Editor’s Note: Ever since the beginning of scientific progress, it has been based on control (or domination) of the natural world. It has been based on a nature-hating patriarchal way of viewing the world. That does not mean that there is no other way to fulfill our curiosity. Numerous indigenous peoples and nonhumans have found ways to fulfill their curiosity within a harmonious relationship (as opposed to a dominating relationship) with the natural world.
This article highlights how scientific progress could destroy the world to the point of causing human extinction.
Our present moment is characterised by a growing obsession with the long term. The study of climate change, for example, relies on increasingly long-range simulations. Science’s predictions are no longer merely hypotheses for validation or invalidation but are often grave threats – of growing scope and severity – that must be prevented.
Predicting oncoming peril demands a proactive response. This means that, increasingly, the pursuit of technoscience tends towards not only passively investigating the natural world but also actively intervening in it. In the case of the climate, one thing this has spawned is the proposal of “geoengineering” – the large-scale harnessing of Earth’s natural systems in order to counteract climate change’s deleterious consequences.
Our anticipations of nature’s perils motivate us to attempt to intervene in it and reinvent it for our own purposes and ends. Accordingly, we increasingly reside within a world of our own making, in which the divide between the “natural” and “artificial” is collapsing. We see this from genome editing to pharmaceutical breakthroughs to new materials. And it is at the heart of the idea of the “Anthropocene”, which acknowledges that the whole Earth system is affected – for better or worse – by human activities.
While some of these technologies are rightly considered the pinnacle of progress and civilisation, our pursuit of anticipating and preventing disaster itself generates its own perils. This is, indeed, what got us into our current predicament: industrialisation, which was originally driven by our desire to control nature, has perhaps only made it more uncontrollable in the form of snowballing climate degradation.
Our efforts to predict the world tend to change the world in unpredictable ways. Alongside unlocking radical opportunities such as new medicines and technologies, this poses novel risks for our species – at ever greater scales. It is both a poison and a cure. Though awareness of this dynamic may seem incredibly contemporary, it actually dates surprisingly far back into history.
Comets and collisions
It was back in 1705 that the British scientist Edmond Halley correctly predicted the 1758 return of the comet that now bears his name. This was one of the first times numbers were successfully applied to nature to predict its long-term course. This was the start of science’s conquering of the future.
By the 1830s, another comet – Biela’s comet – became an object of attention when an astronomical authority, John Herschel, hypothesised that it would one day intersect with Earth. Such an encounter would “blot” us “out from the Solar System”, one popular astronomy book sensationally relayed. Edgar Allen Poe even wrote a short story, in 1839, imagining this world-ending collision.
On the other side of the world, in 1827, a Moscow newspaper published a short story envisioning the effects of an impending comet collision on society. Plausible mitigation strategies were discussed. The story conjured up giant machines that would act as planetary “defensive positions” to “repulse” the extraterrestrial missile. The connection between predicting nature and artificially intervening in it was already beginning to be understood.
The short story had been written by the eccentric Russian prince, Vladimir Odoevskii. In another story, The Year 4338, written a few years later, he fleshes out his depiction of future human civilisation. The title came from contemporary calculations which predicted Earth’s future collision with Biela’s Comet 2,500 years hence.
Humanity has become a planetary force. Nonetheless, Odoevskii’s vision of this resplendent future (complete with airships, recreational drug use, telepathy, and transport tunnels through the Earth’s mantle) is relayed to us entirely under this impending threat of total extinction. Again, scientists in this advanced future plan to repel the threat of the comet with ballistic defence systems. There is also mention of hemisphere-spanning systems of climate control.
This perfectly demonstrates that it was the discovery of such hazards that first dragged – and continues to drag – our concerns further into the future. Humanity only technologically asserts itself, at increasingly planetary levels, when it realises the risks it faces.
It is no surprise that, in the appending notes to The Year 4338, Odoevskii provides perhaps the very first methodology for a “general science of futurology”. He lays claim to being the first proper, self-conscious futurologist.
In 1799, the German philosopher Johann Fichte anticipated our present megastructure of planetary forecast. He foresaw a time of perfect prediction. Gleefully, he argued that this would domesticate the whole planet, erase wild nature, and even entirely eradicate “hurricanes”, “earthquakes”, and “volcanoes”. What Fichte did not foresee was the fact that the very technology that allows us to predict also itself creates novel and unforeseen risks.
