1nc – heritage k vs alpharetta ds
critique
1nc – historical bloodlust
The impact calculus of extinction scenarios rely on the humanist
assumption of a flourishing life to be preserved – yet ignore the
fact that life has never flourished – instead is upheld by endless
exploitation and violence.
Colebrook, 17
[Claire Colebrook, Edwin Erle Sparks professor of English, philosophy, and women’s, gender
and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. Her latest book is Death of the
Posthuman: Essays on Extinction (2015), 1 June 2017, “End-times for humanity”,
https://aeon.co/essays/the-human-world-is-not-more-fragile-now-it-always-hasbeen, 10-16-20 // jmk]
The end of the world is a growth industry. You can almost feel Armageddon in
the air: from survivalist and ‘prepper’ websites (survivopedia.com,
doomandbloom.net, prepforshtf.com) to new academic disciplines (‘disaster
studies’, ‘Anthropocene studies’, ‘extinction studies’), human vulnerability is in
vogue.
The panic isn’t merely about civilisational threats, but existential ones. Beyond
doomsday proclamations about mass extinction, climate change, viral
pandemics, global systemic collapse and resource depletion, we seem
to be seized by an anxiety about losing the qualities that make us human.
Social media, we’re told, threatens our capacity for empathy and genuine
connection. Then there’s the disaster porn and apocalyptic cinema, in which
zombies, vampires, genetic mutants, artificial intelligence and alien invaders are
oh-so-nearly human that they cast doubt on the value and essence of the
category itself.
How did we arrive at this moment in history, in which humanity is more
technologically powerful than ever before, and yet we feel ourselves to be
increasingly fragile? The answer lies in the long history of how we’ve understood
the quintessence of ‘the human’, and the way this category has fortified
itself by feeding on the fantasy of its own collapse. Fears about the frailty
of human wisdom go back at least as far as Ancient Greece and the fable of
Plato’s cave, in which humans are held captive and can only glimpse the
shadows of true forms flickering on the stone walls. We prisoners struggle to turn
towards the light and see the source (or truth) of images, and we resist doing so.
In another Platonic dialogue, the Phaedrus, Socrates worries that the very
medium of knowledge – writing – might discourage us from memorising and
thinking for ourselves. It’s as though the faculty of reason that defines us is also
something we’re constantly in danger of losing, and even tend to avoid.
This paradoxical logic of loss – in which we value that which we’re at the greatest risk of forsaking – is at work in how we’re dealing
with our current predicament. It’s only by confronting how close we are to destruction that we might finally do something; it’s only by
embracing the vulnerability of humanity itself that we have any hope of establishing a just future. Or so say the sages of pop culture,
political theory and contemporary philosophy. Ecological destruction is what will finally force us to act on the violence of capitalism,
according to Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014). The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has
long argued that an attempt to secure humans from fragility and vulnerability explains the origins of political hierarchies from Plato to
the present; it is only if we appreciate our own precarious bodily life, and the emotions and fears that attach to being human animals,
that we can understand and overcome racism, sexism and other irrational hatreds. Disorder and potential destruction are actually
opportunities to become more robust, argues Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile (2012) – and in Thank You for Being Late (2016),
the New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman claims that the current, overwhelming ‘age of accelerations’ is an opportunity to
take a pause. Meanwhile, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute pursues research focused on avoiding existential
catastrophes, at the same time as working on technological maturity and ‘superintelligence’.
It’s here that one can discern a tight knit between fragility and virility. ‘Humanity’
is a hardened concept, but a brittle one. History suggests that the more we define
‘the human’ as a subject of intellect, mastery and progress – the more ‘we’ insist
on global unity under the umbrella of a supposedly universal kinship – the less
possible it becomes to imagine any other mode of existence as human. The
apocalypse is typically depicted as humanity reduced to mere life,
fragile, exposed to all forms of exploitation and the arbitrary exercise
of power. But these dystopian future scenarios are nothing worse
than the conditions in which most humans live as their day-to-day
reality. By ‘end of the world’, we usually mean the end of our world. What we
don’t tend to ask is who gets included in the ‘we’, what it cost to attain our
world, and whether we were entitled to such a world in the first place.
Stories about the end of time have a long history, from biblical eschatology to medieval plague narratives. But our fear of a
peculiarly ‘human’ apocalypse really begins with the 18th-century Enlightenment. This was the intellectual birthplace of the modern
notion of ‘humanity’, a community of fellow beings united by shared endowments of reason and rights. This humanist ideal continues
to inform progressive activism and democratic discourse to this day. However, it’s worth taking a moment to go back to René
Descartes’s earlier declaration of ‘I think, therefore I am’, and ask how it was possible for an isolated self to detach their person from
the world, and devote writing, reading and persuasion to the task of defending an isolated and pure ego. Or fast-forward a few
centuries to 1792, and consider how Mary Wollstonecraft had the time to read about the rights of man, and then demand the rights
of woman.
The novelist Amitav Ghosh provides a compelling answer in his study of global
warming, The Great Derangement (2017). Colonisation, empire and climate
change are inextricably intertwined as practices, he says. The resources of what
would become the Third World were crucial in creating the comfortable middleclass existences of the modern era, but those resources could not be made
available to all: ‘the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be
practised by a small minority … Every family in the world cannot have two cars, a
washing machine and a refrigerator – not because of technical or economic
limitations but because humanity would asphyxiate in the process.’
Ghosh disputes one crucial aspect of the story of humanity: that it should involve
increasing progress and inclusion until we all reap the benefits. But I’d add a
further strand to this dissenting narrative: the Enlightenment conception of rights,
freedom and the pursuit of happiness simply wouldn’t have been imaginable if
the West had not enjoyed a leisured ease and technological sophistication that
allowed for an increasingly liberal middle class. The affirmation of basic human
freedoms could become widespread moral concerns only because modern
humans were increasingly comfortable at a material level – in large part thanks to
the economic benefits afforded by the conquest, colonisation and enslavement of
others. So it wasn’t possible to be against slavery and servitude (in the literal and
immediate sense) until large portions of the globe had been subjected to the
industries of energy-extraction. The rights due to ‘us all’, then, relied on ignoring
the fact that these favourable conditions had been purchased at the
expense of the lives of other humans and non-humans. A truly universal
entitlement to security, dignity and rights came about only because the
beneficiaries of ‘humanity’ had secured their own comfort and status by
rendering those they deemed less than human even more fragile.
What’s interesting about the emergence of this 18th-century humanism isn’t only
that it required a prior history of the abjection it later rejected. It’s also that the
idea of ‘humanity’ continued to have an ongoing relation to that same abjection.
After living off the wealth extracted from the bodies and territories of
‘others’, Western thought began to extend the category of ‘humanity’ to capture
more and more of these once-excluded individuals, via abolitionism, women’s
suffrage and movements to expand the franchise. In a strange way these shifts
resemble the pronouncements of today’s tech billionaires, who, having extracted
unimaginable amounts of value from the mechanics of global capitalism, are now
calling for Universal Basic Income to offset the impacts of automation and
artificial intelligence. Mastery can afford to correct itself only from a position of
leisured ease, after all.
But there’s a twist. While everyone’s ‘humanity’ had become inherent and
unalienable, certain people still got to be more fully ‘realised’ as
humans than others. As the circle of humanity grew to capture the vulnerable,
the risk that ‘we’ would slip back into a semi-human or non-human state seemed
more present than before – and so justified demands for an ever more elevated
and robust conception of ‘the human’.
‘Humanity’ was to be cherished and protected precisely because it was so
precariously elevated above mere life
One can see this dynamic at work in the 18th-century discussions about slavery.
By then the practice itself had become morally repugnant, not only because it
dehumanised slaves, but because the very possibility of enslavement – of some
humans not realising their potential as rational subjects – was considered
pernicious for humanity as a whole. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792), for example, Wollstonecraft compared women to slaves, but insisted that
slavery would allow no one to be a true master. ‘We’ are all rendered more brutal
and base by enslaving others, she said. ‘[Women] may be convenient slaves,’
Wollstonecraft wrote, ‘but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the
master and the abject dependent.’
We hate to say it, but happiness is illusory, and life is always
already ending – then again you knew that.
Alpharetta DS knows it too – but they can’t face the fact that
we’re evil. They attend the end of the world through a negation of
the world as it inevitably is and will be, conveniently ignoring all
of human history to affirm tropes of human heroism that justify
the worst evils imaginable. They go beyond reason to be
complicit with a pro-life politics in an attempt to redeem
humanity, but these appeals are only reactionary and actively
short-circuit the formation of theories that don’t center around
the human relation to worldly affairs.
Our lives are nothing, but empty destruction and suffering and
they have to come to terms with that. The notion that amending
the Speedy Trial Act will suddenly make life good is a neoliberal
fantasy incapable of overcoming structural harms of the world.
Only by thinking about the present in the terms of absence and
rejecting notions of flourishing life can we develop a genuine
ethic of understanding our existence.
