Sapiens: That this kind of total skepticism won Harari such an admiring audience among so many leading avatars of technocratic progress is one of the curiosities of the TED Talk age. But the skepticism also flatters, especially those inclined by their own sense of accomplishment to contemplate the longest sweeps of history. Inviting you to contemplate that history, Harari also seems to pull you beyond or outside it. In this way, he shares strains of lecturesome DNA not just with Diamond but with Joseph Campbell and even Jordan Peterson. In his subsequent book, Homo Deus, Harari endorses a new contemporary myth, though he doesn’t quite recognize it as such—making his own case for the near-term arrival of a superpowerful artificial intelligence that will render everything we know as “humanity” close to obsolete.
Against the Grain: The human remains excavated from this time tell a clear story of human strife: the people were shorter, sicker, and died younger than their predecessors. The average height fell from 5′10″ for men and 5′6″ for women to 5′5″ and 5′1″, respectively; settled communities were more vulnerable to infectious disease, but obesity and heart disease also spiked. This is why it’s so that the case against civilization, as the critic John Lanchester has called it, can be made simply as a case against farming.
“the worst mistake”: Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover, May 1987.
“we might call the Liberal Story”: Yuval Noah Harari, “Does Trump’s Rise Mean Liberalism’s End?” The New Yorker, October 7, 2016.
ekpyrosis: This was the belief that, periodically, the cosmos would be entirely destroyed in what was called a “Great Year,” then be re-created and the process would begin again. Plato preferred the term “perfect year,” in which the stars would be returned to their original positions.
“dynastic cycle”: Although some accounts of the cycle offered a dozen or more phases, according to the Chinese philosopher Mencius the cycle had only three (essentially rise, peak, and decline).
“eternal recurrence”: Nietzsche first proposes this idea, that everything is bound to repeat itself eternally, as a sort of thought experiment in The Gay Science (1882). But he would return to it again and again, often describing it as something more like a law of the universe—which is similar to how it was treated by the ancient Egyptians, Indians, and Greek Stoics.
“public purpose” and “private interest”: Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Cycles of American History (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986).
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: In his 1987 book, Kennedy offers a relatively simple model of great-power history: growth fueled by natural resources followed by decline precipitated by military overreach.
The Progress of This Storm: The main thrust of this book, Malm’s follow-up to Fossil Capital, is that while we may believe that “nature,” as something distinct from “society,” has disappeared, in fact global warming has brought it back with a punitive vengeance.
Ethics at the End of the World
podcast “S-Town”: McLemore, whose panic may have been caused in part by mercury poisoning, was most concerned about Arctic ice melt, drought, and the slowdown of the thermohaline convector.
“I sometimes call it toxic knowledge”: Richard Heinberg, “Surviving S-Town,” Post Carbon Institute, April 7, 2017.
“nature is thriving”: Thomas’s book is Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction (New York: Public Affairs, 2017), and while it offers not so much a full-throated celebration of what he calls an “age of extinction” but a more modest proposal that we view the positive, generative effects of climate change alongside its crueler impacts. This is a note of contrarian optimism echoing Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, in their Break Through: Why We Can’t Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists and Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene; and the Canadian, Swedish, and South African academics behind the research collaboration “Bright Spots,” who, despite considerably more concern about the effects of global warming, nevertheless keep a running list of positive environmental developments they believe makes the case for what they call a “good Anthropocene.”
“The Second Coming”: Among other things, Yeats gave Joan Didion the lines she built into her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
“immanent anti-humanism”: The program is also neatly contained in Jeffers’s most famous poem, “Carmel Point”:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
a time of approaching ecological collapse: Indeed, the manifesto continues, “human civilization is an intensely fragile construction,” and yet, they write, we are forever in denial about that fragility—our very day-to-day lives depend on that denial of fragility, perhaps as much as they depend on the denial of our own mortality. This is what the philosopher Samuel Scheffler means when he suggests that, in an agnostic world, the role once played by an afterlife in inspiring and organizing and policing moral and ethical behavior has been taken up, in part, by the conviction that the world will continue on after us when we die. In other words, the idea that life is not just worth living but worth living well, he suggests, “would be more threatened by the prospect of humanity’s disappearance than by the prospect of our own deaths.” As Charles Mann summarizes Scheffler, considering the ethical paradox of human action on climate change, “The belief that human life will continue, even if we ourselves die, is one of the underpinnings of society.”
“Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilization may become unstoppable,” Kingsnorth and Hine wrote in their manifesto. “That civilizations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.”
“We believe that the roots”: “We do not believe that everything will be fine,” Kingsnorth and Hine write. “We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be.”
In the manifesto, Dark Mountain outlined what they called “the eight principles of uncivilization,” a sort of mission statement for their movement that moves from general principle and perceptions to a more focused statement of intent. “We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our time can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions,’ ” the list begins, and though they foreswear these kinds of solutions, they don’t entirely give up on response. But Dark Mountain is ultimately a literary collective—organizing festivals, workshops, and meditation retreats—and the most concrete, practical response they call for in their manifesto is in art. “We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves,” namely “the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature.’ ” These, they add, “are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.” In response, they promise, “we will assert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment” and “will write with dirt under our fingernails.” The goaclass="underline" through storytelling, to find a new vantage from which the end of civilization would not seem so bad. In a certain way, they suggest, they themselves have already achieved this state of enlightenment. “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop,” they write. “Together we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.”