Not With A Bang But A Whimper - The Sky Is Falling, Climate Change, And Other Nonsensical Existential Worries

T.S. Eliot wrote these final verses in his poem The Hollow Men

    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.

The exaggerated concerns of self-absorbed men will turn out to be nothing, hollow, shallow misinterpretations of the impossibility of predicting, controlling, and managing the future

    Between the desire
    And the spasm
    Between the potency
    And the existence
    Between the essence
    And the descent
    Falls the Shadow

Lessons not learned by the generation of existential worriers. 

Perhaps it is Biblical injunction, sin, forgiveness, and redemption which are at the heart of such concern.  If there is sin to be forgiven, evil to be countered, a generation of vipers to be reformed, then worries about climate change, income inequality, racial injustice, gender bias and a whole host of other obstacles in the way of salvation come naturally.  

 

Hindus and Buddhists have no such concerns.  The world was set in motion by Brahma and follows on in cycles of birth and rebirth without judgment.  Muslims prostrate themselves before Allah - the creator of all, the prime mover.  Everything may happen for a purpose, but his purpose. Existentialists and nihilists conclude no differently.  

As the Shakespeare critic Jan Kott put it, history is the record of The Grand Machine, a perpetual motion engine whose only purpose is to power human activities. Innate, hardwired human nature provides the context, the algorithms, the stuff that turns energy into action.  

If one were to lay down all of Shakespeare's Histories in chronological order, the dramas played out would be exactly the same - the same palace intrigues, interfamilial internecine warfare, the same greed, jealousy, envy, and ambitions - and only the particular way individuals behaved would change.  Richard III and Goneril wanted exactly the same thing but went about fulfilling their ambitions in very different, personal ways. 

Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil took this scenario a step further,  There were some men who, determined to act in a determinedly territorial, self-interested way, would do so with superhuman intent and ability.  They would be the Genghis Khans of the world who make it in their own image - no better or worse than anything that came before, but a pure expression of individual will. 

Which brings us to the current Chicken Little generation, worried about everything: 

One morning, as Henny-Penny was plucking worms in the henyard, an acorn dropped from a tree right onto her head! She had no idea what had hit her, however, and so she started shouting: 

“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

She ran around in circles for a while, calmed herself, and then got right to waddling—she had to alert the king!

So what happened to the philosophical circumspection of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Nietzsche, and Epictetus? What squeezed every bit of historical perspective, every ounce of objective reserve, and turned an entire nation into a republic of worrywarts?

'Climate change is an existential threat', the worriers claim, the end of life as we know it, a devastating event as cataclysmic as the extinction of the dinosaurs. 

There is nothing in Darwinian theory to suggest that human beings are the final product of evolution, the end game, the be all and end all of existence but just another step along the way; and yet there are still those who want to hang on tooth and nail to our minor evolutionary episode. 

Understandable of course. No one wants to give up the here and now and the assumption that the best of all possible worlds is coming; but some attention ought to be paid to Leibniz and to Voltaire's satirical Candide. There is no such thing as better, said both, only the coursing of a random sequence of events 

Yet the climate worriers, the social reformers, the justice missionaries, and the street corner prophets of doom persist.  Chicken Littledom is an industry, a well-financed, politically-supported, neo-Biblical movement with no capital - a Ponzi scheme of impressive proportions.  Donations pour in, are recycled through agencies, institutions, churches, neighborhood groups, and end up absolutely nowhere in the scheme of things.  The earth may be warming or not, thanks to human activity or not, but there will be only the normal, evolutionary process of perpetual change.  

Bob Muzelle was a Yale graduate, University of Chicago PhD, and a lifelong activist for social change. A Freedom Rider, a nuclear non-proliferation activist, an environmentalist, and an advocate for racial, gender, and ethnic justice he worked eighteen hour days until he dropped dead in his traces, hands still on the keyboard, shoes off, and a half-written article entitled 'Melting Icecaps - The Last Warning' on the screen. 

'A fitting end', said the Yale Alumni magazine in an obituary written by a colleague equally engaged in social reform.  'A man for all seasons, a mensch, a social hero', and yet for all his Sturm und Drang, few people outside the concerned inner circle of progressive claimants paid much attention.  The hammering, badgering, and hectoring of the progressive Left was dismissed and forgotten.  More and more people through what sociologists called 'philosophical osmosis' became Vaishnavas and Shaivites - instinctive, absorptive believers in the grand scale, the endless cycle - or Nietzschean nihilists without ever thinking about it.  

 

A sucker might be born every minute, and you might be able to fool most of the people most of the time, but there is some innate sense of equilibrium in all of us.   Maybe, said cynics, it might have been because of the increased sightings of flying saucers and UFOs over the American West that did it.  If we are not alone, then maybe we're not such hot shit, the only living things in the universe, and something will either visit us or follow us. 

Bob's Yale class set up the Bob Muzelle Fund For Social Progress but got no takers - a few desultory contributions nada mas, and the portal was closed after six months.  Just like environmentally-attuned investment funds all of which went bankrupt, this pie in the sky, fairy tail donation opportunity was irrelevant undesirable from the beginning, 

The funeral, the wake, and the burial were lightly attended.  Bob's brand of exercised righteousness was considered a historic anomaly.  Nobody rode Freedom Buses or chanted 'Freedom Now!' any more.  The world of virtual reality and AI made all of that irrelevant and supernumerary. There were a few alte kockers who braved the rain and threw some flowers on the casket; but they were far too old to even remember whose body was in the casket, but the gesture was appreciated.