Last year I celebrated the apex of birthdays in the life of any philosophical nerd: 42. I can’t hope to top that this year, but that’s okay. Each year is something of its own (see some of my previous birthday posts here and here.)
Birthdays and Deathdays
This year I’ve been thinking a little bit about my post from four years ago when I discovered that I had, statistically speaking, entered middle age. I’ve also been thinking a lot about death in my philosophy and horror class (an occupational hazard, I suppose). I’ve always been a bit prone to melancholy and thoughts of death (not quite enough to be goth, but I see what the goths are on about).
Given that my life is more likely than not more than halfway over at this point, should my birthday be a day of celebration of my existence thus far or a mourning in anticipation of an impending deathday?
Yesterday in my class we discussed Katherine Allen’s article on Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (in the excellent volume, Stephen King and Philosophy). Allen discusses the concept of bioconservatism, or the idea that there is something important about the human condition as it is, at least when it comes to death. As she puts it, “death is a feature, rather than a bug, of human existence.”
Evidence that King probably intended something like this in the novel can be found in his 2000 introduction to Pet Sematary. He explains that the idea began when the family cat died and his daughter said, “Let God have His own cat!” While King admires her tenacity, he ultimately can’t accept it. He says it best:
Climate Change and Humanity
But how much comfort is that in light of the very real likelihood that the next 100 years will be tragic for humanity if even only the most conservative estimates about climate change are correct? Sure, I won’t be around for most of that 100 years, but it’s not all about me. Many young people I care about will be around, not to mention the billions I don’t know.
I’ve written before about the movie Interstellar and how it brings up the question of the meaning of not just my life, or your life, but of the life of humanity as a whole. I argued there that the end of life for humanity is not in itself a tragedy, but making a point like the one I made about the meaning of an individual life, perhaps that humanity will come to an end is what makes the life of our species meaningful at all, whether that end comes in evolving into something else or in the next several decades as the result of the climate-changing habits of many of us.
I don’t think climate change in the next 100 years will be the end of all human life, but of course I can’t rule out that possibility. I don’t think any of us should be certain of humanity's long term survival. The reports are grim. I have something more like a hunch that we are better at surviving than that. Many humans will probably have difficult lives, most of this difficulty borne unequally and unjustly by the poorest and most disenfranchised humans. Humans will probably have to do some serious rethinking of the technological and economic systems that brought us here. Life for people who are young today and those who are yet to be born might look something like Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, if we’re being hopeful, or something like Mad Max or Octavia Butler’s Earthseed duology, if we’re less hopeful.
Humanity can’t go on forever any more than I can go on forever as an individual human. I don’t know how much longer I will live, but it has been a good life so far. I have been lucky enough to exist for a short time, to contemplate a few things, to experience love and friendship, heartache and fun. I have things I would like to do yet (getting tenure is high on that list at the moment!), but I realize I can’t do everything. My to do list will never be complete. There are thousands of good books I will never read (the single saddest thing about mortality for me).
The tragedy of our impending climate crisis is not that humanity might end, because given evolution, impermanence, and entropy, that is already assured by the universe. The tragedy is that, even if we are spared an early extinction, many humans, especially those who least deserve it, will suffer in ways we can scarcely contemplate, much less are equipped to handle.
It’s easy to despair when thinking of the next 100 years for humanity. Despair if you must, but I don’t think this gives an excuse for total inaction.
Politically- or economically- minded readers (especially the “leftist-er than thou” crowd), might mock my simple-mindedness, but I honestly believe that things like basic human kindness and decency as well as the ability to laugh and to celebrate small things (like birthdays) are going to help keep us human in trying times. This is not at all to discount political action and the willingness to boldly rethink the systems and ways of thinking that caused this whole mess in the first place. We desperately need that. But we also need to stay human through it all, at least until our descendants become something else far into some unimaginable future.
I don’t know if I’m right about any of that. I’m even less sure all humans are capable of any of that. But I will do my part for today by celebrating the small, human thing of my birthday.
