The Sunlight is Gloomy. There. I said it.

My best friend, Sean Hood, one of the most creative and talented people I have ever met, recently posted a pictorial-verbal essay on sunlight (Undergrids.com). He contrasts this with his earlier writings of the Black Sun (not the human historical connotations of Black Sun but the mysterious, energetic force of the Black Sun as written about by Sean and the likes of Barry Michels/Phil Stultz (The Tools; Coming Alive)). Here is my response to his post that I think is worth extracting and just posting here.

Sunlight and heat slay me. Although I’m not often bored, I am so when I can’t move or think or daydream. In that sense, I resonate with Mick Jagger’s Stones song in which he sings that “Sunshine bores the daylights out of. me…chasing shadows, moonlight mystery….”

I often find myself confused by the collective assumptions about sunny days (“beautiful!”) and cloudy/rain days (“gloomy”). I too have the opposite reactions. Stepping back from our current period of very reasonable concern that sunlight might be a proximate cause of human extinction, it seems understandable that the Sun was worshipped. For the past 50,000 years or so, if I understand our history, humanoids have been sustained by the sunlight—not threatened by it. Of course, sunlight is neutral. A star amongst trillions just engaging in its burning chemical reactions. For humans, though, the Sun is something that each summer becomes more of a real threat to global stability. In 2018, parts of Yemen had temperatures of 125F during the peak of the summer. It’s estimated that, if this temperature rises even by 5F, the environment would not be compatible with human life. Hence, it follows that, if sunlight produces ever increasing temperatures over the next, say, 20 years, there may be a requirement for mass seasonal human migration from equatorial regions. And given how the USA is currently responding to “visitors” from other sovereign nations seeking (some of them) asylum from social dangers, things look rather stark for, say, 100 million to 500 million people migrating North every summer just to survive the ambient temperatures. One can imagine a large scale international cooperative effort to make the best of the situation but, if the history of human behaviors is an indicator of any value, international cooperative efforts to help others is an unlikely scenario. Exploitation, famine, military blockades, large-scale violence: that’s the stuff of massive environmentally-driven migration. It’s odd to think that such challenges will likely arise for humanity in a decade or so.

Check the science behind this expectation. I dare you to do so. (Note: have a bottle of Scotch and ice nearby after. your research review.)

Another thing that Sean’s post brings to the surface is that humans, not through pure malice or anything so sinister, don’t tend to believe it until they see it. Scientists put the equivalent of a Honda Accord on Mars and equipped it with live-action cameras and data-gathering computers. Virtual reality and AI are in their infancy and the science behind these produces staggering alternative reality experiences. So why do we dismiss so easily the unanimous conclusions of climate scientists?

I’m going to ask that question again: why do we dismiss so easily the unanimous conclusions of climate scientists? I read an article on MotherJones recently about grief and disengagement among leading international climate scientists. Many have dropped out of the field and have opened flower shops or moved to the wilderness. The scientific data are so overwhelmingly clear, these scientists say, that we’re headed for global chaos and loss of life on the order of possibly billions, that they have self-identified as having developed the so-called Cassandra Syndrome: tellers of truth that are destined not to be believed. Fully informed climate scientists, at their most optimistic, talk about how mass international cooperation, put into effect immediately, might (might?) avoid some of the more severe consequences of what is indeed transpiring with our ecosystem and its suitability for human life. I appreciate that they focus on the optimistic. The dulcet phrase: “mass international cooperation.’ However, when have humans ever put aside their own immediate self-interests and profits and cooperated on a mass global scale? Of course, the answer is: never. 

One might object and point out that this is the first time that such gravitas has touched humanity. That’s a fair observation. I’ll even punt on the Cuban Missile Crisis during which, if historians are to be believed, massive nuclear annihilation of our planet, something essentially advocated by both the US and Soviet military generals of the time, was prevented by a then-secret back-channel gossamer communication thread between JKF and Khrushchev via Bobby Kennedy and a mid-level Soviet diplomat.

So let’s look at current global cooperative behavior. Current foreign policy as practiced by the strongest world powers suggests that global cooperation is an oxymoron. The USA pulled out of the already rather symbolic Paris agreements. Fat and rich American politicians are labeling climate catastrophists as fringe kooks—even though the latter have the overwhelming support of scientific data on their side.

So as not to get too caught up in the mind-bending complexity of climate science, let us dumb ourselves down a few notches. No crowd was ever done a disservice by dumbing things down for the sake of true appreciation of an existing group problem. OK. so…we know that copper conducts electricity. Science has data that overwhelmingly support this fact. I can be called a fringe kook for knowing that copper conducts electricity if, for some reason, copper not conducting electricity was an important assumption for the immediate profits of multibillion dollar interests. All their dismissals won’t matter, though, when a piece of copper is placed in front of their eyes and it conducts electricity. This analogy holds with regard to climate change except, in the copper scenario, the multibillion dollar interests would simply lose a lot of money. Applying the analogy to climate catastrophe, well, multibillion dollar interests would also lose a lot of money but the planet on which that money has any meaning or significance would not be habitable by humans.

Circling back to the Sun, I resonate completely with the Black Sun as Sean describes it. Sunlight implies constant activity, productivity, consumption, happiness, and the illusion of infinite growth. Black sun rays imply being (as opposed to doing), periods of prolonged inactivity, preservation, and the reality of finitude. In this sense, taking off the trappings of contemporary acceptable appearances, I worship the Black Sun—“worship” in the sense that it and its mysteries lead me to resonate with a sense of peace whereas the Sun and bright sunlight and all of the associations Sean linked to the bright Sun (including glib and greedy climate catastrophe deniers), these latter elements create a sense of dread in me and an intuition that vast suffering and destruction are quite literally on our horizon.