three of us are human, as far as I can tell.
Nandita Bajaj 51:28
Exactly.
Robert Jensen 51:29
And so we can use our rational capacities to help us deal with the inevitably non-rational aspects of our lives as well. You know, that's education. That's what I always thought when I was teaching at the University of Texas, that was my goal, to help students understand, we're all non-rational, but we do have rational faculties that we can bring to bear on that to try and make a more decent world - a world more aligned with the principles of equity, justice, fairness, and sustainability that we claim to hold. So why not give it our best shot?
Nandita Bajaj 51:59
Yeah.
Alan Ware 51:59
Right. And that, instead of denial, which you mentioned, which can be adaptive, I've heard others mention, we do have to deny certain things just to make it through life and get through the day. But if we have a collective denial about problems, and even talking about them, and you mentioned in the book that a lot of friends and allies will advise against saying some of the things you said today in public because they think people can't handle the full truth.
Robert Jensen 52:26
Well, I often use the analogy of families. Apparently, there are a lot of dysfunctional families in the modern world. Oh, wait, I come from one. That's right. Well, the first thing, the first thing you understand about dysfunctional families is they thrive on silence. And that basic family systems therapy, it creates conditions under which people can talk about difficult subjects. And end that denial. You know, every dysfunctional family is in denial about its own dysfunction. So that's a pretty basic principle. If any of us have struggled with this, as I have, you realize that's the starting point, the ability to speak to end the denial. Well, why is that any different on a planetary level, a social level? It's the same concept. But I, again, don't want to be self-righteous. I've engaged in my own denial many times over many years, and in some sense, probably still do. But we can collectively say, let's work to help each other get past that denial. And the collective nature of this is crucial. Nobody can do this on your own, or with a friend or two. We're not going to make real progress until this is part of a collective conversation. And again, I'm not naive. Right now, in politics in the United States, where I live, it's hard enough just to have a political conversation in which there's an agreement on certain factual bases, you know. But in the spaces that are open to this kind of conversation, I think we have to press this conversation. It may not be on the national political terrain right now. But it certainly is in smaller places, smaller political groups, groups of friends and family, there's a lot of places we can have this conversation.
Nandita Bajaj 53:58
I think one of the reasons there is maybe an increased degree of fear and having these conversations is there's a lot of fear of making mistakes while you're doing this work. And so to avoid making mistakes at all, and being seen as somehow complicit with the wrong kind of crowd, most people just avoid the issue altogether, instead of you know, falling down headfirst and getting back up and taking responsibility, and keep on moving on. Because we don't have the time or the privilege to protect ourselves from that kind of criticism if we are really grappling with the work in an intentional way.
Robert Jensen 54:41
That's an excellent point. I'm not sure I've thought about that. But one of the aspects of privilege is the privilege to avoid taking responsibility, accountability, and committing to something. There's been a much needed emphasis on the problem of white supremacy in the United States and other countries as well. And one of the things unfortunately that's done, I think, is it's led white people to say, "Well, I don't want to weigh in, you know, I want to listen." Well, listening is an important part of education and growth, of course. But at some point, you have to make a commitment.
Nandita Bajaj 55:11
Right.
Robert Jensen 55:11
And there are different approaches to dealing with the problem of white supremacy. And if you're white, and you commit to a particular perspective, there going to be people who don't like you - who think you're wrong. But the answer isn't to evade, the answer is to step up and say, "Yes, this is what I believe, this is where I'm putting my political energy," knowing you will be critiqued for it. In some ways, this has been the story of my life. It started, as we mentioned earlier, in the radical feminist critique of pornography and prostitution and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation. Well, a lot of my friends in the liberal left world disagree with me. But I felt it was important to make that commitment because the women I have learned from, and the women who I found most compelling, made a great case for a critique of and resistance to those sexual exploitation industries. But it meant I got criticized by a lot of other women. That's the price of the ticket if you want to be intellectually and politically relevant and, and engaged. And it's true on almost everything these days, but we never got anywhere by evading. That's, I think you're right. That's very clear now.
Nandita Bajaj 56:15
Yeah, I think it comes with any kind of leadership position. You just have to be aware and willing to take a lot of criticism and still stay grounded within your motivation for what's driving you to do this work. And if it is validation and affirmation, then you know, you're not in the right kind of field.
Robert Jensen 56:34
This is where I'm so glad I was a weird kid who got teased a lot and never fit in. Because when your early experiences are already being the weird guy-
Nandita Bajaj 56:42
Right.
Robert Jensen 56:42
Then when you get older, and you take a stand that people attack you for, it's sort of like, "Oh, yeah, I remember this. It's like being in high school again." I'm not being glib, I think it was good training to be marginal, when you're younger, is really, really pretty painful-
Nandita Bajaj 56:58
Right.
Robert Jensen 56:58
When you're growing up. But it can, it doesn't always do it, but it can sort of steal you to critique in a certain way. You stay true to what you believe to be yourself, and your own conclusions, so.
Alan Ware 57:09
So Robert, how do you respond to the standard question of is there any reason to hope?
