Having wandered Earth for 200,000 years, it may be time for Homo sapiens to consider that destiny did not intend its occupancy for eternity, and perhaps far short of that as such things go. Faced with certain eventualities, humans could shuffle off this mortal coil not individually, as with the younger Cato, but collectively, like the mythical lemmings. This possibility could have occurred to humans in times past but barring divine wrath, which brought it close with the infamous flood, never with today’s plausibility. Both then and now our extinction, leaving aside another wayward asteroid, would be self-generated: earlier in the form of punishment for sin, today for presumably different reasons but with the same locus of responsibility. Modernity in its post-WWII incarnation has had tangible reasons to discover that each day really could be the last, or at least a major step in that direction. And that feels very different and even sobering, although the point of my writing is that while it surely is different, it hasn’t been notably sobering. Human complacency and bias strongly tend toward the assumption that tomorrow will be essentially like today; we know that earthquake and hurricane are always theoretically possible for some people but as blips within overall continuity and probably someone else’s problem. A growing cohort no longer feels so confident, and with good reason, it seems to me. They focus chiefly on the means that might precipitate the end point, while I am more interested in those tendencies within human nature and culture—in our mind and spirit—that invite disaster, the Why and Wherefrom. I suspect that the reasons humans have created and accepted serious risks to their existence go deeper than aspiration and its side-effects, on the one hand, and complacency and bias on the other.
Linguistic evolution is indicative: Humanity no longer faces mere risks—instead, existential risks. Around some watercoolers, these have honorary status as “X-risks.” They are thought of as threats of human extinction or decimation to near extinction, civilizational collapse, loss of all or most of those ways of living that are highly valued, and of human potential. In short, very serious change in human prospects. The field of studying all this is in a definite growth stage and it would be irresponsible not to pay attention. Intellectual fashions come and go as do other varieties, but this one describes threats that could take us along as they go. Among groups that have sprung up are these: the Future of Life Institute, the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, the Existential Risk Observatory, the Future of Humanity Institute, and there are probably others. The identified risks vary slightly from group to group and some see more and others fewer, but certain ones make every list: nuclear war, A.I., climate change, pandemic. These are my choices as well, but for completeness the others include biotechnology, collapse of fresh water and food sources, biodiversity loss, a host of natural and humanmade catastrophes, and of particular interest to me, national and international failure to understand what’s going on and act to prevent it (even in the face of copious study and publication by the groups indicated above, and others, and the ability to open one’s eyes to obvious possibilities).
As an American, I’m particularly interested in how my own country is handling the heebie-jeebies it must certainly be experiencing at these prospects of annihilation. Except…it isn’t, because it doesn’t appear to recognize them as X-risks. Or doesn’t want to. Or its citizens feel too threatened by each other to notice. Or it is too busy growing the economy to have time. Or it doesn’t have the capacity anymore to steadily face reality and do anything big, visionary, and of positive import to self-preservation. Or all of the above. It is not an inspiring sight. By way of illustration let me offer a few recent comments and observations gathered easily, without deep research to confirm them—it’s all there in the newspapers and other publications for those who wish to see.
In the New York Times (3-13-23), an article by Serge Schmemann discussed Russia’s recent decision to suspend participation in the New Start nuclear arms limitation treaty, the last one remaining of its kind. Part of his point was that few people know what it is, what it meant, and what’s going on in the nuclear arms dimension of our omnipresent international competitions. What was once the subject of scary dramas and books and on the minds of those people willing to stare into the abyss has faded away. “More than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear obliteration simply doesn’t rank among Americans’ greatest fears.…My grandson, a college student, told me his peers don’t see a global nuclear war as a real danger today.” Seemingly, they have a lot of company. Not because the possibility of nuclear catastrophe is no longer serious, or because there is an iota of evidence that global political leadership has things under control or is even cognizant, or because universal peace has finally descended. Instead, I suspect it has been filed under old business; we have habituated to its looming presence and since it didn’t happen yesterday it won’t happen tomorrow. How long, after all, can people stay anxious? And as anxiety diminishes, how much less cautious are we in subduing the threat (a threat that is framed by political leadership as a necessary deterrent, life-preserving and war-preventing, irrational as that sounds)?
And consider A.I. A day earlier than the above, again in the Times, Ezra Klein wrote under the heading “This Changes Everything.” Artificial intelligence, he says, is developing at a pace few people recognize and with possible effects few can anticipate. As with quantum physics or our quotidian desktop computer, it is also an arena where technical people commonly acknowledge they don’t fully understand how it works but that it’s quite useful. Still, they recognize that AI contains seriously fuzzy mechanisms with potentially calamitous outcomes. Speaking of people working in its development, Klein says:
It is a community that is living with an altered sense of time and consequence. They are creating a power that they do not understand at a pace they often cannot believe. In a 2022 survey, A.I. experts were asked, “What probability do you put on human inability to control future advanced A.I. systems causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species?” The median reply was 10 percent. I find that hard to fathom, even though I have spoken to many who put that probability even higher. Would you work on a technology you thought had a 10 percent chance of wiping out humanity?
