Children of Men and the Torch

Shadowlands #1

In the film Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón (2006), human civilization is on the brink of extinction. The year is 2027 and nations around the globe have collapsed from a combination of civil unrest, famine, disease, and nuclear war. Warlords and gangs roam Europe. People in South America fight to the death over dwindling food supplies. Major cities on the American East Coast have been leveled by atomic bombs.

Only Britain soldiers on, the last country left with a functioning government, but the island nation is flooded by waves and waves of asylum seekers fleeing the chaos, radiation, and plague from other parts of the world. In response, the country has become a police state with the army rounding up, imprisoning, or executing all incoming immigrants.

Outside of the immigrant camps, free British citizens live out depressing, meaningless lives. Most have turned their back on reality through a combination of alcohol, drugs, and escapism. Others have taken their own life through various, commercially-available suicide products.

It is the end of days. Human civilization, as we know it, breathes its last breaths and slowly descends into a dark pit of chaos, despair, and death.

Why?

Because there are no children. Eighteen years prior to the events of Children of Men, humans mysteriously become infertile, meaning the youngest person alive is now an eighteen-year-old adult. Over the course of two decades all of the children have grown up, and no incoming babies are around to replace them. So instead of a self-rejuvenating continuum of life, existing perpetually and cyclically, the human race begins to age rapidly. Before the end of the century, it’ll disappear entirely.

The key subtext to Children of Men is the suggestion that the result of this knowledge—that human existence is coming to an end—is specifically what causes civilization to collapse. That the ubiquitous experience of childlessness—the nonexistence of youthful energy; the lack of juvenile innocence, wonder, and joy; the absence of the incoming generation—drives the world into a kind of overwhelming and violent anxiety, which rapidly results in global destabilization and multiple crises of war, famine, ecocide, and mass migration.

But why would this happen? Why would the disappearance of children result in such a collapse? The number of working age people around to keep society functioning hasn’t changed. There’s still food, and electricity, and roads, and laws, and entertainment. It’s not as if anyone alive is in immediate danger or going to die any sooner.

What’s changed other than adults are now freed up to do whatever they want? They can party 24/7 without needing a sitter. No more screaming babies on airplanes, amiright?

No, society collapses because widespread, absolute infertility and the disappearance of children represent an immense spiritual crisis, the most immense spiritual crisis possible. It casts the human race into a kind of Shadowlands.

Whether or not we know it, we exist inside a matrix of human perpetuity; both an unspoken narrative and ontic reality that is predicated on the cyclical, never-ending nature of our existence: our parents’ generation came before us; they gave birth to us and raised us; then we give birth to and raise up the next generation, which will inherit the world and keep it all spinning long after we die. This continuum—as far as we’re concerned—has always existed and will keep existing, keep renewing itself cycle after cycle, generation after generation, forever.

This matrix of human perpetuity is the water we swim in: most people have children and a great deal of their sense of purpose and fulfillment stems from raising them, providing for them, teaching them, and seeing them flourish. And even those who don’t have children still have a sense that someone else has children, that there’s an incoming generation that will inherit and maintain and steward everything around them, that human existence will perpetuate beyond their individual timeline, that life will go on.

Now, if you were to displace a person from this matrix, if you destroyed the narrative of human perpetuity—say, by telling them scientists figured out that the sun will explode in a few years—this would change their outlook on life. To say they would be ‘devastated’ is putting it mildly: their entire sense of reality would be annihilated. They wouldn’t know what to do with themselves, much less process their own existence. Undoubtedly, they would stop working towards things, stop sacrificing their time and energy for the ‘greater good', stop investing in the future. They would think to themselves, “What’s the point?”

Now this would be true even if they knew the event would occur after they die. Perhaps the blow may be softened by the notion that they would avoid a fiery death; perhaps they would still get several decades of recreation before they kick the bucket. But the sun exploding in, let’s say, a hundred years is still going to change their outlook on life. It’s still going to make them think, “What’s the point?”

Why?

Because our entire physiology, our entire phenomenal reality, everything that makes us what we are, is grounded in the notion that something transcends us, that our efforts contribute to the ongoing project of our family’s or our people’s or our species’ or the human spirit’s existence. That together as humans, we carry a torch and it keeps burning long after we die.

