Humankind as Life’s Executioner: The Environmentalist’s Nightmare

In the West, environmentalism is politically correct. We’re supposed to recycle, stop eating meat or supporting the abuse of animals, eat organic foods, crack down on pollution of the atmosphere and on wildlife poaching, support the uses of renewable energies like wind turbines and solar panels, protect the rainforests and endangered species, and be one with the environment, go out into nature and commune with the elements, go camping and realize that our survival depends on a healthy and sustainable ecosystem, that species are interconnected so that if too many become extinct, a whole ecosystem is threatened.

Even while most Westerners--myself included--nod sagely when our commitment to received wisdom is tested and we’re faced with such prescriptions and principles, most of us eat meat, prefer cities to the wild, buy products from companies that pollute the atmosphere, drive vehicles that use nonrenewable energy, and in general identify with pop culture that elevates people above the rest of nature. Most Westerners would say that they’re environmentalists, but in reality they’re part of the problem, from an environmentalist’s perspective. What the environmentalist doesn’t wish to add is that her ideology, about how we all have to curb our practices so that a life-friendly environment can be preserved, is apparently opposed to human nature.

That’s why conservative Christians, for example, whose Bible tells them to be stewards of the planet, usually can get away with demonizing environmentalists, pretending that the scientific warnings about the harm our societies are doing to the atmosphere, to the global climate, and to the ecosystems are just frauds. You see, there’s a kernel of truth in this conservative’s skepticism. To be sure, this conservative’s stated reasons for opposing a rollback of our unsustainable business practices are kneejerk advertisements for big business that kick Jesus in the face and also in the balls. But in spite of that hypocritical propagandist’s surrender to the morally questionable forces of technoscientific societies, there may be a serious problem with the environmentalist’s message. We should ask ourselves why this message has only been politically correct--outside of certain liberal European countries. Why can’t most of us feel that we should be environmentalists and should therefore drastically change our behaviour and our societies for the benefit of all life? Why do we instead merely pay lip service to the message and go about our destructive business?

The answer is that environmentalism is a radical ideology that would destroy modern societies, if carried to its logical conclusion and applied. But assuming that environmentalists nevertheless have the science on their side, there’s a disturbing implication: human nature is opposed to the flourishing of Life in general. The traits that distinguish us as a species, of which we’re so proud, are weapons targeting all known life forms, set to reverse the whole triumphant saga of life’s evolution. We are destroyers and we’re able to deceive ourselves about our natural role, because our weapons--our machines and social infrastructures--are so elaborate that we must first spend thousands of years developing them, so that we can think of ourselves as creators. We destroy precisely with every one of our distinguishing features, with our self-awareness, opposable thumb, language, reason, curiosity, social instinct, and culture. And those weapons are pointed at us as well. This should be the environmentalist’s nightmare, that not only are most of us effectively super-villains in our support of the human project of building systems that threaten to destroy all life, but this isn’t even a choice: natural selection may not be eternal and just as every organism self-destructs, so too our species may be the doomsday weapon that’s naturally forced to bring all life to an end. Our uniqueness as a species may be needed to terminate the bizarre initial emergence of life in the void.

Evolving the Doomsday Machine

How could such a paradoxical species evolve by natural selection? Surely the environment would select against traits that are detrimental to the spreading of the genes needed to produce those traits. For example, if reason causes us to learn how to exploit natural processes and our instinctive self-interest leads us to apply that knowledge by developing technologies that empower us at the cost of threatening the habitats of other species, and if we rationalize that process with one anthropocentric ideology after another, how could reason have evolved in the first place? The answer is simple. Natural selection has no forethought and reason’s self-destructive potential is actualized only in the long term. In the short term, reason benefitted each generation of our ancestors by enabling them to fend off predators, to learn how to hunt prey, and thus to survive in the hostile environment in which the human cerebral cortex evolved. Only with hindsight can we all-too intelligent creatures see that the evolution of life may have been naturally limited from the start, that while natural selection was busy preserving genes by creating a variety of replicating hosts, that is, by creating the bodies of insects, fish, mammals, and so on, that process was always set to expire at some point. The arms race between species, the tendency for species to become more and more specialized, and the availability of the niche that intelligence exploits made our emergence probable, and so throughout the eras of life’s evolution, there’s been a higher order pattern corresponding to its own natural law: as life branches off into kingdoms, families, and species, a species will likely develop that will act on its unique potential to end the spreading of life. Life’s evolution may have been creatively self-destructive from the start, which would make sense if all natural processes are finite.

