Not long ago I wrote an essay[1] about what are called “existential risks,” aka “X-risks,” those calamitous possibilities (e.g., nuclear war, anthropogenic climate disruption, pandemic, and more, sometimes referred to collectively as the polycrisis) that are considered capable of rendering Homo sapiens extinct, or nearly so, and our present ways of life definitively so. I did not write about hopeful notions of ways humans might eliminate or mitigate the risks. I tend to believe the risks will cease being risks only after they become active realities since we don’t seem a notably life-loving, far-sighted, or prudent species. I wondered, instead, how it could be that we allowed ourselves to have such risks imposed on us and in some cases even to embrace them as necessary to achieve valued ends, a seemingly unfathomable notion but apparently believed by a majority in many cases and complacently accepted in others. I assumed that an answer to my wonderment, even if only partial, would say something as well about the lack of prudence and care noted earlier since they are surely entangled. What in our minds and spirits and cultural structures had opened the door for self-extinctive arrangements and has so far discouraged decisive efforts to close it? Who knows to what extent the mere existence of X-risks has been life-altering? Without self-understanding, how could we hope to address the potentially catastrophic circumstances to which we have arrived, so far without effective challenge?
Few of us manage for long to deny the reality that eventually we die, all of us, even those who for one delusory reason or another consider themselves too special or irreplaceable for extinction (or are simply too anxious at the prospect of nonexistence and unwilling to face it) and so seek routes of escape (cryonic preservation, anyone?). I die. They die. Everybody dies. Consciously and more often unconsciously this fact affects the way we live. Whether the prospect of one’s death is anxiety-ridden or not, its eventual reality is always a presence in one’s life, and we manage to get by in its shadow (and, with occasional wisdom, not only get by but are changed and deepened by its integrated awareness). Presumably, the failure to locate counterfactual examples helps with this. But our knowledge of eventual death is incomplete for life does not come with a scheduled end-date. No one knows when the day will arrive (unless they schedule it themselves), bleakly for some but with relief for others.
I wonder if our living in the shadow of X-risks does not have much the same quality as living in the shadow of our dying? Extinction by one or more existential risks lacks the certainty of my death, while sharing the uncertainty of its timing, but they are abundant with potential to facilitate it. Both are subject to denial. The X-risks I am thinking of here are primarily nuclear war and anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD), which differ mostly in the time they take to turn risk into reality. Both are indisputably the result of human choice. Nuclear war and ACD are under our control, unnecessary, irrational…and both march onward to their destined conclusions. The U.S., in fact, has committed to spending around $2 trillion on building new and improved nuclear weapons it claims never to want to use. War is rooted in fear, power lust, mundane inertia and unimaginative thinking; ACD is rooted in a similar mundanity combined with greed and hypertrophic materialism. The majority of Americans do not seem deeply concerned about either of them.
So, I write for the minority who see what’s coming and lack confidence they can have much effect on its course and who think the nature of our socio-political and economic systems is such as to empower those with the highest risk tolerance (on behalf of the most desperate hunger for power and/or wealth) in the country. A risk tolerance that includes its necessary self- and other-deceptions which from my minority’s view so far exceeds prudence and any prospective benefits as to constitute culpable heedlessness. Yet, they are in control and the majority passively accepts their version of the ethical and existential calculus. What is the minority to do? To be clear, some of them remain deeply involved with efforts to eliminate or mitigate the risks but as realists they recognize the odds against success are steep and time is limited. Activists, too, face the question of how to live with their knowledge of looming disasters.
Following the analogy of living in the midst of X-risk with living in the knowledge of your own inevitable death, and noting the minority that intends to live good lives even in the face of ultimate X-risked calamities, I seek principles for how to live good lives in the midst of these prospects—one imposed by Nature, owing to human disruption, through still not fully imaginable climatic disturbances, and the other by the unaccountable socio-political establishment that steers the ship relentlessly toward the reef of nuclear disaster. Humans yearn to create and discover sources of meaning and purpose in a Universe that I believe has its own sources and leaves ours for us to discern. I add that the minority’s anxiety or hopelessness isn’t rooted in narcissism or lack of care for the commons—just the opposite. X-risks do not exist independently of the culture, and in the minority’s eyes that culture is so distorted by the forces that led to the Risks and so resistant to honest self-awareness and the changes that could follow from such insight that it does not elicit respect. If there is to be salvation from the Risks, the minority of which I speak would not want it to be a return to the present status quo. They seek meanings that the culture doesn’t support and therefore must find ways of operating counterculturally in the presence of its existential risk accompaniments along with its myriad failures—in the world, but not of it.
