IMPERIAL SPECIES

1 Progress and collapse

The end of all flesh is come before us. But we are too swept up in our greed to see what’s in front of our face. Look on the dead earth. This is our work. This is what our hands have made, and we find it all very good. Here is the fruit of progress. But a dark time is on the way. We can see it close at hand. But we have to shut our eyes to it, since we don’t care to stop it, as we trust that it won’t come till we are gone. From now on the end of the earth ought to be the starting point of all our thinking. But this is the one theme that no one can bear to think of.

The human race has as bright a future as all the old master races, which thought they could spread their righteous rule over the benighted globe.

2 Our lethal resilience

It is our own invulnerability that has made the earth so fragile. Nothing can kill us, and so we are bound to kill it. Fire one year, flood the next, but we come through it all with heavier pockets and lighter hearts.

We will need all our resilience to get us through the havoc that our resilience will cause. And as we grow more resilient, we will live in a constant state of emergency.

We can live through any disaster, so why should we care if we make the earth unliveable for all the species which are not so resilient?

What does not kill us makes us willing to kill all that might get in the way of us staying alive.

We no longer need to adapt to our environment. We know how to adapt every environment to our own needs, and in so doing we will lay it waste. And the only one that we won’t be able to will be the paradise that we have shaped for our own use.

If a thing needs to be saved, then it must be well past saving.

The suicide of our species will come too late to save the earth.

3 Do we deserve to survive?

Each generation will grow more predatory, more restless and more distracted than the last, more rootless and more plugged-in, more disembodied yet more in thrall to its gross cravings, more solipsistic and more connected, more helpless to quash the giddy wishes that will wreck it, too weak to save itself, and not worth saving.

Our predominance will prove that we lacked the wisdom to know how to wield it. Human kind will soon die, but not till it has shown by all its brutal and sordid triumphs that it does not deserve to live.

Having pillaged the planet so heedlessly, why would we deserve to live through its jaunty holocaust?

Once human kind has gained the power to indulge its least whim, it will at last get exactly what is coming to it. But how it will squeal when it soon gets what it deserves.

Having put nature and art to the torch, the one decent thing we could do now is to throw ourselves on the pyre.

4 Our infatuation with progress and power

We gauge our own power by how heavily we press on the earth and by how much room we take up in it. Why would we want to touch the ground lightly? We want to make it feel our full weight. And we are proud that we can force it to yield so pliably to our brutal manipulation. Our self-importance grows with our girth.

We used to be exasperated by the helplessness which hemmed us in, now we are awed by the might which will bring us down.

All the things that add to our power bring us nearer to our end. And all that we now care for are the things that add to our power.

Having ruined the earth by our power, we hope to repair it by finding ways of using ever more power. And we now have so much of it, that we provoke the very threats that we are so afraid of.

5 Progress and our doomed omnipotence

Our last idol will prove to be the exterminating godhead that we have made of our own omnipotence.

Our homicidal kind, unyoked from all its oppressions, has set itself up as the sanctimonious autocrat of the wide earth, which it will keep on ravaging till it rebels.

‘All men,’ as Defoe wrote, ‘would be tyrants if they could,’ and now each tame feeder can. The aim of democracy is to raise each one of us to the greedy beatitude which despots alone used to enjoy. Any leader now who dares to interfere with our tyrannical whims must be a tyrant.

Our omnipotence will soon reduce us to impotence. And our pitiless arrogance will leave us abject and self-pitying.

Having sent the gods to their dim graves, we will soon flex our godlike might by abolishing all the rest of life. And so we will die alone in omnipotent desolation.

Our machines lend us a divine power which we make worse use of than any devil could.

When people have at last got hold of the power to achieve any end they want, they will use every end as a means to get more power, and that will be the end of them. They will soon have procured a might as limitless as their desires, and they will use it to lay waste the earth.

6 The progress of the imperial species

We are an imperial species, and every place on earth is now ripe for our exploiting. The empire of human freedom and power will be the last and most extortionate empire of all. And it will soon go the way of all empires, and will die by its own overreach. Our domination of nature will leave us more vulnerable than ever to its deadly force. Human kind may set itself only those problems that it can solve, as Marx said, but by its control of the earth it will goad nature to set it problems that it can’t solve.

By using mind to control matter, progress will at last extend the dominion of brute matter to all things of the spirit.

Since all things exist in time and so must change over time, they must have a history. But as soon as nature came to be part of human history, it ceased to have a future. And though we now have a more modest view of our place in nature, there will soon be no place for nature in our world.

The most noxious invasive species on every continent has been the white race.

7 Colonizing the galaxy

Having rendered this accursed orb uninhabitable, we dream of forsaking it and infecting the rest of the solar system with our taint. And having wrecked this earth by colonizing all four corners of it, we plan to save our ravening breed by colonizing the galaxy. Once we have turned this Eden to a garbage dump, we will quit it to found our paradise among the constellations, and export our kitsch to new planets, and turn them into garbage tips. We reach for the stars, and drag down the sky on our heads.

Having turned this paradise to a lifeless desert, we hope to settle some lifeless desert and turn it to a paradise.

Having killed off all the lesser breeds of life on earth, we sweep the cosmos in search of the superior ones which will be more worthy of our intercourse.

We act like earth’s spoilt brats, sulkily set on mangling it if it won’t disgorge all that we demand. We will wear out the old earth in our vain striving to slake our thirst for unstopping novelty. This planet is our plaything. We will break it and scrap it and get a new one.

8 Our frantic progress will kill us

We may be doing the best we can, but if that’s the case, it would be better if we gave up and did nothing at all.

Nothing can save us, since nothing can stop us. We all spin like tops, knowing that if we slowed down, we would totter and fall. The earth can’t be saved, since we can be coaxed to do better but not to do less. And there’s no money to be made from persuading people to stay put and be content with what they’ve got. We would rather do anything at all than do nothing. And we would rather run mad than slow down. ‘If a soldier or labourer complains of working too hard,’ Pascal proposed, ‘try giving them nothing to do.’

We are all getting so much out of life, that we don’t aspire to do better, and can’t bear to do less.

We think that we will be saved when we have got more of the things that we crave, freedom, growth and machinery. But these are the things that we need to be saved from. And the things that might save us are the things that we recoil from, repression, restraint and simplicity.

NATURE’S END

9 Progress to the end

Our relations with the virgin earth began as repeated and aggravated rape, and will soon end in a murder-suicide. By the time Jesus comes back to judge the living and the dead, we will already have passed judgement on our own kind by annihilating it.

Human kind was set on committing suicide from the first. All that it lacked was the means. And progress supplies it with no end of these. Nothing now could save the earth from human kind or human kind from itself.

Tradition was a cult of the dead. Progress will prove to be a frenetic cult of death.

Our war on nature has entered its triumphal phase. All that remains is to mop up the bedraggled remnant. But all our victories will prove to be pyrrhic, and one more will be enough to break us.

A few hundred years of hectic progress will soon put a stop to four billion years of patient evolution.

Any kindness that we show the earth will merely drag out its agony.

The earth was doomed, the day that the first crop was sown. We have been living in the end times since the beginning.

Civilization makes progress by devising the innovations which will speed it to its ruin.

Civilization was the brief phase that we forced nature to pass through on its way to becoming garbage.

10 Our nature will end nature

In order to put an end to nature, all we need do is stay true to our own nature. God help any cause that’s so weak that it has to rely on human nature for its success.

The little that is left of our own nature will soon make an end of the little that is left of the rest of nature.

The indomitable human spirit will soon beat down all that stands in the way of our self-destruction.

We talk as if there were no form of life on earth but our own, and soon there won’t be. In a short time the whole globe will be humanized. And soon after that it will be dead.

It is said that the solution to our problems lies in the human heart. But that’s part of the problem. The human heart is programmed to prefer technocratic solutions.

Since nature has doomed each of us to die, why should we care if we blast it with a universal death?

We are so cut off from nature, that we dream that we want to go back to it. And now that we have wrecked it beyond repair, we hope soon to restore it to its pristine purity.

11 The wild and the tamed

We are genially reducing the earth to a vast labour camp and a vast death camp. We cram it with breeds that live and die for us, while fecklessly extirpating the rest. So we hold out to the beasts an unenviable choice, feed us, amuse us, or die. But we will pamper the tame remnant in zoos and kennels as our near equals, once we have rid the world of all the untameable ones. And the only wild things that will survive are those that learn to scavenge off our refuse.

