The other day, the EDP published a piece by Rupert Read, with the eye-catching title “Ragnarök, storytelling and facing up to our eco-crisis.” Well, it drew my eye anyway. Rupert Read is well known in these parts, or at least, he’s been heard of by a few. Previously I referred – erroneously – to him as a local Green MP, confusing him with Adrian Ramsay. That’s probably a Swiftian insult or something. What he is, is a former Green councillor at Norwich’s City Council. He did once stand for Parliament, but did not win his race. He is now involved with something called Climate Majority, which is several people demanding that the UK Government do what they want.
Asterisk: I don’t know how many of them there are. Their analysis of their path to success is, however, a delusion. It involves a lot of people telling the government to take action. However, this is demanding a national suicide project, which the majority will back out of when it starts to hurt. That’s my theory, anyway.
Read’s piece begins uncontroversially, by extolling the virtues of stories. You’ll hear no dissent from me there. As you know, I write stories all the time, of probably indifferent quality, certainly if my readership is the measure of how good they are. Everyone reads, hears, and sees stories all the time, or they should do. Plus, people are natural storytellers. Some of us are better at it than others, but we all tell stories.
The next step is a logical one for Read. Our ancestors told stories, not just to entertain, but to impart wisdom.
These ancestral cultures maintained a deep connection with nature that we’ve largely lost in our industrialised world – a disconnection that has accelerated deadly climate change and biodiversity loss and taken us over the edge of our planetary boundaries.
At this point, the reader may not be surprised to find me parting company with the thesis. Yes, we are insulated from Nature, to our detriment. But actually the industrialisation he speaks of has pros and cons. I do not believe climate change is deadly in the sense he does – I don’t even think the idea passes a cursory consideration. Yes, there is serious biodiversity loss, but there is really no prospect that any retreat from industrialisation would save it – quite the reverse. The ancestral cultures had Hobbesian lives, and we simply don pink sunglasses when looking back at them. Remove modern industrialisation today, and billions would starve tomorrow. And poverty inevitably leads to wholesale environmental destruction as we slide down Maslow’s hierarchy.
According to Read, the present civilisation is doomed – because of the planetary boundaries, etc. It isn’t true. But, he says, we need stories to guide us through what is inevitably coming. We do not need unadulterated doom, nor tales of rainbows and unicorns frolicking on Teletubby hills. What we need is
A ‘thrutopia’ which is about showing how we are getting through what is coming responsibly, transformatively, in the best way we can.
Like those of old, storytellers of today need to be brave, to embrace the realities of our situation but also resist the siren call of an excessive knowingness that pretends to exterminate all hope.
I don’t think any of this makes sense, but I kinda get what he’s trying to say.
This civilisation might be endable by way of what would, on balance, be a magnificent transformation.
Ignoring – with difficulty – the apparent coinage in the middle there, what is this transformation he envisages? The time of endless growth is over, he says. (It had better not be. The poor of the world have to be uplifted to a comfortable standard of living, if we ever hope to spare the environment.)
We’re in what Churchill, in similar (though actually less desperate) circumstances, called the age of consequences.
It’s at this point that bemusement turns to consternation. Does Read seriously believe what he put as a parenthetical there? Besides, it’s a misquote, I think. Here is what the member for Epping said on 12 November 1936:
The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.
The context, for those unfamiliar, is the blasé attitude taken by the government of the day when it came to answering the growing threat from Nazi Germany. The entire debate is worth skimming through. Things were said then that their authors, I’m sure, greatly regretted not long afterwards. But thanks to Hansard, their shame is (semi) immortalised.
(though actually less desperate)
One of the characteristics that bring the climate obsessives into disrepute is their hyper-focus on now, and the lack of perspective they show about what went before. Their attempts to convince us that 2025 is worse than 1936 can only work on the gullible. But surely they want a majority on board with their schemes, not just the easily swayed? If so, it would be better to be objective, and to demand action proportionate to the problem, rather than overclaim, and demand the end of civilisation in order to deflect a threat that itself has no power to end civilisation.
Read goes on to say that there is no fix to the fix we are in. Things are going to get worse, whatever we do. (Some of us might suggest that climate policy might cause civilisation to deteriorate faster than climate change will. But we too must beware catastrophisation, just like those on the other side should.)
