To Understand Our Existential Crisis, We Must Understand the Paradox

Published in 1725, Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons is considered one of the crowning musical works of the Baroque period.

I have no technical knowledge of classical compositions. But as T S Eliot said in his essay on Dante, just like “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”, so it is with great musical compositions. Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons is no exception in that sense and I have always enjoyed listening to it.

The Four Seasons is a group of four concerti and Vivaldi composed it only for stringed instruments. Each concerto gives musical expression to a season, beginning with spring and going through summer and autumn before capping the composition with winter. The cyclical nature of the seasons are depicted to distinguish them from one another.

Vivaldi’s seasons could be distinguished, not just through the use of stringed instruments but also by looking out the window. The concerti were published in Amsterdam in 1725, a very different time and era. The Industrial Revolution was still three decades in the future. Ozone stayed in the stratosphere to protect life instead of descending to the troposphere; we weren’t sending carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and halogenated gases into upper atmosphere, at least not in volumes that could outpace emissions sinks. So, yes, Vivaldi could use his ornate, Baroque technique to produce a masterpiece.

No more. While we can still listen to Vivaldi’s concerti, the seasons are all getting mixed up or showing extremes. The climate is now a global emergency, a grey rhino headed towards us.

In these bleak times, South Korean filmmaker Sung Myungjoo has produced a captivating documentary “The [uncertain] Four Seasons,” a musical climate project launched in 2021 by the global advertising agency AKQA.

We are losing the race. What’s worse, we have got the entire framework of how to address this existential crisis wrong. Let me explain. The first is our idea of growth. The second, our hope that we can innovate our way out of this crisis.

Along with filmmakers Kang Mina and Ahn Seo Hee, Sung engaged the Seoul Project Orchestra to play Vivaldi’s four movements recomposed by Artificial Intelligence using climate data projected for the year 2050. The AI added percussion and brass instruments to a work meant only for stringed instruments. The film was recently aired by Al Jazeera under the title Dystopia of Seoul.

As the principal percussionist Kim Miyoune says in the film: “Vivaldi’s work has the brilliance of all four seasons, spring, summer, autumn and winter. But the 2050 version doesn’t have that. It is very desolate.”

The basic idea is simple, not Baroque, and brilliant: “the film is about a different, unusual exercise combining Vivaldi’s famous music with weather data and expressing climate change in musical form for different parts of the world. Antonio Vivaldi depicted spring in an upbeat way, with flowing springs and bird song at a time when seasons were predictable.”

That’s no more the case.

We are losing the race. What’s worse, we have got the entire framework of how to address this existential crisis wrong. Let me explain.

The first is our idea of growth. The second, our hope that we can innovate our way out of this crisis.

Both are terribly flawed. Why? Because we just don’t understand that everything in human life comes at a cost. No matter what we do, we will be mining the resources of this planet further and, in that process, generating costs that will, like our “progress” and “growth” since the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1760, outstrip the benefits.

In the process we have created the existential problem that now threatens our very existence, existence that in our naïveté we took for granted and to which we accorded an unproved eternity.

Let’s take our idea of growth. Humans are distinct from other species in the animal kingdom by virtue of our desire and capability to generate surplus. Since the Industrial Revolution this capacity has brought science and capitalism together to both generate great achievements and great tragedies by colonising peoples and plundering their resources.

This pursuit also threw up the twin ideas of western values and enlightened civilisation, virtues that led to Rudyard Kipling’s savage wars of peace and the white man’s burden. Such was the belief in rationality and science that, to quote James Scott, even disparate thinkers were “inclined to see a coming world in which enlightened specialists would govern according to scientific principles and the ‘administration of things’ would replace politics.”

Politics, grounded in interests and emotions, did not go away. But the civilisation founded on constant growth and scientific principles and discoveries flourished — through capital, control of resources and military power.