We love wild nature, now that we have tamed and gutted it. And what tender moments of communion we will share with it, as we squeeze the life out of it.

We picture the world as a garden, because we assume that all the things in it are made for our use.

By the time that we learn to live at one with all living things, they will all be dead.

We might not quite succeed in emptying the globe of all life, but we will at least fill it with the worst sort. Having killed off all the wolves and lions, our fate is to be devoured by vermin.

The wild beasts were a benediction to us. But we have been nothing but a scourge to them.

Nature is a slum which we have bulldozed to make way for our gleaming new city of progress.

12 Progress to a virtual nature

As the green world goes to rack, instead of cherishing its last frail traces, we more and more hanker for the synthetic and the virtual. Our devices add to our dominance, while distancing us from real life. By the time that we put an end to the real world, it will have so long faded from our view, that we won’t so much as remark its passing. We will be rocketing too fast for the report of its perishing to reach our ears. And we will haunt like white ghosts the death agony of this tormented globe.

We are too rapt up in documenting and photographing our own fabulous lives to perceive that we are killing off all life around us. Our machines are gnostic angels which will soon deliver us from the toils of this earth.

The world was never real for us. And never have we been so absorbed in the world as we are now. But the world that absorbs us is not the real world. It is the thin but vivid world of our fantasies which we scroll through on our screens. And soon we will empty the earth of all the kinds of life for which it was real.

The camera replaced art with a gaudy yet mechanical realism. And now it is replacing the real world with a thin image of itself.

13 The fiction of nature

Our love of nature is one of the fictions that we cling to while we are reducing nature to a fiction. And wildlife are imaginary beings which we are fond of viewing on our screens.

In books what we like is tragedies that end happily, as Howells said. But in life we are manufacturing a paradise that will end in devastation.

Now that nature is long done with, in the wake of each natural disaster that we cause we lament the loss of pristine nature.

We have to hope that stories will save us, since we want to keep on doing the things that we think make good stories of our lives. And all these spell bad news for the earth.

We have to act as if we could save the earth by telling stories, since all the plain facts make it clear that it is doomed.

GREED

14 Greedy apocalypse

Our avarice is preparing for us a humane and prosaic armageddon.

We have drawn fire down from heaven, and we will use it to burn up the earth. Our promethean greed will put out the stars, and poison the pure air.

We prefer to be rich hirelings than poor and free. We refuse to submit to a voluntary poverty. So the maimed and broken earth will soon force us to submit to a compelled one. Human kind will live on as a residue of harried scavengers, roaming in a vast red desert, preyed on by implacable nomadic bandits.

Our greed for more and more life will soon make an end of all life. Our age of barren affluence will soon give place to a far worse age of barren havoc.

15 Natural capital

Democracy and capitalism work as unerring counters to register and indulge worldwide cupidity and solipsism. So they are sure to wreak on us our doom. They are steadily grinding down the planet. But since we can’t steel ourselves to give them up, we have to put our trust in them to save it. And so they will be brought down not by a proletarian revolution but by the earth which they are oppressing. Their eradication won’t be the mere overthrow of one class by another but will spell the elimination of our whole kind. The system of capital will kill the planet before a downtrodden caste can rise up to kill it.

Is human kind a tool that capitalism is using to wreck the earth? Or is capitalism a tool that the earth is using to rid itself of human kind? Capitalism does not promote the flourishing of human kind. It promotes the flourishing of capital at the expense of human kind and of the earth.

Capitalism does not raise up its own gravediggers by consolidating the proletariat as a class, as Marx claimed. It digs its own grave by scarifying the face of the earth.

As Marx wrote, ‘No social order ever comes to an end before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed.’ And all the colossal forces set in train by the needs of capital won’t have developed to the full till they have devoured the whole earth.

16 Progress will eat the innocent earth

Our innocent greed will soon eat up the innocent earth. It is the beasts that know not what they do, and so they are bound to fall as prey to us, who know all too well.

The world belongs to us. So we must have the right to smash it and snatch the small shard of it that we want. This earth, pure and unprotected, is just the quarry to tantalize our bullying greed. But as Faulkner prophesied, ‘The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.’ We have shown the land no justice. So it will soon show us no mercy. It will visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of us who hate it.

The all-consuming gods of silver and gold are unifying the globe in their frantic worship. We do homage to earth’s maker by ravaging what he has made.

How many Edens did we have to desecrate, to found this barren paradise of consumers?

17 More will be less

The law of nature is growth. But we will wear out nature because we have found an unnatural means to an unnatural form of growth.

People have to keep growing richer, so that they will be able to pay to repair the earth which they have wrecked to grow so rich. But they are too greedy to stop and fix anything.

Money and machines will brutalize the earth before they have time to soften and civilize us.

Our social drive to compete exceeds our natural urge to survive.

Human kind is entering on the golden age of Midas. Its lust for more will doom it to lose the lot. It will stop at nothing to get all that it wants, and so nothing will be all that it will get.

By making more of everything, we are bound to make everything worse.

18 Electrifying the planet

Human beings are animals that have learnt how to harness forms of energy other than their own food. And so we cease to live in the here and now, and migrate to a future of restless accumulation.

Our mastery of electricity has brought an end to civilization, and will soon bring an end to life on earth. It replaced civilization with kitsch, and will soon replace a living planet with a dead one.

When we can generate all the clean, cheap, renewable power that we want, we will burn up the earth faster than ever, though in an impeccably sustainable way.

What steam was to factory capitalism, electricity is to consumer capitalism. It supercharges its buying and selling. And so we, its willing dupes, lose interest in anything that does not run on electricity. And we will have to turn the earth into a vast dynamo to provide us with more and more of it.

What a profusion of physical inputs it requires to keep a disembodied mind running. The future of humanity is a sum that doesn’t add up.

The world began with God’s creation of light, and it will soon come to an end now that we have learnt to use electricity.

19 No restraints to progress

We must choose between self-restraint and self-destruction. But the choice has already been made for us by the system over which we have no control, which will destroy us by freeing us from all our restraints.

The fatal syllogism. Human kind could be saved from annihilation only by restraining itself. Human kind will not brook the least restraint. Therefore human kind cannot be saved from annihilation.

Our species is out of control. It would rather kill itself than control itself. And the sole kind of restraint that it will put up with is the one that promises more self-indulgence in the future.

We are wrecking the earth because we can. And we won’t stop because we can’t.

Our desires are so unnatural and immoderate, that only ignorance and repression can keep them within the pale of nature.

We are too weak to resist our cravings. But we will be bold enough to ransack the whole globe in our rage to feed them.

Our collective illusions used to hold us back. Now the atomized dreams of our greed lash us on.

Any species or society that rises above subsistence won’t stop till it has devoured the earth.

We are willing to squander our lives but not to scant our fidgeting desires.

We now have the means to end ourselves, and we lack the restraint to save ourselves.

20 Plenty and progress

Scarcity was an economic challenge. Plenty is an ecological disaster. Scarcity kept us in chains. Plenty gorge us till we burst.

Having been so long oppressed by famine and scarcity, we are now merrily oppressing the rest of creation to snatch our brief day of plenty. The old dreams of abundance will soon come true as a nightmare of squalid planetary immiseration. As private greed produces collective prosperity, so now collective prosperity gives rise to global carnage.

The first and only one of God’s commands that we gave heed to was to replenish the earth and subdue it. And by doing so we wrecked the rest of creation.

Mass consumerism is ravaging the planet. And all we can think of to repair it is to consume in more benign ways.

The only solutions that we have for our global problems are the slogans of the same global greed that is poised to end us. And the best course that we can think of to save the planet is to mouth the catchcries that are urging us on to wreck it.

Democracy auctions the land’s extorted plunder to pay for its heyday of luxuriance.

Human kind is so prudent, that it will bankrupt even inexhaustible nature. Prudence will waste all its vast resources more thoroughly than prodigality could have done.

A species that can turn everything to its own profit is bound to blow it all.

21 The diseases of progress

In the past people used to be prey to the diseases of want, but from now on they will be prey to the diseases of affluence. They lay out vast sums of money and ingenuity to treat illnesses for which there is no cure. But they are too lazy and self-indulgent to avoid the conditions which they so easily could.

To find cures for the diseases that shorten human life is to feed the disease that is devouring all life.

How droll to watch a culture that is killing itself and the earth from too much love of life wring its hands over a suicide or euthanasia here or there.

