The documentary “What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire” is nothing less than a 123-minute cat scan of the planet and its
twenty-first century human and non-human condition.
Carolyn Baker -- Speaking Truth To Power -- CarolynBaker.org
A REVIEW OF THE DOCUMENTARY "What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire", by Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson
I didn’t way it would be easy; I just said it would be the truth.
Morpheus, from “The Matrix”
If
anything is not easy to watch but absolutely the truth down to one’s
toenails, it is Tim Bennett’s and Sally Erickson’s doggedly transparent
documentary, “What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire.”
Nothing less than a 123-minute cat scan of the planet and its
twenty-first century human and non-human condition, this documentary is
indeed, “in your face,” but with reverence, poignancy and solemnity yet
sending world-class denial artists running to re-watch “Little Miss
Sunshine” another one hundred times. While viewing it, I could see in
my mind Carl Jung puffing on his pipe and pensively whispering under
his breath, “Human beings can only handle so much truth.”
Divided
into four parts, Waking On The Train, The Train And The Tracks,
Locomotive Power, and Walkabout, the film begins with Tim Bennett’s
personal saga of awakening in the eighties from lifelong slumber.
Recounting the realities he has subsequently discovered is a tedious
litany of human and planetary horrors that only those ready to awaken
with him are likely to endure. To their credit, Bennett and Erickson
offer no “happy ending chapter” at the end -- no list of quick and
painless fixes. Nothing about the world humans have created in the past
several thousand years is painless, and nothing they might contemplate
doing to remediate it could ever be quick. “What A Way To Go” is
nothing less than two physicians presenting a diagnosis of terminal
cancer to a patient who currently feels and looks “just fine.” Still
another metaphor might be the one that Bennett and Erickson present in
the documentary’s first chapter, namely, that of a suicidal individual
standing on a ledge at the top of a very tall building, contemplating
jumping to his death. It is an image to which the filmmakers return
several times as the film progresses.
The
issue of denial is addressed head-on as the documentary’s numerous
interviewees name it and its consequences. Those individuals include:
Thomas Berry, Richard Manning, Stuart Pimm, Ran Prieur, Paul Roberts,
William Schlesinger, Richard Heinberg, Chellis Glendinning, Derrick
Jensen, Jerry Mander, and Sally Erickson. Specifically, Derrick Jensen
speaks of the energy that it takes to remain in denial, and how humans
who stop clinging to it discover that as a result, an enormous amount
of energy is freed up to do whatever work the planet’s terminal state
calls them to do.
“What
A Way To Go” names Peak Oil, climate change, mass extinction, and
population overshoot, as the four pivotal and daunting challenges that
humans must address and resolve if any species are to remain on planet
earth. Equally terrifying, in my opinion, are two symptomatic offshoots
of these four: nuclear holocaust and global economic meltdown.
So
how do humans -- that species which unlike all the others, is in the
process of rendering earth uninhabitable -- reverse the nightmare we have
created? While for many of us, it may seem like a no-brainer, Bennett
and Erickson emphasize that unless the issues are unveiled and talked
about, no hope for solution exists. Given the documentary’s unrelenting
reminders of the lethal trajectory to which the human race has
committed itself, the filmmakers’ insistence on breaking one’s own
denial system is a crucial first step to all others.
As
an historian I particularly appreciate Sally Erickson’s assertion in
the film that in order to begin addressing the issues, we must develop
a historical perspective and understand how we arrived at this point in
human history. This is exactly what I have attempted to do in my
recently-published book U.S. HISTORY UNCENSORED: What Your High School Textbook Didn’t Tell You.
Americans in particular are loath to investigate causes and prefer to
hastily “move on” to solutions; however, without understanding causes,
it is impossible to construct viable solutions.
Especially
validating for me was the perspective this documentary lends to the
issue of Peak Oil in relation to climate chaos. While experts on
hydrocarbon energy such as Richard Heinberg
leave no doubt in the viewer’s mind that Peak Oil is a frightening
reality, those same experts, including Heinberg, acknowledge the
gargantuan climate change monster that could surpass Peak Oil not only
in its consequences but how quickly those consequences manifest the
collapse of civilization and make the planet uninhabitable.
As
for the tiresome “technofix” argument -- you know, the one that says that
because humans are the superior species and have created such highly
sophisticated civilizations, we will ultimately invent technology that
will adequately reverse the “Big Four” pivotal challenges, Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael and The Tales Of Adam,
compares humans living in developed countries to people living in very
tall brick buildings who every day go to the bottom of their building
and remove 200 bricks and bring them to the top of the building.
