Survival Is Not Enough

Secular people often frame world crises in the framework of survival of the species, and then wonder why nobody cares. The Earth is becoming less habitable and this could spell disaster for human beings down the line, yet a mass ecological consciousness has failed to develop. Why is this?

Well the truth is that the common person sees quite clearly something that is often obscured for the intellectual. Survival of the species isn't as motivating as secularists imagine it to be. Secularists must attenuate everything to evolutionary ends, but evolutionary ends are not necessarily the end of the individual. Dostoevsky wrote about this all the time: life is not enough. Give a man everything he needs to survive, and he will live in reckless abandon to affirm living over surviving.

The individual person transcends history. That transcendence is so powerful that before the individual soul, the whole of history is hidden in shadow. Only a cosmic context can satisfy the soul. Not even a global context is enough, because the individual can abstract to infinite proportions. All temporal problems pale before human freedom and the use of human freedom. I'll assert my own infinity before the finite span of human history. Tell someone that something is God's will and the intuit its value from that. Tell them that their posterity as at stake and they don't care. Because the present moment, the use of my freedom here and now comes to me as a nodule of infinity, and so dwarfs the concerns of any span of time.

People keep harping about survival and generally people keep not caring. We consume more, we buy more, we save less and we produce more of what destroys the environment. You want to motivate people tell them a narrative, one they can believe in, that incorporates the danger to the spirit, not the body. Tell them of satan and his schemes, and they'll join to fight. That is the consequence of the human spirit. But, then, secularists can't account for the spirit, and so are at the mercy of it's power.