Guest Commentary: Moving beyond apex predation

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Guest Commentary: Moving beyond apex predation
Dr. William Nylen

BY DR. WILLIAM NYLEN

In our relentlessly successful efforts to join the mass extinction that we are inflicting upon our planet, we humans might wish to step back and acknowledge those traits that have brought us our success.

First, as products of nature (albeit now, and for now, its masters), we have excelled at the planetary game of natural selection. We have cunningly, ruthlessly, and unforgivingly outcompeted all challengers.

There’s nothing particularly human about this selfish desire to occupy and dominate planetary space. All life attempts the same. We’re just better at it than anything else. So, while some of our fellow creatures have learned to use primitive tools to assist in gathering food and shelter, our tools can remove mountaintops, irrigate deserts, eliminate uncooperative species, and blow up cities. We humans rule the world.

Beyond our prowess in eliminating or subjugating the competition, our second defining trait is our capacity to convince ourselves that there’s some kind of “higher purpose” to all the killing and the subjugation. Theologies, philosophies, cosmologies, mythologies, ideologies — all of these creative constructions have imbued our competitive efforts with a sense of mission; that whatever sacrifices, atrocities, or sufferings we encounter along the way are, or become in our minds, both necessary and inevitable and, therefore, justified.

And in times where we’ve turned our competitive energies against ourselves, these rationalizations have served to rally and concentrate our collective efforts to the killing and subjugation of each other. These intra-species conflagrations, however, do not weaken us. Ultimately, they make us stronger — better able, as a whole, to kill and conquer all the other species we compete with.

Our prize? Ultimately, our descendants will be able to look out over a depleted, exhausted landscape and triumphantly declare, with their dying breath, “We did it. We won!”

But wait. Must we end on such a pessimistic note?

Probably. But not necessarily.

If we want our victory to be sustainable over the very long term, our first challenge is to recognize that the human traits that have brought us to this point — win at all costs and justify the results as necessary if not sacred — cannot and will not allow us to survive into the future. Mass extinction is happening all around us. The planet is changing before our very eyes. Simply wanting to return to the way things were is literally a dead end. Justifying anything and everything we do by referring to some long-imagined “higher purpose” is also a dead end.

Letting go of the past, letting go of the way we humans have always made sense of the past, is far easier said than done. But it must be done if we are to avoid the Pyrrhic victory of that dying breath.

Our second challenge will be to ground our common purpose — our species’ survival — in the survival of the very life-sustaining planet we inhabit. The good news is that science has progressed a great deal in terms of mapping out what needs to be done. The less-than-good news is that most of our exalted “higher purpose” imaginings ignore or actively reject the science of planetary health.

There was a time in recent history when it seemed as if science, on the one hand, and our theologies, ideologies, etc., on the other hand, could reconcile around the notion that our cultural imaginings could continue to operate and be useful in the spaces of our existence that science didn’t or couldn’t understand. For example, science tells us that survival — passing on our DNA to the next generation — is our “purpose.” Spirituality and an afterlife, being impossible to scientifically observe or measure, therefore remain as the proper domains of theology. Similarly, the morality of social hierarchies and the ethics of operating within them can be seen as the proper realm of philosophy.

Today’s resurgent fundamentalist theologies and ideologies, however, relegate all knowledge as subservient to their own long-imagined and entirely unverifiable “Truths.” These may have once been functional in winning the brutal planetary game of natural selection. But in ignoring or actively rejecting science, they are now one of the main obstacles to our long-term survival as a species. Until they take their proper place as complementary to science, albeit in a secondary role, humans will continue to rush headlong toward joining the growing ranks of mass extinction.

— Nylen is professor of political science and director of international studies at Stetson University.

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