November 29, 2015

Matt Alspaugh

Introduction

Who are the people of the future? Do they even matter to us? I recall a thought experiment that goes something like this: Suppose you awake, with a startle, from a dream — a dream in which you have a clear premonition about your death. Well, not about your death, exactly, not when it will happen or how — though you do learn it will be a peaceful death — but you have the premonition that exactly one month after you die, the whole world will end in an instantaneous cataclysmic disaster, when a huge meteorite crashes into it. One month after you die, everybody dies.

How do you feel about this knowledge? Is this a nightmare or not? After all, you will already be dead! What does it matter about the people in the future? Especially for those of you, like me, who have no biological heirs, no children or even nieces or nephews, who would be eliminated in this premonition. If you are like most folks, even for me this dream is a nightmare, for it represents a horrible loss, even though it doesn’t touch us personally.

Current Events

What will the people of the future say about us?

It’s easy to look at the news of recent weeks and not feel hopeful. It’s easy to look at the news and imagine a dystopian future, a world with scarcity, and suffering, oppression and violence, and this is even if we survive as a species a few generations into the future. I ruminate on just a few examples.

Climate Change

The greatest threat we leave the people of the future is global warming. We learned last week that global temperatures have already risen 1 degree centigrade over pre-industrial levels, halfway to the 2 degree point considered to be safe[1]. Even if we were to stop all carbon dioxide production today, we’d still see a continued rise in temperatures, though not as bad as if we do nothing.[2]

Terror

So to change the direction on climate change, our hopes are pinned on the UN Climate Conference starting in Paris this week. In Paris. The scene of recent and horrific terrorist violence. The attack represents  the opening of a second worldwide battlefront in what was once a minor civil war between the Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad and that confederacy now calling itself the Islamic State. How will we in America respond to the attacks?

I see many potential parallels to our 9/11 experience. Recall that September, we had a very small window of a few weeks of communal grief, hope, interconnectedness, and it seemed that a thoughtful response might be possible. But what followed was a kind of patriotic rage, leading to poorly planned and executed military actions. We have now made such a mess of the Middle East that it feels almost inevitable that something like the Islamic State would emerge.

So today, we, and France, and perhaps Russia may fight and prevail, but will we remember this time that the real effort comes afterward? Will we grasp the reality that we need to invest significant non-military resources — time and money — to restore civil society?

Terror at Home

But while we get enraged about terrorist acts overseas, do we turn a blind eye to terrorism in our own country, carried out by birthright citizenship Americans? Terror such as Friday’s terror attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. Just the latest in a string of mass murders.

And what is our political response to the Colorado Springs shooting? While the Democratic candidates responded quickly, so far only one of the Republican candidates has responded, Ted Cruz offering at the least, a message of prayer for the victims.[3]

I can understand, though not quite forgive, the Republican candidates unwillingness to speak up, for they are all trapped — on the one side by the gun manufacturers and their right-wing anti-government extremists, on the other by anti-abortion fundamentalists, and on the third by the need for Citizens United cash.

The Stalemate

But here’s the deeper concern. In a little piece in New York Magazine, I learned that 95% of the people in this country already have decided who they will vote for in November  2016.[4] About half of those will take any Republican, even Trump, over any Democrat, and another half will take Hillary or Sanders over any Republican.  So very few people — 5% — will make a very key decision. This group has been shrinking, plunging from 15% in the 1960s to 5% today. Meaning that the divide between the left and the right is magnifying.

Money and Climate Change

Which means the money becomes even more important. Money changes minds, money creates polarization and stalemate. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week[5] shows that funds from ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers drove climate researchers to change their thematic content, their messages in ways that misinformed the public and the political process. And so we cycle back around to the question of climate change again. It’s not a pretty future.

Cynicism

I’m sure this is just one circle my cynical, ruminating mind could travel around. I’m sure I’m not the only one who lies awake at night sometimes, with the mind racing around in circles, chasing its tail, as I toss, and turn, roll from my back to my side to my belly to my side, turning always to the right — that’s curious — trying to make sense of it all.

It’s not a pretty future, this cycle in my mind, if I let it race.

Religion and the Distant Future

Maybe I could find some comfort in faith. I am man of the cloth, after all. I’ve studied religions, lots of them. Maybe Christianity — my childhood religion. As I lay there, I think about the idea of the second coming, maybe that might bring me comfort about the future. After all, the early church was intensely focused on the idea of the immediacy of Christ’s return. When that didn’t happen, the whole thing became a kind of a faith test: “Jesus is coming, look busy.” I think that’s in the Book of Romans somewhere. 