In the process we have created the existential problem that now threatens our very existence, existence that in our naïveté we took for granted and to which we accorded an unproved eternity. As George Tsakraklides has put it, “the innovations need the civilisation to exist, and the civilisation simply cannot carry on without them. It has become hostage to the innovations it invented, almost like an organism giving birth to its own parasite”.

Our second problem is that while innovations have brought us to this pass, we believe innovations will get us out of our predicament.

This has spawned an entire sustainable development industry with its platitudes and unsustainable jargon. Here’s what Dr. Ilhan Niaz has to say in his Downfall: Lessons for our Final Century —

“Like Professor Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide…they [sustainable development club] remain convinced, in spite of all experience to the contrary, that we are living in the best of all possible worlds and that somehow technical innovation and more disciplined enforcement of environmental rules will allow us to advance along an infinite growth trajectory.”

The paradox makes shipwreck again on the rocks of innovation optimism. The truth is somewhat different. Let’s take one example, the Electric Vehicle (EV).

Fossil fuels are bad, which they are, so let’s target 20[**] as the year we go global with EVs, replacing the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE). Batteries are here, tailpipe emissions are a thing of the past. Voila!

Well, not quite.

Let’s begin with manufacturing. Both EV and ICE vehicles require a chassis. The chassis in both cases requires steel and aluminium. Smelting produces emissions in both cases. The carbon footprint for both is the same at this stage. Now begins the difference. The EV requires the manufacturing of batteries and the energy source to power the batteries. Depending on the type of batteries, we have a combination of lithium, cobalt, and nickel.

Mining these minerals has a high environmental cost because of fumes and because it is a water-intensive process (one tonne of lithium to manufacture batteries for 100 cars requires two million tonnes of water). Studies show that “this inevitably makes the EV manufacturing process more energy intensive than that of an ICE vehicle.” It can also leave pollutants in river waters and streams, as happened in Yichun in China where lithium production had to be halted. Nickel and cobalt have similar issues.

There’s a further problem of transporting the batteries. According to Earth.org, a global environmental movement, “A 2021 study comparing EV and ICE emissions found that 46% of EV carbon emissions come from the production process while for an ICE vehicle, they ‘only’ account for 26%.”

Okay, but we already know the slogan: EVs are dirtier to build but cleaner to drive. So, what’s the big deal?

But the main point is not these technicalities. Nor is about EV versus ICE. Or to say that we mustn’t get rid of ICE vehicles. It is about the paradox, a paradox begotten of a structural bind. The civilisation we have created is now habituated to modern conveniences.

Much. EV now built; it hits the road. That means powering its batteries. Powering it requires electricity. Electricity means power generation. Is the source of electricity eco-friendly, as in wind or solar? I didn’t mention hydropower, because while it is considered a renewable source of energy, it creates its own environmental and social problems.

Or is it (horror of horrors!) coal or fuel-generated? If it is and you are powering your EV batteries through coal or fuel-generated power then you might recall the Roman emperor Nero who, we are told by Will Cuppy, was ahead of his time in some respect and “boiled his water to remove impurities and cooled it with unsanitary ice to put them back again.”

There’s much else to be said. For instance, how the demand for EVs would push up prices, which will raise the demand for and price of lithium and which could then “lead to indiscriminate mining of nickel, cobalt, and lithium, which are finite resources, leading to even more environmental harm.”

But the main point is not these technicalities. Nor is about EV versus ICE. Or to say that we mustn’t get rid of ICE vehicles. It is about the paradox, a paradox begotten of a structural bind. The civilisation we have created is now habituated to modern conveniences. The privileged enjoy them and mine the planet’s resources for more conveniences; the deprived aspire to them. It’s an ecosystem that is destined for a headlong collision with the planetary ecosystem.

Not only is it too late, it is also near-impossible to break the basic mould of our current ecosystem of modernity. Sustainable development, as Niaz said in his book, is “a hoax.” The only way forward is to go back. And that’s not happening.