Month: January 2019

In a piece that appeared in last month’s New York Times online philosophy blog—plainly titled “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?”—Todd May explores the existential question of whether the inherent and singular value human beings possess as an intelligent species, through our scientific and intellectual and creative pursuits, is worth the immense anguish our practices inflict on the nonhuman animals with which we share this planet:

“To make that case, let me start with a claim that I think will be at once depressing and, upon reflection, uncontroversial.  Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it.  This is happening through at least three means.  First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems, as the recent article on Yellowstone Park in The Times exemplifies.  Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwise be intact.  Third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways.  There is no reason to think that those practices are going to diminish any time soon.  Quite the opposite. . . .

. . . But there is more to the story.  Human beings bring things to the planet that other animals cannot.  For example, we bring an advanced level of reason that can experience wonder at the world in a way that is foreign to most if not all other animals.  We create art of various kinds:  literature, music and painting among them.  We engage in sciences that seek to understand the universe and our place in it. . . .

. . . We appreciate and often participate in such practices because we believe they are good to be involved in, because we find them to be worthwhile.  It is the goodness of the practices and the experiences that draw us.  Therefore, it would be a loss to the world if those practices and experiences ceased to exist.”

Todd May, “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?,” The Stone, New York Times, December 17, 2018

On the abstraction of extinction, I take something of a prostrative view:  It seems to me the natural world has a way of deciding for itself who ought to be here and when it’s time for them to go; at some point, after all, it concluded the dinosaurs had overstayed their welcome, and with the brute efficiency of an asteroid strike, put them on a path to annihilation.  There’s something perversely liberating—and by extension even comforting—about the question of our own existence being out of our control.

But… that’s not what’s happening here at the dawn of the Anthropocene, is it?  It’s the very practices we engage in—our project of civilization itself—that has brought on the existential crises we now confront.  Since this blog often examines its subjects narratively, this citation seems apt:

“In many dramatic tragedies, the suffering of the protagonist is brought about through his or her own actions.  It is Oedipus’s killing of his father that starts the train of events that leads to his tragic realization; and it is Lear’s highhandedness toward his daughter Cordelia that leads to his demise.  It may also turn out that it is through our own actions that we human beings bring about our extinction, or at least something near it, contributing through our practices to our own tragic end.”

ibid.

Climate change—at least this epochal instance of it—is the (admittedly unintended) consequence of our own Industrial Age–conditioned behaviors, rather than that of some naturally occurring planetary phenomenon.  Far from a cyclical geological inevitability, like, say, an ice age, we’re doing this to ourselves, outside the governing purview—or otherwise unimpeded design—of nature.

Or are we?