But Odoevskii appreciated this. In 1844, he published another story entitled The Last Suicide. This time, he envisioned a future humanity which had again become a planetary force. Urbanisation has saturated global space, with cities swelling and fusing into one Earth-encompassing ecumenopolis – a planetwide city.
Yet Odoevskii warns of the dangers that come with accelerating modernity. This is a world in which runaway technological progress has caused overpopulation and resource depletion. Nature has become entirely artificial, with non-human species and ecosystems utterly obliterated. Alienated and depressed, the world welcomes a demagogue leader who convinces humanity to wipe themselves out. In one last expression of technological might, civilisation stockpiles all its weapons and proceeds to blow up the entire planet.
Odoevskii thus foreshadows contemporary discussion on “existential risk” and the potential for our technological developments to trigger our own species extinction. Right back in 1844, his vision is gloomy yet shockingly prescient in its acknowledgement that the power required to avert existential catastrophe is also the power requisite to cause it.
Centuries later, now that we have this power, we cannot refuse or reject it – we must wield it responsibly. Let’s hope that Odeovskii’s fiction doesn’t become our reality.
Editor’s note: Every time a corporation or state puts forward a development project to further reinforce existing structures of power, it is done under the guise of “economic prosperity.” Those most affected by the project are brought forward as one of the beneficiaries of the so-called economic progress. In reality, their ways of life and livelihood are destroyed, making them more and more dependent on the larger economy and, thus, on the state. The nonhumans are left unmentioned. The same claims are being made about the Uinta Basin Railway. As is mentioned in the article, there is little probability that the railways will be used for anything except transporting fossil fuels.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. DGR does not endorse all of the ideas expressed here. We do not believe solar, wind or geothermal energy are a viable – or even an ethical – alternative to fossil fuel. Regardless of that, we do agree with the author’s analysis of the Uinta Basin Railway contributing to further climate change.
This is a call to action. Stop this project before it starts. Get involved in an organization to Stop the Unita Basin Railway. Or get involved in fighting for what you love, start your own organization. Spread the word!
The Uinta Basin is home to a diverse set of creatures from endangered black-footed ferrets to plants that cannot be found anywhere else in the world, such as the Uinta Basin hookless cactus and Graham’s beardtongue.
But the basin also sits atop pockets of crude oil and natural gas, which are being extracted: to transport these fossil fuels to the Gulf Coast, local governments and oil companies are planning to invest up to $4.5 billion to construct a new railway through it.
Although the project has been approved, construction hasn’t begun and it’s not too late for U.S. President Biden to keep his climate pledges and stop the new railway, a new op-ed argues.
The Uinta Basin, named after the Ute Tribe, is located in Northeast Utah and Western Colorado, about 200 miles from Salt Lake City. Streams from the Uinta mountains roll through the basin into a tributary of the Colorado River – supplying 40 million people with water throughout the drought-ridden West. Plants that cannot be found anywhere else in the world, such as the Uinta Basin hookless cactus and Graham’s beardtongue, flourish in the Uinta Basin. The ecosystem also harbors endangered species such as the sage grouse and black-footed ferret.
By all accounts, the Uinta Basin is a beautiful ecological haven. Unfortunately, however, it sits atop pockets of crude oil and natural gas, which are being extracted. To transport crude oil to the Gulf Coast where it will be refined, local governments and oil companies are planning to invest $1.5 to $4.5 billion to construct a new railway through the basin.
View of Christmas Meadows in the High Uintas Wilderness Area. Image by Brandon Rasmussin via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
The Uinta Basin Railway is a proposed 88-mile stretch of train tracks that will blast through mountains, reroute 443 streams, bulldoze through endangered sage grouse habitat, appropriate private property and even fragment a roadless area in the Ashley National Forest. According to the U.S. Forest Service Chief, “a railway does not constitute a road.” The railway is projected to quadruple the region’s oil extraction from 85,000 up to 350,000 barrels of oil per day – resulting in an increase in air pollution, noise pollution, habitat degradation and a greater risk of water pollution, train derailments and wildfires. The region already suffers from chronic air pollution, falling below federal standards for ozone pollutionset by the Environmental Protection Agency.
By quadrupling fossil fuel extraction in the Uinta Basin, construction of the railway is projected to increase U.S. carbon emissions by 1%. Escalating climate change will bring more wildfires and more drought to the region – at a time when the Biden administration should be actively trying to reduce carbon emissions to prevent further climate change-fueled catastrophes.
