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.

Linguistic evolution is indicative: Humanity no longer faces mere risks—instead, existential risks. Around some watercoolers, these have honorary status as “X-risks.” They are thought of as threats of human extinction or decimation to near extinction, civilizational collapse, loss of all or most of those ways of living that are highly valued, and of human potential. In short, very serious change in human prospects. The field of studying all this is in a definite growth stage and it would be irresponsible not to pay attention. Intellectual fashions come and go as do other varieties, but this one describes threats that could take us along as they go. Among groups that have sprung up are these: the Future of Life Institute, the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, the Existential Risk Observatory, the Future of Humanity Institute, and there are probably others. The identified risks vary slightly from group to group and some see more and others fewer, but certain ones make every list: nuclear war, A.I., climate change, pandemic. These are my choices as well, but for completeness the others include biotechnology, collapse of fresh water and food sources, biodiversity loss, a host of natural and humanmade catastrophes, and of particular interest to  me, national and international failure to understand what’s going on and act to prevent it (even in the face of copious study and publication by the groups indicated above, and others, and the ability to open one’s eyes to obvious possibilities).

As an American, I’m particularly interested in how my own country is handling the heebie-jeebies it must certainly be experiencing at these prospects of annihilation. Except…it isn’t, because it doesn’t appear to recognize them as X-risks. Or doesn’t want to. Or its citizens feel too threatened by each other to notice. Or it is too busy growing the economy to have time. Or it doesn’t have the capacity anymore to steadily face reality and do anything big, visionary, and of positive import to self-preservation. Or all of the above. It is not an inspiring sight. By way of illustration let me offer a few recent comments and observations gathered easily, without deep research to confirm them—it’s all there in the newspapers and other publications for those who wish to see.

In the New York Times (3-13-23), an article by Serge Schmemann discussed Russia’s recent decision to suspend participation in the New Start nuclear arms limitation treaty, the last one remaining of its kind. Part of his point was that few people know what it is, what it meant, and what’s going on in the nuclear arms dimension of our omnipresent international competitions. What was once the subject of scary dramas and books and on the minds of those people willing to stare into the abyss has faded away. “More than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear obliteration simply doesn’t rank among Americans’ greatest fears.…My grandson, a college student, told me his peers don’t see a global nuclear war as a real danger today.” Seemingly, they have a lot of company. Not because the possibility of nuclear catastrophe is no longer serious, or because there is an iota of evidence that global political leadership has things under control or is even cognizant, or because universal peace has finally descended. Instead, I suspect it has been filed under old business; we have habituated to its looming presence and since it didn’t happen yesterday it won’t happen tomorrow. How long, after all, can people stay anxious? And as anxiety diminishes, how much less cautious are we in subduing the threat (a threat that is framed by political leadership as a necessary deterrent, life-preserving and war-preventing, irrational as that sounds)?

And consider A.I. A day earlier than the above, again in the Times, Ezra Klein wrote under the heading “This Changes Everything.” Artificial intelligence, he says, is developing at a pace few people recognize and with possible effects few can anticipate. As with quantum physics or our quotidian desktop computer, it is also an arena where technical people commonly acknowledge they don’t fully understand how it works but that it’s quite useful. Still, they recognize that AI contains seriously fuzzy mechanisms with potentially calamitous outcomes. Speaking of people working in its development, Klein says:

It is a community that is living with an altered sense of time and consequence. They are creating a power that they do not understand at a pace they often cannot believe. In a 2022 survey, A.I. experts were asked, “What probability do you put on human inability to control future advanced A.I. systems causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species?” The median reply was 10 percent. I find that hard to fathom, even though I have spoken to many who put that probability even higher. Would you work on a technology you thought had a 10 percent chance of wiping out humanity?

Well, maybe you would. After all, there is lots of money behind it, and power, and corporate and national competitiveness. Its developers are said to feel a “responsibility” to offer this astonishing artifact to the world, and the technological imperative has been assumed since shortly after technological and industrial forces broke the back of those who rejected it…ergo, who can or would try to stop its progress even if they could? (I’m not convinced AI is likely to wipe us out, but it does seem likely that the mind-set of its developers and its continuity with similar life-depreciating mind-sets common in our culture, especially among avid corporate avatars of wealth, will help to extinguish much of the value of not being wiped out.)

How about anthropogenic climate disruption? It was a busy week for X-risk consideration—March 12 brought news about the relentless drive by petrochemical companies to obfuscate, distort, deceive…whatever’s needed to continue its profitable work wrecking the climatic foundations of life as we’ve known them for millennia. It is not hard to find evidence of this and the sight of corporations still treated as if respectable lying about lying or lying through misdirection and pretense still astonishes and may be diagnostically significant to the point of this essay—Why aren’t these people shunned? Why are they still accepted in what used to be called “polite society”? Doesn’t their role as instigators of an X-risk matter? Of course, they need similarly profit-focused enablers and the giant banks are happy to gather with them at the trough, regardless of consequences, by lending a helping hand through financial arrangements. In his sub-stack column “The Crucial Years,” Bill McKibben says of this:

…in an emergency we should be able to expect something slightly resembling responsibility from them [financial institutions]. Facing the civilizational crisis that is climate change, they should act in at least modestly pro-social ways. Instead, they’ve continued to pursue their most narrow and short-term self-interest, loaning money to the fossil fuel industry for its continued expansion even though every climate scientist on the planet has insisted that expansion must come to a screeching halt.

