To Mourn or to Hope: Mark C. Taylor as a Knight of Faith

To Mourn or to Hope

Reflections on Mark C. Taylor as a Knight of Faith

A talk by Jack Miles

University of California, Santa Barbara

February 28, 2024

Thank you, Tom, for that gracious introduction and for this invitation to join a group of Mark C. Taylor’s students and colleagues, some of long standing, others just arrived, in reflection upon his work—including even his most recent, still forthcoming After the Human, a work that that synthesizes with candor and in depth the interlocking factors that make, unmake, and remake our world and our intervolving selves within it; a work that, for me, completes the large arc that Mark opened in 2009 with his landmark After God. 

I have had the honor and pleasure of following Mark’s work from his second published book to this latest, still-forthcoming effort, and of being his friend from before even his first book was published, which is to say from when we met in 1968 as graduate students and neighbors at Harvard University.  The title of my remarks today is “To Mourn or to Hope.” The subtitle is “Reflections on Mark C. Taylor as a Knight of Faith.”  

The perhaps ever-so-slightly cheeky subtitle grows out of my experience of my atheist friend not just through reading his published work but also through an ongoing correspondence with him that has grown, since the use of email first became widespread in the 1990s, to almost daily exchanges. He was an early adopter of email, you will not be surprised to hear. Me he had to goad into it, and, to tell the truth, I still have my reservations. 

I offer this bit of personal history as context for beginning my reflections today with an email message that I received from Mark on New Year’s Eve 2023, as we were all midway in our annual Great American Exercise in assessing the old year and prognosticating the new. Mark’s New Year’s Eve message included the following:

As I have watched friends and relatives age over the years, I have been struck by how often they come to believe that the world is going to hell. This does not necessarily mean that they turn nostalgic, [though] that is often part of it. Rather, it has seemed to me that believing things are getting worse makes it easier [for them] to leave the world.

How can we avoid falling into the trap of thinking the world is going to hell and that this time the possibility of the end is different? As you know better than anybody, that’s an ancient story. I’m not sure, but I do know that having kids and being a teacher change[s] the stakes. As you know, for someone who has spent much of his life reading, teaching and writing about [Søren Kierkegaard] {he wrote SK}, hope does not come easily. I’ve said and written that a question I often ask myself is how far into the night I should take my students. What I know as my end nears is that I owe them hope even if it is difficult to affirm. At the end of the day, or at the end of my days, that’s what After the Human is about. 

When Mark writes that I, Jack Miles, know better than anybody that the apocalyptic fear or fantasy is an ancient story, he alludes to the fact that I am general editor of The Norton Anthology of World Religions and have seen the ancient story manifested in various guises. This is quite true, and I accept the tacit compliment but today choose to turn it into a challenge. From a very broad religious perspective, I maintain, it need not be a trap to accept the possibility or even to resign oneself to the likelihood that this time is indeed different; that this time, irreversible climate failure is indeed ending life on Planet Earth as we have known it; that this time the prophets of apocalyptic doom are telling the simple truth: the doom is already all too visibly descending upon us. 

Apocalypsis in Greek does not mean “catastrophe.” Though the word apocalypse has come to mean “catastrophe” in English, the Greek word means “revelation.” I should add perhaps that the biblical book called Apocalypse or Revelation reveals a future in which after great tribulation this world ends and another begins, one so happy that in it “every tear shall be wiped away.” So, the original biblical apocalypse ends as a true divine comedy.

Sadly, what climate science has revealed to us, its revelatory apocalypse, is a catastrophe without a happy ending. We have seen this catastrophe beginning to occur in our own daily lives. We have all the evidence we need to be quite sure that our governments will not avail themselves of the remedies that once were available. The fight to stabilize the climate that we live in just as much as we live in our own homes has been lost. We are looking at a chess board on which early mistaken moves cannot be taken back, and though checkmate has not yet occurred, we can see from the board that it will undoubtedly occur. To acknowledge all this is not to fall into a trap, although to rescue Mark’s metaphor, it may be to recognize that a trap has sprung and that we are now inescapably caught in it.

A particular favorite of mine among Mark Taylor’s books is his brief, brilliant 2021 monograph for Columbia University Press, Intervolution: Smart Bodies, Smart Things. The first chapter in that book begins with the striking sentence, “If you can understand the ‘artificial’ pancreas I wear on my belt, you can understand the world now emerging in our midst.” Mark is severely diabetic. The pancreas that he wears on his belt is a state-of-the-art insulin pump doing for him what the normal pancreas does for non-diabetics. What makes his pancreas artificial is, above all, artificial intelligence, and much of Intervolution is an introduction to AI made compelling by the author’s literally physical involvement with his subject. 

The first version of the artificial pancreas that Mark wears was released with a glitch, and I recall him telling me what it was like for the device to awaken him in the middle of the night with the loud signal that it was failing; what it was like to then call the support desk at the manufacturer for help and get an answer that did not work; then to call again and again and get a different answer from each successive technician. I mean, people, it’s one thing when your iPhone freezes and you get frustratingly different answers from Apple. It’s another when it’s your pancreas that is failing!