22 Those who love it will destroy it

We love life so much, that we won’t hesitate to kill all of it, just to tear one more bleeding hunk from its flank to feed our hunger for it.

The natural will to live makes unnatural monsters of us all.

Our frantically life-affirming society will force a final ruin on the earth. It clings to life while hurtling on to a destruction of its own making. It is those who love life that will soon bring it to its unlovely end. We clench it so tightly that we are crushing it. We love this life that is killing us, and we are killing this life that we love.

The ride has never felt so fast and exhilarating as now when we are rollicking pell-mell downhill. And woe to anyone who would dare to put a brake on our hard-driving haste.

We shall perish as the helpless casualties of our own insuperable compulsions.

The young wreck the world to snatch their cut of it. And dotards wreck the world since they will soon be departing it.

23 Life feeds on life

We are sure that we have everything to live for. And so we won’t scruple to kill everything in order to go on living.

How thoughtful of God, to have set in train five mass extinctions, in order to make way for us, so that we can unleash a sixth and final one to end all life for good.

God at last found out that the most deadly force in the universe is life itself, and that a form of life that is aware of its place in the world will leave no place for all the rest.

Human kind cannot fulfil all its capacities without destroying itself and all the rest of life.

24 Loving nature to death

Only a being that lives at a safe distance from nature could love it.

In order to enjoy the simple and natural, you need to have the wherewithal to live out of range of their unpleasantness.

Our preference for a planet teeming with life may be a mere prejudgment in favour of what piques our interest because it is like us. And it’s a preference which we in our destructive perversity are doing our best to frustrate. Life is a mere local infestation on an out of the way planet. Earth is no more beautiful than Saturn or Mars, but we will make it quite a bit uglier. It is a dung heap, and we are the maggots that make it writhe.

25 Our ugly desires

We are recreating the plentiful land in our own worst likeness, flat, wasted, withered, sere and stunted. Soon we will have made it as ugly as our heart’s desire.

We will devour all that is fresh in our frenzy to feed fat our stale desires. And our ravening inanity will eat up the round earth in order to fill itself.

The world with which we will smother the earth will be as dull and heavy as concrete, and as slick and light as plastic.

People don’t know what they want, but they will despoil the dappled world to grab as much of it as they can. Their schemes are as mean as they are peremptory and rapacious. For such small bait they will chew up the multitudinous world. They harpoon great whales, to whittle their bones to make walking sticks.

Our mean greed will soon drain the broad earth of its unfailing bounty. We swarm like a battalion of ants on the carcass of some great bull. Yet when the carrion earth wriggles with ten billions of us, it will seem to us more alive than ever.

The last dark day will dawn on mortals still dreaming of plunder and scrabbling to wring some reckless profit from the gangrened earth. They will be too busy rummaging the corpse to grieve for the life that they have murdered.

Our society acts like a lunatic, barrelling along, ranting incoherently, wild eyes fixed on some non-existent goal.

26 The wreck of perfection

To flee their personal torments, people feel that they have the right as a species to scourge the planet. They will turn the earth to a hell, to air-condition their private inferno.

We will make the worst of everything by scrabbling to get the best for ourselves. Each of us is bent on bettering our own small nook, and we will end up strewing the whole globe with ash and rubble. In order to make our own little life charming, we will make the lush earth desolate. And we will smash it to smithereens in our madness to make our own puny and broken lives whole.

We can’t so much as tend our gardens without poisoning the soil. All of us can now claim our place in the sun, though we may find it a bit too hot for our liking. As Emerson exclaimed, ‘What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would.’

HAPPINESS

27 The rapacity of happiness

The search for happiness is a grand pretext for the untrammelled indulgence of our greed.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for us spell death, bondage and woe for the earth. They are the ideology of an age so caught up in accruing the means to freedom and happiness that it will never live free and happy. And we bring misery on the earth in our mad chase after happiness which leaves none of us any happier.

We have strip-mined the earth to manufacture the small disposable article of human happiness.

This earth is dying, and we are having a high old time doing all the things that are killing it. ‘They joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.’ We all wring our hands over the ruin of the earth, while we all go on ruining it. There’s more money to be made and more fun to be had from wrecking the planet than from repairing it.

The life of hectic consuming which now seems to be the sole kind worth living will soon put an end to all life.

Progress has provided all of us with more and more deluxe substitutes for joy.

The pursuit of happiness makes us too wound-up to find joy, too frivolous to be serious, and too rapacious to leave the earth any chance.

28 The age of destruction

We subsist in a brief interim of frantic happiness between the end of universal misery and the dawn of universal destruction. We have had the best of it, and it has not been much good. Our prosperity has hoisted us an inch above the ground for a brief term. But its loss will bury us a mile below it for all of time. We will presently be more forlorn than ever, ground between our ancient afflictions which we can’t evade and our gluttonous new appetites which we can’t get our fill of.

By seeking to cure their chronic woes people will turn them into acute and fatal ones. They will fall victim to the frenzied remedies that they take up to heal the wound of their being. They are so eaten up by their discontent, that they have resort to a manic hilarity which will eat up all the world.

Nothing now will change, and it will all keep on getting worse. Life will soon revert to a fevered gloom more black and miasmal than it’s ever been.

All our good days are done, our bright dawns have waned, their freshness has faded, their dew has sweated off in our glaring neon. ‘For the world hath lost his youth, and the times begin to wax old.’ The best of life is over before it’s even begun.

29 The happy earth, the frantic world

The woes of our unblessed race have for so long weighed the earth down. Now its convulsive gaiety is set to burn it up. ‘And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.’ This globe has for millennia been sodden with our agony. Now we will scorch it to stoke the flame of our joy.

We, who can never find happiness, will badger the happy beasts to extinction by our vain schemes to reach it one day. The earth, caked so thick with our misery, will soon smother all the more carefree kinds of life. We will kill them all off to snatch a brief joy that we would not feel in any case. We will lay waste the whole earth to get our hands on things that are wasted on us.

People won’t balk at emptying the earth of all life in their rage to fill their own small lives with a minute more of tawdry fun.

The long-suffering earth won’t last through a few more centuries of our scramble for happiness.

Human kind now rockets so fast, it trusts that it is approaching escape velocity from the miseries of the earth and time. But it will crash before it reaches it.

30 The greatest unhappiness of the greatest number

The pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number will inflict the greatest misery that the globe has ever had to bear. It is a ruthless juggernaut which pays no mind to how much life it will crush under its adamantine wheels. It costs a ton of irreparable animal wretchedness to squeeze out one gram of our brief felicity. And it takes a regime of global oppression to make a local human emancipation.

We seek the happiness of the greatest number, but only of that small class of beings who matter because they are of the same species as ourselves.

31 The mirage of happiness

People won’t hesitate to put an end to the earth for all time, in their rage to snatch a mite more of what they will lose so soon. The last two hundred years have shown how little joy they get from gaining the whole world. And the next two hundred will prove how much it will grieve them to be reft of it.

Our day of prosperity will cost the earth, and we won’t scruple to force it to pay the price. We will trash it to tighten our grip on a gladness which we would scarcely feel.

Happiness is a mirage. But we will turn the lush earth to a desert in our fury to make it real. Our shiniest dreams will melt the earth to a dark shadow. We will never bring in the millennium, but we will incinerate all living things in the attempt. As Baudelaire wrote, ‘the cannon booms, limbs whizz hither and yon, one can hear the groans of the victims and the howls of those officiating at the sacrifice. It’s human kind in search of joy.’

We befoul the innocent air with the stinking discharge of our industrialized jollity. And now that we are cut off from our roots, why should we mind how we blight the soil?

People presume that nature grants them the right to be happy, yet they are callously gouging from it the bare right to live.

JUSTICE

32 Destructive justice

The earth will be laid waste, not by war but by peace, not by poverty but by plenty, not by ignorance but by ingenuity, not by repression but by liberation. It has more to fear from our good angels than from our bad ones. The more tame we grow to one another, the more savagely we hack and mangle the earth.

People are doing all the good that they can, and it will soon have put paid to the earth.

We are the salt of the earth, and we crust it so thickly, that we will soon kill it.

Malice slew its multitudes, but virtue will bring death to the innocent earth.

33 Progress to justice

Our love of justice, which sets us above the rest of the beasts, grants us a warrant to wipe them out.

Our sense of justice grants that we owe duties only to the class of living things that are like us. And so it will help to empty the earth of all the rest that are not like us.

People assume that they will have attained a state of supreme justice, when the meek members of this one species have ceased to prey on one another and have joined in harmony to prey on all the rest.

