“New research explores climate change and the limits of human progress…
"The deeper problem, he argues, lies in the complexity of civilization itself—a global industrial society that has grown both unsustainably expensive and dangerously vulnerable to the environmental stresses that accompany climate change."
"A lot of people confuse pessimism with nihilism, apathy and despair," Scranton said. "But pessimism is actually about recognizing our limits, letting go of unrealistic goals, finding solidarity in the fact of human suffering and doing what you can now, not in some utopian future."
"Modern pessimism emerged as a skeptical critique of early Enlightenment hubris, but it has roots in ancient wisdom from Sophocles to the Bhagavad Gita. Both the history of philosophy and modern insights from psychology show that pessimism is not only an effective way to deal with big problems, but a healthy approach to the unpredictability of circumstance, especially in fraught and difficult times."
In "Impasse," Scranton examines the "myth of progress"—how cultures have navigated societal collapse, failures in climate change communication, political extremism and "the end of the world as we know it"—ultimately concluding that the situation does not seem to be comprehensible within progressive modernity.
"Pessimism is fundamentally about recognizing and living within natural human limits,” Scranton writes. “It’s about recognizing that suffering is inevitable but not unbearable. It’s about learning to die and learning to live with death. And finally, it’s about committing to a radical and paradoxical hope: the hope that life might be worth living after the end of the world."
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-explores-climate-limits-human.html