No surprise, then: throughout this book, Mark is as keenly sensitive to the risks and dangers posed by AI as to the promise. This double awareness is on especially vivid display in his concluding chapter, “Intervolutionary Future.” Yet alongside that awareness, I discern something that approaches a solemn commitment in the last paragraph in the book, a paragraph that gestures back to the opening sentence with its mention of the artificial pancreas: 

To the question I ask my students—Do you think evolution stops with us and we are the last form of life?—my answer is a resounding “No!” Human being, like every other form of life, is but a single chapter in a much longer story whose beginning and end forever elude our grasp. Though we cannot know with certainty what comes next, I suspect that in the years to come human beings and machines will become even more closely interrelated until the so-called natural and so-called artificial become indistinguishable. AI will become part of “my” mind, and what had been prostheses will become organs of “my” body. Then I will no longer have to wear “my” pancreas on my belt. At this tipping point, the form of life that once was known as human will intervolve into something we cannot imagine. “My” pump and the networks it supports and that support it have allowed me to participate in a process Hegel aptly describes as “the arising and passing away that does not arise and pass away” longer than I would have been able to without them. This is not immortality, but it is enough for me as I give way to whatever comes next.

Readers of Mark Taylor’s work will likely have come across more than once his claim that religion is most itself when least recognized or organized as such. As it is for others in this philosophy of anonymous religion, so it is also for him. His religion is most itself where he least acknowledges it as religion by that name. I submit that the brave wager with which he ends Intervolution, facing down all the dangers that he himself has just enumerated, is his faith – faith in the core biblical sense of trust or confidence rather than the contemporary sense of intellectual assent --  and that like Pascal’s famous wager, Mark’s faith, his meliorist trust in the future may be embraced or refused by his readers, just as Pascal’s wager has been embraced or refused through the three centuries and more since he wrote. 

None of us engages religion for the first time in adulthood. For all of us, one way or another, the religious question is first posed in childhood and perhaps, in some ways, most profoundly then. In the third-person introduction to A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life, the 2022 book excerpting Mark’s and my Covid correspondence, one may read the following about his early formation:

Mark’s recalling in 2020 that the “whole Earth” image was first seen at the end of 1968 bespoke his respect for science as the son of a high school science teacher in prosperous Westfield, New Jersey. Both his parents were teachers (his mother taught literature), and, “in our family,” as he wrote in 2007, “school was church and books were scripture. More Protestant than they ever realized, my parents always assumed that teaching was a vocation. It took me many years to understand that this is one of the primary reasons teaching has always been so important to me.”

I trace the somber elegance of the concluding paragraph in Intervolution to the lasting influence of Mark’s mother, the literature teacher. What I see in the same paragraph’s inspiring vision of science conferring immortality upon us by way of artificial intelligence is a confession of faith that may be traced to his father, the science teacher. I confess, however, and confess is definitely the right word here, that though Mark Taylor is indeed at such moments a man of faith, his is a faith – a trust, a confidence -- that I do not share, at least not on the terms proposed. To best illustrate where, to quote Ivan Karamazov, I “hand back the ticket,” let me simply introduce a negative, the word not, into the key sentence in that beautiful paragraph: 

Though we cannot know with certainty what comes next, I suspect that in the years to come human beings and machines will NOT become even more closely interrelated until the so-called natural and so-called artificial become indistinguishable.

Why not? Simply because, as I have already begun to argue, runaway global warming – what UN Secretary General Guterres calls global boiling and I think of as global burning -- will bring the entire intervolutionary adventure to a brutal, externally imposed halt. In principle, it could certainly have continued. In practice, it will stall out, for climate failure will mean the failure of science to continue as the richly funded enterprise we have known. The scientific enterprise will slow to a halt once the planetary ecological matrix necessary for its continuation has collapsed. Climate failure will entail this failure amid a cascade of other failures. Silicon Valley is already laying off workers en masse. So is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I grant, of course, as we all must, that we cannot know with certainty what comes next, and in any case the cascade of failures that I speak of will not occur all at once as in our endless stream of post-apocalyptic movies. What is now so foreseeable as to seem inevitable looks more like a parade than like a cascade. But I believe that we can know to a near certainty that the economic and political powers that be in our world will fail to do what must be done to save the human habitat, that the habitat will fail with their failure, and that we stand, therefore, at the start of a relentless and hideous cavalcade of ruin.

You may have noticed that in the previous paragraph I spoke of global warming, global boiling, global burning, and climate failure. I did not speak of climate change. The phrase “climate change” is a euphemism introduced to replace “global warming” with something more anodyne, something that suggests the harmless changeability of weather. But we are not looking at mere variability. We are looking at collapse.

Mark is fully aware of the peril that faces us. Early in After the Human, he writes:

Things are now so out of balance that we may be past the point of no return. We have become an invasive species whose voracious appetites are destroying the host, without which we cannot survive. 

What is to be done to delay this eventuality and is there enough time to do it? While the answer is not clear, to throw up one’s hands in despair will make the catastrophic outcome inevitable.

