Here is a re-post of a book review worth a second read. Specifically, it’s a review of Undaunted, by Carolyn Baker, a fascinatingly bad book.
I don’t normally discuss my dislike of books in public, as the lives of authors are tough enough without negative press, but In this case I believe the author did a disservice to an important topic—and I am not being facetious when I say the book’s shortcomings were fascinating.
Synopsis
I’ll start off by simply describing the book.
Undaunted: Living Fiercely into Climate Meltdown in an Authoritarian World, by Carolyn Baker
2022. Apocryphile Press
Carolyn Baker thinks, not without reason, that the world as we know it, and possibly all life on Earth, is ending. She explicitly states that there is nothing we can do now to avert this catastrophe, but we can live fully and joyfully while our lives last by embracing, rather than rejecting, our grief, fear, and anger. Undaunted is supposed to be about how to do that.
A recurring theme is the inadvisability of various escapes from what the author calls “our predicament.” The escape she spends the most time attempting to close off is hope—hope that some technical fix or other last-minute miracle will avert climate catastrophe and save us. “Hope” is one of those words that can mean multiple things that differ both subtly and radically from each other, to the point that it is sometimes possible, even advisable, to both abandon hope and cling to hope at the same time.
It’s not entirely clear what Ms. Baker means by the word, hope, and her reasons for attempting to strip her readers of it (she explicitly states such as her goal) are not fully and clearly defined. However, I can list a few possibilities gleaned from her words:
- Hope is a denial of reality as it now is, and as such presents us from dealing with reality effectively.
- Hope allows us to think it’s OK to keep doing things that make the situation worse.
- Hope blocks us from experiencing the personal and spiritual transformation that loss and grief would otherwise give us.
Besides hope, Ms. Baker also attacks several other unskillful states (a phrase she doesn’t use, but given her reliance on Buddhist and Hindu concepts in certain places, it seems appropriate). “Doom and gloom,” that is, an obsessive focus on the horrific details of climate catastrophe, comes under repeated criticism, not because Ms. Baker disagrees about the doom part (she doesn’t), but because such obsessiveness is both strategically and spiritually unhelpful—it blocks the spiritual gifts of loss just as hope does. Similarly, denigrating and dismissing as problematic the whole of humanity prevents us from accessing the meaning and richness of human relationships. Human connection is one of the primary sources of meaning in Ms. Baker’s view. Straight-up denial that a problem even exists is as bad as hope, and for the same reasons.
The various chapters—all short, competently written, and full of excerpts and references to other interesting works, address various thematically-related topics, such as the importance of consciously limiting one’s awareness so as to avoid getting too overwhelmed, or the importance of accepting and feeling grief and related emotions. Each chapter concludes with a list of “fierce practices,” mostly journaling exercises apparently designed to foster personal growth through awareness of loss and grief.
There are some real gems in the book, however, there is also a pervasive lack of focus, as though much of Undaunted were a cloud of thematically-related material, rather than a pointed, reasoned argument or a set of instructions towards a clearly-defined goal. Undaunted also suffers from reliance on highly-questionable source material, largely through her repeated references to Indigenous culture (note the counterfactual use of the singular) and her use of hospice as a metaphor for the current state of the Earth (she appears to fundamentally misunderstand hospice).
And then there’s Ms. Baker’s central premise, that the Earth’s condition is hopeless. That premise is, shall we say, questionable at best.
Opinion
Ms. Baker’s book is easy to dismiss on the basis of its many flaws, but it so very almost gets so many important things right. They say “almost only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades,” but an idea is close enough to being a hand-grenade that almost is worth paying attention to.
Grief is important. Despair is important. Giving up is, under some circumstances, important. Radical transformation can indeed follow radical loss, and even without such existential considerations, there’s something to be said for turning when you meet a wall instead of continuing to crash straight onto the bricks over and over. What we need to give up on, what kinds of hope no longer serve us, is an important topic to discuss right now. Ms. Baker is right as far as that goes.
I’m just not sure she discusses it well.
There are several important distinctions Ms. Baker either misses or appears to miss. Most critically, the fact that we can’t now escape from climate change undamaged does not mean that fighting climate change is pointless. It could still get a lot worse, and that means we still have the power to prevent it from getting worse. She also does what most writers on climate change seem to, which is to assume that our collective failure to take meaningful climate action is simply some permutation of either human nature or “Western” (that is, “not-indigenous”) culture—when actually climate inaction is the deliberate creation of very specific people with a very specific agenda, people who are still pursuing their agenda as we speak, people who are largely getting away with it.
