[Adapted from “On Living In An Atomic Age (1948), by C.S. Lewis]
Too many of us spend way too much time thinking about the global pandemic, economic collapse and nuclear war.
“How are we to live in this era of nuclear threat, escalating inflation and rampant viruses?”
I am often tempted to reply, “The same way you would have lived in the early twentieth century when the great depression hit, or like you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of tuberculosis, an age of paralyzing polio, an age of syphilis, an age of air raids, and age of railway accidents or an age of motor vehicle accidents.
In other words, don’t begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, you and everyone you love have already been sentenced to death before the threat of viral pandemics or nuclear warfare was ever invented: and a high percentage of use were going to die in unpleasant ways. You and I have a great advantage over our ancestors – antibiotics and anesthetics – to this day we still have them.
It is perfectly ridiculous to go whimpering about the day with long drawn faces because the great scientists of our time have added one more chance of a painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. None of us get out of this alive. None. Not one.
My first point in this monologue is that you and I must pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by a virus, skyrocketing inflation or a nuclear bomb, then let that destruction, when it comes, find us doing sensible human things like praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing golf (scratch that – I hate golf), chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of chess or darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep, thinking about viruses or nuclear warfare or gasoline prices. They may break our bodies (in my experience, any microbe can do that) but, they need not dominate our minds.
“But,” you will reply, “it is not death – not even painful and premature death – that we are all hot and bothered about. Of course, the chance of that is not a new thing. What is new is that the virus or the bomb or climate change may finally and totally destroy civilization itself. The lights may be put out forever.”
This brings us much nearer to the real point. Let me try to make clear exactly what I think that point is. What were your views about the ultimate future of civilization before the pandemic appeared on the scene? What did you think all this effort of humanity was to come to in the end? The real answer is clear to almost everyone who has even a smidgeon of scientific background; yet, oddly enough, it is hardly ever mentioned. And the real answer (almost beyond doubt) is that with or without viruses, nuclear warfare and economic collapses the whole story is going to end in NOTHING.
The astronomers hold out no hope that this plant is going to be permanently inhabitable. The physicists hold out no hope that organic life is going to be a permanent possibility in any part of the material universe. Not only this earth, but the whole show, all the suns of space, are to run down. Nature is a sinking ship, and we are but passengers.
Nature does not, in the long run, favor life. If Nature is all that exists — in other words, if there is no God, and no after-life of some sort somewhere outside Nature — then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without any possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it.
No doubt a nuclear bomb may cut its duration on this present planet shorter that it might have been; but the whole thing, even if it lasted for billions of years, must be so infinitesimally short in relation to the oceans of dead time which preceded and follow it that I really feel no excitement about its curtailment.
What the wars and the weather and the pandemic have really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous periods before 1914 and 2021, we began to forget. And, in reality, this reminder is actually a good thing. We have been awakened from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about reality.
We see at once (when we have been waked, no “woke”) that the important question is not whether a virus or a nuclear weapon is going to obliterate our “civilization.” The important question is whether “Nature” — the thing studied by the sciences – is the only thing in existence? Because if you answer yes to the second question, then the first question only amounts to asking whether the inevitable frustration of all human activities may be hurried on by our own action instead of occurring at its own natural time. That is, of course, a question that concerns us very much.
Even on a leaking ship that is known to certainly sink sooner or later, the news that the boiler might blow up now would not be heard with indifference by anyone. But those who knew the ship was sinking in any case would not, I think, be quite so desperately excited as those who had forgotten this fact, and were vaguely imagining that it might arrive somewhere.
It is, then, on this second question that you and I really need to make up our minds.
Let us begin by supposing that Nature is all that exists. Let us suppose that nothing ever has existed or ever will exist before or after except this meaningless play of atoms in space and time: that by a series of hundredth changes it has (regrettably) produced things like — conscious beings who now know that their own consciousness is an accidental result of the whole meaningless process and is therefore itself meaningless – though to us, it feels quite significant.
In this situation (in which the Oxford Handbook estimates 25-50% of civilized countries seems to believe is the present reality), there are really only three avenues of action:
(1) You might commit suicide. Nature which has blindly & accidentally given me for my torment this consciousness which demands meaning and value in a universe that offers neither, has luckily also given me the means of getting rid of it. I return the unwelcome gift. I will be fooled no longer. (I do not recommend this avenue.)
(2) You might decide simply to have as good a time as possible. The universe is a universe of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can. Unfortunately, however, there is on these terms, with inflation and gasoline prices so high so very little left to grab — only the coarsest sensual pleasures is really left. You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person, and of her character, are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes.
You can’t go on getting any very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it.
You may still, in the lowest sense, have a “good time”; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live.