(Why do X-risks persist? Because, among other reasons, once esteemed corporate leaders and enablers who presently benefit from future calamity are still treated publicly as if estimable.) Culpability goes viral here; it isn’t just the banks and fossil fuel corporations complicit in this crime against Earth, but the Biden administration (under the influence of banks, fossil fuel corporations, and others) approved a massive new oil development project in Alaskan wilderness, while simultaneously protecting other areas from such activities, thus avoiding consistency and violating earlier commitments against such business, as if the latter protections will obviate the effects of the former permissions. In a similar burst of inconstancy, Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act both put considerable funding into renewable energy sources and agreed to auction millions of acres of federal lands for oil and gas drilling. I once taught college classes in business ethics (yes, there is such a field) and this reminds me that such endeavors are thought of in the corporate world as “just business” or business as usual, and I would offer that “just politics” operates in much the same manner. Ethics can easily reduce profitability or electability so are dispensable. (Donald Trump says that when he becomes President again one of his mantras will be “Drill baby, drill,” which is akin to encouraging fish to swim, although fish avoid when possible toxic waters.)

Speaking of viral, there is still pandemic to think about. How many countries other than the U.S. had more of their citizens die during the COVID-19 pandemic than the 1918-19 Spanish flu? Over a million of us (and still adding one to two thousand per week) compared to approximately three quarters of a million in the earlier onslaught, which is surely a major feat considering our wealth and supposed medical sophistication and resources (our higher population is not explanatory since there are more people everywhere, COVID is far less lethal than was the Spanish flu, and its total deaths do not come close to those of that earlier pandemic). No one not in Stage IV denial and/or commitment to right-wing dogma cannot recognize that the U.S. never united to face the threat and instead tens of millions allowed themselves to be led naively down a virus-strewn pathway resulting almost certainly in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and attendant suffering. Can we imagine doing better when a far more deadly virus comes along? There are no signs we are preparing for it through strengthening public health resources or publicly coming to terms with why we failed so unexpectedly and dramatically to effectively cope with what was going on. Of the four X-threats under discussion, this is the only one that has had a genuine trial run, which offers recent evidence of a unique sort, experienced by all Americans, of a deadly stimulus and egregiously failed national response. And this failure—a malign collaboration between governments at all levels and American citizens—helps to understand the durability of X-risks of all kinds. We also notice that the Covid pandemic was  the only one among even the larger inventory of potential risks without a conscious, decisive human fingerprint on its irruption, although either of its two potential origins (lab leak or wildlife meat market) reveals human fallibility and ignorance as pathogenic. The remaining existential risks all appear derived from the use of or lust for power.

~ ~

I began work as a psychotherapist in the early 1970s. Research in the area of what’s called learned helplessness began, as far as I know, in the late 1960s. I remember becoming aware of the concept and theories surrounding it early in my practice and of thinking it a useful framework for understanding certain dimensions of some clients’ behavioral and cognitive dynamics. It made evident sense. Until I began thinking about existential risks and the American response to them, I don’t know that learned helplessness had entered my mind conceptually for decades, probably since I stopped doing therapy in the mid-90s. But it came back to me when I realized that from a theoretical perspective it could help explain the ineffectiveness and even la belle indifference that is currently so common in the presence of the most serious of matters, assuming survival to be a continuing concern of most people, which it does not always appear to be. (Not to be hyperbolic but it sometimes seems as if the common, fast becoming humdrum, American drama of random mass shootings, in which the shooter uses the police for assisted suicide if he doesn’t do the job himself [after killing as many as he can], may well be an apt metaphor for the zeitgeist when it comes to responding to X-risks—here too the American response is to be effectively unresponsive. And more, to describe certain aspects of failure as the price of freedom.)

The picture that increasingly comes to mind as I think about each of our four risk areas—nuclear holocaust, A.I., climate disruption, pandemic—separately and collectively can accurately be described, as one stands back and observes the participant/victims, as one of felt helplessness. I think it reasonable to wonder just how much effective coping can be expected of humans under circumstances where they face large or multiple threats, and more so when efforts to effect change in other, less significant areas, usually appear fruitless. Some of us last year noted the 20^th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, and I recall that back before it was launched millions of people in this country and abroad made clear their objections, their belief that it was wrong and could only bring disaster and death and suffering, which it did in spades despite the expertise lined up in its favor. But the die had been secretly cast well before and those in charge were not to be dissuaded. We were told to trust them. After the bombs began falling, the public went mostly quiet. We have learned helplessness and it is reinforced from the top.

There is much from which the citizenry today could learn to feel helpless. The dominant institutions have grown fewer and bigger, richer and more powerful, impersonal and invulnerable, less and less responsive to humble taps on their doors by customers or constituents. This is called modern capitalist and bureaucratic efficiency and we its “beneficiaries” are said to be served by that with lower costs and material abundance, yet many of us have a hard time distinguishing those supposed benefits from being ignored. From college during the ‘60s I still remember an economics professor explaining how the balance of big labor, big business, and big government would contain one another’s excesses and redound to the common good. Obviously it was an unstable balance since the corporate leg of the triad has managed to decimate the labor leg and to contain any over-enthusiasm of government on behalf of the public. When government, the political arm in particular, momentarily forgets its true masters, it isn’t long before it remembers and redirects its temporarily aberrant energies back to coddling its corporate keepers. Most people have learned to tolerate this in various ways while some seek relief in the protective shade of a demagogue. When mundane reality as worker, consumer (that demeaning label), or citizen, confirms in myriad small and large ways people’s ineffectiveness at preserving their autonomy, agency, and rights, what would make them think they could do anything about the potential doom hanging over their heads? To systemic racism and systemic inequality should we add systemic helplessness? (One wonders if there are any positive system dynamics.)

