The end of everything
When you're not young, and have already forgotten most of what being young was about, there are still a few knotty recollections that serve to remind you that whatever being young was, it wasn't at all like being old. Sex is one of those things. When you're old, you can still keep a candle burning to sex if you want - and it seems somehow fitting to have some small shrine flickering away there, for nostalgia's sake if nothing else, and to dedicate the odd votive offering and yard of kleenex - but what shocks, and rankles, is the undeniable fact you used to be its slave. This is one of the surreal things about youth, that young people don't even see as odd because they're so used to it, and because the culture encourages them to see it as normal - this tyrannical power that sex, in whichever of its various manifestations, exercises over us. I won't go into this because I've talked enough about it elsewhere. But that's definitely one thing.
Another thing, which my reading last night brought back forcefully to me, is our non-acceptance of death. That is very much a young person's foible, it seems to me. I can still - with difficulty - remember the feeling of bottomless, inconsolable dismay I felt as a child on being apprised that I was not going to live forever. The only possible response the nine-year-old me could shore against this incredible piece of bad news was the wilful adoption of a fairy-story ending to my life, in which death would prove to be only apparent and would actually turn out to be a mere house-moving exercise, where I would eventually end up in some large, airy, cloudy place in a community of harp players kitted out in El Greco togs, smugly brandishing a down payment on eternity. I don't have very clear memories of this, but I suspect the same sense of doom, terror and desperation returned to haunt me at some point during my teens, when the power of the aforementioned fairy-story to command intellectual assent began to wane.
What I do remember much more clearly is that, by the time I was in my early twenties and reading Unamuno, I was already extremely unimpressed by his insistence that the death of the individual ego was such a tragic thing that to pretend to be resigned to it could only be the pose of a hypocrite or a liar. This conviction seemed to me, then as now, merely revelatory of Unamuno's own lack of emotional maturity. After all, most people, by the time they are in their twenties, have been through at least one of two formative experiences, viz. falling in love, and discovering empathy, both of which have the effect of curing you of any misconception that your ego is, in comparison with that of the (beloved or admired) Other, all that special. It's true, of course, that the simple knowledge that, in losing you, the world will not have actually lost anything particularly fine or unique, does not always work as consolation against the fierce, irrational instinct for personal survival, especially not to begin with - but in the absence of any alternative comfort, it at least goes some part of the way, and as you get older, and life finds ever newer and more ingenious ways to frustrate and disappoint you and take you apart and turn you into a sick parody of your youthful dreams, you come to regard the prospect of your own death pretty much in the light of a holiday, or a well-earned retirement: ultimately, you reflect, your existence was never other than an obvious mistake, an unfortunate accident, a bureaucratic cock-up, a needless duplication of an already existing set of resources. And that's pretty much where I am now, when it comes to my own death. If I'm honest, I'm rather looking forward to it. I love the idea of never having to head out to work again.
Hopefully, when the time comes, it will be quick and painless.
But is that all that life is or can be about - stumbling through the maze in the half-light, avoiding pain, shrinking from the thorns, until we find the blessed exit at the other side and sink back into our natural state of permanent non-existence?
Perhaps it is, looked at in a certain way: but the point I wanted to make here is that this way of looking at life isn't the one that comes most easily or naturally, even to me. That, at least, is what reading Catherine Ingram last night made me think.
"It is through cultural worldviews and through self-esteem that humans ward off the terror of death," she observes, referencing Ernst Becker. It is the "cultural worldview" part that makes sense to me here (self esteem never having been my forte, as readers of this blog will have noted). For me, this "cultural worldview" is a cognitive construction, which hoovers up all those experiences one has as an individual and to which one attaches value - experiences of creativity, say, of Jewish Aunts (q.v.), of sex, of epiphany in the Joycean sense, of love or intimacy if you're one of the lucky ones - and represents them to your consciousness as Universal Experiences. Thus, you assume that your particular experience of joy is simply an instantiation, within your own consciousness, of a broadly identical experience which is simultaneously occurring in the minds of millions of other people at any given time (or is at least permanently available to those minds). The fact that it is not unique to you means that your own personal death, and the consequent definitive loss of any further such instantiations within your own deleted identity, appear trivial: not because you do not attach value to those experiences in question, but rather, because you assume that their value is preserved and guaranteed by the persistence of the species. As long as there are people to live, to breathe, to feel, to enjoy life, every detail of the Universal Human Experience remains secure. Such a worldview is actually very practical, in that it provides you, the individual, with a ready-made mission: to ensure that anything of value you discover in your own experience is made available to others, whether in the form of an artistic product, or set of instructions, or whatever else may be called for, but ideally in some stable reproducible form. And that's what it's all about.
