CS Lewis, on something akin to doom-scrolling

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors — anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

CS Lewis

The element that opposes doom is hope and Jack Lewis found his hope in faith. I do too. His essay, “On Living in an Atomic Age” (pdf), says it much better than I can — and yet it is a sensible and human thing to find wisdom in the past and speak about in in the present.

Evidence written in the stars and laws of thermodynamics prophesies that everything will wind down and end, boring and uniformly cold. That was the understanding of the cosmos in Jack’s time, and it’s still the mainstream scientific consensus today. There are new hypotheses — Okamoto’s law of increasing complexity (“On the Arrow of Time and Organized Complexity in the Universe”) was published not even a year ago — and it feels wrong to not mention that but natural science is generally not enough to say that the world is beautiful and existence is worthwhile. The best it does is to point at how the world is beautiful.

Whether existence is worthwhile, well, that’s the thorny question.

Nihilism says you might as well make your existence meaningful; theism says that you are not alone in the struggle to make meaning because there is a higher being or being reaching down to make heroes, demigods, or saints out of us; Christianity says that this is how the Creator answers the problem of entropy: by sending his only Son to live and suffer and die as one of us and lead mortals into the impossibly good gift of new life.

Despite the differences in these beliefs they tend to bring people together into an unspoken, philosophical coalition. Would you join the Forces of Hope against a rising tide of rage-bait and doomerism? Because, yes, that resistance is real.

This challenge is especially important for those of us who live online. Algorithms — right? You know what I’m talking about. Something that humanity is struggling with at this very moment, is how to live with agents we’ve created. Somehow they’ve wound up with the power to suggest to us how we should spend our time and how we should feel. And because wealth and power correlate with greed, many of those algorithms are configured with the goal of capturing attention as easily and effectively as possible. They’ve learned that scaring and enraging people, while not empowering them, fits those goals.

And damn if it doesn’t make big tech a lot of money. But yes, the resistance is real.

It is our business to live by our own law not by [Nature’s]: to follow in private or in public life, the law of love and temperance even when they seem to be suicidal, and not the law of competition and grab, even when they seem to be necessary to our survival. For it is part of our spiritual law never to put survival first: not even the survival of our species. We must resolutely train ourselves to feel that the survival of Man on this Earth, much more of our own nation or culture or class, is not worth having unless it can be had by honourable and merciful means.

The sacrifice is not so great as it seems. Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilization are the only people by whom civilization is at all likely to be preserved. Those who want Heaven must have served Earth best. Those who love Man less than God do most for Man.

That’s the first general order of the armies of hope: do sensible human things. Find beauty and love it. Find human beings, love them more. When God calls, love God the most.