"Rev. Chris Korda confronted an alien intelligence known as The Being who speaks for the inhabitants of Earth in other dimensions. The Being warned that our planet's ecosystem is failing, and that our leaders deny this. The Being asked why our leaders lie to us, and why so many of us believe these lies."
Into the face of the young man who approached me at five past noon, there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces some sinister secret is to be shared. Wordlessly, he beckoned me with a flap of his hand and pressed a scrap of paper into my palms. An address, not one of the physical kind - but one that leads to a certain website, was carelessly scrawled into the parchment. I queried him, asking for the nature of his enterprise, and was answered by a frantic gesture towards my computer. Puzzled and beleaguered, I acted upon his insinuations and tapped away at the search bar. It was then, that I discovered THE CHURCH OF EUTHANASIA [NSFW].
It is an inconvenient truth, that us humans attempt to smother beneath their selfish affirmations, that our actions will doom this planet to fire and brimstone. This raises the question, not of 'who is to blame', but of why we are to blame - and what should be our next course of action? I will elaborate on the first question before I proceed.
Edward O. Wilson proposes the profound theory, that intelligence snuffs itself out. He solves Fermi's paradox: we don't receive messages from the stars because by the time an alien life form has enough power to transmit that far, it's already on the threshold of annihilating itself, and the odds of its brief blaze of glory lining up with ours are infinitesimal. This is closely related to the view that life (particularly human life) creates short-term order at the cost of accelerating the entropy of its environment, in stark contrast to the idealistic Gaia theory. Antihumanism, is the answer.
Antihumanism can be usefully contrasted with humanism. Humanism derives from the ancient Greek notion that man is the measure of all things, and that without human existence nothing would have value. Concealed within this is the assumption that only humans experience value. This assumption has no basis in biology, but is nonetheless one of the pillars of modern civilization, because it provides justification for extermination of other species. The denial of intrinsic value to nonhuman life is the essence of speciesism, and is closely related to the dogma of dominion, i.e. that it's man's destiny to subjugate all other living things. Human monoculture and its destructive nature is the crucible for our regression as a species.
The central paradox of antihumanism is that humans evolved, and are therefore no more or less natural than any other living thing. Stephen Jay Gould argued convincingly that evolution doesn't converge on anything except fitness for conditions: there are no good or bad organisms, just ones that survive, and mostly ones that don't. Richard Dawkins went even further and described organisms as mere transport for genes, in which case the DNA we share with all other eukaryotes is the winner, regardless of what humans do. One proposed resolution is that humans are malignant life, as argued by A. Kent MacDougall in Humans As Cancer. This sidesteps the problem however, because cancer is also natural, and closely related to viruses. The higher-order question is ethical: why is malignancy bad, and from what point of view is its badness determined?
The paradox of human naturalness could possibly be resolved by arguing that sentience is not intelligence but the ability to feel pain and pleasure. What distinguishes humans from other primates is the existential suffering that results from self-knowledge, particularly fear of death. Since humans have such capacity for suffering, we should have equally developed empathy, but instead we succumb to corruption, creating hellish conditions for humans and nonhumans alike. Thus despite our naturalness, humans can and should be blamed for wrecking the planet, precisely because we're capable of feeling remorse for having done so. If we're unable to reform ourselves, as seems increasingly to be the case, we should have the decency to step aside and give other organisms a chance. Apes might re-evolve back into us, but they might not, and either way it won't be our fault.
Onto, the latter issue - and more importantly - the issue of what should be our course of action. It is simple. Thou shalt not procreate. Achieving species consciousness is key to this One Commandment, and the only way we can achieve species consciousness is to eliminate history, and free ourselves from the malicious tyranny of our 'leaders'. Jeremy Rifkin explains.
"How do we leap in consciousness to species politics, how do we go beyond the rhetoric? First of all, we can't have cheap grace. You know what cheap grace is? Any neo-orthodox Christian philosophers, theologians? Okay, I'll give you the cheap version of cheap grace, you ready? You go to a Jimmy Swaggart rally. The guy got caught again, didn't he? (laughs) You go to a Jimmy Swaggart rally, and afterwards you're so moved by his eloquence you say "I have been saved." And the next morning you go out there in the driveway and there's the BMW, you stick that little bumper sticker on the bumper "Honk If You Love Jesus." You don't fight the powers and principalities, you don't bear witness to the coming of the kingdom, we don't walk in the footsteps of Jesus, we don't minister to the poor, God forbid, we don't re-distribute our wealth and commit ourselves to Jubilee, we just honk, honk, honk if we love Jesus, you know people like that? (cheers, applause) ... alright, you know these people.
