The Fatal Flaw at the Heart of Our Civilization
Unless We Have a Great Transformation, We Face Three Decades of Collapse
"But what is he?" I asked, frustrated. My mind hurt. I need to figure things out, or else I go a little crazy. And this was one question that I couldn't figure out. Nothing seemed to fit.
"Well," the kid sis, aka the editor in chief, replied, furrowing her brow, taking a long moment to reflect, "he's a…he's a person."
"Ahhhhh." I sighed in sweet relief. A buddy? A friend? A toddler? A child? My child? All of the answers I'd come up with were true, but only in a small way. Inadequate, not developed, not true enough. The correct answer was as simple as it was elegant. My little doggy. What was he? He was a person.
Forgive me. I know that you probably know this. But I only had a little friend later on in life. I'm slow, sometimes. OK, much of the time, my lovely wife would say.
We're going to talk about the future, why it seems to be going wrong, how to fix it, and to do that, we're going to have to talk about the past. And to do that, it all begins with my little buddy, and maybe yours, too.
What is this thing called human civilization, at its root? It's a long, long struggle for personhood.
Today, you can see that struggle writ large. The forces of regress — the ones who want to undo civilisation, the fascists, Trumpists, Brexiters, and so forth — want to unmake personhood. They want to make minorities less than human again, not to mention women, the LGBT, and so on.
They are ascendant in the world today. Even if Trump has finally been defeated, Trumpism hardly has. Why are the forces of regress and barbarism ascendant? Why is this an age of little fires of fascism everywhere? Because the forces of progress have forgotten that civilisation is the struggle for personhood. For always advancing it, expanding it, enlarging it.
Let me explain that super abstract point, which might not really make sense yet.
In the beginning of the thing we call human civilization, there were three kinds of groups. First came kings, who were more than human. Then came nobles, who were human. And then came everyone else — serfs and peasanst, who were not fully human, and slaves, who were less than human. This form of society was lopsided: persons made up a tiny, tiny minority. And those who were full persons could do whatever they wanted to everyone else, more or less, whether they were nobles in Europe, or samurai in Japan.
It took millennia for an age of revolutions to come about — in the 18th century — and personhood finally began trickling down. At last, more people were persons. Men, with enough money and land. After another half century or so, most men become persons — if they were the right skin colour. Another half century, and after a long, long struggle, women began to be persons, too. And after another long, bitter struggle, finally, minorities were recognised as person, like, for example, during the era of civil rights in America. And after that came the turn of the LGBT.
That's the story of human civilisation in one paragraph. Do you see how it has everything to do with expanding personhood, enlarging it, so that it's boundaries stretch outwards? That is how the fundamental values of civilisation — decency, kindness, truth, beauty, fairness, goodness — grow. And when we don't expand those values, the forces of regress tend to resurface — and win, because this struggle is perpetual, as Camus pointed out.
So are we done? Is that it? To human civilization? The long struggle is over, now that minorities and women and the LGBTQ are recognized as persons — beginning to be, anyways? Let me ask that a different way.
Why isn't the centre left fighting anymore to expand the boundaries of personhood? The answer is that it believes that we have reached the end of history — that the struggle has been won, and there is nowhere left to take personhood now.
But it is wrong — badly wrong. Believing in ends of history is always a mistake.
Where personhood must go from here is, in one sense, painfully obvious.
The planet is burning. We are in an age of mass extinction. The earth's great ecologies are reaching tipping points, from which there's no return. And all that is because personhood is still barely an inkling of what it should be. At the same time, more than half the world lives without decent food, water, sanitation, healthcare, education. Humanity, too, is not fully granted personhood yet, either.
Snowy — that's him in the pic above — does something funny and strange. Something so human that I can't help understand that he really is a person. He won't do his business if anyone's around — especially not if anyone's looking at him. Which they tend to do, because, well, he's supercute. Now, a scientist might say — "that's just an animal protecting himself from being too vulnerable!" But…and here's the point…what about you? I'd bet that you can't exactly do your business when people are staring at you, either. You're not so different.
