by James Wallace Harris, 4/15/24
Years ago, I read This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. It was a passionate plea to act on climate change because if we didn’t everything would change. Her new book, Doppelganger, is a metaphor about our polarized society and what keeps us from changing even though Klein still makes a case that we need to change.
Between reading these two books I gave up all hope that humanity would change. I read Doppelganger as further proof that we won’t change even though Klein again passionately expresses the rational reasons why we should. I also believe we all need to change, but sadly, I don’t believe we will.
Doppelganger begins with Naomi Klein explaining how people on the internet often confused her with Naomi Wolf, a once respected feminist who is now considered a conspiracy crank. Klein uses the idea of the doppelganger as a metaphor for how to relate to our opposites, whether male/female, black/white, liberal/conservative, religious/atheist, Christian/Jew, Israeli/Palestinian, etc.
Klein goes to great lengths to make the metaphor work in several situations, but I found that distracting. What the book does exceptionally well is to ask: How do we decide what to do when half of us disagree with the other half? We all assume there is one truth, but everyone sees a different side of it.
In many chapters Klein makes Wolf seem ridiculous, but there are quite a few places where Klein recognizes Wolf’s point of view, or even gives her credit for being right.
I believe that extremists on the left act like naive young children, while extremists on the right act like selfish young children. In other words, I believe Klein is unrealistically hopeful, while Wolf is self-centeredly overly positive.
I must assume Klein writes her books believing we can still change. With Doppelganger she’s hoping that if we can get together and endeavor to understand each other we can make rational compromises. That would be lovely if she were successful and right. I believe Klein is right but won’t be successful.
We are doing essentially nothing towards controlling climate change. Wars, collapsing economies, and weather catastrophes are on the increase. Our responses are becoming more irrational, rather than wiser. We must face the fact that evolution works on all levels, and Darwinian conflict will always prevail.
The strong are going to take what they want at the expense of the weak. To solve all the problems Klein covers in her books would require overcoming our Darwinian natures and everyone acting for everyone else’s good. I no longer believe we’re capable of such altruism.
In the early days of Christianity, its philosophy was anti-Darwinian. But modern Christians have lost all their compassion. Christianity has been dissolving for centuries. The compassionate Christians gave up on God and became liberals, and the ones left became conservatives who rewrote Christian ideals with serving rationality that backs evolution.
In other words, I believe early Christianity, and 20th-century secular humanism were two times in history where we tried to fight our Darwinian natures, and in both instances, the movements failed.
We’re not going to change.
Not to end on a completely depressing note, I’ll try to offer a somewhat positive idea. Since we won’t change, the environment will. How can we use our Darwinian nature to build hardened societies that can survive climate catastrophes? Don’t read too much hope into that. What I’m saying is how can the strong survive the coming changes we chose not to avoid?
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
I regret that I must agree with you on this.
But, with regard to Christianity, I recommend Tom Holland’s book Dominion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Holland_book)
Sounds interesting.
I grew with you 1000%. The other night when I could find nothing to watch on TV, I watch part of an episode of For All Mankind when they were all walking down the inside building of NASA to get on the rocket with the first woman on board and Petula Clarks’ song “The World” was playing and it may me feel sad and melancholy. I just knew deep inside that our time is passing and the dreams 50 years ago of getting to the moon and Mars and setting up a global cooperative base with many nations contributing and wars finally subsidizing, was only a dream…one that is dead now and a future that will not be.
I’ve also kept your post from years ago about the 50 reasons we will not survive. It was spot on.
I do try to look at the big picture of evolution and get some comfort that we, living now, but also 50 years ago, are privileged to have even seen the hope and dreams, even if it is not to be. Today’s world has grown cynical and mean and filled with anger and greed. It’s a sign (not in a religious sense) of the final years, which could still be a couple of generations or so.
Maybe someday the earth will heal and another species will evolve without the Darwinism of “the strongest survive”, but more “for the good of us all.” But best to be grateful that once upon a time…there was a possibility, that just didn’t pan out. Maybe others elsewhere have. After all we are still at the type 0 civilization and how many get to type 1-3, never mind a type 5.
NIce review, Jim. I too just finished Doppelganger for a second time of both reading and listening. there was a LOT I missed on the first reading, but I’m getting older and I doze off sometimes or tune-out – ???
I hate to say it but we’re not going to change and even if we did I don’t think we’ve got enough time to fix climate change, only one of a multitude of issues. BUT! if, by some miracle, we did fix climate change, then we’d just have another go at destroying the earth because our impulses for more, more, more of everything will be the same. It’s a problem of limited resources and unlimited demands. We could only take a shot at trying but that would have to be with very tight regulations on land use, population growth, and a myriad of details.
Also ever since St Paul (or possibly prior to him) we’ve had this idea that whatever religious or spiritual truth is true for me, has to be true for the world. So Paul and his band of Christians started evangelizing and hating Jews and that spread – but the Arabs got wind of it and started their own empires. and now our own hard-wired duality is in play again -
So I suppose it’s nice that we have the idealist Kleins of the world – we need them for the hope of it. But it won’t work for the same reasons the “War to End All Wars” didn’t work.
I think we all feel it and I think that’s a big part of the problem with the younger generations.
Unless someone comes up with some idea we can all agree on (or 80% of us, including the elite 10%, I think the world ia going to be a very different place in 50 – 100 years. Humans will survive but there will be way, way fewer of us.
One of my favorite bumper stickers is “Change is inevitable. Progress is optional.”
Homo sapiens has made tremendous progress in the quality of life for ever greater percentage of people on earth on just about any indicator you want to measure. Steven Pinker makes a great case for human progress in his book Enlightenment Now.
Most people don’t understand how change happens and yet there are very interesting explanations in the model of Spiral Dynamics pioneered by Clare Graves and popularized further by Don Beck and philosophers like Ken Wilber and Steve McIntosh.
The idea in Spiral Dynamics, which is a developmental model, is that people change in response to external requirements. People don’t change until they have to. They change to adjust to external circumstances in order to survive and maintain their desired quality of life.
Change occurs in our world view when we become frustrated with the stuckness in our current world view and desire something better which requires a new world view. A world view is made up of beliefs, values, and practices, and people at lower levels of consciousness their world view is not apparent to them and is unconscious and thought to be the truth because the have no perspective and so is accepted without questioning.
Change occurs based on a Hegelian dynamic of a thesis being countered by an antithesis which struggles until a synthesis at a higher level, hopefully, is created. The evolutionary process is facilitated by conflict as world views which conflict organize themselves at higher levels of complexity and order as the yin and yang are reconciled.
I have not finished Doppelganger yet so I am still hoping that Klein will become aware and describe the yin and yang of things. Out of nothing, the ground of existence, there occurred a separation in which life was born in dichotomy. Life in the ego world arose as a result of bifurcation which is an illusion as the Transcendent Source is a non dual Oneness. The consciousness of humanity is evolving to the peace of the healing of the separation when everybody loves everybody all the time. Are we a long way off? Perhaps, but part of faith is the belief that it is only a matter of time.
Because of christianity