Called to Resist Extinction—until we fail.

[1] What does it mean to have a calling—to live out vocation—if human civilization is headed for extinction?   Extinction, after all, is absolute in its finality.  Theologically, it is the unraveling of Creation.  It voids the relationship between God and God’s people, effectively terminating the Genesis injunction to “be fruitful and multiply” and “fill the earth”.     Extinction means the end—full stop—to vocation.  Once extinction happens, there is no one left to be called, and no neighbor left to serve.  Nothing.

[2] The question may seem wildly premature.  Human extinction in the physical sense is not likely to happen in the immediate future, assuming we are spared a full-blown nuclear exchange or a very sneaky asteroid or some universally lethal pandemic.  Nor is complete extinction likely to happen for decades, or even by the end of the twenty-first century, even according to the most dire estimates.  So isn’t the real extinction of humanity too far off to worry about?

[3] Any such complacency rests on a mis-framing of the question.  Extinction is not an end state that appears suddenly out of nowhere.  Rather, it is a road along which we travel–a dystopic process occurring within human history, not outside of it.  As a process, extinction arguably has started already.  Worrisome trends already are evident and likely will gather momentum over the next several decades. As the sinews of civilization and its supporting ecosystem “services” are cut away, piece by piece,  the number of extinct non-human species climbs slowly and inexorably;  the food chain is disrupted by species die-offs; lethal viruses are liberated from disturbed ecosystems;  climate change inexorably reduces the carrying capacity of the planet;  states fail; environmental refugees abandon their homes by the millions and are not welcome to put down roots elsewhere.  Rising temperatures alone may make much of the world uninhabitable by 2100, with unstoppable trends by 2050.  Rising temperatures engender feedback loops and interact with other disintegrative processes in ways that we are barely beginning to understand.

[4] Theologians already have started pondering the vocational significance of these disintegrative processes.  For example, Kristen Johnston Largen distinguishes natural from unnatural extinctions and argues that we are called to consent to the former and resist the latter.

In our current context, it is critical that we both accept the inevitability of our own death and the inevitability of species extinction.  Both are natural and built into the evolutionary mechanism of creation.  Yet, at the same time, it is equally critical that we mobilize all our resources and begin to turn the tide on the looming ecological disaster that is the sixth extinction.[1]

The odds worsen when we realize that it might take considerably less to bring about the effective extinction of humans than the disappearance of other species.  For nonhuman species, extinction requires the destruction of the material supports for life—call it “physical” extinction.   In contrast, the human species may require only whatever physical destruction is necessary to make life not worth living, through an unstoppable and irreversible erosion of past, present and future meanings.

[5] This “societal” (as opposed to physical) extinction involves 1) the loss of an experienced and remembered past, 2) the loss of an anticipated and lived-for future, and as a result 3) the loss of a worthwhile present.   The absence of all three dimensions of time is what sets societal extinction apart from other losses and marks extinction as nothing less than the undoing of Creation.  For Christians, the Genesis story signals not simply the beginning of life and the conditions for supporting life, but the beginning of meaning.  Meaning is embedded in time.   A lively sense of vocation presupposes a rich saturation of meaning in time past, present and future.

[6] Of course, meaning lacks stability and permanence.   To lose meaning is a normal aspect of human life; each successive generation loses most of the memories of the previous, thanks to the passage of time.  Parents and friends pass away; colleges, businesses and churches close.  All this is as normal as our own natural mortality which Largen calls “personal extinction”.

[7] Societal extinction, in contrast, involves an unstoppable erosion of past, present and future meaning in our lives.  We can see this starting to happen, as disasters and terrors undermine and destroy whole communities.  Wars ravage entire countries destroying past, present, and future.  Refugees have a bitter foretaste of societal extinction when they flee all that is precious to them.  To be sure, the people of the U.S. are less experienced in the progress of societal extinction than residents of regions at risk: low-lying islands, flood-prone Bangladesh, the desertifying sub-Saharan Africa, and other places where climate change is producing victims by the millions.  For them, the future is clouding over.  Societal extinction involves the unstoppable degrading of natural and human environments—the experience of being caught in crises that only get worse and never retreat or fade away.

The black hole of societal extinction

[8] What happens when all the meanings that occupy our social imaginary—including apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fantasies—disappear into a black hole of disruption and nothingness?  Once in my dreaming, I experienced the convergence of physical and societal extinction.  In the early 1980s, nuclear tensions ran high.  I dreamed I was floating over pristine Minnesota lake country—a landscape of clear lakes and deep green forests under fluffy white clouds against a pure blue sky.  As I floated along, I was suddenly startled to realize that these were no longer “lakes” or “trees” or “clouds” or “sky”.  All the natural features were there but had lost their names in a nuclear holocaust that had wiped out humanity.  In my nightmare, the first human’s work of naming was undone.  I felt unutterably sad that the human world of meaning—past, present, future–was completely wiped away.  But at least physical nature had survived, by whatever future name it might come to be known by some new species.

