Whether you believe that human beings were created by an all-powerful God in a universe designed for their sustenance and enjoyment or, on the other hand, that the universe Big Banged itself into existence, and humanity resulted from a long string of spontaneous chemical reactions and mutations and now occupies a lonely niche in an unfathomably huge emptiness, in either case, humans were never inevitable and their continued existence is not assured.
This somber notion serves as background for an article by Adam Kirsch in the current edition of The Atlantic. In “The End of Us” Kirsch describes two emerging schools of thought about the future of humanity:
“Anthropocene anti-humanism” holds that humans have thoroughly despoiled the only place in the universe that’s fit for them to live and that their elimination, suddenly by, say, nuclear war or gradually, then not-so-gradually, by climate change, is inevitable. But for anti-humanists, this is nothing to be regretted; the Earth will get along just fine without us. To imagine otherwise is a “symptom of human arrogance.”