Where he writes “While the answer is not clear…,” I ask, “What is to be done once the answer does become clear, and we know that we are in fact past the point of no return?” Mark writes on the same early page:

Our age requires what early Christian theologians called metanoia – a spiritual and philosophical conversion to a non-anthropocentric vision that promotes hope in spite of despair. 

He continues:

The position I develop in the following pages is Radical Relationalism in which divisive oppositions and conflictual activity give way to codependent and coemergent symbiosis in which everything becomes itself in and through the probabilistic entangled play of differences.

Though philosophically stated, and with meticulous attention to each successive word, this vision boldly reinscribes the Peaceable Kingdom of Isaiah 11:6 where “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” 

But will this dream come true? And if what is called for is religious conversion, to whom shall the threatened world turn for help if not to the leaders of organized religion? Prof. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, the Hindu atmospheric scientist to whom Janet Napolitano, as president of the University of California, turned for help in preparing the set of scalable climate-stabilization measures that then-Governor Jerry Brown took to the COP 28 conference in Paris in 2015, had earlier worked as a consultant to Pope Francis in preparation of the pope’s climate encyclical Laudato Si’. “Ram” Ramanathan is of the opinion that the global metanoia that Mark speaks of cannot possibly be obtained without fully mobilizing the world’s organized religions, organization being, of course, crucial to every effort to stabilize the climate. Such, until very recently, was my aspiration as well, and it was in that vein that I was the one humanist invited to contribute to Bending the Curve, the report that Gov. Brown took with him to Paris. I was hopeful, in other words, as late as 2015, but 2023 has tipped me into despair. 

Accordingly, I want to argue this evening, against Mark, that throwing up one’s hands in despair, as he puts it, cannot make a catastrophe inevitable if it is inevitable already. In other words, I want in some way to dignify or valorize despair – call it resignation if you will -- as an intellectually and emotionally appropriate and even salutary response to the now virtually certain failure of the climate that has underpinned human life and human progress as we have known them and therewith also of the modernist faith – never, of course, acknowledged as faith – so massively grounded upon the continuation of human life and human progress as we have known them.

Twenty-five years ago, I wrote an essay entitled “Global Requiem: The Apocalyptic Moment in Art, Religion, and Science.” At that time, back in 1999, I was poised between optimism and pessimism regarding the imminence of ecological disaster but clearly tilting toward optimism. Through the ensuing years, however, and most especially over this past year, I have reached or at least all but reached a tipping point. Mark would say that I have finally succumbed to the old man’s temptation of Après moi le déluge. For now, I retort that my perception of an encroaching downfall, a climate failure, is genuinely different because it derives uniquely from, on the one hand, our knowledge of deep geological history as begun by Charles Lyell and continued in our day by the cosmogenic nuclide dating of ice cores and, on the other hand, from our painful awareness of species extinction as initiated, of course, by Charles Darwin and continued in our day by the Sixth Great Extinction now proceeding at an accelerating pace. Other apocalyptic revelations or intimations of global mortality have been mythological or at best intuitive. This one is different. This one is empirically grounded and, for that matter, impersonal. It is happening, whether you or I or anyone we know gives it even a moment’s thought and with lethal potential for every project that we think we or others around us have under way.

To determine whether I am right to despair in this way, right to hand back the faith ticket that Mark offers, I will, before concluding this talk, share with you a selection of late-breaking climate news of the sort that has moved me to infer that, yes, the climate contest is most probably over, and we have lost. Before doing that, however, I ask your indulgence as I quote a few paragraphs from the opening of my earlier meditation on this very subject, hoping that – today, twenty-five years after I wrote it -- its relevance within today’s talk will become evident as I read. Do, please, listen very carefully to the opening quotation from the Bible.

Global Requiem

The Apocalyptic Moment in Art, Religion, and Science

The title of Ernest Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, came from the King James Version of the Bible, more exactly from the opening of the Book of Ecclesiastes:

        The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose….

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.  (Ecclesiastes 2:1-9)

The Book of Ecclesiastes is an example of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament or Tanakh.  Biblical wisdom differs from biblical prophecy in that God, who sometimes promises through his prophets that he will indeed do something new under the sun, is expected in wisdom literature to do no such thing.  Unlike prophecy, wisdom envisions the future of the natural world as the continuation without change of the past.  Vain illusion is overcome and relative peace achieved when the striving of human beings, each with just a brief lifetime to live, is seen against this backdrop of natural eternity: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever."  

….

Not all great literature and by no means all major religious traditions teach a wisdom that entails this kind of resignation to death as a part of the human condition.  There are religious traditions, especially in the West, that promise victory over death, and there are works of imaginative literature that celebrate a reckless defiance of death that verges on outright denial of its reality.  Within the Bible, the voice of prophecy--exulting with St. Paul "O death, where is thy sting?  O grave, where is thy victory?” (I Corinthians 15:55)--is much louder than the voice of wisdom, and even secular art in the West often aspires to immortality through the undying fame of the artist or through the durability of the art itself. Thus, death can be defeated if, as Shakespeare’s sixty-fifth sonnet conventionally puts it,

..this miracle have might,

  That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Even in the Bible, however, and even in secular Western tradition, the voice of resignation to death is never entirely silenced; and particularly if we recall that the wisdom that links the Book of Ecclesiastes to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises also links it to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, this tradition may be regarded as a virtually perennial, virtually universal wisdom.

