All things must pass

Human life is fleeting. An analogy has been made that, if the history of time (since the Big Bang) were scaled down to one year, then:

All human prehistory (from the first known stone tools) and history have occurred in the last 1/2 hour of New Year's Eve.

Human life is not only recent, but would seem to be doomed. H.P. Lovecraft spoke of we humans as inhabiting a "placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity". The island in question is not merely an island in terms of space – this island Earth – but in terms of time. It's temporal extent is limited by beginning and end, so that it hangs in suspended isolation in eternity, as well as infinity (a concept that Lovecraft was to articulate in The Shadow out of Time). It's not only individuals and species that are born and die, but planets and solar systems (and probably universes, too):

The scientists agree that we do not yet know how ubiquitous or how fragile life is, but as Guinan concludes: “The Earth’s period of habitability is nearly over ― on a cosmological timescale. In a half to one billion years the Sun will start to be too luminous and warm for water to exist in liquid form on Earth, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect in less than 2 billion years“.

We all know about this kind of thing, already, and we all know (as well) that many are beginning to put the end of things (for the human race) as an event much nearer in the future. (Although, on a related note, a recent e-mail from the Center for Biological Diversity tells me that "less than half of all Americans have ever heard of the extinction crisis, and even fewer believe it's really happening".) In this article, Franny Armstrong is quoted as saying:

If we don't cause massive social change in the next few months then it is about all over for life on earth…

With a question as serious as the extinction of life on Earth (all life?), I wish that more specific information would be given, rather than just a vague but urgent apocalyptic threat, but I suppose that's the fault of the article rather than of Ms. Armstrong. On the whole, I find information on the impacts of climate change to by far less accessible than it should be considering how serious the whole issue is. It is far, far easier to find out, say, how Charlotte Church is getting on with Gavin Henson than it is to find digested, clear, specific information on the impacts of climate change, especially the projected impacts. Franny says it will be "all over for life on earth", but what is that based on? There's the Pentagon report, of course:

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

Although that's a few years old now.

Still, what we're given the digest of is the 'what' and not the 'why' or 'how'. I wish the two elements of 'what' and 'why/how' were put together in a more readily available form, since, as we all live, more or less, on this planet, we all need to know about this sort of thing. I'm reminded a little of the government's completely uninformative public information films on AIDS back in the 80s:

Anyway, all this is a lead up to me saying that I wanted to compare and contrast the following two clips:

The second of the two was sent to me – I believe – in another Center for Biological Diversity, or possibly a Friends of the Earth e-mail. I noticed, when I first watched it, that it had had five hundred and something views. It was sent to me a few days later in a different e-mail, and I watched it again. I was curious as to how many views it had had in the intervening days. The figure was still only five hundred and something. I found this inexpressibly sad, and posted the clip on this blog. I see that, at the moment of writing, the clip has had 919 views.

George Carlin, by contrast, has had 1,430,146 views. He is far more qualified than Maria to fit the description he gives of environmentalists: "white, bourgeois liberals". He is a rich, white American. Or was.

I find some of Carlin's material amusing, and some of it interesting. A friend recently told me he'd discovered Carlin, and we had a brief conversation about him. He mentioned the clip I've just posted. "Yeah," I said, "but…", countering something that Carlin had said in the routine. "I think it's meant to be a joke," said my friend, "It's comedy."

Now, this is an interesting point. I don't get the sense that Carlin is being ironic here. Do you? I think he means what he's saying. We could say, yes, but he's letting off steam, or, yes, but it's in the context of comedy, and you have to take a more complex view of it, not simply take it at face value, etc. We have to ponder such things, because of the growth in observational comedy, the death of the punchline and so on, which means that comedy is not so much about being funny any more. I didn't notice any jokes in Carlin's seven-minute peroration there. There was the occasional allusion to humour, but nothing side-splitting. Basically, these days, stand-up comedy can be just like a blog – like this blog – a lay-person spouting opinions about anything they want to spout opinions about for an hour or two, although, unlike a blogger, they get paid for it. As long as the audience manage to cough up a titter or two during the course of the evening, and the person on stage makes a silly face now and then, it qualifies as comedy.

