Tag: John Lachs

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Living In the Shadow of Doomsday

Fresno Bee, September 11, 2022

Down in Antarctica, a massive glacier is rapidly melting. The media have dubbed this 80-mile-wide ice sheet “the doomsday glacier.” Reporters warn that when the glacier collapses, it could raise global sea level by 2 feet. The collapse could happen as soon as 2031.

We are a long way from Antarctica. But it’s easy to picture the ice melting during our roasting September heat wave. My car thermometer hit 117 the other day.

It does seem like our “house is on fire,” as Greta Thunberg put it in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland a couple of years ago. Thunberg said, “I want you to panic.” She continued, “And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

When speaking to the elites at Davos it might help to ring the alarm bells loudly. Our leaders are currently throwing a few buckets of water at an advancing wildfire. They need some political heat to get them moving.

But what about the rest of us? Should we panic? Eco-anxiety is a serious problem, as I discussed in a previous column. Nihilism and despair are as deadly as the rising heat. If doomsday really is right around the corner, we might be inclined to crank up the AC, pull down the blinds and abandon hope.

Doomsday is pretty depressing, after all. But let’s think critically about our language for a moment. Words like “doomsday” cause panic and despair. Two feet of sea level rise is bad. But the world won’t end. Media literacy can help prevent overreaction. Doomsday is just a word. It was chosen by the headline writers to capture your attention.

It also helps to recall that human beings are adaptable and inventive. We likely won’t prevent climate change from re-shaping civilization. But human beings change and adapt. The history of civilization is a story of our adaptability and inventiveness. The future won’t be easy. And there will be pain. But it’s better to embrace the inevitability of change than to hide in the closet.

We had some practice in dealing with radical change during the COVID-19 pandemic. Things fell apart for a time. Remember the fear? The uncertainty? The toilet paper shortages? But we adapted. The response wasn’t perfect. Many people died. Political life became polarized. And we’re still recovering. But here we are. Life goes on. It’s different today than it was a few years ago. But each dawn is different.

We need to develop a kind of Stoic resolve, leavened with creativity, humor, love, and joy. One of my mentors, the philosopher John Lachs, described this as “Stoic pragmatism.” He encourages us to confront tragedy with “equanimity born of joy.”

We need endurance and acceptance but also good humor and energy. When things get rough, as they always do, it helps to smile into the pain. Shake off the suffering and keep going. That’s what marathon runners do. It’s what inventors, entrepreneurs, and artists do when they hit a roadblock. Make a joke, suck it up, and get back to work.

We have strayed pretty far from the doomsday glacier. But the end is never really far away. On any given day, millions of people experience their own private doomsdays. Loss is inevitable. Everyone you know and love eventually ends up dead. And no civilization lasts forever.

In admitting our mortality, there is the risk of despair. But it is better to look into the abyss with open eyes than to live in denial. And once you accept the inevitable, you can discover acceptance and even joy. John Lachs put it this way in a book he wrote about death and dying: “Of course we die, but why should that spoil breakfast?”

That cheerful nugget of wisdom is helpful. This doesn’t mean that we should just smile and wave without taking action. The house is on fire. There’s work to be done. And we’re going to have to adapt. But freaking out doesn’t help. When doomsday arrives, it’s better to greet it with creative good humor than with anxiety and despair.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article265519076.html#storylink=cpy

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The Wisdom of WTF

Sometimes you just have to say “WTF.”  In an imperfect world there is wisdom in a shrug of indifference.   

I’ve been thinking about this when considering student responses to a scandal that recently rocked my university involving the Chancellor of the California State University, who was our former President.  What’s remarkable is that most of my students don’t seem to care.  When I discussed this in class, most shrugged it off.

Some may think those students are callous and clueless.  But I’m not so sure.  A shrug is a strategy of self-preservation in a world of alienation.  To say “WTF” is to express disbelief at how stupid things are.  Sometimes it is an outburst of anger.  Sometimes it is a cry of despair.  Almost always it is an expression of alienation.

The world is too big for us to comprehend.  The forces that buffet us are beyond our control.  The omnipresence of alienation poses a challenge for the human spirit.

One of my mentors, the philosopher John Lachs, describes this in a recent book as the peculiar unhappiness of the modern world:

Huge institutions surround and engulf us: we feel powerless to influence their course… We are lost in their bowels and experience much social life as a sort of homelessness.  The devastating sense of the meaninglessness of what we do and of our own unimportance moves us alternately to shoulder-shrugging indifference and to personal despair. 

An obvious solution is to reform our institutions and make them more friendly and transparent.  But even that work is mostly beyond our control.  It also helps to understand that alienation is, as Lachs puts it, “the cost of comfort.”  Even though we are alienated, the modern world provides us with previously unimaginable health, wealth, and power.

And so we take the good with the bad.  And on occasion we sigh and say, “WTF.” 

Outrages abound.  Powerful leaders make huge mistakes.  Democracies elect buffoons.  Ecosystems are in crisis.  War is on the horizon.  Poverty continues.  And the pandemic plods along.

We fret and fume about all of this.  And our anxiety increases.  There is mostly nothing any individual can do solve these problems.  So there is wisdom learning to say “WTF.”

Alienation has a long history.  Karl Marx thought capitalism was built upon alienation.  The existentialist of the 20th Century saw it everywhere.  Human beings do not feel at home in the world.  We are estranged from one another and even from ourselves. 

Alienation is a common theme in literature and film.  In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield thinks everyone around him is phony.  In The Matrix Morpheus tells Neo, “You are a slave.  Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.” 

Alienation appears when we are stuck in traffic.  We experience it when prices rise and paychecks shrink.  It occurs when we work on our tax returns.  The world’s systems are indifferent to us.  We are cogs in a machine over which we have no control.

Alienation gives birth to resentment and anger.  It is part of the discontent fueling “the great resignation” (as I discussed in a recent column).  It fuels suicide and addiction. 

It even helps explain conspiracy theories.  The conspiracy believer is trying to make sense of a world that makes no sense.

And so instead of beating your head against the wall, learn to shrug it off.  We say “WTF” because we know we deserve better; but also, because we know there’s not much we can do about any of this.

Sometimes “WTF” is a cynical abdication of responsibility.  Imagine, for example, saying “WTF” as you jump off a cliff.  So we must be careful not to let “WTF” give rise to nihilism.

To avoid that we should recognize solidarity in the shrug of indifference.  You and I both know that the world is out of joint.  But at least we’re in this together.  The process of making meaning often begins when we look at our neighbor and say “WTF.”  From there we can begin to make things better, one shrug at a time.