Within this universal wisdom, the typical function of the imagination has been to find ever more telling ways to contrast the brevity and vulnerability of human life and therefore the folly of human desire with the immemorial indifference of nature.  You and I may grieve at our own passing or the passing of a loved one. We may ask, like King Lear with the dead Cordelia in his arms,

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life

And thou no breath at all?

Yet we may be consoled that, though we pass away, the sun rises, and the sun sets, and the earth abides forever.  We may bring ourselves, by a spiritual discipline, into harmony with this whole.  There are different paths to this harmony, some more ancient, some more modern, but the essential psychological mechanism at work here is older than Ecclesiastes, older than the Epic of Gilgamesh, as old, perhaps, as fully human speech.

In our own day, however, this ancient wisdom, this primeval therapy, is being undercut by processes that are both spiritual and physical.  We have been in possession since Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin of a disturbing new awareness that nature too has a history.  It does not abide forever.  This alone is enough to undercut the age-old contrast between the temporality of mankind and the eternity of nature.  But more recently that disruption has acquired a corollary. If the first generations that assimilated Darwin's thought were concerned with the origin of species, our own is concerned in an unprecedented way with the extinction of species and, above all, with the threat of extinction that faces the human species.  During the 1850s, while Darwin was concluding The Origin of Species, the rate of extinction is believed to have been one every five years.  Today, the rate of extinction is estimated at one every nine minutes.  

…

As this paradigm shift takes place in the realm of politics and activist science, another change looms in the realm of the imagination and, perhaps also, in the practice of religion.  If the earth is failing as a viable habitat for our species, then we can no longer imagine our individual deaths, as we have so long been accustomed to do, against a backdrop of continuing life.  As we cease to do so, as we recontextualize our personal deaths in the emerging prospect of species death, can there, should there be a religious wisdom that will accept species death as if it were personal death?  Can a new William Cullen Bryant write a new "Thanatopsis" in which "The paths of glory lead but to the grave" not just for each man and woman but for the human species as a whole?  Beyond even that, can we resign ourselves in advance not just to extinction of our species but to the extinction of the terrestrial biosphere as we know it, consoling ourselves perhaps that the planets will still orbit the sun even when the one planet that for some few millions of years supported life no longer does so? 

Or should we, instead, repudiate this ancient wisdom as unwisdom and turn instead to the prophetic option, the path of protest and refusal rather than the path of acquiescence and acceptance?  Do we prepare to die with dignity, or do we shed all dignity and prepare to fight to the death?  Shakespeare, heir to both biblical options, captured both in astonishingly few words in the greatest of all his soliloquys:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 

[the wisdom option]

Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them

[the prophetic option].

The religions of the world have resources for either option; but whether we consider religion or art, the choice we face is an historic one, for step by step, the earth, which once seemed to abide forever, now seems to be dying around us.

In each part of the world the omens of this death are different.  I grew up in Chicago, on the shore of Lake Michigan, and found a kind of peace, at different seasons of the year and of my early life, walking along the lakefront.  A moment of ecological truth came for me when in 1987 I read William Ashworth's somber, brilliant book The Late Great Lakes: An Environmental History (Alfred A. Knopf).  Lake Michigan, which had seemed so timeless, was dying faster than I was.  Before my own life was over, it might become a vast vat of chemicals, as devoid of life as ashes in a funerary urn.  The ancient lake and my still young self seemed almost to be exchanging places.  Unsettlingly, it was I who seemed to have the longer life expectancy.

…

What will be the consequences for religion and for the arts, especially literature, if and when we conclude that the effort to produce a sustainable society has definitively failed?  Long before the human species is extinct, we may know that we are irreversibly en route to extinction.  Just as any of us may discover tomorrow that he is not just mortal but actually dying of an incurable disease, so we may discover as a species that we are not just endangered but actually doomed and that within a foreseeable, measurable time span.  Such a prognosis, if it comes, surely will not come as it does in the disaster movies that are now so strangely popular; namely, with a warning that unless a given action is taken within ten days or ten hours, the world will end.  No, it will come rather as an accumulation of ignored warnings from scientists and science journalists and an ensuing consensus that the opportunity to take the action that would have saved the species has come and gone.  At that scientifically apocalyptic moment, should it be reached, and we can certainly imagine it being reached, actual extinction may still be far enough in the future that there will be time for a new kind of religion and a new kind of art to develop.  These will be, no doubt, a religion and an art born of despair, but religion and art--far more than politics or commerce or science--are precisely those products of the human spirit to which we turn in times of despair.  The last days of the human race may be, not to speak at all flippantly, our finest hour. 