Humans are bound to stamp out nature, because they see that they are part of a polity, but not that they are a part of it. They feel that they have a slot in a rapacious economy, but no home in a broader ecology. What kind of contract could they make with the earth? And how could they owe a thing to the animals, which don’t have the means to enforce their debts? And since we have no compact with the earth and living things, we are still in a state of nature with them, which is to say, a state of war.

The meek who are to inherit the earth should surely be the sinless beasts of the field, and not the unrivalled but perverted predator mankind. But our meek breed will have wiped them out before they can claim their bequest.

34 The monster of progress

There’s no need of bad people in order to mess up the earth. All that’s required is plenty of good people, and there’s now more than enough of them.

We are transfixed by the spectacle of moral bogeymen and horrors. So how could we see the nest of mundane blameless greeds that are poisoning the ground beneath our feet? We love to wring our hands at moral abominations such as the holocaust, since they keep our minds off the philanthropic holocaust of nature which we are all at work on right now. And we scare ourselves with monsters, so that we don’t have to see that the monster is us. We don’t have the guts to be afraid of ourselves as we ought. Or we don’t have the sense to see how much we have to dread from our own power.

Our selfishness will crush the earth beneath its boot, but our good will couldn’t save it. So intent are we on obliterating it, that by acting in unison we will do so the sooner.

Our heaven on earth will soon have us praying for death or else glad just to drag out one more day of crippled life.

35 Sanctimonious terracide

Our species hopes to get away with planetary murder. If it succeeds, this will show that it is an exception to nature’s laws, as it always thought. And if it fails, this will be one more proof that nature is unjust.

Our extermination of all living things won’t put the least dent in our moral self-satisfaction.

What chance did the innocent animals have against such righteous devils as us?

The planet is not safe from a species such as ours which holds that it was put here to save it. Who will save the earth from a species that spawns so many saviours?

We are well-intentioned devils. And the earth won’t be good enough for us, till we have turned it into a perfect hell.

Each of us would balk at doing the least wrong, and yet we are all colluding in the most monstrous wrong that could be conceived.

36 Progress to utopia

We are sure that we will someday land in utopia, once we have got through the storm that our progress has whipped up. And we will have just cemented in place the copestone of our new Jerusalem when the end time comes to pluck it down on our heads.

We boast that we are the stewards of creation, while we rack it like fiends of destruction. The human race claims to be the gardener, but it is the locusts come to devour the garden. ‘The land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness, yea, and nothing shall escape them.’

The best thing we could do to help the earth would not be to live for it, but to die for it.

Our moral progress makes our material progress all the more lethal to those species that lack our gift for moral progress.

We glory both in our justice which has loosed all humans from their thraldom, and in our power to bind the whole planet to do our will.

The devil wished to put an end to life. He knew that he could not make us any worse, so he improved us, and that will do the job far quicker.

37 Our self-applauding rectitude

When human beings have ground to chaff all their fellow forms of life, they will tell poignant stories to weep for their own plight and how they have been forsaken and to boast of how heroically they struggled to save them. How they will pity themselves for having been deserted by all that they have so pitilessly killed.

The dead earth, which we have plastered so thick with our smug moral fables, would present a fine moral fable of its own, if there were a soul left to read it.

We are so full of our own rectitude, that we will feel no guilt when we have emptied the earth of all living things.

Though we make the worst of everything, we won’t stop believing the best of ourselves. We are such scrupulously moral creatures, that we don’t just want to ruin the earth, we want to be applauded for our fine motives as we do it.

We will bring nature to its opprobrious end in a festival of self-congratulation. And our recessional will be an anthem of booming self-satisfaction. Our species will keep on extolling its good intentions right up to the point when they bring down the curtain on the disgraceful farce.

38 No one to blame

Everything that each of us does will help to bring ruin on the earth. But nothing that any of us does could help to save it. And there’s no need to stop, since none of us will be called to account for any of it. ‘Collective crimes make no one answerable,’ as Napoleon said. The one thing that all will agree on when the end of the world comes is that someone else must have been to blame for it.

Each of us is happy to do what we know we can get away with. And since all of us are doing it, each of us knows that we can get away with it.

How would the animals judge us? Who cares. Kill them all, and don’t give them the chance.

A species that is sure it will one day ascend to live in a pure realm of ends will reduce the whole planet to a sordid tyranny of means. We will entitle several billion egos to act as if they were the ends for which the earth and all living things serve as a means.

39 The irrelevance of good intentions

We preen ourselves on our nice distinctions of right and wrong. But they are nothing weighed against our brute physical impact. We fiddle with our fine moral discriminations, and meanwhile our material might goes on callously decimating the earth. The gross consequences of our acts will far outweigh their exquisitely judged motives. Our good intentions blind us to the great evil that we do.

Never have we been more ready to do our duty to the natural world. And never have we been wiping it out at such a rate.

The first law of our moral code is to do no harm. Yet the harm that we do by living our irreproachably moral lives is far greater than any harm we could do by acting immorally.

Human power now has so few limits, that human motives and intentions are of no effect.

It makes no difference now how benign our views might be. In the world market we are all mere consumers. And the righteous and the unrighteous will work as one to suck the earth dry to its last drop.

People used to hate nature, but they lacked the power to do it real harm. Now they love it, and all that they do brings it nearer to its end.

Our evolved ethical codes will prove less effectual than the instincts of a parasite, which at least has the sense to keep its host alive.

The human race with its greeds and gods has dropped like a slow asteroid on this sad planet. This will be the sum of the moral significance of our incorrigibly moralizing breed.

FREEDOM

40 The progress of freedom enslaves the earth

Why would the rest of life rejoice at the reign of carnivorous human liberty? Every extension of human emancipation has come at the cost of the enslavement of the earth.

Democracy has freed our species to lord it over the earth.

Human liberty has bound the earth in chains. What has cut us loose will make an end of us, but not till we have used our surly freedom to make an end of all the earth.

The truth that has made us free has made the earth a slave.

We don’t doubt that once evil powers no longer force us to do the wrong thing, we will always do the right one. But when we are free to do as we like, we will have got so much power, that whether we do right or wrong will be all the same.

The world is overpopulated with other people’s children. And it will be wrecked by other people’s greed.

41 The havoc of freedom

Freedom has no content. If it did, it would not be free but determinate. And it will empty out all the world trying to fill itself up. What we are free to do we are bound to do. And what we do once we are sure to do over and over.

As Pascal said, it is not good for us to be too free. Or it is not good for the earth which groans under the weight of our freedom. We deem that each of us should be free to get what we want. But what we want will tear from the rest of life the bare right to draw breath.

What hope could there be for us, when we have to look for our rescue to the very powers that have brought us to this brink, freedom, democracy and technology?

We mock those doomed peoples in ancient times who redoubled their vain offerings to their idols when they had failed to save them. But how much stupider are we? Capitalism, technology and democracy are killing us, and more and more we count on them to save us.

In the past we cursed our servitude. Soon we shall have cause to curse our freedom.

42 The curse of choice

Freedom of choice is the sole kind of enfranchisement that we now set any store on, since it is the sole kind that capitalism has need of. And all our choices work to one end. They give us no choice but to go on degrading the earth in obedience to the system of choice.

The car is the prime symbol of our personal freedom, and one of the chief tools of our species’ enslavement of the globe. First it helped to wreck the city, the matrix of civilization, and now it is helping to wreck the natural world. And don’t we all love our cars more than we loved nature or civilization? We all now look on life as a road. Nothing behind us, everything in front of us.

The system of rational choice leaves us no rational choice but to maximize our own utility at the expense of all other living things.

The net effect of all our discriminating personal choice will be an indiscriminate obliteration.

In our age of self-admiring individualism we love to cheep that each of us can make a difference. And this is exactly what each of us is doing by every free act of getting and spending.

The belief that each of our choices can help to save the earth is part of the ideology of the system of choice which is ravaging it.

43 The wrong of rights

Human rights seemed at first to be no worse than a benevolent fiction, till we turned them into a terracidal fact. They do more damage than human crimes, since all rights are the one right, the right to consume and to subdue the earth.

Human rights make earth’s oppression. We now exult in our inviolable rights with the same assurance that sovereigns trumpeted their divine right to rule just in time for their anointed heads to be chopped off.

Humans will wreck the earth not by the wrongs that they do to one another, but by the rights which they arrogate to their whole species.

