Doomerism as reactionary elitism

Here’s a super interesting essay [gift link] from environmental studies professor Tyler Austin Harper on how today’s doom junkies had some very distinguished precursors a century ago, including Winston Churchill and H.G. Wells. Harper makes a particularly sharp point in arguing that the current outburst of doomerism is fueled by elite anxieties about a rapidly changing world. (It may seem banal to observe that people at the top of a social hierarchy are automatically inclined to see social change as bad, but it isn’t noted nearly often enough).

One way to understand extinction panics is as elite panics: fears created and curated by social, political and economic movers and shakers during times of uncertainty and social transition. Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change. Today it’s politicians, executives and technologists. A century ago it was eugenicists and right-leaning politicians like Churchill and socialist scientists like [J.B.S.] Haldane. That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction.

To whatever extent, then, that the diagnosis proved prophetic, it’s worth asking if it might have been at least partly self-fulfilling.

Harper doesn’t mention the worldwide resurgence in fascist or fascist-adjacent political movements, but these are certainly animated by the sort of tribalist zero-sum life as continual struggle against apocalyptic threats mentality that he’s discussing more generally.

For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex.

Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”

Harper describes how the specific apocalyptic anxieties of the 1920s are to a significant extent being repeated today: fears of super-intelligent machines that somehow become sentient agents and conquer and enslave their creators, of weapons of mass destruction that we aren’t wise enough to avoid using to annihilate ourselves, of population explosions of lesser breeds, along with population implosions of the superior races/nations, of environmental catastrophes such as global pandemics, etc.

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard?”

“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—”

“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

“You ought to live in California—” began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”

There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.

The Great Gatsby (1925)

Many of the social and political anxieties that gave rise to fascism 100 years ago are welling up again, especially among the reactionary and crypto-reactionary elites whose support for fascist movements was absolutely critical a century ago, and whose support today is equally essential for those movements to flourish.