In other words, like Snowy, you have an innate sense of dignity. Of shame and guilt, and also of empathy, belonging, grace, truth, meaning, love, beauty. You don't have to try to be these things. You just are. Snowy will be your friend, if you are his friend. It's the most natural thing in the world for him. He will recognize you as a person, if you recognize him as one. Do you see what I mean a little bit?Snowy passes both my tests of personhood. He has it, and he can give it. But we are failing this test of personhood. We are not giving it as much as we should. When we go for our little daily walks, I pass by the old, old trees, on the street where the college is. I wonder: why don't they have names? They've been here longer than any of us have. Perhaps you see what I mean.
In 1972, James Lovelock offered the Gaia Hypothesis. What if, he asked, the earth was alive? I don't know if I "believe" the Gaia hypothesis. That's a very American way to put it. A religious one. Educated minds, enlightened ones — they contemplate, reflect, entertain, think about. I contemplate what the Gaia hypothesis might mean. And it leads me to another question.
What if the earth was a person? I mean: how would our world change institutionally, politically, socially, culturally, if we recognised the earth as a person?
Well, one thing we'd immediately begin to see is that this person is a slave. One thing that "civilization is always expanding the boundaries of personhood outwards" means is that we are always faced with new slaveries. And the first kind of slavery of the 21st century is about nature. We enslave it. If the earth were a person to us, it would be a person who did most of our work — provided our water, air, food, and medicine — but received less than nothing in return. It wasn't paid for the work it did — and so how could it sustain itself? It had few rights, if any, and mostly, they were superceded by our right to abuse and exploit it, however we wished. Is it any surprise, then, that just like a slave, nature is in shock, terrorized, traumatized, dying slowly?
If we recognised the earth was our slave — but should be a person — then our systems would have to change. All of them. Our economics could no longer be built on the foolish idea of GDP — which counts profits, but not, say, the species going extinct to provide them — and "stock markets" booming, while life on earth begins to go extinct. We'd need to reinvent our economies wholesale — at a conceptual level, not just with money.
Our politics would have to change radically, too. We'd need to probably have parliaments with Speakers for the Earth. Endow this person with constitutional rights — make it free and equal and deserving of fairness, which is what personhood is — and then grant it representation, too. Imagine that the Speaker for the Earth could get up and object, every time some Senator who's a well-paid corporate shill demands more of the planet and life on it to abuse, exploit, and enslave.
That's how we begin to have a livable planet again — through this kind of deep change. A Green New Deal is good, but it's a band aid for a civilisation that has stopped being one, stopped expanding personhood outwards, so the forces of regress are winning.
Let's go further still. How would our societies have to change? I often wonder why our cities are so…ugly. Recognising the earth as a person would mean what some call "rewilding" our cities. Letting animals and plants thrive, and learning to live beside them, making space for them, instead of simply concreting over them. Why is it that you have to travel to a zoo to "see" animals"? Why don't they just get to live in parks, on every block?
"LOL," you might say, "Umair! Grow up!! What's the point of that?" I'm coming to that. How do you think that would affect us — being closer to a planet we recognised as a person, instead of walking apes living in isolation in concrete and steel bunkers?
We'd be much, much happier. More peaceful. More pleasant and kind and empathic and generous and loving.
No, I'm not kidding. That's what having a little buddy, a dog or a cat, does to a person — tons of research proves that. Want to be happier? Get a pet, not just a shrink. But the lesson is profound. We are alienated things, living in our shining towers of glass and steel, in our concrete cities and suburbs. We're deeply unhappy as a civilization, and it shows in everything we do. In our addiction to anti-depressants — can you think of another species like that? — in our constant need for dumb, violent escapism, in our endless wars, in our susceptibility to superstition, in our need for the acquisition of shiny things to fill the gaping hole in our lives.
We have a life-shaped hole in our lives, my friends, and it exists because we live in such a way that nature is not really part of it. Put nature into it — even in the way of a tiny pet — and our sense of happiness and meaning and fulfilment all skyrocket. That says, too, though, that our way of life needs to be redesigned.
Why does our happiness and meaning and fulfilment go hand in hand with nature? And by nature, I don't just mean "animals" or "woods." I even mean a dancefloor. Something as simple as that.
The answer goes like this.
