Sep 16, 2022 (eand.co)
The Greatest Mistake in History — And Why We’re Still Making it
When it’s late at night — 4AM — I go to the window to sneak a cigarette. Snowy wakes up, and trots over — even though I say “It’s OK, buddy. Just rest!” He noses my leg aside, sits in his favorite spot underneath the sill, and looks up at me, sleepily. Dad, seriously? It’s 4AM! Let’s get some sleep. I’ve had a long day!
Me? At that precise moment, I feel a flood of emotion. A strange kind of grief. It’s not pure pain. It’s bittersweet. You see, I know something terrible. I’ll outlive my little dog. Or at least I probably will, might — the sunlight can kill me. I watch the city breathing in its sleep. Snowy falls into a slumber, too, right at my feet. And this strange pain pours through me.
Extinction. I’ve come to think that the question of Extinction is going to define the rest of human civilization. It’s that…big. Hard to grasp, right now. We’re the ones living inside the horizon of the Event. The only human beings alive to experience one of deep history’s — billions of years of it’s — mass extinctions.
What does it mean for us? The questions haunts me. Maybe you, too. I’ve come to think of it this way. Forgive me, because I’m going to struggle and muddle my way through a complex series of thoughts and ideas, still half-formed in my head. You can decide if I do them justice.
The strange bittersweet pain that I feel looking at my little doggy — we all feel it, touching our loved ones. What is it? I used to run away from it. Tried to escape it. Those of who feel things deeply — and aren’t adept at blocking our feelings off, either — in the end, though, can’t hide. Because there is no hiding from this feeling. This is the feeling of finitude. Of the sure knowledge of mortality.
This bittersweet feeling is the human condition. You can quibble with me all you like about that, but I’d bet that you, too, have tried to escape it, only to find you can’t. And like me, you’ve made a kind of difficult peace with it, because right down at the core of us lies this inescapable, terrible, strange, immovable pain. It’s raw, deep, primal. We know we’re going to die. The end. Lights out.
Now, you might think that’s a cliche. But it’s only recently in history that we’ve even begun to admit such a feeling exists. Until the Existentialists came along — at least in Western culture — it was more or less taboo to admit you felt this way at all. You had to pretend to believe in a cute fairy tale, called heaven, where the good people went, and a hell, where the bad ones were sent. The Existentialists came along and finally put words to this strange feeling, shattering this taboo of millennia. Kierkegaard’s cry of angst was about the pain, Sartre’s nausea, about the inescapability, Camus’s absurdity and strangeness about the tinge of sweetness amidst the bitterness of finitude.
What does all that have to do with Extinction? Everything. Existence is the opposite of extinction, after all. Complicated ideas, like I said. Let’s begin to make all that real.
If I ask you, what was the first civilization on the planet, you might reply: The Minoans, or maybe Mohenjo-Daro. Is that a “correct” answer? What about the first culture? You might reply with cave paintings in France, still thousands of years older. But you’d be completely wrong.
There’s a simple fact about history that’s as chilling as it is profoundly disturbing — as it is surprisingly almost unknown. The first culture that we know of, really, wasn’t human. What was it? It was the Neanderthals. The Neanderthals, to most people, are something like “animals.” But that is very wrong. The Neaderthals, we know now, had culture. They’re believed to have buried their dead, suggesting that they had some kind of spirituality. They forged tools. They created art.
The oldest known human art is about 45,000 years old. The oldest known Neanderthal art is 60,000 years old.
Think about that for a second. Really think about it. The first culture on this planet wasn’t human at all.
So why doesn’t anyone much really know it? Don’t you think that’s a striking and almost devastating set of facts? Why devastating? Well, because of what happened next.
What happened to the Neanderthals? We did. Or at least that’s how the thinking goes. We came along, and poof — soon enough, the Neanderthals were gone. Why? Evidence suggests that we killed them off. With then advanced weaponry like bows and arrows, with superior tools, probably with larger scale organization, too.
Stop, again, and really think about all that. Think about how we tell the story of human history. It goes like this. Once upon a time, there was the Stone Age, then there was a thing called civilization, with the advent of agriculture, then the Enlightenment happened, then along came the Industrial Revolution, and now we’re here. Broad strokes, sure. Fairy tale.