~ ~

Existential risks abide tenaciously, patiently, seemingly in a world of their own, floating beyond the public ken. A few academics specialize in their study, a few others recognize a need for concern, and soothing words are applied by those in charge, which serve like dressings for old wounds, masking without alleviating; the public goes on working and playing, oblivious, its supposed leaders functionally in the same condition. It is ironic that a species that has specialized in telling itself, ever since it began indulging such soliloquies, that it is separate and above all other life owing to its unique intelligence, and now it threatens to run the bus that carries all life into an abyss without using that intelligence to pause and ask, “Why?” and “What for?” and “Is it time to regain control?” What was important enough to risk it all? We are a species that appears to have lost its center, its focus and purpose. Its tools have outpaced their creators, whose control seems tenuous and fading. What happened?

If, as I think, learned helplessness is part of the explanation it is necessary to describe its source as well as ancillary reinforcing factors: How was it taught and what was the teacher? Why did the lesson take? Where was the classroom? The answers begin with another question: What do people live for? Whatever else one does—how they use their time, their work, their religion and politics, their relationships—somewhere inside them, perhaps vestigial, is a sense of something that gives a reason or justification, value or purpose, to getting up in the morning and doing whatever they do until returning to slumber. I acknowledge that it could be mere habit, an alternative to death for as long as it lasts, but outside of that utter ontological vacuity there are occasional signs of wakefulness in most people. They may be small and flaccid and offer little resistance to the power of helplessness; in lieu of energizing the germ of agency their impotence and uncertainty may obscure or even replace belief in its germinative potential. Since I speak of the core from which a meaningful life would spring, the teacher of helplessness must be compelling and have the imprimatur and force of common socialization to stymy inbuilt purposive striving. It would shoulder aside alternative expressions of psychic or telic value. It would be attractive and promising but not to higher regions of consciousness. For maximum effect it would need to be seen as given, as obviously the way things are, as path to a sense of success of an undiscriminating sort. It would keep one occupied. In short, the helplessness imagined here is the kind that prevents not just engagement with genuine values but of envisioning their real existence. It looks like the present day, the present economic determination of personal and national fiber where there’s hardly any vision not economically rationalized. It has a mind of its own and power to go with it, apparently irresistible and always certain that it is for the good of everyone. (Sounds also like a depiction of the presently much-discussed role of smartphones among young people, now that I think about it.)

~ ~

As far as I am aware, most of the attention to X-risks focuses on how they put us at risk and what we might do to avoid or mitigate them. We apparently do not consider the matter of why nearly so interesting. Why would humans create such risks and allow them to persist, why was their evident riskiness either not foreseen or not taken seriously and not prevented, why was the risk accepted (if perceived) and with what vision of its ultimate course and fruition? I examine these questions under the light (or shadow) of certain assumptions. First, that only a serious absence in human consciousness and/or equally serious distortions of reality could prepare the way for such risks to occur and be tolerated, even routinized and rationalized as essential to our way of life. Second, I appeal to daily experience in stipulating that human nature is primarily and excessively egoistic and easily drawn to misperceptions of what is essential and real. We are self-centered and anxious and quick to seek security in the wrong places; our flaws as a species are significant and obvious but mostly denied or avoided—we just live and die with them. Third, having given up seeking after the ethical Good and failed to see that all lives have their separate and equally valuable Goods, we have erected a delusional vision of humanity that places us above Nature, autonomous, powerful, individualistically separated, and self-guided by a self-serving will that knows where it is going. That we are one among others on a provident Earth as part of an eternally mysterious Universe that may have values of its own embedded within—some of which we depend upon and others share—has blown right past us.

(Although I won’t go into detail here, it seems to me likely that the assertion and acceptance of ontological primacy by Homo sapiens must have paved the way to our present belief in the rightness and normalcy of exploitation as our standard relation with the Earth and its life and other substance. In this manner all became resource for the use of our species, eventuating even in “human resources,” and I do not think it stretches too far to see the movement onward from there to factory-farmed animals and wars ranging from the quotidian to the genocidal as primacy was reassigned to specific kinds of people [and species] standing above other kinds. Primacy may in time have reached even into the lofty realms of reality wherein Homo sapiens assumed transcendence, including freedom from facts and from existential and moral limitations.)

Human nature, though, exists with…let us call it, possible potential. Ill-defined as it necessarily is, our nature subsists, as does that of every other kind of life, imbued with preferred ways of living and flourishing. Of ways that can nourish and fulfill and guide a life course. But they can be dammed, diverted, transformed unrecognizably, and it seems rather easily. As such, they become a different kind of X-risk and not one on any of the lists I mentioned at the beginning.

I offer the following observations as a response to the Why and Wherefrom questions. First, X-risks generally are birthed, set in motion, and justified from the top down with the possible exception of pandemic. The whines that yet another nuclear arms race, more fossil fuel extraction, more technology and specifically more AI developing more capacity to do more things…each and all claimed to serve the public good is a combination of self and other deception on behalf of egoistic aims. When the powerful believe in or want something in our system, they usually get it; the risks are born by all but the gains are disproportionately localized among themselves. Thus are risks created and sold and too often bought. Second, existentially fulfilled humans might be expected to resist having their existence and fulfillments put in jeopardy. But in order to have reached this happy condition they need a cultural vision of something more valuable than materialism and militarism, something like moral commitments, communal solidarity, and forms of service to Nature and others. To speak the words is to recognize their generalized absence, which raises the prospect that if helplessness were unlearned, what then? Where would the new vigor and competence find outlets for finding existential meaning?