(Note: I speak of “the minority” not with any defined sense of who they are or how many; they are at present more a postulate than determinable group. I see them out there, am acquainted with some and familiar with their general characteristics, assume there are more, and am a member myself but know that we lack the numbers or power to alter entrenched cultural ways.)
In 2013 philosopher Samuel Scheffler published Death and the Afterlife[2]. The afterlife for him referred to the Earthly future following one’s death (not personal transition to a metaphysical state), meaning the continued existence of humans but without the deceased, i.e., “after-his-life”. Scheffler’s reflections convinced him that our knowledge that people will carry on with the business of living and culture was of crucial importance to our finding value in our present lives and projects even knowing that we face our own inevitable demise. In his words, “…the existence of an afterlife is a condition of many other things that we care about continuing to matter to us.” And, “…I will argue that the importance to us of the afterlife can help to illuminate what, more generally, is involved in something’s mattering or being important to us, or in our valuing of it” (pp. 15-16). Although I’m not convinced he’s right, at least not mostly, it is provocative to consider. He uses P.D. James’ The Children of Men for one model of a disappearing humanity. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and George Stewart’s Earth Abides are other examples of the genre but not ones he mentions. None entertain Scheffler’s questioning but each stimulates the imagination as to the effects on an ever-diminishing (or already diminished) population of humans witnessing the disappearance of their conspecifics, leading possibly to a last man or woman. James’ version of human extinction is via infertility, Shelley’s and Stewart’s through pandemic.
Scheffler wonders what it means to a person to know that life will go on after his death, while I wonder what it means to that person to know they inhabit an Earth and a society that could essentially end within an hour, or more slowly but with equal finality over a few decades. My question is how to live with that knowledge—the uncertainty of when life could become unbearable combined with the prospect that society is in any event crumbling into nihilistic emptiness. Simple observation of the renewed nuclear arms competition and its absurd rationalizations combined with fossil fuel executives continued social acceptance even while methodically deceiving members of the society their products will surely wreck…unsavory affairs, both of them, and sufficient to make many of us hopeless that these kinds of people in this culture will ever voluntarily change or that other power centers will require them to. Thus, again, how do we and our like-minded cohort choose to live worthy lives when the larger world is going to hell. What follows is what comes to mind as I consider what seems to me a realistic rendering of what has to be dealt with if one wants to go on, or out, responsibly.
As I begin, I realize that the people I’ve spoken of as the minority probably don’t need me to write about this (maybe no one does since none may think alternative ways are necessary or possible). In their own multifarious fashions, I expect most of this minority are well on the way to knowing how to live honorably and purposefully within any conditions, but particularly in perilous times within a feckless society. Others who are still looking may be drawn to those already on a way and find guidance. I often read words from people working hard to stem the forces of climate change that say “despair is not an option.” My response is that it’s exactly the appropriate option, but not as a place to stay. The feeling of despair needs to become a catalyst for thinking and acting with the understanding it can provoke. Some may decide, after facing the dark wall of despair, that even knowing they will in all likelihood fail, they will choose to continue the struggle against ACD or the existence of nuclear weapons but without false hope and with equal determination to live a good life anyway, focused on factors of being that are still meaningful, including action that does not depend on success to be worthy. Or they might abandon the contest and, like people who feel they had a productive and satisfying career but are ready for change, resign and engage with other sources of meaning. But, again, who am I to write about this? I am satisfied it might turn out that I write, in the fashion of Marcus Aurelius, notes “to myself” with no further effects (not pretending to his greatness, only his intentions).