Robert Jensen 57:15
Well, sometimes people will say to me, how do you get out of bed in the morning? And I always say, "The question isn't how, it's the fact that I do." And I get out of bed in the morning because I find joy in the world. I find beauty in the world. I enjoy work I do. I have people I love. I get out of bed because of the same things that everybody else does as well. And so, facing down difficult realities about the world doesn't magically paralyze you. It can, and in some cases, it does, but it doesn't have to. So recognizing that joy and beauty are all around us, even in times of collapse, I think is very important. You know, we've talked a lot about the kind of conundrums of being human. And one of those is in this concept that Wes came up with called Ecospheric Grace. So for those who know, you know, religious traditions, especially the Christian tradition, we talk about the grace of God, the you know, unmerited favor. That God loves us, we don't deserve it, but we got it. Well, Wes made the point that we love the world. Most of us have a deep emotional connection to the larger living world. But he says we have to come to terms with the fact the world doesn't love us back. We love the ecosphere. It doesn't love us. To the ecosphere, we're just another species, right. So how do we recognize the grace that is the systems of this planet, give us everything we need to live? And there is a kind of grace in that, not just for humans, we're not special, it's for every species. And how do we have gratitude for that and affection for that larger living world, but recognize we're not special, we don't have any unmerited favor. That's one of the things we do in this book, is we try to take theological concepts and use them in a secular way to realize there is wisdom in those even if one doesn't accept some of the claims of a particular religious tradition. And since Wes, and I both come out of Protestant Christian traditions, things like grace are concepts that have been relevant in our lives. And we're working with that instead of trying to work against it. But I don't know that the question is, where do you find hope? The question, again, is what does it mean to be alive? And even if there are a set of problems that are beyond our likely capacity to solve, in that sense, you know, you have no hope, it doesn't mean that life ends, it means that you adjust to trying to live a good life within rapidly changing conditions. And to me that's adequate to motivate me to continue to work, to continue to connect to other people, and to continue to face these difficult realities we're talking about. You know, it might be that I have a special advantage because I'm from North Dakota. And my recollection of growing up in North Dakota was basically you got up in the morning and you shovel the sidewalk, and then you got up the next day, and you shovel the sidewalk. It didn't ever seem to end. Before rapid climate change, it seemed like my early training was in endless shoveling of snow, but it didn't mean life wasn't worth living, it just meant that every day you got out of bed and there was more snow to shovel. Maybe I have a hidden advantage being from North Dakota.
Nandita Bajaj 1:00:04
Just the way you were speaking about hope at the end reminded me of Victor Frankl's work. He believed that we could find hope in even the darkest of places. And that our motivation for life actually comes from meaning. And to tie it all back together, that's something you talk about in the crisis of meaning is, we are missing those seminal questions in our lives. Why are we here? Who are we? And where are we going? And what is our purpose? It just becomes easier with consumption and more things around us to get distracted and not engage with our humanity in the deepest possible way.
Robert Jensen 1:00:44
For a long time Wes has been saying there are these three enduring questions. Where did we come from? What kind of creature are we? And what is to become of us? Well, you know, the astrophysicist have answered the question, where did we come from in some sense. Well, what kind of creature are we? Well, Darwinian evolution by natural selection helps us figure that one out. What we still don't know is what is to become of us. And that's not a question to answer. It's a question to live. And this is where my friendship with Wes has been so helpful. To see somebody twenty-two years older than me still actively, eagerly engaging those questions has been really, really wonderful. Because we all need role models that show us it's worth doing. And in the book, and near the end, we recount a particularly meaningful conversation I had where Wes was out for a walk, he lives on the prairie in Kansas, and he was looking at the plants and the animals all around him. And he called me up and he said, "Why is this not enough?" Right? "Why is all of this incredible beauty and diversity that is there, waiting for us, why is this not enough? Why do we need theme parks and Las Vegas and cruise ships? Why do we need that? Why is this not enough?" And of course, for Wes, it is enough. It's been enough for him his whole life. And that question stuck with me. Why is this not enough? Because of course we all know, in the end, it is. Meaningful human connections in an endlessly fascinating world are enough to keep us all afloat. And so I think those are the kinds of observations about how to live in the world that don't dictate to people how they should live, but they suggest that we do have enough, and can make our way with this. And maybe that's, for me, more important than trying to understand hope. It's recognizing that in the beauty and the diversity of the world, we have everything we need, even when we face down questions that are every bit as dark as the question of the Holocaust that Viktor Frankl was writing about, maybe even on a grander scale. In some sense, it's the human condition. It's that human estate of grief and joy. It's where we live, we don't get to move out of it. There's no forwarding address. This is where we're going to end our time. And my other thought is, you know, on an individual level, I know I'm going to die. And I've known I was going to die for most of my life. It doesn't lead me to ask, "Well, what's the point if I'm going to die someday?" In fact, I don't think very many people wake up and say, "Well, what's the point of doing anything, I'm going to die someday?" Well, if this civilization, if this system that we live in is going to die someday, it's going to pass, it doesn't make our own lives meaningless. It doesn't mean struggling to make that as humane as possible is meaningless. It just means that's the inevitable fate of all of us. And so, just like we get up every morning knowing we're going to die, we can get up every morning, knowing that current systems are going to pass from this world at some point and still find meaning in life.
Alan Ware 1:03:33
Here, here.
Nandita Bajaj 1:03:35
I can think of no better way to end that.
Robert Jensen 1:03:37
Well, this is the best conversation I've had about the book since it came out. But you all have been doing so much work on this for so long that, you know, you come with the kind of depth of thought about it that is really refreshing. So thank you.
Alan Ware 1:03:48
Thank you.
Nandita Bajaj 1:03:50
Thank you so much. That was a really thoughtful and engaging and thought-provoking conversation.