Uinta Basin is freckled with small cities and towns such as Vernal, Duchesne and Jensen. The region’s economic history can be summarized as a series of boom and bust cycles due to its reliance on fossil fuels. The whims of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the fluctuations of oil prices determine the quality of life for many people in the Uinta Basin. These fluctuations often send communities into periods of growth and stretches of economic depression that threaten small business and family security.
Proponents of the Uinta Basin Railway claim that its construction will diversify the economy of the region by connecting it to the global market. However, there is little evidence that the railway will be used to transport anything but oil to or from the region, especially because at least 130,000 barrels of oil per day will have to be transported to recoup the cost of construction. This will only cause harm and exacerbate boom and bust cycles.
If the railway is constructed, the communities of the Uinta basin will not gain a diversified economy. But there are viable options to re-stimulate and stabilize the economy of the region without large-scale ecological destruction. In the Uinta Basin there are potential sites for geothermal energy production and wind farms, and the entire region is suitable for solar energy production. Additionally, the region’s state parks and Ashley National Forest attract anglers, hikers and outdoor enthusiasts – accommodating a growing tourism industry.
Although the Uinta Basin Railway has been approved by the U.S. Forest Service and the Surface Transportation Board, construction hasn’t begun. It’s not too late to stop this catastrophic project from happening. President Joe Biden has made it a priority to address the climate crisis. To uphold his commitment to a livable climate and to safeguard our country’s biodiversity, the president should now backtrack on the Uinta Basin Railway and cancel the project from moving forward.
The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition (Coalition) has filed a petition with the Surface Transportation Board (Board) requesting authority to construct and operate an approximately 85-mile common-carrier rail line connecting two termini in Utah’s Uinta Basin near South Myton Bench and Leland Bench to the national rail network. The construction and operation of this proposed project has the potential to result in significant environmental impacts. Therefore, the Board’s Office of Environmental Analysis (OEA) has determined that the preparation of an EIS is appropriate pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
The Uinta Basin Railway is a preliminary public private partnership(PPP). A PPP is used for collaboration to fund, build and operate infrastructure projects. This financing scam allows a project like the Uinta Basin Railway to move forward faster.
The public funds authorized for use on the railway come from mineral lease fees. Oil and gas are minerals for which producers pay a mineral lease fee to the federal government as part of the Mineral Lands Leasing Act of 1920. The government then gives part of those funds back to the state to be used within communities where the minerals are extracted.
The Utah Permanent Community Impact Fund Board manages these funds and has granted $27.9 million to the Seven County Infrastrucutre Coalition for planning and studies in the environmental clearance process.
The private industry will pay an anticipated $1.2-$1.5 billion for construction, operation and maintenance of the railway. This financing will be paid through contracts and service fees for use of the railway.
Scientists warn that the Earth may be reaching a planetary tipping point due to a unsustainable human pressures, while the UN releases a new report that finds global society has made significant progress on only four environmental issues out of ninety in the last twenty years. Climate change, overpopulation, overconsumption, and ecosystem destruction could lead to a tipping point that causes planetary collapse, according to a new paper in Nature by 22 scientists. The collapse may lead to a new planetary state that scientists say will be far harsher for human well-being, let alone survival.
“The odds are very high that the next global state change will be extremely disruptive to our civilizations. Remember, we went from being hunter-gathers to being moon-walkers during one of the most stable and benign periods in all of Earth’s history,” co-author Arne Mooers with Simon Fraser University explains in a press release.
If it all sounds apocalyptic, the scientists say it probably should.
“In a nutshell, humans have not done anything really important to stave off the worst because the social structures for doing something just aren’t there,” says Mooers. “My colleagues who study climate-induced changes through the earth’s history are more than pretty worried. In fact, some are terrified.”
A new bleaker world?
Much like a single ecosystem can collapse if overexploited or degraded for too long, the scientists argue that the global environment could also reach a tipping point, leading to a whole new world. While planetary states have changed throughout Earth’s history—such as the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and the rise of the mammals—this would be the first global shift caused by a single species. The 22 authors—including ecologists, biologists, complex-systems theoreticians, geologists and paleontologists—examined how human pressures are modifying our atmosphere, oceans, land, and climate to an extent in which current ecological states could collapse, impoverishing the world.
“The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations,” says lead author Anthony Barnosky, with the University of California, Berkeley. Some species would likely come out as winners in this scenario, but overall biodiversity would crash with drastic impacts for human society.
