A Question of Justice: Roy Scranton

What does justice look like in the face of civilizational collapse?

Standing in a parking lot full of vehicles at the edge of Notre Dame’s idyllic campus, Professor Roy Scranton explains that it’s simply too late for us to avoid doing philosophy. What he means by philosophy is something not often found these days in the course listings of academic philosophy departments. It’s not ethics, politics, or epistemology that we can no longer avoid, but philosophy understood as the practice of “learning to die.” 

For more than ten years, Roy has made a persuasive case based upon his deep familiarity with the work of climate scientists, policy experts, and national security officials that civilization as we now know it will change dramatically in the next few decades. Questions about what we can do to stop climate change might be well-intentioned, but given the inevitability of climate disaster they’re also a waste of time. “If we don’t have basically immediate, radical drawdown of the amount of carbon dioxide we’re emitting into the atmosphere,” he explains, “it’s ridiculous to talk about mitigation of climate change. If we keep using fossil fuels at all we’re totally screwed.”

Since it’s unlikely—if not impossible—that we’ll simply stop emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, civilization as we currently know it is most likely going to die. So we should turn our attention to how. It’s a point he first explored in 2015 in an award-winning essay called “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,” which he later developed into a book.

Big questions from the start

Originally from Oregon, Roy was the first in his family to attend college. He dropped out during his first year to become a writer, a decision that now causes him to shake his head although he’s glad he made it. In the years following his first stint in college, he wrote drafts of several novels as well as an operetta, a play, a movie script, short stories, and poetry. A couple short stories and a couple poems got published. He worked various jobs, mostly food service and minimum wage positions that led to what he describes as a “marginal, low-rent existence.” He moved around the West for a few years and eventually found himself in Moab, Utah.

Then three things happened that provoked him to rethink what he was doing with his life: a bicycle accident that badly damaged his face; the sudden death of a writer friend; and terrorists carried out four attacks that killed almost 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. 

“I can’t just fade out here in the desert,” he thought. “I’m young and have a lot of life to live, and now there’s this terrorist attack, the world has changed, I don’t know what it means, and I want to understand.” 

He moved back to Oregon and into his mother’s basement. He was 25 and couldn’t get a job because of facial damage from the bicycle accident. He continued to write and was reading arguments from all sides about why the 9/11 attacks had happened. He found them all unsatisfying so he enlisted in the Army to see for himself.

Learning to die and civilizational collapse

In the Army from 2002 until 2006, Roy served in Iraq for 14 months. He spent much of his time in and around Baghdad, the capital of Iraq and at that time the second-largest city in the Arab world after Cairo. At one point his unit was assigned to participate in unexploded munitions missions during which he served as the battery commander’s driver. That meant he drove the lead vehicle on missions to find and dispose of unexploded ordnance—bombs, grenades, shells, bullets, and mines. 

Early in the Iraq war, improvised explosive devices began to appear more frequently and cause extensive damage. The fedayeen—guerrilla fighters carrying out attacks on behalf of Iraq—were staging surprise attacks all over Baghdad. “I was freaking out,” he says. “I was just scared. Which, you know, seems like a perfectly rational response, but I couldn’t be scared and do my job because my job was to be in front of this convoy. So I had to figure out a way to deal with that.” 

He dealt with it by reading the Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, a 17th century samurai warrior who became a Buddhist priest late in his life. Roy remembered the book from a 1999 Jim Jarmusch movie called Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, featuring Forest Whittaker as a mafia hitman who models himself after samurai warriors.

One samurai meditation from the Hagakure requires a warrior to imagine he’s already dead before going into battle so he’s liberated from fearing death while fighting. Roy practiced it every day for months while facing IEDs and sniper fire in Baghdad. He now sees it as an image of our shared future: a civilization in ruins calling for radical adaptations to our way of life. But he’s not the hopeless fatalist some criticize him for being. He believes we won’t continue to live as we do for much longer, but he nonetheless hopes we find a new future together. 

In his next book, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, Roy asks if we’re telling the right stories about the end of our current world and what comes next given that we simply don’t and can’t know what the future holds. There he warns against the appeal of apocalyptic narratives because they make a spurious claim to know the future and prevent us from an honest encounter with our unknowing. In the 2020 essay that developed into Impasse, he explores what he calls “apophatic futurism” as an orientation that is genuinely open to the possibility of a new world because it fully embraces our not knowing the future. And in that embrace lies the “possibility of a new world yet to be born.”

Background artwork: L.A. Forest by José Ramirez