Considerable effort has gone into understanding the alienation, anger, and nihilism of present-day Republican Trumpists who embody one expression of despair. I won’t add another exegesis but do suggest that part of their feeling may be that in experiencing the anonymity and injustices of this society and seeing the impediments to having their voices mean anything, they fail to discern ways of living that don’t require toppling the power structures (laudable though that might be), indulging in conspiracy theories, lapsing into victimhood, or moving full-tilt into an ends-justify-any-means mentality, and instead to live as if the existing structures do not matter insofar as possible. In other words, turn from victimization and scapegoating to an alternate form of agency. The sense of victimization is a dangerous brew to drink deeply of and seems to have produced the intoxication of endless grievance, which can become addictive and preclude thoughtful alternatives, especially when the alienated succumb to the sway of demagogic cultivators of grievance. Clever cultivators turn grievance into a community of the aggrieved and the mutual reinforcement can become too comfortable to step aside and experiment with alternative ways. Even their “god” can be drafted into the community and give it legitimacy, to the point where former moral strictures become disposable for the sake of the power goal. All of which is to say that both my minority and the nihilists want a good way of life but the former are better positioned to create it, among other reasons because they haven’t imposed so many additional impediments on themselves, nor committed themselves to a state of permanent estrangement, anger, and defensiveness as, it seems to me, the others typically have. Grievance and helplessness are close cousins.
First thought about a way of living before the abyss: I suspect that if most of us lived within strong communities built on ethical or authentic religious commitments we wouldn’t be talking about existential risks and the effects of their presence on choosing ways of life since such risks probably wouldn’t occur (“probably” being a crucial caveat since all human associations have a built-in potential for going awry; we may be exceptional compared to other species mostly in the wide range of our flaws). Such communities aim to protect and nourish their people and want to know, for example, how it is that more war-mindedness with more nuclear weaponry is good for the soul and good for peace, international relations, or social existence. Why do we find ourselves as a nation so regularly and frequently at odds with other peoples, so reliant on the hammer of force for persuasion, and so determined always to be on top? And of course, much more can be said, but the point is that my minority will want for themselves and their families and associated others to help create and sustain communities of mutual care and peaceful aspiration in the midst of this conflictual, alienated world, which is manifestly impoverished of organic communities; questions large and small must be reflected upon. Their focus on their community will carry substantial emotional weight, but I don’t picture it closed, oblivious to conditions outside, near or far, uncaring about injustices suffered half a world away. They aim to be restorative, within and without, as far as possible. And to a large extent they will have had to separate themselves attitudinally from existing societal and especially political norms in order to succeed. If community is to be a vital presence in lives it will start small and may stay there; good ones are good models for wider society but I don’t see “missionary work” as part of their mission. Rather, they represent foundational duties and values that allow stability for whatever individual or group aspirations may follow. The political realm is a necessary, albeit too often a tawdry, one and at present it is hard to imagine it becoming a source of normative inspiration, rationality, or societal improvement. Like corporations it has become too big and unaccountable and mostly an arena for conflict, ambition, and grasping after power and wealth. Until that begins to break down from its own contradictions and the frustrations of an alienated populace—expressed in ethical and responsible ways, one hopes—voting for the best of the worst in hope that the balance between them will slowly shift, may be all we have. Despair momentarily redirected.
Community serves its own vital interests because it must in order to thrive and serve its purposes, but it responds to those of its members at the same time—they are, after all, its reason for being. Its rituals and shared endeavors strengthen the communal body and as well relationships with fellow humans through which many of the chief goods of existence derive: relationships, it should be clear, that are not chiefly transactional, functional, or merely convenient but that compose friendship and mutuality, loving action and reliability. Furthermore, brief observation of the present social world writ large reveals the toxicity of lost trust and the lost commitment to truthfulness on which good communities stand. They aim for restoration of diminished ethical and intellectual goods, for the satisfaction of communal needs, and the well-being and integrity of participants.