[9] My dream was tinged with sweet melancholy.  In contrast, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road offers a harsh and unsentimental answer to the question of what societal extinction might look like.[2]  The story follows a father and son who are making their way through the bleak greyness of the Allegheny Mountains.  The past is remembered only by the father, and the future looks unrelievedly grim.  Years earlier, nuclear war set off a “nuclear winter” which tipped the atmosphere into a flux of perpetual storminess, and effectively put an end to photosynthesis.  Humanity lost the capacity to grow food.  On the road the father and son encounter scary remnants of society, grotesque caricatures of what once were elements of a thriving social order: a marching legion, an aging housebound couple, a gang of thugs, and assorted loners.  All these rough, emaciated beings are bent on surviving, but no food can be grown.  Only one form of living protein remains, and these remaining humans are desperate to cannibalize it.  As father and son flee for their lives again and again, the son clings to the one shred of present meaning that remains: he and his father are to be counted among the “good guys” since they refuse to eat human flesh despite their looming starvation.  Eventually the father dies.  The grieving son is taken in by a wandering man and woman with a young daughter, all that is needed, in effect, to reconstitute the nuclear family.  The novel closes on a note of precarious future meaning.  It offers a faint glimmer of hope that human society might survive into the next generation.

[10]The Road envisions one slender thread of meaning that staves off the finality of societal extinction.  That thread of meaning is necessary to sustain agency—the capacity of the father and the son to continue their journey.  If, as seems likely, our own process of societal extinction worsens over the next few decades, will we be able to sustain such a sense of agency?  The question is inexpugnably personal.  Could I survive under such conditions?  Would I have the strength, the emotional toughness, the cunning, the predatory instincts, the resourcefulness and the tool-making capacity to make my way through societal wreckage?   But then there is a further question, regarding meaning: would I want to?  Would I have the resolve to keep moving, like the father in The Road?  What if I lacked  the prospect of some survivor’s camp, some new seedbed of civilization over the horizon, to draw me on?   What if my shallow civilizational optimism were thoroughly shattered by the loss of all the family members I held dear?  Would I have any hope-driven energy to persevere across a landscape that was relentlessly indifferent if not hostile to my own survival?  What would be the psychic basis of my survivalist strength?

[11] The questions are bleak, and I am not alone in asking them.  For some people, this is not imagined as a nightmare but a real possibility; it is not a game.  Informed by apocalyptic visions from Hollywood, they buy camouflage clothing, outdoor gear and guns to test their capacities against these cinematic fantasies.  Some even welcome the prospect of societal breakdown.  I won’t join them.  Much as I love wandering the woods and testing myself against whatever weather nature might throw at me, I have no appetite for proving that I could survive.  My personal survival simply wouldn’t mean enough to keep me going.  To defend loved ones?  That would help, perhaps.  But as the climate crisis unfolds, we—each of us individually, and collectively—will need an all-encompassing reason for continuing to live.

Towards an account of vocation in a time of extinction

[12] For a life truly worth living, I would need a yet wider and deeper circle of reference and meaning, which cannot be ginned up from thin air or vacuous affirmations.  For Christians, the meaning of life is expressed in a sense of being called to a vocation.   A sense of vocation requires rigorous self-examination, not simply affirmation of what we are doing.   Pious affection for Creation is not enough.  It does us little good to implore God in Sunday morning prayer to protect Creation, or to call church members to more conscientious stewardship.  To understand our call we need to take an unsparing look at how the human species is contributing to its own societal extinction.  Hard questions must be faced.  If God loves all of Creation, then how can God love the one species which is destroying the rest of Creation?  Is God willing to sacrifice all of Creation for the one species which is ruining it?  Does such a question even make sense?  Most personally, since I as a member of the human species am inextricably implicated in the destruction of Creation, why would God even want me to live?  How can we sustain a sense of meaningful existence once we absorb the overwhelming fact of complicity in our own demise?

