The Anthropocene Reviewed(4)

When Bill Shankly died in 1981, Gerry Marsden sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at the memorial service—as it has been sung at many funerals for many Liverpool supporters. The miracle of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” for me is how well it works as a funeral song, and as a high school graduation song, and as a we-just-beat-Barcelona-in-the-Champions-League song. As former Liverpool player and manager Kenny Dalglish said, “It covers adversity and sadness and it covers the success.” It’s a song about sticking together even when your dreams are tossed and blown. It’s a song about both the storm and the golden sky.

At first blush, it may seem odd that the world’s most popular football song comes from musical theater. But football is theater, and fans make it musical theater. The anthem of West Ham United is called “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” and at the start of each game, you’ll see thousands of grown adults blowing bubbles from the stands as they sing, “I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air They fly so high, nearly reach the sky Then like my dreams, they fade and die.” Manchester United fans refashioned Julia Ward Howe’s U.S. Civil War anthem “Battle Hymn of the Republic” into the song “Glory, Glory Man United.” Manchester City fans sing “Blue Moon,” a 1934 Rodgers and Hart number.

All these songs are made great by the communities singing them. They are assertions of unity in sorrow and unity in triumph: Whether the bubble is flying or bursting, we sing together.

“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is cheesy, but it’s not wrong. The song doesn’t claim the world is a just or happy place. It just asks us to walk on with hope in our hearts. And like Louise at the end of Carousel, even if you don’t really believe in the golden sky or the sweet silver song of the lark when you start singing, you believe it a little more when you finish.

In March 2020, a video made the rounds online in which a group of British paramedics sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” through a glass wall to coworkers on the other side, who were in an intensive care unit. The paramedics were trying to encourage their colleagues. What a word that is, encourage. Though our dreams be tossed and blown, still we sing ourselves and one another into courage.

I give “You’ll Never Walk Alone” four and a half stars.





HUMANITY’S TEMPORAL RANGE



WHEN I WAS NINE OR TEN, I saw a planetarium show at the Orlando Science Center in which the host, with no apparent emotion in his voice, explained that in about a billion years, the sun will be 10 percent more luminescent than it is now, likely resulting in the runaway evaporation of Earth’s oceans. In about four billion years, Earth’s surface will become so hot that it will melt. In seven or eight billion years, the sun will be a red giant star, and it will expand until eventually our planet will be sucked into it, and any remaining Earthly evidence of what we thought or said or did will be absorbed into a burning sphere of plasma.

Thanks for visiting the Orlando Science Center. The exit is to your left.

It has taken me most of the last thirty-five years to recover from that presentation. I would later learn that many of the stars we see in the night sky are red giants, including Arcturus. Red giants are common. It is common for stars to grow larger and engulf their once-habitable solar systems. It’s no wonder we worry about the end of the world. Worlds end all the time.



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A 2012 survey conducted across twenty countries found wide variance in the percentage of people who believe humanity will end within their lifetimes. In France, 6 percent of those polled did; in the United States, 22 percent. This makes a kind of sense: France has been home to apocalyptic preachers—the bishop Martin of Tours, for instance, wrote “There is no doubt that the Antichrist has already been born.” But that was back in the fourth century. American apocalypticism has a much more recent history, from Shaker predictions the world would end in 1794 to famed radio evangelist Harold Camping’s calculations that the apocalypse was coming in 1994—and then, when that didn’t happen, in 1995. Camping went on to announce that the end times would commence on May 21, 2011, after which would come “five months of fire, brimstone and plagues on Earth, with millions of people dying each day, culminating on October 21st, 2011 with the final destruction of the world.” When none of this came to pass, Camping said, “We humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing,” although for the record no individual ever humbly acknowledged anything while referring to themselves as “we.” I’m reminded of something my religion professor Donald Rogan told me once: “Never predict the end of the world. You’re almost certain to be wrong, and if you’re right, no one will be around to congratulate you.”

Camping’s personal apocalypse arrived in 2013, when he died at the age of ninety-two. Part of our fears about the world ending must stem from the strange reality that for each of us our world will end, and soon. In that sense, maybe apocalyptic anxieties are a by-product of humanity’s astonishing capacity for narcissism. How could the world possibly survive the death of its single most important inhabitant—me? But I think something else is at work. We know we will end in part because we know other species have ended.

“Modern humans,” as we are called by paleontologists, have been around for about 250,000 years. This is our so-called “temporal range,” the length of time we’ve been a species. Contemporary elephants are at least ten times older than us—their temporal range extends back to the Pliocene Epoch, which ended more than 2.5 million years ago. Alpacas have been around for something like 10 million years—forty times longer than us. The tuatara, a species of reptile that lives in New Zealand, first emerged around 240 million years ago. They’ve been here a thousand times longer than we have, since before Earth’s supercontinent of Pangaea began to break apart.