Well, maybe you would. After all, there is lots of money behind it, and power, and corporate and national competitiveness. Its developers are said to feel a “responsibility” to offer this astonishing artifact to the world, and the technological imperative has been assumed since shortly after technological and industrial forces broke the back of those who rejected it…ergo, who can or would try to stop its progress even if they could? (I’m not convinced AI is likely to wipe us out, but it does seem likely that the mind-set of its developers and its continuity with similar life-depreciating mind-sets common in our culture, especially among avid corporate avatars of wealth, will help to extinguish much of the value of not being wiped out.)
How about anthropogenic climate disruption? It was a busy week for X-risk consideration—March 12 brought news about the relentless drive by petrochemical companies to obfuscate, distort, deceive…whatever’s needed to continue its profitable work wrecking the climatic foundations of life as we’ve known them for millennia. It is not hard to find evidence of this and the sight of corporations still treated as if respectable lying about lying or lying through misdirection and pretense still astonishes and may be diagnostically significant to the point of this essay—Why aren’t these people shunned? Why are they still accepted in what used to be called “polite society”? Doesn’t their role as instigators of an X-risk matter? Of course, they need similarly profit-focused enablers and the giant banks are happy to gather with them at the trough, regardless of consequences, by lending a helping hand through financial arrangements. In his sub-stack column “The Crucial Years,” Bill McKibben says of this:
…in an emergency we should be able to expect something slightly resembling responsibility from them [financial institutions]. Facing the civilizational crisis that is climate change, they should act in at least modestly pro-social ways. Instead, they’ve continued to pursue their most narrow and short-term self-interest, loaning money to the fossil fuel industry for its continued expansion even though every climate scientist on the planet has insisted that expansion must come to a screeching halt.
(Why do X-risks persist? Because, among other reasons, once esteemed corporate leaders and enablers who presently benefit from future calamity are still treated publicly as if estimable.) Culpability goes viral here; it isn’t just the banks and fossil fuel corporations complicit in this crime against Earth, but the Biden administration (under the influence of banks, fossil fuel corporations, and others) approved a massive new oil development project in Alaskan wilderness, while simultaneously protecting other areas from such activities, thus avoiding consistency and violating earlier commitments against such business, as if the latter protections will obviate the effects of the former permissions. In a similar burst of inconstancy, Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act both put considerable funding into renewable energy sources and agreed to auction millions of acres of federal lands for oil and gas drilling. I once taught college classes in business ethics (yes, there is such a field) and this reminds me that such endeavors are thought of in the corporate world as “just business” or business as usual, and I would offer that “just politics” operates in much the same manner. Ethics can easily reduce profitability or electability so are dispensable. (Donald Trump says that when he becomes President again one of his mantras will be “Drill baby, drill,” which is akin to encouraging fish to swim, although fish avoid when possible toxic waters.)
Speaking of viral, there is still pandemic to think about. How many countries other than the U.S. had more of their citizens die during the COVID-19 pandemic than the 1918-19 Spanish flu? Over a million of us (and still adding one to two thousand per week) compared to approximately three quarters of a million in the earlier onslaught, which is surely a major feat considering our wealth and supposed medical sophistication and resources (our higher population is not explanatory since there are more people everywhere, COVID is far less lethal than was the Spanish flu, and its total deaths do not come close to those of that earlier pandemic). No one not in Stage IV denial and/or commitment to right-wing dogma cannot recognize that the U.S. never united to face the threat and instead tens of millions allowed themselves to be led naively down a virus-strewn pathway resulting almost certainly in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and attendant suffering. Can we imagine doing better when a far more deadly virus comes along? There are no signs we are preparing for it through strengthening public health resources or publicly coming to terms with why we failed so unexpectedly and dramatically to effectively cope with what was going on. Of the four X-threats under discussion, this is the only one that has had a genuine trial run, which offers recent evidence of a unique sort, experienced by all Americans, of a deadly stimulus and egregiously failed national response. And this failure—a malign collaboration between governments at all levels and American citizens—helps to understand the durability of X-risks of all kinds. We also notice that the Covid pandemic was the only one among even the larger inventory of potential risks without a conscious, decisive human fingerprint on its irruption, although either of its two potential origins (lab leak or wildlife meat market) reveals human fallibility and ignorance as pathogenic. The remaining existential risks all appear derived from the use of or lust for power.
~ ~
I began work as a psychotherapist in the early 1970s. Research in the area of what’s called learned helplessness began, as far as I know, in the late 1960s. I remember becoming aware of the concept and theories surrounding it early in my practice and of thinking it a useful framework for understanding certain dimensions of some clients’ behavioral and cognitive dynamics. It made evident sense. Until I began thinking about existential risks and the American response to them, I don’t know that learned helplessness had entered my mind conceptually for decades, probably since I stopped doing therapy in the mid-90s. But it came back to me when I realized that from a theoretical perspective it could help explain the ineffectiveness and even la belle indifference that is currently so common in the presence of the most serious of matters, assuming survival to be a continuing concern of most people, which it does not always appear to be. (Not to be hyperbolic but it sometimes seems as if the common, fast becoming humdrum, American drama of random mass shootings, in which the shooter uses the police for assisted suicide if he doesn’t do the job himself [after killing as many as he can], may well be an apt metaphor for the zeitgeist when it comes to responding to X-risks—here too the American response is to be effectively unresponsive. And more, to describe certain aspects of failure as the price of freedom.)