The word community is so commonplace that I need to give its use here more depth. After all, we hear people speak of the business community or the academic community and we know it only means that community members have a common occupation and may rarely act as a community at all (except in the former case through lobbying). We also speak of the community of Houston or Mayberry and know they each are defined by geographic boundaries but have little more in common. Even so, we’ve identified the first element of community, which is internal commonalities, which in richer versions of community become deep and interwoven. Elements of one’s identity, shared values, mutual care, certain practices, rituals, and aspirations, all of these creating a solidarity felt in shared responses to communal joys and tragedies. There has to be enough sameness to bind along with enough diversity and freedom mixed with respect and responsibility to ensure the community’s stable and satisfying existence through time. There is nothing novel in this description; everyone’s familiar enough with the concept to use it frequently, casually, and usually haphazardly. But when Americans get past the pabulum of “healing our divisions” and speak specifically, the decline of community and responsible civic-mindedness in our splintered, antagonistic public sphere are identified as culprits more often than any other factor I am aware of. Resilient communities are essential to everyday convivial existence and even more so in the face of the great Risks. Years ago, as a marital therapist, I remember talking to couples about weighing the dangers of winning arguments while losing, through competitive behavior, the marital foundation and the respect and confidence necessary to sustain it. People in communities that aim to thrive remember this as well; no issue can be more important than retaining the ties that bind, mutualities of care that are fostered within community. Families can reflect communal solidarity as can neighborhoods, towns, and so on, formally and informally but small is usually better. Most of us, I believe, require some elements of conscious community to protect meaning, especially in the midst of nihilistic, X-risked times. And perhaps the most distinct indication of its presence is that its members know implicitly it is always there for support while still holding them accountable for how they live.
A distinction comes to mind between How we live and What we live for. With or without existential risks I think the How answer should be unchanged except as self-reflection moves it toward more depth in the face of threats. (And existential risks, we have to remember, are not just threats to existence but to meaningful existence, which certainly broadens the field.) At our best—a realm we rarely spend enough time getting to know—the ancient prescription to practice virtue and pursue wisdom is excellent and flexible as to the details. Living toward Truth, Beauty, and Goodness speak for themselves, however lonely the ideas may have become. But no prescription is any better than the assiduity of one’s compliance. The notion of living each day as if it were your last seems to me vacuous. But whether living with the expectation of finding paradise or knowing that calamity, sooner or later, is always a possibility and perhaps a certainty, how one lives rightly, because it is right, should be unchanged from our ideals. As for the What, under the shadow of X-risks we don’t find clarity about the end time that we find in Scheffler’s thought experiment; rather, we are presented with a certainty without a date. Which means that we aren’t confronted with the limits faced in his scenarios, limits as to what to engage with that isn’t dependent on duration. The time dimension need not be a factor in choosing what is worth living for. So if finding the elusive cancer cure captures your mind, I see no reason not to go forward even if the cure turns out to be only a short-lived blessing. The search would be good in itself and who knows how long it would be useful. X-risks do not affect, for me, what to regard as essential and meaningful. What does come to mind, though, is something like the awareness of an aging person that time is shorter than she’s always counted on and that even before it runs out her capacities will diminish. Second chances are few to nonexistent and careless delay not well advised. The degrees of urgency that may accompany this aren’t replicated exactly in an existentially risked world, but there may well be a sharpened awareness of what is important. And more than that, in the process of separating out the unimportant from the important. Not, I wouldn’t say, as intensely as in the aphoristic “The prospect of one’s imminent hanging tends to sharpen the attention” (to paraphrase Samuel Johnson), but still a regular reminder that nothing can be counted on as fully as the integrity and satisfactions of right living, a good life whatever worthy purposes it is lived for and for however long, and we should get on with it.
(I speak of the risk of nuclear holocaust as if its conversion into catastrophic reality were a certainty because I believe it very likely is and for several reasons. First, it’s been with us for nearly 80 years, which comforts those committed to its eternal value as a peacemaker, but not those who read the meaning of this differently. We appear to have learned nothing during this period about the waste and uselessness of Mutually Assured Destruction as a strategy [if you knew that deterrence had failed and that a massive strike was on its way to our country, what would be the point of reciprocating in kind since the perpetrator had already fouled his own nest and nothing would be gained for us by fouling it more extensively?] and the supposedly deterred Russia, for example, still finds it useful to publicly toy with the idea of throwing a nuke or two into the Ukrainian conflict. The story of 80 years of near accidents, barely avoided misinterpretations, and saved-at-the-last-minute surges of good judgment doesn’t evoke confidence for the long term. Second, the longer a Risk exists the more normalized it becomes and the less likely to elicit appropriate anxiety and caution and the greater likelihood of disaster happening, either intentionally or not. Since we don’t hear the obvious questions asked—“What could possibly be worth the costs of failure?” and “Aren’t you putting a wee bit too much faith in consistently good judgment under pressure than history and our knowledge of human psychology would recommend?”—the legacy of misguided nuclear war-fighting scenarios continues apace. There is very serious doubt as to the need for obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and no doubt as to its immorality, but there was momentum from years of cruelest war and I imagine feelings of novelty, pride, and vengefulness. Momentum tends to close minds and is always potentially present; in war it becomes callous. Lastly, while it might be irrational, unspeakable, and catastrophic to use the damnable things, people have always been known for launching irrational, unspeakable, and catastrophic acts so it would hardly be unprecedented except in scope.)