[12] Lutheran theology will find this challenge familiar, at least on the surface.  It knows the despair that is provoked by divine condemnation of human striving towards salvation.  The root challenge that Luther faced and that we still face is how to regain a viable sense of agency in the face of overwhelming, disabling despair.  In response to his own despair, Martin Luther paved a sure and certain road to hope by insisting that the law of divine condemnation is set aside by the gospel of God’s indestructible love for us in Jesus, and then by discovering vocation as the active expression of such hope.  We need to know that we as a species are called to survive, that that is our vocation.  The hope from God’s right hand nourishes the life we are called to protect through God’s left hand.

[13] We Lutherans live simultaneously in an order of salvation and of vocation.  Of course, the besetting problem is no longer my doomed individual effort to justify my existence, but the victimization of all Creation.  This dramatic expansion suggests that in this larger frame, the traditional concern of justification has become marginal, but that is not the case.  To be sure, the challenge is no longer to stamp down human pride, crush self-sufficiency, and escape a sense of personal powerlessness over his fate, as it was for Luther.  Now the challenge is to provide a reason to continue to exercise agency—a reason to live in the unstoppable slide towards societal extinction.[3]

[14] I can’t imagine a belief system that could survive direct contact with societal extinction in the endgame when it arrives.  But I can imagine a belief system that might prove its value along the road to that extinction, as conditions gradually darken.  It would have to nurture hope in the strong sense, as that disposition of being oriented to the possibilities for constructive action, as the ethicist Frederick Bird defines hope.[4]  To that end, it would have to be sturdy and portable—able to withstand the shocks of unexpected disappointments, betrayals, losses and other disheartening surprises.  It would have to provide a secure psychic home—a comforting refuge.  It would have to be composed of easily remembered concepts yet have enough substance to invite continuing pondering.  It would have to provide a range of interpretative possibilities to keep conversation going among survivors, if only to keep their minds engaged, supple and open to the transcendent.  Most important, it would have to provide transcendent, unimpeachable reassurance to jump-start human agency in the face of disabling despair.

[15] The recently deceased theologian Phil Hefner provides a frame for sustaining a sense of meaning past, present and future.  In an early paper, he proposed a “fuller concept of evolution” to encompass what science tells us within faith.[5]  His notion of the human as “created co-creator” locates us in a process that began with the big bang and proceeds through biological and moral stages, with the emergence of imagination and spirituality as distinctive human features.  “Being human involves a great deal of creating, imagining new worlds, and constructing those worlds.”  Now, of course, the science of climate change has destroyed such optimism, but not his prescription for vocation.  “The mandate of our vocation is to use our giftedness within nature and on behalf of nature, nature including our fellow humans….”  The abiding strength of this view is its comprehensive reach.  Confident in where we have come from, we can position ourselves against the darkness of what is to come.  Like the father and son in The Road, we know where we have come from and are headed in the moment.  With a comprehensive understanding of our evolution so far, we can acknowledge that a gracious God may have something more in mind than the survival of humanity as a species.  We can embrace the paradox of God’s will for us to live and the fact that we are destroying the conditions for our long-term survival.  God promised in Genesis never to destroy humanity, but God did not promise to prevent humanity from destroying itself.

[16] Our vocation then is paradoxical.  Enveloped in a comprehensive cloud of meaning, we are called to resist extinction with all our might—but then to consent to it when it becomes inevitable, in the belief that God has something new in store for planet earth.  Hefner provides the frame for embracing both sides of the paradox.  We can look back at the long history of our evolution, knowing with complete confidence that God created our agency as a means to protect and sustain Creation, including our species.  We therefore are called to fight like hell to do so, even as our species bends our apocalyptic world towards the postapocalyptic end of human meaning.  At the same time, we realize that creation of the human species does not exhaust God’s creative aim, and that at some point we must acquiesce in our own demise.  The father and son in The Road never got to that point, and we might pray that we never do, either.

[1] Kristen Johnston Largen, “Un/natural death and extinction”, dialog 57:4(December 2018), 279-286.

[2] Cormac McCarthy.  The Road.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

[3] By raising the possibility of extinction, the argument made here extends far beyond current Lutheran teaching.  For example, a recent ELCA social message claims we are at a ‘kairos’ moment—an occasion for repentance and redirected action, which it prescribes in rich and thorough detail, even though its conception of ‘kairos’ does not extend as far as the threatening possibility of societal extinction.  (https://resources.elca.org/theological-discernment/earths-climate-crisis-social-message/?_ga=2.92941789.1103814902.1724895552-624643502.1724895552)

[4] Frederick Bird. The Generative Power of Hope: Anticipating Possibilities in Times of Crises.  Springer (2022): 35-40.

[5] Philip Hefner. “A Fuller Concept of Evolution: Big Bang to Spirit”.  Zygon 47: 2 (June 2012), 298-307.