The question, rather, is how to live in the End of Days.
I don’t have a comprehensive answer to that question, any more than you do, but I do have some thoughts welling up, also as a result of watching that same movie.
When I wrote my thesis about the origin of the failure of the species, my main concern was What To Do.
Should we become warriors for "the climate" along the lines of a Bill McKibben? (Or better, a Greta Thunberg, although she hadn’t been invented yet.) Should we become even more militant than that, in the tradition of EarthFirst! and Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrenchers? Should we give up on this planet and look to Mars like Elon Musk? Should we forget all about it and just live like there IS a tomorrow–or something else entirely?
It’s not as important to me as it once was.
I can listen, as I did today, to people like Nina Turner and Michael Moore, taking inspiration from their optimistic energy and their belief in the triumph of the human spirit. (They’re part of my tribal religious order.)
I can think in terms of smaller victories–maybe at some point, against the odds, the people really will have had enough, and rise up, and wildcat strike en masse, and just demand the breakup of the corrupt systems that have a stranglehold on their very lives.
Maybe they’ll get real healthcare that isn’t about lining the pockets of third-party middlemen for no rational reason at all.
Maybe a living wage. Maybe even a return to "the dignity of work", to abuse that shopworn and deceitful phrase once more.
But then I come back around to the first point in the movie, and in my thesis too, which is that none of those victories, no matter how elating or uplifting, will fix the underlying problem–whether we choose to see that problem simply as the Profit Motive like the film does … or whether sedentarism and grain silos and kings and slums and mass incarceration and internal combustion are all just evidence of a catastrophic genetic defect that will end us, full stop.
Which is how I see. The human experiment.
Negative result. Zero sum. A return to stardust, and dark matter, a million generations rising into the night air like a runaway soap bubble and evaporating into undetectable mist; sweet dreams are made of this.
Which brings me to the second point I took from the movie, that brilliant detour by Sheldon Solomon into a more interesting question than What To Do.
A glimpse, of how to live.
Solomon’s point as I hear it is that virtually all of the soapy frothing of culture, the good, the bad, and the ugly of it, is a reaction formation to the fact of our own personal mortality–our inevitable individual meeting with the Reaper.
Don’t fear it, we are told, because:
There’s a God, and S/he is love, or
He who dies with the most toys wins.
The rise of the proletariat and the end of capital is nigh.
Our children are our future.
If you live life as a proper warrior, Valhalla welcomes you.
There is no death without rebirth; incarnate to reincarnate.
Immortality, literal or symbolic, awaits you.
Some of it is intensely beautiful. None of it is true.
Solomon (and what a name that is, speaking of the great books of the one true lie) goes on to say that encountering competing worldviews, and therefore alternative tales of immortality, will always remind us of the fact that they’re all just stories, and that includes the variation of immortality prized most highly by our own culture.
I think this is the good news about multiculturalism.
To encounter the Tibetan Book of the Dead is primarily a good thing because it makes us anxious, by putting us back in touch with the simple fact that our own Catholicism or our own Joseph Smith Magic Underwear Cult is … just another story, and none of them are true.
To encounter a shithead bible thumper in a pickup with a gun rack and a MAGA hat–same story. His version isn’t true, which reminds me that my immortality story isn’t either.
None of them can save us from our own end of days.
Much less from the End of Days on a planetary scale.
I came to this conclusion, the relativistic parts of it anyway, pretty early on–middle twenties for sure.
But recent events, impacting a life which is now reaching its final phase either way, have given the conclusion another tinge or hue. It goes something like …
Death writ small and large is not optional. (Worse still, "you do not know the day or the hour".)
But given that ultimate damn fact …
I would prefer to die free.
A complicated proposition.
I remember once in high school we were assigned some story to read, and I barely remember anything about it–might have been Shirley Jackson, maybe not.
But it was about an old woman who wanted to kick her addiction to painkillers before she died.
This made almost zero sense to me at the time. Why not check out peacefully in drugged out bliss?
But I get it now, just a little more clearly.
It turns out that this is the real reason to quit smoking, for example. It’s not about longer life, or healthier life, or finally saying a big fuck you to the paternal that got me hooked in the first place.
It’s about the fact that the nicotine drug is just another way of trying to block out the terrible awareness of the void of death waiting just around the corner. Quieting the voice that knows the truth.
Because that is the drug’s function, and since living as an addict to nicotine (or booze, or the christian heaven, or fascism or the myth of progress) is not living in awareness of the horror of mortality, it is not living free.
And I would prefer to die free.
Honestly I still don’t think I’d mind a little taste of something sweet as I pass into the great black hole, as long as it didn’t get in the way of the last big experience in life.
What I couldn’t stand for though would be lingering for months as a half-dead oxy addict, because that’s not living free, or dying free either.
There’s a lot more to this epiphany and more than just a daily spill’s worth I’m sure.
For instance, I’m looking at some of the great literary suicides–Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace–in a new light now. (Don’t worry. I’m happy, and not sick, and I love life.)
For instance, I’m really grateful to the people that made that film in the first place, because it brought me here. I am, I tell you with with a full awareness of irony …
In a better place now.
Winkity wink.
Also, although I no longer particularly care about What To Do about the big existential question vis a vis myself, or the allegedly human ‘race’ and death …
I do realize that making films and telling stories is a good thing. The movie brought me to this better place. My story today may have a corollary impact on someone else.
I would prefer to die free.
I would prefer that you and I live free, until then.