Research on ecological collapse has shown that once 50-90 percent of an ecosystem is altered, it risks imminent collapse. Extrapolating this to the world as a whole, the researchers point out that today 43 percent of the world’s terrestrial ecosystems have been converted to agriculture or urban use with roads covering most wild areas. Experts say that by 2025, half of the world’s land surface will have been altered. Even untouched areas, however, are feeling the impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.
“Can it really happen? Looking into the past tells us unequivocally that, yes, it can really happen. It has happened,” Barnosky says. “I think that if we want to avoid the most unpleasant surprises, we want to stay away from that 50 percent mark.”
The scientists also compared today’s environmental pressures to past tipping points that led to wholesale planetary changes.
“The last tipping point in Earth’s history occurred about 12,000 years ago when the planet went from being in the age of glaciers, which previously lasted 100,000 years, to being in its current interglacial state,” explains Mooers. “Once that tipping point was reached, the most extreme biological changes leading to our current state occurred within only 1,000 years. That’s like going from a baby to an adult state in less than a year.”However, he adds: “The planet is changing even faster now.”Co-author Elizabeth Hadly says that tipping points may have already occurred in some regions, leading to a ruined environment, worsening conflict, and human misery.”I just returned from a trip to the high Himalayas in Nepal, where I witnessed families fighting each other with machetes for wood—wood that they would burn to cook their food in one evening. In places where governments are lacking basic infrastructure, people fend for themselves, and biodiversity suffers,” she says. “We desperately need global leadership for planet Earth.”
Editor’s note: Protecting the ocean means life protection, our ecosystems depend on intact and clean oceans. Even though the aim is to protect 30% of the planet, it’s not clear what conservation actually means worldwide. That leads to ineffective conservation measures and demands more knowledge about oceanic ecosystems and also implementing it. For the most part protected areas don’t need to be managed, they just need to have humans leave them alone.
There’s never been more momentum for protecting the ocean, but new research finds that many efforts fail to protect endangered species — or have barely gotten off the drawing board.
Ocean ecosystems and the marine wildlife that depend on them are under threat as never before. Between overfishing, climate change, plastic pollution, and habitat destruction, it’s a bad time to be a prawn, cod, seabird, or whale.
There’s no single silver bullet solution to the biodiversity crisis, but in recent years, many people in the environmental community have focused on the goal of “30 x 30”: protecting 30% of the planet by the year 2030. Many nations have made promises toward that goal, including the United States, which has adapted it into the “America the Beautiful” initiative.
Measurable goals like this provide nations with clear, quantifiable conservation goals that others in the international community can follow, verify, or use to identify shortfalls and push for more action.
At the same time, many experts warn that number-based targets like “protect 30%” lend themselves to incentives to arguably-kinda-sorta protect as much as possible, rather than protecting the most ecologically important areas. Governments, for instance, can use what’s euphemistically referred to as “creative accounting” — counting things as protected that probably should not be considered protected.
Two new research papers examine some of this creative accounting in the ocean. Together, they stress important things to keep in mind when creating protected areas and when assessing their usefulness.
To Protect a Species, Protect Areas Where They Actually Live
A surprisingly common issue in area-based conservation happens when a government declares a new protected area to help save a threatened species of concern…without first checking to see if the species actually lives within those boundaries.
It happens more often than you might think. A new study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology looked at 89 marine protected areas in Europe that are supposed to protect diadromous fish species (those that migrate between ocean and fresh water, like salmon or some eels) of conservation concern.
Their findings are shocking: Many of these areas protect habitats where those fish species do not live, and very few of them protect the most important core habitat for any diadromous fish species.
“A marine protected area should be an area that protects part of the marine environment,” says Sophie Elliott of the Wildlife Conservation Trust, the study’s lead author. “I say ‘should’ because there are a lot of parks that don’t have enough thought put into them. Quite often things are done quickly without thinking or understanding the situation.”
Sometimes this happens because of limited resources for scientific study. In other words, according to Elliot, we simply don’t know enough about species’ habitat use to protect their key habitat, at least not yet. This is known as the rare-species paradox: Endangered species are often hard to find and study, especially in the vast ocean, so it can be hard to understand what habitat qualities they need to thrive, even if we can hypothesize that protecting certain regions will mitigate some of the threats the species face.
Other times government officials, in search of positive publicity, announce a new protected area that was studied but wasn’t intended to protect a species.
“We had a series of MPAs that were supposed to have measures in place to protect certain species,” Elliott says. “But then an extra species got tacked on to the stated goals of the MPA, and it wasn’t effective for that species.” She declined to identify examples, given the political sensitivities of some of these protected areas.