Third, I acknowledge that my background view of human nature is a pessimistic one. It holds that the forces of greed, delusion, and power lust that fuel X-risks will always be with us through the agency of those motivated by these forces—those with the capacity to activate them for their presumed benefit combined with the incapacity they’ve incurred from lack of a vivid, constraining conscience. But they don’t do their damage alone. Masses of other humans, differently constructed, are unmotivated to discern reality, to give up gullibility for responsibility, to trade in complacency for their own agency, to feel the urgency of moral obligations. If this picture is anywhere near accurate, why wouldn’t existential risks arise, spread, be excused and avoided as long as they are useful to some? It is hard to imagine that sufficient numbers of people would see these things for what they are and act to forestall them and then remain vigilant enough to prevent recurrences.

Fourth may seem to go afield; I offer it in the form of a story. Although pandemic has afflicted humans for millennia, the other identified risks arose after WWII, which doesn’t deny that their roots go back farther. I’m sure they in fact do since they are consistent with values that have always been with us in America. After the War, and after the vaporization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the most notable development that I am aware of was the turning of our society decisively toward economic and militarized ends. Its chief orientation became consumerism and international dominance, and as money began to flow a few inevitably took off in frenzied pursuit of wealth and power. Soon that was not enough and they wanted more than their share and to control the levers that directed it so that their interests prevailed. They became nihilistic as the hunger took over their minds and getting what they wanted became their primary end, not to be constrained by moral obligation and social responsibility. It seems significant to me that the move from going after more to going after more than their share was so swiftly incorporated into their mindset. Naturally, such a move required that the rest of the citizenry had to be kept passive and dependent on a relative pittance of the economy’s returns and on debt in order to participate in and feed the consumer machine, which they had been persuaded was society’s main aim and their own private pleasure; after years of Depression and war it probably does not surprise that they were imminently persuadable, especially in the early years. If it didn’t make it inevitable, feeding the commodity beast surely made it likely that existential risks could become enablers—those with hands on the levers having only a single aim believed that any means would do to reach it. For them, all risks were acceptable because profitable, supportive of their control, consistent with their belief in their “divine right” to rule, their unique and special natures, their wisdom. Egoism and a large sense of entitlement and invulnerability can make people act like this and to reject all efforts to impose limits on them or adequately tax their returns.

As this nihilism grew their citizen subjects’ gullibility, dependence, and helplessness grew in tandem, as did their alienation from responsible citizenship. Complacency and compliance became normalized to such an extent that, for example, people passively accepted the gathering of vast amounts of personal information from their online activity, which is then sold in order to manipulate their thinking and aspirations with targeted advertisements and other biased and often false material. For another example, without being asked it became common for all their financial transaction data to be gathered by central data banks, their “credit worthiness” rated and, once again, sold to whoever paid the price (which goes even farther than other intrusions in that the divinized “credit score” affects everything from mortgages to jobs and thus a little more of their autonomy swishes away silently). On a larger scale, American militaristic adventurism was helpful in a host of ways, ranging from creating and protecting markets to entering lavish contracts for adventure equipment to keeping their subjects distracted; in any event the alliance with another form of power came naturally since it was not competitive with theirs but in fact subsidized it. (It worked so well that, in the style of repetition compulsion, they’re working one of its angles again: hostile, conflict assuming, persistently threatening, militarized attitudes toward China now lead to discussion of whether there will be war [who knows for what reason?] and to further stir and enrich the pot yet another nuclear arms race has launched.) So, in similar fashion, it goes with the fossil fuel conglomerates and the technologists all the way up to AI and its metastatic expansion. By building a society that provides minimal security to the unpowerful (which would only sap their motivation and turn them into malingerers) and maximal security to the powerful (which feeds their dynamism, their innovative, entrepreneurial agitations on behalf of raising the tide that floats all boats and trickles down besides), vanity at the top and helplessness below solidified. So far the only responses are as expected for the disempowered: They act out diffusely through chemical and commodity compulsions, suicide, violence, gun worship, and now “populism.”

The story is near its end. I find it almost impossible to conclude that one or another X-risk will not eventually unleash itself and end the present human project (not tragic in itself since self-induced and lacking even a weak version of a happier sequel), decisively wreck Nature (ecosystems and their necessary biodiversity, soil, water, climate, wildlife), and leave a comparatively few demoralized humans struggling to survive and rebuild something in a hostile human and climatic environment. The implacability and arrogance of the powerful combined with the ineffectuality of their subjects along with risks that seem to move inexorably closer to autonomous action, beyond human direction, seem to guarantee a denouement of this sort.

~ ~

Deeply relevant to the occurrence and recurrence of existential risks in the U.S., we may ask ourselves what might seem an odd question: Is the U.S. a nation that respects life, a nation whose spirit has ever incorporated a deep valuing, even cherishing, of life? Its history of relations with the indigenes who had lived here for thousands of years, with kidnapped and enslaved Africans, with poor people, Nature and animals, suggests not. Violence against fellow citizens and readiness to war against other peoples and nations…gun worship in the midst of mayhem enabled by weaponry meant for battlefields…fervent antiabortion crusades, a fetus fetish alongside comparative indifference toward the born…incarceration of its people at the highest rate for the longest sentences in the cruelest  conditions. At best, we’re ambivalent and selective in which lives matter and to what extent. Pundits known for their pro-fetus commitments not uncommonly supported American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11. I saw a car once with adjacent bumper-stickers affirming opposition to both abortion and gun control (another one paradoxically affirms commitment to “God, Guns, and Family”). Is unwillingness to take X-risks seriously another signal that life doesn’t much matter, that people just aren’t sure what they think about it or what to do with it?

