The thing that sets “cosmic horror” apart from other kinds of “horror” isn’t that it’s set in space or deals with aliens, but that it confronts the protagonists with forces so far beyond them that their world views are shattered and they are forced to realized just how cosmically tiny they are. Almost inevitably this causes them to break down or go mad in despair and hopelessness. But that has always kinda baffled me: if you already *know* that you are, cosmically speaking, truly unimportant… will the reality of it really crush you? Similarly, sometimes people are confronted with their own mortality, or with the end of the world, or some such, and they go bugnuts. But then, *everybody* dies, and we all know it. The United States won’t last forever; western civilization will collapse into an unrecoverable dark age; a supervolcano will go off and blanket the continent in a yard of ash; the sun will bloat, turn red and die. We *know* these things, and yet generally people just get on with life, even knowing the general futility of what they do in the grand scheme of things. We’re every day faced with The End and our own unimportance, yet we don’t go bugnuts and run through the nearest WalMart stark naked squirting cheap generic ketchup all over the bagged tighty whities in the mens department while screeching about Yog Sothoth and white privilege. Most days, anyway.

A contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft was Robert E. Howard, creator of “Conan the Barbarian.” Howard was *very* different from Lovecraft; where HPL was a bookish, sickly New England introvert, REH was a a rootin-tootin’ six-gun packin’ brawlin’ Texan. But different as they were, Howard and Lovecraft  were literary friends, trading not only correspondence but also incorporating each others ideas and sometimes even characters into their own mythos. It is not unreasonable to say that Conan lived in the same world as Cthulhu, the Deep Ones and the Elder Things, just ten or twenty thousand years earlier than most Lovecraft tales. And Conan was aware of similar sort of entities and unimaginable powers beyond himself; he knew that his place in the universe was insignificant. But Conan never fell into despair or went mad at the thought of it. Robert Howard was well aware of Lovecrafts “cosmic horror,” yet he had an answer to it in the form of how Conan viewed the world:

“I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom’s realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer’s Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”

Basically… “Meh. Ain’t nuthin’ I can do about it.”

I was reminded of all this today after reading this article:

The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It’s Sending People to Therapy

The contents of which article are pretty much what’s promised by the title. A paper has declared that not only is climate change accelerating and inevitable, it’s unstoppable and it will lead to essentially the end of modern civilization within the lifetimes of many of those reading the paper. Accurate or not, I dunno (not my area of expertise). I do know that history is replete with sudden climatic changes that have trashed civilizations; a volcanic eruption in the fifth century wiped out harvests around the Mediterranean and helped spread a plague; the result of these was a terminal weakening of the Roman Empire as well a chaos among surrounding barbarian nations. The result of all that was Rome finally fell and Rome went from a city of more than a million to a virtual ghost town.

The last twenty years have seen record heat wave on top of record heat wave; the oceans are getting warmer and acidifying. Holes are bursting open in the Siberian tundra, spewing out kilotons of methane to go speed up global warming some more. If the oceans warm up a few more degrees, the methane hydrates on the ocean floors might burst and loose *their* megatons of methane into the atmosphere. The Indians and the Chinese are sending more CO2 into the atmosphere every year, having long since surpassed the US. And the people in the west who claim to care about this sort of thing the most are proposing actions not only doomed to fail, but to make things worse. Where an active program to develop nuclear power could not only clear CO2 out of the atmosphere, it could bolster western economies; instead, we get rubbish about ending air travel and relying for our very lives on the whims of the weather. The article points out that in 2018 Europe reaped six million tons less wheat than it should have due to droughts; if European climate alarmists were honest and non-hypocritical, they would recognize that a reduced – and presumable reducING – harvest means that fewer mouths can be fed… and thus Europe should *not* take in massive numbers of third worlders to live on the dole.

The article suggests that *lots* of people have read this paper promising DOOOOOM in about a decade, and have taken to panic and despair. What the article does *not* suggest is that these people are turning that despair into anything productive. Some are heading out into the sticks to live as “climate preppers,” which, if the climate is going to change as much, as bad, and as permanently as some suggest, is a singularly useless thing to do. It would be like building a waterproof underground bunker on some low-lying Pacific island in order to ride out sea level rise. Instead, these people should either:

1: Do like Conan and just get on with life. By doing so they will still contribute to the economy, providing some meager assistance to those few who are working on  actually useful projects like space colonization and nuclear power.

2: Actively contribute to, say, space colonization, nuclear power development, third-world birth control, continent-scale aqueducts and desalination systems, planetary scale geoengineering efforts, etc.

I was also reminded of the alternatives to despair and madness when faced with cosmic horror after watching this simple yet surprisingly funny recent Saturday Night Live skit: