Image: Darwin’s notebook
Our anthropocentric mode of thinking runs so deep that we very rarely even notice it. For example, I can’t count the amount of times I’ve been told that humans are special. People list all kinds of things they think that most other animals can’t do, like reflective thinking.
But scientists are realising that more and more animals can do a surprising amount of these things. They can also do their own amazing feats, which we barely understand and have no hope of emulating. To take just one example, have you got any idea about the sort of biological electronic warfare array a hammerhead shark is packing in that wing over its nose?
Most of us subconsciously think that everything is slowly evolving towards us, and just hasn’t caught up yet. But it’s not that animals can’t have certain levels of attributes because they aren’t as clever or important as us. It’s not that nature somehow ran out of juice and can’t be bothered anymore.
A gorilla is quite happy being a gorilla. In fact it’s perfect at it. It’s not a ‘lower’ version of anything, least of all us. It’s not sitting there in the rainforest feverishly wondering how it might put on a suit and tie and start buying cappuccinos. Given that it turns out that being a gorilla doesn’t threaten to destroy all life on Earth, any neutral observer would place the higher value on them, not us.
Dominating and destroying everything around you does not make you better at life. It does not make you ‘more’ evolved, as if that were even a thing. How is that we are still applying the mediaeval Great Chain of Being, with us at the top?
In fact, the reason we’re on the brink of being deleted is because we’re not better at life, we’re not the smartest animal here. In the history of the Earth, we may turn out to be an incredibly short evolutionary dead end, kind of like the species equivalent of Betamax, MiniDiscs and the Sinclair C4.
Life in our universe seems to express itself as a vast continuous process of iteration. Everywhere different sequences are playing out in a ferment of beginnings, risings and endings. It’s like a constant experimentation, without any particular goal or conclusion other than its continuance. In the unearthly light of that, humanity as a species is almost certainly just another unraveling of possibilities.
We might imagine the universe ‘thinking’: “What happens if an ape species grows a big brain and does loads of tools...oh, that.” And then dispensing with us without a scintilla of regret and moving on in what in universal terms is the merest nanosecond, if it considers time at all.
Maybe the ultimate dead end is our consciousness of death itself. In the vast roulette wheel of space, somewhere sometime the probabilities tried out what would happen if an animal became aware of its imminent death. And found that the animal, unsurprisingly, went mad. Never mind, says the universal never mind, and the wheel goes spinning on, through the boundless infinity...
Building big fireworks that can take us to the Moon, or Mars, or beyond has absolutely no effect on that.
On what evidence, other than our narcissism, did we decide that the universal value of something is measured by how far or fast it can move about, or what it can affect and destroy? Surely our ultimate value for some imagined alien super-race would be how well we have managed to live in harmony with the uniquely beautiful and rare orb we live on? In which case we are operating at a demonstrably less evolved level than any other animal on Earth, and we only make it worse by hilariously believing we are above them all.
Environmentalism should be a shift away from this mode of thinking, but most of it isn’t. Campaigners have put in a huge amount of effort trying to convince people that animals and landscapes are useful or important to us. It’s a self-fulfilling ego trip. It accepts that humans will only give a shit about something if it’s in their direct interest to do so. But if that were really true WWF might as well just start farming pandas for steaks.
The obvious truth is other animals don’t have any obligation to be of any use to us whatsoever. They shouldn’t have to serve us to stop us exterminating them.
Can you imagine that alien super race arriving here? They take a quick look, ask themselves “how can humanity be useful to us?” Food? Fuel? Entertainment? If they can’t think of anything they just slaughter everyone and replace us with something they can slap in a sandwich. Would they be the good guys in the movie?
The fundamental we must accept is that affect is not control. A toddler can affect the motion of a moving car, that doesn’t make him Ayrton Senna. And the vehicle we are riding through space is infinitely more complex than a Formula One car. If it wasn’t clear before it should be now - nature is entirely in control of itself, which completely includes us. This should, in a sane world, go without saying.
It’s clearer now because so many of the systems that we even appeared to be in control of are spinning out of our hands. Nature’s autopilot was always in the driving seat, we just wiggled the wheel for a very brief period and convinced ourselves we were steering. We’re like Maggie Simpson in the back of Homer’s car with the tiny plastic dashboard, bibbing our hooter and sucking our dummy.
The planet is reaching for the ejector button. It’s increasingly trying to regulate us out of existence. If we take the planet to be a living body, which it demonstrably and scientifically is, then it has spiked a fever in the form of climate change. It is sending out its pandemics to rid itself of the humanity disease.
Because humanity is the Earth’s cancer. It’s a cliche, I know. But only because it is so obviously true. Cancers are not evil, and neither are we. They’re natural phenomena, simply overgrowths of parts of the body, which is what we have become. We have overreached ourselves, blossoming out like a tumour across the body of the planet, disrupting other systems. Now we will see: will we kill our host body? Will it successfully rid itself of us? Or will Earth go into some kind of remission where we live on together for a while longer?
And ultimately, universally, it doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant. Sure, we tell ourselves stories about how we are the universe experiencing itself, but since when did something need an audience in order to fulfill its existence? And if it does it can surely conjure up more than one?
After all, who’s keeping score? What entity out there is going to care if a small blue planet in the outer spiral arm of the immense expanse of stars we named after a dairy product goes all but dormant of life for a few hundred thousand years? Given the enormity of the universe and vicissitudes of time and space, even if there were interstellar travellers around, they could just as easily miss us by a few million of our years in time as a few light years in distance. We’re the flash of the tiniest spark in a mind bending expanse of stars.
Even we don’t mourn the latest mass extinction events, and we live here. If humans do go extinct, the chances of anyone else mourning our passing are infinitesimally small. The chances of our entire species being entirely forgotten within a few thousand years are almost as much a certainty as our personal demise within 150. So why do we spend what little time we have in existence trying to pretend to be of any importance? Is it possible that if we just got over ourselves we might have a better time of it while we’re here?
All this, ironically, makes ‘saving the planet’ a delusion, and throws us back onto a focus on ourselves after all. What is it, ultimately, about ourselves that we want to change? What do we want to save?
On the originality of species
Lovely stuff Andy. It's the hubris that cuts me, and writings like yours that helps to remind me that it's not universal. Not that that means there's much hope for a true enlightenment, more that we're not alone in these perspectives and suspicions. It helps lessen the almost permanent sense of cognitive dissonance too. Keep it coming sir.
You are too good to write blogs, better write a book!