The picture that increasingly comes to mind as I think about each of our four risk areas—nuclear holocaust, A.I., climate disruption, pandemic—separately and collectively can accurately be described, as one stands back and observes the participant/victims, as one of felt helplessness. I think it reasonable to wonder just how much effective coping can be expected of humans under circumstances where they face large or multiple threats, and more so when efforts to effect change in other, less significant areas, usually appear fruitless. Some of us last year noted the 20th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, and I recall that back before it was launched millions of people in this country and abroad made clear their objections, their belief that it was wrong and could only bring disaster and death and suffering, which it did in spades despite the expertise lined up in its favor. But the die had been secretly cast well before and those in charge were not to be dissuaded. We were told to trust them. After the bombs began falling, the public went mostly quiet. We have learned helplessness and it is reinforced from the top.
There is much from which the citizenry today could learn to feel helpless. The dominant institutions have grown fewer and bigger, richer and more powerful, impersonal and invulnerable, less and less responsive to humble taps on their doors by customers or constituents. This is called modern capitalist and bureaucratic efficiency and we its “beneficiaries” are said to be served by that with lower costs and material abundance, yet many of us have a hard time distinguishing those supposed benefits from being ignored. From college during the ‘60s I still remember an economics professor explaining how the balance of big labor, big business, and big government would contain one another’s excesses and redound to the common good. Obviously it was an unstable balance since the corporate leg of the triad has managed to decimate the labor leg and to contain any over-enthusiasm of government on behalf of the public. When government, the political arm in particular, momentarily forgets its true masters, it isn’t long before it remembers and redirects its temporarily aberrant energies back to coddling its corporate keepers. Most people have learned to tolerate this in various ways while some seek relief in the protective shade of a demagogue. When mundane reality as worker, consumer (that demeaning label), or citizen, confirms in myriad small and large ways people’s ineffectiveness at preserving their autonomy, agency, and rights, what would make them think they could do anything about the potential doom hanging over their heads? To systemic racism and systemic inequality should we add systemic helplessness? (One wonders if there are any positive system dynamics.)
~ ~
Existential risks abide tenaciously, patiently, seemingly in a world of their own, floating beyond the public ken. A few academics specialize in their study, a few others recognize a need for concern, and soothing words are applied by those in charge, which serve like dressings for old wounds, masking without alleviating; the public goes on working and playing, oblivious, its supposed leaders functionally in the same condition. It is ironic that a species that has specialized in telling itself, ever since it began indulging such soliloquies, that it is separate and above all other life owing to its unique intelligence, and now it threatens to run the bus that carries all life into an abyss without using that intelligence to pause and ask, “Why?” and “What for?” and “Is it time to regain control?” What was important enough to risk it all? We are a species that appears to have lost its center, its focus and purpose. Its tools have outpaced their creators, whose control seems tenuous and fading. What happened?
If, as I think, learned helplessness is part of the explanation it is necessary to describe its source as well as ancillary reinforcing factors: How was it taught and what was the teacher? Why did the lesson take? Where was the classroom? The answers begin with another question: What do people live for? Whatever else one does—how they use their time, their work, their religion and politics, their relationships—somewhere inside them, perhaps vestigial, is a sense of something that gives a reason or justification, value or purpose, to getting up in the morning and doing whatever they do until returning to slumber. I acknowledge that it could be mere habit, an alternative to death for as long as it lasts, but outside of that utter ontological vacuity there are occasional signs of wakefulness in most people. They may be small and flaccid and offer little resistance to the power of helplessness; in lieu of energizing the germ of agency their impotence and uncertainty may obscure or even replace belief in its germinative potential. Since I speak of the core from which a meaningful life would spring, the teacher of helplessness must be compelling and have the imprimatur and force of common socialization to stymy inbuilt purposive striving. It would shoulder aside alternative expressions of psychic or telic value. It would be attractive and promising but not to higher regions of consciousness. For maximum effect it would need to be seen as given, as obviously the way things are, as path to a sense of success of an undiscriminating sort. It would keep one occupied. In short, the helplessness imagined here is the kind that prevents not just engagement with genuine values but of envisioning their real existence. It looks like the present day, the present economic determination of personal and national fiber where there’s hardly any vision not economically rationalized. It has a mind of its own and power to go with it, apparently irresistible and always certain that it is for the good of everyone. (Sounds also like a depiction of the presently much-discussed role of smartphones among young people, now that I think about it.)
~ ~
As far as I am aware, most of the attention to X-risks focuses on how they put us at risk and what we might do to avoid or mitigate them. We apparently do not consider the matter of why nearly so interesting. Why would humans create such risks and allow them to persist, why was their evident riskiness either not foreseen or not taken seriously and not prevented, why was the risk accepted (if perceived) and with what vision of its ultimate course and fruition? I examine these questions under the light (or shadow) of certain assumptions. First, that only a serious absence in human consciousness and/or equally serious distortions of reality could prepare the way for such risks to occur and be tolerated, even routinized and rationalized as essential to our way of life. Second, I appeal to daily experience in stipulating that human nature is primarily and excessively egoistic and easily drawn to misperceptions of what is essential and real. We are self-centered and anxious and quick to seek security in the wrong places; our flaws as a species are significant and obvious but mostly denied or avoided—we just live and die with them. Third, having given up seeking after the ethical Good and failed to see that all lives have their separate and equally valuable Goods, we have erected a delusional vision of humanity that places us above Nature, autonomous, powerful, individualistically separated, and self-guided by a self-serving will that knows where it is going. That we are one among others on a provident Earth as part of an eternally mysterious Universe that may have values of its own embedded within—some of which we depend upon and others share—has blown right past us.