Colebrook 16
(Claire, its Claire Colebrook, you know who she is, “Against Life” – chapter 2 – The
Once and Future Humans: Between Happiness and Extinction,
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv47w5sc.6, accessed 11/23/20, zc - we don’t endorse ableist
language within this evidence)
The same balanced negotiation between self-enclosure and connectedness
applies to the human species, which has at once always defined itself as
separate—as not one being among others, but as the condition for all sense and
self-definition—and yet as also completely connected to a life and world that it
appreciates and fulfils. Just as the individual being might be traumatized,
ruptured, or vanquished by excessive influx of stimulus or an
overexposure to an exteriority that it can neither narrate nor bind, so
the human species might also be globally disturbed by its perception
of a life, time, and end not its own. Just as the individual would retreat
from excessive influx and turn back towards the self-creation of
meaning, so the species as a whole (if such a whole is possible to
imagine) might also start to retreat or react by thinking its own ends
and its own happiness. This, indeed, is what ties two of the grand trends of
twenty-first-century writing across a number of fields. There is both an almost
unlimited exposure to an inhuman time and a future of non-being, with writing
and visual culture attending to human extinction and posthuman worlds,
alongside an intensely inward focus on the inescapability of human meaning and
happiness. The two of these tendencies are often combined in the same text:
think of all the post-apocalyptic texts—such as both the film and novel version of
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—in which a destroyed human order is shored up
by local, familial, and heroic struggles of self-definition.-5 Or think of the series
of “turns” in theory in which a supposed recognition of the
posthuman—including animal worlds, artificial intelligence, life
beyond our species, the end of human exceptionalism—is coupled
directly with a retreat into meaning. Here again, affect is crucial, as it at
once promises to be a posthuman concept that lies beyond the man of reason,
and yet is continually referred back to the body, life, emotion, and feeling.
This complex relation of recognition and retreat, in which an inhuman future is
responded to by reaffirming the primacy and unity of affective life, marks some of
the most urgent issues of our time, including climate change. Humans at once
recognize that as a species they have now marked the planet to the point that
geologists are proposing an Anthropocene era, and yet this “awareness” has
yielded a sense of global homeliness with the earth being imagined as one
interconnected whole or organism. Or consider animal studies, in which the
privilege accorded to human speech and awareness is replaced by an attribution
of meaning and world-making to animals. Now every being has its own
meaningful world, and human meaning-making is thoroughly
entwined with the worlds and affections of both animals and
machines. Most importantly, and this will be the focus of the rest of this chapter,
the “affective turn” appears to open Western thought to a new outside that would
no longer be determined, in advance, from anthropocentric projection, but this
could only be the case if affect were no longer within human
cognition but would open body, mind, and world to a realm of forces beyond
“our” range of mastery. That is: rather than attributing affect or feeling
and worldliness to those who are “just like us,” we might ask whether
genuine ethics would begin from an absence of feeling. Rather than
following Kant and beginning by attributing the dignity and freedom of
personhood to others (including nonhumans), we might begin by asking
what it might mean to allow something to be or have worth that was
not an example of flourishing life. As Simone Weil argued: perhaps it is
when I approach someone who does not strike me as blessed with the dignity of
personhood and autonomy that ethics might genuinely begin. In terms of human
happiness and the future, we might begin to think about the present not
in terms of the flourishing of interconnected life, but in the thought of
what cannot be felt in the present. (Sympathy and empathy may extend to
the next few generations, but is this where our obligation and thinking should
stop short?)
II.
In the second section of this chapter I pursue five interrelated claims, all of them
concerned with what has come to be known, in theory, as the “affective turn.”
First, this turn to the inescapable horizon of life is part of a broader context in
which there is a general “feeling for life” (or in which life is celebrated as a
domain of lived feeling).
Second, this turn to, and celebration of, the primacy of life is a reaction
formation. Just as it becomes increasingly evident at the level of
information that the life we know and live is destructive, and nearing
its end, the affirmation of life becomes ever more shrill. Just as we are
confronted with the force of the Anthropocene event—that “man” is not some idle
cultural construct but a scar on the geological landscape—we willfully assert a
world that is happily posthuman.
Third, the conceptual and discursive resources that are currently deployed to
approach what we imagine to be our future are symptoms of a widespread
psychosis. When Freud diagnosed civilization as neurotic, he based his analysis
on the overly stringent moral demand that one love one’s neighbor as one’s
self.16 Given the impossibility of living up to that all too inhuman demand for
universal human love, civilization unleashed aggression in the form of global
warfare. By contrast, our current world of affect, life, love, feeling, emotion, and
the freedom of the posthuman is structured by a different demand: we ought no
longer subject ourselves to any imperative other than that of life’s self
furtherance. From neurosis—or displacement of the real force of our condition
(shifting aggression to war)—we have developed psychosis: there is no sense
beyond the pure punctuality of the present of any future, force, horizon, or sense.
The primacy of affect and the lived, and the denial of any theory or point of view
beyond the lived, short-circuits the fleeting attempts the humans
species has made to consider its relation to a globe that is not its
own.
Fourth, this psychotic imaginary is most evident in the discourses of climate
change policy and ecological criticism. We consider and meditate upon survival,
adaptation, mitigation, and our debt to the future, as though “our” living on were
unquestionably justifiable, desirable, and inevitable.
Finally, Mikhail Bakhtin once noted that the problem with the ancient Greeks was
that they didn’t know they were ancient Greeks. One might allow this to figure our
present: the problem with the last humans is that they don’t know they are the
last humans. If we were to contemplate this thought—that this may be
the end of life as we know it but also that such an end cannot be
known—might we not approach the future less in terms of living on, and more
by way of asking that if life has no prima facie value as such, how might we live
in the absence of a horizon of a human future.
Life
The self-proclaimed affective turn encompasses a series of different maneuvers but is at least united by a
criticism of cognitive and linguistic approaches. In cultural, literary, and political theory it has now become
a commonplace to insist upon forces that are neither conceptual nor linguistic. In many ways this is a
seemingly posthuman endeavor. It is no longer the case that all those features deemed to define the
human subject—such as logic, language, and culture—can really account for the human polity, and so it
is not surprising that affect (along with a broader interest in the related notion of emotions) is now defined
as the proper domain of political analysis. Man is apparently dethroned or decentered by those who seek
to explain the emergence of human society through broader inhuman evolutionary imperatives. Language
and morality, for example, are now extensions of tendencies that mark all life and understanding of life,
and a return of man to the life of which he would be but one expression is at once a recognition of a
nonhuman temporal trajectory at the same time as it operates as one more anthropocentric projection.
For even though evolutionary thinking, and the argument that humans evolve from initially affective
responses, seem to destroy the man of reasoned cognition, they nevertheless redefine all life in terms of
purposive response. Affect serves to link all life, including humans, into a single self-creating whole, and it
is this imperative to turn back towards the affective domain that seems to pose an all too easy exit from
the myopic enclosure of man.
What if all the evidence of human destructiveness towards the planet
were read as an indication that man is not an affective animal, that he
is not intimately connected and entwined with life, and that a certain
anthropocentric projection of happiness continues to captivate
whatever is left of thinking? It is assumed that all human developments,
including the seemingly autonomous development of art and culture, really have
their basis in the organism’s survival mechanism. If the man of reason is
vanquished by posthuman turns to life, the man of self-organizing affects is not.
Writers such as Lisa Zunshine,27 Brian Boyd,28 and Joseph Carroll29 have all
reacted against theory (supposedly detached from life) and argued that studies of
textuality be grounded not only in life, but also in a life of purposive striving. What
is unquestioned is the figure of life from which language, morality, and art have
evolved: life is, it is assumed, self-furthering, creative, and tied to a dynamic
world of which it is an expression. That is: the turn to life or the affective
turn repeats all the tropes and figures that have marked the human
happiness tradition. It is now the entire domain of life that is a self-organizing
open whole, godlike in its capacity for self-feeling and self-regulation. If there
were to be—as evidence suggests—an aspect of life that remained separated,
destructive, unaffected, and self-enclosed, then affect might not be the great
exit or “turn” it at first appears to be. Why, we might ask, just as we ought to be
acknowledging a global waning of affect (when we do not feel the forces of the
fragile planet) do we insist so much on the affective locus of all life? The
relation between happiness and life might be accounted for, not so
much by affect, as by psychosis. A certain image of happiness—as life
oriented towards its own fruition but always by a subtle negotiation with its very
own outside—describes the ways in which humans still insist upon a life of
meaning. Meaning, far from connecting us to a world, cocoons us from the world:
for the world of meaning is always the world for the living being.
Extinction
It appears as though the happiness bubble might have burst, or might
be threatened from without. How do we explain a surge in self-help
and social science titles on happiness alongside an increasing
awareness of the end of the human species, either through
cataclysmic events or slow attrition, or a combination of the two? I
would suggest that despite its long philosophical history happiness is a secular
problem: if there is a life or good beyond this world then a resignation to suffering
for the sake of a transcendent beyond makes sense. Aristotle’s eudaimonia,
though not strictly translatable as “happiness,” focuses on the coherent totality of
a life in this world, in which the self forms itself according to its own capacities for
flourishing in relation to others who are also deemed to be self-creating wholes.
When Kant later rejects happiness as a valid end for human moral decision
making he does so in response to an emerging secular attempt to ground ethics
in human well-being, and his response to this maneuver makes sense only in a
world in which life is accounted for and valued here and now without subjection
or reference to some otherworldly beyond. If those to whom Kant is responding
established happiness, pleasure, and good feeling as the basis for human
morality, they did so because it was no longer self-evident that one might act,
live, and understand oneself in accord with a deferred and inhuman end of life.
Kant’s conception of duty, for all its opposition to happiness
(ostensibly), is nevertheless thoroughly within the happiness
paradigm: living well is not the pursuit of pleasures. If one were to make
pleasure the end of life then life’s values and valuing would be subject to the
contingencies and vagaries of existence. Life would lack meaning and
coherence. If, however, one acts lawfully-acting as if one might be free from all
the desires and pathological interests of this material world—then despite the
seeming chaos of existence one can imagine how the world would be if humanity
were to act rationally. One might act and decide as if there might be a rational,
progressive, and ordered sense to one’s own and humanity’s narrative.
