It’s 2am. The nightclub is still full, but about to empty.
You are lonely, horny and the options remaining are not as great as they were.
More than that, you’re drunk and your vision and judgement aren’t what they might be in the frigid light of day.
So that one over there in the corner, who’d normally be considered an arm-chewer/put-a-paper-bag-over-his-head-and-he-will-become-“mr-right-now”? They’ve just graduated to “warm body, will do for now.”
And if someone tries to mock you later, you can shrug your shoulders and say ‘whatever – I was wearing beer goggles.”
So, if I told you I was going to pivot this towards a thing about climate change, you’d brace yourself for some not very funny joke about ‘reducing emissions.’
Not today!
I want to try to be All Serious and Philosophical, and get into epistemology and ontology and other long-words I learnt at my first go on the rodeo of university, all those years ago.
Our judgement is affected by, well, goggles, lenses, expectations. The Germans have a word for it (of course) – Weltanschauung.
I would say that our last 100 years or so, and certainly since the Great Acceleration began in the 1950s, we (1) have been wearing oil goggles. We have been seeing the world as an inexhaustible orchard and playground, where there are no problems that cannot be solved. All you need is to go to a slightly deeper horizon and find more of The Stuff. And the stuff is all around us, we swim in oil the way that goldfish swim in water.
Scientists and activists have tried to puncture the lens, to rip the oil goggles (or blinkers, depending on your point of view), but we swat them away and duct tape the oil goggles on even more securely (2).
But we’re running out of duct tape, aren’t we?
And we can’t see this world, let along imagine others (there, told you I’d get the ontology stuff in there).
But the world can see us. And the age of consequences has begun.
The second half of (the first half of?) the twenty-first century is going to make the first half of the twentieth century look like a golden age of peace, love and understanding. Ho-hum.
Footloose notes.
- (1) By “we” I mean people like me – middle-class, raised in the west in relative or absolute prosperity and security, in permanent global summertime, with the expectation that the future was also going to be secure, with ever-cooler and shinier gadgets. That has never been a “we” that covered most people, even in the West. It covers fewer and fewer people as time goes on. But people do cling to their oil goggles.
- (2) Vision-smission. The typical western privileging of sight, blah blah. See also John Carpenter’s delirious ‘They Live!’, for a slightly different sunglasses thing.
See also Imperial Mode of Living