The antiabortion movement may be emblematic. How many of its leaders and participants are genuinely pro-life in the broadest sense—uncomfortable about capital punishment, war, police violence, infant and maternal mortality, poverty, factory farming and other abuses of animals,  offenses in general against life’s declared sacredness? How many actively remember that the fetus is within a woman who has far deeper and more legitimate claims on her body and the course of her life than any outsider? How much bad faith has been demonstrated in the post-Dobbs frenzy to universalize the prohibition? Antiabortion rests fundamentally on religious beliefs that have never been shown to reflect a compelling state interest in generalizing to nonbelievers. Pro-fetus is clearly not pro-life. “Unborn children” is an emotive oxymoron rather than meaningful label. (As an elder, I could as well be called an undead corpse since, like the unborn children, I’ve not gotten there but it is my direction—still, I ought not be treated as a corpse yet.) I am tempted to see the crusade as the easy way and in a sense anti-life. It is much easier to grapple with the imagined future of a fetus than the present impingements and assaults on born beings who display complexity and variety and many of whom may not be very likable or of approved attitudes and ethnicities, gender orientations and identifications, or—not to be forgotten—species. Extant beings are ethically more challenging, more ambiguous in their virtues, not necessarily among those you’d invite into your home or even be seen with. Infants—but not fetuses—can be picked up, passed around, doted on, loved directly and unconditionally, for they are real persons. (I do not deny, only recategorize, the devotion parents-to-be feel for their fetuses, which is obviously real and admirable. I intend the digression to illustrate analogically diversion from seeing existential risks as existential.)

Respect for life, a true experience of and resultant belief in the sacredness of life: Do we look like a society that really thinks this possible in reality as opposed to homily? The only thing we may have to go on, lacking reverence for the being of Earth and its creatures, as we think about facing existential risks is self-interest, and while powerful in its way at times, it may have been lost in the shuffle, is often unreliable and manipulable, and has notoriously bad judgment.

~ ~

I find myself moving toward an existential, even eudemonic, account of X-risks and their normative acceptance. Zen master Dogen 800 years ago said: “To forget the self is to become one with the 10,000 things.” More recently, Iris Murdoch: “In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego.” The 10,000 things is the totality of existence. Becoming one with existence, overcoming ego, is the point of all serious spiritual traditions. One with God. One with reality. One with what captures, enriches, ennobles your attention. This is a truth I can accept without need of complete understanding. One with brings tranquility, care for, wholeness and peace. It describes solidarity. I believe its absence is another part of an explanation for obliviousness in the face of X-risks. The lack of it leads to violence and indifference. American society is where people live in isolation. They pursue individual goals and/or sink into the apartness of anomie. They suffer alone; many seek relief in the vacuity and falsity of the ersatz-social internet, often in an intensity of disgust and rage that is as close to sharing as they come. And further relief in materialist aspiration and competition, in winning and dominating. Existential risks enter an atmosphere of existential emptiness. If we were to respond competently to the former we would first have to face the latter, and the absence that composes it: oneness with the 10,000 things, oneness with even a few things. Self-fulfillment begins in self-forgetting. Remembering, instead, the others and their presence, their needs and their entwinement with your own. Presence has many names: genuine relationship, community, active care. Remembering the essentials is the first essential, along with knowing what makes them essential. Committing to care for things worthy of care—Right care, it might be called, bridging Right view and Right effort in Buddhism’s Eightfold Path.  Avoiding extinction or deeper debasement may begin with identifying a path.

If it’s true—as it likely is—that humans aren’t really built to deal competently with multiple, simultaneous, major sources of anxiety (infamous multitasking and time management notwithstanding)…and further that those sources  are the reality we’ve made for ourselves and as things are configured will continue making for ourselves…what are we to do, if we do anything? Prioritize and take them one-by-one? Division of labor? Call it creative destruction and rejoice at all the new potentials? Grieve, remain helpless as we’ve learned to do, deny reality? Or go to the root and face the X- and other risks as one risk, one source, one absence at the center of our lives—the loss of existential meaning through failure to grasp essentials: solidarity with our own species and Nature and allowing the care that naturally flows from that to bind us: becoming one with the 10,000 things. I do not mean religious conversion, only opening, turning, attending. Existence may take us more seriously than we take it and use our own ignorance to fashion mortal consequences.

~ ~

Already a few individuals and small groups are working to build lives in the shadows of existential risks and cultural decay. They try to remove themselves psychologically and spiritually from the way things are and where they appear to be headed so as to build relations with one another and Nature that enrich and support, that foster compassion and mutual engagement. Helpless in the large world but robust and effective in loosely delineated communities of care. These, too, will perish if an X-risk becomes actuality, but on the way to the apocalypse they represent the better potentials of humanity and meaningful ways to live their lives.