Now it is just this self-ordering, imaginative, and non-contingent basis
to decision-making that characterizes most of the literature on
happiness. Happiness is achieved not by allowing oneself to be seduced by
positional goods—such as salary, possessions, and externally granted relative
honors—but by focusing on one’s own ends, and attending to those ends
throughout an entire and reflected life. Happiness is tied to ongoing self-worth,
valuing who I am such that I will often act in ways that are contrary to pleasure
but for the sake of an integrated sense of identity. Nowhere is this more evident
than in the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, where Nick Bostrom
argues that a future in which there were no humans at all would obviously be far
more lamentable and catastrophic than a future in which there were far fewer
humans: the very possibility of no humans at all is so desperately counter to all
rational desire that we should—now—do all we can to avert this catastrophic
risk.20
If, as is occurring today, one is presented with an increasingly stark version of
Kant’s posed opposition between the violence and chaos of history on the one
hand and some rational order of humanity on the other, then it might help to
explain the proliferation of the two great topics of the twenty-first century:
happiness and extinction. In the face of a warring, terrorized, resource-
depleting and depleted species of humanity, why would we not turn
back to the sense we can make of our own lives? If the demands of the
world seem to require that we make decisions that go beyond individual lives,
that go beyond national interests, that require calculations where blame and
agency are distributed and not attributable to single individuals and corporations,
and where these decisions present us with choices in which the future may be
significantly bleaker than the present even in the best case scenario, then it
makes sense that we might retreat from such global imperatives and focus on
happiness. If this were so then happiness would not be the rational response to
the recognition that after the death of God we need to grant meaning to our own
lives; happiness would be a symptom (evidence that we have neither the wit nor
courage to face the threats to our lives). Happiness would be a reaction
formation: it is precisely when the chaos, violence, and unjustifiable
wreckage of the human species becomes apparent that we cling ever
more securely to the prima facie value and worth of human life. This
occurs not only, as I have already suggested, in the explicit turns towards
happiness in fulfillment literature and the social, but also in theory’s turn to affect
and to the supposed posthuman, and in the realm of cultural production where
supposed post-apocalyptic narratives are organized through an aesthetics of
happiness.
The Psychosis of Affect
The turn to affect is explicitly an anti-cognitive and anti-Cartesian commitment to forces, perceptions, and
distributed relations that exceed the centered subject of decision and cognition. We should, we are told,
abandon the figure of the man of reason who calculates the world that he represents, and instead should
see human subjects as formed from complexes of embodied, connected, and dynamic feelings: some of
those feelings are registered or felt and lived as emotions, but the real claim of the affective turn is to go
beyond what is explicitly given and known. The affective turn occurs alongside various turns (such as the
inhuman turn, the speculative turn, the ethical turn, the performative turn, the posthuman turn to animals
or technology). All of these self-narrating moves claim to go beyond the self-enclosed, judging, calculating
man of reason in favor of a single domain of life—including machines, animals, and inorganic forces—and
so with a broad claim for new ways of knowing that would be directly contrasted with the evils of
instrumental and self-serving reason. Such moves are, I would argue, ultra-human, reactive, and
psychotic. They are ultra-human precisely because the aesthetics of the supposedly self-forming and
meaningful human soul is now transferred to the world as such. It is now the world that is pictured as one
self-forming and inunanently self-referencing whole.
The clearest case of this would be James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, ostensibly presenting a heroic
battle between a rapacious humanity whose militaristic and industrial might is destroying the planet, and
another world of ecologically attuned beings who are affectively connected to each other and their world,
with the world they inhabit operating as a single organic and mindful network. Grace, played by Sigourney
Weaver, discovers that the environment her American colleagues are aiming to conquer is “like a neural
network.” The military’s attempts to conquer such a world are object-oriented—seeking to plunder the
planet for “Unobtainium,” thereby destroying a world of harmony and cloyingly kitsch beauty. What occurs
in this compensatory narrative is a rejection of man as master of a world that appears as so much
standing reserve, and a new notion of what a world after or beyond man might be. And yet what is this
posthuman world of neural connectedness and deep ecology but a lure or alibi that seduces “us” into
being opposed to the man of instrumental reason and violence, calmed by the promise of one great
thinking, feeling, living, and ultimately beautiful world as organism? Just when the earth is not ours, when
the forces of the cosmos are operating in divergent lines that go well beyond any connectedness or
feeling of the human or of organic life, we proclaim that “man” is really nothing more than a fleeting and
imprisoning figure that we might cast off for the sake of global joy.
Even though we appear to be attendant to what increasingly appears to be the
literal end of man—the disappearance of the human species from the planet—
we do so in ways that are ultra-human. We either imagine that we can cast
off the ravages of human culture and become one affective body of life, or we
entertain a series of “ends” of the world, but always devolving and
retrieving human happiness narratives. These are either narratives in
which the “end” is at once the saving of humanity via a saving of “man”—the
standard disaster movie scenario where various threats are
entertained only to be overcome by human heroism—or post-apocalyptic
landscapes in which (despite the destruction of what has passed for civilization)
familial, gendered, and personal narratives frame “our” relation to the end. This
coupling of the end of humanity with human-all-too-human ends has its mirror
image in the frenzied production of posthuman theory in which various
supposedly nonhuman domains of life (such as animals, plants, or technology)
are granted all the attributes that had defined man-including speech, art, morality,
and mindfulness. What is not attended to is the extent to which a certain inertia,
non-life, detachment, and attrition of affect marks the twenty-first century.
The Anthropocene era has been posed by geologists to name the scarring of the
earth that will be apparent, in the future, just as we can today read the earth’s
history via stratigraphy; it will be possible, after the end of humans, to read our
species’ mark on the planet. One cannot will away man and proclaim a
posthuman present, given that the supposed fiction of man has altered the planet
and its future. By declaring that we are, already, affective, connected,
emotional, embodied, and other-directed beings we foreclose the
extent to which we have been, and continue to be, capable of acting
without any concern for our planet, for nonhuman life or for a future
that would be more than an extension of the present. If earlier figures of
what counted as human were speculative—with man mastering the future by
establishing a single overarching system that would enclose all possibility within
a schema of mastery and production—then the present might be better referred
to as psychotic. By declaring that the man of reason, in his representational,
cognitive, calculative, individual, and disembodied comportment is a fiction that
we have now overcome, and by insisting that we are already affectively
attuned to the earth, we enclose the world and ourselves in a myopic
bubble of happiness. We refuse to face a future in which humans will
literally not exist, a posthuman future that will be precipitated by our current
sense that we have easily cast off the worst of the human.
Changing Climates
It might seem, despite all the claims for a joyous posthuman future released from the self-enclosed and
instrumental reason of man that we are, finally, taking cognizance of the limits of the planet and the
volatility of the future. Nowhere would this be more evident than in the increasing awareness of climate
change. Although governments’ policies across the globe tend to incorporate climate change within
standard notions of human survival and worth, assuming that “we” need to spend and destroy less now in
order to extend our species survival into the future, there have also been deep ecological arguments
insisting on more radical change. Deep ecology, however, assumes precisely what the event of climate
change ought to question: the interconnectedness of life. At a manifest level climate change has not really
occurred as a change at all. It is still assumed that humans are ultimately oriented towards their own
future and survival. Environmentalists who are critical of a perceived human destructiveness nevertheless
focus on a possibility of an alteration in human comportments: if humans were to be fully connected with
the earth upon which they depend then appropriate adjustments in behavior and consumption would
follow. But it is not only ameliorative policy discourse, with its talks of adapting, mitigating, surviving,
offsetting, and capping and trading that maintains a notion of the prima facie value and survivalworthiness of the human (asking how “we” extend our lives into the future by using less now to live
longer). The concepts of critical discourse (including the concept of climate) partake of the same
psychotic and affective foreclosure that marks the supposed inhuman or posthuman turn. Concepts of
climate, environment, ecology, and (more specifically) the earth as Gaia or organism-like whole are tied to
an imaginary of interconnectedness, in which humans are presented with the imperative to shift from
subject-object paradigms of calculation and mastery to a more attuned awareness of the world’s
complexity. The notion of climate, or the sense that there is something like a surface or terrain of dwelling
that is changing as a consequence of our actions, or that climate change is anthropogenic, relies on a
certain structure of relations and causality. Humans are part of a whole, with their actions altering that
whole. Although it is widely accepted that there is very little, if any, time left to act on the problem of
climate change before incurring catastrophic damage there is nevertheless the sense that there is “a”
climate and that other factors (such as political or economic expediency) may impede us from doing what
is required.
One of the problems for both policy and for ethical theory has been
the relation between affect and information: we are presented with
information and evidence, and yet despite the dire predictions and
high stakes we seem to be incapable of taking the sorts of actions
appropriate for the scale of predicted disaster. The old notion of
thinking globally but acting locally may not just be inadequate and
insufficient, but also delusory to the point of psychosis. Climate change
both as a physical event and as a broader historical experience of new limits
(where humans are presented with the notion that they will be geologically
significant, capable of creating a new strata discernible as the Anthropocene era)
does not testify to the importance of affect and interconnectedness. Rather, what
climate change evidences is the error of misplaced affective intensity. We
become more and more aware of emotions, bodies, social networks, and—most
importantly—a single climate of interconnected forces. What we foreclose is any
possibility of affect that would go beyond human organic bounds. Part of the
problem is the very figure of climate and environment, and the affective
comportments it brings in train, not the least of which is the image of the globe as
unified and organic whole. As we turn more and more to the happiness of selfdevelopment, emotional intelligence, affective networks, and the significance of
the smallest of things (including our intertwined relations with animals, objects,
images, and technology), we short-circuit the forces of the multiple climates that
cannot be felt and that cannot be attended to through single frames and
timelines. Rather than focusing on climate change and the problem of, say,
extending our range of sympathy into the future we might be confronted by the
disjunction between affect and climates.
