We’re Doomed. Now What?
We all see what’s
happening, we read it in the headlines every day, but seeing isn’t
believing, and believing isn’t accepting. We respond according to our
prejudices, acting out of instinct, reflex and training. Right-wing
denialists insist that climate change isn’t happening, or that it’s not
caused by humans, or that the real problem is terrorism or refugees,
while left-wing denialists insist that the problems are fixable, under
our control, merely a matter of political will. Accelerationists argue
that more technology is the answer. Incrementalists tell us to keep
trusting the same institutions and leaders that have been failing us for
decades. Activists say we have to fight, even if we’re sure to lose.
Meanwhile, as the gap
between the future we’re entering and the future we once imagined grows
ever wider, nihilism takes root in the shadow of our fear: if all is
already lost, nothing matters anyway.
You can feel this
nihilism in TV shows like “True Detective,” “The Leftovers,” “The
Walking Dead” and “Game of Thrones,” and you can see it in the rush to
war, sectarianism and racial hatred. It defines our current moment,
though in truth it’s nothing new. The Western world has been grappling
with radical nihilism since at least the 17th century, when scientific
insights into human behavior began to undermine religious belief.
Philosophers have struggled since to fill the gap between fact and
meaning: Kant tried to reconcile empiricist determinism with God and
Reason; Bergson and Peirce worked to merge Darwinian evolution and human
creativity; more recent thinkers glean the stripped furrows
neuroscience has left to logic and language.
Scientific
materialism, taken to its extreme, threatens us with meaninglessness; if
consciousness is reducible to the brain and our actions are determined
not by will but by causes, then our values and beliefs are merely
rationalizations for the things we were going to do anyway. Most people
find this view of human life repugnant, if not incomprehensible.
In her recent book of
essays, “The Givenness of Things,” Marilynne Robinson rejects the
materialist view of consciousness, arguing for the existence of the
human soul by insisting that the soul’s metaphysical character makes it
impervious to materialist arguments. The soul, writes Robinson, is an
intuition that “cannot be dispelled by proving the soul’s physicality,
from which it is aloof by definition. And on these same grounds, its
nonphysicality is no proof of its nonexistence.”
The biologist E.O.
Wilson spins the problem differently: “Does free will exist?” he asks in
“The Meaning of Human Existence.” “Yes, if not in ultimate reality,
then at least in the operational sense necessary for sanity and thereby
for the perpetuation of the human species.” Robinson offers an appeal to
ignorance, Wilson an appeal to consequences; both arguments are
fallacious.
Yet as Wilson
suggests, our dogged insistence on free agency makes a kind of
evolutionary sense. Indeed, humanity’s keenest evolutionary advantage
has been its drive to create collective meaning. That drive is as
ingenious as it is relentless, and it can find a way to make sense of
despair, depression, catastrophe, genocide, war, disaster, plagues and
even the humiliations of science.
Our drive to make
meaning is powerful enough even to turn nihilism against itself. As
Friedrich Nietzsche, one of Western philosophy’s most incisive
diagnosticians of nihilism, wrote near the end of the 19th century: “Man
will sooner will nothingness than not will.” This dense aphorism builds
on one of the thoughts at the core of Nietzsche’s philosophy, today so
widely accepted as to be almost unrecognizable, that human beings make
their own meaning out of life.
When forced to the precipice of nihilism, we would choose meaningful self-annihilation over meaningless bare life.
In this view, there is
no ultimate, transcendent moral truth — or, as Nietzsche put it in an
early essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” truth is no more
than a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.” If
we can stomach the moral vertigo this idea might induce, we can also see
how it’s not necessarily nihilistic, but in the right light a
testament, rather, to human resilience.
The human ability to
make meaning is so versatile, so powerful, that it can make almost any
existence tolerable, even a life of unending suffering, so long as that
life is woven into a bigger story that makes it meaningful. Humans have
survived and thrived in some of the most inhospitable environments on
Earth, from the deserts of Arabia to the ice fields of the Arctic,
because of this ability to organize collective life around symbolic
constellations of meaning: anirniit, capital, jihad. “If we have our own why in life,” Nietzsche wrote, “we shall get along with almost any how.”
When he wrote “Man
will sooner will nothingness than not will,” Nietzsche was exposing the
destructive side of humanity’s meaning-making drive. That drive is so
powerful, Nietzsche’s saying, that when forced to the precipice of
nihilism, we would choose meaningful self-annihilation over meaningless
bare life. This insight was horrifically borne out in the
Götterdämmerung of Nazi Germany, just as it’s being borne out today in
every new suicide attack by jihadi terrorists — even as it’s being borne
out here at home in our willfully destructive politics of rage. We risk
it as we stumble toward another thoughtless war, asking young men and
women to throw their lives away so we might continue believing America
means something. As a character in Don DeLillo’s novel “White Noise” put
it: “War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say
something good about their country”— which is to see war as an active
nihilism supplanting a passive one.
