We observe in the news with some frequency heart-lifting acts that are arguably inspired by pure altruism.* These are usually situations that are highly localized and dramatic. We see first responders rushing toward the scene of a disaster, heedless of the perils that might await them; citizens rush into collapsed buildings, putting their own lives at risk, trying to save complete strangers; soldiers diving on hand grenades to save the lives of their comrades, and; average people plunging into raging floodwaters, or rushing into burning homes without any prospect of financial reward or recognition. This we tell ourselves is humanity at its best, exercising that most excellent of human values – – kindness – – and the spirit of self-sacrifice contained in the words that “greater love hath no man than he should lay down his life for his friend.”
Coexisting with this admirable human value, and perhaps far exceeding it in its consequences, is that other human capacity for intra-species cruelty and extermination. Beside the same newspaper column extolling the exploits of an altruist might well be a report of slaughter, torture, or genocidal behavior of one social group upon another. It is perplexing that the same member of the species that might rush into a building to save a child from certain death might elsewhere be rushing in a building to hack a child to death with a machete because it is the offspring of a different faith or race. A woman or elderly helpless people might just as easily be summarily executed. And, in that act supremely contrary to altruism, someone might turn themselves into a lethal bomb to kill and maim innocent bystanders out of the motivation of their own eternal reward.
None of this is new, or even startling; it’s in our face every day. But the purpose here in establishing this alpha and omega, these extremes of kindness and cruelty that are installed in our “humanity,” is to preamble the theme of this essay that is to consider the prospects for nothing less than the survival of the human species. It is no easy matter to consider, and some might aver at the outset that the survival of the species depends upon human kindness, and others might plausibly argue – – and this has been the prevailing argument – – that it requires the capacity to act with self-regard and violence. One dimension of the argument might well be that with the combination of rationality and a sense of commonweal, our planet can accommodate our species in peace and comfort. The other would allege that evolution has hardly worked in that manner in the past and that the pizza of plenty simply does not have enough slices to go around, and somebody is going to have to go to make room for others.
We’ve seen both of these scenarios time and again in movies and novels and television series, as well as documentaries. With globalization, interlinked economies, inter-continental ballistic weapons, and transportation systems that can vector a deadly terrorist or an innocent carrier of a lethal microbe, with human behaviors that are changing the temperature of the planet, the acidity of the oceans, the fundamental meteorological rhythms, the ecosphere might at any time reach your reversible tipping points that will call upon those human capacities for both kindness and cruelty as a feature in the forefront of our consciousness, and the everyday conduct of our lives.
At present most of us try to shut these chilling concerns aside and continue our daily lives, acting as if we didn’t know. It seems there is no more reason to dwell upon our collective extinction then it is upon our individual mortality. Life used to be, as someone put it, “nasty, short, and brutal”; for most of human history it has been, but ironically, at the very time that human advancement has reached the capacity to amend that adage, it might never come to be realized. This scary specter has even tapped the self-promoting “greatest nation in the history of the earth” on the shoulder in recent times. Although it might well have been an anomalous period, most of the 20th century America fed itself upon the idea that each generation would live better and longer than the previous. But that might just have been an upward pulse, a quantum leap in productivity and exploitation of earthly resources, not to discount the exploitation of colonialism that gave us the illusion that such disequilibrium was the order of the day.
But for others, survival is already uppermost in their minds, and what has come to be called “doomsday prepping”** has become a cottage industry – – abetted by that other industry of the production of firearms – – that bespeaks the less noble, but perhaps instructive social-psychological dimension of our humanity that inclines us, once confronted by the prospect that our resources and our lives are threatened, to “circle the wagons,” hunker down, and protect ourselves and what we regard as “ours.” There is little doubt in this writer’s mind that the perverted contortions of the Second Amendment to the Constitution and its almost maniacal results in firearm proliferation and ownership are considerably assisted by the implicit and explicit “prospects” that there are many “others” out there who want what’s “yours.”
We probably should also consider that other form of “doomsday prepping” called “endtimes prepping,” that the time is nigh when Jesus will come to collect the faithful and escort them whole and uncorrupt back to some eternal NASCAR event and barbeque in “paradise.” If you put doomsday and endtimes together, and it may well be that they do become fused in the minds of some survivalists, there is a bit of a dilemma posed by the apparent conflict between the Christian notion of self-sacrifice and that of the fundamentally human desire for self-preservation. Is that starving person rushing toward your door going to be invited in for agape, or should their belly blow out with your favorite automatic weapon?
I find the preppers and other survivalists interesting in another regard. They are, psychologically, the canaries in our coalmines of environmental consciousness. At this point they are hardly coherent in their premises; some believe that the survival times will result from environmental disaster, other political circumstances such as “Big Brother” government; others fear sun spots, cyber hacking of the power grid, immigrant groups and mass migrations, natural disasters, plagues, famines, nuclear Armageddon, alien invasions—you name it, pluck it from the Bible or Stephan King, they think they can prevail over it, especially if they can arm and fortify and prepare themselves to keep anybody else from getting what’s “theirs.”
It is also at this nexus that even the environmentalist narrative shares the inevitability of finality. Maybe the meta-systemic is that we cannot avoid the entropy–that we are not designed to go on forever, but just the current arrangement of carbon atoms at some point headed for re-cycle. If we look past all the naïve bullshit between Genesis and Revelations out to the universe such would be a compelling conclusion.
So, is there anything to be done? We could take evolution seriously, and we could take seriously that we are of the earth—earthlings—and Mars is not an option. We probably won’t, maybe can’t. So . . .
. . . get Prepped, or get Saved, . . . Oh, or Get Rich. That’s next.
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© 2013, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 5.10.2013)
*We can save for some other time the argument of whether or not there can be any such thing as pure altruism, where even the actor might be unaware of subconscious, subliminal, instinctual or eternal reward motivations for self-sacrifice.