Their need for utilitarian calculation assumes a conception of
“lives worth living” which the critique is vehemently against –
Benatar, Singer, Bostrom, they’re all humanists who depend on
the liberal notion of the “able body” to determine value – that
necessitates the violent exclusion of those who fall outside the
category of human like animals, queer folks, and native peoples –
a legitimate questioning of our ethics is impossible as long as
utilitarianism can be used to facilitate genocides in the name of
humanism.
Colebrook et al. 18
(Claire, published as a collection of works, other authors had no part in writing this
essay, it’s Claire Colebrook, you know who she is, “After Extinction” – chapter 7: LIVES
WORTH LIVING, zc)
Utilitarianism is a motif that will necessarily haunt questions of
extinction and capacity: as resources and the capacity to survive become
threatened, decisions will need to be made regarding the worth of life. Precisely
in this respect, it is utilitarianism that has also articulated the most
offensive position on disability. By “offensive,” here, I am not referring to an
affect or emotion but rather—as in the manner of a military offensive—to a direct
and forthright targeting of what has been set aside as “disabled.” Here it might
seem that a utilitarian approach is partial and that there are other ethical
paradigms, which of course there are, but I want to argue that the extreme
positions that utilitarianism has yielded bring to the fore what is implicit in a
broader history of ethics focused on personhood and a life worth living. One
of the objections to calculations of utility would be by way of a deeper or
inviolable conception of the person, but this too relies on distinguishing between
what counts as “utility” and what would warrant a mode of “dignity” beyond
calculation. For Nussbaum, the key stakes of justice lie in considering what counts as a dignified life, where dignity includes
capacities that extend beyond social utility and mutual advantage. Her claim is that dignity should be the basis for social
entitlements and that we attribute dignity not for rational and active powers but for “our” animal fragility: “bodily need, including the
need for care, is a feature of our rationality and our sociability; it is one aspect of our dignity, then, rather than something to be
contrasted with it.”4 This is perhaps why Nussbaum’s title refers to “species membership,” as though feeling and caring for one’s
kind (which would, in part, include nonhuman animals) are not only a recognition of dignity but dignify one’s own life. To suffer, to be
fragile, is to possess a life worth living. Here Nussbaum refers to the value and enhancement (beyond strict utility) of caring for
others and of having social relationships with those whose capacities are not those of the classic rational individual. Her approach
on capacities “includes the advantage of respecting the dignity of people with mental disabilities and developing their human
potential, whether or not this potential is socially ‘useful’ in the narrower sense. It includes, as well, the advantage of understanding
humanity and its diversity that comes from associating with mentally disabled people on terms of mutual respect and reciprocity.”5
Nussbaum presents her account as a broadening of theories of human justice by
way of a more classical conception of the life worth living, one not reduced to
narrow notions of mutual advantage. Even though her discourse and disciplinary
terrain might appear to be strictly philosophical, the very mode of posing the
question of what we owe to a life is really (ultimately) the question
that presses itself upon human civilization now , and always. As “we”
look to the future and the sixth great extinction event, the question of
who and what survives will be imposed upon us. Utilitarian approaches to
this question are, as I have already suggested, offensive, but they are because
they disclose something offensive—or combative, violent, conquering—in the
philosophical tradition of dignified humanity and the life worth living. In this
respect, disability is neither a recent nor a local concern: the very formation of the
Greek polity is based on the exclusion of those with lesser capacities. Even
though, as Lennard Davis has argued, the notion of the “normal” body is very
recent and is quite different from earlier cultures’ conception of an ideal body that
no actual member of the species achieves, the exclusion of those who do not
possess the proper potentiality of political humanity has been at the basis of
the history of the Western polity.6 When Nussbaum argues for an
expanded sense of capacities, she nevertheless, and necessarily, maintains the
question of the life worth living. This classic philosophical question always and
necessarily invokes ability, or, more accurately, disability, and this in two
respects. Not only are subjects defined by way of powers (of reason,
deliberation, and empathy) but those capacities in turn are enabled by a history
of technologies and archives on which “able” subjects are increasingly
dependent. At the very least, definitions of proper political persons rely on quite
specific capacities that, even in expanded scenarios, are not all-inclusive. More
importantly, the quite specific concept of the liberal, deliberative, rational, and
empathetic subject depends on a history of “enlightenment” that disabled many
lives, by way of exclusion, colonialism, resource depletion, or
expropriation. In a world where not all lives matter to the same extent, the
concept of disability is precisely what enables political inclusion,
privilege, and personhood. When Peter Singer argues, in a manner that
appears to be exceptional, and exceptionally offensive, that rationality and
autonomy (and not species membership) are the capacities that would preclude
us from being right in killing another human being, he is taking part in a far
broader offensive that is definitive of the philosophical epoch oriented around the
question of the life worth living.7 For Singer, what matters when
considering a life and its worth is not that life’s capacities but its
capacity to suffer; however, this nevertheless raises the worthiness
and power of affect. What has proven to be so shocking about Singer’s work
is his highlighting of a rationality already at work in claims regarding human
dignity: we have already deployed notions of value and worthiness, values that
Singer wishes to shift from species membership or supposed rational powers to
affective powers. Not only is the question of the life worth living offensive (in its
implicit generation of an unworthy life) but the life worth living is—for all its
rhetoric of autonomy and power—a life of dependence and incapacity,
generated through a history of enlightenment that is a history of
appropriation, plundering, brigandry, excessive consumption, and
energy profligacy. The Cartesian reflective subject is utterly dependent on
networks of labor and technology that bolster his power while remaining outside
immediate command; and as the history of enlightenment progresses, so does
felicitous incapacity. “We” become more and more powerful by way of
networks—the Internet, data, cheap goods, cheap skills—that rely on others’
capacities. Our exceptional political ability as subjects of reason is twinned with
intensified incapacity, just as our autonomy is ultimately dependent on a history
of ongoing slavery. Could we have the able political subject of
deliberation and reason without the planet-destructive history of
industrialism and globalism that at once enables and disables what
has come to be known as humanity? Could there have been a tradition of
“the life worth living” without a global industry that generated unworthy and disabled lives? And is not the question of the life worth living, the capable life,
intertwined essentially with dependence and incapacity?
What I want to question here is whether such a question can have any
coherence at all in an epoch of extinction: to ask about lives worth living is
necessarily to be offensive, valuing the worth of some lives over
others, and thereby waging violence (however slow) against some
forms of life. If, as I would also argue, any epoch of thriving and fecundity takes
place at the expense of some lives, then all ages are ages of extinction.
What makes our time—the sixth mass extinction—more intense is that questions
that have always haunted political personhood are now becoming more explicit.
The interrelated problem of capacity and extinction has not only determined the
human lives that are deemed to be worth living but has also generated the liberal
political person whose autonomy, productivity, super-intelligence, and heightened
capacity for urbanity is the Anthropos of the Anthropocene, the “man” whose cost
to the planet is too exorbitant to reckon.8 When (today) utilitarian
arguments are explicitly offensive, or make the claim that some lives
ought not be lived, they reveal the offensive (combative, polemical,
violent, barbaric, sacrificial) nature of what has called itself
civilization. If this civilization, today, is facing extinction and is therefore
pressed—more than ever—to consider ways of “weighing lives,” it may either
continue with ever more nuanced and expanded conceptions of the worth of life,
or it may regard this question itself as an indictment of the very rationality it seeks
to save. Phrased differently, we might say that the problem of disability runs
to the very heart of the extinction-logic that enables the political
tradition of the person. Both those who assume that the human
species—because of certain capacities—has a prima facie right to
survive and those who calculate that human life as such is not worth
living (for all their seeming extremity) are expressing a broader logic
of the proper potentiality of a highly normative conception of human
flourishing. As an example of the prima facie “right to humanity,” I would cite
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s defense of Wilfrid Sellars and philosophical
progress. The rational image we have of ourselves, even when at odds with
scientific evidence about the irrational causes of our behavior, will generate an
ongoing history of coherence and inclusion, where the rational “we” extends itself
to value others:
Gregarious creatures that we are, our framework of making ourselves coherent to ourselves commits us to making
ourselves coherent to others. Having reasons means being prepared to share them—though not necessarily with
everyone. The progress in our moral reasoning has worked to widen both the kinds of reasons we offer and the group to
whom we offer them. There can’t be a widening of the reasons we give in justifying our actions without a corresponding
widening of the audience to which we’re prepared to give our reasons. Plato gave arguments for why Greeks, under the
pressures of war, couldn’t treat other Greeks in abominable ways, pillaging and razing their cities and taking the
vanquished as slaves. But his reasons didn’t, in principle, generalize to non-Greeks, which is tantamount to denying that
non-Greeks were owed any reasons. Every increase in our moral coherence—recognizing the rights of the enslaved, the
colonialized, the impoverished, the imprisoned, women, children, LGBTs, the handicapped . . .—is simultaneously an
expansion of those to whom we are prepared to offer reasons accounting for our behavior. The reasons by which we
make our behavior coherent to ourselves changes together with our view of who has reasons coming to them.
And this is progress, progress in increasing our coherence, which is philosophy’s special domain. In the case of
manumission, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, criminals’ rights, animal rights, the abolition of cruel and
unusual punishment, the conduct of war— in fact, almost every progressive movement one can name—it was reasoned
argument that first laid out the incoherence, demonstrating that the same logic underlying reasons to which we were
already committed applied in a wider context. The project of rendering ourselves less inconsistent, initiated by the ancient
Greeks, has left those ancient Greeks, even the best and brightest of them, far behind, just as our science has left their
scientists far behind.
