Consider PD James' Children of Men not as the rather conventional thriller that it turns out to be, with "The Good Guys" racing to save "The Only Hope for the Human Race" from "The Bad Guys", but as a dystopian thought experiment.
The book's premise, as you doubtless know by now, is that the human race can no longer reproduce, and is condemned to watch itself die a slow, whimpering death. In the first few chapters, before the conventional thriller takes over, PD James takes time to spell out some of the implications of this premise: the ache for children, the loss of interest in sex, the general ennui, the organised group suicides.
For me, this part of the book ended all too soon. Could we go back and explore that a bit further? How much of your life, how many of your daily routines and projects, would cease to have any meaning without an assumed future generation to carry on your work? Would you bother learning anything new? give to charity? campaign, or vote? invest in the stock market? plant trees? recycle your aluminum cans? fall in love and marry?
How many of our jobs would still matter? We would still want food, of course, electricity, cars, dentists, policemen; but would there be much point in the educational system, the legal system, the publishing industry, the campaigning charities, the construction industry, or that huge financial machine known as The City? For politicians, only three or four issues would continue to matter: utilities, care for the elderly, keeping us amused and safe enough to end out our days with a semblance of order and dignity. Would we still have any motivation to be responsible, honorable, unselfish -- or even to get out of bed in the morning?
My point is simple: the implicit future gives meaning to practically everything we do. When environmentalists talk about the need to prevent catastrophic climate change, they often speak about our responsibility to future generations. They invoke this as a general moral principle, a sort of Kantian duty to the unborn that might somehow motivate us to change the way we live now; as if, without this duty, our only care would be to ensure that the end of our own life was comfortable. Après moi le déluge -- or in this case, perhaps, après moi le désert.
If we were religious in the conventional Biblical sense, the end of civilisation might not matter to us; perhaps God means it to end anyway, and besides the meaning for our lives would lie in our eternal life, not in this temporal one. But for most of us, any meaning we have lies in this life, because there is no other. We know this, and are no longer surprised at it. What we don't so often articulate is how much of that meaning is tied up with an assumption of continuing life. Not our own personal lives, which will come to an end; but the continuation of human civilization -- imperfect, of course, but still somehow splendid, and still striving to be better. Our lives rest on this assumption as surely as the lives of conventional Christians rest in God; we might even say, to borrow from orthodox theology, that the future is that in which we live and move and have our being.
"Time past and time future", wrote Eliot, "point to one end, which is always present." Why pretend to worry about the future unborn? If civilisation dies out before they are born, they will never know the difference. The real focus of concern is ourselves, our own lives. We think about the future, campaign for it, invest in it, worry about it, practically all the time; our lives would be empty without it. So forget some falsely unselfish duty to some vague future generation: saving the future is really about saving ourselves -- from meaninglessness, from emptiness, from the end of hope. "I can understand now", says PD James' hero, "how the aristocrats and great landowners with no hope of posterity leave their estates untended...Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses...seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defenses shored up against our ruins."
***
Patti currently works as Director of Resources for Forum for the Future. Prior to working at the Forum she worked at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, initially as Director of Information Technology and subsequently as Deputy Secretary General.
Patti currently works as Director of Resources for Forum for the Future. Prior to working at the Forum she worked at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, initially as Director of Information Technology and subsequently as Deputy Secretary General.
6 comments:
I was, as you might guess, intrigued by your blog. A few phrases resonated with me!!!! I was also reminded of attending my first ever clergy chapter meeting nearly thirty years ago. It was a discussion on preventing a nuclear war that might destroy the planet and the human race. One elderly, retired minister asked "And why would we want to save the human race?"
Personally I just don't like PD James' rather preachy style. On the same theme, but I think more imaginative and challenging is William Golding's "The Inheritors" (1955). It's set, not at the end of the human race but at the beginning, and puts those who feel there is no future for their race into a much more startling and frightening context.
But I think you're right - it boils down to our thoughts about time and salvation. Personally I go for a faith which isn't so locked into a linear idea of time and isn't so locked in to a need for salvation.
