The bad news in his book comes across loud and clear. But the answer to the question in the second half of his title is not really provided. He predicts increasing devastation, but has little to say about how we might realistically avoid it. He argues that the collective action needed to properly address global warming at this stage would require radical redistribution of wealth, the dissolution of nations and the establishment of one world government with a “monopoly on force.” Given both the scale and the totalitarianism of that blueprint — and the inconvenient fact that the opposite of political unity is happening all the time — even Scranton admits that he’s “pretty sure we’re going to keep fumbling along toward our doom.” One finishes his book with little hope.

But why hope? Another choice, philosophically speaking, is to steer into the skid; to go, as Jack Donaghy on “30 Rock” might recommend, “into the crevasse.” After all, people — and I’m looking at every last one of you, as well as straight into the mirror — are stupid and shortsighted, about matters small and large. Brilliant thinkers (all of them stupid in their own way, no doubt) have been saying this for centuries, well before the advent of human-fueled global warming; even before the geological appearance of Reddit.

Eugene Thacker has thrown a party for all of these eloquent cranks in “Infinite Resignation,” and he is an excellent host. The book, a collection of fragments that takes its title from Kierkegaard, is a survey of the pessimism and dark quips of the Danish philosopher and his ilk, combined with Thacker’s own aphoristic thoughts on the subject. The last third of the book is a series of short biographical essays about the “patron saints of pessimism.”

Image Eugene Thacker, author of “Infinite Resignation.” Credit... Prema Murthy

Thacker, a professor at the New School in New York City, is the author of many previous books, including a trilogy about the “horror of philosophy.” In the first volume of that series, he wrote, in a line Scranton would likely endorse, that it is “increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are a part.”

Thacker calls pessimism “the most adequate” and “the least helpful” of philosophies. He delineates two varieties of it: “The end is near” and “Will this never end?”

Werner Herzog would be ideally suited to narrate certain passages of this book. “Few sights are more awkward (or embarrassing) than that of human beings in nature,” Thacker writes. He finds self-help books not just “ineffectual” but “odorous.” Along those same lines, he expresses disappointment in Samuel Beckett for writing “Fail better,” the line of his most likely to be quoted by aspirational writers on social media. “The therapeutic function soon gets the better of us all,” Thacker laments.