This kind of progress, unlike scientific progress, tends to erase its own tracks as it is integrated into our manifest image
and so becomes subsumed in the framework by which we conceive of ourselves.9
For all its manifest worthiness, the notion of a progressive “self-image” that gains
in ongoing global coherence, alongside scientific progress, sees its path of selfcorrection as improving with more and more human life taking part in the journey
of development. One could make the rather obvious point that such a notion of
“progress” by way of inclusion and ongoing “self-image” precludes other ways of
thinking about human and nonhuman life that do not involve self-image (or some
shared normative conception of “the human”), but in addition to the colonialist
mentality of self-justification, one might ask about the price paid for such a history
of philosophical progress. Would not other modes of life—such as those without
an overinvestment in “self-image” or “the” human—have generated a quite
different history of the planet? Such a question cannot be asked if a
certain mode of human reason is an unquestioned good. But just as the
inflation of human personhood precludes asking the question of the loss and
extinction of other lives with other capacities, certain arguments for the extinction
and annihilation of part or all of humanity also assume the value of the person—a
single life with its specific coherence, value, and meaning. (Not only is such a
notion historically and culturally specific, and tied to a highly normative
conception of human self-awareness, it is also this self with an unquestioned
right to the “good life” of reflection, reason, and self-determination that has
generated the Anthropocene.)
Specifically, the uncertainty of our future renders old models of
reason inadequate – utilitarianism is a reaction formation that
affirms life via affect and imagination of policy proposals to
preserve a notion of humanity exclusive to the white settler. Their
proposal to “save humanity” also saves the structural issues that
facilitated our extinction in the first place while locking in worse
forms of violence – that turns case.
Colebrook 14
(Claire, its Claire Colebrook, you know who she is, “Sex After Life: Essays on Extinction
Volume 2”, chapter one – feminist extinction, pages 13-14,
http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Colebrook_2014_Sex-After-Life.pdf,
accessed 11/23/20, zc)
But is redemption this easy? Although we know that events are occurring for
which the old models of calculative reason are inadequate, it is uncertain
just what or how much we could tackle from our supposedly new point of view of
engaged, dynamic, extended, embodied, and emotive selfhood. Is this new
vitalism or anim(al)ism really a felicitous shift in modes of thinking that will allow
us to deal with the current critical state of our milieu, or is it a reaction
formation? I would suggest the latter, especially if we consider not
only the joyous affirmations of life—with the discovery of empathy (Rivkin
2009), affect (Gregg and Seigworth 2010), embodiment (Rowlands 2010),
universal creativity (Russell 2007), and wondrous futures (Levy 1997)—but also
seemingly dire warnings. James Lovelock’s ‘final’ warning is, after all, a warning
for us— otherwise it would not be final. It assumes our duration, the end of
life for us (Lovelock 2009). To say that Gaia is vanishing is to equate our
system of life with systematicity tout court. Could we not see the present as the
end of this Gaia, if Gaia really is an apt figure? What is not considered—
beyond questions of warning, surviving, saving, and death knells—is
what kind of life the actual death of man might enable, whether ‘we’
ought to live on, and just what or who this saved ‘we’ approaching
finality might be. If we are seeking to save ourselves then are we also
saving the survival mechanisms that have brought the human species
and its milieu to the brink of destruction? If we wish to destroy ‘man’ as
the rapacious Cartesian, calculative subject of instrumental reason in order to
save life, who is the ground of this futural and counter-human annihilation? For
all the problems of destroying man in the name of something other than the
human, and for all the resonance of this survivalist self-destruction with the very
grips of humanism it is aiming to vanquish, so much of the posthuman rhetoric
today appears to declare itself as already attuned to the life that ‘man’ so
lamentable ignored (up until now).
It is just at the point at which the future’s potentiality and openness appears to be
radically lacking in life that what counts as thinking (ranging from high theory to
popular science) has discovered a life that goes beyond the old, limited, finite,
and all too concrete models of mind. This seeming revolution of over-turning man
for the sake of the life that man has denied is—far from being man’s other—the
very hallmark of the end of man. Man has always existed as a being who ends
himself: as soon as the human is given some natural or limited definition, man
discovers that his real, creative, futural being lies in some not-yet realized
becoming that will always save him from a past that he can denounce as both
misguided and as at an end (Derrida 1969). Today, just as the human
species faces possible and quite literal extinction, ‘man’ extinguishes
himself: he declares that he is neither a brain in a body nor a mind in
a machine, but always already ecological—sympathetically,
emotionally, and systemically attuned to a broader milieu of life. Such
claims range from popular neuroscience’s claims for emotional and affective
selves, to system theory’s arguments for a self that extends beyond the bounds
of the individual body and a whole series of appropriations of non-Western
traditions of mindfulness in which the self can overcome its egoistic prison. Once
again what is affirmed—against all the evidence for a malevolent
relation or intrinsically suicidal system of humanity and its environs—
is an original human connectedness, an irreducible system in which the
world is never alien raw matter but always this particular world as it is disclosed
for this particular organic life.
We forfeited any value our lives once held when we violently
slaughtered the Neanderthals – it’s been downhill from there –
Human heritage is defined by an irredeemable historical
bloodlust. In confrontation with our violent humanist and colonial
histories that perpetuate endless violence unto colonized
peoples, animals, and the environment, the alternative embraces
human extinction as a thought experiment that opens up space
for a new ethic of existence and a utopian anti-humanism.
Kochi and Ordan 8
-
-
The debate is about humanist histories of violence and ethical systems
relationalities towards extinction – any other question is ultimately
irrelevant.
Alternative is to embrace extinction as a thought experiment – that
decenters human analysis and opens up space for a new ethic of
existence, one that is firmly against life.
[Tarik Kochi, legal and political theorist working within the traditions of critical
theory, critical legal theory, international political theory, historical sociology and
the history of political thought at the University of Sussex, School of Law, Politics
and Sociology. Noam Ordan is a linguist and translator, conducts research in
Translation Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel. Borderlands. An Argument for
the Global Suicide of Humanity. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/AnArgument-for-the-Global-Suicide-of-Humanity-KochiOrdan/a76d0bd31f7f65f264fb16e190c6bbf066f9e2a6 ***Footnotes have been
inserted into the text. dwrs & zc]
Introduction
In 2006 on an Internet forum called Yahoo! Answers a question was posted
which read: “In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally,
how can the human race sustain another 100 years?” The question was asked
by prominent physicist Stephen Hawking (Hawking, 2007a). While Hawking
claimed not to know ‘the solution’ he did suggest something of an answer
(Hawking, 2007b). For Hawking the only way for the human race to survive in the
future borderlands is to develop the technologies that would allow humans to
colonise other planets in space beyond our own solar system. While Hawking’s
claim walks a path often trodden by science fiction, his suggestion is not
untypical of the way humans have historically responded to social, material and
environmental pressures and crises. By coupling an imagination of a new world
or a better place with the production and harnessing of new technologies,
humans have for a long time left old habitats and have created a home in others.
The history of our species, homo sapiens, is marked by population movement
aided by technological innovation: when life becomes too precarious in one
habitat, members of the species take a risk and move to a new one.
Along with his call for us to go forward and colonise other planets, Hawking does
list a number of the human actions which have made this seem necessary. [1]
Hawking’s list of possible and current causes that might necessitate cosmic
colonisation includes: the possibility of nuclear war; human induced global
warming; the potential release of genetically engineered viruses. [footnote 1
ends] What is at issue, however, is his failure to reflect upon the relationship
between environmental destruction, scientific faith in the powers of technology
and the attitude of speciesism. That is, it must be asked whether population
movement really is the answer. After all, Hawking’s suggestion to colonise other
planets does little to address the central problem of human action which has
destroyed, and continues to destroy, our habitat on the earth. While the notion of
cosmic colonisation places faith in the saviour of humanity by technology as a
solution, it lacks a crucial moment of reflection upon the manner in which human
action and human technology has been and continues to be profoundly
destructive. Indeed, the colonisation of other planets would in no way solve the
problem of environmental destruction; rather, it would merely introduce this
problem into a new habitat. The destruction of one planetary habitat is enough –
we should not naively endorse the future destruction of others.
Hawking’s approach to environmental catastrophe is an example of a certain modern faith in technological and social progress. One
version of such an approach goes as follows: As our knowledge of the world and ourselves increases humans are able to create
forms of technology and social organisation that act upon the world and change it for our benefit. However, just as there are many
theories of ‘progress’ [2] Two examples of modern ‘progress’ can be found in Kant and Popper. The first describes the operation of
reason, which through reflection upon the world and its own intelligent critical and moral faculties may gradually become more
‘enlightened’ and morally better. The second describes through empirical scientific inquiry and the method of falsification, the way in
which science may build a firm body of knowledge through which it can progress in its knowledge of the world and in the production
of technology that can assist the perpetuation of human life. When using the term ‘progress’ it is a combination of these ideas which
we find representative and which figures such as Hawking are ideologically guided by. [footnote 2 ends] there are also many modes
of reflection upon the role of human action and its relationship to negative or destructive consequences. The version of progress
enunciated in Hawking’s story of cosmic colonisation presents a view whereby the solution to the negative consequences of
technological action is to create new forms of technology, new forms of action. New action and innovation solve the dilemmas and
consequences of previous action. Indeed, the very act of moving away, or rather evacuating, an ecologically devastated Earth is an
example at hand. Such an approach involves a moment of reflection – previous errors and consequences are examined and taken
into account and efforts are made to make things better. The idea of a better future informs reflection, technological innovation and
action.
However, is the form of reflection offered by Hawking broad or critical enough?