It's interesting to speculate on what people would do in response to the catastrophe of universal infertility - the absence of a human future. I think there would be a variety of responses, some of which may well be contradictory and could lead to armed conflict.
There would be a whole category of response which would try to deny the absence of a future and in some way recreate it in fantasy. There would be the traditionally religious who would look to the deus ex machina to arrive before the end and put everything right or implement the Final Judgement. Some would simply put their faith in the possibility of immortality in a spiritual realm.
Implacable secularists would look for a technical fix - pushing for continued research into the cause of the infertility well after every female in the population was beyond child-bearing age. The SETI project would seek vastly increased resources in order to make contact with "The Aliens" who, as everyone knows, possess vastly superior technology to ours and surely would be able to help us in our hour of need? Still others would work at archiving the collective knowledge and culture of humanity, storing it in vast "time-capsules" built to survive not just thousands, but millions, of years. Such caches would be intended for the aliens, when they arrive, or for an intelligent species which might eventually re-evolve on Earth. Perhaps the time-capsules would be buried on the Moon (a la "2001 Space Odyssey") to ensure they survived the geological periods of time involved.
These latter projects would require large-scale heavy-industrial resources which I do not think would be possible given the widespread feeling of ennui and hopelessness that would prevail. Civil society and production would very likely break down after a few years. So in practice, I think that while these kinds of projects, expressing hope for a distant future, would be mooted and discussed and fought over, nothing would be done.
I believe there are accounts of American Indian tribes who, being displaced from their traditional hunting grounds, just lay down and died. Losing the environment in which their society could continue to live meaningfully, continued existence was pointless. I think that, in general, this would be the overwhelming response of humans faced with universally sterility.
So what consolation might be "rational", and not self-deluding, in such a context? Taking a cosmic perspective one might say that in the course of evolution species develop and die and that the disappearance of humans is no more tragic than the loss of the dinosaurs. One might comfort oneself with the thought that eventually on Earth, or possibly on another planet, other intelligent life might evolve to "replace" us. I'm not sure why I might feel comforted by this. Perhaps the idea that *somebody*, even if it is not us, is perceiving and pursuing its purposes the universe makes me feel that a community of intelligent life continues.
There is only one problem with this thought though: we have no idea how rare life is in the universe and how often, if at all, intelligent life evolves. It could be that life is incredibility unlikely and intelligent life even more so. Perhaps the Earth is the only place where life exists so that to lose an intelligent species (the *only* intelligent species) would be tragic indeed.
Rob Wheeler
Ms. Whalley,
Your post about the future prompts me to post the comment below. This comment is part of a longer post on my blog, “Worshipping at the Church of Non-Realism,” called “Why Do We Believe?”: The Theological Implications The URL for my blog is http://churchofnon-realism.blogspot.com/ I hope you and the other readers of “Thought Bubbles” will read and comment on my blog.
Thanks.
Pete McNamara
Novelty because of contingency:
Contingency is a major aspect of evolution. Mutations, which are chance, contingent changes in organisms’ genetic make-up, make evolution possible. Those mutations that give organisms an adaptive advantage permit them to reproduce more and, with time and more advantageous mutations, their progeny become more dominant. However, the events of evolution cannot be predicted in advance for the very reason that they are contingent. Their contingency makes them novel, and the past is not a guide to new evolutionary events. For example, the emergence of life and consciousness could not have been predicted from even a close scrutiny of the early cosmic events. Contingency is not a mask for a hidden necessity dictated by past events but not yet understood. Rather, it is the way the cosmos breaks out of subordination to habitual routine and opens itself to the future.
With novelty, evolution moves toward the future:
With the recognition of unpredictable novelty as a central feature of evolution, we can shift our metaphysical focus from the inexorable, predictable working out of necessary past conditions to the contemplation of the unpredictable, unknown future, filled with both threat and promise. This metaphysics of hope looks toward a future in which the apparent chaos now may resolve into more meaningful patterning in the “fullness of time,” in “God’s time.”
