What does it mean to rebel against extinction?
Ironically, it means one is opposed to the driving force of evolution; which is to say, one is anti-life understood in the immoral terms of difference and becoming.
For whether we like it or not, mass extinctions periodically destroy up to 95% of life forms in giant orgies of death and scientists think that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived have now - like the Monty Python parrot - passed on, ceased to be, joined the choir invisible. It's simply pointless protesting the fact that evolution needs death more than it loves life.
We used to think the sun revolved around the earth. Then we discovered it wasn't so. Now there are young people who sincerely believe the earth revolves around them. The overly-privileged and self-righteous children of generation snowflake who talk about saving the planet are, ultimately, only concerned about protecting their own future.
But alas, everything isn't all about them - anymore than it's all about the polar bears or coral reef - and their will to conserve and self-preserve has become a form of mania expressed as moral and political alarmism.
Whisper it quietly, but every species is ultimately endangered and will one day topple into the abyss of non-existence. And if, as certainly seems to be the case, humanity is giving profligate Nature a helping hand by rapidly speeding up the extinction rate and destroying the environment, it might be remembered that we too are part of the biosphere and our actions just as natural as those of any other species.
In other words, there's no need to feel guilty or sinful; the so-called sixth extinction event lacks moral significance, even if we're the causal agents. Besides, as biologist R. Alexander Pyron has pointed out:
"Unless we somehow destroy every living cell on Earth, the sixth extinction will be followed by a recovery, and later a seventh extinction, and so on. [...] Within a few million years of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, the post-apocalyptic void had been filled by an explosion of diversity - modern mammals, birds and amphibians of all shapes and sizes. This is how evolution proceeds: through extinction."
Professor Pyron also reminds us that whatever effort we make to stabilise and maintain present conditions, sea-levels and temperatures will continue to rise and fall and the climate as we know it today will eventually be "overrun by the inexorable forces of space and geology".
Finally, it should be noted that even the most rebellious of extinction rebels doesn't object to the planned eradication of deadly diseases such as HIV, Ebola, and malaria, even though these are "key components of microbial biodiversity, as unique as pandas, elephants and orangutans". As indicated earlier, the campaign to save the Earth is really a campaign to save the Earth for us: Extinction Rebellion is just another exercise in anthropocentric conceit and hypocrisy.
Thus, whilst it's true that climate change may have certain dramatic effects - such as coastal flooding and widespread famines - and whilst it makes sense to take action to mitigate these things, I refuse to be lectured by adolescent eco-warriors, bandwagon jumping celebrities, or grey-bearded old hippies with an apocalyptic worldview.
In fact, push comes to shove, I remain more sympathetic to the arguments put forward by members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, founded by Les U. Knight in 1991. For like Rupert Birkin, I regard people as an obstruction and a hindrance to the future unfolding of evolution and believe that only our self-extinction will allow life to continue perfect and marvellous in all its inhuman splendour.
See: R. Alexander Pyron, 'We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution.' The Washington Post (22 Nov 2017): click here.
And click here for my post on Voluntary Human Extinction (published 12 October 2013).
But alas, everything isn't all about them - anymore than it's all about the polar bears or coral reef - and their will to conserve and self-preserve has become a form of mania expressed as moral and political alarmism.
Whisper it quietly, but every species is ultimately endangered and will one day topple into the abyss of non-existence. And if, as certainly seems to be the case, humanity is giving profligate Nature a helping hand by rapidly speeding up the extinction rate and destroying the environment, it might be remembered that we too are part of the biosphere and our actions just as natural as those of any other species.
In other words, there's no need to feel guilty or sinful; the so-called sixth extinction event lacks moral significance, even if we're the causal agents. Besides, as biologist R. Alexander Pyron has pointed out:
"Unless we somehow destroy every living cell on Earth, the sixth extinction will be followed by a recovery, and later a seventh extinction, and so on. [...] Within a few million years of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, the post-apocalyptic void had been filled by an explosion of diversity - modern mammals, birds and amphibians of all shapes and sizes. This is how evolution proceeds: through extinction."
Finally, it should be noted that even the most rebellious of extinction rebels doesn't object to the planned eradication of deadly diseases such as HIV, Ebola, and malaria, even though these are "key components of microbial biodiversity, as unique as pandas, elephants and orangutans". As indicated earlier, the campaign to save the Earth is really a campaign to save the Earth for us: Extinction Rebellion is just another exercise in anthropocentric conceit and hypocrisy.
Thus, whilst it's true that climate change may have certain dramatic effects - such as coastal flooding and widespread famines - and whilst it makes sense to take action to mitigate these things, I refuse to be lectured by adolescent eco-warriors, bandwagon jumping celebrities, or grey-bearded old hippies with an apocalyptic worldview.
In fact, push comes to shove, I remain more sympathetic to the arguments put forward by members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, founded by Les U. Knight in 1991. For like Rupert Birkin, I regard people as an obstruction and a hindrance to the future unfolding of evolution and believe that only our self-extinction will allow life to continue perfect and marvellous in all its inhuman splendour.
