"This Is Why We Need A New Enlightenment: Human Beings Need To Re-Think Their Place In The World They've Destroyed"
Umair Haque
A strange juxtaposition struck me this morning.
Astronomers announced possible signs of life on Venus — and I say possible in the slimmest of ways. Meanwhile, last night, the BBC broadcast David Attenborough’s magisterial Extinction: a documentary about the severity of human-caused mass extinction on planet earth.
Doesn’t that strike you as funny?
Sad?
Curious?
Here we are, we walking apes. Searching desperately for some slender sign that we’re not alone in the universe. Meanwhile, we treat life on this planet so callously and foolishly that we’re killing it off.
If there are aliens, my friends, they’d regard all that as ironic. Psychologically telling of self-defense. Profoundly ignorant and foolish. To search for life elsewhere while killing off furiously what there is here — what are we really looking for? It’s not life. It’s meaning, purpose, an end to the despair of the walking ape.
The despair of the walking ape. I don’t say that lightly. We are in a situation, a plight, that it took millennia to really understand. It was only the existentialists who, in the shadow of a World War, among its ashes, had the courage to finally say what we had all been thinking. There seem to be no answers. The very ones we search so desperately for. Why are we here? Who made us? What happens after we die?
The universe remains silent, indifferent.
Camus called all that absurd, Sartre said it made him nauseous.
There is no greater pain than this. The existential despair of the walking ape. How did we deal with it in our long, terrible history, which we often mistakenly call civilization? Well, first we came up with omnipotent people in the sky, who made us, and take care of us in eternal afterlives — if we’re good, that is. But if we’re honest, believing in people in the sky isn’t a great defense against the terrible pain of just existing without any explicit answers as to why or how or wherefore. And organized religion may have been a balm for the individual, but it has also led to strife and division: crusades, epochs of war and bloodshed and violence. That violence still rages in many parts of the world.
After we “killed off God,” demystified the universe, as the sociologists say, as Nietzsche said, with reason and science, we created an even more powerful and dangerous answer to the question of existential despair. Consumerism. Which quickly became the new opiate of the masses. Who cares where I came from? Where I’ll go? Who made me? My point in this life is having more stuff than you. That way I attain more status. I symbolically slay you with acquisitions, and I feel superior to you.
Even if that feeling is evanescent, this game of escapism from existential despair can go on for a whole lifetime. And where organized religion at least attempted to find a moral orientation — care about your neighbour, don’t be selfish — consumerism’s great sin is that it denies the existence of morality at all.
The only point of life is me, my narcissism, my craving to feel above you. (Alan: Anybody come to mind?)
But all there is in life is the quest for the narcissistic feeling of supremacy over and above the next person.
When a society is just a group of individualists climbing and clambering atop each other, what happens?
America does.
People develop no trust in each other.
They come to hate one another, regarding others as rivals and adversaries.
People can’t walk beside one another, and ever invest in public goods.
You can see the dystopian place America ended — school shootings, people begging for healthcare online, red skies, a lunatic President.
That’s where the non-answer of consumerism to the great question of existential despair leads: nowhere.
And yet it’s not just America that walked the wrong path. We did, as a civilization. Our planet is dying. It’s not a natural death. It’s a murder. Who is killing off life as we know it on planet earth? We are. That was the point of Attenborough’s Extinction. It was too difficult, almost, to watch. How do you grieve for a billion lost lives? If my puppy is as human as anyone else I know — how can I not care about all those beings being drowned, incinerated, starved?
And how, then, are we capable of ignoring all that, and going happily about our daily business? Have we all become American Idiots — capable of turning a blind eye to violence and brutality, cheering it on with dead eyes and plastic grins?
The walking ape, it turns out, has a terrible, terrible capacity for violence. That is our true original sin, our Achilles heel. We invented all the following things, and practice them still: war, slavery, genocide.
We think of animals as dangerous predators — but a lion is not out there trying to hoard all the money in a society, and starve everyone else.
It takes us to do that — whether at the level of a Bezos or a Zuck, or the world’s rich white 20%, who won’t share the ill-gotten gains of centuries of empire and violence back with the 80% who are the descendants of the people of colour they enslaved and brutalized.
The human ape has the greatest capacity for violence of all things. The mass extinction of life happening now is our fault. We are right up there with the meteor which killed off the dinosaurs. We appear not to be able to mourn or grieve for the scale of death we cause, either.