Nature deals with each one of us as the nazis dealt with the jews, subjecting us to pointless and excruciating experiments before it kills us. ‘Heaven and earth are ruthless,’ as Lao Tzu says. ‘They treat the ten thousand things like straw dogs.’ And we now do the same to nature as a whole. We grant our own kind a fictitious troop of rights so as to make war on her.

We solemnly debate the duties that we owe to the animals, at the same time as our sheer numbers are shoving them off the edge of the earth. To confer rights on them would be to add insult to injury by pretending to make them part of the regime of liberal individualism which will soon do them to death.

44 Progress and individualism

Each of us knows that we have far more to gain from our own greed which is sure to wreck the world than from the collective self-restraint which might save it. And each nation state knows the same.

Individuals are casualties of nature’s care of the species. And the whole of nature will be a casualty of each individual’s care for itself.

The liberty of each will lay waste the inheritance of all.

In the past the state bore down hard on the individual. Now the individual partners with the state to bear down hard on the earth.

A species each of whose members has a chance to flourish is destined to eat up all the rest. Where each of us is such a big winner, the one loser is bound to be the earth.

Each of us is too important to die, and we are all agreed that the whole human race is so precious that it has a right to kill the earth to keep on living.

How could we say there is no progress, when each of us sees a proof of it in our own fantastically successful life? If we had merely failed, we would have done far less damage to the earth.

The innocent freedom of each of us will make the brute power of all to squeeze the life out of the earth. And the sum of all our individual rationality will add up to an ecocidal madness.

EQUALITY

45 Equal to oppress

Equal rights for all will rape the globe far more brutally than the desires of the few. When they have ceased to dread the wild beasts devouring them, the lambs will feel safe to nibble the pasture bare to the dead root. A few billion sheep will chew up much more than a pack of wolves.

The earth will be baked to ash not by the blaze of some grand enterprise but by the brushfires of ten billion low desires.

Democracy grants to each of us a patent to the overbearing voraciousness which in the past grandees alone were graced with. It is the human will free and equal to lord it over the rest of creation. We treat nature as great landowners dealt with their vassals. In Tolstoy’s words, ‘I sit on a man’s back, choking him and forcing him to carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all practicable means, except by getting off his back.’

46 Gang of equals

Democracy is one more syndicate of gangsters, hustling to bag as much loot as it can and get out before the crash comes. It will lay waste all that it has inherited, and squander all that it has stolen. But it will still dare to boast of its benevolence in enabling each class to get rich on its cut of the spoils. It is indulging its brief prerogative to devour all that is too weak to fight back, the past and the future, the memory of the dead, the blackened planet.

From the earth’s point of view, democracy is no more than the exchange of a few bloody tyrants for a few billion.

Democracy mows down all life to clear a path for its marauding greed. It claims every right for its own, and abrogates all its duties to the rest of creation.

All great things have been the work of elites. But the humblest of us will have a hand in democracy’s crowning work of world destruction.

47 The progress of the one equal species

There is only one class now, the class of all human beings, who are free to work the indentured earth till it gives out. The few used to club in oligarchies to stomp on those beneath them. Now we gang together in democracies to pillage the subjected land. Inequality cuts off one class from the next, equality cuts off the whole of human kind from the rest of life.

Now that the franchise has been extended to all classes of beings that matter, those that don’t have it don’t matter. And so we are free to ride roughshod over their interests.

All of us now know that we are born equal because we all belong to the one species that is superior to all lower grades of living thing. And we know that they are inferior, because they are too weak to wrest our privileges from us. We are all equal because we are biologically separate from the rest of the beasts. And this separateness gives us the right to enslave or to eliminate them at will.

48 The injustice of altruism

The more freedom for us, the more bondage for the earth. The more wealth for us, the more poverty for the planet. As justice between the members of our own species grows, the justice we extend to the rest of the species shrinks. And the more widely power is dispersed among us, the more of it there is to press down on them.

All of us are so well-intentioned and cooperative, and each of us brings our modest faggot of kindling to add to the common bonfire that will burn up the world. And all that we do adds fuel to the conflagration. It is the better angels of our own nature that have put it in our power to control and kill all nature.

Our egoism would not have wrecked the earth so thoroughly, if it had not been helped by our altruism. And our folly would not have done so much damage, if it had not been armed by our ingenuity.

We can pity a dying animal, yet we go on inflicting such dire injuries on this dying planet.

49 Our ravenous solidarity

We work as one to smash the whole earth, so that each of us might seize our own shard of it. By cooperating so closely, we will screw up our sanctimonious ravenousness to a murderous predominance. We will kill all the lesser forms of life by kindness to our own.

We are strangling the land in our close fraternal bands. Our solidarity has multiplied by many times the destructive force of our selfishness. Altruism is the egoism of our self-infatuated species, and our pacifism is its jingoism. And they both arm us to make war on the earth with a more brutal effectiveness. They are the oil to grease the engine of greedy capitalism which is pulverizing the land.

When the human family has learnt to live as one, it will be free to eat up all the rest of life. And when the whole of our kind leagues in brotherly love, it will work with one accord to kill off the rest of the beasts that are not its kin.

Our prophets have always looked to the great day when the lion would eat straw like the ox. But we can’t be expected to eat straw. So we will kill all the lions and eat all the oxen.

50 Making peace to make war on nature

The nations now toil so resolutely for their greed, that they lack the vigour to wage big wars. And they won’t resume, till their insatiability has sharked up all that is worth wrangling for, and has left nothing for them to loot. But how nice will they be to one another once their candy and toys have been torn from them? They may turn cannibal again, when they have chewed through the rest of their fodder.

We are too prudent or too nerveless to put an end to ourselves by violence. So we will use what’s left of our vigour to do it by our greed.

A species that was mad and wicked enough to invent nuclear weapons deserves to be destroyed by them.

We have made peace with each other, so as to make war on the verdant world. Like the romans, we cause a desolation, and call it concord. Peace now wrecks the globe as war once did. The age of destruction will dawn the day that we call a halt to all conflict. It will roll out to the accompaniment not of martial trumpets and drums but to the merry blare of pop tunes.

The old nation states laid waste continents from time to time. The new solidarity of the human race will lay waste the whole planet for all time.

51 No cause worth fighting for

Millions have died to defend a false idea of their country. But we won’t check a single one of our desires to conserve this common earth. We were always willing to kill foreign peoples to assert creeds that we didn’t quite believe in. Now we don’t scruple to kill the whole of creation to get things that we don’t even want.

Humans now feel sure that no cause is worth fighting for, but the least of their wants is worth ransacking the entire earth for. They have thrown off the baggage of beliefs in their sprint to get rich.

We flinch at the name of nihilism, while we are grinding the earth to nothing.

Mass suffrage has taught us that where there is no vision the people flourish.

ENLIGHTENMENT

52 From dark superstition to deadly progress

We have woken from our morose superstitious dreams to an enlightened devastation, which will have a fiery but unilluminating end. When we threw off the chains of superstition, we didn’t free ourselves to seek the truth, but bound ourselves as slaves to toil for our avarice. Our ignorance gave way not to the reign of wisdom but to a mad scramble for lucre.

The age of reason set up human progress in place of divine providence, and so we will anticipate a god-sent apocalypse with a godless one.

In the world’s fresh sunrise, when there was still an earth, everyone saw spirits and wonders. But they were not enchanted, but haunted and tormented. So the enlightenment, which rose like a dawn, has now blazed into a noon of rapacious mayhem. Now that our eyes can see what’s real, we will leave nothing real to see.

How this bright globe began to go dark, when our benighted race grew enlightened. We use our reason to light the way for our greed. Having suffused the earth with such a gleam, how could we see that it is an emanation of hell fire? ‘To light the streets by setting fire to houses,’ Lichtenberg wrote, ‘is a bad form of illumination.’

53 Dark enlightenment

The diffusion of knowledge will run as the scout in the van of worldwide wreckage. ‘Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.’ We exploit it all, record it all, and wreck it all.

Knowledge makes the world seem more unreal, and we will use our technical knowledge to annihilate it for real. Our spectatorial knowledge reduced the world to a play of shadows. And now we will use our instrumental knowledge to tear down the playhouse.

Knowledge fails to stop us from going wrong. It helps us to profit so much from it, that we can keep on going wrong in the same way. Or else it finds us worse ways to profit still more.

The course of events in a technocratic age exemplifies the cunning of unreason in accomplishing the most chaotic and destructive ends by the most orderly and rational means.