See: R. Alexander Pyron, 'We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution.' The Washington Post (22 Nov 2017): click here.
And click here for my post on Voluntary Human Extinction (published 12 October 2013).
A brilliant reductio 'ad absurdum', but both reductive and absurd, nevertheless. Life may well be, in a sense, a special form of being dead, but is also a mode of creative rebellion and aesthetic differentation within the impersonal and indifferent narrative of death proper – or, to invoke the title of Norman O. Brown's seminal 1959 work, life is 'against' death. Just being alive is essentially a project of resistance, an act of defiance before the fantasy of extinction. (Which is, to remind ourselves, a fantasy – it is entirely possible that the psychophysical atoms of the cosmos are continuously recomposed, as stated by the scientific Law of Conservation. There is no necessary death/extinction in the final analysis.) While the hilarity of the Python 'Dead Parrot' sketch resides in the preposterousness of death dressed up as life for the sake of making a quick buck, it's funny precisely for the way it freezes death within life, dropping poor Polly Parrot into the hot cauldron of existence as a rigor mortis of insensate feathers, in which she becomes a kind of living myth. Death has no dominion, even when it does.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the ecophile citizens presenting themselves for arrest by the indifferent orifices of what's left of the sorry British state this week (to call them, disparagingly, 'young people' is itself a reduction - the oldest participant peeled off the UK streets this week was, we read, 77 years 'young') are obviously entirely 'entitled' to be furious and frightened at their fucked-over futures, however long they have. Life loves to be alive (even misery loves company) in its unique existential mystery, in which it's the privileged and irresponsible political class that are rightly now running for cover behind their meat-headed police protectors. Tarring peaceful protesters as Generation Snowflake is so far wide of the metaphorical and meterological mark it might as well call the sun the rain!
One has to wonder where the blogger truly sits if anywhere. Lest we think his soul is straightforwardly of the same hue as Kirsten Dunst’s pathologically depressed character in Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, who awaits the unstoppable and all-extinguishing impact of a neighbouring planet with inhuman unconcern, he strangely goes on to change tack and apparently acknowledge the value of climate measures after all like a middling liberal, but appears to be most upset that the 'wrong' cultural group(s) (too middle class, too young, too old, too successful, too hairy etc. etc.) have taken hold of the political agenda. For our part, we are delighted at the prospect of being educated and inspired by a 16 year old selective mute on the Aspegers/OCD spectrum from Sweden in the person of Greta Thunberg - a young woman so admirably without pretension or airs ('I feel like I'm dying inside if I don't protest'), and so independently interdependent, she refuses all public endorsements and affiliations.
The idea of man as a merely 'natural' being is palpably ludicrous. When humanity is not choking the oceans with plastics (a man-made artificial substance the last time we checked), engineering catastrophic prionic illnesses in livestock such as BSE by perverting the food chain, or littering the galaxy with rocket junk, s/he is making music, scaling mountains and building cathedrals. In all these domains, man is a profoundly unnatural (or 'cultural') animal, in which inheres both the bipolar human will to astonishing acts of creativity and horrifying perversion/destruction.
Finally, Professor Pyron's views have been widely critiqued on both logical and analytical grounds in the scientific community (the so-called 6th extinction is, in the views of many, catastrophically distinguishable from all others both in its probable human genesis/drivers and scope for multi-species annihilation), though just in passing one imagines Darwin might not have been too impressed by Pyron's thanatomaniacal conception of evolution (whose ridiculous bow-tie we would gladly see propelled into extinction).
ReplyDeleteAs for the atheistic conception of 'inhuman splendour', we might well agree that man may be the privileged vessel of the inhuman/evil, and so should stick around for that endgame if nothing else. Rather obviously, such an aesthetic valuation (not least because it IS aesthetic) does require at least one human being to make it.
Just briefly ...
Delete(1) I would have thought that, as a fan of Samuel Beckett, you would have delighted in the 'absurd' elements of this post.
(2) As for the charge of reductionism, surely all language in its conceptual-metaphorical attempt to describe or analyse complex real world phenomena might be said to be reductive.
(3) Didn't Norman O. Brown reject his own thinking in the 'seminal' work you mention? In 1974, for example, he confessed to feeling under an obligation to 'torpedo' the book and destroy its immature positions.
(4) If, as you say, there's essentially no death or extinction, why do you argue that climate protesters are 'entitled' to feel 'furious and frightened' at the prospect?
(5) Greta Thunberg doesn't want to 'inspire' you. She wants, rather, to spread panic and make us all feel her fear, her pain. And with a face and mad disposition like hers, she certainly scares the bejesus out of me.
(6) Your reinforcing of the nature/culture binary is both surprising and disappointing. In fact, I can't even begin to express my shock and dismay.
(7) Pyron's views may have been subject to critique. But I smile to see you write of logic, consensus and the scientific community. And his central point stands: extinction is the engine of evolution. That, as Greta Thunberg would say, is a fact; not an opinion.
(8) Are you suggesting that non-human life forms have no sense of beauty? See Nietzsche on the animal origins of art and moral evaluation.