So because we’re such skilled pattern detectors, we can see how the emergence of life spelled doom, but the forces of natural selection are blind to that probability. The genes kept pumping out mutations and the environment preferred some by eliminating others, and so species survived and gradually adapted to changes in their environment. And that process was liable to create a species with the skillset to end the proliferation of genes once and for all. Those destructive traits can evolve because they have dual uses: in the short term they benefit each generation of replicators, but in the long run they support the higher order evolution of culture, of ideas which inspire us to humanize the environment, if only to quell the existential terror that results from self-awareness and high intelligence. A humanized environment, though, is bad for nonhumans, and so that anthropocentrism would thereby extinguish us as well.

Moreover, our ability to undo the planet’s life-preserving processes could have evolved as a side effect of traits that were directly selected by the environment (because those traits increased the chance that our ancestors’ genes were reproduced). For example, as far as the genes and our formative environment were “concerned,” to personify them for the sake of simplifying the explanation, reason evolved for limited ends, such as its uses in self-defense, hunting, and in structuring society by biasing the members towards expressing themselves, which leads to a competition and the emergence of a dominance hierarchy. But at the cultural level, the host organisms passed on traditions from one generation to the next, so that the institutions of modern science, capitalism, and democracy eventually emerged, which apply rigorous and primitive forms of reasoning alike in a way that conforms to the higher-order pattern of life’s self-destruction. Overall, reason may still benefit us by equipping us to survive, reproduce, and raise our offspring to do the same, but reason creates cultural superstructures, ideologies, and a transformed environment that make life in general unsustainable, as implied by environmentalism.

Gestalt Switch to the Dark Side

How, more specifically, would this destruction take place? The process would be much too elaborate to be easily summarized, since I’m proposing that most of what we’ve done and indeed most of what we’re capable of doing should be seen as nails in Life’s coffin. But here are some examples. As I’ve explained elsewhere, language gives us top-down control over our thoughts and thus greater self-control, because the use of arbitrary symbols makes classification easier. That greater access to the contents of our minds also allows for more and more abstract thinking, as we come to play with mental schemes of organizing our concepts and labels. Somewhere along the way we acquire the dualistic distinction between the self and everything else and so we become self-aware. As has been clear since at least the Garden of Eden myth, self-awareness leads to alienation as we come to understand our finitude and thus our existential predicament.

That alienation detaches us from the rest of the natural order and so instead of following just the basic biological patterns, we make up rules by inventing cultures, which are human-friendly environments regulated by religious traditions and other social conventions. Once detached from the primitive biological struggle for survival and reproduction, that is, once distracted by the many more “sophisticated” and “elevated” pursuits of starting a business, going to war, getting into politics, learning a trade, practicing a craft, and so on, we become free to dedicate ourselves to a goal other than that of mere survival. That opens the door to the path of destruction; that is, we become free to govern ourselves in a way that’s hazardous to other species and thus eventually to ourselves. Lacking outward physical defenses, we’ve evolved instead high intelligence and the opposable thumb to exploit our rational discoveries. Technoscience empowers us, but because we’re alienated from nature, we use that power to egoistic ends, enslaving or exterminating other species, destroying their habitats to make room for our expansion, polluting the environment for short-term gain, and so forth. Technology allows us to adapt to most environments on this planet, and so our success becomes a global rather than just a local threat.

Or take the conceit that our naked bodies are particularly beautiful, compared to nonhuman bodies. Supposing this judgment weren’t just laughably subjective and symptomatic of our infantile self-centeredness, the more beautiful we are, the more self-absorbed we become and so the less interested we find ourselves in the disastrous long-term effects of our materialistic lifestyle. Or take the social aspect of reason, which includes the many fallacies and biases to which cognitive scientists have confirmed we’re prone. Those weaknesses of reason indicate that reason evolved as a means of using rhetorical tricks to persuade other members of our group and to achieve greater social status for the trickiest among us. For example, we tend to ignore evidence that conflicts with our beliefs and to be preoccupied with evidence that confirms what we want to believe. So if we’re instinctively more interested in our happiness than in that of strangers, we can concoct all sorts of rationalizations so that we don’t feel ashamed when we ignore the suffering of those strangers, including the suffering of nonhumans. Our ideologies become blinders so that we don’t question the direction in which we’re collectively heading.

