Against Human Extinction

Why Should Humanity Continue?

It is fashionable to speak of our species extinction glibly in some circles. Maybe to even welcome it.

There are psychological reasons for this. Late capitalism is literally destroying the biosphere and the very natural systems upon which all live depends. This creates pressure in the human psyche that manifests in some as profound cynicism.

The internal process makes the link between our massive extractive and polluting economy and the ecocide. So far, so good. But the mental train does not stop there. There is no pause for deep reflection. The mission is to affix blame, perform contrition, and find redemption.

In that paradigm, the only path to redemption for such a huge a terrible crime (sin really) is death. This is not the result of careful logical analysis, but more akin to a religious belief.

In our collective consciousness there are two forces—Eros, which propels us towards life, and Thanatos, which propels us towards death. The Pro-Extinction stance is just the right wing Christian rapture story for leftists.

In the Evangelical version the righteous (them) go to a mythical heaven and everyone else goes to an equally mythical hell. The left-wing version has no heaven or hell as such, but is does have a mythical notion of the world without us—a heaven on earth where all the other life forms are suddenly revived and are free to frolic in the ruins of our cities.

What would a logical counter argument consist of?

Let’s begin with the affixing of blame. The pro-extinction crowd properly notes the human culpability but makes the following huge leap—that ALL humans must die because a few defective individuals, suffering from a collective psychopathy, have created an economic system that allows themselves unlimited power, and that they have successfully imposed this system on the rest of our species and on the rest of the biosphere.

In fact, if this were a torts trial, the lawyers would be parsing the blame. Attaching percentages. Every one of us does harm, but the type and amount of harm varies greatly.

Some of the harm may be the result of our expanded population, made possible by science. We are simply animals with big brains. Solving mechanical problems is our great talent, and we are driven to do it. The result, in this case, has been to exceed the carrying capacity of the earth on a species wide basis.

A byproduct of this great leap forward has been an increase in comfort that has changed all of those societies that have partaken, even to a small extent. Refrigeration, fast travel, temperature control. There is a long list of things that most of us would be loathe to give up. Some are, arguably, necessary to a decent life. And the societies that still don’t have these things want them.

This is an experiment gone very wrong. A recent and ongoing experiment. In a larger sense, 20 years does not even register. A human lifespan is barely a blink. At 500 years there is, perhaps, a recognizable blip, if one could stand outside of time and observe the entire 4.5 billion year history of our planet.

And this particular experiment, collectively known as the Industrial Revolutions, is about 500 years old. There is a cognitive distortion at play here, in which we think that the edifice that exists in our time was always so. Our species lived for several hundred thousand years without the comforts delivered by the various industrial revolutions.

Our general culpability in this ecocide resides in the use of petroleum and other elements of modern comfort. But as things stand, most of the world’s population has no choice in this. The entire structure of our societies is inextricably tied to the ecocide through the mechanics of predatory capitalism.

So, who should get 90% of the blame? The 1500 billionaires and the perhaps 6000 high multi-millionaires. These individuals and the corporations which they control bear the blame for this. Why wish extinction on an entire species for the sins of a tiny percentage?

These overlords have, as a class, their own thanotic vision, but it does not involve complete extinction. Just the mass die off of everyone but themselves and enough slaves from the lower classes to serve them.

But how does this implicate late stage capitalism? Wouldn’t these advances that allowed our over-population and ensuing harm have happened anyhow? Yes, the technology that has brought us refrigeration, cars, and the internet would have almost certainly occurred.

But in a very different way without capitalism. In a purely scientific environment, harms could be corrected for or avoided all together. And if that was not possible, that line of development would end. We know that just because a thing CAN be done is not a good reason to do it.

Unless we are using capitalist “logic”. Their system DEMANDS the doing of anything that makes a profit, regardless of harm. Furthermore, the billionaires and their corporations must only be charged for the direct expenses of producing harmful things and harmful results.

The harm to the environment and to our communities are “externalities” and the cost to mitigate, if such is possible, falls on the people, not the billionaires.

If we want redemption, it seems that eliminating both capitalism and the oligarchs it has created makes more sense than wishing extinction on our own species.

My next consideration is as follows: we are remarkable. Humans are just animals. And as such they have qualities that are without peer in the biosphere. If we could just stop demanding that we be aligned with angels and not with beasts we could find a way to live in harmony with the rest of the world. We existed in that state for around 200,000 years. The destructive imaginative binges of various religions that made us separate ourselves from the rest of the web could be an anomaly. Eight thousand years is not all that long. We, in the so called developed world, were beginning to understand. We are capable of growth.

And, finally, we must not go extinct because of the very damage wrought in the last half-century by the psychopathic capitalists. There are dead zones that only we can clean up. None of the other species are capable of cleaning up our mess.

The Pro-Extinction concept of a heaven on earth, free of human scum, is impossible. If we don’t both stop the carnage AND mitigate the damage, we WILL go extinct. But through cascading catastrophes, so will the rest of the living beings on this planet.

The result will not be an ecological paradise but rather a dead ball of rock. Our fate is tied to the rest of the biosphere, and theirs to us. The intelligentsia would better serve the living earth by considering ways to eliminate the overlords than by dreaming of our species extinction.