(Although I won’t go into detail here, it seems to me likely that the assertion and acceptance of ontological primacy by Homo sapiens must have paved the way to our present belief in the rightness and normalcy of exploitation as our standard relation with the Earth and its life and other substance. In this manner all became resource for the use of our species, eventuating even in “human resources,” and I do not think it stretches too far to see the movement onward from there to factory-farmed animals and wars ranging from the quotidian to the genocidal as primacy was reassigned to specific kinds of people [and species] standing above other kinds. Primacy may in time have reached even into the lofty realms of reality wherein Homo sapiens assumed transcendence, including freedom from facts and from existential and moral limitations.)
Human nature, though, exists with…let us call it, possible potential. Ill-defined as it necessarily is, our nature subsists, as does that of every other kind of life, imbued with preferred ways of living and flourishing. Of ways that can nourish and fulfill and guide a life course. But they can be dammed, diverted, transformed unrecognizably, and it seems rather easily. As such, they become a different kind of X-risk and not one on any of the lists I mentioned at the beginning.
I offer the following observations as a response to the Why and Wherefrom questions. First, X-risks generally are birthed, set in motion, and justified from the top down with the possible exception of pandemic. The whines that yet another nuclear arms race, more fossil fuel extraction, more technology and specifically more AI developing more capacity to do more things…each and all claimed to serve the public good is a combination of self and other deception on behalf of egoistic aims. When the powerful believe in or want something in our system, they usually get it; the risks are born by all but the gains are disproportionately localized among themselves. Thus are risks created and sold and too often bought. Second, existentially fulfilled humans might be expected to resist having their existence and fulfillments put in jeopardy. But in order to have reached this happy condition they need a cultural vision of something more valuable than materialism and militarism, something like moral commitments, communal solidarity, and forms of service to Nature and others. To speak the words is to recognize their generalized absence, which raises the prospect that if helplessness were unlearned, what then? Where would the new vigor and competence find outlets for finding existential meaning?
Third, I acknowledge that my background view of human nature is a pessimistic one. It holds that the forces of greed, delusion, and power lust that fuel X-risks will always be with us through the agency of those motivated by these forces—those with the capacity to activate them for their presumed benefit combined with the incapacity they’ve incurred from lack of a vivid, constraining conscience. But they don’t do their damage alone. Masses of other humans, differently constructed, are unmotivated to discern reality, to give up gullibility for responsibility, to trade in complacency for their own agency, to feel the urgency of moral obligations. If this picture is anywhere near accurate, why wouldn’t existential risks arise, spread, be excused and avoided as long as they are useful to some? It is hard to imagine that sufficient numbers of people would see these things for what they are and act to forestall them and then remain vigilant enough to prevent recurrences.
Fourth may seem to go afield; I offer it in the form of a story. Although pandemic has afflicted humans for millennia, the other identified risks arose after WWII, which doesn’t deny that their roots go back farther. I’m sure they in fact do since they are consistent with values that have always been with us in America. After the War, and after the vaporization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the most notable development that I am aware of was the turning of our society decisively toward economic and militarized ends. Its chief orientation became consumerism and international dominance, and as money began to flow a few inevitably took off in frenzied pursuit of wealth and power. Soon that was not enough and they wanted more than their share and to control the levers that directed it so that their interests prevailed. They became nihilistic as the hunger took over their minds and getting what they wanted became their primary end, not to be constrained by moral obligation and social responsibility. It seems significant to me that the move from going after more to going after more than their share was so swiftly incorporated into their mindset. Naturally, such a move required that the rest of the citizenry had to be kept passive and dependent on a relative pittance of the economy’s returns and on debt in order to participate in and feed the consumer machine, which they had been persuaded was society’s main aim and their own private pleasure; after years of Depression and war it probably does not surprise that they were imminently persuadable, especially in the early years. If it didn’t make it inevitable, feeding the commodity beast surely made it likely that existential risks could become enablers—those with hands on the levers having only a single aim believed that any means would do to reach it. For them, all risks were acceptable because profitable, supportive of their control, consistent with their belief in their “divine right” to rule, their unique and special natures, their wisdom. Egoism and a large sense of entitlement and invulnerability can make people act like this and to reject all efforts to impose limits on them or adequately tax their returns.
