History: future of homo sapiens

Human craving for development is insatiable. As Sapiens explores new vistas, conquers new worlds, achieves new breakthroughs in science, accumulates more wealth, the reaction is not one of satisfaction or a desire to put the brakes on the human project, what John Stuart Mills called the stationary state, but the feverish desire to continue exploring.

It begets us more wealth, more discoveries, innovative technologies and, if optimists are to be believed, greater control over nature and the resources of this planet. Advances and breakthrough in genetics and bio-technology have begun to give us such confidence that scientists are talking about prolonging human lifespans, making them disease-free, even conquering death.

To quote Yuval Harari, “having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”

But there’s a slight problem with this project: the paradox. The danger, or regression if you will, that inheres in what we consider material progress and the negative fallout for this planet of the power sapiens exercises. There have been enough warnings about rewriting “the rules of the game”, essentially extracting more from a finite planet and faster than it can regenerate.

That has a cost, perhaps one so great as to lead us to what Elizabeth Kolbert calls “The Sixth Extinction”: “The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.”

This is no alarmism. As noted, there are warnings aplenty. Kolbert mentions a quote by ecologist Paul Ehrlich on a sign in The Hall of Biodiversity: “In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.”

That’s also the running motif of Ilhan Niaz’s latest book. A brilliant young professor of history, Niaz’s latest book, “Downfall: Lessons for our Final Century”, comprises seven essays that trace the doom staring us in the face through historical and philosophical references and trajectories. While Niaz asks in the concluding chapter if there is a way out and whether and how we could avoid the sixth extinction, he also informs us at the very outset that “humans are not generally good at contemplating the end”.

This is not just a statement thrown carelessly at the reader. Niaz presents to the reader historical, philosophical and even social-psychological evidence to argue that while “History teaches us that all things have a culmination point, that no state is permanent, and that individuals are transient and expendable,” it is well-nigh difficult, if not impossible, for states and societies to think “rationally about the future”. Humans “behave as if they will last forever”.

For all the intellectual prowess of Homo sapiens, there is “mounting evidence,” says Niaz, “that life on Earth has been plunged into mortal danger by modern human civilisation, particularly the neoliberal variant of capitalism that has raged and dominated globally over the past 40 years”. He argues, and presents evidence to that end, that “The damage already done is so great that a crisis of habitability is inevitable. And our heedlessness is so entrenched that humans, especially the top 10 percent, will continue to plunder and waste until the Earth becomes unfit for all life.”

While each of the book’s seven essays can stand on its own, taken together they present Niaz’s argument from a number of angles and perspectives. The first “explores the ideas of Ibn Khaldun, Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and Darwin in determining what the future holds and what modern society ought to draw from the past”. They are chosen carefully because, as Niaz explains, it’s important to “dissuade the readers from the popular and historically inaccurate rhetoric that present crises are unpredictable”.

Khaldun tells us “how regimes fail to maintain rationality in decision-making”. Malthus determined that the population grows through geometric progression and the food production increases through arithmetic progression. In other words, the population will grow more quickly than the food supply. Result: “every breakthrough that allowed us to feed or support more people led to population increases that soon outstripped improved productivity”.

JS Mill, one of Niaz’s “outliers”, realised at the height of the Industrial Revolution that economic development could not continue indefinitely and proposed the “desirability of an eventual stationary state”, a condition where the humans have accumulated enough wealth for everyone to live moderately well. Much before the idea of growth became the central mantra of economists, leading to “rapaciously extractive economics”, Mill “wondered about the ‘ultimate point’ of industrialisation”.

Niaz’s fourth key thinker in the book’s schema is, of course, Darwin whose “paradigm helps explain what had happened in the past when species had to adapt to macro changes in the objective conditions around them”.

The subsequent discussion takes us through other historical and contemporary examples to show that “blinded by a hubristic reverence for [our] ingenuity”, we have crossed many tipping points. The incorrigible optimists, what Niaz calls Panglossists — a reference to Professor Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide — are as dangerous as the growth-obsessed economists because they think that human ingenuity and innovation can handle and offset the looming disaster, employing “intelligence to do unimaginably stupid things.”

But Niaz’s most scathing criticism is reserved for economists and their idea of infinite growth which forces us to mine every resource in a finite planet. This is a motif that runs through the essays but is centrally discussed in the second. “Most economists and development practitioners do not have the faintest clue as to how wrong the central assumptions of their disciplines are.”

While he mentions Left-wing and centrist critics of mainstream economics — Steve Keen, Ann Pettifor, Raghuram Rajan, Yanis Varoufakis et al — he argues that “Their disagreement was not concerned with the desirability of growth but with its equity and with the excessive dominance of financial interests in decision-making to the neglect of the real economy, of people, places, things, and ideas.” Nor is he enamoured of sustainable development, which he calls a “hoax”.

Niaz’s third essay uses Herodotus and his Histories to “probe why humans are terrible at making wise decisions”. The conversation between Solon and Croesus indicates that “human nature is programmed to seek glory and success, but once attained, these acts inhibit rationality and magnify conceit in one’s innate superiority”.

But there’s also the problem of optimism, the “Pangloss Effect”. Niaz identifies three causes for it: biology (the inability of animal brains to react to difficulties unless they are immediate); our imagination and its effects on our ability to understand the causes of phenomena around us; self-centredness, which begets “material optimism”. Taken together, these causes leads us to believe that “without having to change our ravenous behaviour, we will find a miraculous solution to our predicament, and this will remain, now and forever, the best of all possible worlds”.

The fifth essay, particularly interesting for me, deals with the geopolitics of climate apocalypse. How the coming disaster will reshape international and interstate relations. The main IR theories are focused on power, its exercise and its distribution. They deal with interstate conflict but none looks at such conflict in an impending dystopian world. As Niaz puts it: “The winners and losers of the looming struggle will not be like the victors and vanquished of many past conflicts. This time, the losers will cease to exist.” To that, going by Niaz’s own findings and prognosis, I will add that even for the winners, for whatever their victory might be worth, the clock will be ticking.

The sixth essay links up with the second to tell us that the “intensive and unequal developmental model” is no more sustainable because “this time the global reach of extraction has undermined the ability of the Earth to support complex life” in ways the past mining of Earth’s resources did not. Result: “the globalist high civilisation is going to end in global collapse.”

The final essay details the “types of political orders [that] might emerge during and after the collapse of the Earth’s habitability”. They could range from fascism to environmental dictatorships to post-apocalypse “tribalism, survivalist movements, and small-scale isolated communities” in the few habitable places that might remain.

Niaz also offers some solutions in the concluding essay. His central point is that we will have to fundamentally change our present outlook, especially in terms of how we perceive growth. That means moving to a stationary phase, a long pause. For this to happen, we will also have to think in terms of historical time, centuries, not just the immediate. We must also abandon hope and move to a collective cooperative model that requires a completely changed outlook on interstate relations. While cooperation is necessary to avoid conflict, we would need to cut down on global trade, supply chains and travel and focus on local production and low consumption.

This is, of course, a bird’s-eye view of Niaz’s book and his recommendations. There’s much more in there and it links up with emerging literature on where the situation is headed.

Even as I was penning these lines, a World Meteorological Organisation report, released on September 7, warned that “The surface ozone levels can increase by 20 percent across Pakistan, northern India and Bangladesh by the middle of the century.” The report says that most of the ozone increase will be due to a rise in emissions from fossil fuel combustion, but roughly a fifth of this would be due to climate change, leading to increases in heatwaves and amplifying air pollution episodes.

So, there it is, the horrifying spectacle of a sixth extinction, this time man-made.

The writer is a journalist interested in foreign and security policies