As I write I begin to sense more strongly that paths to right living with X-risks hanging over us may not be so different from what they would be at any other time. Yet, recurring to my aphoristic mention of the effects of his hanging on the mind of the condemned, it may well be that these Risks, since we can’t wave them away, could have the beneficial side-effect of focusing our attention. I live on the North Coast of California and have watched for years how fires have destroyed regions I have camped in and loved along with many others; I have breathed the smoke and seen darkened skies. More than once, I have been driven from camp by wildfire. I have come to believe that climatic change will eventually precipitate the end of almost all these forests by heat, drought, and wildfire, if nuclear holocaust doesn’t get them first. Across the country people have been flooded, burned, and blown away by weather extremes, though many still refuse to make the connection with ACD. Denial is a powerful force in many minds, especially those that haven’t had their attention sharpened as mine has been (which, it might be said, has had the effect of my own version of expecting to be hung). At least not sharpened yet. But for those who are ready for it, and for whom imagination, objectivity, and foresight are still not thought conspiratorial, the power of the Risks we face becomes ever clearer. So prudent, protective preparation along with identification of their most valued people and objects leads many to reflect on the same things that interest me here.
Among other things I hope our eventual “hanging” will provoke: re-remembering that we live within Nature and that we owe it gratitude and love for its gratuitous blessings. Blessings that are of course all threatened, along with us, by existential risks. My main consolation is that while my kind and many other forms of life will perish, Nature will persist and in time (perhaps millions of years) return to health, preferably without the presence of any who are apt to forget where they came from and what they owe it. Most of us have books that we return to periodically over the years, always finding new meanings. One of these for me is The Consolation of Philosophy. Written 1,500 years ago and having nothing to say about Nature, its focus is on what ultimately matters, not surprising since the author, Boethius, an upper-class Roman who finds himself imprisoned and condemned to execution (that duly arrived), is looking for solace in his grief and anxiety. He finds it remembering the essentials of what makes for the highest goodness and happiness, which are internal and spiritual and depend on self-sufficiency (rather than wealth, status, etc.) and equanimity. Contingency is native to life, as both Boethius in his cell and we fenced around by X-risks well know; we hope to learn soon enough, along with him and what we see in Marcus Aurelius’ “notes” (otherwise known as his Meditations, which is also old, about 1,800 years), and in our much younger reflections, which are remarkably similar to theirs…what we really must learn are the ideas and commitments that can supersede contingency.
I put our relation with Nature in the same set of categorical meanings and values as our human relations. Over the centuries we have separated ourselves from Nature, wanting for some reason to feel residents of a higher realm, sufficient to ourselves, superior, and in control. There is a mountain of books on the history of our attitudes toward Nature (that mostly intend to demonstrate our existential uniqueness) and what most amuses, when it does not alarm me, is modern scientific work that is constantly surprised at animal capacities often followed promptly by efforts to hedge them in as still inferior. The concept of anthropomorphism has been drafted into discounting anything that reeks of “attributing human qualities to animals,” seemingly unable to alter their assumption and imagine that all animals, including humans, partake in their own ways from the host of capacities offered us by Nature. A certificate of human ownership of such qualities has not, as far as I know, been found, and there is something almost pathetic in the scrambling to maintain a sense of human separateness and superiority. I suppose the “great chain of being” is with us still, with only the fully ethereal possibly superior to us, but maybe not, we wish to arrogantly imagine. Humility would help; our existential risks could well serve to stimulate that too rare human attitude, but I won’t count on it.
