Reinventing the Human
Preparing for the Next Chapter of the Planetary Journey
As recent events make clear, our civilization will soon be required to change in profound ways. As just one example, our species has used up the majority of the Earth’s fossil fuels — a storehouse of energy built up over BILLIONS of years — in just over a century. It’s certainly possible that we might be able to wring one or two more generations of oil out of the ground, but in the bigger picture, it seems clear that a civilization powered by the continual extraction of resources from a finite planet is not sustainable. In this sense, we find ourselves at a critical juncture in the history of our species and our planet — the end of one chapter and the start of another. To give voice to this profound shift, a growing number of scientists are suggesting that the end of World War II marked the beginning of a new geological era, the Anthropocene. What delineates this new chapter, they argue, is that most of the large planetary-scale processes now bear the indelible imprint of a single species — Homo Sapiens sapiens.
As humanity becomes a planetary power, our behavior will obviously need to change in fundamental ways. In the coming decades, we will need to dramatically alter the way we power our civilization, and also the way we feed and clothes billions of humans. At YourCosmos, however, we believe a much deeper change will also be required. For our species to survive and thrive now that it has attained these massive powers, we must fundamentally reimagine our relationship to the earth community and the cosmos. The shift required of our species, in other words, is not just a technological one — what’s needed now is the formulation of new worldviews.
As we see it, the reigning worldview of the last several centuries is no longer viable. Although it has served humanity admirably (bringing us antibiotics, the internet, airplane travel etc.), its fundamental commitment to limitless growth can no longer be sustained. While the idea that the more-than-human world is here simply for our use worked admirably in 1700, in the context of almost eight billion humans, it’s now causing the collapse of many of the world’s ecosystems.
In trying to give voice to the failings of our modern worldview, the cultural historian Thomas Berry argues that since the birth of our species, humanity has never lived in as small a space as it does today. In many ways, Berry’s claim seems patently outrageous because it flies directly in the face of our dominant cultural myth — which proudly proclaims that our civilization now occupies the BIGGEST space it ever has. And, of course, we don’t have to look far for evidence to support this narrative of progressive empowerment and enlightenment. As scientists are fond of pointing out, we’re the very first generations to know about the Big Bang, and to have conclusive evidence of a trillion other galaxies. We are also the first generation to have cracked the secret of biological life, and to now be able to use that knowledge to take CONSCIOUS control of evolution. (And more pragmatically, we are also the first generation to have self-driving cars and self-cleaning toilets.)
While Berry wouldn’t dispute these claims about humanity’s unprecedented powers, he would suggest that they have come at the price of an impoverished relationship with the world. Although our coffers and our armories have swelled, he might say, our forms of thinking, seeing, and relating have gotten progressively more stunted and superficial. We now have the ability to cut down millions of acres of trees every year, but we have lost the ability to see the inner depth of a single tree. Similarly, we now have the power to capture and control the consciousness of billions of people (through TV, social media, and advertising) but we have lost the ability to see the inner depths of the people crossing our streets and our borders. As an example of this myopia, the rapper Immortal Technique argues that many Americans have a difficult time even seeing people from developing nations as fully human. “In this country,” he says, “the attitude that is fed to us is that outside of America live lesser people.”
As a result of the iron grip of capitalism’s invisible hand, Berry might suggest, the modern human has been reduced to a consumer and a unit of labor power (which corporations now unabashedly refer to as a human RESOURCE). From Berry’s perspective, this shrinking of our awareness, and the consequent impoverishment of our relationships, has everything to do with the filter we’ve been referring to as our worldview.
Of course, many prominent thinkers disagree vehemently with Berry’s assessment. As one example, Steven Pinker’s recent book Enlightenment Now is a paean to the modern scientific worldview. As a perfect rebuttal to Berry’s critique, Pinker argues that things have never been better. Interestingly, however, Pinker’s criteria for progress center almost exclusively on just a SINGLE species (you’ll never guess which one). Stepping outside the unexamined assumption that what counts is how things are going for humanity, Berry might ask us to consider a different question: Have OTHER species noticed a marked improvement in their quality of life since the scientific revolution began?
To make this concrete, I’ve been wondering lately about how many species I can name for whom life has gotten significantly better since the year 1500? How many of the earth’s 8 million species have been the beneficiaries of the industrial revolution? Personally, I came up with four — dogs, cats, rats, and roaches. But then, I remembered that last year, humans killed almost three million dogs and cats in the U.S. alone. And, we also ripped the reproductive organs out of millions more.
While industrialization has brought many very real benefits to humans, it seems to me that many of those benefits have been the result of an industrialized assault on the natural world. For example, our increased standard of living seems inextricably connected to the development of the kind of technological power that allows us to kill 4 billion trees in a single year, along with more than 50 billion chickens and 1.5 billion pigs. Seen from the perspective of the biosphere as a whole, our mechanized war on the natural world has turned into a genocide the likes of which have not been seen on this planet for 65 million years. This genocide, which in scientific circles goes by the less-charged term ‘sixth mass extinction,’ does not seem to be a matter of scientific debate. There are questions about how FAST it’s happening, but no one doubts that it’s well underway.
At YourCosmos, our belief is that this mass-extinction is being caused a particular worldview, and this worldview is powered, ultimately, by a few central ideas. The shocking (and also hopefully empowering) truth is that it’s a small set of unexamined IDEAS that are now running our planet.
In the next post, we’ll peer more deeply into the challenges of our current scientific worldview.