There is, of course, that niggling question which has often exercised me: are people feeling all this enough? Wouldn't it be awful if I was the only person able to derive this peculiar, unsavoury, morbid pleasure from this particular piece of trashy music, such that when I died, that particular variant of morbid pleasure became, in the overall human emotional fauna, an extinct species? Also: might I not be idealising the consciousness of others? Why is it sometimes so hard to chase away the pernicious fiction of a Collective Consciousness; and why, having done so, does it feel so necessary to posit present and future goddesses, gifted with unfeasible powers of sustained attention and depth of sympathetic insight? Am I not mythologizing "universal human experience" just a little? Am I counting on there being superior consciousnesses lying around that real humans seldom or never possess? Am I not (with the goddesses, with the imaginary aliens picking over our fossils in rapt fascination) secretly inviting God in by the back door?
But leaving all these questions aside, what is the proper way to face the imminent (according to Ms Ingram, and I believe her, having come to similar conclusions myself independently) extinction of the human species, and of most life on the planet beyond the hardiest bacteria? Sure, we can still, for now, argue about when. I will cling to the bad-faith, unfeasibly optimistic scenarios if they will let me imagine, for my son, an immediate future that isn't a nightmare of disease, discomfort and starvation in the midst of a terrifying, post-apocalyptic anarchy about to fall on us. What else can I do? other than try to leave as shamefaced inheritance a chemical quietus or a bare bodkin? But even hoping for a short stay of execution, enough to get people used to the idea of not bringing more kids into the world, it isn't sensible to suppose humanity can hold out for long against such a vast array of existential threats as we now face. And what is curious is how, as I face the extinction not only of myself, of my genes, but also of my species, I persist in looking for some justifying external consciousness, some onlooker or watcher of the skies, in whose calm, understanding gaze something can be one day revived, at whatever degree of remove. This is where Great Filter theory appears, to stamp out the embers of our last remaining hope. There will be no later, sympathetic discoverer of our species' abortive attempt to civilise itself. There can be no such entity, because it is an evolutionary impossibility. Anything that reaches a certain level of intelligence is destined to destroy itself soon after. Intelligent life is not something our universe is well suited to foster or preserve. It's a flash in the pan. It doesn't really belong.
I agree with Ms Ingram about how we can or should respond to our predicament - all the way to "What if we forgave everybody everything?". Obviously, there will be an admixture of self-deception and wilful blindness in whatever we choose to think or feel. It could scarcely be otherwise: we aren't designed to live without hope and without purpose. We're stuck with how we're built. At least, I am.
Another thing, which my reading last night brought back forcefully to me, is our non-acceptance of death. That is very much a young person's foible, it seems to me. I can still - with difficulty - remember the feeling of bottomless, inconsolable dismay I felt as a child on being apprised that I was not going to live forever. The only possible response the nine-year-old me could shore against this incredible piece of bad news was the wilful adoption of a fairy-story ending to my life, in which death would prove to be only apparent and would actually turn out to be a mere house-moving exercise, where I would eventually end up in some large, airy, cloudy place in a community of harp players kitted out in El Greco togs, smugly brandishing a down payment on eternity. I don't have very clear memories of this, but I suspect the same sense of doom, terror and desperation returned to haunt me at some point during my teens, when the power of the aforementioned fairy-story to command intellectual assent began to wane.
What I do remember much more clearly is that, by the time I was in my early twenties and reading Unamuno, I was already extremely unimpressed by his insistence that the death of the individual ego was such a tragic thing that to pretend to be resigned to it could only be the pose of a hypocrite or a liar. This conviction seemed to me, then as now, merely revelatory of Unamuno's own lack of emotional maturity. After all, most people, by the time they are in their twenties, have been through at least one of two formative experiences, viz. falling in love, and discovering empathy, both of which have the effect of curing you of any misconception that your ego is, in comparison with that of the (beloved or admired) Other, all that special. It's true, of course, that the simple knowledge that, in losing you, the world will not have actually lost anything particularly fine or unique, does not always work as consolation against the fierce, irrational instinct for personal survival, especially not to begin with - but in the absence of any alternative comfort, it at least goes some part of the way, and as you get older, and life finds ever newer and more ingenious ways to frustrate and disappoint you and take you apart and turn you into a sick parody of your youthful dreams, you come to regard the prospect of your own death pretty much in the light of a holiday, or a well-earned retirement: ultimately, you reflect, your existence was never other than an obvious mistake, an unfortunate accident, a bureaucratic cock-up, a needless duplication of an already existing set of resources. And that's pretty much where I am now, when it comes to my own death. If I'm honest, I'm rather looking forward to it. I love the idea of never having to head out to work again.
