But it seems these mini-stories are not truly connected to a meta-story. Can we really find meaning by a bunch of disconnected stories, by our plurality alone? It would seem at some point the ripples lose steam, we have to deal with our own demise, or even the demise of the cosmos. In other words, the story does come to an end in the finite sense. I’m not being apocalyptic here, just realistic. Whether we look down 100 years, or 100,000,000 years, there is an end coming.
End of story.
But the secularist can’t deal with this, so he/she needs to come up with some long term purpose. In a post-Christian age, the secularist invents their version of Revelations of a coming doom that man can potentially solve. Today’s story usually revolves an apocalypse through climate change or some other environmental catastrophe.
With this came the ideological tool of sustainability, which sees human beings as the core problem to the earth and that this problem could be curtailed by state using regulation to control human behavior. The common good is for a collective impulse to preserve nature at the cost of individual liberties and the goods we have for our human purposes.
As James Schall says,
“The root of the sustainability mission, I suspect, is the practical denial of eternal life. Sustainability, in effect, is an alternative to lost transcendence. It is what happens when suddenly no future but the present one exists. The only future of mankind comes to be seen as an ongoing planet orbiting down the ages. It always does the exact same boring thing. This view is actually a form of despair. Our end is the preservation of the race down the ages as long as possible; it is not personal eternal life. Sustainability implies strict population control, usually set at about two or three billion. Excessive numbers must be eliminated for the good of future generations. Sin and evil imply misusing the earth, not our wills in our relation to ourselves and each other.”He adds, “Is there not something terribly dangerous about the assumption of responsibility over future generations?”
Do we even know what the future needs? Let’s not forget many of resource concerns we had about energy in the 1970’s have since been resolved through ingenuity. Imagine had we rationed energy resources during those years instead of innovating?
Of course, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have other ideas, which would require us to explore a new home in space. They may have a point: let’s move these problematic humans to other places and screw up things there.
But when are we to evolve (and not sustain) as people in our true home?
We can control things only so far. The finite end is coming no matter what our Pelagian attempts. So maybe best to prepare for that, than kicking the secular can down the road. “The garden does not exist for its own sake but for what goes in it” (Schall).