Ragnarok
Stories can help us come to terms with what is happening to us – and the story Read chooses to highlight in this context is that of Ragnarok. It resonates with the “climate and nature emergency.” The gods, giants and mythical beasts join forces, and:
Although they are often adversaries, in Ragnarök, these diverse forces collaborate in the face of an existential threat.
The Norse gods faced their doom with courage and determination, working alongside their traditional enemies to confront the impending catastrophe.
Now, I’m not entirely sure what happened at Ragnarok. I wasn’t there. But I don’t think this characterisation is entirely accurate. Rather than uniting, the allies and enemies had a giant barny – that’s what Ragnarok is. If they had united, who would they have been fighting? In fact, what is said to have happened is that the traditional enemies slipped their bonds and formed an army to take on Odin and his pals. Loki was chained in a cave, having venom dripped into his eyes. Fenrir the wolf was bound with a magical ribbon, which Tyr had to give up a hand to get him into (yes, many of these themes are echoed in Tolkien). Hel was hurled into Niflheim, the realm of winter. Jormungand was tossed into the sea, and grew so large that he encompassed the world.
Somewhat ironically (for a heat-death climate apocalypse), the Twilight of the Gods is signalled by three consecutive winters with no summer between, Fimbulwinter. There are various other harbingers. Then Loki and crew are set free and the ship formed of the nails of the dead sets sail (which is why you should never die with long nails if you want to postpone the end of the world). All the baddies cross the Bifrost, which breaks behind them.
Then out sally our heroes to engage in glorious battle one last time. The image (by Gehrts; featured image up top, too) chosen by the EDP to illustrate Read’s piece has some familiar figures. Odin faces Fenrir, and is about to be swallowed whole. Thor faces Jormungand, bangs him dead with Mjollnir, but drops dead himself after staggering back nine steps (covered in poison; I don’t know why nine steps exactly). All the gods perish in the battle, and the giant Surt sets fire to the world with his flaming sword.
Asterisk: some gods survive. But I don’t know if they were at the battle.
Relevant to today’s world, this spirit of cooperation and shared struggle urges us — as we face, tellingly, a somewhat brutal summer, a harbinger of the harder years to come — to confront deadly climate change head-on, recognising that our actions matter, even against seemingly insurmountable odds.
I’d rather confront climate change head on than Fenrir, that’s for sure. However. Read is inspired by the collaboration of gods and monsters to battle their inevitable shared doom, when in fact the monsters were hell-bent on eating the gods. Hey-ho. The chaos that climate change is causing in the world resembles Ragnarok. Except it doesn’t, does it?
I’m not really seeing our current “predicament” reflected in this tale. Ah – but wait. We don’t go around: we go through.
Ragnarok is not the end after all: there is an after. The human Lif and his wife Lifthrasir hide in the world tree (Yggdrasill) and survive the flames.
Here’s how Norse Myths (Kevin Crossley-Holland) puts it:
Lif and Lifthrasir will have children. Their children will bear children. There will be life and new life, life everywhere on earth. That was the end; and this is the beginning.
Climate change is not going to bring about the Twilight of the West. We have sowed the seeds of that by choosing to forget where we came from. These are the stories we need to tell: what came before, how our ancestors built what we now have, and how we can keep it. Life is easy for today; but I fear that an inflexion point is near. Rupert Read believes the end of the era of growth is coming. The end of the era of growth, for this country at least, happened twenty years ago, and not because of climate change. Growth was followed by stagnation – will that be followed by decay?
Since our Green author mentioned one of Churchill’s speeches, I’ll end with another quote from the contribution he made that day:
If we go on like this, and I do not see what power can prevent us from going on like this, some day there may be a terrible reckoning, a very terrible reckoning, and those who take the responsibility so entirely upon themselves are either of a hardy disposition or they are incapable of foreseeing the possibilities which may arise.
Let’s hope there is no terrible reckoning for us resembling Ragnarok. If there is, we won’t have Thor on our side.
Note
Read the ?original? English translation of Ragnarok towards the end (where else?) of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda here.
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