Obviously, such ludicrous behavior is unsustainable and will inevitably
result in the demise of the building’s foundation and its collapse.
Ultimately,
“What A Way To Go” meanders into the root causes of our planetary
nightmare: our disconnection from ourselves, each other, and the earth;
the cultural stories that have been forgotten and replaced with newer,
self-destructive ones about growth, domination, and hubris; the systems
we have created and the addictions that feed those systems, and of
course, our denial.
In
Part Four, “Walkabout,” we are given not hope, but the challenge of
creating options, the first being, the decision to grow up, forsake our
denial, and become adults. Richard Heinberg reminds us that, “We have
been so infantilized by civilization that we can no longer survive
without it. As all of this starts to shift and change and disintegrate
and collapse there’s the opportunity, in fact, to come back to
ourselves. To grow up, fundamentally, as people and as a culture.”
Both
Erickson and Bennett have incorporated their own children into the
documentary with brief comments from Erickson’s daughter and Bennett’s
son. Erickson herself states that in terms of future generations, “I
think they’re going to look back and shake their heads and say, ‘What
happened to those people? How did they lose sight of such basic
things?’”
Earlier
I used the analogy of two physicians announcing to a patient that
she/he has terminal cancer, and it is appropriate here to ponder what
cancer actually is, namely, the growth of cells out of control, thus
the more archaic reference to a cancer as a “growth.” Growth has become
for Western civilization a cancer that is destroying its inhabitants,
the ecosystems, all other forms of life on earth and the planet itself.
Or as the author, William Kotke notes, “Civilization is a mental/material world of culturally transmitted illusion.” Growth must cease, and it will cease, whether we choose to participate in that process or whether we don’t. Civilization will collapse, and that collapse offers opportunity
as well as crisis. It may occur suddenly, or it may transpire as the
economies and infrastructures of developed nations are hollowed out
over time.
Appropriately, Bennett and Erickson have chosen the subtitle, “Life At The End Of Empire.” In his recent book Nemesis,
historian Chalmers Johnson notes that an empire and a democratic
republic are inimical to each other. Where one exists, the other
cannot. If a nation chooses empire, its democratic republic will
dissolve and ultimately perish. Should it choose to retain democratic
republic, it must forsake empire; it cannot have both. The United
States has chosen empire, and its citizens are allowing the shredding
of its Bill of Rights and the evisceration of its civil liberties. All
empires inevitably collapse, and everyone reading these words is living
that collapse in this moment.
At this writing, world financial markets are reeling from Tuesday's sell-off bloodbath in China and Europe. The day before, a U.S. government auditor warned that U.S. debt to other nations is spiraling out of control.
Virtually every project of Western civilization is unsustainable,
especially its debt. An equally frightening but enormously important
documentary that every thinking American must see is “In Debt We Trust”
which illumines another locomotive out of control, imminently headed
for a bottomless chasm. While I don’t wish to prognosticate that this
week’s plunge of financial markets is the beginning of that economic
train wreck, I know that the centralized financial systems that manage
the United States government are behaving like the individuals
mentioned above who carry the bricks from the bottom of their building
to the top of it, leaving the foundation in peril of collapse. The
fundamental difference is that when the American people behave in such
a manner, they remain in the building and will be victimized by the
collapse, whereas members of centralized financial systems have
helicopters waiting at the top of their buildings which allow them to
abscond with the bricks, turn them into gold, and deposit them offshore.
While
no one wishes to jump off the ledge like the one on which the man at
the beginning of “What A Way To Go” has perched himself, there is a
sense in which all of us must either jump or have something far more
momentous than our physical existence annihilated. The documentary
quotes Andre Gide:
One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
In
the final moments of the documentary, Bennett offers an invitation to
the viewer: “Let’s jump off the train and build a boat … a lifeboat, an
ark, a galleon of adventure and imagination destined for unknown lands.
Build it now. The ice is melting. The waters are rising. We’re going to
have to let go of the shore.”
Bennett
concludes the documentary by stating that he doesn’t know if he will
survive the collapse but that he is committed to showing up in the
world and telling his truth. It’s almost as if his physical survival is
much less urgent than that commitment -- in which case, I must concur with
his and Erickson’s message: What a way to go!
CAROLYN BAKER, Ph.D., not only manages Speaking Truth To Power -- CarolynBaker.org -- but is a professor of history and author of a book in press, COMING OUT FROM CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM: Affirming Life, Love, And The Sacred. Her recently published book, U.S. HISTORY UNCENSORED: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You, may be purchased at her site. She is available for speaking engagements and author events and can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..