My article goes on from there, but I have deliberately stopped quoting it at the point in it where I saw the “scientifically apocalyptic moment” as a moment that we could imagine ourselves reaching. Twenty-five years later, I see that moment as one that we have now demonstrably reached. I will address only a bit later the question of what kind of art or religion might retain validity in the face of this dark recognition. At this point, let me offer four suggestive considerations in support of my contention that the climate cause is lost.

First, there is the simple fact that 2023 was the warmest year on record, arguably the warmest year in 125,000 years, and a sign to some climate scientists that the pace of global warming is accelerating. And the heat beat goes on: January 2024 was the hottest January ever measured. Last year was the year when the heat ceiling of 1.5 degrees Celsius – the ceiling whose breach the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has officially sought to avoid since 2010 -- was breached for the first time. Next year or the year after, to be sure, the temperature may dip below 1.5 degrees Celsius again. What matters so much more is that the overall curve is relentlessly upward and that not one of the factors bending it upward has been restrained significantly enough to bend it downward in time. 2023 was a year in which the Amazon rain forest suffered from drought, the Swiss glaciers lost 10% of their mass, unprecedented forest fires raged in Canada and, more devastatingly, in Greece. Every week, in fact almost every day, brings news of another unprecedented weather event, and it has become plainer than ever that there will be no “new normal.” There will be only the commencement of what Amitav Ghosh wrote so penetratingly about in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable—namely, an era of unknown length in which it will no longer make sense to speak of any flood as a 500-year flood or any fire as a 1,000-year fire, for the kind of stability implied in such statements will have been lost beyond all recovery. Everything will be unprecedented because precedent itself will be a thing of the past.

Second, 2023 was the year when the United Nations Climate Change “Conference of the Parties” or COP met for the 28th time since 1997 in, astonishingly, the United Arab Emirates, one the world’s most extravagant petrostates. The conference was attended by some 1200 fossil fuel lobbyists, their number quite dwarfing the number of climate scientists in attendance. On the eve of the gathering, UN Climate Change released a “Global Stocktake” report characterizing what the twenty-seven previous COP conferences had collectively achieved as mere inconsequential “baby steps.” What was required to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees, the report said, was nothing less than a 43% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared to 2019 levels. The means to achieve this reduction are in hand, the report said, but, my friends, they have been in hand for a long while. What seemed beyond obvious on the eve of COP 28 was that the available means of climate stabilization had not been and clearly would not be adequately deployed in time. A depressing kind of proof came when the final documents of COP 28 dared to include the dread words “fossil fuel” for the first time and this inclusion was regarded as a major breakthrough. Twenty-six years of baby steps, twenty-eight meetings, and only now a first mention of the poison to which industrial civilization is addicted? Having effectively despaired of holding the globe under 1.5 degrees of heating above pre-industrial levels, scientists now hope to hold it below 2 degrees Celsius, once see as something close to a worst-case outcome. This is their fallback position, but, realistically, what hope do they have of better compliance with their recommendations in the generation to come than in the generation just past? Twenty-eight more such COP meetings seem, sadly, so unlikely to make a difference that our crossing the 2 degrees Celsius line seems inevitable. And Ramanathan, though a techno-optimist, believes that there is a one-in-twenty chance of a four- or five-point rise by the end of the century – in other words, a one-in-twenty chance of a climate crash. He regularly asks his audiences whether, if you knew that an airplane had a one-in-twenty chance of crashing, you would put your child or grandchild on that flight.

Third, 2023 was the year in which it became steadily more likely if not all but certain that Donald J. Trump would reclaim the U.S. presidency, and, so far, 2024 has only lengthened the odds against Joseph Biden. I had hoped deep into last year that criminal convictions of Trump for his actions on January 6, 2021, would swing enough voters into the Biden camp to win his re-election. But the tardiness of Attorney General Garland in bringing charges and the gratuitous delays imposed by Republican judges have by now made a Trump conviction before the November 2024 election unlikely. 

The return of Trump brings two phrases to my mind from, once again, Hamlet’s immortal soliloquy: “the proud man’s contumely” and “the law’s delay.” Here is the immediate context:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th’unworthy takes….

The proud man’s contumely… the law’s delay. With Trump back in the White House, the years 2025 to 2028 will be like the years 2017 to 2020.  Trump, who in his first term as president withdrew the United States from the 2015 Paris climate accords, will do so again. He has declared global warming a “Chinese hoax,” and in no area of his first term was his destructive achievement better organized or more consequential that in his gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency and his reversal of the measures that the Obama administration had taken to conform to the Paris climate accords. The probable return to the White House of Donald J. Trump is a major reason to despair that mitigating climate action will be taken by the one nation without whose leadership in this area there can be no hope of global action in defense of the human habitat. Under Republican rule, the United States will cease to be a world leader, no longer the linchpin of NATO, no longer an honest broker in the Middle East, no longer a Pacific as well as an Atlantic power, and above all no longer the moral center of what was once called the Free World in addressing impending climate failure as the supreme moral issue of our era.