Evidence that King probably intended something like this in the novel can be found in his 2000 introduction to Pet Sematary. He explains that the idea began when the family cat died and his daughter said, “Let God have His own cat!” While King admires her tenacity, he ultimately can’t accept it. He says it best:
Perhaps ‘sometimes dead is better’ is grief’s last lesson, the one we get to when we finally tire of jumping up and down on the plastic blisters and crying out for God to get his own cat (or his own child) and leave ours alone. That lesson suggests that in the end, we can only find peace in our human lives by accepting the will of the universe. That may sound like corny, new-age crap, but the alternative looks to me like a darkness too awful for such mortal creatures as us to bear.Or, as I put it in my review of that novel,
Would you abolish death if you could? Might we be better beings without it? Or is there some secret blessing dyed into the horrors of death, one that makes us the beautiful, tragic creatures we are?So maybe, just maybe, the end of a single human life is not a tragedy, but what allows for it to have any meaning at all.
Climate Change and Humanity
But how much comfort is that in light of the very real likelihood that the next 100 years will be tragic for humanity if even only the most conservative estimates about climate change are correct? Sure, I won’t be around for most of that 100 years, but it’s not all about me. Many young people I care about will be around, not to mention the billions I don’t know.
I’ve written before about the movie Interstellar and how it brings up the question of the meaning of not just my life, or your life, but of the life of humanity as a whole. I argued there that the end of life for humanity is not in itself a tragedy, but making a point like the one I made about the meaning of an individual life, perhaps that humanity will come to an end is what makes the life of our species meaningful at all, whether that end comes in evolving into something else or in the next several decades as the result of the climate-changing habits of many of us.
I don’t think climate change in the next 100 years will be the end of all human life, but of course I can’t rule out that possibility. I don’t think any of us should be certain of humanity's long term survival. The reports are grim. I have something more like a hunch that we are better at surviving than that. Many humans will probably have difficult lives, most of this difficulty borne unequally and unjustly by the poorest and most disenfranchised humans. Humans will probably have to do some serious rethinking of the technological and economic systems that brought us here. Life for people who are young today and those who are yet to be born might look something like Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, if we’re being hopeful, or something like Mad Max or Octavia Butler’s Earthseed duology, if we’re less hopeful.
Humanity can’t go on forever any more than I can go on forever as an individual human. I don’t know how much longer I will live, but it has been a good life so far. I have been lucky enough to exist for a short time, to contemplate a few things, to experience love and friendship, heartache and fun. I have things I would like to do yet (getting tenure is high on that list at the moment!), but I realize I can’t do everything. My to do list will never be complete. There are thousands of good books I will never read (the single saddest thing about mortality for me).
The tragedy of our impending climate crisis is not that humanity might end, because given evolution, impermanence, and entropy, that is already assured by the universe. The tragedy is that, even if we are spared an early extinction, many humans, especially those who least deserve it, will suffer in ways we can scarcely contemplate, much less are equipped to handle.
It’s easy to despair when thinking of the next 100 years for humanity. Despair if you must, but I don’t think this gives an excuse for total inaction.
Politically- or economically- minded readers (especially the “leftist-er than thou” crowd), might mock my simple-mindedness, but I honestly believe that things like basic human kindness and decency as well as the ability to laugh and to celebrate small things (like birthdays) are going to help keep us human in trying times. This is not at all to discount political action and the willingness to boldly rethink the systems and ways of thinking that caused this whole mess in the first place. We desperately need that. But we also need to stay human through it all, at least until our descendants become something else far into some unimaginable future.
I don’t know if I’m right about any of that. I’m even less sure all humans are capable of any of that. But I will do my part for today by celebrating the small, human thing of my birthday.
Postscript
What I want for my birthday more than anything else in the universe is for everyone to realize the wisdom of Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted "Theodore" Logan.
Coda
Nobody sums up everything I feel about birthdays quite like Weird Al, so here is Weird Al's "Happy Birthday!"
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