Reviews Learning to die: wisdom in the age of climate crisis
Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky University of Regina Press, 2018 ISBN 978-0889775633
I am not sure how I came across this book; I think I followed a link on Twitter. It appealed to me immediately and I ordered it from Mr Bs, our Bath independent bookshop, then promptly forgot all about it. When I learned it had arrived, I asked my wife to pick it up for me while she was in town. ‘What’s it called?’ she asked, and I couldn’t remember. She brought back this tiny book with a shocking cover and title. I opened it and was immediately engaged. It may be tiny, but it explores a huge theme: How should we die at the end of times? Or as Margaret Atwood puts it, ‘Truth-filled meditations about grace in the face of mortality’. Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky are Canadian scholars of international repute: he a typographer, poet, and translator; she, a philosopher and poet. Learning to Die is beautifully designed, typeset and bound. It feels quite apt to study almost unthinkable topics through a beautiful physical object. The book contains two short essays and an afterword that critiques Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. The first essay, by Bringhurst, The Mind of the Wild, sets out our predicament, that we are at the end of times. He considers the nature of the wild Earth, ‘living life to its full… self-directed, self-sustaining, self-repairing, with no need for anything from us’. Humans are, of course, part of this, but, in a telling phrase, he describes us as ‘liminal creatures’, on the margins of the wild, sometimes tempted to believe the ‘witch tale’ that we can live entirely outside it. The wild world is extraordinary resilient, and yet it has been pushed by humans beyond its limits: ‘Does anybody honestly suppose that nature can be tricked into giving more and yet more every year, without end?’ The dominant human culture is increasingly toxic to the wild, bringing about mass extinction of life on Earth, the sixth such great extinction. If anything survives, ‘it will again be the wild… that is responsible for the healing’. This extinction includes humans. ‘Cultures change. And ours will soon be changing big-time… If there are any human survivors of the next mass extinction, the cultural slate will be wiped pretty clean. No one may have heard of Shakespeare or Bach, Picasso or Plato’. Life will not go on forever, but somehow, we are making it shorter by far than we need to. Bringhurst is demanding we look reality in the face, challenging us with the realities of death: ‘You, your species, your entire evolutionary family, and your planet will die tomorrow. How do you want to spend today?’ We are up against a wall; more and more of those who care are standing against the unsustainable mainstream. We may not be able to save the world, ‘but you might just manage to save your self-respect.’
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Jan Zwicky picks up this essentially moral question. The title of her essay, A Ship from Delos, refers to the death of Socrates. Because executions are proscribed during the annual embassy to Apollo at Delos, his is delayed; but when the ship returns, his death is inevitable. ‘Humans collectively are now in Socrates’ position: the ship with the black sails has been sighted. Catastrophic global collapse is now on the horizon… nothing remotely like adequate measures are being undertaken… when we go, we are going to take a lot of innocent beings with us.’ Zwicky’s essay explores the question, ‘What constitutes virtue in such circumstances?’ The answer, she tells us, is surprisingly straightforward: ‘what has constituted virtue all along. We should approach the coming cataclysm as we ought to have approached life’. She translates ‘virtue’ as ‘excellence’: it’s about being an excellent human being. The excellence she pursues is based on the ‘suite of virtues that Socrates cultivated… and… embodied clearly on the day he learned he was going to die’, arguing that ‘these virtues are a good starting place since they are the foundation of moral thought of the industrial culture that is the root of the crisis’. From Plato’s account, Zwicky derives a list of core Socratic virtues: • Awareness coupled with humility regarding what one knows • Courage • Self-control • Justice • Contemplative practice • Compassion
So much of the discussion about the ecological catastrophe is couched in practical terms, about carbon reduction, alternative economic models, politics and human rights, species conservation. Rarely do we go to the moral and ethical heart of the matter, usually staying at a level of guilt-inducing should/should not injunctions. Zwicky’s essay fills an important gap. So how might we practise these virtues ‘in the face of sighting our own ecological ship from Delos?’ Awareness is about ‘knowing what’s what’, about looking the truth in the eye, acknowledging what is the case. This is a significant challenge; for it is often argued that to be aware that death is imminent is to extinguish hope. Zwicky explores these issues carefully, not allowing easy answers. Hope is not destroyed. Beauty remains. The human inventive spirit remains. The Earth is prodigious, life will proliferate again. And awareness must be coupled with humility: we do not know what the future will hold. On the other hand, denying responsibility, denial of our complicity is part of refusing to know what’s what. Zwicky challenges us: those of us who have enough to eat and freedom to think must see clearly what our situation is: ‘Its desperate character, its blinding pain, must become an integral part of what we know.’ This will take courage. It will take physical courage to stand up to the inevitable pain and duress; it will take civic courage to live with wars and violence; it will take moral courage to exercise the virtue of awareness with humility. It demands. Selfcontrol seems to be something the dominant culture lacks: not just ‘grim, Procrustean self-denial’, but knowing when enough is enough, embracing simplicity. And it will require compassion, particularly so we do not indulge in contempt for those struggling to come to awareness, who deny ‘what’s what’. The virtue of justice is more complex. Zwicky compares the Platonic notion of justice as the ‘order of the soul’ with the modern view articulated by philosopher John Rawls that it is about fairness. There is a complex argument here, which includes the question: since we cannot remedy the situation we © Journal of holistic healthcare
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Volume 16 Issue 2 Summer 2019
