It was over, he said. It was too late, we had dithered too long. Our society had already become too fragmented and dysfunctional for us to fix, in time, the calamitous mistakes we had made. And, in any case, people’s attention remained elusive. Neither season after season of extreme weather events nor the risk of extinction for a million animal species around the world could push environmental destruction to the top of our country’s list of concerns. And how sad, he said, to see so many among the most creative and best-educated classes, those from whom we might have hoped for inventive solutions, instead embracing personal therapies and pseudo-religious practices that promoted detachment, a focus on the moment, acceptance of one’s surroundings as they were, equanimity in the face of worldly cares. (This world is but a shadow, it is a carcass, it is nothing, this world is not real, do not mistake this hallucination for the real world.) Self-care, relieving one’s own everyday anxieties, avoiding stress: these had become some of our society’s highest goals, he said—higher, apparently, than the salvation of society itself. The mindfulness rage was just another distraction, he said. Of course we should be stressed, he said. We should be utterly consumed with dread. Mindful meditation might help a person face drowning with equanimity, but it would do absolutely nothing to right the Titanic, he said. It wasn’t individual efforts to achieve inner peace, it wasn’t a compassionate attitude toward others that might have led to timely preventative action, but rather a collective, fanatical, over-the-top obsession with impending doom.

It was useless, the man said, to deny that suffering of immense magnitude lay ahead, or that there’d be any escaping it.

How, then, should we live?

One thing we should start asking ourselves was whether or not we should go on having children.

(Here, the discomposure I mentioned earlier: murmurs and shifting among the audience, that woman’s nervous laugh. Also, this part was new. The subject of children had not been raised in the magazine article.)

To be clear, he was not saying that every woman expecting a child should consider having an abortion, the man said. Of course he was not saying that. What he was saying was that perhaps the idea of planning families in the way that people had been doing for generations needed to be rethought. He was saying that perhaps it was a mistake to bring human beings into a world that had such a strong possibility of becoming, in their lifetimes, a bleak and terrifying if not wholly unlivable place. He was asking whether to go ahead blindly and behave as if there was little or no such possibility might not be selfish, and perhaps even immoral, and cruel.