God “lets the world be,” permitting evolution:
Haught (John F. Haught, author of “God After Darwin’) is a theist, not a non-realist, but his theism is such that it has similarities with Cupitt’s non-realism. This is particularly apparent with regard to Cupitt’s solar ethics. Cupitt maintains that we are to shine in the world for others like the sun. The sun does not grasp but empties itself, living and dying at the same time, and in so doing serves us all. Such solar language recalls the great hymn to Jesus in Philippians 2 that starts in verse 5: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Jürgen Moltmann argues that the creation of the universe itself is not so much a display of divine might as a consequence of God’s self-restraint. In order to create heaven and earth, God emptied Godself of God’s all-plenishing omnipotence, and as Creator took the form of a servant.
Calvin wrote that the world is a theater with God as the audience. This vision of God’s emptying is as if a “theater” has been provided where the drama of creation could take place. Like all good dramas, this play has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Science has sketched the outlines of the beginning of the world and the middle, our current time, but the future only God knows.
A view of God as the God of the future, suggests not a God “up there,” but a God “up ahead,” drawing the whole creation forward into the future. In being the God of the future, God does not “micromanage” as a designer, but rather gives the world room to be itself. The world emerges as separate from and uncontrolled by God. This metaphysical and theological framework provides a way of bringing meaning not only to our bewilderment about our broken world and our individual suffering, but also the apparent struggle, waste, and suffering occasioned by evolution through natural selection.
I was a little bemused by Pete McNamara's previous comment on Patti's piece. He says that 'God “lets the world be,” permitting evolution'. Leaving aside how we could possibly know this (it sounds like a simple speculation as it doesn't account for anything) I am not sure how this relates to the problem faced by humanity in the scenario. What consolation would there be in believing in a God who is in love with contingency and chance when you face extinction as an entire species? A God who is as impotent as the human race, in the scenario, would be indistinguishable from a non-existent God!
Rodney Codd
I felt Patti Whaley was making a false distinction between the present and the future in her piece. We are constantly moving into the future and finding the achievement of our interests there. Only the dead or those moving at the speed of light live in an eternal present and would find their interests, if they had any, confined to such a present. The "unborn", the inhabitants of the future, are not separate from us in interest just because they are separated from us in time. The present does not have a separate significance of its own. Patti's end-of-the-world scenario perhaps reflects her own slightly misanthropic mindset rather than any vital issue. Disconnecting from the unborn does not leave us much humanity to celebrate or explore. Such an exploration, conducted with honesty, is bound to discover we are more than just time-independent, individualist, island selves -- "gods" in the negative, unrelating, other-denying sense which has brought so much 'righteously' hostile, totalitarian anti-humanism in the past. If the end of the world loomed, there would be at least some who wouldn't be using the situation as an excuse to ditch the most essential dimension of humanity but would be operating on our most positive drive, akin to faith, continuing to work to solve the problem right up until the moment they and their defiance were extinguished. Their results are what they would try to preserve and pass on to any successors, rather than constructing a beautiful grave. We are not the whole of life.
I'm not sure that Ploughsharer has really grasped the point of Patti's thought experiment. It in no way reflects misanthropy to imagine that the world has no future generations. It is simply an exercise to demonstrate that we *need* future generations to give our lives meaning here and now. Remove the future and the meaning of life *now* disappears. Ploughsharer says: "We are constantly moving into the future and finding the achievement of our interests there". Indeed - that's exactly the point. We are living in a trajectory *towards* the future - always. Remove that movement and trajectory and life loses meaning. There can be no meaning in living simply *now*. The *point* of life is always in the future to which we move.
Ploughsharer says that humans would keep on trying to solve the problem right up to the end and they would try to pass on their results to any successors. But think about it for a moment. You are assuming that society goes on just as it did before and that the entire industrial-technical infrastructure remains intact. However, the population is shrinking and there are no new students coming along to take up the scientific research required. After 50 years of searching for an answer people will just give up. If I am right the ennui would hit early and many of the last generation of young peopel would see no point in taking up science and so the research would founder much earlier.
It is the fantasy of "eternal life" that we can live a static life in the unchaging, eternal present. Change and moving into an unfolding future is what gives outr lives meaning.
Rob Wheeler
redherring@tiscali.co.uk
Post a Comment