By David Warden
David is chairman of Dorset Humanists, a partner group of Humanists UK. This article is based on a recent talk he gave to Dorset Humanists.
We're always berating ourselves these days. We berate ourselves for climate change, for inequality, for loss of biodiversity, for overpopulation, for pollution, for food waste, for cruelty to animals, for corruption, for hate speech, for populism, for war... The list goes on and on. No wonder we sometimes end up saying ‘the planet would be better off without us’, even entertaining serious doubts that we will make it to the end of the 21st century.
It's not entirely irrational to lay the blame for all these woes on the human species. But it is profoundly unhealthy psychologically. A therapist might say that humanity has fallen into an abusive relationship with itself. The most vulnerable victims of this abusive relationship are children. No wonder so many of them are suffering from poor mental health and existential anxiety.
Self-flagellation is a recurrent theme in the psychology of religion. Confessing your sins and lashing yourself until you bleed is an extravagant way to demonstrate your superior virtue. Conversely, if you do not confess your sins this shows wilful ignorance of your moral depravity. Immense moral pressure is, therefore, brought to bear on everyone to confess their sins and do some form of penance.
Humanists are forever campaigning against the influence of monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Islam but we do not always notice that, as traditional religions recede, new secular religions have hijacked the very same neural networks that supported the old religions. Environmentalism is a clear case of a new secular religion. Its sacred object is the Earth itself, sometimes referred to as the goddess Gaia. Human beings have sinned against this goddess through greed and hubris. Consequently, she is in a state of fever and perturbation, and this will inevitably lead to a biblical Apocalypse in a few short years. There will be floods, fires, droughts, and pestilence. We must confess our sins, repent of our evil ways, and get back into a right relationship with Mother Earth. Any small offering will help, such as recycling your plastic milk bottles or paying cash indulgences to offset your carbon emissions. But more strenuous efforts would be better, such as giving up flying, eating a plant-based diet, and wearing sackcloth and ashes (OK, I borrowed the last bit from John the Baptist). Anyone who dissents from this new religion can be denounced as a ‘climate denier’ and campaigners are calling for corporations which harm the planet to be held criminally responsible.
There is, of course, a perfectly rational case to be made for taking care of the environment. But making a religion out of the environment can hardly be recommended as a humanist response. The ancient Stoics advised that we should try to see things in proper perspective. For example, the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, described ‘the whole Earth as a speck’. In 1990, a photograph of the Earth was taken by Voyager 1 from a distance of 3.7 billion miles from the Sun, inspiring the scientist Carl Sagan to describe our planet as a ‘pale blue dot’. The Earth is precious but it is not a goddess. It is a dangerous planet which is utterly indifferent to our existence, and indeed to the existence of any life-form. We are the lucky inhabitants of a brief interglacial period in the long-running Pleistocene Ice Age which is poised to bury us under ice-sheets a mile thick in the not-to-distant future. The Earth is not being bombarded by asteroids but occasionally it drowns hundreds of thousands of people in random tsunamis and crushes innocent children in earthquakes. Extreme weather events have always occurred. Manmade climate change does not cause such events. It merely makes them somewhat more extreme and somewhat more frequent. Without greenhouse gases we would freeze to death, and without CO2 all plants would die and so would we. The Earth is a fussy planet, reacting to a minute increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration from 0.028% (pre-industrial) to 0.042% (current).
The campaign group Extinction Rebellion warns us in lurid apocalyptic terms that humanity is poised on the verge of extinction. Well of course we are. Every other hominin species from Australopithecus to Homo Neanderthalensis has gone extinct. Homo sapiens has been around for a mere nanosecond in terms of geological time and in another nanosecond we will be gone. The human species, as well as every individual human being, is mortal. The Sun itself is mortal, as is the entire universe. In terms of Stoic philosophy, extinction is nothing to get worked up about.
‘Imagine the vast abyss of time, and think of the entire universe; then compare what we call a human lifetime to that immensity. You will see how tiny a thing it is that we wish for and seek to prolong’. Seneca the Younger, Epistles 99.10
‘Do not overlook how short are the lives of all mortal things, and how insignificant – yesterday a little blob of mucus, tomorrow a mummy or ashes’. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.48
Another Stoic insight is that attachment to things beyond our control is a form of slavery – the remedy is to focus on what we can control. None of us can solve all of the world's problems. So yes, it is virtuous to recycle our milk bottles and avoid extravagant consumption. But we should not fret about the fate of the planet. The planet will look after itself until it is incinerated by the Sun.
No doubt the Stoics will be criticised for inculcating a sense of indifference. They did indeed recommend that we should be ‘indifferent’ to ‘externals’ – things beyond our control – so as to maintain an inner state of tranquillity and equilibrium. But at the same time, they also taught that to live a virtuous life we should be engaged in public affairs. After all, both Seneca and Marcus Aurelius were Roman statesmen. Their unique philosophical perspective was in helping us to get the right balance between doing what we can – attending to those things which are under our control – at the same time as not getting too worked up about outcomes which are mostly beyond our control. If we commit to practising this Stoic wisdom, then we are likely to be rewarded with less anguish about the state of the world and with more wellbeing.
As humanists, we should not wish for the human race to eliminated. That fate will come soon enough. We have been thrown into existence by evolution. Our brains are weird contraptions and we're still working out how to optimise them. We are a humble ape, but we are also capable of magnificent achievements like composing symphonies and flying to the moon. We should not be too harsh on ourselves. Let us live virtuous lives and enjoy our brief span of eternity.
‘Here is the result of wisdom: a constant and unvarying kind of joy.’ ‘So long as we draw breath, so long as we live among humans, let us cherish humanity.’ Seneca, Epistles, 59.16; On Anger, 3.43.5
Further reading and references
The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual (2018) by Ward Farnsworth, a professor at the University of Texas.
CO2 levels from NASA Earth Observatory and NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory.
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