Ha, ha, some of your friends ... okay. Cheap grace and the body politic. Is it tempting to isolate out these great environmental and human tragedies, as if they could be neatly addressed through legislative initiatives? Electing the right people to office. Committing ourselves to a covenant or charter. These crises cannot be dealt with or addressed until we are willing to do battle with the world view that gave rise to them. That's what's missing at the Summit at Rio. That's what's missing at the official Summit at Rio. I sat in a room, I shouldn't tell you this, but I'll let you in on this, I sat in a room ... for four days, three years ago, on the first little planning session on Rio. With Maurice Strong and about twenty-five people. Not one word at that meeting about changing world views.
A world view is a world view when you don't know it's a world view. A way of thinking that's so embedded into the psychology of a species or a culture that we never challenge it, we never question it, yet it's world views that dictate our policies ... that motivate our politicians, that underwrite our institutional foundation. Let me give you an example. Anybody here have a, ah, and keep thinking the global and human environmental crisis, anybody here have a digital watch? A digital watch. Okay, let me, what's you name? Shawn, let me see that watch, if that's the right one for me. Absolutely. Thank you. Alright.
Keep thinking world views, and keep thinking global structures, now here's Shawn's watch, here's mine, what do you see on my dial that you don't have on Shawn's. Circle. You know if I were to come down here from another galaxy and I landed in this room at the Marriott, first stop, homo sapiens. Cute. But I don't know a thing about you, first thing I'd say is "show me your timepieces." If I know how you keep time, I'm going to know more about you ... than any other part of your social experience. Time is the most intimate part of our consciousness. Yet, it is the most important part of cementing social relationships. St. Augustine, the great schoolman of the church, once mused, "What is time? I know what it is," he said, "until you ask me." So I have a circle on my watch, and what's going on on the watch, we've got what else on that watch? Hands. And what are they doing? Which way? Good. (laughs) I had a student at a university two years ago who said "counterclockwise." (more laughs) My watch has a circle on it, the hands are going clockwise, and they relate to what? Right. The sun, the rotation of the Earth, the Circadian reference of the solar day, the last faint reminder that for eons of time, we measured time, in terms of our indebtedness to, the larger Earth rhythms that we are a part of. And if anyone ever asks you at a cocktail party "How do you know we're part of an organism?" Easy.
Below our spatial reality, below the atoms, below the DNA, there is a temporal reality they have not even been able to understand. And in every species, there are biological clocks, more than we can ever count. And we're learning, that they are totally in synchronization, with the Circadian day, the lunar month, as in the menstruation cycles, the Circannual rhythms, men and women, all species, are totally temporally, rhythmically synchronized to the rotation of the Earth in the universe. An accident of history? Darwinian trial and error?
If a civilization nails its time span to the moment, and loses a sense of history and the future, does that have any relationship to the global environmental crisis, enclosure, and the human crisis on the planet? Eliminate history, eliminate obligations, covenants, contracts. Eliminate history and my time is not spoken for; I can have pure power in a vacuum. That's what Big Brother did. He remade history every day to suit the expediency of the political moment. And our kids have a little saying, are there any people here under twenty? ... That should say something to us, we've got to get moving here, anyone under twenty? The young people have a saying, if they want to dismiss someone, they'll say "hey man, you're ... " What's the other one, "hey man you're ... " History. Because history doesn't exist for them. Eliminate history ... eliminate continuity ... between the generations. And narrow the time span ... can we then steward the future? Shawn? Where are you? Have you been born again? Shall we bury this out at the Marriott Hotel in a kind of ceremony? (applause) Thanks. Alright.
World views. Alright, I'm going to try something, with you folks. This is a little sleazy way to learn, but, I'm going to try it anyway. Are you ready? One dollar. One dollar. See if you can get this. If I were to say to you what value has emerged in the last ... how many have heard me speak in the last three ... four years? You can't play this. If I were to say what value has emerged in the last hundred years, out of obscurity, did not exist more than a 150 years ago, it is now the dominant value of our civilization, critical to our science, essential to our technology, motivates the marketplace, absolutely underlines our economic theory, and pushes most of our private and public life, what is that value? (many answers) Greed and sex? (laughs) That's close ... Ego ... Y'all missed it, you got pretty close, but you missed it. You ready? You're going to really regret that you didn't get this, because this is the simplest.
There are two basic coordinates: time and space. If we want to know the problems of our world view, go deep into the temporal value, and deep into the spatial value, and then we'll be able to re-learn our participation in the universe, you ready? Here's the temporal coordinate of the modern world view. It is this word.Efficiency. How important is that? Have you ever had anyone ... efficiency is the prescription for disaster for this Earth. Efficiency is destroying the planet. Now you heard real crazy stuff, didn't you? That's how you know you're deep in a world view."
And with that, let me remind ourselves to maintain the great vigil of this great insitution. The Four Pillars: suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy. In the words of the Cree people:
Only after the last tree has been cut down,
Only after the last river has been poisoned,
Only after the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten.
The Being
