Stoic Reflections On The Collapse Of The Gulf Stream, Third and Final Part
Marcus Aurelius, Cosmic Perspectives, and Geological Time
Watch the stars in their courses as though you were accompanying them, and reflect constantly on the changing of the elements into one another. A mind that is impressed in these ways is cleansed of the filth of life on earth.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (7.47, tr. Waterfield throughout)
This is the third of my posts on Stoic reflections which can help us with climate anxiety— as well as climate rage, climate depression, climate suicidal ideation, and whatever other hosts of internal demons beset us- as well, I hope, with climate apathy and climate despair.
I think the reflections I offer here may be the most controversial, although I can honestly say they’ve been among the most helpful for me personally.
Asia, Europe: mere corners of the universe. Every ocean: a droplet in the universe. Mount Athos: a clod of earth in the universe. The entirety of present time: an instant in eternity. Everything is petty, changeable, vanishing. (Meditations 6.36)
Everything ends. People, civilizations, and even ecosystems. All trace of the earth will eventually be obliterated by a supernova. What is that was happening next week?
If humans survive until then (extremely unlikely, but let’s accept it as a thought experiment) how would they feel?
That something horribly wrong and unjust was happening, probably.
All of human civilization, every beautiful and wondrous creature, the long, intricate work of evolution, all incinerated with no one to remember or celebrate or carry forward any of it? Yet we know with this will happen when our gorgeous (and terrifying) sun eventually burns out, and it may have happened many, many times before, for all we know.
The universe is promiscuous, mind-staggeringly generous, and also both creation and destruction are essential to its weave. Creation and destruction of every possible kind. This was somehow intuited by many ancient cultures, who believed the universe itself would eventually be destroyed by fire. We can affirm, with Marcus Aurelius, that all things that happen are part of the intricate, interconnected whole of the universe as it has to be, and so are not “bad” or “wrong” but in the nature of things, and we can also recognize, with the Daoist sage Laozi, author of the Daodejing, that heaven treats its creatures like “straw dogs” - the ceremonial artworks burnt heartlessly in sacrificial fires (Daodejing 5).
I have thought along these lines for years, slowly and gently leaning into a greater and greater acceptance that this is the way things are. A couple of years ago I was sent an article by Paul Kingsnorth by an editor at a magazine. In it Kingsnorth tracks his own journey from radical environmental activism to despair, and then to some degree of recovery through just this realization, which he calls “geological thinking.” Kingsnorth writes:
The greatest ecological crisis in the earth’s history began with the emission of climate-changing gases by an organism that had spread widely across the planet, colonizing many of its ecological niches. These gases—the waste products of its lifestyle—gradually accumulated in the atmosphere. For a long time nothing noticeably changed, but at some stage a tipping point was reached and the planet’s climate flipped rapidly from one state to another. The composition of the atmosphere changed, becoming poisonous to most life on earth, and the planet’s mean temperature plunged, precipitating a global ice age. The resulting mass extinction killed perhaps 90 percent of all living things on earth.
This was 2.3 billion years ago. The climate-changing organisms were bacteria, and the poisonous gas they emitted was oxygen. Without the planetary catastrophe they precipitated, you, and almost everything you know about life on earth, would never have come about at all.
As Marcus wrote, “Take a view from above — look at the thousands of flocks and herds, the thousands of human ceremonies, every sort of voyage in storm or calm, the range of creation, combination, and extinction (Meditations 9.28).”
Whether we humans survive or not, we definitely live in an age of extinction. “The current extinction rate is estimated at anything between 100 and 10,000 times the expected rate of ‘background extinction,’” Kingsnorth notes, “and as the expansion of the human economy continues, with its associated resource extraction, fossil fuel combustion, population increase, and mass destruction of ecosystems, the Holocene Extinction is accelerating beyond our ability to even accurately measure it…”
My point in offering these reflections is ataraxia, a mind less troubled by agitation and suffering— not the encouragement of nihilism or inaction. I think that when processing this information we may go through an initial phase of “Well, then why bother doing any thing? Why care at all?”
Well, why? From the Stoic point of view, because caring is simply the right thing to do for a rational animal on the vulnerable earth. A scientist whose name I’ve forgotten pointed out a few years ago that when one realizes one’s car is inescapably going to collide with a bus, the rational reaction is not to lift one’s foot off the brake and just let it happen. The rational response is to take evasive measures and try to limit the damage.
The reason I am offering these reflections from Marcus Aurelius here is because when we human beings regard the climate crises we may respond with unrealistic hope (which can then turn to despair), with anxiety, or a painful sense that something “wrong” is happening, something against the grain of things, a horrible violation of nature.
Yet that is just not so.
When it comes right down to it we are not separate from nature, no matter how much our human arrogance insists that we are. It is, in the last analysis, it is nature itself that it is causing the climate crisis. The nature that we are, the same nature that caused the previous mass extinction events. It is in the nature of things for species to grow too big, to despoil their environment and trigger their own destruction, often with much collateral damage. So far, we are no different.
What presumably distinguishes us from bacterium, of course, is our ability to recognize what is happening and make different choices, slow or halt the damage, restrain ourselves. As of yet it doesn’t seem we are able to do this on the huge collaborative, corporate, political level that is needed. The Stoic argument here, however, would be that our goal should be our own virtue, not success. This is, as my Stoic readers will know, because our virtue, or excellence— which, as humans, is our capacity for self-aware, rational choice—is up to us, but success is not, and because wellbeing lies not in success but in expressing our excellence as rational beings.
“Everything comes from heaven,” writes Marcus, “either springing directly from the universal command center or as a consequence. The lion’s gaping jaw, poison, and all forms of criminal behavior are, like thorns or mud, no more than by-products of those sublime and beautiful sources. You shouldn’t think of them as having nothing to do with the object of your reverence, but take into account the common source of all things (Meditations 6.36).”
Is it possible for us to recognize that the climate crisis, and all the ecological damage our evolutionary success has caused, is part of the weave of the cosmos and an expression of the same natural laws that produce flowers, Bach concertos, rainbows, and the gleam in the eye of human children?
Is it possible to do that while still making rational choices about how to live best as humans and protect the ecology which we rely on?
This, according to the ancient Stoic Zeno, is what it means to follow nature. It is the expression of our own virtue as rational animals, while surrendering externally to necessary unfolding of the cosmos at the behest of nature’s laws.
For me personally when I remove what I think is the delusional sense of guilt and human responsibility from the climate crisis, when I stop seeing it as a horrible wrong or nature gone off the rails, I feel calmer and more resilient, and can accept that things will unfold as nature commands.
That, and I’ll continue engaging in climate activism and trying to prepare myself and my family to survive.