Nature is our birthplace, home, and greatest source of beauty, inspiration, and spiritual nurturance, not to mention all the essentials of biological life. Experiencing palpable connection and allowing its movement toward a reverential sense of engagement and love…I would say that Nature like God (speaking of whom metaphorically) composes every particle of every whole and its unified being. It cannot but distort humanity to deny its dependent connection, its immersion within, a natural world. All that’s necessary is remembrance and active respect. Yet, firmly as I believe and have experienced the truth of these ideas, I know that for most Nature has subsided into leisure and touristy, decoration and trivia, background and servitor for human yearnings. But for those who take our circumstances seriously and wonder at the anomaly of intelligent beings choosing so unintelligent a path as those Risks entail, Nature feels like solace and “Mother” and risking her feels as wrong as risking ourselves, and perhaps more so since she is the victim in this tragic melodrama. Mutuality in community finds in mutuality with Nature a place of equal goodness. Native Americans regularly have to remind exploiters that certain mountains and rivers are sacred to them, a foreign notion when bulldozers seek financial returns. My only question for the Natives is where sacredness ends, what are its limits? Certainly, some natural settings have special meaning that stands out in their history and culture, but I find it impossible to delineate a line between sacred and profane Nature just as I do between supposedly ensouled Homo sapiens appearing within a Universe occupied otherwise by only unensouled matter and machinelike life.
I began writing these thoughts with the idea that self-imposed existential risks signaled a matching and enabling existential emptiness in the culture. This led me to wonder if such a bizarre situation didn’t indicate a need to think about how best to live in the shadow of possible mega-calamities that could kill and wreck beyond imagination. I now see more clearly what I had already surmised: the terms of right living and good lives are the same whenever and wherever I look while allowing for differential response and expression related to cultural variables. Whether life is expected to go on in more or less the same conditions as now, or whether something on the order of Scheffler’s thought experimental endings were anticipated, or whether, as in the present reality, existentially apocalyptic potentials have been created to satisfy the cravings of what I consider the most powerfully addictive drugs there are—power and wealth—fundamental values can still guide lives. They are pole stars for serving and expressing essentials of the good and the right, those qualities that are good in themselves and still matter the most. But my perception, or my interpretation, is that while tolerance of existential risks expresses something central to who we have become, action and belief without a “pay-off” do not much matter. Instead, self-interested ends justify any means toward getting them, and it seems as if the getting is the only measure—it has moved into the center of a morally evacuated space. Distinctive today, with our historically unique X-risks, we see societies willing to be lured into quiescence and often even affirmation, societies that are failing at their most crucial tasks in tandem with citizens doing the same. And if this is true, those who are aware of the existing and potential losses and who retain visions of distinctive forms of right living may need to withdraw insofar as practicable from prevailing norms, and when possible, find others with like-minds to define and achieve separation. What should be emphasized in this movement: ethical and spiritual views, acceptable occupations (both for making a living and for living), family focus and its structures, physical and philosophically-based living arrangements whether in rural or urban settings, desired degrees of insularity and openness, and so on. I’m not talking about traditional notions of a commune but of “intentional communities” that may take an array of forms of varying cohesion, and may not even look like a community from the outside, but that are characterized primarily by their rejection of much that they find objectionable in present attitudes and ways of living. Good examples of what is already being done can be found at https://www.ic.org/ (Foundation for Intentional Communities), https://www.bruderhof.com/ (a unique religiously based residential community), and https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/weave-the-social-fabric-initiative/.
Although not consciously intentional, I have moved into a paradigm I have long considered the best general conception of ways, means, and aims for living deeply and caringly. It emerged from my engagement with Martin Buber’s work in the 1960s beginning with the seminal I and Thou. The crux is relational mutuality and care that have their realization in relations with fellow humans, Nature, and “forms of the spirit,” that is, experiences and perceptions that evoke distinctive, spiritual expression. Three things stand out for me when I picture the realm of ethics that are consistent with this paradigm: they arise wherever a person comes into relation with others, any others; they are ineluctably engaged with any significant endeavor and have primacy; they point toward and often express the mysterious (and I would say spiritual) domain in which existence is invisibly immersed. If we are to move slowly toward a more hospitable and convivial world—always limited by our meager capacities as humans, but surely superior to what we have now—realistic ethical vision added to rejection of nihilism and the great Risks that we have burdened ourselves with will be part of it.
[Craig Brestrup, Dec. 2024]
[1] “The End of Our World,” unpublished but available at https://www.caminobaybooks.com/the-end-of-our-world/.
[2] Oxford University Press, 2013.
