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Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation.
In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts.
But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can’t be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it’s the different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus. That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve, and put to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming buzzing inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.
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Bypassing the imaginary relationship part for a moment, what about the real situation? Unknowable, of course, as per above. But consider this aspect of it:
Recent extinctions include the Saudi gazelle, the Japanese sea lion, the Caribbean monk seal, the Christmas Island pipstrelle, the Bramble Cay melomys, the vaquita porpoise, the Alagoas foliage-gleaner, the cryptic treehunter, Spix’s macaw, the po’ouli, the northern white rhino, the mountain tapir, the Haitian solenodon, the giant otter, Attwater’s prairie chicken, the Spanish lynx, the Persian fallow deer, the Japanese crested ibis, the Arabian oryx, the snub-nosed monkey, the Ceylon elephant, the indris, Zanzibar’s red colobus, the mountain gorilla, the white-throated wallaby, the walia ibex, the aye-aye, the vicuna, the giant panda, the monkey-eating eagle, and an estimated two hundred more species of mammals, seven hundred species of birds, four hundred species of reptiles, six hundred species of amphibians, and four thousand species of plants.
The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, and thus the start of the Anthropocene in its clearest demarcation, which is to say, we are in a biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts. Also the mass extinction is one of the most obvious examples of things done by humans that cannot be undone, despite all the experimental de-extinction efforts, and the general robustness of life on Earth. Ocean acidification and deoxygenation are other examples of things done by humans that we can’t undo, and the relation between this ocean acidification/deoxygenation and the extinction event may soon become profound, in that the former may stupendously accelerate the latter.
Evolution itself will of course eventually refill all these emptied ecological niches with new species. The pre-existing plenitude of speciation will be restored in less than twenty million years.
13
Anytime he broke a sweat his heart would start racing, and soon enough he would be in the throes of a full-on panic attack. Pulse at 150 beats a minute or more. It didn’t matter that he knew he was safe, and that this panic reaction was to something that had happened long before. It didn’t matter that he lived outside Glasgow now, and had a job in a meat-processing plant that gave him access to refrigerated rooms where the temperature was kept just a few degrees above freezing. By the time an attack started it was too late; his body and mind would be plunged instantly into another terrible tornado of biochemicals, pounding through his arteries like crystal meth at its paranoid worst.
This was what people called post-traumatic stress disorder. He knew that, he had been told it many times. PTSD, the great affect of our time. As one of his therapists had once explained to him, one of the identifying characteristics of the disorder was that even when you knew it was happening to you, that didn’t stop it from happening. In that sense, the therapist admitted, the naming of it was useless. Diagnosis was necessary but not sufficient; and what might be sufficient wasn’t at all clear. There were differing opinions, differing outcomes. No treatment had been shown to be fully effective, and most were still largely experimental procedures.
Exposure to events like the event: no.
He had tried this on a visit to Kenya, out every day in temperatures that crept closer and closer to the unlivable. That had resulted in daily panic attacks, and he had curtailed the trip and gone back to Glasgow.
Virtual environments in which to explore aspects of the event: no. He had played video games that made him relive parts of the experience in ways he could control, but these games were as ugly as any M-rated travesty. Panic attacks were frequent, during the games or not.
Rehearsal therapy: he had written accounts of the event while on beta-blockers, repeating this exercise over and over. Sleepy all the time because of the beta-blockers, memoir as automatic writing: I tried to get people inside. I had a water tank in the closet. I hid what I had. The pistol barrel was a little black circle. Everybody was dead.
No good. Just more blurry sick gasping panic attacks, more nightmares.
About half the time he fell asleep, he had nightmares that woke him in a cold sweat. Sometimes the images were sadistically cruel. After waking from one of these dreams he had to try to warm back up, so he would wiggle his cold toes, toss and turn, try to forget the dream, try to get back to sleep; but it took hours, and sometimes it didn’t work. The next day he would operate like a slow zombie, get through the day by working mindlessly, or by playing video games, mostly games in which he bounced from point to point in a low-g environment. Asteroid hopping.
His therapists talked about trigger events. About avoiding triggers. What they were glossing over with this too-convenient metaphor was that life itself was just a long series of trigger events. That consciousness was the trigger. He woke up, he remembered who he was, he had a panic attack. He got over it and got on with his day as best he could. The command not to think about certain things was precisely a mode of thinking about that thing. Repression, forgetting; he had to learn to forget. Perpetual distraction was impossible. He wanted to get better but he couldn’t.
Cognitive behavioral therapy was accepted by many as the best way to deal with PTSD. But CBT was hard. He pursued it like a religious calling, like a sidewalk over the abyss. One therapist said to him, when he used that phrase, everyone walks that sidewalk over the abyss, that’s life. Mine’s a tightrope, he replied. Focusing on balance was necessary at all times. In that sense, distractions were actually contra-indicated. If you were distracted enough, then a single misstep could send you plunging into the abyss. Constant vigilance— but this too was bad, as just another way of thinking about it, of paying attention to it. No. Hypervigilance was part of the disorder. So there was no way out. No way out but dreamless sleep. Or death.
Or certain drugs. Anti-anxiety drugs were not the same as anti-depressants. They were meant to foil the brain’s uptake of fight-or-flight stimulants. To give consciousness a bit of time to calm the system down by realizing there was no real danger. These drugs had unwanted side effects, sure. Flatness of affect, yes. It was even part of what you wanted. If you killed all feelings, the bad feelings would necessarily be among them and therefore less likely to appear, even if they were the first ones in line, ready to pop. But if you did accomplish that flattening of all feeling, then what? March through life like an automaton, that’s what. Eat like fueling an old car. Exercise hoping to get so tired you could fall asleep and make it through the night. Try not to think. Try not to feel.