Family Secrets — More than a Matter of Degree
Family Secrets — More than a Matter of Degree
David R. Weiss — July 8, 2023
I suppose all families harbor secrets in their distant or recent past. The family member whose attitudes or actions are cause for scandal. Poor (embarrassing, unethical, disastrous) choices we’d rather not be reminded of or let others know about. Facets of ourselves we haven’t yet figured out how to be honest about with ourselves or others. Scattered vignettes or whole chapters of our familial past get covered over with silence. Skip that initial “I suppose.” All families harbor secrets. It’s just a matter of degree.
And the truth is, we negate our own potential wholeness so long as we allow the secrets to hold sway. (See my June post, “ Unsealing Family Secrets … with Grace,” for some reflections on that.) But today I’m writing about family secrets of a different sort-an altogether different tense, in fact. There are also family secrets in our future. These secrets, too, are a matter of degree-but also, much more, as I will explain. And these secrets, too, negate our own wholeness so long as we allow them to hold sway.
Monday (July 3, 2023) brought the planet its hottest day on record since global air temperature record-keeping began in 1884. It lasted just one day, as if July 4 was already whispering, “Hold my beer,” as the sun rose. And then July 5 did the same. We won’t set a new global temperature record every day this month. But historically July is Earth’s hottest month-and there’s an El Niño in effect right now (a cyclical ocean-driven warming pattern)-which makes it very likely that July will become the hottest month since 1884. Except-
Except the past 75 years of industrial-driven warming have already made us such an outlier compared to the centuries before records were kept. And science has shown us the broad temperature ranges of earlier eras. Which is why, numerous atmospheric scientists have said that this year’s July will likely be the hottest month ever-by a long stretch. Since the Eemian period. About 125,000 years ago.
How’s that for a family secret? We have now so altered the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere that my kids and grandkids are heading into a future more like a past 125,000 years ago than anything in my childhood.
My son, Ben, just turned 36 years old to my 63. In the next 27 years, as he “flips” his age and reaches 63 for himself, every single heat record for every single day, week, month, and year will have been broken multiple times. By his 63rd birthday in 2050 (when my other kids will be: Susanna, 54; Meredith, 64; Megan, 66; Leah, 68; Laura, 69), if Ben is “fortunate,” the planet will have inched its way upward to 1.7 oC (3 oF) above the pre-industrial era, effectively ushering him and all his siblings into a whole new world. If he’s less fortunate, the planet will have stepped right past 1.7 oC and moved on toward 2 oC (3.6 oF). A mere fraction of a degree, but with catastrophic effects rippling across ecosystems, economies, societies … and, of course, across the lives of my kids (and yours.)
But, family secret-really? Well, how often have I discussed this “inheritance” with Ben (or my other children). Not never. But not often. And not at length. And not with anything close to the seriousness these few degrees will bear on their lives. No, this is truly a family secret hiding in their future. Surely not easy or comfortable to discuss. But just as surely, their ability to find wholeness in that future rests on their ability to wrestle with this secret with honesty and wisdom. If that isn’t the business of family, I don’t know what is.
And, of course, family secrets traverse generations-impacting more than just kids. I have nine grandkids. The youngest, also named Benjamin, will match my 63 in July 2080. By then the other grandkids will be: John (66), Eli (66), Gretchen (67), Nora (68), Landon (69), Waverly, Kaleb (71), Tomas (73). Hard to imagine these children older than me. Harder still to imagine their world in 2080. Painfully hard. These are children I’ve doted on. And by 2080 they will have grown into their adult years through decades more daunting than any I have lived.
Nothing can be said with exact certainty about that future. The details remain secret to all of us. But what we know is not encouraging. The Paris Agreement originally hoped to achieve a 1.5 oC (2.7 oF) limit in temperature rise but settled for aiming at anything less than 2.0 oC (3.6 oF). Yet the net effect of policies in place since the Paris Agreement have us on a trajectory to 2.7 oC (4.9 oF) by 2100. And the actual practices of fossil fuel corporations and government deals to build new pipelines and develop new projects continue to pretend like these targets don’t really matter. While all the science tells us they matter more than ever.
But, as I indicate in the title, this family secret is more than a matter of degree. Because it isn’t just about the numbers on a thermometer. Ultimately, this is about whole systems that teeter on the edge of collapse. Ecological systems. Economic systems. Political systems. Social systems. And they won’t wait until 2080 or even 2050 to start teetering- they already are.
The smoke from Canadian wildfires that played havoc with your breathing recently? That’s the smell of collapse. A symptom of a hotter planet (drier soil, more bark beetles, higher winds), but even as the wildfires burn, the carbon-laden smoke set up the atmosphere to trap yet more heat to drive the cycle further, harder, hotter, the next time. And this dynamic plays out in a whole host of interconnected planetary systems. So much so, that once whole systems begin to irreversibly tip (they are already teetering!) all those “degree” targets will become wistful projections for some bygone world-no longer our world at all.
Those stock market jitters that just won’t go away? That’s the rattle of a growth economy feeling the inexorable pressure of a finite world where finally there is no such thing as an externalized cost. Our economy, like OceanGate’s Titan submersible, is held together by hubris (rampant pride). Within decades the pressure of our finite world will leave our economy looking like that submersible does today: twisted wreckage.
That nearly unimaginable rightward lurch of the Republican party and the Supreme Court? That’s the instinctive human reaction to ecological and existential anxiety. This desperate political maneuvering, intimately tied to the preservation of white supremacy, is also a textbook scenario of how privilege responds to the mounting pressure of collapsing ecosystems and economies. And those polarized views, flavored by xenophobia and manifest in rampant violence and other wholesale fraying of our social fabric? That, too, is the evidence of ecologically-driven societal collapse-already well underway. It is what has always happened when civilizations outgrow their fit in the world.
We are on the cusp of a societal collapse never seen in the lifetime of anyone alive today. Not a downward turn in the economy. Not a conservative swing in politics. Not an era of social discontent. And least of all a brief interlude of warmer than usual temperatures. Collapse. And it is entirely inevitable at this point. There is no technological breakthrough or government regulation that can stop it. Because it is linked to an ecological collapse the likes of which no human being has EVER experienced in all of human history. Our future is literally unthinkable.
Well, not so much mine, which will run another 20–30 years or so. That future is bleak. Hard to imagine. But the future my children and grandchildren will face, that future is unthinkable. And that is a family secret-an uncomfortable truth kept in the shadows by consensual silence. And it threatens to leave them wholly unprepared for what is to come. There is nothing I can do to stave off collapse, but there are a whole set of insights, appetites, skills, habits, that I might bequeath to them … that might better equip them for this inheritance. But to do so, I need to break the silence of this most hidden of family secrets about their future. Hidden not least by the desperate hope it might not be true. And the fearful knowledge that it is.
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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, doing “public theology” around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in writing Community Supported Theology atwww.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.
Originally published at http://davidrweiss.com on July 8, 2023.