Nietzsche wasn’t
himself a nihilist. He developed his idea of truth as a “mobile army of
metaphors” into a more complex philosophy of perspectivism, which
conceived of subjective truth as a variety of constructions arising out
of particular perspectives on objective reality. The more perspectives
we learn to see from, the more truth we have access to. This is
different from relativism, with which it’s often confused, which says
that all truth is relative and there is no objective reality.
Fundamentally, Nietzsche was an empiricist who believed that beyond all
of our interpretations there was, at last, something we can call the
world — even if we can never quite apprehend it objectively. “Even great
spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience,” he writes.
“Just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and
stupidity begins.”
Nietzsche’s positive
philosophical project, what he called his “gay science,” was to create
the conditions for the possibility of a human being who could comprehend
the meaninglessness of our drive to make meaning, yet nonetheless
affirm human existence, a human being who could learn “amor fati,” the
love of one’s fate: this was his much-misunderstood idea of the
“overman.” Nietzsche labored mightily to create this new human ideal for
philosophy because he needed it so badly himself. A gloomy, sensitive
pessimist and self-declared decadent who eventually went mad, he
struggled all his life to convince himself that his life was worth
living.
Today, as every hour
brings new alarms of war and climate disaster, we might wish we could
take Nietzsche’s place. He had to cope only with the death of God, after
all, while we must come to terms with the death of our world. Peril
lurks on every side, from the delusions of hope to the fury of reaction,
from the despondency of hopelessness to the promise of destruction.
We stand today on a
precipice of annihilation that Nietzsche could not have even imagined.
There is little reason to hope that we’ll be able to slow down global
warming before we pass a tipping point. We’re already one degree Celsius
above preindustrial temperatures and there’s another half a degree
baked in. The West Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, Greenland is
melting, permafrost across the world is liquefying, and methane has been
detected leaking from sea floors and Siberian craters: it’s probably
already too late to stop these feedbacks, which means it’s probably
already too late to stop apocalyptic planetary warming. Meanwhile the
world slides into hate-filled, bloody havoc, like the last act of a
particularly ugly Shakespearean tragedy.
Accepting our
situation could easily be confused with nihilism. In a nation founded on
hope, built with “can do” Yankee grit, and bedazzled by its own
technological wizardry, the very idea that something might be beyond our
power or that humans have intrinsic limits verges on blasphemy. Right
and left, millions of Americans believe that every problem has a
solution; suggesting otherwise stirs a deep and often hostile
resistance. It’s not so much that accepting the truth of our situation
means thinking the wrong thought, but rather thinking the unthinkable.
Yet it’s at just this
moment of crisis that our human drive to make meaning reappears as our
only salvation … if we’re willing to reflect consciously on the ways we
make life meaningful — on how we decide what is good, what our goals
are, what’s worth living or dying for, and what we do every day, day to
day, and how we do it. Because if it’s true that we make our lives
meaningful ourselves and not through revealed wisdom handed down by God
or the Market or History, then it’s also true that we hold within
ourselves the power to change our lives — wholly, utterly — by changing
what our lives mean. Our drive to make meaning is more powerful than
oil, the atom, and the market, and it’s up to us to harness that power
to secure the future of the human species.
We can’t do it by
clinging to the progressivist, profit-seeking, technology-can-fix-it
ideology of fossil-fueled capitalism. We can’t do it by trying to
control the future. We need to learn to let our current civilization
die, to accept our mortality and practice humility. We need to work
together to transform a global order of meaning focused on accumulation
into a new order of meaning that knows the value of limits, transience
and restraint.
Most important, we need to give up defending and protecting our truth, our perspective, our Western
values, and understand that truth is found not in one perspective but
in their multiplication, not in one point of view but in the aggregate,
not in opposition but in the whole. We need to learn to see not just
with Western eyes but with Islamic eyes and Inuit eyes, not just with
human eyes but with golden-cheeked warbler eyes, coho salmon eyes, and
polar bear eyes, and not even just with eyes at all but with the wild,
barely articulate being of clouds and seas and rocks and trees and
stars.
We were born on the
eve of what may be the human world’s greatest catastrophe. None of us
chose this, not deliberately. None of us can choose to avoid it either.
Some of us will even live through it. What meaning we pass on to the
future will depend on how well we remember those who have come before
us, how wisely and how gently we’re able to shed the ruinous way of life
that’s destroying us today, and how consciously we’re able to affirm
our role as creators of our fated future.
Accepting the fatality
of our situation isn’t nihilism, but rather the necessary first step in
forging a new way of life. Between self-destruction and giving up,
between willing nothingness and not willing, there is another choice:
willing our fate. Conscious self-creation. We owe it to the generations
whose futures we’ve burned and wasted to build a bridge, to be a
bridge, to connect the diverse human traditions of meaning-making in
our past to those survivors, children of the Anthropocene, who will
build a new world among our ruins.
Related: “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene”
Roy Scranton is the author of “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization” and the forthcoming novel “War Porn,” and is a co-editor of “Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War.” He has written for The New York Times, The Nation, Theory & Event, Rolling Stone and elsewhere. Twitter @RoyScranton.
