Some predict that we humans will make ourselves extinct if we do not stop climate change. Would the loss of our species matter? On this page and the next, Anthony O’Hare and Simon Burchell present opposing views.

Anthony O’Hear argues that the loss would matter

Human extinction matters because many unique and valuable qualities would be lost were there no people to understand and appreciate them.

I do not assume that there is a God or that we will enjoy any personal immortality. My remarks are directed primarily to those who think human extinction does not matter precisely because they believe that there is no more to human existence than our physical presence on Earth, and that it has no other value or context.

Suffering not the whole story

One person who thought that human extinction would not just not matter, but would actually be a good thing was Schopenhauer, and so in some moods did Tolstoy. Buddhists crave extinction and so, according to Sophocles, did the ancient Greeks (very ancient Greeks), as represented by the satyr Silenus. Broadly, all these characters think of life as predominately a matter of suffering, compounded by the cravings of the will, which are evil, and themselves a main cause of suffering. So, with all due deference to the selfish gene, it would be far better if we, our sufferings and our evil cravings all ceased to exist.

All life is not suffering, the first Buddhist noble ‘truth’ notwithstanding, nor are the will and human freedom necessarily negative or irredeemably evil. 

Loss of beauty

One thing which will go when we are extinct is music, which I will take here to stand for all beauty and all human perception. For there will be no one to hear it.

Through our human embodiment and our sensibility we are able to perceive and create things which existed neither before us, nor will survive us. Even for those who are dismissive of the trivia and detritus of human life, there must be something of great value lost if the B minor Mass or Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 or Schubert’s Quintet or Opus 111 were never again to be heard.

Those who are dismissive of all the rubbish connected with our existence overlook the fact that the great works of human civilisation are created on and out of a mass of rubbish, and are great in part because they transform and transcend their base materials. 

Intelligibility through science

We could say something similar about science. Indeed, the philosopher C.S. Peirce did just that: ‘The only thing which makes the human race worth perpetuation is that thereby rational ideas may be developed and the rationalisation of things furthered’; not perhaps the only thing, but certainly a thing, and a thing which would be lost if we were extinct.

Peirce’s thought is that in our scientific inquiries, the universe becomes intelligible and transparent to mind, and that that is somehow worthwhile. A world without music would be a poorer world, and so would a world without scientific understanding, but which just went silently and mindlessly on and on.

Both art and science are products of human evolution, and both depend on what Peirce dismissively called human ‘breeding and swarming’, forgetting that without the one there would not be the other, and that the other also shows that there is more to our breeding and swarming than simply Darwinian imperatives. 

Remembering and inwardness

We can understand, we can contemplate, we can create, we can appreciate beauty, we can discern the sacred in our lives and in the world. We do evil, to be sure, which is what tips many into pessimism. But we can also do good, in big ways and in small. We can also remember the sufferings we and our ancestors have wreaked on the world and on each other. By a natural human instinct we think it important that the Holocaust be remembered, and not just as a cautionary tale, but important for those who suffered. With human extinction all will be forgotten, and there will be no one to pray for forgiveness for the sins of the human race.

Why are we humans here on Earth? It may be, as the poet Rilke suggests, ‘in order to say: House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Peartree, Window… but to say, remember, to say this so as never the things themselves meant so intensely to be…’ The human race is, in a sense, the inward centre of  this part of the universe, in unique ways perceiving it, feeling it, articulating it, and in so doing creating much, the bad and the good, the great and the small, all intertwined, interdependent. Without us all this inwardness will be lost, even and perhaps especially if there is no God for us to turn to.
 
Anthony O’Hear is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham