Agnes Callard on the last generation

Agnes Callard writes in The Point- 

On the face of it, it is incredible that the simple knowledge that “we are the last humans” should lead to complete ethical and political collapse. Scheffler believes this is possible. He explains that so many of our practices—seeking a cure for cancer, building a new building, writing a poem or a philosophy paper, fighting for a political cause, giving our children moral lessons we hope will be handed down again and again—depend, in one way or another, on positing a world that will go on without us. The meaning of our lives, in the here and now, depends on future generations; without them we become narrowly self-interested, prone to cruelty, indifferent to suffering, apathetic.

Actually if we had 'simple knowledge' about any future event then there would have to be a way in which that event could be avoided. This is because the same Structural Causal Model which generates that 'simple knowledge' about the future can also be used to avoid that fate. I have simple knowledge that I will die within a month if I have nothing to eat and drink. So I do a lot of stuff to secure food and water.

Any sort of 'simple knowledge' about our species' annihilation would feature a Structural Causal Model. We'd devote most of our resources to finding a mechanism which averts that calamity.

What if a supernatural or extra-terrestrial being gives us a 'zero knowledge proof' that a calamity will strike on such and such day? Then we'd be spending a lot of time beseeching that being to save us.

Our priorities might change quite drastically if we have 'simple knowledge' that we 'are the last humans' but there will be no political or ethical collapse. Some social constraints will be loosened others will be tightened.

First personally, I can see Scheffler’s point: it fills me with childlike panic to contemplate the possibility of my sons’ generation as the final one. I cannot allow myself to imagine humanity being snuffed out—not even in the gentlest way possible, by infertility.

But Agnes is imagining precisely this scenario.

The best scene in Children of Men comes toward the end, during a bloody battle in an apartment building: everyone stops what they are doing when they hear a baby’s cry as it is being carried through the carnage. They stop fighting not in order to protect the baby, nor in order to threaten it, but just to look at it—they find it absorbing, wonderful. They would rather listen to the baby cry than dodge an oncoming bullet, or stab an attacker. The baby is the drop of the ethical introduced into a gray and demoralized world; the baby is the glimmer of the possibility that human life might actually be worth fighting for.

Why? Because the premise of the film is that babies can't exist anymore. That's why the baby is important. The film was silly and I remember little of it.

Future generations matter because they are a condition on the possibility of goodness and evil for every generation in the here and now.

Rubbish! Saying so, doesn't make it true. The first Christians believed that, as Christ said, not a few among them would witness the End of Times. Plenty of sects have had beliefs of this type. But politics and ethics did not collapse. Why? If there is an 'Eschaton' (i.e. a God ordained doomsday) then there must be a Katechon or Divinely ordained mechanism for keeping everything as it is till the end of Days.

So suggests the movie, and Scheffler concurs. But he had better be wrong.

Why not simply say 'he must be stupid'?

Because here is something we know for sure: there will not always be future generations. This is a fact. If the virus doesn’t do us in, if we do not do one another in, if we manage to make everything as sustainable as possible, nevertheless, that big global warmer in the sky is coming for us. We can tell ourselves soothing stories, such as the one about escaping to another planet, but we are embodied creatures, which is to say, we are the sorts of things that, on a geological time scale, simply do not last. Death looms for the species just as surely as it looms for each and every one of us.

So what? The fact that we die doesn't change anything. There is an 'overlapping generations' equilibrium. OLG models have been around longer than I have been alive. A modest discount rate- even a fraction of a percentage- means that the final catastrophe has little bearing on everyday economic activity.

How long have we got? At a recent public talk, the economist Tyler Cowen spitballed the number of remaining years at 700. But who knows? The important thing is that the answer is not: infinity years.

Rubbish! It makes no difference to the present value of any project whether the series is infinite or terminates far enough away. That's why a 90 year lease extension is about the same price as the freehold.

Forever is a very long time, and humanity is not going to make it.

But everybody has always known this. Religions teach it. Science explains how and why it will happen. But the thing does not matter in the slightest.

A crisis of meaning looms, one that will only deepen as we feel ourselves approaching the end. The Schefflerian edifice is doomed to collapse. Just as the thought that other people might be about to stockpile food leads to food shortages, so too the prospect of a depressed, disaffected and de-energized distant future deprives that future of its capacity to give meaning to the less distant future, and so on, in an kind of reverse-snowball effect, until we arrive at a depressed, disaffected and de-energized present.

But this has never happened!

The last generation is the linchpin of the whole system. But how can their lives have meaning, if the mere thought of the abyss sends a person collapsing into panic and depression? The answer is that the last generation is going to have to be composed of people better and braver than we are now—and it is our job to help them end up that way. We must take the first steps toward learning to make the unthinkable thinkable, so that they can take the last ones.

Being silly is no use to anyone. Whatever steps Agnes takes would be silly steps. Nobody will remember them. Humanity may soon face an asteroid collision or something of that sort. The chance of survival might be slim, but the only steps that will then be taken will be steps such that at least a portion of the race survives the apocalypse. This survival may not be physical. It may be metaphysical and ontologically dysphoric. But those steps will not follow on from Agnes's silly steps.

On 9/11, some of the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 did something very heroic: they rose up against the terrorists holding them hostage, with the result that their plane crashed into a field rather than the Capitol building. Viewed from a certain angle, you might wonder why this was so impressive: if you know you are going to die either way, why not do some good while you are at it? But this would be a mistake. It takes incredible energy, passion and conviction to rush at your captors, and mustering all that up in the face of the certainty of death is an astonishing feat. Courage means that things can still matter to you—a lot—even when you know you are going to die. Courage means seeing the value of your life as being about more than survival—living ethically, not merely biologically.

When have people not mustered courage in the face of certain death? The Flight 93 passengers knew that the hijackers intended to crash the plane, not land it and demand a big ransom. So they acted rationally in trying to foil the hijackers plan.

Now in a certain sense, relative to the last generation, the Flight 93 passengers had it easy. They could say to themselves, “Something still matters—namely the lives of other and future people.” What force beyond concern for others is strong enough to drive one’s energies, projects, attachments and commitments all the way through to the end?

The possibility that the end can be evaded either physically or metaphysically.

Scheffler seems right in saying that many human projects would lose their meaning in the infertility scenario.

Sure! But others would become much more meaningful. But the same could be said for any large enough exogenous shock. What is important is to identify the correct Structural Causal Model so as to act in such a way as to avert calamity.

And we can see this on a smaller scale by observing that no one would take up the violin, start building a cathedral or search for a cure for cancer hours before they are to die.

But they would take up things like estate planning and writing a will or else praying or savouring their last meal or bottle of wine etc, etc. Knowing you have a time constraint, changes your behavior. You do things which have immediate utility.

So we have to ask, what is the last generation going to be able to care passionately and deeply about?

Not being the last generation. Those guys are gonna be working their butts off only pausing to shoot silly people who try to waste their time.

I do not know the answer, nor even whether there is one. But I do know that my instinctive recoil from asking it is cowardly, and that the terror I feel every time I try to face it needs to be overcome.

Yes dear. Have a nice cup of cocoa. Also buy yourself a big teddy bear.

We are living in frightening times.

No we don't! We live in a time of affluence and security.

We should do everything possible to keep the human project going as long as possible, but we should also appreciate the fact that we cannot defer the question about the value of this project indefinitely.

'Keeping the human project going' does not require worthless drivel spouted by a hysterical attention-seeker.

These two tasks are not the same; they belong to different groups of people.

There is only one task. The other is just histrionics of a silly sort.

For a long time, philosophy and the other humanistic disciplines have been concerned with how to achieve advances that might mirror those of the sciences.

But to achieve advances would mean getting rid of silly people and hiring smart ones.

But it will not be through science that we come to reconcile ourselves to the fact that unlimited scientific progress is impossible.

Who cares what you reconcile yourself to, if you are a silly person?

The humanist was never really in the business of making progress.

Which is why a liberal arts degree reduces lifte-time earnings for a large class of students.

Her job is to acquire and transmit a grasp of the intrinsic value of the human experience;

But all humans grasp this- unless they are terribly silly. Human experience is about doing sensible things because, every-time you do silly things, you get egg on your face.

this is a job whose difficulty and importance rises in proportion to the awareness that all of it will be lost.

Sez a silly person teaching a worthless subject.

It is the humanist’s task to ensure that, if and when the infertility scenario should arise, things will not stop mattering to people. We must become the specialists of finitude, the experts in loss, the scientists of tragedy.

And the roller-skating waitresses of the drive in restaurants of talking worthless shite.

At times like this, when a window opens, and all of humanity sees the End rushing at us from the future, it behooves the humanists to be the ones who refuse to shut our eyes.

Shut your mouths, for God's sake. Your eyes don't matter because you only see stupid shite.

The Last Generation. Scientists and politicians must work to delay their arrival as long as possible; humanists, by contrast, must help prepare us for them.

But we'll be long dead before the last generation shows up. So, we don't need to be prepared for them. If we are making a genuine contribution to STEM subjects, future generations may remember us kindly. But if we are merely weeping over their fate and not doing anything useful, then we were part of the problem confronting them. We weren't part of the solution.

Agnes Callard, reminding us that our species-life is precarious, shows why the 'liberal arts' represent a shameful profession- though perhaps a harmless enough hobby.