Are We a Failed Species?

I watched Woody Allen's most recent film, "Whatever Works," last night, and was impressed overall by the themes of misanthropy and neuroses that the film presents. Larry David plays a physicist plagued by his overweening knowledge of his own eventual decomposition, and lectures often about all of the grim realities about modern life.

He typifies a person that is too often associated with the "doomsayers" who hearken to the end of our cheap energy extravaganza, claiming at one point, "The human race is a failed species." Things seem so bleak to his character, Boris, that he sees the whole human experiment as a mishatched endeavor.

I often come across this perspective among many 21st Century urban dwellers, and increasingly among the young, fresh-out-of-college grads who have idealism when it comes to their careers and personal lives, but a exhibit a sense of destitution when it comes to the collective fate of humanity.

When I speak with them about the unfolding environmental catastrophes, or the coming energy descent, they often respond with short quips to the effect of:

"Yeah, it's just human nature."

"We're a destructive species."

"I think it's just built in our DNA to engineer our own annihilation."

I find this very unfortunate, and I think we need more clarity here about this so-called "human nature." A lot of the ailments David's character laments are decidedly modern, urban ones, tied to terrorism, plagues, health problems, obsessiveness, crime, and social decay. They would not exist in a traditional Native American society, or in any of the other thousands of land-based human communities that modern culture has squelched in its ascent to dominate the planet and become the one-world, global culture of commerce and consumption we inhabit today.

Daniel Quinn makes the case pretty clear in both Ishmael and The Story of B that "This Culture" is not the only one to have ever existed. Derrick Jensen, Chellis Glendinning, Paul Shephard, and several others have made the case as well. There have been countless human cultures, over innumerable generations, and each has manifested different human tendencies to differing degrees. There is no "human nature," only "human culture" which lays emphasis on certain aspects of human behavior.

We are not a failed species; we are living in a failed and failing culture, a techno-industrial civilization that emphasizes the rationalistic values of efficiency, utility, and production at the expense of everything living in this world.

One of the first steps to making a move away from this destructiveness is to acquiesce to the fact that we are NOT the only human culture that has ever existed, and neither are we the most adept at providing for human needs. We produce a lot of material wealth at the expense of natural and spiritual integrity. Many of the failures of the modern world are results of a failed world-view, and the primary foundation of this world-view is that civilization--cities, agriculture, standing armies, animal husbandry, employment, education, domestication even--is an unquestionable given in the landscape of human culture. "There is no culture without civilization"--a fact that anthropology (yes, we Westerns must rely on the most perceptive of our myopic sciences to justify a point) has refuted time and again.

And also, when a person protests the wastefulness of the extraction-based economic model, they are not decrying the fundamental traits of "the human race." They are not saying anything regarding the human species "as a whole." Much of what passes as the "human species" today are just the writing-reading-calculating breed who bathe in their own reflection and own cultural creations as though it were an ether bequeathed from the gods.

We decry the current moral-social-political order because it is a farce, and the farthest from the bedrock needs of the wild human spirit that one could possibly get. "Humans" aren't the failed evolutionary experiment; rational, technological civilization is.

But all of this is really a question of values. I hate assertions like "civilization is a failed experiment" because I feel like it deserves countless qualifications. Was Indian civilization superior to Western civilization, or was it not plagued by its own "outcasts" and blatant moral depravity? Has city culture ever yielded anything more for the human race than penury, servitude, and dependence upon a strong, centralized state? Do you value the increase in population provided for by modern agriculture just because you regard more people as "morally good"? Do culture and the arts make up for the great crimes--both humanitarian and ecological--committed to support an educated leisure and priestly class?

I hope more people can clarify for others that the "human race" that goes around denouncing itself for its own failures is not the only race that has ever existed, nor is it the only one that ever will. Others will come; others--post-technological, neo-aboriginal--are already on the way. As more of the current generation realize the countless unforeseen avenues open to the human spirit and human expression, maybe we will see the dawn of a "humanity" truly deserving of the name.