Here is a Youtube film of a recent (August 2014?) panel
discussion on “Existential Risk”—risks to the survival of the human species as
a whole. I have transcribed the initial response of Harvard psychologist and
popular intellectual Steven Pinker:
"I guess I’m skeptical of
existential risk as an important topic, for two reasons. One of them is that
there’s a long history, going back to the Book of Revelations—apocalyptic
thinking—that always comes up in new guises. Whatever the newest technology is,
people always imagine how it could be an existential risk. And the history of
apocalyptic predictions is actually kind of amusing in retrospect. In the
1930’s, it was fear that if you combined the poison gas from WWI with
airplanes, then you could have the threat of airplanes spreading poison gas
over the surface of the Earth and extinguishing humanity—something we don’t
really worry about anymore, even though it’s still technologically possible.
And when I grew up, there were both scientists and political scientists who
said that it was a certainty that the US and the USSR would fight a nuclear
war, ending humanity. And that certainty didn’t happen. And then there was
polywater, a polymerized form of water that would turn all of the world’s water
into thick goo; there were the nanobots that were going to consume every bit of
organic matter and smother us in grey goo. The problem with existential threats
is they’re very easy to imagine. If you play them out on the stage of your
imagination, they often speak more to our anxieties than to credible threats. I
guess I’m more worried about sub-existential threats; that is, rather than
worry about the very last of the 7.2 billion people on Earth today, I think
it’d be bad enough if there’s ten thousand or a hundred thousand or a million
who get killed, and we know that there are things that can do that kind of
damage and we don’t have to play out farfetched scenarios to imagine that
people are going to be dying from hunger and disease and war and genocide. My
priority would be these sub-existential threats that are certain—they’re
happening every day—and that affect the fortunes of actual people."
This is essentially the same move made repeatedly and
incisively by John Michael Greer, in books like
Apocalypse Not and at his blog, the
Archdruid Report. While there is much to be learned from Greer, his argument
about existential risk—that there can be no such thing on humanly meaningful
timescales, since people have anticipated it so many times before, without
result—seems to me quite fatuous. I recently addressed this in “
Collapse
Awareness and the Tragic Consciousness (a blogpost at
Nature
Bats Last):
It is well to point out (Greer,
2009) that apocalyptic claims have always proven erroneous in the past, and
they may do so again. But the human past never included environmental stressors
that were planet-wide, beyond which there can be no appeal. Fossil aquifers and
fossil fuels cannot renew, except on a geological timescale irrelevant to human
affairs. Radioactive elements (like nuclear waste, nuclear plant leakages, or
the depleted uranium the U.S. shot all over Iraq,) have half-lives in the
thousands and even millions of years. Four hundred ppm of CO2 makes for a hell
of a greenhouse effect, complete with positive feedback loops; the most
dangerous of these is the methane cascade problem. There is no remaining “New
World” by which to repeat the surprise of 1492 — the frontier is closed, and
the world is round.
Drop a baseball from the top of the
Empire State Building, and there will be many opportunities to point out that
it is going down and must hit the ground. Each presents a corresponding
opportunity to reply that yes, it may be going down, but it hasn’t hit — and
that you pessimists have repeatedly claimed that it’s going to hit the ground,
yet it still hasn’t, so maybe it never will. So it is with claims of
apocalypse.
Having addressed the central point of Pinker’s argument,
let’s consider the tone and substance of the remainder. Consider the first
example of the “amusing in retrospect” pseudo-existential threats that so
troubled our naïve predecessors: poison sprayed from planes. During the Vietnam
War, the United States denuded Vietnam of some five million acres of forest,
causing around 400,000 deaths and 500,000 birth defects for decades after.
Monsanto and Dow Chemical Company manufactured most of the herbicidal
defoliants used by the US (the most common of which was known as Agent Orange
(after the color of the barrels that stored it), totaling over seventy million
litres of poisons, notably the amazingly toxic
dioxin (Stellman, 2003).
Today Monsanto douses agricultural fields with vast amounts of somewhat
comparable
poisons like Roundup, whose active ingredient glyphosate has been associated
with a range of serious health effects.
According to Carey Gillam of Reuters, “In 2007, as much as 185 million pounds
of glyphosate was used by U.S. farmers.”
Call it agribusiness or sociopathy, this amounts to: spraying poison from planes. While
Pinker is obviously correct in observing that the practice has not killed
everyone on Earth, he sounds too glib to have considered that fossil-fuel
dependent agriculture (of which petrochemical toxins are a crucial part) is in
fact an existential threat. The soil of the US and many other countries is no
longer a living ecosystem that sustains itself through the natural cycling of
nutrients and water among thousands of interdependent species; it has become an
inert sponge for inputs of fossil fuels—ammonium nitrate fertilizers from
natural gas, pesticides and herbicides from petroleum. These are used with GMO
crops whose two commercial merits are, first, their ability to resist (briefly,
until the target organisms develop resistance) the expensive weed-killing
herbicides Monsanto and Dow manufacture, and second, their engineered
sterility, which forces farmers to pay Monsanto for new seed every planting
season, or face starvation. The mass suicides of farmers in India are
associated with this extractive model of agriculture. It is, in Pinker’s words,
one of the “sub-existential threats that are certain—they’re happening every
day—and that affect the fortunes of actual people.” But if we leave Monsanto
and Cargill and Syngenta and Dow Chemical to their own devices, they will
happily compromise the food chain until it fails.