The question that preys on me though is this: Except for these few, is the reality of human nature, now thoroughly mixed with the dross of modernity, one that renders it fatally distorted such that the critical mass necessary for major positive change cannot be assembled and sustained except in exceptional small forms? To begin with the present, however, forgets the historical and developmental context. Human nature is formed, shaped, influenced, and directed to different depths and degrees at different stages of a life course by distinct familial, societal, and cultural forces; no one escapes the processes but each comes out with their own distinctive character configuration and access to limited and discontinuous freedom of will. “Why now?” must be asked of our perilous and often dismal time regardless of how the decay and internal alienation compare to previous episodes or if it is just acutely terrible simpliciter. I speculate that the bill for foundational myths and delusions has finally come due, that they can no longer be avoided or denied as they have always been, and that the threat of exposure disorients a large mass of citizens, especially, it seems to me, White ones who have heretofore enjoyed secure dominance. Concomitant demographic and cultural changes, changes that happen to coincide with the repressed material and reinforce its effects, aggravate mass feelings about the meaning of the exposure, increase their sense of being threatened by it, and foster fear, anger, breakdown, and retreat to nihilism. Further, what’s called a democratic country clearly does not serve the majority of its citizens very well but serves a minority quite well; the gross metrics of material fairness are the obvious quantifiable, albeit least significant, indicator. Simply put: the U.S. is not the exceptional democracy, land of opportunity and equality, or bearer of goodness worldwide that it has imagined it was. It is violent, anxious, self-centered, imperialist, and caste-ridden, and some people are willing that it stay that way, guarded by autocrats and their acolytes, mostly it seems White, Christian, nationalistic, and xenophobic. Their alienation extends to people who are different, to different ideas and ways of life, moves on through alienation even from facts and truthfulness, and ends in alienation from self.

Parenthetically, I feel much as these people do about the failures of this society and share many of their objections, but not their explanations, reactions, and solutions and omitting the bigotry and intolerance, the authoritarian and violent tendencies they so often exhibit. America is clearly rigged for the advantage of the rich and prominent; workers are often treated as serfs and unions fought at all costs; government social support spending goes disproportionately to the already privileged; vast sums are spent on the military in the absence of serious threats to national security while the country itself decays; democratic functioning is too often more form than substance, unresponsive to citizen needs, and focused on interests of the powerful more than any other. But these people who sense the problems refuse to look at the underbelly and to track them to their corporate and plutocratic sources and instead offer themselves to the loudest demagogue. Why such a poorly fashioned and very often dishonorable response? How much does the learned helplessness mentioned earlier help to understand this turbulence and its inevitable anxieties? Instead of taking responsibility for accurate assessment of the ailments too many offer themselves to those mostly oriented toward tearing things down, people preoccupied with their own interests but pretending otherwise, people who will exploit them—a change of oppressors  but not of oppression itself. And it is not just current afflictions that prey on masses of Americans. The country has a long history of violence and appropriation and government by the few. The history that certain factions are now working overtime to suppress through control of teachers and librarians, schools and books, and that has been disguised under platitudes and lies, may become irresistible. A vast “coming to terms with” is struggling to be born, and some would prefer to abort it.

Here is a thought experiment: Those of the transhumanist persuasion describe a mix of advanced and advancing technological interventions into the presently merely human (albeit who-we- evolved-to-become) realm. They range from defeating death, or at least to multiplying spans of life, all the way to downloading minds into computers and…well, I’m not sure what happens to the body at that point. If it’s like sending an attachment from my saved file, which as we know doesn’t actually leave my machine, perhaps we could end up literally talking to ourselves: embodied self to mechanized self. Which could be interesting as, though identical mentally, they would speak from such different domains. (Would anyone really want to become a disembodied mind?)

Suppose the decision were made to change the human mode of being in a different direction—From Promethean/transhuman to “limited” human? We give up a few degrees of our “freedom” to do as we please and become more like a natural animal, like wildlife, which once we actually were. Rather than ambition to “better” ourselves (and we know what that means), we would aspire to be better as what we are: Animals within ecosystems and communities into which we fit with our fellow plants and human and nonhuman animals; where behavior flowed naturally in directions that reinforced the fit, and we received great satisfaction at being alive as what we were and where we were and doing things more appropriate to who we were, and did not disrupt the lives of others, except to the extent that trophic and other necessity patterns required. Like water flowing along its bed without having to think about it, abiding with gravity and topography toward its destination. Animals do what’s right for them to do, naturally, with thought only for living: for reaching goals and satisfying needs. There is vast beauty and majesty in the vision of all this life going about its business in ways that fit who they are, ways that they have followed satisfactorily when they weren’t disrupted. (“There is grandeur in this view of life,” said Darwin, “with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” This at the conclusion of the first edition of On the Origin of Species, although he was making a slightly different point.)  As human animals transformed we would still have distinctive ways, but with circumscribed “freedom” we would value what we had and our part in it and live attentively, occasionally warily but deeply and more respectful of other beings and our fit in the preexisting scheme. Like other social animals we would live amongst our kind and as humans with more mutual care than presently since “getting ahead” had lost meaning. We would be humble in recognition of the gifts we’d received and the knowledge of our dependencies and vulnerabilities. Our true distinctiveness as moral creatures could manifest.

This whimsical vision would depend on forfeiture of some of what we call freedom and laudable aspiration today and would thus be anathema to the typical human mind-set. But consider all the ways we already sacrifice freedom for what we consider more valuable purposes. Self-mastery, or self-control, is the fount of all freedom in that one surmounts persistent desires and intense emotions, greed and aversion, baseless fear and antipathy, all on behalf of seeing things more clearly and choosing more wisely. And marriage, parenthood, or other committed relationship where one sacrifices full independence for the benefits of mutuality and care. And duty: We recognize that a relationship, role, or implicit demand for reciprocity requires setting certain other possibilities aside on behalf of fidelity, loyalty, or love. Law-abidingness? Contractual obligation? Citizenship? In every respect, it seems, meaningful existence depends on constraints, whether unconsciously accepted or consciously chosen.