In addition to gathering more data and always basing protected-area design on the best available data, Elliott recommends a more holistic approach to designating future protected areas.
“When people think about putting MPAs in place, look at the whole range of biodiversity that exists within it, because there might be many endangered and protected species,” she says. “You need to know what’s in that MPA and do ecosystem-based management” — management focusing on the whole ecosystem and not just individual species. It’s the difference between protecting cod by establishing fishing quotas versus protecting cod by also managing their habitat and predators and food and other things that eat that food. “We’ve long been calling for that, but we aren’t really working toward it at all,” she says.
What Counts As ‘Protected’ Varies More Than You Think
Another key issue in marine protected area management is what should count as “protected.”
Some areas restrict oil and gas extraction but allow any and all fishing. Some allow swimmers and other recreation, while others say people can’t even go scuba diving.
In one glaring recent example, the advocacy group Oceana U.K. found evidence that the United Kingdom allows bottom trawling in many of its MPAs. Bottom trawling is a fishing method that’s extremely destructive to sensitive habitat types; it’s been compared to clear-cutting forests to catch rabbits.
“At the end of the day … there’s no one clear definition of what conservation means around the world,” says Angelo Villagomez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has studied the issue. “One of the negative externalities of the global push to protect 30% of the ocean is that some governments are more concerned with being able to say that they protected 30% of the ocean than they are concerned with delivering meaningful biodiversity protections.”
Villagomez and his colleagues have identified another big issue: According to their new analysis in the journal Conservation Letters, fully one-quarter of the 100 largest marine protected areas — as cataloged in the United Nations and IUCN’s world database of protected areas — are announced but not yet implemented. Many have no clear timeline of when the formal protections might be put into place, or what those regulations might look like.
For now, those areas exist on paper but remain unprotected in the real world. For example, the paper cites the OSPAR MPA network covering 7% of the Northeast Atlantic, which currently appears to have no concrete protections.
This wide range of rules and inconsistent protections makes it harder to protect the ocean — or to count it toward 30×30 goals.
Governments are not supposed to submit anything to the world database of protected areas until something is designated, “but they do, and that’s just the reality,” says Villagomez.
But here’s the biggest problem: The study found that many of the world’s largest MPAs lack the scientific knowledge, funding, and political support to be effective.
“We know that MPAs work when they are well designed and provided the funding to operate,” Villagomez told me. “But for about one-third of the MPAs we studied, based on everything we know about protected area science, they will never result in positive outcomes for biodiversity.”
The conclusions of these two papers are clear: Too many marine protected areas are poorly designed and sited in places where the species they’re ostensibly trying to protect do not actually live. Also, too many allow destructive extractive industries to operate, limiting the benefits of any protection.
Despite these setbacks, Villagomez remains optimistic about the future of MPA-based protections.
“The good news is that this works really well about one-third of the time — if you play baseball and you hit the ball 300 out of 1,000 times, you’re going to the Hall of Fame,” he says. “There’s a ton of science that shows that well-designed well-implemented MPAs work, and for one-quarter of the MPAS we looked at, they’re well designed and are just lacking funding for implementation.”
David Sherman is a marine biologist specializing in the ecology and conservation of sharks. He received his Ph.D. in environmental science and policy from the University of Miami. Follow him on Twitter, where he’s always happy to answer any questions anyone has about sharks.
Editor’s note: Just substitute the word civilization for the word modernity.
By Tom Murphy – using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options / Do the Math
Having developed a perspective that modernity is fated to fail, and that many of our culture’s current pursuits and institutions are misguided efforts to prop up temporary structures, I often encounter the reaction that I am being defeatist. If what I am saying is true, then what’s the point? Yeah: what is this point that others believe justifies all the craziness? Whatever they think “the point” is could well be based on unexamined and incorrect beliefs.
I will attempt in this post to explain what I mean by this, in multiple passes. A starter example may seem a little patronizing, but could still be helpful. If your world only makes sense and has meaning on the premise that Santa Claus exists, then you’ve put yourself in an unfortunate place. Others have found ways to appreciate life without that requirement based on a falsehood.
Let’s also try generalizing the concept before getting to specific examples. We start with something I present that happens to be essentially true (or indeed comes to pass in due time), whether or not we can say so with absolute certainty. Then imagine that the reaction is: “Well, if that’s true, then what’s the point of living?” Well, we obviously are living, and if we do so in the context of this truth, then it makes little sense to say there’s no point in living. The problem must then lie in what the person believes “the point” to be, and therefore must be wrong about that. In this sense, a “what’s the point” challenge might be taken to signal a flawed worldview.
