“Anthropos”

 “Anthropos” is the Greek word for “man” or “human.” Who or what is this Anthropos? In some Anthropocene literature, humans are referred to as “geological agents,” “geological forces,” or even as a “God species.” The first two metaphors emerged in the writings of Paul Crutzen, who also coined the term “Anthropocene” and was one of the first to argue that our cumulative behavior has ushered in a new geological age. “God Species” is the title of Mark Lynas’ 2011 book. As individuals, we probably don’t see ourselves as such but at a species level these metaphors reflect both our ingenuity and our shortsightedness, as our progress narrative continues to pressure the ecosystems that support us. Daniel Christian Wahl, whose influential work on regenerative design calls the old progress narrative of endless growth one of “degeneration.” He links its current iteration “to neoliberal economic globalization and a false separation between nature and culture along with the belief that humanity has some kind of dominion over the rest of the community of life.”

In other words, this narrative is fueled by increasing consumption and the extraction and pollution of resources that would take millions of years to regenerate.  In furthering a narrative of “reinhabiting the earth,” Wahl argues we need to learn to live within the means of each bioregion. However, “Before we can ask or answer appropriately what we need to do to create a sustainable human presence, or how we might go about doing it, we need to ask ourselves a more complicated question, a much more difficult question. What is it about human beings that makes us worth sustaining?” 

This means asking who or what Anthropos is and should be, which should be an ongoing inquiry. Without keeping this question in view, he argues that it is difficult to think soberly about our prospects or to avoid naively assuming a technological fix is at hand or to drown in “climate doomism.”

Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s penetrating articles on the Anthropocene raise the same question. He agrees with Eisenstein and many others on the need for a politics of intrahuman justice. He also argues that politics must be grounded in a new philosophical anthropology: a new understanding of the changing place of humans in the web of life and in the connected but different histories of the global and the planetary. In future writings and images, I will be working my way through Wahl’s fundamental question.

However, the framework for the philosophical anthropology Chakrabarty says we need already exists. The basics were articulated by early 20^th century German philosophers, such as Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, and more recently by Hans Blumenberg. Despite their differences, they began not with the nobility of reason as a defining characteristic of humans but with the simple fact that human animals are extremely vulnerable,  prematurely born creatures. Reason is a contingent adaptation.

So, despite our achievements, our survival as a species over the millennia necessitated becoming second-natured or enculturated as compensation for an extreme biological vulnerability. Each member of our species is born utterly helpless. Without extensive parenting and emotional attachment, which is simultaneously an enculturation that absorbs the narratives and customs of a specific region, we wouldn’t make it. Cooperation was and is still necessary. If we begin with this simple and obvious fact as a template, it is clear we are not and never have been masters of the universe. The clues to what we now need are in what made us possible as a species in our evolutionary history.

We are, as Roy Scranton wrote in his elegiac Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, “contingent adaptation[s] to particular circumstances,” a species that developed a “knack for symbolic communication” that depends on having developed both short-term and long-term memory. To return to Wahl’s question: Scranton gives us part of the answer when he argues that what may save us is memory. Part of becoming second-natured depends on having preserved learning from the past as a bridge to a future. There is no way to move forward without access to what is best from the past. Think about how long it must have taken our species to figure out which mushrooms were edible and then pass on this learning to descendants. Realistic planning is impossible without the conserving function of memory in its many forms. One of the most precious forms of memory is what we call the “humanities.”

Scranton argues: “As biological and cultural diversity is threatened across the world by capitalist monoculture and mass extinction, we must build arks: not just biological arks, to carry forward genetic data, but also cultural arks, to carry forward endangered wisdom…. The fate of the humanities, as we confront the end of modern civilization, is the fate of humanity itself” [109]. So, why have the humanities and the arts suffered the most from short-sighted budget cuts? Why are they just so much superfluous material a student must learn to get a degree? Why have we allowed the humanities to become so thoroughly discredited and mired in political disputes about censorship that we cannot see what they can teach us? Identity politics is covering up a much deeper issue—the fate of humanity. Of course, we need a critical eye when receiving the teachings of the past—but that is the gift immersion in the humanities can give us.