The whole experience of the second coming is mapped out in glorious and gory detail in the last book of the Bible, the Revelations of John, that wild acid-trip of a book that almost didn’t get included in the canon — and some of us think Christianity would have been better had it been left out. But in Christianity, there is an endpoint to life and to this world, things here on earth will come to an end, and another realm will replace this. I’m not ready to stop with that, so I move on.

How about Hinduism, with its cosmology of cycles within cycles? Life is created and destroyed in cycles lasting 4.32 million years, and well, we’re near the end of one such cycle.  But the whole universe is also created and destroyed in cycles, each lasting 8.64 billion years. But these are just a part of a larger cycle of the life of Brahma, lasting 311.04 trillion years. And that cycle repeats endlessly. It’s all a little mind boggling! I find this comforting, if a little hard to grasp.

Discussion

How about our own UU tradition? We don’t have much to say about the future. Not that we’re negating those other beliefs, we just don’t say much.

UU theologian Galen Guengerich calls us the gratitude people. He tells us, “Gratitude links us to the past by revealing to us our identity: how we became who we are, and it links us to the future by revealing to us our duty: what we owe back in return.”[6]

I lay there, and remember to do my gratitude practice, recalling three things I’m grateful for that day. That helps. The future is important, but so is the present. I think of Susan Werner’s song[7], her gentle persistent message: “May I suggest to you – that this is the best part of your life.” Even at three in the morning, legs restless, a little too warm, or cold, “this is the best part of my life.” 

Another line of hers comes to me: “May I suggest to you — There is a hope,  that’s been expressed in you,  the hope of seven generations, maybe more.”

The hope of seven generations, maybe more. I know now what I must do, which is what any of us must do, which is simply to do what I can. To imagine, as Wendell Berry does[8], a realistic vision for the future, not too dystopian, but no paradisal dream, but not too fantastical either. And to work for that future. In fits and starts, imperfectly, but with great effort, for in its hardship is its possibility.

Conclusion

I think again of the Letter to the People of the Future, by John Cummins, written sometime last century, Becky texts me and tells me of a website called “Letters to the Future”[9], in support of the Paris Climate Project. I read many of these letters, by such thinkers as Bill McKibbin, Jane Smiley, and Jim Hightower. Some are hopeful, others pessimistic.

I close with the words from one of those letters to the future, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, philosopher and novelist.

Dear Descendants,

If you are reading this, then you must exist, and so my greatest fears haven’t been realized. We didn’t manage to eradicate our kind from the universe.

Wherever you are,  you must look back at your ancestors — us –with outraged incredulity. How could we not have cared about you at all, you wonder? You are our kith and kin. Didn’t we consider that you deserved the same rights to flourish as we presumed for ourselves?  …

We were human, all too human. And being human we tended to prioritize our own lives, our own self-interest, over those of others. It’s not that other selves meant nothing at all to us. But our own selves always meant so much more. 

You just weren’t very real to us, you others who didn’t even enjoy the privilege of existing. How could your claims … rein in our desires? And we were so inventive in our technologies, which pelted us with more and more things to want, amusements to distract us from what we should have been thinking about — which was you.

And now it’s we who no longer exist. Perhaps you’d just as soon forget about our existence, as we forgot about yours. If only you could, I imagine you thinking. If only you could blot us out of your consciousness just as thoroughly as we blotted you out of ours. 

If there are still storytellers among you — if that’s a human capacity that you can still indulge — then do a better job than we did in making the lives of others felt — each and every life, when its time comes, — a towering importance.

May you flourish. May you forgive us.[10]

Notes:

1 https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28469-carbon-emissions-hit-new-high-and-temperature-rise-soars-to-1-c/

2 http://www.iflscience.com/environment/what-would-happen-climate-if-we-stopped-emitting-greenhouse-gases-today

3 http://time.com/4128435/presidential-candidates-respond-to-planned-parenthood-shooting/

4 http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/politics-where-nobody-changes-their-mind.html

5 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/11/18/1509433112.abstract

6 Rev. Galen Guengerich “Theology for a Secular Age”, 2009

7 Susan Werner, “May I Suggest”

8 Wendell Berry, “The Wisdom to Survive”

9 https://www.letterstothefuture.org/

10 https://www.letterstothefuture.org/letter/31/moral-monsters/