Okay. That’s the template. Let’s do a few practice cases (optional if you want to cut to the chase), and work our way toward the main event regarding modernity.
Determinism
As we have no demonstrable evidence to the contrary, it is likely true that the universe operates as a quasi-deterministic symphony that writes itself in real time as the tangle of relationships described by physics play out. I say quasi-deterministic because quantum probabilities add spice to the details of the unfolding, but still in a prescriptive way. Most people have serious problems with this view, because life does not at all feel like it operates deterministically. I get it. Truly, the “undetermined” sensation is not lost on me for a second! But so what? Why would the actual real universe as it exists before us care what notions and hang-ups I construct in my brain about how it works?
Mind-bendingly complex and cool things can emerge from “the stage”—as far as we know all 100% consistent with the laws of physics that we have carefully elucidated, and to which no replicable experiment has found exception. That’s a strong bit of evidence on the side of determinism: we can’t override the physics that makes our neurons do what they do, for instance. Life certainly feels undetermined and open-ended, because the complexity is so extraordinarily insane that the only conceivable way to reveal the outcome is to play it out with the actual full universe as expressed in unfathomably rich inter-relationships between all the particles. No one—including the universe itself—knows for sure exactly what comes next in every detail (though broad brush predictions about things like sunrise tend to be pretty solid). Just because it’s deterministic doesn’t mean there’s a plan or a script: just rules and scads of interactions.
So, if in rejecting the notion of determinism, someone says “What’s the point in getting up every day if I’m just executing a script?”, then whatever they imagine the point to be is whacked in the context that determinism is actually the way of things. Something doesn’t make sense in their view of the world (which I will alternately label as worldview or cosmology), in a broken sort of way. In other words, if the only thing that makes sense to someone is to live in a world that is not deterministic, but the world is indeed deterministic, then that person’s sense-making of the world is essentially misguided. They have no authority to determine whether determinism is true or not, so what’s their coping strategy if—as mountains of evidence suggest—the universe turns out to be deterministic? Do they have a plan for that besides reactive rejection, or does it break their whole cosmology and leave them rudderless? What a shame, if they short-circuit based on their own chosen flaw: an unforced error. I suppose they can also just never accept determinism and continue to be comfortable within their cosmology, fragile as it may be.
Free Will
It goes pretty similarly with the sensation of free will. Again, I get that our perception of the world convincingly fools us into mistaking agency for free will. But what if that’s wrong? Yes, we have agency in that we are actors in this self-writing script and have impacts on the rest of the performance—impacts that are hatched by our own neurons without violating any laws of physics. But there’s no sign of a “soul” that can override the relationships between all the stuff that makes us up. If physics (e.g., neurochemistry) were that easy to override, then how can drugs gain the upper hand? How can anesthesia make us go completely blank for hours without even a sense of time (where does the soul go)? Why does our sense of soul/awareness/consciousness coincide with our biological birth and subsequent development as biological beings? It’s dazzlingly impressive how resistant people can be to the notion that we are wholly corporeal beings. What a spectacle!
Anyway, it is unacceptable to many to suggest that we don’t have free will—which has every likelihood of being the case with no firm evidence to the contrary. Again, we don’t get to choose whether it’s true or not. If in someone’s mind there’s “no point” to living without free will, and indeed there’s no free will, then we have another case of a self-defeating choice of beliefs: another unforced error.
Consciousness
A third related piece and then I’ll move on to modernity. We are aware of ourselves, which we call consciousness. Many elect to see this as a state of transcendence. Whatever. Call this fascinating piece of emergent complexity what you like, but it seems to be a quality of many forms of life, and this totally makes sense. It is hard to see how you would stop even a moderately complex being with many sensory inputs and a brain from building a mental model in which the organism is a “self” or “entity” that needs to maneuver and perform certain functions in certain ways in order to be a successful member of the community of life. Evolution sees to it that those unable to conjure this capability are less able to operate successfully in a soup of other “entities” who can manage to do so.
If your standard-issue human supremacist has trouble accepting that consciousness is not unique to humans, but just another cool outcome of the evolution of complex organisms, then they have managed to set themselves up poorly—because loads of evidence points to (probably) universal consciousness (not all of identical form, naturally). So if the point to being human is this special power, then it’s a stupid corner to have painted oneself into. Angry reactions then boil down to anger at oneself for engineering another unforced error.