3) You may defy the universe. You may say, “Let Nature be irrational, I am not. Let it be merciless, I will have mercy. By whatever curious chance it has produced me, now that I am here, I will live according to human values. I know the universe will win in the end, but what is that to me? I will go down fighting. Amid all this wastefulness I will persevere; amid all this competition, I will make sacrifices. Be damned to the universe!”
I suppose that most of us, in fact, while remain materialists, adopt a more or less uneasy alternate position between the second and the third attitude. And although the third is incomparably the better (it is, for instance, much more likely to “preserve civilization”), both really end up shipwrecked on the same rock. That rock — disharmony between our own hearts and Nature — the is obvious in the second. The third seems to avoid the rock by accepting disharmony from the outset and defying it. Yet, it won’t really work. In it, you hold up your own human standards against the idiocy of the universe.
That is, we talk as if our own standards were something outside the universe which can be contrasted with it; as if we could judge the universe by some standard borrowed from another supposed realistic source). But if Nature — in the space–time–matter system — is the only thing in existence, then of course there can be no other source for our standards. They must, like everything else, be the unintended and meaningless outcome of blind forces. Far from being a light from beyond Nature whereby Nature can be judged, they become the only the way in which anthropoids of our species feel when the atoms under our own skulls get into certain states — those states being produced by causes quite irrational, unhuman, and non-moral. Thus, the very ground on which we defy Nature crumbles under our feet. The standard we are applying is tainted at the source. If our standards are derived from this meaningless universe they must be as meaningless as Nature.
For most modern people, thoughts of this kind must be thought through before the opposite view can even get a fair hearing. All Naturalism leads us to this in the end — to a quite final and hopeless discord between what our minds claim to be and what they really must be if Naturalism is true. They claim to be spirit; that is, to be reason, perceiving universal intellectual principles and universal moral laws and possessing free will. But if Naturalism is true, they must in reality be merely arrangements of atoms in skulls, coming about by irrational causation. We never think a thought because it i s true, only because blind Nature forces us to think it. We never do an act because it is right, only because blind Nature forces us to do it. It is when one has faced this preposterous conclusion that one is at last ready to listen to the voice that whispers: “But suppose we really are spirits? Suppose we are not the offspring of Nature . . ?”
For, really, the naturalistic conclusion is unbelievable. For one thing, it is only through trusting our own minds that we have come to know Nature itself. If Nature when fully known seems to teach us (that is – if the sciences teach us) that our own minds are chance arrangements of atoms, then there must have been some mistake; for if that were so, then the sciences themselves would be chance arrangements of atoms and we should have no reason for believing in them.
There is only one way to avoid this deadlock. We must go back to a much earlier view. We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it. We are strangers here. We come from somewhere else. Nature is not the only thing that exists. There is “another world,” and that is where we come from. And that explains why we do not feel at home here.
A fish feels at home in the water. If we “belonged here” we should feel at home here. All that we say about “Nature,” about death and time and mutability, all our half-amused, half-bashful attitude to our own bodies, is inexplicable on the theory that we are simply natural creatures. If this world is the only world, how did we come to find its laws either so dreadful or so comic? If there is no straight line elsewhere, how did we discover that Nature’s line is crooked?
But what, then, is Nature, and how do we come to be imprisoned in a system so alien to us?
Oddly enough, the question becomes much less sinister the moment one realizes that Nature is not the end all be all. Mistaken for our mother, she is terrifying and even abominable. But if she is only our sister — if she and we have a common Creator — if she is our sparring partner — then the situation suddenly becomes quite tolerable.
Perhaps we are not here as prisoners but as colonists: only consider what we have done already to the dog, the horse, or the daffodil. Nature is indeed a rough playfellow. There are elements of evil in her. To explain all that would carry us far back: I should have to speak of Power and Principalities and all that would seem to the modern reader most mythological. This is not the place, nor do these questions come first.
It is enough to say here that Nature, in her different way, is much alienated from her Creator, though in her, as in us, gleams and rays of the old beauty remain. Yet, they are there not to be worshipped, but to be enjoyed. She has nothing to teach us. It is our business to live by our own law, not by hers: to follow, in private or in public life, the law of love and temperance even when they seem to be suicidal, and not the law of competition and grab, even when they seem to be necessary to our survival. For it is part of our spiritual law never to put survival first: not even the survival of our species. We must resolutely train ourselves to feel that the survival of Man on this Earth, much more of our own nation or culture of class, is not worth having unless it can be had by honorable and merciful means.
The sacrifice is not so great as it seems. Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilization are the only people by whom civilization is at all likely to be preserved. Those who want Heaven must have served Earth best. Those who love Man less than God do most for Man.