Reasons to be cheerful

In Season 4 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Buffy is brought back from the dead by her friends who believe her to be suffering torments in hell. One of the pivotal moments is during an episode where the town is under an enchantment that turns everything into a song-and-dance number. As in all good musicals, the songs display the characters’ innermost feelings and secrets, and Buffy reveals that she had not in fact been in hell - but in a place where there was “no pain, no fear, no doubt; a place of comfort and love.”  Heaven, no less. For her, it is the hard and violent “real” world that is Hell.

Despairing, near suicidal, she is pulled back from the brink by the (sung) insight that

Life’s not a song.
Life isn’t bliss.
Life is just this:
It’s living.
You have to go on living.

The whole season is about dealing with becoming an adult and understanding what it is that makes life worth living. The question of what – if anything – makes life worthwhile is a recurring theme (albeit not usually with vampires) through the ages from Seneca’s line: "merely to live is an act of courage” to Hamlet to Dorothy Parker’s poem Resumé:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

In Buffy’s case, though, the stakes are raised beyond that of the fate of one individual – her dilemma is bound up with the fate of the whole world; indeed the personal drama becomes, quite literally, that of the world. It’s a psychologically perceptive metaphor: we all exist in own individual universe and personal calamity does often feel like the end of the world.

I was reminded of this direct link between individual, personal choices and those of the planet a few nights ago when I was watching the excellent and moving Lungs. It’s an intense, moving and frequently funny two-hander with recognisable people trying to navigate the complexities of a modern-day relationship. They start to question whether having a baby is a responsible, ethical choice since doing so leaves a carbon footprint as big as flying back and forth to New York every day for seven years.

As the late, Eric Hobsbawm wrote, a hundred years ago the idea of global peril was beyond imaginative conception. At that time, mass casualties of man-made calamities were numbered in the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands. The horrors of the Congo Free State that shocked so-called civilised society and inspired Heart of Darkness were modest in scale by modern standards.

 

The millions dead and wounded during the industrial slaughter of the First World War were such a profound shock to the psyche of the human species that they effectively put an end to the civilised assumption of “inevitable human progress” of the preceding hundred years.

The rest of the Twentieth Century only accelerated this trend of expanding scale of destruction. The word “genocide” was coined in 1944. Three years later Stalin chillingly said that “one death is a tragedy; one million a statistic.” And by that time the world was living with the possibility of nuclear war and today is still coming to terms with the concept of global peril.

Since 1945 as the global population has mushroomed, paradoxically, in Western culture at least, the prominence of the individual has risen. One consequence, perhaps, of this apparent contradiction is the rise of the popular trope of one person “saving the world.”

 

The last few years have seen the world become ever more-connected. Now, for the first time in human history, we are aware of the combined impact of our individual choices on the fate of a fragile world. This awareness can become paralysing.

It is this paralysis that Lungs explores as the couple try to focus on the possible hastening of the end of the planet as a way of assessing whether to take the very human decision of having a child. This is not a polemical piece (unlike, say, the recent Ten Billion at The Royal Court) and the play works because these debates come out of the narrative situation and drive it forward rather than placing them centrally.

On the same day as seeing the play, I had a meeting with an arts organisation and we were discussing what they were doing in terms of Environmental Sustainability. The Executive Director made the point that there is a conflict between much of what they could do and its affordability, citing the example of the high cost of sustainably sourced timber for set construction.

This dilemma is in a similar territory as that of the play. What does it actually mean to be good? How much is enough? I think this taps into a certain viewpoint that can be characterised as “hair-shirt.” That is, we (particularly in the developed world) have got to “give up” up unsustainable habits and change our behaviours. Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in these discussions is the suggestion that to be “good” - to be responsible citizens - we need to renounce the world and live as hermits.

As well as being a bit depressing, this can also be counterproductive – most of us are not capable of doing that; therefore, the thinking goes, anything less is an empty, futile gesture so there’s no point in doing anything at all.

Generally, the framework within which these issues are considered is very often in such polarised “either/or” terms: Utopia/ Dystopia; extinction/ no change; become a hermit/ don’t do anything.

Personally, I find this, whilst understandable, very unhelpful. It’s not a question of choosing between one option or the other. Yes, we need to conduct our lives in a better fashion, more in tune with the warp and weft of the world we inhabit; but surely we would all like to do that? Exploring the possibilities of what that might mean I think is hugely exciting.

In the Pixar film, Wall-E, Earth has been rendered near uninhabitable by a man-made ecological disaster. Humankind has departed in a luxury spaceship hoping that the planet will be cleaned up by the robots left behind. Over generations, cossetted and pampered, humans have lost the ability to do much at all – even walking. When the Captain of the ship discovers all that has been lost on Earth (especially dancing!) he wants to go back. He is stopped by the Autopilot that tells him that the only worthwhile thing left to do is to “survive”. The Captain replies with the memorable cri de coeur “I don’t want to survive! I want to live!!”

The Captain has a reason, a motivation for “living.” What is common to the sentiments of Buffy, Lungs, and Wall-E is that “living” is much more than just existing and that there is a reason behind wanting to “live”. In the case of Lungs, it is linked specifically to creating and nurturing of another life. I don’t think it is reading too much into the play to infer that the immersion in the waters of life – in this case, the joy, wonder and love that comes with parenthood – are powerful reasons for living. And powerful reasons for living can mean powerful reasons for exploring ways of conducting that life that - in the words of Bruntland - “meets the needs of the present without compromising the life of future generations.”

I think this gives courage, perseverance and even hope. It helps make sense of our endeavours. As Ruskin observed, it is not what we get, but what we become by our endeavours that make them worthwhile.