Blessed with formidable intelligence, man dreams of brain-powered survival: technological advance, space colonisation, even a radical alteration of his own nature as future man-machine. Sadly, from this heroic optimism, it’s but a short step to narcissistic pessimism. Haunted by life’s intrinsic fragility, humans obsess about calamities. Yet even when panicking about Hiroshima repeats or global warming, man exults in his own mastery: destroyed or self-destructing, he thinks he’ll take the world down with him.
The ecosystem, similarly, is viewed only in terms of its capacity to sustain human life. Natural disasters are seen in terms of human casualties and damage to property. It’s as if human life and all that’s living on a planet cradling millions of species were one and the same. The conflation is in keeping with an anthropocentric concept of divinity: God is made in man’s image, His grace denied other life forms. Man doesn’t bother with a scientifically valid question a poet once asked: if fish dreamed of heaven, wouldn’t their god resemble a fish?
Shedding political correctness, some scientists wonder aloud if puzzlingly destructive humans aren’t an evolutionary aberration on a planet that’s billions of years old. More, if their ceasing to be might not be a blessing for biodiversity. Arguing from the other end, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said the earth – survivor of ice ages, meteorite hits and mass extinctions – had enormous capacity to withstand man’s assaults. When disaster strikes, humans could be discarded by a planetary shrug.
For most people though, it’s unthinkable humanity’s extinction can be a cosmic non-event. How can earth survive the moral calamity of man’s absence? This illusion has a long intellectual lineage. Philosophers have said the world is Will and Idea, both human monopolies. They’ve claimed reality consists of phenomena as perceived by consciousness. The world, called into being by the mind, cannot exist independently of it. Only, taken to its logical end, that’s to argue that the fact the earth predates human life is itself an embedded mental construct!
As humanity builds knowledge, philosophy, religion and science seem to converge at one point: reality as ‘thing-in-itself’ is elusive. So far, quantum physics, probing the quirky subatomic world, endorses that. Macro-reality has reference points but it’s a question of scale. As Pascal wrote, the vast and the infinitesimal both escape the intellect, which is capable of grasping the ‘part’, not the ‘totality’ which can only be apprehended spiritually.
Can the natural order, then, be tamed by meanings imposed by men? The nature of its sovereignty, its resistance to forced penetration, is radical. Just as the nature of human freedom, in the existential sense, is radical. The one reinforces the other. Accepting the universe’s indifference to human concerns requires intellectual courage. And apprehending its cosmic force demands a liberating intuition that helps overcome the limits of human understanding. Both efforts are necessary if man is to spare the earth thoughtless depredations.
If man thinks he alone is the measure of all things, he can know neither reality’s true measure – nor his own possibilities of transcendence. When such a man ceases to be, no wiser dead than living, the sun will go on shining. Distant stars will still be born and decay. Nearer home, creatures big and small will regain a terrestrial heaven from which they had been banished. And the earth may even be better off for it.
The ecosystem, similarly, is viewed only in terms of its capacity to sustain human life. Natural disasters are seen in terms of human casualties and damage to property. It’s as if human life and all that’s living on a planet cradling millions of species were one and the same. The conflation is in keeping with an anthropocentric concept of divinity: God is made in man’s image, His grace denied other life forms. Man doesn’t bother with a scientifically valid question a poet once asked: if fish dreamed of heaven, wouldn’t their god resemble a fish?
Shedding political correctness, some scientists wonder aloud if puzzlingly destructive humans aren’t an evolutionary aberration on a planet that’s billions of years old. More, if their ceasing to be might not be a blessing for biodiversity. Arguing from the other end, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said the earth – survivor of ice ages, meteorite hits and mass extinctions – had enormous capacity to withstand man’s assaults. When disaster strikes, humans could be discarded by a planetary shrug.
For most people though, it’s unthinkable humanity’s extinction can be a cosmic non-event. How can earth survive the moral calamity of man’s absence? This illusion has a long intellectual lineage. Philosophers have said the world is Will and Idea, both human monopolies. They’ve claimed reality consists of phenomena as perceived by consciousness. The world, called into being by the mind, cannot exist independently of it. Only, taken to its logical end, that’s to argue that the fact the earth predates human life is itself an embedded mental construct!
As humanity builds knowledge, philosophy, religion and science seem to converge at one point: reality as ‘thing-in-itself’ is elusive. So far, quantum physics, probing the quirky subatomic world, endorses that. Macro-reality has reference points but it’s a question of scale. As Pascal wrote, the vast and the infinitesimal both escape the intellect, which is capable of grasping the ‘part’, not the ‘totality’ which can only be apprehended spiritually.
Can the natural order, then, be tamed by meanings imposed by men? The nature of its sovereignty, its resistance to forced penetration, is radical. Just as the nature of human freedom, in the existential sense, is radical. The one reinforces the other. Accepting the universe’s indifference to human concerns requires intellectual courage. And apprehending its cosmic force demands a liberating intuition that helps overcome the limits of human understanding. Both efforts are necessary if man is to spare the earth thoughtless depredations.
If man thinks he alone is the measure of all things, he can know neither reality’s true measure – nor his own possibilities of transcendence. When such a man ceases to be, no wiser dead than living, the sun will go on shining. Distant stars will still be born and decay. Nearer home, creatures big and small will regain a terrestrial heaven from which they had been banished. And the earth may even be better off for it.
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