Sandy & the Stalled Society

“Hurricane Sandy provided plenty of hardship. But it also furnished a glimmer of hope that people will begin focusing on saving the planet and, in doing so, will cast off the sense of futility and nihilism that permeates many aspects of contemporary culture.” Sanford Rose

Dolors & Sense

by Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—12/10/2012—I do not wear a hair shirt: I do not feel that hardship is good for the soul.

Hurricane Sandy provided plenty of hardship. But it also furnished a glimmer of hope that people will begin focusing on saving the planet and, in doing so, will cast off the sense of futility and nihilism that permeates many aspects of contemporary culture.

As the late Jacques Barzun pithily observed: “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label.”

Barzun felt that modern culture had reached an advanced state of decadence, as was the culture of Western Europe on the eve of the Reformation. Ergo the title of his great work of a dozen years ago: From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present.

One of the hallmarks of this decadence is the absence of great causes, the exhaustion of the possible.

The struggle against global warming, a development the effects of which were only imperfectly apprehended in 2000, can, indeed must, become the cause célèbre of the next few decades.

It is a cause that can offer purpose and direction to otherwise vectorless, meandering lives, thereby becoming a means not only to banish anomie but also to furnish true happiness—the special kind that arises when people are convinced that they are working for objectives larger than immediate self-satisfaction.

Sandy, at least in part the consequence of an inexorably warming ocean, occurred at the tail end of a presidential campaign that scarcely touched on the issue of global warming, evidence itself of a national political life that is profoundly decadent.

But if the storm raises to some measurable degree the level of political awareness of the problem, its costs may prove more bearable. Still more bearable, if that awareness focuses on control of the carbon emissions that are warming and acidifying the ocean rather than merely on adaptation to the consequences of those emissions.

We can emulate the Dutch and put up barriers to the sea. We can in effect re-Hollandize Manhattan Island. We cannot Hollandize the entire East Coast, much less the world.

It is trite to quote the adage about the ill wind, but in truth this hurricane may at day’s end prove a harbinger of hope.