And consider the in-built constrictions of freedom. Patterns and proclivities start forming at conception and during gestation and are then further shaped, enhanced and suppressed through childhood and the most formative years, and then life-long. All the way, we are clearly more guided by the unconscious than the conscious functions of our minds. By the time we have discernible and predictable character, when we know ourself and are known as a certain kind of person, we hardly know or can say how we got there and by what mechanisms. It’s as if we have been chosen by ways of life, ideas and values—serve as their keepers, in a manner of speaking—and are more or less established as those who live out the scripts of such lifeways. We are not relieved of all freedom, certainly, there are moments, occurrences, moral challenges, where we have still the responsibility of using freedom to choose, but it is a choosing that relies on all we have been and our character and our estimation of the most good thing in response to the circumstances… freedom finally of the most vital sort, ethically situated.

~ ~

I think it would be delusional for anyone to imagine having grasped the full extent of contemporary human attraction toward whistling past the graveyard of existential risks. No more do I grasp that than I do all that went into the suicide of a friend. Logic tells me that the choice of, or even risk of, termination must be rooted in lost value, lost meaning, lost belief in or experience of the sureties of love in its various forms and the virtues in theirs. We have become spiritually blighted, without natural immunity or creative, intelligible responses. I speak not from misanthropy; more like unrequited love. If I seek a single virtue as antidote, I find one of the least compelling to the modern mind: Humility. Self-focus is the bane of fulfillment and an excellent pathway to isolation and emptiness. Could one imagine our yielding anthropocentrism, egoism, and materialism in order to reach ecocentrism and communalism? To step back from self-interested preoccupations in order to serve the whole, to recognize that self- and other-interest are compatible and even require one another for completeness? Extinction by asteroid impact would be tragic, but by our own volitional acts arising from our own failures does not reach the level of tragedy. It would be unfortunate, disappointing, a great waste but a predictable one for a species unwilling to face its own nature and existential situation. A folly of squandered prospects.

~ ~

This point of view may seem preposterous. The two X-risks that seem to me most likely to do the most damage, nuclear weapons and climate disruption, are macro level, one a calamity-in-waiting, the other a calamity-in-process, both ready to make the lives of those who survive onerous and tenuous. Big problems that clearly exceed the big brain’s ability to expunge them. Our minds and morality are not up to the challenge. In response, I have proposed micro level coping: Look to our lives, look to what’s most meaningful, look to the components of lives oriented around the Good. But power never yields gracefully; power smiles indulgently as its subjects become better persons and inexorably ensures that they don’t let that stuff get in the way of power’s control. It’s why I say that despair is the most rational response. But not the despair of intense emotion and grief, of resignation and all-hope-is-lost. The despair that sees human nature realistically, with all its deep flaws, and that recognizes that one still has a life to live— this singular, one-and-only time—and that it matters how one does it more than how it turns out. The cards dealt are not good ones but they’re what you have to work with.

Political theorists say that in any nation somewhere around a third of the populace would be comfortable with authoritarian leadership, i.e., life is too much for them so they’d prefer to let others answer the big questions. In the U.S. today it seems to me that that portion has grown by half so that close to 50% are ready to throw up their hands, believe whatever poppycock is put before them by authorized provisioners, and turn themselves over for delivery to…well, to wherever the controllers tell them is best for them.

Which brings me to this point: The macro level where existential risks are created and where micro level suppression and adaptive correspondences are formulated and imposed is itself, because of its sheer size, emblematic of our conundrum. Its subjects may seek a means of resistance but are stymied by the enigma of controllers’ adamant commitment to business-as-usual, even though it threatens to kill even themselves. Bigness, I am saying, creates an environment to which few people are adapted for living. But a few are quite at home there and naturally take power and sooner or later are corrupted by it. Gargantua is suited for their desires. It is anonymous, impersonal, implacable, immovable. Despair is the rational response if ideas of successful confrontation are imagined, especially successful in such a way that it doesn’t merely replace present human widget-likes with different but similarly motivated widgets, and if timeliness requires swiftness in turning Gargantua’s course from visible shoals of disaster.

Despair is useful when it clears the vision of wishful thinking, delusion, or anomic ennui. For me it opens the vision to micro level projects such as mentioned above. Recognizing that humans do best at relatively small scales and that relations of care and mutuality grow richer and more reliable at that scale…also recognizing that severance from relations with Nature that reflected appropriate gratitude and wonder have been soul-deadening…and that it is the existence and texture of all the relations alluded to here that are the chief source of meaningful ways of being—building on this human creativity has a chance to reflect the creativity of the Universe, of existence, which did a very good job on its own before we thought we knew better.

I have wondered about correspondences between body and soul such that deficiencies of any of their respective vital “nutrients” affect them both with illness. Scurvy, for instance, sickened thousands of sailors through the late 18^th century as their vitamin C dependency went unsatisfied while they were at sea. The result: They bruised easily, developed bleeding gums, weakness, fatigue, and sometimes death. Does the human mind and spirit have analogous dependencies? What are the effects when they are not met? If, say, the forms of love, the overcoming of ego, and the pursuit of ethical and intellectual virtues are components of the Good and the Good is fundamental to good lives, why wouldn’t we become symptomatic if they are neglected? Does it go too far to imagine that what are called “deaths of despair” (suicide, chemical dependencies), violence, alienation from neighbors and retreat into ideological boxes, the transcendence of everyday obligations to morality and truthfulness through nihilism and rejection of an objective world…to imagine that these are the symptoms. If these are signs of what might be called spiritual neglect, as I believe they are, then well-being obviously has wider dimensions that contemporary culture tends to give it with any seriousness. Micro reflects macro.

