My crumbly crew are having coffee at the community centre after its annual carol concert and Charlie hits his usual glass-half-empty note. Trouble is, he’s right. Goodwill seems pretty thin on the ground nowadays, wherever you look. Wars and rumours of wars, famine, drought, fires, floods, plagues among the people, pestilence among the beasts, it’s all beginning to sound a tad apocalyptic. An end time has begun, or so it seems.
End time is something on which we elders have authority: reminders of its imminence fill our days. As a life with any future purpose evaporates, dissatisfaction with the present becomes my lingua franca as I acknowledge my redundancy. I become, like Charlie, querulous and fault-finding as I lose touch with the world, its language, its mores, and its business.
However, if I am honest, I am faced with a most inconvenient truth. If social literacy has morphed into narcissism, if civic ethics have been exchanged for consumer loyalty cards, that’s my doing, because today’s world is yesterday’s creation and I am yesterday’s man. I am responsible. But these are minor issues, a form of displacement activity to shield me from acknowledging my contribution to a darker crisis, for which my generation is largely responsible: the human obsession with growth, comfort and convenience that has poisoned the air, contaminated the seas, intoxicated the soil and barbarised its creatures.
Nowhere is our hubris better illustrated than by our describing the crisis as a planetary issue. It isn’t the planet that’s in crisis, simply its top predator. Our fellow inhabitants of Earth are praying for the end of the Anthropocene era – which is surely better described as the androcene, in recognition of its primary authority.
We have been here before. Our species spent 200,000 childhood years refining the social contract as subordinate residents. Then, around 17,000 years ago, we experienced our first episode of global warming when the thaw ended the ice age. It produced the same degree of societal and elemental chaos that will occur this time. We emerged to dominate the globe as tooled-up owner-occupiers. The next stage of our evolution will hopefully empower us as adults to be custodial tenants of our exuberant planet.
This is an evolutionary moment and how we address this prospect will be our legacy and that’s where the crumbly perspective may be of use, because I am experiencing on a personal level what our species is facing on a global dimension. When my end comes, my legacy for those who survive me will depend on the manner in which I departed, either as curmudgeonly life-denier or gracious celebrant. I should confront the dying of my light, not with rage, but with gratitude to a generous planet and remorse for my profligacy.
Goodwill should be my legacy: like a dog, goodwill is for life, not just for Christmas, and I should bow out benevolently. This will not avert the end time but it may inform the mindset of the next epoch of our remarkable species and earn it the right finally to be called sapiens.
• Stewart Dakers is an 80-year-old voluntary community worker