As this nihilism grew their citizen subjects’ gullibility, dependence, and helplessness grew in tandem, as did their alienation from responsible citizenship. Complacency and compliance became normalized to such an extent that, for example, people passively accepted the gathering of vast amounts of personal information from their online activity, which is then sold in order to manipulate their thinking and aspirations with targeted advertisements and other biased and often false material. For another example, without being asked it became common for all their financial transaction data to be gathered by central data banks, their “credit worthiness” rated and, once again, sold to whoever paid the price (which goes even farther than other intrusions in that the divinized “credit score” affects everything from mortgages to jobs and thus a little more of their autonomy swishes away silently). On a larger scale, American militaristic adventurism was helpful in a host of ways, ranging from creating and protecting markets to entering lavish contracts for adventure equipment to keeping their subjects distracted; in any event the alliance with another form of power came naturally since it was not competitive with theirs but in fact subsidized it. (It worked so well that, in the style of repetition compulsion, they’re working one of its angles again: hostile, conflict assuming, persistently threatening, militarized attitudes toward China now lead to discussion of whether there will be war [who knows for what reason?] and to further stir and enrich the pot yet another nuclear arms race has launched.) So, in similar fashion, it goes with the fossil fuel conglomerates and the technologists all the way up to AI and its metastatic expansion. By building a society that provides minimal security to the unpowerful (which would only sap their motivation and turn them into malingerers) and maximal security to the powerful (which feeds their dynamism, their innovative, entrepreneurial agitations on behalf of raising the tide that floats all boats and trickles down besides), vanity at the top and helplessness below solidified. So far the only responses are as expected for the disempowered: They act out diffusely through chemical and commodity compulsions, suicide, violence, gun worship, and now “populism.”
The story is near its end. I find it almost impossible to conclude that one or another X-risk will not eventually unleash itself and end the present human project (not tragic in itself since self-induced and lacking even a weak version of a happier sequel), decisively wreck Nature (ecosystems and their necessary biodiversity, soil, water, climate, wildlife), and leave a comparatively few demoralized humans struggling to survive and rebuild something in a hostile human and climatic environment. The implacability and arrogance of the powerful combined with the ineffectuality of their subjects along with risks that seem to move inexorably closer to autonomous action, beyond human direction, seem to guarantee a denouement of this sort.
~ ~
Deeply relevant to the occurrence and recurrence of existential risks in the U.S., we may ask ourselves what might seem an odd question: Is the U.S. a nation that respects life, a nation whose spirit has ever incorporated a deep valuing, even cherishing, of life? Its history of relations with the indigenes who had lived here for thousands of years, with kidnapped and enslaved Africans, with poor people, Nature and animals, suggests not. Violence against fellow citizens and readiness to war against other peoples and nations…gun worship in the midst of mayhem enabled by weaponry meant for battlefields…fervent antiabortion crusades, a fetus fetish alongside comparative indifference toward the born…incarceration of its people at the highest rate for the longest sentences in the cruelest conditions. At best, we’re ambivalent and selective in which lives matter and to what extent. Pundits known for their pro-fetus commitments not uncommonly supported American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11. I saw a car once with adjacent bumper-stickers affirming opposition to both abortion and gun control (another one paradoxically affirms commitment to “God, Guns, and Family”). Is unwillingness to take X-risks seriously another signal that life doesn’t much matter, that people just aren’t sure what they think about it or what to do with it?
The antiabortion movement may be emblematic. How many of its leaders and participants are genuinely pro-life in the broadest sense—uncomfortable about capital punishment, war, police violence, infant and maternal mortality, poverty, factory farming and other abuses of animals, offenses in general against life’s declared sacredness? How many actively remember that the fetus is within a woman who has far deeper and more legitimate claims on her body and the course of her life than any outsider? How much bad faith has been demonstrated in the post-Dobbs frenzy to universalize the prohibition? Antiabortion rests fundamentally on religious beliefs that have never been shown to reflect a compelling state interest in generalizing to nonbelievers. Pro-fetus is clearly not pro-life. “Unborn children” is an emotive oxymoron rather than meaningful label. (As an elder, I could as well be called an undead corpse since, like the unborn children, I’ve not gotten there but it is my direction—still, I ought not be treated as a corpse yet.) I am tempted to see the crusade as the easy way and in a sense anti-life. It is much easier to grapple with the imagined future of a fetus than the present impingements and assaults on born beings who display complexity and variety and many of whom may not be very likable or of approved attitudes and ethnicities, gender orientations and identifications, or—not to be forgotten—species. Extant beings are ethically more challenging, more ambiguous in their virtues, not necessarily among those you’d invite into your home or even be seen with. Infants—but not fetuses—can be picked up, passed around, doted on, loved directly and unconditionally, for they are real persons. (I do not deny, only recategorize, the devotion parents-to-be feel for their fetuses, which is obviously real and admirable. I intend the digression to illustrate analogically diversion from seeing existential risks as existential.)
Respect for life, a true experience of and resultant belief in the sacredness of life: Do we look like a society that really thinks this possible in reality as opposed to homily? The only thing we may have to go on, lacking reverence for the being of Earth and its creatures, as we think about facing existential risks is self-interest, and while powerful in its way at times, it may have been lost in the shuffle, is often unreliable and manipulable, and has notoriously bad judgment.