Can we make a serious attempt to fight for climate justice while also honoring grief, learning from sadness, and meditating upon despair? I think so. And Ms. Baker doesn’t precisely say we can’t. But she doesn’t say we can, either.
My fear is that Undaunted will be just another excuse for good people to do nothing while evil wins. The author seems utterly unaware of several important facts, among them that “our predicament” really can get a lot worse than it is right now. Also, my suspicion is that the book offers the wisdom of the ages filtered through a heavy layer of unchecked privilege, becoming simply an unusually nihilistic version of same-old, same-old: privileged, mostly-white people once again making it all about them. Transform your Inner Self while Rome burns.
We need to do better.
Being the Change
I want to do the inner work Ms. Baker says I should. I agree with her there. But I will not accept her as my guide into what promises to be difficult, painful territory because the various shortcomings of her book mean she has not earned my trust. I need a guide I can trust, if I am to visit dark places.
Whom do I trust?
Ursula K. LeGuin (her novels, The Farthest Shore and The Left Hand of Darkness have been particularly useful in my contemplation of Undaunted). Terry Tempest Williams (read Refuge, if you haven’t yet). Charles Curtin. Elisabeth Curtis. Rowland Russell. Tom Wessels. Gary Snyder (notably Practice of the Wild). Me, quite possibly.
What might I say to myself, to you, about how to answer Ms. Baker’s challenge?
Stay Current
There are many possible paths of personal development and discovery that may be relevant to “our predicament,” as Ms. Baker calls it. These paths begin in or pass through Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, various practices that might broadly be called “indigenous”, psychotherapy, New Age, and probably a million other things. I have, at one time or another, felt the pull of several of these and borrowed tools from them, and I honor those that find one or another of these paths useful. But I am not, by nature, a devotee. I cannot focus on anything except the work I have in front of me and the individuals I care about or have a duty to care fore.
I need something very simple, very direct.
And I’m thinking about how easy it is to decide that whatever’s going on doesn’t count, that a loss or disruption isn’t that bad, is temporary, or is just plain not real. That we’re going to get back to normal, soon, so emotionally reacting to whatever current predicament we’ve got isn’t necessary. And indeed some problems are temporary, but others aren’t. And it’s hard to know which is which.
There are some corners of the therapy/recovery world where they use the phrase “getting current” to refer to a deliberate acknowledgment of emotionally salient reality. For example, you could start a therapy session by spending five minutes or so just checking in about how you’re doing, how you’re feeling, what’s been on your mind lately. Then, even if you spend the rest of your session talking about some other thing, you are grounded in your current emotional reality instead of whatever form of happy face you normally wear for whatever reason.
So “current,” getting current, being current, is a kind of technical term meaning to be consciously grounded in your current emotional reality—not that you’re enlightened or present or mindful, just that you’re not emotionally wrapped up in some pleasant fantasy-land. Your emotions are where you are.
So before attempting some sort of “journey” involving healing work and discovering the Self and making decisions about which types of hope to lose and which to keep, how about just get current. The world is what it is. Your life is what it is. How do you feel?
How do you feel?
Make Room
One of the things that most impresses me about those I consider wise is the ability to pause between stimulus and response. Somebody says something, and instead of getting defensive or angry or happy, or whatever else, you just pause. And in that pause you can notice that maybe you’ve misunderstood something or overlooked something. You can choose a skillful response, instead of acting on knee-jerk impulse.
I’d like to learn how to do this, to be less buffeted by my emotions, so I can learn things that upset me or talk with people who disagree with me without feeling the need to shut down or escape.
What about you?
Cthia
One of the things you may or may not know about me is that I’m a serious Trekkie especially interested in Vulcan culture. Vulcans are a species of hyper-rational aliens who have supposedly given up emotion in favor of logic—although fortunately certain writers have given this fictional species more nuance over the years, explaining that they don’t lack emotion, they just transcend it, and so on.
So, we are told, Cthia is the Vulcan word usually translated as logic, but this is a mistranslation– “reality-truth” would be better. The Vulcan Mastery of Passions is, in fact, based on the teachings of a man named Surak (most Vulcan male names are similar to his in tribute, don’t let that confuse you) who realized that people were hurting and killing each other out of knee-jerk emotional reactions, largely fear. He taught that once one had acknowledged and accepted one’s emotions fully, they could no longer dominate one’s behavior and perceptions. One could then choose instead to do the right thing—and the right thing to do could be discovered by rigorous attention to reality-truth (cthia) and an ethical system rooted in core concepts such as honor, duty, the celebration of diversity, and the awareness of unconditional joy.
The older I get, the more I find that all that actually works. It might be applicable to our “predicament.”