For all our prudence, we will lose everything. And for all our greed, we will end up with nothing. For all our wiliness, we will prove the dupes of our own shallow desires. All our dexterity won’t solve a single one of our problems. And all our enlightenment will plunge the earth into darkness. For all our generosity, we will leave nothing for those who come after us. And for all our creativity, we will do away with the whole of creation.

Never has the light seemed more dazzling, but never has the future been so dark.

54 The ravages of knowledge

Our knowledge killed the gods, and our machines will kill the earth.

We can’t know a thing without destroying it, once we get it in our power. But we will succeed in destroying our own kind without having learnt who we are. We have become the masters of the earth without having learnt to master our own desires. And we will die of our knowledge, still lost in our illusions.

Knowledge has now so ravaged the world, that not even the old reliable stays of prejudice and stupidity could save it. The dispersion of knowledge will soon snuff out the light of life.

Ours is the sole species that can take in the beauty of the world, and all we have done is to twist it out of shape. We can see the whole, the glory and the meaning, and we will smash, darken, deface and disorder it, in order to get hold of the ugly and empty scraps that we crave. On our banners we write the lie that truth is beauty, while we reduce the earth to an ugly mess.

Once we gained the know-how to get to the moon, we were bound to put an end to the earth.

55 Knowledge no progress

The future, as Wells wrote, will be a race between education and catastrophe. But each will nudge the other to speed up, and it will end with them crossing the finish in a dead heat. ‘Knowledge,’ said Cioran, ‘having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.’

The same greed that lured us to explore the globe will soon goad us to wreck it. Navigators were the advance guard of empire, as information is now the advance guard of the exploitation of the whole earth.

Science is the champion of human liberation. And by emancipating all our energies through its knowledge, it has enslaved the whole globe to our desires. Art was the lackey of tyrants and obscurantists. But it did no harm, because it held no sway.

We will soon find that to know nature and to kill it are two steps in the same process.

56 Saving ignorance

Our progenitors were saved from ruining the land as we have done not by their wisdom and innocence, but by their nescience and incompetence. They had no choice because they lacked the means. And we have no choice because we have so many of them. We are no more vicious than they were, just more successful. And they knew too little to make as much of a hash of things as we have. ‘If we possessed one granule of knowledge,’ Montaigne wrote, ‘there would be no restraining us.’

Our wise ancestors would burn down a forest to catch a deer. Now we will burn up the whole globe to get what we want.

Gods and creeds used to help keep the earth free by oppressing and stupefying us. Now like all the rest of our illusions they urge on our avarice and self-assertion. They help us to do more, go faster, get richer, and wreck the earth.

Till now the coercive sleights of established custom, superstition, usage and bigotry have stopped us from exterminating all that lives. Our rapacity used to be hobbled by our ignorance, now it is sped on by our ingenuity.

We can be held in check only by illusions. But all our illusions now tell us that nothing ought to hold us back.

Natural ignorance is the one thing that might have saved us. But all we have is the unnatural kind which does almost as much harm as our knowledge.

57 Confronting our condition

Humans don’t want to face their real predicament, since they can’t bear to undergo the shock treatment it calls for. And if they dare to put their finger on the symptoms of their disease, they still can’t bear to admit its real cause, which is too many people and too much growth.

We can’t steel ourselves to deal with our real threats, which are growth and overpopulation. And so we have to waste our time failing to deal with second-order threats such as climate change.

There are two kinds of optimists. The first are loath to take the cure, and so claim that the malaise is not real. The second accept that it is real, and so must pretend that the cure is on course to work. They deem that if the disease is dire enough, some miracle cure is sure to be found.

Our condition must now be terminal, since we have to steer our thoughts from our real dangers by fretting about things that are no threat to us.

Since we have outgrown our innocence, we need to cling all the more to our illusions, so that we won’t have to see the ruination that our knowledge will bring on us.

58 Addicts of hope, junkies of progress

Our despair would wear us out, and our hope will wear out the whole earth. When there is so much hope in the world, you know that it’s time to despair. There is no future for us, now that we have all turned into the hopeless addicts of optimism. The best we can hope is that it will kill us quick.

Could a misanthrope wish for our race a more sombre doom than the one that its own bright hopes are preparing for it? But our pessimism can’t guess how bad our optimism will make the time to come.

The devil’s hopes must be riding high, now that hope is in the saddle on earth.

So long as there is hope for our species, there’s no hope for all the rest.

It is no longer fear that we have to fear. It is hope.

People will turn the earth to a hell, since they can’t let go of the hopes which they trust will make it a paradise.

Give people hope so as to inspire them to do the right thing, and they will listen to you, though they won’t do it. Show them what a desperate plight they are in, and they won’t despair, and they won’t even hear you. There are those who must shut their ears to the bad news, because they don’t want to change how they live. And there are those who are willing to listen to it, but still don’t change their life.

When people feel hopeful, they go shopping.

59 Progress to despair

Despair is our last, best hope. Too bad there is no hope of our ever despairing. And it would be too optimistic to trust that even a dose of despair could heal us now. Our plight is so hopeless, that all we have left is hope.

We would rather kill the earth with our hopes than save it at the cost of our despair.

Despair may be defeatism, but hope is collaboration with the system that jeopardizes the planet. Despair, people say, would lead to paralysis. But that might be just what we need, when our frenetic hopes have left the earth half-dead.

Gramsci urged us to keep up an optimism of the will and a pessimism of the intellect. But it is because our incorrigible optimism of the will does so much damage that we need a pessimism of the intellect. And yet we still don’t have the clear head or the courage for such a pessimism. And these days we have so much optimism of the will, that even if we had any pessimism of the intellect, it would be vain to hope that it might save us.

60 The swindle of optimism

Our rapacious optimism will make this the most exciting time to be alive, since we doubtlessly won’t leave a morsel for those who are so unlucky as to come after us.

The future that our optimism will bring about will be an apt chastisement for our deluded and arrogant hopes. But we trust that the chastisement won’t come till we are gone, and that it will be others who will suffer it.

Optimists trust that the costs of their hopes won’t run fast enough to catch up with them.

Hope is the steam that keeps the turbines of consumption spinning, and we think we can heal the planet by generating more of it.

The twittering optimism of experts who ought to know better should show us that it is high time to have done with hope.

We know too much to hope, and yet we know so much that hope is all we have.

When people chirrup that it’s never too late, you can bet that it’s been too late for a long time.

The whole of human kind will soon be like girls and boys on christmas eve, too keyed up to sleep for excitement at the good things that are in store for it.

61 Delusion is our last defence

We cloak the nihilism of our actions beneath an optimism of the intellect and a sentimentalism of feeling.

To solve our global problems we have recourse to a personal optimism that fuels the frantic buying and selling which is the principal cause of all our global problems.

In the past our hopes served as a harmless haven from our inescapable disappointments. Now they goad us to get and spend as much as our hands can grasp. They used to deny reality. Now they drive us on to devour it.

We will have to use all the sleights of our optimism to get through the terminal havoc wrought by our progress. And we will need to make our songs and movies cheerier and more affirmative than ever, to lighten our spirits as we bring the earth to its dark close. Our best days are in front of us, we have to keep chanting as we go down into the black pit that our hopes have dug for us.

It’s a good thing we have all our technologies of happiness, since all our technologies make us so unhappy.

How much hope we will need to call on to keep sifting through the cinders, when optimism has burnt up the earth.

62 The god of humanism

When half-gods go, we are free to give our full devotion to the real idol of our greed.

Humanism is the collective egoism of our species. It is the creed which gives a charter to our domination of the earth. And the age of humanism is an age of humanity dehumanized by the ingenious devices of its own making.

When sovereigns set up their gods, the poor had good reason to tremble. And now that humans have set themselves up as gods, the land has reason to tremble. Having shed the shining gods which we made to reflect our glory, we now worship our own selves, naked, unhampered and almighty. Humanism will be our last idolatry. And we will immolate the smouldering planet as a burnt offering to its insatiate deity.

Sartre said that existence precedes essence, but human kind’s realization of its essence will shortly precede its non-existence.

As patriotism is the egoism of a people, humanism is the rapacious and sanctimonious egoism of our whole species.

63 The suicidal deity of progress

Each god has tried to bring an end to all flesh. The old ones wished to put a stop to life, but were too weak to do it. And the new humanist one does not want to, but it can’t help itself. It will prove how far it outranks the old ones by finding a way to wreck the earth which they made. Marx dubbed it ‘the highest divinity. There shall be none other beside it.’ Humanity is a god powerless to save itself from the mayhem wrought by its own power. And humanism is the gold leaf encasing the monumental clay image of Mammon which we all bow down to. And we will turn the earth into a burning fiery furnace for all the lower forms of life that don’t join in its worship.