Does his mode of reflection pay enough attention to the irredeemable
moments of destruction, harm, pain and suffering inflicted historically
by human action upon the non-human world? There are, after all, a
variety of negative consequences of human action, moments of destruction,
moments of suffering, which may not be redeemable or ever made better.
Conversely there are a number of conceptions of the good in which humans do
not take centre stage at the expense of others. What we try to do in this paper is
to draw out some of the consequences of reflecting more broadly upon the
negative costs of human activity in the context of environmental catastrophe.
This involves re-thinking a general idea of progress through the
historical and conceptual lenses of speciesism, colonialism, survival
and complicity. Our proposed conclusion is that the only appropriate
moral response to a history of human destructive action is to give up
our claims to biological supremacy and to sacrifice our form of life so
as to give an eternal gift to others.
From the outset it is important to make clear that the argument for the global
suicide of humanity is presented as a thought experiment. The purpose of
such a proposal in response to Hawking is to help show how a certain conception
of modernity, of which his approach is representative, is problematic. Taking
seriously the idea of global suicide is one way of throwing into question an
ideology or dominant discourse of modernist-humanist action. [3] Albert Camus
in fact considered suicide to be the most important philosophical problem. To
decide whether one’s life is worth living is the primal question from which any
philosophy derives (Camus, 2005). [footnote 3 ends] By imagining an alternative
to the existing state of affairs, absurd as it may seem to some readers by its
nihilistic and radical ‘solution’, we wish to open up a ground for a critical
discussion of modernity and its negative impacts on both human and
non-human animals, as well as on the environment. [4] We do not
purport to develop here a full-fledged eco-centric theory, but rather to bring into
the moral discourse a solution to a situation taken to the extreme from a
humanistic standpoint. However, note that eco-centric ideas are, in some
respects, already part of the legal sphere, at least to the extent that questions
regarding the standing of trees in court are debated in academia and in the
courts (see Stone, 1996). [footnote 4 ends] In this respect, by giving voice to the
idea of a human-free world, we attempt to draw attention to some of the
asymmetries of environmental reality and to give cause to question why attempts
to build bridges from the human to the non-human have, so far, been unavailing.
Subjects of ethical discourse
One dominant presumption that underlies many modern scientific and political
attitudes towards technology and creative human action is that of ‘speciesism’,
which can itself be called a ‘human-centric’ view or attitude. The term
‘speciesism’, coined by psychologist Richard D. Ryder and later elaborated into a
comprehensive ethics by Peter Singer (1975), refers to the attitude by which
humans value their species above both non-human animals and plant life. Quite
typically humans conceive non-human animals and plant life as something which
might simply be used for their benefit. Indeed, this conception can be traced back
to, among others, Augustine (1998, p.33). While many modern, ‘enlightened’
humans generally abhor racism, believe in the equality of all humans, condemn
slavery and find cannibalism and human sacrifice repugnant, many still think and
act in ways that are profoundly ‘speciesist’. Most individuals may not even be
conscious that they hold such an attitude, or many would simply assume that
their attitude falls within the ‘natural order of things’. Such an attitude thus resides
deeply within modern human ethical customs and rationales and plays a
profound role in the way in which humans interact with their environment.
The possibility of the destruction of our habitable environment on earth through
global warming and Hawking’s suggestion that we respond by colonising other
planets forces us to ask a serious question about how we value human
life in relation to our environment. The use of the term ‘colonisation’ is
significant here as it draws to mind the recent history of the colonisation of much
of the globe by white, European peoples. Such actions were often justified by
valuing European civilisation higher than civilisations of non-white peoples,
especially that of indigenous peoples. For scholars such as Edward Said (1978),
however, the practice of colonialism is intimately bound up with racism. That is,
colonisation is often justified, legitimated and driven by a view in which the right
to possess territory and govern human life is grounded upon an assumption of
racial superiority. If we were to colonise other planets, what form of ‘racism’
would underlie our actions? What higher value would we place upon human life,
upon the human race, at the expense of other forms of life which would justify our
taking over a new habitat and altering it to suit our prosperity and desired living
conditions?
Generally, the animal rights movement responds to the ongoing colonisation of animal habitats by humans by asking whether the modern Western subject should indeed be the
central focus of its ethical discourse. In saying ‘x harms y’, animal rights philosophers wish to incorporate in ‘y’ non-human animals. That is, they enlarge the group of subjects to
which ethical relations apply. In this sense such thinking does not greatly depart from any school of modern ethics, but simply extends ethical duties and obligations to nonhuman animals. In eco-ethics, on the other hand, the role of the subject and its relation to ethics is treated a little differently. The less radical environmentalists talk about future
human generations so, according to this approach, ‘y’ includes a projection into the future to encompass the welfare of hitherto non-existent beings. Such an approach is
prevalent in the Green Party in Germany, whose slogan is “Now. For tomorrow”.
For others, such as the ‘deep ecology’ movement, the subject is expanded so that it may include the environment as a whole. In this instance, according to Naess, ‘life’ is not to
be understood in “a biologically narrow sense”. Rather he argues that the term ‘life’ should be used in a comprehensive non-technical way such that it refers also to things
biologists may classify as non-living. This would include rivers, landscapes, cultures, and ecosystems, all understood as “the living earth” (Naess, 1989, p.29). From this
perspective the statement ‘x harms y’ renders ‘y’ somewhat vague. What occurs is not so much a conflict over the degree of ethical commitment, between “shallow” and “deep
ecology” or between “light” and “dark greens” per se, but rather a broader re-drawing of the content of the subject of Western philosophical discourse and its re-definition as
‘life’. Such a position involves differing metaphysical commitments to the notions of being, intelligence and moral activity.
This blurring and re-defining of the subject of moral discourse can be found in other ecocentric writings (e.g. Lovelock, 1979; Eckersley, 1992) and in other philosophical
approaches. [5] This blurring, broadening and re-defining of the ‘subject’ has a history in Western philosophy that precedes the ‘deep ecology’ movement. It occurs notably in
the philosophy of Spinoza. Further, it has also occurred in differing ways, and with differing levels of ‘success’, in the philosophies of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Deleuze.
[footnote 5 ends] In part our approach bears some similarity with these ‘holistic’ approaches in that we share dissatisfaction with the modern, Western view of the ‘subject’ as
purely human-centric. Further, we share some of their criticism of bourgeois green lifestyles. However, our approach is to stay partly within the position of the modern, Western
human-centric view of the subject and to question what happens to it in the field of moral action when environmental catastrophe demands the radical extension of ethical
obligations to non-human beings. That is, if we stick with the modern humanist subject of moral action, and follow seriously the extension of ethical obligations to non-human
beings, then we would suggest that what we find is that the utopian demand of modern humanism turns over into a utopian anti-humanism, with suicide as its outcome. One way
of attempting to re-think the modern subject is thus to throw the issue of suicide right in at the beginning and acknowledge its position in modern ethical thought. This would be
to recognise that the question of suicide resides at the center of moral thought, already.
What survives when humans no longer exist?
There continues to be a debate over the extent to which humans have caused environmental problems such as global warming (as opposed to natural, cyclical theories of the
earth’s temperature change) and over whether phenomena such as global warming can be halted or reversed. Our position is that regardless of where one stands within these
debates it is clear that humans have inflicted degrees of harm upon non-human animals and the natural environment. And from this point we suggest that it is the operation of
speciesism as colonialism which must be addressed. One approach is of course to adopt the approach taken by Singer and many within the animal rights movement and
remove our species, homo sapiens, from the centre of all moral discourse. Such an approach would thereby take into account not only human life, but also the lives of other
species, to the extent that the living environment as a whole can come to be considered the proper subject of morality. W e would suggest, however, that this philosophical
approach can be taken a number of steps further. If the standpoint that we have a moral responsibility towards the environment in which all sentient creatures live is to be taken
seriously, then we perhaps have reason to question whether there remains any strong ethical grounds to justify the further existence of humanity.
For example, if one considers the modern scientific practice of experimenting on animals, both the notions of progress and speciesism are implicitly drawn upon within the moral
reasoning of scientists in their justification of committing violence against nonhuman animals. The typical line of thinking here is that because animals are valued less than
humans they can be sacrificed for the purpose of expanding scientific knowledge focussed upon improving human life. Certainly some within the scientific community, such as
physiologist Colin Blakemore, contest aspects of this claim and argue that experimentation on animals is beneficial to both human and nonhuman animals (e.g. Grasson, 2000,
p.30). Such claims are ‘disingenuous’, however, in that they hide the relative distinctions of value that underlie a moral justification for sacrifice within the practice of
experimentation (cf. LaFollette & Shanks, 1997, p.255). If there is a benefit to non-human animals this is only incidental, what remains central is a practice of sacrificing the lives
of other species for the benefit of humans. Rather than reject this common reasoning of modern science we argue that it should be reconsidered upon the basis of species
equality. That is, modern science needs to ask the question of: ‘Who’ is the best candidate for ‘sacrifice’ for the good of the environment and all species concerned? The moral
response to the violence, suffering and damage humans have inflicted upon this earth and its inhabitants might then be to argue for the sacrifice of the human species. The
moral act would be the global suicide of humanity.
This notion of global human suicide clearly goes against commonly celebrated and deeply held views of the inherent value of humanity and perhaps contradicts an instinctive or
biological desire for survival. Indeed the picture painted by Hawking presents a modern humanity which, through its own intellectual, technical and moral action, colonises
another planet or finds some other way to survive. His idea is driven by the desire for the modern ‘human’, as we know it, to survive. Yet, what exact aspect of our species would
survive, let alone progress, in such a future? In the example of the colonisation of another planet, would human survival be merely genetic or would it also be cultural? Further,
even if we can pinpoint what would survive is there a strong moral argument that the human species should survive?