The reality of human history? It’s a completely different story. We weren’t the first intelligent species. We weren’t the first to have culture — or some level of civilization, which is what things like art and tools imply. They were the first, our cousins. And we killed them off.
In the fairy tale version of human history, we’re born innocent, like children. Wrong. We were never innocent. Our very first act as a species was extinction. Of our closest cousins.
Think about how horrific all that is. Does it make you stop in your tracks? Your heart pound a little bit? It does to me. When I think that we annihilated another species with art, culture, tools.
We were born in Extinction. And here we are again — our civilization culminating in it, too.
Coincidence? Hardly.
You see, all that is unspeakable. And it says something true about us. Something truer than anything else.
We are capable of incredible violence. Violence like no other beings this planet has ever remotely even seen. Our first act was genocide, and here we are all over again, on the brink of Extinction. No other being comes close to our capacity for violence, the scale of it, the horror of it, the careful, deliberate ruthlessness of it. Nobody else was trying to kill off the Neanderthals, even though countless other species existed. We made it happen. No other species is remotely capable of what we are — genocide, ecocide, annihilation. The lions are just eating what they need. We, on the other hand, kill for far stupider reasons.
All of that brings me back to what the question of Extinction means. You see, only a being with a terrible, endless pain in it could really be capable of the level of violence that we are. Either that, or a robotic one, programmed only to destroy. But we’re not robots. We make choices. And those choices seem to be driven by a terrible, deep, abiding pain, at the core of us. Only a being in that much pain would lash out like we do. Killing our cousins 50,000 years ago. And now? Annihilating everything else in sight.
Some kind of terrible, deep pain has to drive human violence. That pain is primal. We’re capable of such brutality, on this incredible, shocking scale, precisely because we’re lacerated by the sure knowledge of our mortality. And it drives us crazy. We invent all kinds of reasons to kill, ironically, enough, in some kind of defense mechanism of reaction formation. Maybe if I kill those guys, hey, I’ll live forever. If I sacrifice them, I’ll get my reward. I’m the chosen one! We are! Eternity’s waiting for us — all we have to do is take it from them!
See how…foolish…all this is? We just all die sooner that way.
It isn’t me who made this point first, by the way. It was Camus and Sartre, gazing at the ashes of World War, weeping. Sartre said, bitterly, “man is a useless passion,” reflecting on how existential terror drives violence. Camus made the point in a way history will never forget, telling the story, in The Stranger, of a man so alienated, he kills a stranger, just because his existential terror is so all consuming. Camus’s point, though, was that that man is all of us. Humankind.
Camus didn’t live to see what we know now, and yet he was — tragically — righter than he knew. He didn’t know that Neanderthals came before us with art and culture and tools, all of which obviously imply language and social organization — or that we killed them off. That man in such great pain that he kills for no reason but that pain is all of us.
Now. What’s the point I’m trying to make? In a sense, I’m trying to discover the fundamental mistake we’ve been making throughout human history. And it seems to go by this name: anthropocentrism.
Think of the fairy tale version of human history — innocence, becoming progress — which erases the bloodstained way we were really born, through the total annihilation of our nearest cousins. It’s centered around us to the point that learning that fairy tale, most people have no idea that we weren’t the first culture on earth at all — the Neanderthals were the oldest culture on this planet. People are utterly shocked when I tell them this simple fact.
Think of my own field, economics. It’s so anthropocentric that, to it, the entire planet and everything on it — forests, fish, birds, insects, dogs, rivers, oceans, mountains — is just a commodity. Economics doesn’t see any of these things as even alive at all.
That, in turn, is because philosophy — Western philosophy — is founded on the Cartesian logic of “I think therefore I am,” which means that things we don’t think think aren’t, and we can abuse and control and annihilate them for own pleasure or convenience or consumption. Just like we did to the Neanderthals.
See how the mistake’s remained the same, all these millennia?
