WHAT TO DO?
Before 2020 we were sitting on the edge of a cliff, contemplating the possibilities of a very possible, and ever more tangible likelihood of climate collapse, and asked ourselves: ‘What to do?’. Then the pandemic came, and we could see answers to the question allowing a postpandemic philosophy to emerge in which the disciplines of the pandemic experience provided positive, solution scenarios to the problem. However, we quickly got sick of the restraints imposed on us by the Ministry of Health and yearned for a return to all our bad habits, gradually sinking back into the old normality, and with that return slipping back into the need for the old depressing question: ‘What to do now?’. But almost before we had even uttered the last syllable of that weak-willed interrogative, the normality has again been shattered by the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Our lives are now filled with complaints concerning the rising price of oil and gas which turns into the rising prices of everything, and we bemoan our plight as if we had never sat on the cliff edge before and there had never been a climate emergency, when it fact the real underlying factor and authentic regulatory force that must be tackled if we are to ever avoid the looming dystopia, is precisely that climate crisis. This new disaster, the war in the Ukraine and the energy crisis unfolding from it, requires the same global self-sacrifice that the pandemic demanded of us, because the real problem that envelopes all problems, the mother-of-all crises underlying reason for all our woes, is the climate emergency.
But why is it so hard to answer this ‘What to do’? Is it because we do not properly grasp what we are asking: that this is not a pragmatic, political question, but a moral one, in fact it is the fundamental question underlying all morality. But that is ignored: the System prefers to pass the question over to the economists who can only deal with the problem in a theoretical way and that, for them, in ultimate terms beyond the next financial year, or at most, the next presidential term in office, the question is unanswerable.
Our nihilistic, capitalist civilisation has no bedrock to anchor its own moralities on and because of that it lacks a meaningful response to the question, so that the question itself dissolves into a simple ‘what should I do?’. But the problem is that even this simple ‘what should I do?’ can become torturous if the general ‘what to do?’ is considered unanswerable.
To anchor ‘what to do?’ we need to place it within the scope of ‘where are we going?’. If the answer to the latter has the form of an eternal continuation through progress, then the commitment to such a journeying will be a liberating one – set free by our powers of creativity, rational thinking and the technologies at our disposal that are themselves products of our liberating creativity. By situating our destiny at the eternal point that can never be reached, we make our purpose an ultimate one: free and ultimate. Asking ‘what to ultimately do to get where we are ultimately headed?’ is, as such, a way of searching for the best way to achieve the end that can never be attained, but will keep us moving forward. By envisioning an end-point beyond a horizon that we are forever crossing, we liberate our Sisyphus-like condition and escape from the tyranny of the systemic hill. The rock we are pushing immediately becomes easier to roll: meaningfulness makes being more bearably lighter. Being itself becomes the object of pursuit, an object that can be worthy and meaningful for all human beings, forever.
