"Memento Mori" for the World?

In this year’s first blog post, I wrote some about the ancient idea of memento mori. (If you didn’t see or don’t remember that, click here.) Now, referring to some of my most important posts from 2022, I am wondering whether memento mori can apply to the world, not just individual people. 

Once again, I am linking to significant ideas of Michael Dowd, by whom I have been significantly influenced.* In December of last year, he posted a new YouTube video titled “Sanity 101.” The full version (here) is over 90 minutes long; the “Cliff Notes” version (here) is 30 minutes.

At some point, I encourage you to listen to one or both of those videos, which have the subtitle, “Living Fully in an Age of Decline: Essential Wisdom for Hard Times.”

While still fully affirming the reality of overshoot and the collapse of what he calls TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it), his emphasis in this new video is “post doom, no gloom.”

Dowd’s main point is that we humans today should not deny what we find disturbing or frightening but fully accept reality. In his opinion, formed by extensive reading of scientists and informed thinkers, the predicament of overshoot and collapse of the world’s civilization is certainly real.

So, acceptance of reality means making the most of the present rather than holding on to hope of change for the better in the future. Accordingly, he speaks pointedly about hopium, that is, holding on to false hopes that prevents us from accepting reality.

Memento mori for us individuals means that we live as meaningfully and as purposefully as possible now, fully realizing that we will die at some point in the future.

Rightly understood, memento mori is not a morbid dwelling on our approaching death, whenever that may be, but a healthy emphasis on living life to the fullest today, and every day.

Perhaps this significant idea needs to be applied more broadly: since the collapse of the world as we know it is inevitable, we need to make our existence in this world now as meaningful as possible, living in this post-doom time with no gloom.

This is a fruitful way for us older people to think. But what about our grandchildren (a disturbing matter I plan to write about next month)?

In spite of all I have learned from Michael Dowd, I have a couple of lingering questions/criticisms of his central emphases.

1) He repeatedly talks about the collapse of more than 100 civilizations in the past, emphasizing that the current industrial civilization’s collapse will be similar to those. But it seems to me that his point would be made more strongly if he talked more clearly about the uniqueness of TEOTWAWKI.

None of the collapsed civilizations of the past were as global in scope as the impending collapse, which could—and likely will!—mean a “mass extinction.” According to National Geographic, there have been five mass extinctions in the history of the earth; the sixth has already started.**

The Nat Geo article says the sixth mass extinction may occur as soon as 2260; Dowd says it is most likely to occur in this century. so why, I wonder, does he repeatedly emphasize the collapse of human civilizations in the past 4,000 years, none of which, obviously, led to mass human extinction.

2) Dowd repetitively emphasizes the futile nature of all human efforts to prevent collapse. All current attempts to stem global warming are based on the belief—or at least the hope—that that activity can and will result in reversal of collapse. Dowd refers to all such efforts as hopium.

But even if all human actions are insufficient to deter mass extinction, which they probably are, surely that doesn’t mean that concerted efforts would not postpone that fate to some extent, and maybe even significantly.

Concern for my grandchildren and now for my two great-grandchildren, makes me want to do more to help push as far into the future as possible what might well be sure mass extinction.

If we take seriously memento mori as individuals, we still do what we can to postpone our death, which is sure to occur at some point.

Similarly, if we apply the concept of memento mori to the present world civilization, shouldn’t we wholeheartedly do all we can to delay the coming collapse/extinction for as long as possible?

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* Last year I mentioned Dowd in four blog posts; the first times are here and here.

**The last mass extinction occurred about 66 million years ago, long before the first civilization of homo sapiens, which began less than 4,500 years ago.