A Debouche
What do we do, each of us that feels it, with the sense of living at the end of time, perhaps conscious of our own dithering as the cataclysm comes, powerless as an individual to stop nuclear war or climate pandemonium, or both, or plain social breakdown, or the worst among us who are full of passionate intensity, then going about one’s business as though nothing were different while everything is at stake, and knowing this fact? Perhaps we tell ourselves that we are “doing enough” but those of us who are “living normal lives” know that this is false unless we radically revise our notions of what “doing something” means so as, it might seem, not to inconvenience us.
Yes, it can be arrogant, narcissistic, pretentious, and privileged - and, in some sense, spiritually and philosophically uninformed - to look out at the world and wring one’s hands at these dismal prospects: no one knows what will happen, after all, and it is not for you to say, and the planet of the humans just might survive yet, and the pessimism which forms is not necessarily easy to distinguish from the self-serving temptation to do nothing - or, in some cases, from nihilism - which obviously should be avoided. But who can sentiently take all this grim horizon in and still live with that sense of expansion into the world that we know we once knew (Is this the aim? Who is “we”?), undoubtedly a product of youthful energy and historical luck, instead of a smoldering conviction of that world bearing down with an inexorable compressive force on one’s body and mind, and then getting lost and bewildered in the whelm? What rough beast, etc.
There are generally two ways of proceeding from here. One may content oneself somehow with what is. This is limited to those with that natural talent for the inner world of perpetual, undislodgeable equanimity borne of insight or those who have disciplined themselves to embrace Epictetus’ maxim that people are not influenced by things but by their thoughts about things . . . or those who construct themselves between the talent and the art, a condition which might arise from meditation or ruminating on spiritual and religious practices, mainly those from the “East”, and their derivatives. Or one may plunge into what Joan Didion named “the ameliorative project” of unknown auspiciousness, which is really an act of faith, with differing degrees of belief in one’s effectiveness, coupled with differing views of whether one’s efficacy matters so long as one tries. There is potential, genuine humility, though also, as always, the risk of unearned pessimism and resignation (“naive cynicism”, as Rebecca Solnit called it), in the idea that one’s effort does not matter, and probably will not succeed, and whatever success means is hard at the outset to know concretely and usually starts as an abstraction at a high level of generality, like justice or peace, or sustainability (which are not necessarily all equally obscure), and may lead to an explicit worthy goal like stopping nuclear war or toppling an oppressive government (to be replaced with . . . what exactly?).
Thus we who have the luxury of these contemplations end up just repeating Hamlet. One is aimless in this dross and is prodded of necessity to search for a higher value to learn to be “okay” no matter what happens, and without complacency, and there is no shortage of those who will tell you this is enough. Perhaps there is that third way of being legitimately undisturbed, or disturbed but in the right way, while one seeks to improve the world (or maybe not, maybe not seeking to improve anything is the wise silent course). Orwell tried to figure out the same conundrum in his essay on Henry Miller, Inside the Whale (1940), and therein one can view the writer’s temptation to “sit on your bum” despite himself (which Miller did, in essence, although he also wrote) and ignore the concentration camps and barbed wire that Orwell noted had eclipsed the Democratic Vistas of yore. Wallace Shaun rejected this “quietist” outlook in his play, The Fever, as a product of bourgeois privilege, and it may be just that. But surely nothing is that simple. Or is it?