And so what happens in Children of Men is: that torch is extinguished. No more children, no more next generation; in eighty years every single person will be dead and humans will disappear from the cosmos, forever. This abruptly and violently shatters the meaning of life. It murders the future. And the world can only get darker, colder, and die.

But that’s not the end of the film.

Enter the protagonist, Theo: a cynical government worker who wanders through the remainder of his life doing the best he can to ignore what’s happening around him. Like everybody else, he is waiting to die. He is too cowardly to kill himself. He regularly drinks himself into oblivion.

But that all changes when he encounters Kee, a West African refugee, who is miraculously pregnant with the first known child in almost two decades. Theo is immediately transformed by this discovery and commits himself to getting Kee and her baby to the Human Project, a rumored underground group of scientists working on a cure for human infertility.

So even though Children of Men presents a fallen world—one that is bleak and depressing and meaningless—it also presents a path to rebirth and redemption, highlighting the thing that makes life so meaningful in the first place.

The discovery of Kee has profound impact on Theo’s sense of purpose, on his self-narrative, on his reason for existence. He goes from demoralized drunken nihilist to courageous guardian and hero. This is best symbolized by Theo taking out a flask of his last remaining whiskey and, instead of drinking it, using it to sterilize his hands before delivering Kee’s baby.

And then he shepherds this baby like a torch—this tiny little flame that must not go out—through the darkness of the dying world and into the salvation of the Human Project, where Kee has a chance of curing infertility and therefore reigniting the engine of life that forms the very core of our existence.

Children of Men is one of my favorite movies—not just because it’s incredibly well done, well acted, and has great action sequences—but because it beautifully illustrates and engages with the concept at the center of my philosophy, The Torch, and the spiritual crisis that arises when we lose contact with it, The Shadowlands. This series of essays will dive deeply into both.

Let’s explore the Torch:

The Torch is the thing we inherit from our ancestors, that we carry and protect and nourish, and then pass on to our descendants.

This, of course, partly refers to genetics. We are the children of our parents, who passed us their genetics. Then we have children, passing on those same genetics. The genetics get passed on from generation, to generation, across millennia.

And, obviously, the passing of genetics is the source an enormous amount of meaning for human beings. This shouldn’t be controversial, as we see it everywhere in our society.

The simplest example of genetic torchbearing being meaningful is sex. Humans love sex. We more than love it, it’s this mesmerizing, sacred thing that utterly captivates us. There’s a reason sex plays such an impactful role in our society, as an object of focus, as an attractor, as a driver. There’s a reason people go to great lengths to get laid. There’s a reason people watch so much porn on the internet. There’s a reason sex sells movies and magazines and clothing and perfume.

This meaningfulness of genetic torchbearing is also demonstrated by the fact that we willingly have children and, historically, have as many children as possible. There’s a reason we’re so intense about our children; so protective; so activated by teaching, guiding, lifting them up; so compelled to hand down to them every last drop of our energy, knowledge, and capital.

There’s a reason the loss of a child is considered the worst thing that can happen to somebody. There’s a reason people seem to feel more at peace with retirement, about getting old, about dying when they have many healthy descendants to carry on after them.

There’s a reason we consider family to be so important, a reason fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters are usually the most important people in our life. There’s a reason we tend to be biased towards kin, more likely to favor and support those who are blood-related over those who are not.

But the Torch isn’t just a metaphor for genetics, for making babies—and this is the key point—the Torch is also a metaphor for culture. There is a cultural continuity that separates humans from other species and—just like the genetic Torch—passing the cultural Torch provides us with an enormous amount of meaning. It is a huge priority to us.

Humans are not static objects, we’re patterns of culture rippling through time, which is why we find creating, directing, and consuming these patterns to be so meaningful. There’s a reason we love creating art. There’s a reason we thirst for knowledge, stories, television, and music—all these information-rich phenomena that we impulsively stuff into our brain. There’s a reason our phones are so addictive, a reason we often spend hours a day sifting through texts, social media, ebooks, music, and videos.

There’s a reason we find meaning in teaching things, in having our culture spread and be adopted by others. There’s a reason we find meaning in sharing information, in telling a friend about our day, in venting to another human about something bothering us, in sharing memorable experiences with loved ones.