Fourth, market forces, the free market, will not succeed in achieving what governments have failed to achieve. Two major stories came out of the annual gathering of business and government leaders at Davos late in 2023: first, the business leaders do expect Trump to be the next president of the United States; second, climate change, which once did seem to be nearing the top of their agenda, has sunk well below the top. In 2023, what they all wanted to talk about was artificial intelligence. They saw it coming—the sale of Open AI for $80 billion, the $1.97 trillion market valuation of Nvidia, and so forth. Meanwhile, well below the plutocratic heights of Davos, examples of local, ad hoc confirmation that business is choosing the short term over the long come readily to hand. I offer just one.

California was once a champion of renewable energy, most notably in the form of rooftop solar panels. But as it dawned on the major utilities that they were on the verge of buying energy from the very customers to whom they had once sold energy, they knew that radical government intervention was called for to preserve their market dominance. They had to put a stop to the regulatory policy that had so fatally encouraged rooftop solar. And they did put a stop to it. They prevailed on the California Public Utilities Commission, its members all appointed by their friend Gov. Gavin Newsom, to reverse the prior policy with one that requires installation of prohibitively expense storage batteries whenever solar panels are installed. As a result, installation of rooftop solar dropped by 85% in some months of 2023, and solar panel companies are deserting the sabotaged California market.

These four considerations can only be persuasive to the extent that they are representative. They stand for the accumulation of news, breaking, as already noted, on an almost daily basis, that make it less plausible by the day to believe that climate failure can somehow be avoided. 

I ask you now, bearing these four enumerated considerations in mind, to stipulate if only as a mental experiment, that I am right to despair, and Mark is wrong to hope. Then what? What follows? Where are we left?

Very well, at this juncture, let me turn to the final, epilogue chapter in After the Human, which Mark entitles “After Thought.”

On the first pages of this chapter, Mark encapsulates in a short paragraph the same dilemma that I presented a few moments ago by quoting from my paper “Global Requiem.” He begins with hope:

Death is the end of the world for an individual, but the human race goes on. While I doubt a personal afterlife, I believe that we continue to live on in those who come after us. 

But he then immediately faces up to what I call the condition for despair, writing:

At some level, we all know that one day in the distant future the sun will burn out and life on earth will come to an end. But if the end were not the predicted 7 to 8 billion years away but were imminent? We live in the shadow of nuclear catastrophe, global pandemics, climate apocalypse and only the willfully blind can deny the possibility of human extinction.

With the prospect of species extinction as distinct from individual death thus squarely on the table, how does Mark choose to engage it? As it happens, his beloved brother, Beryl, known to the family as Butch, died last May, and Mark’s grandchildren attended the memorial and the disposal of the ashes at Gettysburg, where the Taylor family has deep roots. For the grandchildren, their granduncle’s death and burial was a first and doubtless formative confrontation with mortality. Then, just a matter of weeks later, Mark’s nine-year-old grandson, Jackson, visiting his grandfather over the 4th of July weekend, ventured an opinion or perhaps a speculation that quite startled my old friend. Jackson volunteered, apropos of nothing, that “people have enslaved the world; maybe it would be better if there were no people.” 

Ever the challenging teacher, Mark promptly assigned the little boy to write an essay developing this thought. Jackson’s two-paragraph essay read as follows:

Humans have enslaved the world. When we walk our dog Sadie, she must be on a leash. Animals are taken from their homes and are put in cages at the zoo. We also eat animals for dinner like cows, chickens, turkeys, and pigs. If we weren’t here all the animals could be free in their natural habitat. We are always doing stuff to hurt our planet. Air conditioners use a lot of energy and pollute the air. We also cut grass and trees to make our yards look nice. This leads to global warming.

What would it look like if humans didn’t exist? All the animals could live in their habitats happily. Every plant could grow as much as it wants. There will be no houses to take up space and no roadkill. Animals would still fight without humans, but we make it worse. The earth would be good without humans. There is no easy answer.

Let me quote again a sentence from the New Year’s Eve message with which I began my talk. Mark wrote then: “I’ve said and written that a question I often ask myself is how far into the night I should take my students.” He had indeed said and written this line about taking his students into the night before, and I had indeed read and heard it before. Part of being someone’s best friend is that you do hear some of their favorite thoughts more than once. This particular thought, however, I had always silently resisted because in my experience of little boys—at Harvard I worked in the Big Brothers program—and even in my memory of being a little boy, night was more darkly, threateningly present, very much as in Jackson’s comment to his grandfather, than in my experience of adults, myself and most of my adult acquaintances. Arthur Koestler once wrote that we do not outgrow adolescence, we just overgrow it. It remains there, beneath the overgrowth, and so too, much more deeply buried, do the terrors of early childhood. But adults are generally happy to allow these terrors to remain buried out of sight and out of mind. Adults, unlike children, conform to a learned social compact that says, “Don’t worry, things will work out all right, they always do.” Children, especially precociously bright children like Mark’s grandson, Jackson, have not yet acquired that socially adaptive adult habit of submerging their fears in the daily schedule of work and play and television. And so, at unexpected moments, we find them, young as they are, gazing into the abyss.

Mark describes himself as unnerved by his grandson’s speculation, which Jackson assured his grandfather, he had not picked up in school or from any friend. “I just thought about it myself,” he said. At this point in After the Human, Mark enlarges the canvas to include several contemporary thinkers who have entertained thoughts like Jackson’s at book length, beginning with Adam Kirsch, author of The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us. Mark chooses not to share with us what he said in commentary on his grandson’s homework. Not for a moment to fault him for keeping their exchange within the family, what I myself would like to do at this point is share with you what I would say if a granddaughter of mine – let’s call her Nuala -- were to challenge me as Jackson challenged Mark. 

This will be a first step toward keeping a promise I made to you earlier – a way, namely, to imagine a form of religion or art, or some blend of the two, that might grow out of the recognition that human extinction is bearing down upon us much more quickly than we ever feared it it would. 

Imagining now a deck or back porch, hear little Nuala coming to Grampa Jack and saying, out of the blue, just what Jackson said to Mark:

“People have enslaved the world; maybe it would be better if there were no people.” 

I reply to her:

“Well, my dear, it will take a long while, but eventually there will be no more people. So, maybe then it will be better for the animals, but I am not so sure."

“No more people?"

“Yes, like no more dinosaurs. You know about the dinosaurs, right?"

“Yeah, they looked like lizards, but big and scary, and they lived a long, long time ago."

“Right, but do you know why there are no dinosaurs now?"

“Um, I think I heard once, but I forget."

“They could only live in a warm climate, and for a lot of different reasons the climate turned cold, and then they died of the cold—not all at once, but little by little there fewer and fewer of them, and finally there were none at all."

“That’s so sad!"

“Yes, but, darling, most kinds of animal do eventually die out. We call that ‘extinction.’ We say, ‘They went extinct.’ We’re a kind of animal, we’re the human animal, and we will go extinct too."

“Why? What did we do?"

“It’s not a punishment, baby. It’s just that certain things that everybody you know does and that we do too are making the air gradually hotter and hotter. Whenever we drive our car, stuff comes out the tailpipe in the back. You’ve seen that in other cars and trucks when we’re on the road. And when it gets cold in the house, and we turn on the heat? Stuff comes out of the chimney, or when we go up in an airplane, same thing. It all comes from the fuel that we burn in the furnace or in the big motors. The parts of the fuel that don’t burn go up there and form an invisible blanket over the whole world, and the blanket stays there forever. You know how when you go to bed, the sheets are cold, but after a while, they get warm? That’s because the sheets hold in the heat that comes from your body. Well, that invisible blanket up there does the same thing for the whole world. It makes the world warmer and warmer and warmer the longer stuff keeps going up there and building the blanket.  But what can people do? The whole world can’t just stop driving and heating people’s houses. So, we’re just stuck."

“We can too stop driving. I can take my bike. And I don’t care about the cold."

“Nuala, you don’t even know about the cold. You don’t know what it’s like to be cold all the time and never able to get warm, like a homeless person. Anyway, for lots of the animals, it’s already too late. They’re already going extinct because of the warming that has already happened."

“Lots of the animals? Like how many?”

“Well, I can’t give you a number. But the scientists say that somewhere on the planet, some kind of animal or plant, maybe just a bug or a bird or something other little thing, disappears forever every eight minutes.”

“Every eight minutes? I’m going to cry. Can’t we do anything?”

“Sweetheart, good people have tried their hardest to do the things that they knew would stop the world from getting hotter and hotter, but now it’s too late. I mean, the world is not going to burn down overnight, but what the good people did just wasn’t enough. Now nobody can stop the world from getting warmer and warmer. It will stay pretty much the way it is until I die, but it will change more before your parents die, and I’m afraid I will change a lot more before you die, and not for the better. So, yes, it’s all very, very sad because this world around us is so wonderful. We love it, and we hate to see it go, but there is one thing we can do. Do you know what it is?"

“No, what?"

“We can mourn. Do you know what mourning is?"

“I think so. Like when Uncle Cormack died, right?"

“Right. Everybody was so sad. Some people cried. But people talked about what Cormack was like, all the good things he did, how funny he was, how kind he was, and how much we loved him.  We couldn’t bring him back, but we could do that."

“Yeah, but then it was over, and we went home."

“No, darling, we went home, but it wasn’t over. Cormack was my brother, and I am crying inside right now, just thinking about him and that he isn’t here anymore for me to talk to."

“But, Grampa, we can’t do that for the whole world!"

“Why can’t we, Nuala? We don’t love the world the way we loved Cormack, but we do love it. Why do you think we can’t mourn it? Mourning Cormack, feeling the pain in our love for him, brought us all close to each other. Mourning the world, well, maybe that can bring everyone in the whole world closer to each other."

“But, Grampa, would the mourning ever stop?”