Pinker’s next example is the Cold War: “when I grew up,
there were both scientists and political scientists who said that it was a
certainty that the US and the USSR would fight a nuclear war, ending humanity.
And that certainty didn’t happen.” The fallacy here is the implication that
because a nuclear holocaust did not happen,
it was never an existential threat. Of course it was. Worse, scholars have
come to appreciate just how close we came to annihilation at several points in
the Cold War, notably the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in which President
Kennedy’s resolve—his moral courage and psychological maturity—was the only
thing between a
mad pack of warhawk generals and the missile launch buttons.
Pinker summarizes: “The problem with existential threats is
that they’re very easy to imagine. If you play them out on the stage of your
imagination, they often speak more to our anxieties than to credible threats.”
There are real threats and imaginary ones, just as there are real people as
well as fictional characters, real diseases as well as socially constructed
syndromes, many real plants and many plastic ones. The rub lies in the
ever-present task of properly sorting the real threats from the unreal ones. It
may be “amusing” to look back on false positives in the history of
threat-assessment, but it would be foolish to neglect current risks on those
grounds, as if there were no such thing as a
false negative—something which doesn’t look like a threat, but turns
out to be one.
Left unchecked,
CFCs might well have permanently ruined the ozone layer, exposing most of the
biosphere to damaging and potentially lethal ultra-violet and other forms of
radiation. Neonicotinoids are a group of agricultural petrochemicals which now
threaten to eradicate bees, without whom there is almost no pollination—a potential
disaster for the terrestrial food chain. Plankton in the oceans are the basis
of the marine food chain; their numbers are down 40% since 1950.
Since no human being can live without food, these are existential threats to
humanity.
On Pinker’s reasoning, to consider existential risk is to
“worry about the very last of the 7.2 billion people on Earth today,” a
rhetorical sleight of hand, since (of course) the issue is the 7.2 billion
deaths of the whole lot of us, not the individual death of the last remaining
member of the species, even though both of these are involved in extinction.
Lastly, we are invited to neglect what the speaker calls
“farfetched scenarios.” Here again, there always farfetched scenarios out
there, but the interest lies in determining just which scenarios are farfetched.
Though concrete facts constrain the social construction of risk perception, it
is still a social construct. Such constructs are rich with biases of class privilege
and other identity elements. It is part of the culture of Harvard University,
and of the One Percent in general, to ignore those who try and call their
attention to serious threats; then mock them with scorn, derision, and contempt;
and then forget all about the whistleblower once his or her warning has come
true.
They often announce that absolutely nobody could have predicted the problem,
which is an attempt to erase from history whoever did make such a prediction,
along with the necessary sacrifices exacted from people who dare to play that
role. This happened with Semmelweis and his discovery that thousands of lives
are saved when a hospital decides it’s a good idea for surgeons to wash their
hands before operating; it happened with Marion King Hubbert’s accurate
prediction of the peaking of conventional oil production in the US and in the
world as a whole; it happened with Trotsky’s prescient warning that Stalin was
going to murder the revolutionary generation of Bolsheviks to consolidate his
power; it happened with Michael Ruppert’s warnings in the late 1990’s that the
US was headed toward a petro-police state, and so on.
In the twenty seconds following 23:08, Pinker says "If you set climate change as a problem to be solved, as opposed to thinking of it as an apocalypse that we have visited upon ourselves and deserve to be punished for our sinful ways, and our only solution is to completely and radically change our lifestyle and value system. I think that's unlikely to solve the problem. I think thinking of it as a big mess that we've gotten ourselves into and what are the ways that we can get the numbers to match up with reality, I think a solution exists." There it is. Watch the clip. What Pinker disagrees with is this fundamental truth, agreed upon by all reasonable people with whom I am at all acquainted: "our only solution is to completely and radically change our lifestyle and value system."
Seated near Dr. Pinker on the panel was Elizabeth Kolbert,
author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe:
Man, Nature, and Climate Change (2006) and The Sixth Extinction (2014), giving the panel the gravitas that helps express the nature of our predicament.
Evidence of abrupt and dramatic
climate change is nearly everywhere you look: unprecedented high temperatures,
storms, floods, droughts, migrations, wildfires, crop failures, species
extinctions (as many as 200 per day), sea ice loss and sea level rise, and the
triggering of perilous positive feedback loops like the methane releases from
both thawing permafrost and the warming ocean floor. While there is meaningful
controversy about just how quickly these will converge and just how screwed we
really are at this point, everybody knows that exponential growth on a finite
planet is the murder of the whole world. Everybody knows about the critical
state of the ecosystem without which life is impossible.
Until I saw this
conference footage, I thought even Harvard knew it.
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