Having reached the end, I now see where I was going. Existential risks threaten human prospects from beginning to end. If those prospects as presently imagined turn out to require existential risks to the Earth’s well-being as well as our own then the turning of Fate, so to speak, toward extinguishing the threat to that well-being can hardly be seen as wrong. We know that Homo sapiens at present and historically are not a net benefit to Earth. Some consider that the loss of our kind of consciousness and some of our talents would be grievous deficiencies for future Earth life, but all things considered, is that true? X-risks coming to fulfillment would cost not merely humanity but the living Earth, which took billions of years to reach a diversity and richness that we are taking only a few centuries to wreck. Even the absence of such risks’ consummation so far has meant a deeply injured planet. Unless our species can live up to the standards of planetary health, which means living up to our own, then human absence would be beneficial to the whole. It is not necessary to wish for human extinction to recognize this and that its occurrence would be self-inflicted. What I think of and have suggested as part of the texture of existentially meaningful lives for Homo sapiens, which means living toward the Good, is our part of being a valuable component of a Universal Good, one that recognizes what a blessing this Earth has been and that nurtures its endurance for the good of existence.

Humans have not always been so “dumb” and self-defeating. There were times long ago, but not all that long ago, when they (usually not including the power-seekers, who seem always to be with us) knew there were no better and more interesting questions to dedicate themselves to than how the world was formed and why, and how persons could live their best lives. Humility and magnanimity, peaceful minds and relations, love of Nature—One cannot be optimistic in light of our nature and history but these would be places to begin for a more enlightened species.

Craig Brestrup

May 2024

I’ve thought more about my encounter with the fellow in Malmo who rescued me from being lost, and also about how many times on this trip I have relied on approaching people on the street asking directions. Ordinarily I’m not in this position and by nature I usually prefer to find my own way. I also realize, if I had a handheld device and had mastered it (two improbabilities for the price of one!) I could have looked up where I was and where I wanted to be and found a route without trouble. But being over here in these new to me countries and frequently at a navigational loss and lacking the device, I’ve become a gatherer of other people’s directions. One observation is how poorly most people either know their communities or how to give directions to locations within them. The more important one, though, is that almost everyone tries and is friendly and accommodating, even lone women at night. And I realize that if I had the mastered device in hand, I’d have missed these encounters and this realization of comity. I’d not have known how far a stranger like the car dealer would go to help a stranger in need. So, my interpersonal world expanded as did my recognition that despite what I believe modern social and economic systems do to human sensibilities, there remain threads of kindness, ethics, and willingness to be bothered spread widely, at least on my travels. I don’t know how influential it is that I’m obviously an aging foreigner depending on foreigners who speak English for help—How many Americans would have responded to me with the same desire to help? But whatever the answer, I think this demonstrates one more loss that the convenience of these devices extracts from human relationships. I already hypothesize that consciousness and social relationships suffer for the absorption of owners in their devices. (I see people not infrequently walking sidewalks staring into their device and I want to stop them and ask what at that moment it is that has their attention. Because I can’t help wondering what could be so entrancing to so many.) There is compulsion in much of this, for sure, and social expectation, not to mention that increasingly those of us without them are at a disadvantage in all those situations where apps and QR Codes substitute for the paper versions of history and, for me, the present. The point of my thinking is the costs to those who have thrown in with these devices and I intend to stay aware and observant to see what else I can discern.

Photo by Stephan Mahlke on Unsplash

The botanical garden in Visby didn’t have greenhouses like the one here does—Many big ones in a giant, 150-year-old glass palace. I passed through them all yesterday and found myself feeling ambivalent about plants in “cages,” so to speak. I’ve read a lot about plant sentience over the last few years and although I don’t know if they find it aversive in any way to live in a greenhouse, and presumably that’s the only way they could live at all in this climate, it’s an even more artificial environment than the outdoor regions of the garden. It feels different to me, even if not to them. So, I spent most of my time walking around outside; beauty after beauty. And when I walked back to the hotel, I diverted through a public park of about the same size and surprisingly almost as lovely, although definitely not offering the enormous variety of the other. But it is a fine place and well taken care of; Copenhagen is a “messier” city than the others I’ve seen but it didn’t show in this park, which seemed to be treated with respect by its visitors and care by its staff of caretakers. Cities rub against my nerves but just getting some distance into parks and I breathe easier, feel better.

Photo by Kristijan Arsov on Unsplash

Photo by Alex Ghiurau on Unsplash

Copenhagen Botanical Garden Walk
https://youtu.be/DLtPmvntIpE  

Tomorrow I drive to Malmo and turn in the rent car and go into Denmark, my last country on the trip. I am ready to get home although ambivalent. It’s been so satisfying to visit all these places and in many to feel so much at home and to know that the odds are I don’t have enough life left to return that to have it come to a close feels wrong in some queer way. I couldn’t and wouldn’t spend much more time in travel mode—it is wearying in ways and I like being settled as I am when I camp. I think it’s just the feeling of losing the connection and its becoming only memory and realizing I’ll probably never expatriate and therefore spend the remainder of my life in a failing country for which I have no respect or affection. I know how to detach and create a relatively closed space around me psychologically and will do that even while staying somewhat abreast of the course of national decay, but the idea of living in a country that I admired and whose ways and people appealed to me more than at home will not evaporate even if I choose not to invest a lot of energy in it. It’s hard to say how much my feeling is an aversion to what I see in the U.S. vs. an attraction to what I don’t have but see in these countries. Obviously, it’s both and probably more or less balanced.

Photo by Oleh Holodyshyn on Unsplash

Photo by Tapio Haaja on Unsplash