Where does the walking ape’s capacity for violence come from? From his existential despair. I say “his” deliberately because most of the violence we do comes from men. It’s legitimated by women, the way polite soccer moms voted for Trump. In either case, though, our unspeakable, incredible capacity for violence — war, genocide, slavery, remember, all things animals don’t do — comes from the terrible anger we feel, too.
What is it, being a walking ape? Why is it so terrifying? Why aren’t there any answers? Why am I going to die, and just stop existing at all? Why isn’t there someone in the sky looking out for me? The walking ape is in terrible, terrible pain, and that pain comes out as the greatest violence that nature has ever known.
George Carlin: It's "The Good Churchgoers" Who Kill The Prophets
Do you see the link I’m trying to make? Let me make it clearer.
We are not happy things, us walking apes. We are riddled with doubt, searing with hatred, pulsing with rage. The venom of a snake or the fangs of a tiger are nothing, really, compared to the anger we feel, for the plight we’ve been put in.
We’re capable of much, much greater violence than any of them, and only beings who are deeply, deeply troubled do as much violence and brutality as we do.
Now. I’ve spoken to you in abstractions, because I’m going to try to struggle to make my point. Here it is.
We need a new enlightenment. Now. One that regards every single being on this planet as worthy. Just as worthy as us. Every single being is the most precious thing there is. Because it is part of the only life we know of.
We don’t need to look on Venus and Mars and so forth — at least not while we’re killing off life right here. To do that is simply to be foolish. Right before our very eyes and in our hands is the greatest treasure in the universe, the only life we actually know of anywhere. And we treat it like a slave, like a thing to be abused, killed and discarded.
We need a new enlightenment. Our economics needs to begin accounting for every life as though it had intrinsic worth. Our politics needs to include all life in democracy — there should be a Speaker for the Oceans and a Speaker for the Animals, not just a Speaker for the People, in our parliaments. Our legal systems must recognise life itself as “persons” — how come Amazon, Inc is a “person,” but the Amazon isn’t? — so that all life has rights, privileges, protections.
Culturally and socially, too, it must become illegitimize to participate in ways of being that treat life as something to abuse, exploit, and kill off — whether that means eating less meat, not buying factory farmed things, or growing one’s gardens.
We need a new enlightenment, and we need it now.
Why do we need it, though? Let me make my message clearer. We need a new enlightenment for three reasons.
One, life on earth supports us. The worms and insects turn the soil in which we plant our crops. The fish cleanse the rivers we drink from. (Alan: Umair is wrong on this point. Fish do not cleanse rivers, lakes and oceans. But his metaphorical point is well taken. These are the organisms that actually clean the world's water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisms_involved_in_water_purification) The trees give us air to breathe. The basics of our lives come from life on this planet — a fact which is becoming terrifyingly clear now, in an age of rapid and severe climate change. People in California don’t have decent air to breathe anymore. Pretty soon, our harvests will fail, and our water tables will run dirty and dry. We cannot live on this planet — on any planet — without valuing life at a much, much higher rate than we currently do, the economist in me might say.
But the second reason, I’ve come to think, is an even more important one. It’s not just about survival, this thing called the life of a walking ape. It is also about happiness, fulfillment, the sense of mattering, of purpose, of love, truth, beauty, goodness. We need much more of it, wouldn’t you say? Or would you like to see the world go on imploding into Trumpisms, Qanons, into hate, stupidity, fear, and rage? But where do we find more of the miraculous and beautiful?
What do you think might happen if we were to live in such a way that we valued life radically more? I think that we would be far, far less alienated creatures. And maybe that sense of existential despair we have might fade. And as it does, so our capacity for violence might recede too, replaced by a sense of inner peace, a kind of repose and calm.
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If we lived in such a way that we didn’t casually kill off life, then perhaps the answers to our questions would be right there in front of us. Why are we here? To care for life. Who made us? Life did. What is the purpose of us? To give life back to life.
Happiness and meaning and purpose? They all come from relationships, not things. And the reason we walking apes are such alienated, lonely, angry things is that we don’t have any real relationships. Yes, if we’re lucky, we have a few with each other. But most of us have exactly none with the other life on this planet.