~ ~
I find myself moving toward an existential, even eudemonic, account of X-risks and their normative acceptance. Zen master Dogen 800 years ago said: “To forget the self is to become one with the 10,000 things.” More recently, Iris Murdoch: “In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego.” The 10,000 things is the totality of existence. Becoming one with existence, overcoming ego, is the point of all serious spiritual traditions. One with God. One with reality. One with what captures, enriches, ennobles your attention. This is a truth I can accept without need of complete understanding. One with brings tranquility, care for, wholeness and peace. It describes solidarity. I believe its absence is another part of an explanation for obliviousness in the face of X-risks. The lack of it leads to violence and indifference. American society is where people live in isolation. They pursue individual goals and/or sink into the apartness of anomie. They suffer alone; many seek relief in the vacuity and falsity of the ersatz-social internet, often in an intensity of disgust and rage that is as close to sharing as they come. And further relief in materialist aspiration and competition, in winning and dominating. Existential risks enter an atmosphere of existential emptiness. If we were to respond competently to the former we would first have to face the latter, and the absence that composes it: oneness with the 10,000 things, oneness with even a few things. Self-fulfillment begins in self-forgetting. Remembering, instead, the others and their presence, their needs and their entwinement with your own. Presence has many names: genuine relationship, community, active care. Remembering the essentials is the first essential, along with knowing what makes them essential. Committing to care for things worthy of care—Right care, it might be called, bridging Right view and Right effort in Buddhism’s Eightfold Path. Avoiding extinction or deeper debasement may begin with identifying a path.
If it’s true—as it likely is—that humans aren’t really built to deal competently with multiple, simultaneous, major sources of anxiety (infamous multitasking and time management notwithstanding)…and further that those sources are the reality we’ve made for ourselves and as things are configured will continue making for ourselves…what are we to do, if we do anything? Prioritize and take them one-by-one? Division of labor? Call it creative destruction and rejoice at all the new potentials? Grieve, remain helpless as we’ve learned to do, deny reality? Or go to the root and face the X- and other risks as one risk, one source, one absence at the center of our lives—the loss of existential meaning through failure to grasp essentials: solidarity with our own species and Nature and allowing the care that naturally flows from that to bind us: becoming one with the 10,000 things. I do not mean religious conversion, only opening, turning, attending. Existence may take us more seriously than we take it and use our own ignorance to fashion mortal consequences.
~ ~
Already a few individuals and small groups are working to build lives in the shadows of existential risks and cultural decay. They try to remove themselves psychologically and spiritually from the way things are and where they appear to be headed so as to build relations with one another and Nature that enrich and support, that foster compassion and mutual engagement. Helpless in the large world but robust and effective in loosely delineated communities of care. These, too, will perish if an X-risk becomes actuality, but on the way to the apocalypse they represent the better potentials of humanity and meaningful ways to live their lives.
The question that preys on me though is this: Except for these few, is the reality of human nature, now thoroughly mixed with the dross of modernity, one that renders it fatally distorted such that the critical mass necessary for major positive change cannot be assembled and sustained except in exceptional small forms? To begin with the present, however, forgets the historical and developmental context. Human nature is formed, shaped, influenced, and directed to different depths and degrees at different stages of a life course by distinct familial, societal, and cultural forces; no one escapes the processes but each comes out with their own distinctive character configuration and access to limited and discontinuous freedom of will. “Why now?” must be asked of our perilous and often dismal time regardless of how the decay and internal alienation compare to previous episodes or if it is just acutely terrible simpliciter. I speculate that the bill for foundational myths and delusions has finally come due, that they can no longer be avoided or denied as they have always been, and that the threat of exposure disorients a large mass of citizens, especially, it seems to me, White ones who have heretofore enjoyed secure dominance. Concomitant demographic and cultural changes, changes that happen to coincide with the repressed material and reinforce its effects, aggravate mass feelings about the meaning of the exposure, increase their sense of being threatened by it, and foster fear, anger, breakdown, and retreat to nihilism. Further, what’s called a democratic country clearly does not serve the majority of its citizens very well but serves a minority quite well; the gross metrics of material fairness are the obvious quantifiable, albeit least significant, indicator. Simply put: the U.S. is not the exceptional democracy, land of opportunity and equality, or bearer of goodness worldwide that it has imagined it was. It is violent, anxious, self-centered, imperialist, and caste-ridden, and some people are willing that it stay that way, guarded by autocrats and their acolytes, mostly it seems White, Christian, nationalistic, and xenophobic. Their alienation extends to people who are different, to different ideas and ways of life, moves on through alienation even from facts and truthfulness, and ends in alienation from self.
Parenthetically, I feel much as these people do about the failures of this society and share many of their objections, but not their explanations, reactions, and solutions and omitting the bigotry and intolerance, the authoritarian and violent tendencies they so often exhibit. America is clearly rigged for the advantage of the rich and prominent; workers are often treated as serfs and unions fought at all costs; government social support spending goes disproportionately to the already privileged; vast sums are spent on the military in the absence of serious threats to national security while the country itself decays; democratic functioning is too often more form than substance, unresponsive to citizen needs, and focused on interests of the powerful more than any other. But these people who sense the problems refuse to look at the underbelly and to track them to their corporate and plutocratic sources and instead offer themselves to the loudest demagogue. Why such a poorly fashioned and very often dishonorable response? How much does the learned helplessness mentioned earlier help to understand this turbulence and its inevitable anxieties? Instead of taking responsibility for accurate assessment of the ailments too many offer themselves to those mostly oriented toward tearing things down, people preoccupied with their own interests but pretending otherwise, people who will exploit them—a change of oppressors but not of oppression itself. And it is not just current afflictions that prey on masses of Americans. The country has a long history of violence and appropriation and government by the few. The history that certain factions are now working overtime to suppress through control of teachers and librarians, schools and books, and that has been disguised under platitudes and lies, may become irresistible. A vast “coming to terms with” is struggling to be born, and some would prefer to abort it.