There’s no need to refute humanism. It will soon come to an end with the human race for whose domination of the earth it served as the apologist.

64 The last generation

God tried and failed to wipe out all life. We will succeed without even trying.

We have at last come of age, and can do all that we want by our own hand, even put an end to ourselves. Our machines will soon complete God’s work of sweeping us off the earth.

Our species is too busy committing suicide to learn how it should live. It is madly intent on killing itself, though it is squeamishly averse to dying any other way.

The humanity that humanism sets on high is the one generation now alive. It cares nothing for its long heritage which it will lay waste for its own brief gain.

The face of the earth now swarms with ten billion extortionate demigods, sure of their own sanctity and determined not to be balked or delayed in the least of their sordid desires. We deify our own will, and won’t scruple to desecrate all that dares to stand in its way.

The sole hope for the earth is that people are now too selfish to be selfish enough to have children.

65 The sacred species

Our blessed species is a curse to all the rest. And we profane the face of the earth in order to propagate its holy strain. A form of life that is sure that it is chosen will stop at nothing to sate its unholy cravings and spread its stain over the clean earth. To call our species sacrosanct is to sanctify voracity.

A species that is sure that it was made in the image of God is bound to remake the whole earth in its own image.

Say that life is sacred, and you blaspheme nature, whose first and final sacrament is death. Life lives by preying on life. So if all living things were sacred, life would not be viable. And since our single species has got it fixed in its head that it is sacred, it will soon make life unviable for all the rest. When we say that life is sacred, we mean that our human life is sacred. And so we keep piling up the corpses of the rest of living things.

Our species is so holy, there’s nothing so filthy but we might not call it sacred, so long as it serves our needs. The pious romans ordained Cloaca as a goddess to watch over their sewage.

A species whose members think that they have souls that will never die is bound to kill all the rest of life that is not so endowed. Since we are the sole form of life fit for heaven, we will make life on earth hell for all the rest that are not.

TECHNOLOGY

66 The progress of marauding technology

Our technological precocity has spread our sway over the earth. But we grudgingly hug justice to our breasts, and refuse to extend it to the rest of creation, since it is too weak to wrest it from us. Our humane amelioration will crank up our mechanical preponderance to a more lethal pitch.

Our cooperation and resourcefulness are provisioning our brutishness and unwisdom with the tackle which they will use to crush us.

Technology brings us permanent global problems by devising temporary local solutions. And progress is a piecemeal reclamation which will lead to a general ruin.

Technology moves so fast, that by the time its critics have discerned what damage its latest improvements will do, it is already making new advances, which will do far more damage of a kind that they can’t foresee.

Science now shows us how bad the future will be. And technology gives us the tools to make it still worse.

Human beings will die as slaves to the devices which they hoped would make them free. They have to pretend that the earth can be saved by their machines, since they love their machines more than they want to save the earth.

67 The mechanical enablers of our greed

Technology has loosed our greed from its physical bonds, and capitalism has loosed it from its social bonds. Humans use their gadgets to control the wild earth, so that they won’t have to control their own wild cravings. They have to keep driving automation to add to their power, since they are too weak to resist their wants. It will act as the perfect detonator for their incendiary greed.

Our machines are the servants of our desires, and will be the masters of our destruction.

Technology is a noxious fume which science exhales when it reacts with utility and greed.

The road to hell on earth is paved by good inventions. Each accursed device piques our rapacity and will hasten our perdition.

The same greed that has pricked us on to invent our machines will prevent us from repairing the ruin which they will let loose on us. Soon they will be smart enough to do anything except clean up the mess they have made of the earth.

The might of our machines will lay bare the squalor of our desires as they enrich us before they end us.

All societies risk becoming like the slaves by which they live. And since our menials are machines, we will grow ever more like them, more clever, efficient, fast and inhuman.

68 Our means will bring us to the end

We will grind the earth in the mill of our ingenuity.

As we perfect the means, we lose sight of the goal or degrade it. We flatter ourselves that we are perfecting the world, when we are only perfecting the means that will be the ruin of the earth.

We progress by getting better at the tasks that will make the whole world worse.

Progress finds out more and more intricate routes to send us off course.

We are ingenious enough to cure all of our ills, save those brought on us by our own ingenuity.

Our inventiveness has put into our hands all the power that our doltishness will use to do us to death.

Technology has lavished on us all the tools and toys to keep us physically and mentally jittering yet sedentary and oblivious. It gives us the means to go so fast that we don’t have to stop and think where it is that we are going.

We will silence the chorus of nature, the better to hear the idiot burble of our gibbering devices.

69 The machine-minded utopia

Human kind gave up aspiring to a moral utopia an age ago. But we still look forward to a mechanized one, which will heave into our lap all the trash that we crave. We count on our machines to manufacture the millennium for us. But our prostheses will degrade this god-hated globe to an airless plastic paradise. Our Eden will be a moronic funfair, buzzing, thronging, garishly lit, blinking with devices and distractions. The human race will die not from truth or light, but from their shabby substitutes, mindless data and mercenary technology.

Our technical expertise has not outrun our moral insight. Knowledge of all kinds has outrun our care. But did it not do that a long time ago?

Convenience is one more name that we give to our power. And we all now have at our beck such a mass of small cheap conveniences, that there’s no hope for the earth. Each day they make life easier for our own kind, and more impossible for all the rest.

All our time-saving devices prove that we have lost the patience to live in the instant.

Progress makes us more childish, but it is always supplying us with new toys, so that we never grow tired of the world.

PROGRESS

70 Progress and the disease of time

Progress is the acute stage of our diseased attitude toward time.

Progress disowns the past, devours the future, and reduces the present to a transit camp en route to some paradise that is forever out of reach.

People used to cling to their old ways because they did not know where they came from. Now they push on with their new ones because they don’t care where they are taking them.

Progress makes each age worse than the last, too smug to look back to the past, and too greedy to leave any scraps for the time to come.

Progress trains us to live in the future, where we can wait for progress to arrive.

71 Progress drags us out of the present

Never have we been more caught up in the present, and never have we been less present. We can’t live for today. But we will burn futurity to cinders so as to live in opulence the day after tomorrow.

Beings who feel that they deserve a place in paradise are sure that they have a right to kill all those that don’t, so as to grab their bliss right now.

The present is a slum which we have to clear so that we can build the shining towers of the future.

In order to gain the power to dominate the planet, which no other animal has, we had to give up the power to enjoy it, which every animal has.

A species that dreams that life must have a goal is bound to bring all life to an end.

It’s just as well for the animals that they live in the present. They don’t know the doom that lies in wait for them at the hands of a species that lives in the future.

72 Progress destroys the past and tries to learn from history

Progress has taught us that we can make a better future by learning from the mistakes of the past. But progress has made the present so different from the past, that the lessons we draw from it are not of the least use.

We used to be condemned to repeat the past. Now progress has brought us up to date, and we are condemned to repeat the present.

Progress is the process by which civilization spreads round the globe now that it is dead.

73 Progress must have no stop

‘Progress would be wonderful,’ said Musil, ‘if only it would stop.’ We can never reach the end at which we aimed, because we have to keep on the move. And since the world can’t stop improving, it will soon have to stop altogether.

Progress perpetuates itself by compelling each of us to join in its march. Since the world is getting better each day, our first duty must be to swim with its tide and help push it on. To stand aloof is to be a traitor to the human race.

If progress goes on for ever, then it fails to reach its goal. But if it does reach some destination, then the future will one day cease to be an improvement on the past. It must tend towards some end, but it must never have a stop. And since progress can never come to an end, the earth and all its life-forms will have to.

Pessimists fear that progress is so fragile it might come to a dead halt some day. If only it could, there might be a limit to the damage it will do. But it’s racing downhill, and gathers speed as it goes. It can’t reverse, and it will end in a violent crash.

Progress is bound to wreck the better world that it has made as soon as it makes it, so that it can make an even better one.

74 Instant progress

We fail to deal with our long-term threats because we are so harassed by our short-term ones. By palliating the symptoms, we give the disease time to spread and grow more pestilential. And by ignoring our long-term threats, we make our short-term ones more acute and more urgent. As Pessoa said, ‘a reformer is a person who sees the world’s superficial ills, and sets out to cure them by aggravating its more basic ones.’