Modernity
I hope these relatively brief starters laid the groundwork for understanding the main topic and weren’t just annoying tangents.
Let me attempt to frame the modernity version in a series of conjectural statements I might make, followed by reactions I might get from mainstream members of modernity.
Statement: We probably won’t have electricity or much in the way of metals in a thousand years (give or take a thousand years or so).
Response: That seems crazy and nearly impossible to imagine playing out short of nuclear annihilation: it would make all our progress to date pointless.
Statement: Earth almost certainly can’t maintain 8 billion people or anything near it for even a century or two—especially without fossil fuels.
Response: It is our ethical obligation to make it work, and we surely will via innovation and technology (fossil fuels are not what makes us amazing: we just are amazing). Otherwise, what’s the point of our having risen to this state?
Statement: Science as we practice it is a net harm: deployed for short-term human gains at great cost to the ecosphere’s health.
Response: If that were true, then what would be the point? Obviously, there’s a point to science, which expands our knowledge and provides ample benefits via technology.
Statement: Centuries from now we will have lost much of the knowledge that science has worked hard to accumulate.
Response: That would be tragic if true: then what’s the point if it’s all going to get flushed?
Statement: I spend much of my time trying to get people to see modernity as fundamentally unable to succeed in its ambitions.
Response: If you think it’s really that bad—doomed to fail—then what’s the point of bothering to write about it?
It would be interesting to collect thoughts about what such respondents do think the point is. How anthropocentric, ecologically ignorant, unrealistic, impractical, short-term, or even delusional are they? What sort of detached utopia do they dream is possible? How much context do they have to ignore or exclude to leave room for this tidy vision of artifice? Trying to remember what it was like to think this way, here are some possible answers:
Eliminate hunger and inequity; achieve world peace; perfect democracy; no barriers due to race or gender; bend the arc or history toward justice; education and good jobs for all.
Pursue science until we answer all key mysteries, cure all diseases, and perhaps even defeat death from old age via molecular biology insights (telomeres!).
Star Trek: leap from our earthly cradle and grace the universe with human greatness.
We’re just starting the good life, which we want billions to experience indefinitely.
Exercise and perfect our dominion over Earth as granted by God (just swept up a few billion Abrahamic subscribers).
Preserve and expand human accomplishment in art, writing, music, architecture, science, technology, etc. These things differentiate us from animals and from our animal past and are the whole point of being human.
Eventually merge our consciousness into digital form and become more than human: unleash new powers and live (forever) in the cloud.
Quick responses to each in turn:
Santa Claus again? A pleasant set of fantasies, but very anthropocentric; ecology-blind; unachievably naive. As an aside, success on the first point inevitably grows the population, scaling up the current tension with respect to planetary limits.
Unachievable hyperbole; we’re not accidentally structured to be capable of understanding everything, and that’s okay; mystery and awe can remain; curing all diseases and achieving effective immortality would be ecologically disastrous!
Mind-numbingly delusional in terms of realism, and also very Human Reich.
And how’s that supremacism working out (in light of a sixth mass extinction)? Failing the test, are we?
Neat things, to be sure, but part of the package (Human Reich) that is destroying what it means to be other species. Focusing on one side of the coin isn’t helpful. These things can’t exist long-term if their very pursuit drives ecological collapse. Attempts to differentiate ourselves from animals is itself a deeply flawed and problematic practice.
Whoa. This degree of disconnected delusional dreaming is almost to the level of mental disease, and ought to be looked at by a professional. Read Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary to learn about the imbalance inherent in this kind of view.
Wrong Cosmology
I think a universal observation about these sorts of objections is that my original statements are incompatible with the cosmologies of the respondents. They fail to compute, within the worldviews of those folks. It feels like unfamiliar nonsense, when “sense” is constructed from a misguided notion of what this existence is all about and what the future promises to hold.
The distilled logic is: “if what you say were to be true, then my worldview falls apart, so what you say doesn’t seem like it can be true.” More bluntly: “I reject your premise, as preserving my worldview is more important to me—even if it’s utterly wrong (which it can’t be, somehow).”
In one sense, the “what’s the point” question is a form of progress. It acknowledges a deep disconnect. Problem identified. Maybe the real point is not at all what was imagined! I view it as similar to the fact—which I relish—that racists hate being labeled as racist. That’s a form of progress: they know it’s not okay, and get all defensive. When someone says “Then what’s the point?” they have made a big step to appreciating the incompatibility. The harder trick is to get them to re-evaluate their cosmology as the chief source of disconnect.
