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More and more people — and they seem to be young people — are taking to social media and various doomer sites (Reddit/Collapse is one of them) to moan that they are so bummed by the prospect of civilizational collapse that they are considering suicide. Now, suicide, like sex, is talked about far more than it is actually done — but this drivel should be dealt with before it becomes a fad.
Did you not get the memo, young tragedians, that you (and I, and everyone we know) are going to die? I can understand the error, because our culture is about being special, and forever young, and being anything you want to be, and never, ever talking about death.
Two years ago I wrote here about the Catholic theologian Richard Rohr’s research into initiation rites, through which all humans passed until a few centuries ago. He found that these ceremonies, in all cultures and times — were used to impress just five basic ideas on young people passing into adulthood. Prominent among these dicta: you are going to die.
In our age we don’t do that, of course, so you youngsters may have missed the fact that everything dies. It’s not just you — another edict of the initiation ceremonies was “you are not special” — and it’s not just humans. Everything dies, including the planet we inhabit and the sun that warms it and the constant stars that decorate its night sky. As Shakespeare put it, “It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”
The thing that allows us not to think about dying is the uncertainty of its timing. The time and place of our individual appointment to step off the planet is unknown and unknowable to almost all of us. That helps us construct our lives despite the death sentence that shadows us. Life, it turns out, really is a sexually transmitted, fatal disease.
That is not news. What we humans have done, for millennia, is resolve to live as best we can while we can, and to maintain — even against the impending pain of death — values that ease our passage and that of our fellow travelers. Things such as kindness and helpfulness and compassion.
Suicide might be a valid option when the crash actually occurs. The radical downsizing of the human population that will ensue will surely present situations where it would be preferable to jump than to be pushed. As I observed here a few months ago, it is time we eased the religious and social strictures against taking one’s own life, for several sound and practical reasons.
But here’s the good news, initiates: you may well die before the crash, in a school shooting or hurricane or while taking a selfie. So cheer up, stop obsessing about the crash, or the death of the sun, or whatever, as a reason to cut your young life short. As the ceremonies used to say, you’re not special, and death will come when it will come. Suck it up.
Thank you Mr. Lewis
I had not noticed the trend but I recognize it now that you point it out.
In my own boomer generation one manifestation of our missing initiations is, “I’m glad I’ll be dead when it really hits.” That shows the absence of Lesson 3 from your sited previous article, “Your life is not about you.”
One might hope instead to be here to help our offspring or young neighbours with skills or other resources we have to adapt to the mess we are leaving them. We could even learn a couple to make sure we can be useful.
Cheers, Rob
Shakespeare also wrote, “to be or not to be – that is the question”. Clearly his views on this life-death issue we characterized by ambivalence. Durkheim considered suicide a reasonable act if it benefited society as a whole; for instance, if a society (be it tribe or nation) was experiencing a shortage of resources, the suicide of a non-productive member could be considered perfectly honorable. He dubbed this ‘altruistic suicide’.
I would like to think that, at my stage in life, if I came down with a horrible illness, I would ask myself Shakespeare’s question and consider Durkheim’s solution.
Just as the timing of our own demise is unknowable the exact timing of the collapse is also unknown. I am personally stepping up efforts to enjoy my life as much as possible while I can. Seems like it would be a shame to check out early.
Haven’t done much research on Rohr’s work, but if what he said on the initiation rites were true it was equally true that these rites were (in most cases) part of a larger worldview which affirmed human existence and rejected the notion that it was futile or the result of some blind accident. Thus, for example, there is the view that we are (like) waves on an ocean. The individual wave may ebb away, but the ocean remains. And one can choose to see oneself, not as a wave, but as the ocean; then the grave loses its sting.
This worldview was actually shared by many traditions the world over in one guise or another, from the Sufis to Vedanta to the Neo-Confucians to Angelus Silesius to the Bantu to Chief Seattle. It (this worldview) has the additional plus point of presenting the world we live in as sacred, since all things are a manifestation of this ocean. And if you view the world as sacred, you won’t see it as a mere quarry of material resources to be exploited, as the modern industrial worldview does.
Conversely, the modern West declared all such ideas BS and instead perpetrated the view that life is just an accident and the world is therefore just a mere quarry of material resources to be exploited. The inclination of modern society to push death into the background where it won’t be noticed may well be the result of that sense of existential anxiety brought about by the value-void modern worldview. A worldview that, ironically enough, has also brought about a state of affairs where we’re now collectively headed for a giant shithole.
The Russian man of letters Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was convinced that the reason for all the horrors of the 20th (and for that matter the 21st) century is that we have forgotten God. I think his words deserve some serious consideration.
(Not that there’s much that can be done anymore at our present juncture…)
Yes, the world view shifted with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. But the real difference, I believe, had to do with technology – which allowed humankind to wage war and general mayhem on a truly mammoth scale.
Our consciousness has evolved to the point that our ego supercedes our temporal state. The planet is all human all the time today, a delusion that will and is leading to our downfall. We no longer leave the elders at side of the river for the wolves to feed on when they become too fragile to cross the angry stream on their way to the Winter hunting grounds. We fight the inevitable step to nothingness, the state that we came from, with our religions of eternal life and overconsumption, not only from fear but from an avarice that has evolved to commandeer our minds.