We're social beings. That's our nature. And the more social that we are, the more happiness, meaning, and fulfilment we're capable of. Those things come from having social bonds, from enacting them, from expressing them, from enlarging them.
Now think about us through that lens. Excising nature from our lives with an industrial-age scalpel, what have we really done? We've massively reduced our own sociality, which just means we've massively limited our own chances at happiness and meaning and fulfillment. One, we live in isolation. Two, we don't have the opportunity for sociality with the planet, for relationships with nature.
Remember those trees on my block with no name? That's a lost relationship. But Snowy's become a part of the naeighborhood. Everybody smiles when they see him. "Hi, Snowy!" they say. That's sociality becoming happiness, in vivid reality. Do you see what I mean a little bit when I say that bringing nature back into our lives is how we expand sociality, and since we are social beings, that is how our own happiness and meaning and fulfilment grow?
I stay up all night, because the light can kill me. And standing by the window at night, as Snowy sleeps, I smoke a cigarette, and a clever little fox walks by. At 3AM, every single night. Doing his nightly rounds for food. I chuckle. Another little guy. But why does he have to live in fear, skulking around? Why doesn't he have a real place, a protected space, to live on my block, too? Wouldn't that be better for everyone — making the kids happy, the parents, the dogs, and so forth, all a little happier, closer? Why don't they greet him by name? Why isn't he part of us?
The answer is that we walking apes have fallen prey to a dangerous delusion. We imagine that we're supreme. You might not be a racist, but I bet you believe in human supremacy. The idea that you're better than, above, an "animal." Are you? Who said so? Just because our species destroys everything it touches? How is that "better"? In what sense, really, are you any more of a person than a dolphin, a dog, a tree, or a little fox? They all feel just the same things you feel. They all communicate and emote and know and love and bond and touch and want and live and die. Just as you will, one day.
How much happier would you be if you recognised all of them as just like you? You wouldn't be so alienated, and so you wouldn't be so unhappy.
Human supremacy is a toxin. It bears no fruit. It isolates us, limits us, restrains us, while justifying the slavery of the 21st century, which is the annihilation of our world. We aren't supreme. We are just here, like everyone else. And all of us — fish, forests, reefs, rivers — are people.
Until we recognize that — really recognize it, reshaping our world politically, economically, socially, culturally, my guess is this. We'll go on being the violent, brutal, walking apes who destroy everything they touch. Maybe, finally, including themselves. Their violence comes from their loneliness, their isolation, their sense of meaninglessness. Not a single God they've ever invented, the walking apes, has reduced their capacity for violence one iota. Think about that for a second. Not one. Nothing has. So what can? Just being here, like the rest of everything living. Learning to recognize every single life has dignity, worth, purpose, and truth, too. Then, as our happiness grows, as our sense of meaning and fulfilment expand, maybe our need for violence, to enslave and exploit and terrorize, finally declines, too.
Human supremacy is the fatal error our civilisation has made. Will it be the one that finishes us off?
Let me connect those final two ideas. The more people — recognized persons — that there are in our society, the more opportunities for happiness there are for all. Think about the LGBT. Before, they weren't people. Poof — opportunities for happiness lost. Today, they can marry, date, romance, share — that's personhood creating happiness.
We are deeply unhappy beings, us walking apes, because our opportunities for happiness are so small. It shows, in us being a civilisation that is still — still — built on violence, on slavery, on abusiveness. Of nature, and also of the half of the world that doesn't have a decent life, while 1% of it has too much. How do we change all this? Fix it? Redress the balance?
The time has come to recognize the world as a person, too. To employ the half of humanity that doesn't have enough in better things than being neo-slaves earning pittances for making baubles for the 10% of the world that enslaved them. Neither of these parties should be exploited and abused like slaves — the planet, or the half of humanity that still doesn't have enough. Recognising them both as full persons is how our own opportunities for happiness expand — those of us in rich societies, anyways.
That's a lot of ideas for one essay. Maybe they're a little too disconnected, I don't know. I hope you get, a little bit, the spirit of what I am trying to say to you. If you want me to sum it up more simply, take a look at the pic above. Little puppy, big world. That's not just Snowy. That's me and you, too.
Umair
November 2020
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