The point is that you can take any of our distinguishing features and view it as a precondition of the extinction of all living things. I’m not saying, then, that our skills are neutral in that they can be used for good or for evil. Instead, I’m saying that there’s a gestalt switch in perspective that we can perform, after which almost everything we do looks like part of a diabolical process. Viewed egoistically or anthropocentrically, we call good that which benefits us and makes us happy. But if we imagine we’re in the environmentalist’s nightmare, all of that goodness is actually the most coldblooded lethality; indeed, the more content and well-fed we are in our cozy social networks, the more shortsighted and blind we become to the damage we’re doing to all life just by successfully fulfilling our role as human beings. This is roughly the lesson of the movie Cube: we each unwittingly contribute to the creation of the instrument of our destruction, and this is part of the hideous evolutionary process rather than some cheesy, improbable conspiracy. And in many other movies, the supposed hero is sickened to realize--sometimes tragically too late--that she’s been the problem all along, that she ought to have been fighting against herself since she’s been on the wrong side without knowing it. I’m suggesting that the unpopularity of genuine environmentalism raises the disturbing possibility that the environmentalist’s nightmare might be our reality and that we can wake up to that nightmare by a sort of gestalt switch.

Needless to say, all of this is speculative, although perhaps little more so than the typical hypothesis in evolutionary psychology. Still, my point isn't just that if we're feeling pessimistic, all of our behaviour can be made to look destructive. No, I'm also assuming that environmentalists have the science on their side to show that our species is in fact particularly dangerous to all living things. I'm just adding an explanation of that danger, by saying that it may be based on an unsettling natural process which unfolded in parallel with the "miraculous" evolution of life in a lifeless universe. 

In any case, if we entertain these speculations for the sake of argument, would it follow that we’ll inevitably cause the end of life? That is, suppose there is a natural process at work here, a higher order life cycle not of individuals or even of species but of all the taxonomic ranks of life on Earth. Life had a mysterious, as yet poorly understood origin and it will have an end at some point, and what I’m suggesting is that we highly adaptable, fiendishly clever primates who are as curious (intrusive) and as selfish (short-sighted) as children seem like good candidates for the catalysts of that final act of Life’s drama. The emergence of organisms was highly unusual, given what we observe in the rest of the universe, and we in turn are highly peculiar compared to what we observe throughout the biological world (although each species has its own fascinating biography). Some mechanism was needed to turn nonlife into the earliest living things and some mechanism may be needed to end all life processes. Of course, another meteor could strike the Earth and so accidentally wipe out all life. But I’m speaking here of a naturally necessary rather than coincidental end of life.

But here’s the answer to the question about inevitability. Physical laws are almost certainly never violated, although quantum mechanics makes those laws only statistical. More specialized laws, though, such as those that correspond to what regularly happens in emergent domains are ceteris paribus, meaning that the regularities depend on “all things being equal,” that they’re context-dependent; that is, the domain in question must be closed off from the rest of the world so that there’s minimal interference with the process that interests us in that domain. The point, though, is that in such complex domains, such as the biological, psychological, or social ones, the processes can be interfered with so that the predicted pattern isn’t actually completed. For example, natural selection is what happens under certain local circumstances, but if those circumstances change, such as when a meteor destroys the planet’s oceans, the biological process ends. By contrast, the order of strictly physical relationships, such as the one sustained by the force of gravity, is much harder to escape. Thus, even were our species probably the seed of Life’s destruction, this probability wouldn’t amount to an inevitability.

Mind you, I wouldn’t be optimistic about our chance of collectively coming to our senses, but individually we can take our stand against the deadly forces that work through us. Just as humans detached from the natural order, preferring to live in our self-made cultural bubbles, so too we can detach from those artificial worlds and renounce the grosser delusions and uglier practices that seem to make us fitting executioners. This would most likely be a doomed rebellion of minorities, but tragedies are the most sublime artworks.