Unending World
A foretaste of Ch. 11 of Stewart Brand’s Maintenance on Books in Progress
Today on Books in Progress, Stewart Brand shares an advance look at a future chapter of Maintenance: Of Everything. This foretaste of Chapter 11, titled Unending World, is an illustrated talk Stewart gave at a workshop at the Santa Fe Institute in December 2023. He was motivated to publish it because of the growing use (and, he argues, misuse) of the term “existential threat” in public discourse.
Stewart writes:
Most of our talk about civilization is about how it will end, and how soon, and why, and who’s to blame. These days, everything the public frets about gets elevated to where it has to be seen as an “existential threat” to civilization.
I think I know where that started, because I was seven in 1945 when the Japanese city of Hiroshima was destroyed by a single bomb. Hiroshima and then the Cold War introduced a new idea to humanity—that we had the power to destroy the world. My youth was poisoned at times by that dread. [...]
Mostly, we still think of Earth in global terms—nations on continents—and the power relations between those various patches. But the planetary reality keeps leaking through, especially in light of climate change, which is not a global issue. It is a planetary one.
That image is wholesome and helpful, and yet the old dread keeps poisoning everything that we think about in a big way. And the dread is harmful. It fosters helplessness. It makes us fear the future and fear everything deeply new. And it is grossly exaggerated.