End Times

[...] Parfit disagreed, writing the following in his 1984 book Reasons and Persons: “Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history. The difference between [possibilities] 2 and 3 may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of history.”

Extinction, as the environmental slogan goes, is forever.19 The true horror of the end of the world is measured not by our own deaths, and the deaths of everyone we know and love, not just by the deaths of our children and grandchildren, but by the nullification of all who would come after them, all those who would live and love and carry this species forward. An existential risk realized is the death of the future.

People have changed, of course. We’ve largely abandoned hideous practices like slavery, expanded the circle of human rights, and fought for the power to rule ourselves. But those changes mostly fed the engine of growth, and put more power in the hands of individuals, to be used for good or ill. Short of a fundamental political or even spiritual revolution, what I can’t see changing is that primal human drive to expand.

Perhaps I’m suffering from a failure of imagination. The Marxist political theorist and literary critic Fredric Jameson, after all, once wrote that it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” But everywhere I’ve traveled on this planet, I’ve seen people who want more. More for themselves, and more for their children. Who will tell them they can’t have it, even if it may cost the world?

So we must run faster, as if we’re running for our lives.

— Bryan Walsh, End Times, 2019.