The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Better Dead Than Read

In the Book of Genesis, God creates mankind last, as if anticipating the theory of Darwinian evolution. But the text is somewhat ambivalent about his accomplishment. Whereas all his other creations - time, space, light, plants, sentient creatures - are explicitly deemed ‘good,’ human beings are merely lumped in with everything else as God surveys the world. The biblical author seems to be hedging the blessing (mitzvah: both a command and a favour) of human ‘rule’ over everything. If so, his caution has turned out to be justified. Putting the inmates in charge of the asylum has turned out to be a profound design flaw.

But perhaps not for much longer. The species Homo sapiens seems to have run its course. It has overwhelmed the creative matrix which produced it. And it has done so in an evolutionary blink of an eye. Its facility for communication through complex language, as Emil Cioran has said, has filled creation with a glut of consciousness, an intellectual burden which it cannot sustain. The threat is not mankind’s greed, or hostility, or sexual urges but thought itself. Thought, which is language in action, produces cooperative effort, which produces technology, which removes all impediments to the spread of the species.

Except, of course, one impediment: the success of the species itself. It is a species which consumes everything it encounters. This it calls ‘finding a use for,’ or sometimes ‘making life better.’ This is an expected consequence of language-use. As Yuval Harari observes, it is gossip which propelled the species into poll position in the evolutionary race. Members of the species gin each other up to want more of everything: more children, more food, more air, water, minerals... well just more of everything. Isn’t this what ruling is all about? Making things better? Enhancing existence? Realising one’s full potential, as well as that of the species? Isn’t that the practical definition of salvation? Striving for perfection?

One of Stanislaw Lem’s stories turns the tables on the evolutionary story we tell ourselves about being the most developed species, the top of the food chain, the acme of known existence. For Lem all this striving, this wanting to be better, bigger, stronger, more secure, to be something other than what we already are, is an obvious evolutionary defect, a dead end genetic branch that will wither as creation moves on. And what it will move on to is the inertia of what the species now sees dismissively as ‘dead matter.’ This is, of course, obviously the case. Look in any grave yard for confirmation; or in the fossil record; or for that matter into the maw of the nearest astronomical black hole. Entropy, that is to say, that silent, peaceful equality is the heaven that awaits us, the omega point of Teilhard de Chardin.

Meanwhile we are effectively trapped in this bubble of language. We can’t resist it, or dispose of it, or in any way mitigate its profoundly destructive consequences - for us as well as for the other species with which we live. We are doomed to destroy them, as in a Ted Chiang story, simply by perceiving them. Even by naming them, we endanger their existence because it means we have become aware of them as a potential resource. We are prisoners of ourselves. Stories about future threats to human existence through developments in Artificial Intelligence are actually distractions from current reality. Language already controls us.

In this light, it helps to look at the record. The Ordovician extinction occurred over a period of a million years as global temperatures dropped, and was caused by silicate rocks sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. 86% of all species perished. The Devonian extinction, triggered by the development of plant life on land releasing nutrients into the oceans, thus wiping out 75% of marine animals. The Permian extinction was the big one, the proximate cause being methane-producing bacteria. 96% of life on each disappeared. The Triassic extinction has no agreed upon cause; but it wiped out 80% of contemporary species. The Cretaceous extinction, the one with the asteroid impact in the Gulf of Mexico as its final coup, was relatively mild; only three quarters of known species were eliminated. It too seems like the revenge of dead matter.

Isn’t it interesting that each of these events was precipitated by material, both living and dead, rather far down the purported evolutionary ladder than the most ‘advanced’ organisms then in existence. Evolutionary development carries with it inherent vulnerability to changes in the environment. The less developed, that is the closer to dead matter, the more likely the chances of survival. And dead matter probably only goes extinct in some sort of cosmic singularity like a black hole. Language simultaneously makes us aware and insulates us from this reality. Inside the bubble of language we can rationalise our inevitable fate - science will save us; God has another world waiting for us; the mathematical probabilities for another similar event is low, etc. We know deep down that language is deceiving us but we act like it’s just part of reality.

The implications are obvious. Neither God nor human beings created language, thus contradicting our fundamental language-based conceit. Language evolved from us but is independent of us. And we are addicted to it. We resent the power of language, even as we pretend to use it to further our own. We are at its mercy and we intend, unconsciously but deliberately, to stop its hegemony. Like every other extinction event, this one too is being executed by an ‘inferior’ species upon one which has emanated from it. We are determined to wipe out language, or at least to scramble it so profoundly that its meanings are irrecoverable. The elimination of so many other species along the way is merely collateral damage, unfortunate but necessary. This perhaps is the true significance of the story in Genesis chapter 11 of the Tower of Babel. And it certainly explains Donald Trump’s appeal to the mass of Deplorables.

Kolbert has the trajectory correct but the mechanism wrong. Nothing about the Sixth Extinction is accidental or unwanted. It was inevitable from the moment an idea and a sound or gesture popped into some primitive head and were linked. That was the start of the rot. And there are plenty of folk out there who are willing to go to the wall in order to stop it. Better Dead Than Read is their motto. Heed them; they are serious and dedicated. And they are winning.

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