One method of approaching these questions is by considering the hypothetical example of the ‘fish people’. Imagine that as a result of global warming sea levels rise to such an
extent that the majority of our current terrestrial habitat begins to be covered by water. One consequence is that only species who already live in a watery environment or can
adapt to live in water will survive. Scientists respond to this change in habitat by genetically engineering some humans so that they have the capacity to live in water, or, by
selecting human candidates who might already have the genetic constitution to survive in water and enhancing their capacity by selective breeding. Within a few generations
these new fish people are the only survivors of the species homo sapiens. They survive as a new sub-species or even as a new species. In a general sense one might argue
that humanity has successfully adapted to a new environment and has survived. But, how much of what we consider to be ‘human’ would in such a case survive? In what way
are the fish people representatives of ‘humanity’?
The example is important because it helps to draw the distinction between the differing notions of the survival of a preferred species and the survival of life in general. If the fish
people were to mutate via natural selection enhanced by genetic technology into a new species, then while they would share many of their genes with our own species they
would also in many ways be radically and fundamentally different. What would over time survive would genetically not be ‘us’ but something like a genetic cousin, akin perhaps
in many ways to our present close genetic cousins, the higher apes – a species with high levels of cognition, degrees of self-awareness and intricate communal forms of
behaviour. What investment would we as humans have in the survival of another species which was not our own? If the question of survival is genetic it should not really matter
whether the fish people of the future or the apes of the present inherit this earth.
If only some of our genes but not our species has survived, maybe the emphasis we place upon the notion of ‘survival’ is more cultural than simply genetic. Such an emphasis
stems not only from our higher cognitive powers of ‘self-consciousness’ or self-awareness, but also from our conscious celebration of this fact: the image we create for
ourselves of ‘humanity’, which is produced by via language, collective memory and historical narrative. The notion of the ‘human’ involves an identification of our species with
particular characteristics with and upon which we ascribe certain notions of value. Amongst others such characteristics and values might be seen to include: the notion of an
inherent ‘human dignity’, the virtue of ethical behaviour, the capacities of creative and aesthetic thought, and for some, the notion of an eternal soul. Humans are conscious of
themselves as humans and value the characteristics that make us distinctly ‘human’.
When many, like Hawing, typically think of the notion of the survival of the human race, it is perhaps this cultural-cognitive aspect of homo sapiens, made possible and produced
by human self-consciousness, which they are thinking of. If one is to make the normative argument that the human race should survive, then one needs to argue it is these
cultural-cognitive aspects of humanity, and not merely a portion of our genes, that is worth saving. However, it remains an open question as to what cultural-cognitive aspect of
humanity would survive in the future when placed under radical environmental and evolutionary pressures. We can consider that perhaps the fish people, having the capacity for
self-awareness, would consider themselves as the continuation or next step of ‘humanity’. Yet, who is to say that a leap in the process of evolution would not prompt a change in
self awareness, a different form of abstract reasoning about the species, a different self-narrative, in which case the descendents of humans would look upon their biological and
genetic ancestors in a similar manner to the way humans look upon the apes today. Conceivably the fish people might even forget or suppress their evolutionary human
heritage. While such a future cannot be predicted, it also cannot be controlled from our graves.
In something of a sense similar to the point made by Giorgio Agamben (1998), revising ideas found within the writings of Michel Foucault and Aristotle, the question of survival
can be thought to involve a distinction between the ‘good life’ and ‘bare life’. In this instance, arguments in favour of human survival rest upon a certain belief in a distinctly
human good life, as opposed to bare biological life, the life of the gene pool. It is thus such a good life, or at least a form of life considered to be of value, that is held up by a
particular species to be worth saving. When considering the hypothetical example of the fish people, what cultural-cognitive aspect of humanity’s good life would survive?
The conditions of life under water, which presumably for the first thousand years would be quite harsh, would perhaps make the task of bare survival rather than the continuation
of any higher aspects of a ‘human heritage’ the priority. Learning how to hunt and gather or farm underwater, learning how to communicate, breed effectively and avoid getting
eaten by predators might displace the possibilities of listening to Mozart or Bach, or adhering to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or playing sport, or of even using
written language or complex mathematics. Within such an extreme example it becomes highly questionable to what extent a ‘human heritage’ would survive and thus to what
extent we might consider our descendents to be ‘human’. In the case where what survives would not be the cultural-cognitive aspects of a human heritage considered a
valuable or a good form of life, then, what really survives is just life. Such a life may well hold a worth or value altogether different to our various historical valuations and
calculations.
While the example of the fish people might seem extreme, it presents a similar set of acute circumstances which would be faced within any adaptation to a new habitat whether
on the earth or in outer space. Unless humans are saved by radical developments in technology that allow a comfortable colonisation of other worlds, then genetic adaptation in
the future retains a reasonable degree of probability. However, even if the promise of technology allows humans to carry on their cultural-cognitive heritage within another
habitat, such survival is still perhaps problematic given the dark, violent, cruel and brutal aspects of human life which we would presumably carry with us into our colonisation of
new worlds.
Thinkers like Hawking, who place their faith in technology, also place a great deal of faith in a particular view of a human heritage which they think is worth saving. When
considering the question of survival, such thinkers typically project a one-sided image of humanity into the future. Such a view presents a picture of only the good aspects of
humanity climbing aboard a space-craft and spreading out over the universe. This presumes that only the ‘good aspects’ of the human heritage would survive, elements such as
‘reason’, creativity, playfulness, compassion, love, fortitude, hope. What however happens to the ‘bad’ aspects of the human heritage, the drives, motivations and thoughts that
led to the Holocaust for example? When thinking about whether the human species is worth saving the naïve view sees these good and bad aspects as distinct. However, when
thinking about ‘human nature’ as a whole, or even the operation of human reason as a characteristic of the Enlightenment and modernity, it is not so easy to draw clear lines of
separation. As suggested by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1997), within what they call the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, it is sometimes the very things which we draw
upon to escape from evil, poverty and harm (reason, science, technology) which bring about a situation which is infinitely more destructive (for example the atom bomb). Indeed,
it has often been precisely those actions motivated by a desire to do ‘good’ that have created profound degrees of destruction and harm. One just has to think of all the
genocides, massacres and wars within history justified by moral notions such as ‘civilisation’, ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’, and carried out by numerous peoples acting with
misguided, but genuine intentions. When considering whether humanity is worth saving, one cannot turn a blind eye to the violence of human history.
This is not to discount the many ‘positive’ aspects of the human heritage such as art, medicine, the recognition of individual autonomy and the development of forms of social
organisation that promote social welfare. Rather, what we are questioning is whether a holistic view of the human heritage considered in its relation to the natural environment
merits the continuation of the human species or not. Far too often the ‘positive’ aspects of the human heritage are viewed in an abstract way, cut off from humanity’s destructive
relation with the natural environment. Such an abstract or one-sided picture glorifies and reifies human life and is used as a tool that perpetually redeems the otherwise ‘evil’
acts of humanity.
Humanity de-crowned
Within the picture many paint of humanity, events such as the Holocaust are
considered as an exception, an aberration. The Holocaust is often portrayed as
an example of ‘evil’, a moment of hatred, madness and cruelty (cf. the differing
accounts of ‘evil’ given in Neiman, 2004). The event is also treated as one
through which humanity might comprehend its own weakness and draw strength,
via the resolve that such actions will never happen again. However, if we take
seriously the differing ways in which the Holocaust was ‘evil’, then one must
surely include along side it the almost uncountable numbers of genocides that
have occurred throughout human history.
Hence, if we are to think of the content of the ‘human heritage’, then this
must include the annihilation of indigenous peoples and their cultures
across the globe and the manner in which their beliefs, behaviours
and social practices have been erased from what the people of the
‘West’ generally consider to be the content of a human heritage. Again
the history of colonialism is telling here. It reminds us exactly how
normal, regular and mundane acts of annihilation of different forms of
human life and culture have been throughout human history. Indeed
the history of colonialism, in its various guises, points to the fact that so many of
our legal institutions and forms of ethical life (i.e. nation-states which pride
themselves on protecting human rights through the rule of law) have been
founded upon colonial violence, war and the appropriation of other peoples’ land
(Schmitt, 2003; Benjamin, 1986). Further, the history of colonialism highlights the
central function of ‘race war’ that often underlies human social organisation and
many of its legal and ethical systems of thought (Foucault, 2003).
This history of modern colonialism thus presents a key to understanding that
events such as the Holocaust are not an aberration and exception but are closer
to the norm, and sadly, lie at the heart of any heritage of humanity. After
all, all too often the European colonisation of the globe was justified by
arguments that indigenous inhabitants were racially ‘inferior’ and in some
instances that they were closer to ‘apes’ than to humans (Diamond, 2006). Such
violence justified by an erroneous view of ‘race’ is in many ways merely an
extension of an underlying attitude of speciesism involving a long history of killing
and enslavement of non-human species by humans. Such a connection between
the two histories of inter-human violence (via the mythical notion of differing
human ‘races’) and interspecies violence, is well expressed in Isaac Bashevis
Singer’s comment that whereas humans consider themselves “the crown of
creation”, for animals “all people are Nazis” and animal life is “an eternal
Treblinka” (Singer, 1968, p.750).
Certainly many organisms use ‘force’ to survive and thrive at the expense of their
others. Humans are not special in this regard. However humans, due [to] a
particular form of self-awareness and ability to plan for the future, have the
capacity to carry out highly organised forms of violence and destruction (i.e. the
Holocaust; the massacre and enslavement of indigenous peoples by Europeans)
and the capacity to develop forms of social organisation and communal life in
which harm and violence are organised and regulated. It is perhaps this capacity
for reflection upon the merits of harm and violence (the moral reflection upon the
good and bad of violence) which gives humans a ‘special’ place within the food
chain. Nonetheless, with these capacities come responsibility and our proposal of
global suicide is directed at bringing into full view the issue of human moral
responsibility.