When I put it that way, do you see how backwards and strange it is the way we live? Surely, future civilizations will regard this absence of relationships with life as something bizarre about us — and the reason that we stayed so violent and pained and alienated, too.
Most of us have no relationships whatsoever with life on this planet. Not with a tree, not with a mammal, bird, insect, fish. Can we build our cities to give us that? Our economies — instead of killing off those things? Our politics? Societies and cultures? To endow life with dignity, rights, inherent and inalienable worth — so that we can begin having real relationships with all the other inhabitants of this planet? See how beautiful and astonishing they are? That they are the miracle we have been seeking all along — the gift of life? That the gift of life that we’ve been looking for desperately has always been right before our eyes?
Ley De Derechos De Madre Tierra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_Rights_of_Mother_Earth
If we lived like that, I think, we would be far, far happier beings. Much more full of purpose, meaning, sanity, grace, love, truth, goodness. We would be far, far less capable of violence — and see it as something ugly and grotesque, rather than a necessary evil. Because our despair would begin to be replaced with a kind of lightness, simplicity, joy, togetherness, a sense of deeper meaning and higher purpose, a connectedness between ourselves and being and time and life. We become enlightened — genuinely — in a new way, or a very, very old one.
Do you feel the meaning of my words a little bit? It’s a very hard thing to express, and surely greater minds than mine have tried. I struggle.
I know that some people — mostly Americans — will roll their eyes at such ideas. Let them: they have destroyed themselves with selfishness, rage, and willful ignorance.
The sane and thoughtful ones among us, though, should perhaps understand the logic of what I’m saying. We are deeply alienated things, us walking apes. Our alienation is a symptom of our existential despair. Coming closer to the heart of life provides a kind of resolution for the pain of just existing that we feel — maybe the only one there is. Yes, I will die. But I will be part of this great cycle of life. Now I am not so alone. I am not the only one in such terrible pain — all life is. I have a reason for being here, which is to nourish and protect and care for the most valuable thing in all existence — life — of which I am a tiny part, too.
That is a very different way of thinking about being and time and dust than we are used to. It is closer, in truth, to “primitive” ways of seeing the world than modern ones. It has little in common, I suppose, with the idea of an omnipotent sky being who will reward us with eternal life if we are good, and good means treating other people who believe in the same thing nicely, but every other being goes to hell. (Do you really think I can accept a system of thought in which my puppy goes to hell, but anyone who prays goes to heaven forever? Snowy is probably the most human being I know.)
And this way of thinking is the diametrical opposite of mindless, thoughtless consumerism. It doesn’t allow us to take any being for granted, to treat anything without grace, autonomy, self-directedness, beauty. It asks us to look for the miracles there are everywhere around us — not cheap salvation to the question of why we are here in a logo or brand or Instagram post.
Those twin answers — religion and consumerism — to the age-old question of existential despair haven’t worked. They have not quelled the rage and fear and terror which beats in the human heart. It still erupts in violence. Only the violence we are doing now is the most terrible violence of all: killing off life on this planet.
We can go on searching for life on other planets. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a noble goal. But see it for what it is. An expression of the terror and fear and pain of being a walking ape, a being with so many questions, and no answers.
That terror and fear and pain, though, has an answer. It is not the answer, by any means, that maybe we want. Yes, we will die. No, nobody is magically going to save us. Yes, we are tiny, fragile, evanescent things.
The answer we have been seeking it seems to me, has been right here all along. To be a part of life, to care for it, to nourish it, to elevate it, and in that way, give meaning and purpose and presence to our own lives.
Americans won’t like my answer because it requires a kind of humility. Americans think of themselves as masters, still, of slaves. They have no humility. They cannot kneel in the dirt and kiss the sky. The rest of us should learn the lesson of the 21st century, though, the one it is trying to teach us, with fire, flood, and plague.
We are not masters, and they are not slaves. We have no right to exploit and abuse life on this planet the way that we do, just because we can. It only makes our alienation and despair worse. Treating all life gently, with care and concern, is how we begin to make real sense of us, to find a purpose for us, to understand ourselves finally — walking apes, in such terrible pain — at long last.
We only ever walk beside each other the long, winding way home. All of us. The apes, on our two legs, the mammals, on four, the insects, flitting beside us. The rivers guide us to the sea. And as the oceans turn us back to water and dust, so the rain breathes us into the soil.
Umair
September 2020
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