I could go on. Think of how anthropocentric culture is. We make a big deal out of capital E Empathy these days — but it’s a rare thing that our culture attempts to tell the story of inhabiting another being’s shoes. What’s it like, being a species on the edge of exintction? How do they see us? Whether it’s Neanderthals, polar bears, or the last white rhinos? What is their lived experience like? Again, because our philosophy says they don’t have any, since they aren’t really alive, at least not in the way we are — conscious, sentient, aware — our culture doesn’t tell the story.
These days, it’s become modish to write articles with headlines like “do animals feel emotions?” They make me chuckle, before they make me boil a little in rage. I think to myself: my friend, haven’t you spent a day with a dog? A cat? A horse? Anyone but a human being? Because if you have, let me tell you, the first thing you learn is about emotions. My little dog gets scared of joggers, and gets overjoyed when he meets an old friend — animal or human. Do animals have emotions? See how…anthropocentric…the question is? It’s a restatement of Descartes all over again. You can almost imagine all those eons ago similar questions being asked: do Neanderthals have emotions? Never mind the art, culture, pottery, rituals, burials. Nope, no emotions here. Cool, guess it’s ok to annihilate them.
Meanwhile, it’s become modish in philosophical circles to speak of something called “long-termism.” The “long-termists” warn in stentorian terms of the “trillions of lives to come.” Those trillions of lives exist in computers, by the way. And the quadrillions, quintillions of actual lives, lived here and now, on planet earth? Oh, they don’t count. Because they’re not human, and therefore, they don’t really exist. Descartes. The Neanderthals. The fatal mistake, all over again.
What a foolish mistake it is. Because anyone can see that it is a mistake now. We aren’t the center of the ontological universe. Not even in material terms. In Plain English, that means: Extinction includes us, too, in the end. We can scarcely kill off life on the planet the way we’ve grown accustomed to, that we take for granted even for another decade or two. We’re running out of water, food, energy, medicine. Our basic civilizational systems are failing. Precisely because we have annihilated too much.
We human beings are masters at the art of Extinction. It’s the blackest art there is, the foulest of all things. And now we are called on to become something greater than that. Givers of life, nurturers of being, shepherds of creation. We can’t go on this way.
We have reached the first genuine turning point in our history. To ford the river of death — in which we are going to now drown — we must choose another way. We have to learn to do things like bring oceans and rivers and entire ecosystems back to life. To maintain the delicate balance between different systems of life. To build systems of our own — economies, measures, concepts — which value all that, seriously, instead of just pretending that life doesn’t exist, except us.
Let me try to sum all that up. I know it’s a lot. Human history so far has been made of what I’ve come to call the Anthropocentric Tragedy. To us, only we exist. The mistake goes so far as to erase the existence of the first culture on this planet, and our annihilation of it. And it keep right on going to now, where we’ve abused and annihilated the planet’s living systems to the point that they can’t sustain us anymore.
If we want civilization to continue, we are going to have to begin to undo the Anthropocentric Mistake, the tragedy of it. To understand anthropocentrism as a mistake, as a falsehood, as an illogical and imbalanced way of thinking. We aren’t the only ones who “really” exist, and just because we’re in existential pain, doesn’t justify annihilation, forever. If that’s all we’re capable of, well, this is where the human story ends — in the Last Extinction. It began with the First Extinction, which was us killing off our cousin, of course.
The first chapter of the human story is about Extinction. From the First — the one we were born in — to the Last. And this has to be the last, one way or another. You see, either it takes us down with it, or human civilization goes on, and there’s another one, the project continuing. Either way, this is the last one, because the next civilization, or ours, evolving, doesn’t have anything left to annihilate. We don’t even have enough, currently, to survive on, which, of course, is why living standards are now plummeting worldwide, and global progress is going into reverse, as Bill Gates laments, but doesn’t fully grasp the reason for.
The first chapter of the human story is about Extinction. The second has to be about Existence. Not just ours. All of it. Every living thing. Every kind of thing which supports it, too. Nurturing and tending to and giving life back to it. Or else we perish. From the First Extinction, to the Last Extinction. And that’s where the story of us ends. Now humanity is asked to change, for the first time in its history. To mature and grow, and bring forth something like the Age of Existence. Are we capable of it? Of all that? I’d be lying if I said I knew. So would you.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Umair
September 2022