Here is a thought experiment: Those of the transhumanist persuasion describe a mix of advanced and advancing technological interventions into the presently merely human (albeit who-we- evolved-to-become) realm. They range from defeating death, or at least to multiplying spans of life, all the way to downloading minds into computers and…well, I’m not sure what happens to the body at that point. If it’s like sending an attachment from my saved file, which as we know doesn’t actually leave my machine, perhaps we could end up literally talking to ourselves: embodied self to mechanized self. Which could be interesting as, though identical mentally, they would speak from such different domains. (Would anyone really want to become a disembodied mind?)
Suppose the decision were made to change the human mode of being in a different direction—From Promethean/transhuman to “limited” human? We give up a few degrees of our “freedom” to do as we please and become more like a natural animal, like wildlife, which once we actually were. Rather than ambition to “better” ourselves (and we know what that means), we would aspire to be better as what we are: Animals within ecosystems and communities into which we fit with our fellow plants and human and nonhuman animals; where behavior flowed naturally in directions that reinforced the fit, and we received great satisfaction at being alive as what we were and where we were and doing things more appropriate to who we were, and did not disrupt the lives of others, except to the extent that trophic and other necessity patterns required. Like water flowing along its bed without having to think about it, abiding with gravity and topography toward its destination. Animals do what’s right for them to do, naturally, with thought only for living: for reaching goals and satisfying needs. There is vast beauty and majesty in the vision of all this life going about its business in ways that fit who they are, ways that they have followed satisfactorily when they weren’t disrupted. (“There is grandeur in this view of life,” said Darwin, “with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” This at the conclusion of the first edition of On the Origin of Species, although he was making a slightly different point.) As human animals transformed we would still have distinctive ways, but with circumscribed “freedom” we would value what we had and our part in it and live attentively, occasionally warily but deeply and more respectful of other beings and our fit in the preexisting scheme. Like other social animals we would live amongst our kind and as humans with more mutual care than presently since “getting ahead” had lost meaning. We would be humble in recognition of the gifts we’d received and the knowledge of our dependencies and vulnerabilities. Our true distinctiveness as moral creatures could manifest.
This whimsical vision would depend on forfeiture of some of what we call freedom and laudable aspiration today and would thus be anathema to the typical human mind-set. But consider all the ways we already sacrifice freedom for what we consider more valuable purposes. Self-mastery, or self-control, is the fount of all freedom in that one surmounts persistent desires and intense emotions, greed and aversion, baseless fear and antipathy, all on behalf of seeing things more clearly and choosing more wisely. And marriage, parenthood, or other committed relationship where one sacrifices full independence for the benefits of mutuality and care. And duty: We recognize that a relationship, role, or implicit demand for reciprocity requires setting certain other possibilities aside on behalf of fidelity, loyalty, or love. Law-abidingness? Contractual obligation? Citizenship? In every respect, it seems, meaningful existence depends on constraints, whether unconsciously accepted or consciously chosen.
And consider the in-built constrictions of freedom. Patterns and proclivities start forming at conception and during gestation and are then further shaped, enhanced and suppressed through childhood and the most formative years, and then life-long. All the way, we are clearly more guided by the unconscious than the conscious functions of our minds. By the time we have discernible and predictable character, when we know ourself and are known as a certain kind of person, we hardly know or can say how we got there and by what mechanisms. It’s as if we have been chosen by ways of life, ideas and values—serve as their keepers, in a manner of speaking—and are more or less established as those who live out the scripts of such lifeways. We are not relieved of all freedom, certainly, there are moments, occurrences, moral challenges, where we have still the responsibility of using freedom to choose, but it is a choosing that relies on all we have been and our character and our estimation of the most good thing in response to the circumstances… freedom finally of the most vital sort, ethically situated.
~ ~
I think it would be delusional for anyone to imagine having grasped the full extent of contemporary human attraction toward whistling past the graveyard of existential risks. No more do I grasp that than I do all that went into the suicide of a friend. Logic tells me that the choice of, or even risk of, termination must be rooted in lost value, lost meaning, lost belief in or experience of the sureties of love in its various forms and the virtues in theirs. We have become spiritually blighted, without natural immunity or creative, intelligible responses. I speak not from misanthropy; more like unrequited love. If I seek a single virtue as antidote, I find one of the least compelling to the modern mind: Humility. Self-focus is the bane of fulfillment and an excellent pathway to isolation and emptiness. Could one imagine our yielding anthropocentrism, egoism, and materialism in order to reach ecocentrism and communalism? To step back from self-interested preoccupations in order to serve the whole, to recognize that self- and other-interest are compatible and even require one another for completeness? Extinction by asteroid impact would be tragic, but by our own volitional acts arising from our own failures does not reach the level of tragedy. It would be unfortunate, disappointing, a great waste but a predictable one for a species unwilling to face its own nature and existential situation. A folly of squandered prospects.