Hopefully, when the time comes, it will be quick and painless.
But is that all that life is or can be about - stumbling through the maze in the half-light, avoiding pain, shrinking from the thorns, until we find the blessed exit at the other side and sink back into our natural state of permanent non-existence?
Perhaps it is, looked at in a certain way: but the point I wanted to make here is that this way of looking at life isn't the one that comes most easily or naturally, even to me. That, at least, is what reading Catherine Ingram last night made me think.
"It is through cultural worldviews and through self-esteem that humans ward off the terror of death," she observes, referencing Ernst Becker. It is the "cultural worldview" part that makes sense to me here (self esteem never having been my forte, as readers of this blog will have noted). For me, this "cultural worldview" is a cognitive construction, which hoovers up all those experiences one has as an individual and to which one attaches value - experiences of creativity, say, of Jewish Aunts (q.v.), of sex, of epiphany in the Joycean sense, of love or intimacy if you're one of the lucky ones - and represents them to your consciousness as Universal Experiences. Thus, you assume that your particular experience of joy is simply an instantiation, within your own consciousness, of a broadly identical experience which is simultaneously occurring in the minds of millions of other people at any given time (or is at least permanently available to those minds). The fact that it is not unique to you means that your own personal death, and the consequent definitive loss of any further such instantiations within your own deleted identity, appear trivial: not because you do not attach value to those experiences in question, but rather, because you assume that their value is preserved and guaranteed by the persistence of the species. As long as there are people to live, to breathe, to feel, to enjoy life, every detail of the Universal Human Experience remains secure. Such a worldview is actually very practical, in that it provides you, the individual, with a ready-made mission: to ensure that anything of value you discover in your own experience is made available to others, whether in the form of an artistic product, or set of instructions, or whatever else may be called for, but ideally in some stable reproducible form. And that's what it's all about.
There is, of course, that niggling question which has often exercised me: are people feeling all this enough? Wouldn't it be awful if I was the only person able to derive this peculiar, unsavoury, morbid pleasure from this particular piece of trashy music, such that when I died, that particular variant of morbid pleasure became, in the overall human emotional fauna, an extinct species? Also: might I not be idealising the consciousness of others? Why is it sometimes so hard to chase away the pernicious fiction of a Collective Consciousness; and why, having done so, does it feel so necessary to posit present and future goddesses, gifted with unfeasible powers of sustained attention and depth of sympathetic insight? Am I not mythologizing "universal human experience" just a little? Am I counting on there being superior consciousnesses lying around that real humans seldom or never possess? Am I not (with the goddesses, with the imaginary aliens picking over our fossils in rapt fascination) secretly inviting God in by the back door?
But leaving all these questions aside, what is the proper way to face the imminent (according to Ms Ingram, and I believe her, having come to similar conclusions myself independently) extinction of the human species, and of most life on the planet beyond the hardiest bacteria? Sure, we can still, for now, argue about when. I will cling to the bad-faith, unfeasibly optimistic scenarios if they will let me imagine, for my son, an immediate future that isn't a nightmare of disease, discomfort and starvation in the midst of a terrifying, post-apocalyptic anarchy about to fall on us. What else can I do? other than try to leave as shamefaced inheritance a chemical quietus or a bare bodkin? But even hoping for a short stay of execution, enough to get people used to the idea of not bringing more kids into the world, it isn't sensible to suppose humanity can hold out for long against such a vast array of existential threats as we now face. And what is curious is how, as I face the extinction not only of myself, of my genes, but also of my species, I persist in looking for some justifying external consciousness, some onlooker or watcher of the skies, in whose calm, understanding gaze something can be one day revived, at whatever degree of remove. This is where Great Filter theory appears, to stamp out the embers of our last remaining hope. There will be no later, sympathetic discoverer of our species' abortive attempt to civilise itself. There can be no such entity, because it is an evolutionary impossibility. Anything that reaches a certain level of intelligence is destined to destroy itself soon after. Intelligent life is not something our universe is well suited to foster or preserve. It's a flash in the pan. It doesn't really belong.
I agree with Ms Ingram about how we can or should respond to our predicament - all the way to "What if we forgave everybody everything?". Obviously, there will be an admixture of self-deception and wilful blindness in whatever we choose to think or feel. It could scarcely be otherwise: we aren't designed to live without hope and without purpose. We're stuck with how we're built. At least, I am.
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