Description
Worldmaking is, inter alia, a form of temporal ordering. While we all make (our own) worlds to address individual existential anxieties and give meaning to our finite lives, ways of making meaningful worlds are also socially embedded and operate at scale across time and space. The notion of ‘modernity’ captures one such recently dominant form of socially embedded worldmaking and is defined by particular temporal precepts: the idea of continuous progress, the corresponding belief that the future will be better than the past, and the adjacent notion that the future is subject to human control. Yet, existential threats such as climate change challenge these beliefs and thus undermine modernity’s ability to assuage existential anxieties and provide guidance for action. This paper identifies and analyses two responses to the anxieties caused by modernity’s decline. One has been to extend the present into the future, for example by storing and ‘backing up’ all kinds of contemporary human artifacts and envisioning their usefulness hundreds or thousands of years from now on. Another has been to try to return to the past, for example by investing in technologies, such as geoengineering, that generate the fantasy of being able to return to an era prior to climate change (“pre-industrial levels”). Ultimately, this paper finds that both responses desperately seek to maintain the validity of modernity’s precepts in the face of fundamentally changed conditions and thus represent a form of climate change denial. What is needed is the recognition that we are in a transition toward a time of postmodernity which requires new ways of seeing and making our world(s).