Technology throws up problems worse than the ones it solves. And then by solving these it stores up still more intractable problems for the future.

75 Progress comes at the end

Progress seems like a new beginning, but it is the beginning of the end.

Progress is not the birth pangs of a new world. It is the fever convulsing one that is near its end. It is the last stage of the delirium that leads to death. As Baudelaire said, it is ‘the grand heresy of decrepitude.’

Where progress holds sway, the accumulated material forces have so much momentum, that the direction of progress is impossible to change. ‘In bourgeois society,’ as Marx notes, ‘the past dominates the present.’

76 We are consumed by the future which we are consuming

The hungry present is consumed by the future, which it is hungrily consuming.

People want to make a future that will be better than the past. But they want to have this better future for their own use right now.

Those who stand by the old ways feel sure that they are coming to an end with them. And those who cheer on the future think that the world is just beginning with them.

The world has grown old under the weight of a species that wants to make all things new.

Each day progress makes life more unliveable yet more impossible to leave. There’s always some new device that we have to hang on for.

Patriarchal societies were prisoners of a past which was no more than a myth. And progressive states are prisoners of a future which will prove to be no more than a dream.

77 The summer is past

Now that people set no value on time, they can’t bear to wait for anything. Everything is urgent, but not one thing is present. The more they make it all speed up, the farther they get from their goal. They live as if it were all makeshift, transient and provisional, and yet they are never in the moment. How could they take the time to build a secure foundation? They are in too much of a whirl to lay up what they might need in the future.

We fear that if we don’t speed up, it will soon be too late. But we are going so fast, that it’s already too late.

We live as if in the aftermath of some great event which never came to pass. ‘The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.’

Progress will prove to be our most self-destructive superstition.

78 Progress to perdition

Progress is the defeat of life by the machine, of insightfulness by inventiveness, of grace by utility, of ends by means, of civilization by technique, of wisdom by power, of love by lust for gain. ‘The more the human race advances,’ as Flaubert said, ‘the more it is debased.’ It perfects itself by the inch, and is corrupted by the mile.

Progress has unchained our predacious breed from the natural checks which have stopped any single species from killing all the rest. Thus the one clear index of progress is the rate at which we are cutting down the forests and killing all the fauna.

There can be no doubt that we are progressing. How else could we account for the vastation that we have made?

In order to wreck the world, all we need do is persist in the projects by which we hope to perfect it.

The wave of progress which has raised us so high and carried us so fast will soon dump us and break our necks.

Progress will make the future so much better than the past, why should we care how bad it will get?

Progress is the process by which each generation proves that it is worse than the last, and makes the world worse for the next.

79 No improvement to progress

If progress could ever give us what we want, we would have no need of it. We have to keep improving, since we can never find satisfaction.

In this world of endless improvement the one thing that doesn’t get any better is progress. Its costs continue stubbornly to mount up, while its benefits are subject to the law of diminishing returns.

A grand appeal to their heroism may seduce the people for a short time. But it soon wears off, and they repent their folly.

The people used to be roused to aim at great things by being told how hard they were. Now they have to be assured that they won’t cost them a cent, and they still don’t want to do them.

If we are to improve, we must be able to measure our improvements. But the things that can be measured are not worth improving in, and the things worth improving in are those that cannot be measured.

A noble taste knows that more means worse. But progress has taught us that better must mean more.

80 The swindle of progress

Progress is a swindle which the present perpetrates on the future. It makes each one of us a free rider on the age to come.

Progress keeps us in its thrall, since its benefits are tangible but delusory, while its costs are covert but real.

We seem to be making progress, so long as we can keep on shifting its costs on to the future.

People will stop at nothing to make the present better than the past, and so they will make the future worse than both.

True progress would be the sacrifice of small present gains for the sake of some great future good. But our sham progress is determined to grab these small present gains for itself and leave the future to pay the cost.

Progress is a cheque which we make out to the future, and then cash and spend for our own use. Pity the heirs of progress, who will be left to pay off the debts of our wild spree.

What’s the good of improving anything, now that progress has doomed it all to ruin?

The future would be right to curse us for the woes that our progress will let loose on it, though it will no doubt be too swept up in its own progress to feel them.

We see the fires on the horizon, and we dart straight for them, sure that they are the beacons of progress.

81 The deadly addiction of progress

Progress has infected us like a virulent pestilence. We would rather die from it than be healed. But it will spare us its worst horrors by terminating us. A utopia is an inferno which soon burns itself up. But progress won’t peter out till it has burnt up the whole globe. It is our last and most lethal addiction. We gladly give up our real good to keep it on the go.

The world is so evil, that in order to make it worse, all we need do is cram it with more of the junk that it has. And that is what progress does.

Progress makes us more smug but more unsatisfied.

We have shrunk to the hungry junkies of progress, mad for our next fix of technology to solve all our problems.

Progress has so addled our brains, that we look back on the havoc it has caused as one of the mistakes of the past which progress will soon put right.

Progress is the cause of most of the ills for which it claims to be the cure.

82 The earth and the world

In the louring evening of the world we still have such sights to charm us. But the green earth will go dark, before we learn to see its beauty. We have no eyes to see the loveliness of the earth which we’ve been blessed with or the ugliness of the world which we have made. The world is a wondrous place, but not for much longer.

Each generation will palm off on the next a better world and a worse earth. Each day the world gains at the expense of the planet. Our worldly hearts will be glad when they can chew up the earth and not need to taste any dirt. All the things that have been a boon to us have been a bane to it, our wealth, machines, human rights, and our manic pursuit of happiness.

As the world becomes more free, more rich, and more enlightened, the earth grows more enchained, more poor, and more bleached. The human race has swallowed the earth and vomited up the world. The earth so innocent, the world so tainted.

83 Salvation by annihilation

Ours is the one indispensable species, since it alone has been tasked with the mission to kill all the rest.

If we had got wisdom, we would have doused the fire of craving that keeps life flaming. But because we are not wise, we will set it blazing so high that it will soon burn out. Far more effectually than any Buddha, we will soon grant all life a lasting release from the cycle of life by snuffing it out for good. So our cruel breed will bring a merciful deliverance to the earth that it has plagued so unmercifully.

Life is an evil machine. And our consciousness has cranked it up to such a pitch of restless frenzy, that it will soon break its springs. Our wisdom has not found a way to make the wheel stand still. So our avarice will set it spinning so fast that it will burst into flames. Our noisy kind will soon bring a dead quiet to the deafened globe.

Nature is a monstrous whirring clockwork of cruelty and futility. And the life of the beasts is a lethargic nightmare from which we have awoken to appalled consciousness, resolved to electrify the world, so that no one need dream again.

The world is set on its path of annihilation. So it may be that everything is for the best after all.

Climate change will act like chemotherapy on our cancerous species. But first it will kill off the body that we have ravaged.

84 Correcting the mistake of life

Sentient life may be the universe’s grand mistake. So it has raised us up to blot it out. Mankind was the last angel that God made, the angel of death to scythe his rank creation. God the destroyer has commissioned us to crown his work by restoring the earth to its pristine lifelessness, or at least to a festering clod crawling with eyeless grubs and maggots. And the appalled earth will make use of our meddling kind as the engine to unload it of its freight of misery. This planet won’t be glad and light again, till it has been disburdened of our desperate and oppressive band. Is the peaceful moon mocking the earth for having to tote such a weight of heaving wretchedness?

If our species has a purpose on this orb, it must be to wreck it. It will stay on it just long enough to wipe all the rest off it. We will leave it denatured, sanitized, deodorized and disinfected.

Human kind is not the meaning of the earth, but the meaning of human kind may prove to be the end of the earth. ‘Man,’ is not, as Nietzsche claimed, ‘a rope stretched between beast and superman,’ but it is with such a rope that we will strangle the planet.

85 The end of us

God could find no other way to do away with our insatiate race, and so he sent us progress.

Life can’t go on as it is. So we have set progress to work, to make sure that it won’t.

The wheels of our discontent have to rotate more and more rapidly as the runaway train of progress speeds up. Modernity accelerates all our projects, not least our self-destruction.

Progress spurns the claims of the dead, but it will soon make them the sole cohort worth envying.

The world may not look so grim as I paint it. But it’s progressing at such a frantic gallop, that it soon will. Progress will make the future the best of all times not to be alive in.

 

See also:     Politics,           Purpose,            Vices