Expecting the worst - and too much

Today George Monbiot enlists Cormac McCarthy's The Road in pressing upon his readers a vision of impending catastrophe. The trouble, if his diagnosis is correct, is that people won't act as if catastrophe is upon them until it either is upon them or very nearly is - until they start to feel its effects. Monbiot writes ruefully:

The stone drops into the pond and a second later it is smooth again. You will turn the page and carry on with your life.

Indeed. For this is what people do. How could they live in the world, most of them, unless they did it? Even before, even without, global warming, the world accommodates so much human anguish, so much suffering, so much in need of urgent attention, that only a saint is able to take it all upon his conscience, and keep it ever-present. We carry on with our lives, doing what we can here or there, some of us less, some of us more, to make things better. Monbiot again:

I sense that... a hardening of interests, a shutting down of concern, is taking place among the people of the rich world. If this is true, we do not need to wait for the forests to burn or food supplies to shrivel before we decide that civilisation is in trouble.

On such a basis, civilization has always been in trouble, since human concern for others stretches only so far, and though sometimes also further than that, it is generally - and properly - stronger for intimate others, on whom most people's quite limited time and energies are concentrated.

This is not either an endorsement of complacency or a plea for indifference; I have myself argued for a morality that would demand more of all of us. It is merely the observation that a politics of meliorative action that deals in imminent catastrophe and an expectation of heroic other-directed concern and other-directed effort is likely to find only a limited audience.