When taking a wider view of history, one which focuses on the
relationship of humans towards other species, it becomes clear that
the human heritage – and the propagation of itself as a thing of value – has
occurred on the back of seemingly endless acts of violence, destruction, killing
and genocide. While this cannot be verified, perhaps ‘human’ history and
progress begins with the genocide of the Neanderthals and never
loses a step thereafter. It only takes a short glimpse at the list of all the
sufferings caused by humanity for one to begin to question whether this species
deserves to continue into the future. The list of human-made disasters is
ever-growing after all: suffering caused to animals in the name of science or
human health, not to mention the cosmetic, food and textile industries; damage
to the environment by polluting the earth and its stratosphere; deforesting and
overuse of natural resources; and of course, inflicting suffering on fellow human
beings all over the globe, from killing to economic exploitation to abusing
minorities, individually and collectively.
In light of such a list it becomes difficult to hold onto any assumption that the
human species possesses any special or higher value over other species.
Indeed, if humans at any point did possess such a value, because of higher
cognitive powers, or even because of a special status granted by God, then
humanity has surely devalued itself through its actions and has
forfeited its claim to any special place within the cosmos. In our
development from higher predator to semi-conscious destroyer we have perhaps
undermined all that is good in ourselves and have left behind a heritage best
exemplified by the images of the gas chamber and the incinerator.
We draw attention to this darker and pessimistic view of the human heritage not
for dramatic reasons but to throw[s] into question the stability of a modern
humanism which sees itself as inherently ‘good’ and which presents the action of
cosmic colonisation as a solution to environmental catastrophe. Rather than
presenting a solution it would seem that an ideology of modern humanism is itself
a greater part of the problem, and as part of the problem it cannot overcome itself
purely with itself. If this is so, what perhaps needs to occur is the attempt to let go
of any one-sided and privileged value of the ‘human’ as it relates to moral
activity. That is, perhaps it is modern humanism itself that must be negated and
supplemented by a utopian antihumanism and moral action re-conceived through
this relational or dialectical standpoint in thought.
The banality of evil, the banality of good
In order to consider whether any dialectical utopian anti-humanism might be
possible, it becomes necessary to reflect upon the role of moral action which
underlies the modern humanist view of the subject as drawn upon by thinkers
such as Hawking. Our argument is that the logical end-point of ethically
motivated technical action is a certain type of human apoptosis – the global
suicide of humanity. In what follows we set out some aspects of the
problematisation of the modern humanist view of moral action and the way in
which this causes difficulties for not only Hawking’s project of cosmic
colonisation, but also for many in the environmental movement more generally.
No matter how hard they try they won’t be able to save humanity
– a litany of alternate scenarios mean we’re gonna go out
inevitably.
Higgins 18 [Abigail Higgins, Abigail Higgins covers international development,
global health, poverty, and gender. Before Vox she was a foreign correspondent
and researcher in East Africa writing for The Washington Post, The Guardian,
and Foreign Policy, among others. 10-18-2018, Vox, "10 ways the world is most
likely to end, explained by scientists", https://www.vox.com/futureperfect/2018/10/18/17957162/nuclear-war-asteroid-volcano-science-climatechange accessed 11-21-2019, dwrs]
Here’s what should be keeping you up at night and what, realistically, might
cause humans to go the way of dinosaurs.
1) Nuclear war
A nuclear detonation from one of today’s more powerful weapons would cause a
fatality rate of 80 to 95 percent in the blast zone stretching out to a radius of 4
kilometers — although “severe damage” could reach six times as far.
But it isn’t just the immediate deaths we need to worry about — it’s the nuclear
winter. This is when the clouds of dust and smoke released shroud the planet
and block out the sun, causing temperatures to drop, possibly for years. If 4,000
nuclear weapons were detonated — a possibility in the event of all-out nuclear
war between the US and Russia, which hold the vast majority of the world’s
stockpile — an untold number of people would be killed, and temperatures could
drop by 8 degrees Celsius over four to five years. Humans wouldn’t be able to
grow food; chaos and violence would ensue.
A big worry here is the arsenal of nukes. While numbers have fallen over several
decades, the United States and Russia have just under 7,000 warheads each,
the largest collections in the world. The UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North
Korea, and Israel all have nuclear weapons.
Hundreds of nuclear weapons are ready to be released within minutes, a
troubling fact considering that the biggest threat of nuclear war may be an
accident or miscommunication. A few times since the 1960s, Russian officers
(and, in 1995, the president) narrowly decided not to launch a nuclear weapon in
response to what they’d later find out were false alarms.
2) Biological and chemical warfare
Unlike nuclear weapons, which require complex engineering, biological and
chemical warfare can be developed at a relatively low cost and with relatively
attainable materials.
In the past few years, the Syrian government has used chemical weapons in the
civil war that has ravaged the country. These chemical attacks using sarin and
chlorine have appalled the international community, and underscored the
damage chemical weapons can do. Weaponized toxic chemicals could do
tremendous harm to a localized target — say, if the toxins were released into the
air or into the water supply.
Biological weapons represent a greater catastrophic threat. Advances in
synthetic biology have made very real the possibility of malicious
actors creating harmful pathogens for weaponization — or innocent
researchers accidentally releasing a lethal infectious bug out into the
world. In the event of a fast-moving pandemic, the world would be pretty
vulnerable.
3) Catastrophic climate change
A United Nations panel of scientists released a report last week saying that we
only have 12 years to keep global warming to moderate levels.
Projections of the effects of climate change vary depending on how much the
Earth warms (usually modeled on an increase of 1 to 3 degree Celsius). None of
the scenarios look good.
At best, we’re looking at more frequent and severe tropical cyclones. Midrange
predictions include the loss of the majority of global agricultural land and
freshwater sources, with major coastal cities like New York and Mumbai ending
up underwater. At worst, human civilization would come to an end.
Even if current global commitments to reduce carbon emissions are kept, there is
a one-third chance of the Earth’s temperature increasing by 3°C, which would
cause most of Florida and Bangladesh to drown.
Catastrophic climate change is also not something we’re dedicating nearly
enough attention to. The author of this section in the report, Dr. Leena
Srivastava, the acting director of general at the Energy and Resources Institute,
points out that we’ve put enough time and resources into airplane safety that only
27 planes crash a year. But “if dying in a flight accident was as likely as a 3°C
global temperature increase, then the number of people dying in airplanes every
year would be 15 [million].”
4) Ecological collapse
Ecosystems are the delicate community of living organisms, like humans and
animals, interacting with their nonliving environment, like air and water.
Ecosystems can recover from a certain amount of impact from humans, like
temperature increases or habitat loss, but there’s a tipping point at which they
can’t — and according to the report, we might be reaching that tipping
point.
Lake Chad in West Africa is an example of ecological collapse. Sixty years of
drought, overuse of water, and the impacts of climate change have reduced the
lake by 90 percent. Its massive reduction has adversely affected the livelihoods
of more than 40 million people in Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon that
depend on it.
Scholars believe this moment in history constitutes a new geological era, called
the Anthropocene. In this new era, humans are the primary change agents,
rapidly degrading what makes the planet habitable, intensifying greenhouse gas
concentration, and damaging the health of marine ecosystems.
5) Pandemics
Twice in modern history, plagues have swept across the world, killing an
estimated 15 percent of the population in a few decades. They occurred way
back in the fifth and 14th centuries, respectively — but there is a serious risk that
a new infectious disease could cause another outbreak, especially with today’s
urban and mobile global population.
Luckily, deadly diseases with the capacity to spread globally are rare. But they do
happen — a century ago, the Spanish flu killed more than 50 million people.
Outbreaks of SARS and Ebola in recent years also ring alarm bells.
Antibiotics, our greatest defense against disease, are becoming less effective as
some strains of bacteria become resistant to them. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria
are responsible for an estimated 700,000 annual deaths. If we don’t develop new
advances against antibiotic resistance, that number is estimated to reach 10
million by 2050.
6) Asteroid impact
Asteroids are rocks that revolve around the sun and that occasionally collide with
the Earth. An asteroid large enough to cause a global catastrophe hits Earth
every 120,000 years, scientists estimate. It’s likely what killed the dinosaurs, and
if an asteroid even one-tenth the size of the one that caused their extinction hit
Earth today, the results would be devastating. Scientists estimate it could release
enough particles to block the sun for months and cause a famine killing hundreds
of millions.
NASA announced in 2011 that it had mapped more than 90 percent of objects in
space larger than 1 kilometer in diameter, and that none of them are likely to hit
Earth. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about smaller objects that, while
unlikely to cause a global catastrophe, could have a big enough local impact to
disrupt social and economic systems.
7) Supervolcanic eruption
A supervolcanic explosion 74,000 years ago ejected so much debris into the
atmosphere that scientists believe it caused the Earth to cool by several degrees
Celsius. Some experts believe this caused the greatest mass plant and animal
extinction in human history, bringing the species to the brink of extinction.
How likely is that to happen today? It’s hard to say since we don’t have much to
compare it to, but data suggests a supervolcanic eruption occurs on average
every 17,000 years. If that’s true, then we’re overdue — the last one we know
of was 26,500 years ago in New Zealand.
We don’t have a way to anticipate eruptions more than a few weeks or months in
advance, and we don’t really have any way to reduce the likelihood of eruption
right now, but scientists are monitoring several areas of risk, including
Yellowstone in the US.