My friends, this is all the imaginary back-porch chat we need to bring me to the exploratory conclusion of this talk. No one in this room is unaware of climate change. Everyone in this room lives with some mix of hope that the worst will not happen and fear that it will. Honestly, my feelings are comparably mixed, and I have engaged in several different, modest forms of climate activism. But indications are dreadfully strong, as I read them, strong enough to fill us with dread, that the world will stay on the fatal course it is now on and that not too very long past today’s date, it will indeed become clear that this regrettable course has become truly irreversible and that the modernist faith in the future that sustained us for so long can sustain us no longer. At that point, when we can see to a certainty that the worst will indeed happen, the choice between wisdom and prophecy presents itself in a new way.

Within the wisdom tradition, hope is essentially a secular, worldly-wise calculation that a desired if less than certain outcome can still be reasonably anticipated. When contrary evidence renders this anticipation unreasonable, the one secular or worldly option that remains is mourning, whence the elegiac tone in works like the Book of Ecclesiastes. Mourning is what can be done when nothing can be done. 

Within the prophetic tradition, however, hope rests on a different foundation than an inference from observable evidence. Prophetic hope is the hope of miraculous fertility that Abraham entertained as a knight of faith, to recall Kierkegaard’s famous phrase, even when instructed by Yahweh to slay his only legitimate son and burn the boy’s body on a sacrificial altar. The suggestive evidence that I have brought forward this evening makes my case that in retaining the hope that he retains, Mark C. Taylor is, like Abraham, a knight of faith. 

Earlier, I cast myself as Ivan, the rationalist among the three brothers Karamazov, and I offered rational arguments against secular hope, against the future envisioned in Intervolution and in After the Human. It was in that way that I handed back the ticket. But now, in good Jesuit fashion, I am distinguishing secular from religious hope and casting Taylor as Alyosha Karamazov, the mystical brother, who knows all that Ivan knows but is unshaken by it. Does the preponderance of secular, empirical evidence argue not for hope but for despair, despair that we and those who come after us have a lasting home in this world and in this intervolving culture? So be it: Mark Taylor hopes bravely on in the face of all this, and his hope makes him a knight of faith—or of faith, hope, and love.

A century and a half ago, a poet wrote about his loss of faith in lines that have had remarkable staying power. Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach,” wrote:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night wind, down to the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Though no one can know exactly what faith Arnold was thinking of when he coined the phrase “The Sea of Faith,” the usual assumption has been that he was thinking of Christianity, then already midway in its long, melancholy retreat. But Christian faith is not the only species of faith that can be found:

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

If in our secular American world, trust in government is gone, trust in academe is gone, trust in science is gone, trust in journalism is gone, trust in law and the judiciary is gone, and finally trust in the air we breathe and the water we drink and the landscapes we have known is gone, then another kind of faith than the Christian has failed, whatever name we choose to attach to this faith, and we can mourn that loss. But whether we hope or not within our mourning, let us at least allow the moment to draw us close together in love, for love is the condition of all honest grief and the fruit of every variety of hope. Whether we live in despair or in hope, love remains our refuge and our strength.

So it is that Arnold ends his poem

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain:

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

I began my remarks this evening pointing out something that after today’s set of remarkable papers is already obvious—namely, that others attending this conference will engage Mark Taylor’s work at depths that I cannot reach. Mine has been a more personal and more modest engagement, the effort of a friend rather than a full-strength colleague. By temperament, Mark is ordinarily more melancholic than I am, ordinarily, readier than I to accept the worst before it has happened. For example, he was certain a good year ago that President Biden has no chance to defeat Trump in the upcoming presidential election. Tonight, though, tonight, I have rather reversed our usual roles, for when it comes to climate failure, our time, if it is not quite yet a time to mourn for the world that has slipped from our grasp, may soon become such a time, and so I have argued. Yet Mark matches my reversal with his own, for he sees all that I see, and yet he perseveres in good faith, as we may rightly say of him, in offering hope to his children and grandchildren no less than to his beloved students. 

For my part, I end asking myself how best we can mourn the world we are losing once it becomes clear that there is indeed no secular, empirical hope of saving it? For me as a churchgoer, this is not a theoretical question of theology or philosophy but an artistic or, if you will, a liturgical question of religious practice. Requiems play a serious part in human life, even for the ostensibly irreligious. The breakthrough called for when the fight is finally finished and when only global requiem remains before us – this breakthrough will lie more in the realm of creativity than in that of further analysis. What kind of ritual or aesthetic performance, in what venues, accompanied by what music, repeated how often, lasting how long will suffice for such lamentation? Do we sing “Nearer, my God, to thee” as the ship goes down with the entire human species on board? Do we sing at all? Why wouldn’t we? What better to do? And why wouldn’t we tell jokes? If we can laugh, does that not argue that we are finally incapable of surrendering some last shred of hope, even as the world dies around us?

I am staggered by where this kind of questioning leads me, but along the way I know this: it leads me to love. Where ignorant armies clash by night, let us be true to one another, cost what it may, and who among us doubts that love can be costly? No matter: whether or not love is all we need, it may finally be all we have.

Thank you for your patience and for your attention.