Once allowing the cosmology to shatter, many of my statements are far easier to entertain, and may even become obvious or seem the most likely truths—to the point of being attractive even. Cosmologies can therefore seriously distort and limit our thinking—affecting our judgment.
Progress?
A quick detour about the word “progress,” which I used three times previously. The first instance was embedded in a mainstream response, used in its common form to reflect technological development, medical advances, access to economic/material “needs,” social tolerance and justice, and the like. Politically, the term “progressive” applies to those seeking expanded human rights and “fair” distribution of earth’s loot for all (humans).
But the second use reflected a much different form of evolution: questioning the traditional meaning of progress is itself progress. Abandoning “progress” as it is usually defined is, to me, progress. Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress helps paint the world in a different light.
Existential Vacuum
A serious barrier to abandoning any cherished cosmology is that without anything to take its place one is left staring into an abyss. It’s scary. What meaning, or purpose could possibly exist? It feels like nihilism. Those who make it to the other side know better. There’s life after Santa Claus; life after shedding God; life without free will; life (literally) with conscious critters to keep us company; life after modernity. By life here, I mean love, joy, meaning, awe, and community. Also pain, loss, death, and other counterparts that must exist hand-in-hand to give substance to the pleasant bits. I’m not trying to sugar-coat: just indicating that rewarding experiences are every bit as possible—if not more so—without modernity.
Think of the picky-eater kid who would only ever eat chicken nuggets, pizza, and hot dogs. Frustrated parents catered to the kid’s limited palate, all the way through high school. Now imagine that during college, the kid (still earning that label) goes on an exchange trip to Thailand. It seems super-scary at first: “Nothing to eat here! I’ll starve!” But eventually, they try some of the less intimidating items, find that they’re quite delicious, and before long discover that Thai food is amazing. The door is open. The original problem, in a sense, was living in a skewed world that allowed or even promoted the maintenance of an unhealthy, limited tolerance for a broader understanding of the world of possibilities.
Once dropping the problematic cosmology that defines the point of life in terms of human “accomplishment” in the narrow context of modernity, a universe of other values systems becomes available to offer sustenance. To think otherwise is to arrogantly assume that thousands of generations of humans who came before were miserable because they had not found their “special purpose” (not referring to The Jerk movie, here). Modernists are nodding, because this sounds right according to their mythology. But that strikes me as delusional bull$#!+! Joy is part of the package of being human, and always has been! Likewise, all the other plants and animals of the world are not frikin’ miserable because they lack modernity! I could turn the tables and say that the modernity disease produces far more misery (for all life) than any other worldview that has ever existed on the planet.
If successful in sloughing off the mantle of modernity, you’ll see it as a hideous garment. Why did you love it so? It filled your head with crazy ideas that caused loads of damage and had no chance of working in the long run anyway. It was completely out of place: clashing contemptuously with the rest of the community of life. Once shot of the foul wrappings, you’ll see that something wonderful has been staring at you all along: life on Earth. It’s amazing, and quite a privilege to be a part of it. You’ll find no shortage of meaning, in a multitude of dimensions (plants; birds; mammals; amphibians; something for everyone). You’ll feel like now that you’re awake from the fever dream, you can imagine living on the planet without the evil trappings and pulls of modernity. You’ll want others to find the same hope and truth, so that you’re not stuck on the destructive treadmill that is too big for you to stop on your own. You need other people to come with you, and leave the piece of junk behind to rust and crumble, as life reclaims its prominence on the planet.
So, What IS the Point?
If modernity is not to last very long, what’s the point in pretending that it will? What’s the point in holding onto a worldview predicated on modernity’s survival? What’s the point of our current choices, jobs, ways of living? To what end do we pursue the things we presently do?
Just because a lot of the things we do today will turn out to be pointless does not mean there’s no point to anything! What a huge and unwarranted leap that is! In the context of a completely different lifestyle as subordinate partners among a cast of many in the community of life, one might find innumerable sources of meaning. Living, loving, caring, helping, singing, laughing, learning, respecting, offering gratitude, appreciating beauty, jabbering, teasing, playing, sharing—for instance—are all part of being human and of being one form of life among many others on this planet: lots of room to find meaning and “points” that validate life. If the meaning in your life is contingent on modernity, then maybe you’ve come to the wrong shop, and ought to look for new forms of meaning that are built to last.