There’s a reason we’re so driven to be part of something bigger than ourselves, why we so readily join religions, cults, radical movements, and fan clubs. There’s a reason why we enjoy being in the presence of others at festivals and parties and bars—basking in the vibe of other people—even if we never actually talk to anyone. There’s a reason we crave a shared narrative, a shared way of life, a feeling of being plugged into a powerful network that’s vibrant and alive and popular and going someplace.

There’s a reason we love the idea of having an impact on the world, of leaving behind a legacy, of being remembered after we die. There’s a reason we don’t like the idea of our heritage disappearing, our people’s way of life dying, the family name being forgotten, our cultural lineage being extinguished.

All of this is to say:

We deeply desire to participate in both a genetic and cultural continuity, a genetic and cultural Torch. That’s where meaning and purpose come from: carrying, passing, and participating in that biocultural continuity. That is what our lives are about. That’s what humans do, what humans are.

And just like in Children of Men, we find ourselves in a fallen world, experiencing a major spiritual crisis, our crisis being that we’re cut off from this Torch, cut off from all the things I just listed, or in poor relations with them. We feel severed from that ancient continuity. We feel we’ve been exiled from that cosmic stream of life.

The Torch is our children, but many of us—for all kinds of reasons—aren’t having children, or aren’t having very many. We are without anyone to pass down to.

The Torch is our family, but a lot of us have wounded relationships with our family, maybe we don’t see them very often, maybe we don’t want to, maybe our extended family has shrunk so small that we’re the last of them. We are without brothers and sisters with which to share in the passing.

The Torch is our tribe, but many of us don’t have anything remotely resembling one. We might have a recreational social scene, or professional colleagues, or a club, or a social media community, but these aren’t people with which we share our life, with which we are spiritually bound, intertwined in the beautiful mystery of survival. We are without a people.

The Torch is our ancestral or indigenous culture, but for many of us that culture has been lost, destroyed, disowned, or forgotten, with nothing to replace it besides crumbling spiritual communities or the crippled pseudo-religions of consumerism and politics. We are without a culture.

The Torch is our homeland, but most of us urbanites don’t live for very long in any one location, nor do we feel any loyalty to any one city, or even any country. We’ve lost connection with the natural world outside of the occasional hike or camping trip, and even then we’re largely tourists, not stewards soulbound to the ecosystem. Others much less fortunate have had their land conquered or destroyed, they’ve been kicked out or displaced. We are without a land.

The Torch is our legacy, but most of us do work that lacks any feeling of long-term purpose, any notion that it will be appreciated or remembered. We are without a role to play.

In all these ways, we are losing our connection with the Torch. We find ourselves exiled into the Shadowlands, severed from that ancient chain of being, that cosmic continuity, that warm transcendent flame. We wish to carry it, we wish to feed it, we want it to shine out into the world. But instead we feel the fire burning low, flickering like a match in the wind.

This state of darkness we’re living in, this fallen world, hits surprisingly close to the world of Children of Men: war, pandemics, migration crises, falling birthrates, rampant depression, anxiety, suicide, feelings of meaninglessness… We exist in similar reality; an existential crisis born of the same spiritual failures, the same disconnections from the Torch. Children of Men presents us a mirror of our own modern world.

But, accordingly, the film also presents a way out: pick up the Torch, commit yourself to protecting its light, and shepherd it to safety. In doing this, Theo is transformed into a passionate hero with a reason to live. In the depths of darkness, he recovers the flame, discovers it has not yet burnt out. He finds that if he can summon the courage to pick it up, maybe that fire can grow, maybe he can jumpstart that engine of life, and deliver it into the hands of the unknown future, bigger and brighter and more beautiful than it was the day before.

I believe we are capable of this as well.

During these essays, I’ll explore the Torch, describe its properties, and discuss the implications it has on our lives. At the same time, I will take the readers on a journey through the Shadowlands of our modern spiritual crisis, explore how we got here, where we might be going, and maybe what we can do about it.

I don’t put forward the ideas that follow as any kind of absolute, unquestionable truth, but rather a public disentangling of my thoughts; an attempt to grasp at the ultimate questions of life as I teeter at the edge of my thinking and creativity.

To all my readers, I hope this series will provoke some insights, maybe breathe some air under the wings of your spiritual journey, and inspire those who feel lost to pick up the fire and find their way out of the shadows.