We're always doomed: get busy

We're just Waiting for the Lights to Go Out according to the Sunday Times. But then, we often are, as The Cooling World on Brain Terminal will remind you. For those who missed the Seventies, it was the decade of global cooling and the return of the Ice Age, which politicians weren't doing enough to prepare for. And all over Britain, people are anxiously rescinding their canaries' privileges in the face of bird flu, confining them to solitary and changing their water in washing up gloves. Disaster porn is a circular diversion: one of those pleasures that keep us from thinking about the failures in our lives without actually solving anything. Failure on a civilisational scale makes personal weaknesses so heartwarmingly trivial. Not that all doomsaying is nonsense. Of course it is true that asterioids fall and flu pandemics strike (but Spanish flu only killed more than WWI because it happened in its aftermath, hitting the weakened immune systems in vulnerable groups) -- but this knowledge is nothing new. Religions have always assumed cataclysmic scenarios: which is why there are so many versions of the flood myth. What is new is the pride of the scientific version, that thinks it invented Armageddon and argues the only answer is paranoid despondency, a condition in which you scrutinise every scarepiece in the paper and do nothing about it. Maybe empires do always fall, but who thinks Greece and Rome have really gone? Their legacy is the foundation of our civilisation: in law and science, art and religion, liberty and government. So even (perhaps when) the West falls, it will leave Michelangelo's David, Newton's Principia, Darwin's Descent of Man, Shakespeare's Hamlet, the American constitution, English common law... and on and on. The saddest thing now is how we remember our mortality but not the value of making things that last. Montaigne says that eternity is in love with the productions of time and we can still read his Essays because he understood that a sense of mortality drives us to reach for eternity. Today we say doom is close, and hence prefer the fly-by-night, the flimsy and the ephemeral. That is like the rabbit hypnotised by the knife held over it. Art in particular needs to discover not events and happenings and self-destructing cobwebs of whimsy, but solid, made things. Masterpieces are a gift across the line into the dark future. The threat of doomday, as religion has always understood, allows us to focus on eternity and live as if our acts and our creations were forever. The truth is "death, but not yet". Wisdom is driven to get busy and build against the inevitable.