I attended a lecture this week from teacher and author Michael Goheen. He said something striking and it's worth noting. Here's my paraphrase: how you understand the end of the world will inform what you believe your mission to be.
The band, R.E.M., used to close many of their concerts with their song 'it's the end of the world as we know it...and I feel fine.' Interestingly, the song is informative and not far from Goheen's point. To feel fine about your mission, you must come to grips with what you believe about the end of the world. But, for many, the world may never end and for others, this is simply paranoia. But, think about it. Goheen's point is that the end of the story informs what we believe our part to be in the story. In fact, Goheen writes,
Heaven, which has been separated...by sin...now is joined in harmonious unity with earth.
(it's worth reading the entire article here)
For example, if you think the end of the story is that every person in the world has access to clean water, then your participation will most likely include digging wells and finding ways to get clean water. If you think that the end of the story includes all of humanity being in a certain economic state, then you will most likely save money or seek to give people access to money. In other words, the end informs the now.
It's worth pondering as we seek to engage globally and interact around the world. One could indeed say, if you don't know where you're going, well, that's a problem. As one writer has put it, if you aim at nothing you will hit it every time.
-bo
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I agree with your main point and I think it's a good one, but something Goheen claims strikes me as misleading: "if one believes the end of history is annihilation, that there is no life beyond this one and that the world and all humanity will be destroyed, then that person will seek to get all the pleasure out of life in the present."
My own thoughts about the probable end of history are the sort Goheen would find pessimistic. With Bernard Williams, I suspect Nietzsche "got it right when he said that once upon a time there was a star in a corner of the universe, and a planet circling that star, and on it some clever creature who invented knowledge; and then they died, and the star went out, and it was as though nothing had happened." But this hardly means that I'm a simple hedonist--or that consistency would lead me to be one. Why should the very distant outcome of "the world and all humanity" undermine my reasons to be a good father, to develop my friendships, or to care about what is true? Isn't it bizarre to think that the reasons we have to be concerned with one another's welfare depend upon whether or not the human species goes extinct in a 10,000 years, or whether or not, in 500 million years, the earth should fall into the sun?
But if there isn't some ultimate end which actually drives out/answers in totality the world's problems (or even our own interpersonal problems) with which we base our "now" on......what is to ultimately stop us from becoming tried and true cynics without any hope/care/concern about adding to or subtracting from the world and the "hell-hole" it is digging?
Mark Kaech,
I suspect that despair and the retreat to cynicism are psychological tendencies which, while understandable in certain circumstances, are hardly ever rationally required.
Consider a man who has worked all his life towards the goal of retiring to a warm Caribbean island. Whenever his co-workers are jerks or life becomes difficult, he turns his thoughts to an image of a small fishing boat beached in white sand in the feathery shade of a coconut palm. But let's suppose that suddenly, in his early fifties, this man loses his retirement savings to Bernie Madoff, or that he is diagnosed with cancer, or that some environmental catastrophe engulfs the Caribbean. We'd understand it when this man then experiences a sudden and severe loss of motivation.
So likewise, it seems to me, we can understand the reaction of despair that a person experiences at the thought that there is no afterlife--when an afterlife is what this person had hoped for and expected. (To a lesser extend, I suppose this can also happen with regard to disappointments about the cosmic destiny of this planet. But this I think is more comical: I imagine six-year old Calvin moping around with Hobbes and insisting that the fact the sun will burn out in five billion years destroys any reason he might have had to do his homework.)
But such despair, as I said, is hardly ever rationally required. This is obvious, I think, to most people who have never lived with the hope of heaven, never counting upon it as an eventual reward. And for those who survive the temporary despair of the loss of this hope, I think that they usually find that many of the reasons they formerly had for getting up in the morning survive pretty much intact. They'll find that they still have reason to mow their lawn, to love their spouses, and to care about health care reform.
I'd like to hear what you think, but I felt that this point was forcefully observed in Cormac McCarthy's book The Road, when, with every ground for hope for the future removed, the father still finds himself with plenty of motivation in his daily struggle to take care of his son, and to do his best by him. What struck me was how, in such a context, this motivation appeared so entirely reasonable.
I don't disagree with your sentiment in that annihilation and its link to hedonism may be overstated. I do think there should be an overarching narrative or larger story that governs life and thus informs not only the end, but the means as well....see also my earlier post on GK Chesterton who speaks to stories well....