Since human life on Earth had a beginning, it’s illogical to believe it can’t have an end. It can and probably will, some day.
Christians believe there is life in death, but most people deny that nowadays. However, no one denies that there is death in life. Living organisms live, then die. We see it with our own eyes.
We are all – even conceivably I am – going to die, individually. And, if we regard the human race as a living organism, we can also die collectively.
Life on Earth can be erased by the sun getting out of kilter and either frying or freezing us to death. A giant meteor may hit the Earth and break it in half. Some meteorological quirk may create a great flood, even bigger than the one spelled with the capital F.
Someone better-versed in science than I am can doubtless come up with many other doomsday scenarios, but there’s no point worrying about them. Such disasters either happen or they don’t, and there’s nothing we can do about the possibility of democide caused by defects in physical nature.
What should concern us is the possibility of suicide caused by defects in human nature. This is worth pondering, if only because we may have a chance to prevent it. This is an outside chance, I’ll grant you that, but a chance nonetheless.
If collective suicide is a possible end, we certainly have the means to achieve it. The most obvious and quickest way to perdition is a no-holds-barred nuclear war, and we are teetering on the brink of it. This is so obvious that I’ll spare you a long list of likely flashpoints that can conflagrate the world.
Death by demographics would be slower but no less possible. After all, throughout the West and much of the East people don’t produce enough children even to maintain the replacement level. If more people die than are born, then sooner or later there won’t be anyone left, what’s there not to understand?
Another suicide, falling somewhere between the two in its potential speed of execution, could be caused by a release of toxins, either accidental, as a result of negligence, or deliberate, as biological warfare. Think of Covid and the havoc it caused, then think of bubonic plague or some other Black Death, multiply the Covid effect by a million and there you have it: suicide by germs.
Then there is this new-fangled Artificial Intelligence, which, according to some dystopic projections, may create a victorious robotic revolt putting paid to mankind. Personally, I can’t understand how creatures can outdo their creators, but since some knowledgeable and respectable people worry about the cataclysmic potential of AI, who am I to argue?
You may think we aren’t so stupid as to let such things happen. I disagree with the second part: we are eminently capable of committing collective suicide. But the first part is correct: we aren’t stupid at all. What we suffer from isn’t a deficit of reason but its surfeit. We are too intelligent for our own good, or rather too reliant on our reason.
If you look at the four possible catastrophes I mentioned, they were made possible by tremendous tours de force of intelligence.
Marshalling and releasing the energy bubbling in the atom took ingenuity beyond my understanding. Think of Democritus (d. circa 370 BC) who came up with the atomic theory of the universe, then jump on to Ernest Rutherford who first split the atom in 1918, to Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and other great minds who devoted their lives to nuclear physics and quantum mechanics.
We should all be in awe of such depths of the intellect so thoroughly plumbed, but awe suggests not only reverential admiration but also fear. The same goes for the biochemists and toxicologists who have developed perfect means of collective suicide.
Gone are the primitive times of yesteryear, when attackers caused outbreaks of deadly diseases in besieged fortresses by lobbing dead rats over the wall. Today the same effect can be achieved globally by breaking a few test tubes in public.
Would you know how to synthesise such toxins? Neither would I. But we can’t accuse those who can do so of lacking intelligence. On the contrary, they must be smarter than you and me, certainly in one specialised area but perhaps also in general.
And I’m almost paralysed by the awe I feel contemplating the intricate minds dedicated to computer technology and its ultimate achievement, AI. If you think for a second they are stupid, then peek into the innards of your Mac and see if you can figure out how it works.
You can’t, can you? Then show some respect for those geeky boffins who spend their lives glued to screens or hunched over plates, microchips and connectors. They may be many things, but stupid isn’t one of them.
Women who decide not to have children aren’t necessarily dumb either. On the contrary, they may be too clever by half. They seek outlets for their minds rather than spending the best years of their lives on pregnancies, nappies, breastfeeding and washing their babies, then looking after them, teaching them to walk, talk, read and tell right from wrong, driving them to school and cooking their meals.
They find such outlets in studying things like physics, biochemistry or computer science and parlaying their education into remunerative careers improving their lifestyle and boosting their self-esteem. You are free to think what you will of such women, or even poopoo words like ‘lifestyle’ and ‘self-esteem’. But you can’t deny those ladies have to be rather smart to have careers, to seek fulfilment in their brains, not their wombs.
Scale such exploits down from physics, biochemistry or computer science, and the same observation applies: careers in public relations, HR, management, sales, even show business take intelligence too. Such ambitious women want their jam today, and let others worry about impending demographic catastrophes. Those childless wonders may be selfish, even cynical, but they are nobody’s fools.
“This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper,” wrote Eliot in his poem The Hollow Man. Hollow spiritually, is what he meant, and this bottomless pit can’t be filled with intellect. And if it can’t, then the world may indeed end, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s with a bang or a whimper.
Human reason will end up denying and eventually devouring itself if its excesses aren’t controlled by a higher reason whence the spiritual and moral constraints come. Such constraints have been systematically removed over the past few centuries, allowing unfettered reason to run free.
Emerging out of the resulting upheavals was Modern man, a creature bristling with noetic smugness. Now he had shaken off the fetters of religion, he no longer had any use for anyone’s reason but his own. Where before he had been enslaved, he was now free.
Yet nothing turns freedom into bondage and then death as ineluctably as a lack of discipline.
No matter how talented a composer is, he’ll produce nothing but cacophony if he ignores the structural and harmonic rules of composition. His unchecked freedom will kill his music.
If anarchists striving for absolute freedom ever produce their own state, the state will soon fall apart, but not before creating the worst tyranny in history.
An anticlerical believer who denies the authority of the Church and relies on his own resources will lose his resources first and his faith second.
The builders of Notre Dame expressed themselves within a discipline. The builders of Centre Pompidou were free to express themselves as they saw fit.
Noetic smugness, unwavering trust in human reason as the be all and end all, may indeed end all. A nuclear scientist’s reason may produce a way to heat our houses or to incinerate them. A biochemist’s reason may create life-sustaining medicines or life-ending poisons. A computer scientist’s reason may produce useful machines or man-eating ogres.
Moreover, a philosopher pondering the link between reason and language may end up denying the validity of reason, language and indeed philosophy (except perhaps his own). Human reason, in other words, may be either a creative tool or a suicide tool, and it takes a higher reason to decide which it’ll be.
Mankind won’t kill itself by being too daft. It may kill itself by being too clever by half. It’s not stupidity but noetic smugness that’s more likely to lock and load the weapon of mass destruction. That’s what put mankind on suicide watch, and we’d be foolhardy to put self-confidence before vigilance.