Let's just assume Carlin means what he says, because I think he does. You might wonder why anyone would care what a dead comedian thinks, anyway. I suppose I was struck by this clip the first time I saw it, precisely because I do think that his spiel is put together well, and because there's something, if you like, 'important' in what he's saying.

I'm not keen on long blog posts recently, so I'll try and keep this short. What he's talking about is facing death. That's what's important. We all have to face death. I die, you die, butterflies die, whales die, planets die, everything dies. At one point he says, "The planet isn't going anywhere – we are". We are on our way out. Well, yes, sooner or later, and it looks like a distinct possibility that it will be sooner. For Carlin it was very much sooner. He's already gone. And I'm sure he was aware at the time that he was about to go. When you're on your way out, why care about the future, and about other people's futures? I can certainly sympathise with that point of view. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I still want to concentrate on death for the moment. It must be faced.

I watched some of this, recently:

I can't help thinking that this is, in some ways, the logical conclusion of what might be called the Christian extroversion of Western culture.

I can't find it on the Internet anywhere, but the same friend with whom I had the Carlin conversation once told me of some Tibetan lama or someone who came to the West and was asked, "So, what do you think of Western religion?" He answered, "It's like Christmas, isn't it?" "In what way?" asked the interlocuter. "Sit on my lap and tell me what you want."

Christmas is precisely the phenomenon that shows how a supposedly spiritual religion, in fact, encourages materialism. All that's good in life is material possession. That is the message of Christmas. And what is behind this message? The fear of death. I wonder if the fear of death is stronger anywhere on Earth than in America, which seems to be the apogee of this tendency in Western culture. I like America, actually. I'm quite fascinated by the sugar-coated optimism of it all, beneath which there lurks one of the highest homicide rates in the world. What I find hard to take about America is the evangelism and unquestioning patriotism… Anyway, this is possibly a tangent. Materialism, consumerism (I hate myself and I want to buy) and the fear of death that lies behind it, are not exclusively American, by any means.

I even sympathise. And naturally I would sympathise. America, we are told, has a dream. I have dreams, too. Sometimes – very often – it seems that in order to face death, one must give up on those dreams, and I don't want to.

But what are our dreams, in the end? A Barbie doll? Kellogs Frosties?

There's a song called Working Class Hero by John Lennon:

As soon as you're born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all.

Yes, John, yes, but… the thing is, we are small. Not just us, but our parents, who work their fingers to the bone for us. That's why they have so little time to give us, because they're fighting to survive in an environment where they realised they are small a long time ago (even if they have managed to stave off that realisation consciously somehow). Remember, John, that you're standing, on a planet that's evolving, revolving at 900 miles an hour…

So, that's the importance of death – of facing death.

However, to get back to my 'but' with regard to the Carlin clip. Carlin was on his way out, sooner than those of us now here to read this blog post. I am able to sympathise with his point of view because I'm probably now closer to death than I am to birth, and have been unsuccessful in just about every conceivable sphere of human endeavour. But there are people still being born, and, whether it's selfish or not, they'd like a clean, or at least a habitable environment, I'm guessing (using my faculty of empathy). If we don't want to simply say, that's it then, we're on our way out, and if we want some kind of future for the children that some people are still producing (large numbers of people according to Consuming Kids) then it's only a matter of practicality and common sense to try and ensure that they have the possiblity of living somewhere, though the more of them there are, the less possibility there is.

Also, there's the question of globalisation. Rich countries like the benefits that accrue to them from global commerce, but if globalisation is to be championed as a result, then that must also mean global responsibility. At present, as the clip of Maria from Kiribati suggests, it is largely the poorer nations who are suffering from the results of environmental destruction, though they are those least responsible for it.

Paradoxically, I think that facing death, that 'giving in', might be the only way to go on.

Let go that Barbie doll. Let go those Kellogs Frosties. Face it. You're going to die. It'll be a relief. Let it go. Let go.

I'm talking to myself, of course.