~ ~
This point of view may seem preposterous. The two X-risks that seem to me most likely to do the most damage, nuclear weapons and climate disruption, are macro level, one a calamity-in-waiting, the other a calamity-in-process, both ready to make the lives of those who survive onerous and tenuous. Big problems that clearly exceed the big brain’s ability to expunge them. Our minds and morality are not up to the challenge. In response, I have proposed micro level coping: Look to our lives, look to what’s most meaningful, look to the components of lives oriented around the Good. But power never yields gracefully; power smiles indulgently as its subjects become better persons and inexorably ensures that they don’t let that stuff get in the way of power’s control. It’s why I say that despair is the most rational response. But not the despair of intense emotion and grief, of resignation and all-hope-is-lost. The despair that sees human nature realistically, with all its deep flaws, and that recognizes that one still has a life to live— this singular, one-and-only time—and that it matters how one does it more than how it turns out. The cards dealt are not good ones but they’re what you have to work with.
Political theorists say that in any nation somewhere around a third of the populace would be comfortable with authoritarian leadership, i.e., life is too much for them so they’d prefer to let others answer the big questions. In the U.S. today it seems to me that that portion has grown by half so that close to 50% are ready to throw up their hands, believe whatever poppycock is put before them by authorized provisioners, and turn themselves over for delivery to…well, to wherever the controllers tell them is best for them.
Which brings me to this point: The macro level where existential risks are created and where micro level suppression and adaptive correspondences are formulated and imposed is itself, because of its sheer size, emblematic of our conundrum. Its subjects may seek a means of resistance but are stymied by the enigma of controllers’ adamant commitment to business-as-usual, even though it threatens to kill even themselves. Bigness, I am saying, creates an environment to which few people are adapted for living. But a few are quite at home there and naturally take power and sooner or later are corrupted by it. Gargantua is suited for their desires. It is anonymous, impersonal, implacable, immovable. Despair is the rational response if ideas of successful confrontation are imagined, especially successful in such a way that it doesn’t merely replace present human widget-likes with different but similarly motivated widgets, and if timeliness requires swiftness in turning Gargantua’s course from visible shoals of disaster.
Despair is useful when it clears the vision of wishful thinking, delusion, or anomic ennui. For me it opens the vision to micro level projects such as mentioned above. Recognizing that humans do best at relatively small scales and that relations of care and mutuality grow richer and more reliable at that scale…also recognizing that severance from relations with Nature that reflected appropriate gratitude and wonder have been soul-deadening…and that it is the existence and texture of all the relations alluded to here that are the chief source of meaningful ways of being—building on this human creativity has a chance to reflect the creativity of the Universe, of existence, which did a very good job on its own before we thought we knew better.
I have wondered about correspondences between body and soul such that deficiencies of any of their respective vital “nutrients” affect them both with illness. Scurvy, for instance, sickened thousands of sailors through the late 18th century as their vitamin C dependency went unsatisfied while they were at sea. The result: They bruised easily, developed bleeding gums, weakness, fatigue, and sometimes death. Does the human mind and spirit have analogous dependencies? What are the effects when they are not met? If, say, the forms of love, the overcoming of ego, and the pursuit of ethical and intellectual virtues are components of the Good and the Good is fundamental to good lives, why wouldn’t we become symptomatic if they are neglected? Does it go too far to imagine that what are called “deaths of despair” (suicide, chemical dependencies), violence, alienation from neighbors and retreat into ideological boxes, the transcendence of everyday obligations to morality and truthfulness through nihilism and rejection of an objective world…to imagine that these are the symptoms. If these are signs of what might be called spiritual neglect, as I believe they are, then well-being obviously has wider dimensions that contemporary culture tends to give it with any seriousness. Micro reflects macro.
Having reached the end, I now see where I was going. Existential risks threaten human prospects from beginning to end. If those prospects as presently imagined turn out to require existential risks to the Earth’s well-being as well as our own then the turning of Fate, so to speak, toward extinguishing the threat to that well-being can hardly be seen as wrong. We know that Homo sapiens at present and historically are not a net benefit to Earth. Some consider that the loss of our kind of consciousness and some of our talents would be grievous deficiencies for future Earth life, but all things considered, is that true? X-risks coming to fulfillment would cost not merely humanity but the living Earth, which took billions of years to reach a diversity and richness that we are taking only a few centuries to wreck. Even the absence of such risks’ consummation so far has meant a deeply injured planet. Unless our species can live up to the standards of planetary health, which means living up to our own, then human absence would be beneficial to the whole. It is not necessary to wish for human extinction to recognize this and that its occurrence would be self-inflicted. What I think of and have suggested as part of the texture of existentially meaningful lives for Homo sapiens, which means living toward the Good, is our part of being a valuable component of a Universal Good, one that recognizes what a blessing this Earth has been and that nurtures its endurance for the good of existence.
Humans have not always been so “dumb” and self-defeating. There were times long ago, but not all that long ago, when they (usually not including the power-seekers, who seem always to be with us) knew there were no better and more interesting questions to dedicate themselves to than how the world was formed and why, and how persons could live their best lives. Humility and magnanimity, peaceful minds and relations, love of Nature—One cannot be optimistic in light of our nature and history but these would be places to begin for a more enlightened species.
Craig Brestrup
May 2024
