At Indiana University each spring there is an arts festival in honor of Kurt Vonnegut, Granfalloon. This year’s theme is his novel Cat’s Cradle, which is the book where he introduces the term Granfalloon (although, to my mind, not really as something one would celebrate; Karass would have been a better choice to name a gathering?). Since that novel is about the end of the world, the IU Cinema is showing films with that theme, including Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), drawn from, though with differences, P.D. James’s novel The Children of Men (1992) (I saw somewhere that James, agreeing that the movie was a different and unique work from her novel, said she liked it).
If you’ve neither read the book nor seen the film, the story begins about eighteen years or so after the last human child was born. Inexplicably, the entire human race has become completely infertile. No one is dying of natural causes prematurely; the world is ending with a whimper. How would we behave?
I love, and highly recommend, the novel – so much so that I would mention it in my classes. I was also inspired by the discussion of the novel in Samuel Scheffler’s wonderful short book Why Worry About Future Generations? A former student remembered that I would discuss these books, and as he was now taking part in the planning for this year’s Granfalloon, suggested that I might be someone who could introduce the film at its screening. I’ve never been asked to do such a thing before, but maybe I still can learn some new tricks.
It turns out he asked me just as I was reading Mary Shelley’s end-of-the-world novel from 1824, The Last Man, as part of a series of readings on Revolution and Ruin from The Culture We Deserve (also highly recommended). And so I drew a bit from that.
The organizers asked me to give a bit of context, but not to say so much about the film itself, since people were there to see it, not hear me describe it. I actually made a point of not rewatching the film before the screening. And I was to to keep it short. So here is what I came up with.
When P.D. James wrote the novel The Children of Men – a great departure for someone who had gained such fame as a writer of detective fiction – she said she started with a simple question: “If there was no future, how would we behave?”
She wasn’t the first, or the last, to pose this question: by coincidence, when I was asked to give these remarks I was reading Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, published two hundred years ago, which was I think the first novel to ask how we would behave if there were no future. Shelley imagined a terrible plague, James imagined mass infertility, though in each story this was a death of humanity: the rest of the natural world would carry on without us.
James takes her title from the Ninetieth Psalm:
Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.
Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.
A stern reminder of our mortality; ashes to ashes.
Yet, while most adults have come to terms with the fact that as individuals they will return to dust, the end of humanity altogether is a different sort of thing. The Children of Men is a melancholy book. Our protagonist, Theo, is a history professor in the novel (in the film he is a bureaucrat), specializing in Victorian Britain. But nobody cares about that anymore, nobody is interested in any lecture he might give on the subject, except as a place to get out of the rain and cold. For why conserve our knowledge and understanding of history if there will be no one to carry on? Who cares about the Poor Laws, or the Reform Bills? What’s the use?
Teachers of art, literature, history, music, the methods of science, do so with the unstated understanding that their students, most of them anyway, will outlive them, and continue this life of study, enjoyment, exploration. Just yesterday evening I went to the student art show at the high school, and it was just wonderful to see their enthusiasm in making and showing their drawings and paintings and photographs.
But what if we knew that art and science and philosophy were coming to an end? We – academics are notorious for this – collect hundreds of books and records with an intuition that, when we are gone, someone else will read them, and listen to them. How awfully sad it would be to think that among us are the very last people who would hear Mozart’s Great C-minor Mass, or read Anna Karenina, or pause to take in the beauty of the autumn leaves in Brown County, or pick up a pencil to make a sketch, or make a cake with that recipe you have always loved.
In Mary Shelley’s The Last Man our narrator, as humanity is dwindling to its last few thousand people, laments:
Farewell to the arts, – to eloquence, which is to the human mind as the winds to the sea, stirring, and then allaying it; – farewell to poetry and deep philosophy, for man’s imagination is cold, and his enquiring mind can no longer expatiate on the wonders of life …
That is how we would feel, but, to get back to James’s question, how would we behave? Would we collapse into anarchy, or tyranny, the strong preying on the weak, the wealthy using their riches to isolate themselves whilst the poor fight amongst each other for the last scraps? Would people be seduced by false prophets? Would academics hold workshops – hybrid, of course – problematizing the predicament? Would we have a society even more cruel than that which we have already created? Children of Men is not optimistic in this regard.
And yet … courage mounteth with occasion. There would be those who, like Theo, face death gallantly, heroically. There would be those who devote themselves to the care and comfort of those least able to care for themselves, even at great risk.
To return to the Ninetieth Psalm:
So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/