Or, What Stories Should We Tell, Lacking a Word for the Breach
Hypothesis: that human societies are still trying to get their heads around a set of artistic, cultural, religious, and philosophical responses to a pretty radical realignment of our understanding of man’s relation to the natural world post-1850. The arts, religion, philosophy — these are all essentially storytelling disciplines, explaining ourselves to ourselves, to pass on to our children this learned idea of what it means to be human. So over a really, really long time — say, 10,000 BC, with the advent of agriculture and human settlement, up to the start of the industrial revolution — we’ve developed narrative and thematic frameworks for understanding our place in the world that implicitly endorse a few assumptions. These might include:
- On a large enough scale, the planet could always absorb human expansion/industry/development, and so these were categorically positive things.
- Human beings are separate from and higher than animals/nature in a certain moral sense, i.e., the goal of ethics is to maximize human flourishing.
- The natural world is bigger and more powerful than human beings could ever meaningfully influence — maybe there’s a panoply of Gods up there controlling the environment that we must contend against, but anyone who invokes the idea of man controlling the earth is just modeling hubris. We don’t even need a vocabulary for the concept.
During this period, Homer and Shakespeare set templates for the Western literary canon, the planet’s major religions developed their basic tenets, and around the world we developed mythologies and storytelling templates that model these basic assumptions about who we are, what we could do, and how the natural world responds. We developed archetypes for explaining this to our children, and those archetypes are founded at least in part on this pre-anthropocene understanding of our relation to the world.
Now, in the last 150 years, things have shifted a bit.
In 1800, estimates have the human population at less than a billion. Currently, estimates say we’ll breach 10 billion in this century. Consequently, in the last couple decades, the concept of a “carrying capacity” of the planet has emerged where there was no real conceptual corollary before.
In 1859, The Origin of the Species turned man’s understandings of his role in the ecosystem on its head, and its moral implications are still being culturally absorbed. What has dominantly been a story of man’s separation from/superiority to the life around us (or even from our own racial subgroups) has been sharply reframed. Now we have to ask, are we morally differentiable from our evolutionary competitors, and if so, on what grounds?
Within the last seventy years or so, we’ve started to understand our capacity to actually damage a planet. Nuclear weapons are the most obvious, uncontested version of humanity’s existential threat to its home. Climate change is likely to dramatically upset civilizations around the globe and the ecosystem services they were built around. There is also a real outlier risk where humans don’t curb their GHG emissions, or runaway feedback effects pick up, that has caused accomplished climate scientists like NASA’s former Goddard Institute chief, James Hansen, to posit extinction scenarios. And even if it’s not speculative human extinction, our impact on the broader ecosystem is uncontested. Half the wildlife on earth has vanished in the last 40 years – past tense. We refer to our impact on the planet as the “sixth mass extinction,” right up there with the one that took out the dinosaurs. I look to thinkers like evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson, with his “Half Earth” call for a human retreat from 50% of the planet in order to preserve ecosystems, as just the beginning of a cultural response to our new understanding of our place in the world.
So these are pretty enormous shifts in our moral, cosmological, and human development frameworks in a historically-speaking pretty short period of time. 150 years ago, we were a fraction of our current size as a species, had sparse experience with extinction, had no meaningful lens to understand environmental destruction on a large or permanent scale, and assumed our role in creation was as its disinterested keeper, or at worst, consumer. Man’s cultural perspective was therefore appropriately insular – our mythologies evolved to mostly explain man’s relation to himself.
This is no longer true to a large degree, and I wonder if we’re still trying to react.
Culture clearly has a place in this dialogue. Scientific headlines can inform how we tell stories about ourselves, but they are an input. We have always been a storytelling species. We will always need to explain ourselves to ourselves through some sort of narrative device. And today, there remains some cognitive dissonance between what science is telling us now and the body of story we’ve inherited. You might even extrapolate that our state of political inaction towards environmental/planetary/interspecies challenges derives from this cognitive dissonance. “Common sense” just tells us there’s no way we should be concerned about blowing up the planet or the moral plight of animals or exhausting our natural resources. But that common sense is inherited from some long cultural narratives that predate these shifts.
Hypothesize that there’s some sort of extra-humanist movement in art or culture that’s waiting to really come into its prime. I don’t know what form they will take or who will write them, but I think in my generation and beyond there will have to be writers, filmmakers, philosophers, politicians, etc. who try to tell new kinds of stories that are responsive to this shift. We will need stories that operate outside of our relationships with each other and consider our relations to a broader, more vulnerable, more interconnected, more morally weighted environment. What could it look like, raw speculation – maybe non-children’s stories that come from the perspectives of animals. Mythologies that reflect human conflict with ecosystems. Morality plays that emphasize the power of people to preserve or destroy a thing that is not us. Maybe the rebirth of allegory as a popular mode of dramatizing conflicts that are larger than human contestants. I don’t know. But there is something missing in the minds of people that I think reflects us not quite having come to terms yet with some real shifts over the last 150 years in understanding our relationship with the rest of creation. With the fact that we’re not even the imperishable center of our own world. And we may not yet have the mythic, narrative, cultural archetypes in our vocabulary to put that breach into the necessary terms.