A Stirring Defense of the Human Species
Hail magnificent ZØltr∆n, disintegrator of worlds!
I must confess: when I read the scientific paper that estimated there might be as many as four hostile alien civilizations in the Milky Way alone, I did not expect to encounter one so soon. It was supposed to be less likely than a massive asteroid strike, itself a 1-in-100-million years sort of event.
Yet here you are! You and your spaceship and its giant incinerator ray.
I think it good of you, oh great and terrible one, to entertain arguments against our destruction, either by vaporizing our planet or (as you have offered in your munificence) by filling our atmosphere with sterilizing but otherwise un-harmful gasses, thereby gently sun-setting the human race. If you must do one, I recommend the latter. That way you will eventually be able to enjoy the highlights of human civilization—its national parks, university libraries, and art museums—in solitude and at your leisure. I have often dreamed of doing so myself.
Still, I think you should spare us. Because you have explained why you are planning to eliminate us, and solicited rebuttals, I can only assume that you have a sense of justice (a willingness to give us what we deserve) and are sensible of human reasons and sentiment. I plan to play on both as I offer, as defenses of our species, the qualities of virtuosity and kindness.
I. The Rather Reasonable Case for Eliminating the Human Race
In your general address to us, you made some rather good points in favor of our extinction, drawing them from our own history and philosophies.
You cited GWF Hegel to the effect that human history is “a slaughter bench.” Alas, this is so. One can open almost any history, say Cary McWilliams’ Southern California: An Island on the Land, and be treated to a horror show. Between 1769 and 1833, McWilliams reports, the Spanish recorded a decline in the native population from 130,000 to 83,000. The difference was attributable to disease, deliberate malnutrition, and murder. After herding the natives onto mission plantations for the purposes of conversion and forced labor, the Spanish fed them diets “insufficient to support life, much less to enable the Indians to perform the labors required of them.” Then the Anglos arrived and pushed out the Spanish, with the aim of turning the rich valleys into cotton fields and grazing land for their cattle.
Was secular economic development achieved with less bloodshed than religious conversion? In a word, no. The Anglos displaced the natives from their land, once again pushing them to near starvation, and then, when the latter retaliated by raiding the settlers’ cattle, the nascent state of California waged an off-and-on war against the indigenous tribes for twenty years. Between 1848 and 1865, the native population dropped from 72,000 to 23,000.
In fairness, the rest of nature is pretty violent too, on our world and, I suspect, on yours. It would be easy to draw up a case against lions for pushing cheetahs to extinction, or bed bugs for the practice of traumatic insemination. Violence alone is not a sufficient reason to destroy our planet or us, unless it is also a convincing reason to destroy you and yours. But in truth we are probably worse than our fellow creatures. The lions and bed bugs cannot help the way they act. We could but don’t, and are therefore culpable, blameworthy, and (perhaps) deserving of punishment.
What is worst of all is our cruelty. Unlike other the history of other violent animals, human history is in large part of a record of bloodshed far beyond what was necessary for our survival, or even comfort. For example, given the execrable conditions on the Spanish missions/plantation, many of the natives understandably ran away. They were hunted down, brought back, beaten, and then housed in the following conditions (again from McWilliams):
The young female neophytes, who were regarded as nuns, were herded into a kind of barrack or compound, called the monjerio, where they were kept under the closest surveillance and confinement. One learns from the chronicles that the monjerio was 17 yards long and 7 yards wide and that it was usually constructed out of adobe brick, with bunks ranged around the walls. The only ventilation came from a single high window, while, in the center of the room, was an improvised sewer or latrine. The stench and filth of these barracks were noted by all observers.
Was this necessary? No. Was it even helpful to the Spaniards’ goals of a pious, pliable labor force? Probably not, given the native peoples’ population crash. Beyond the suffering itself, what appalls is the foresight, planning, and execution on display here. Cruelty and torture require a high degree of imaginative sympathy, the ability to know exactly how much something is going to hurt someone, and then doing it anyway. Compared to other life on earth, we are uniquely talented in this regard. We also find ways to institutionalize cruelty. After the Spanish pursued their sadistic designs for decades, the Anglos pushed them out and bettered them. California law held that “an Indian could be shot for any minor infraction of the white code, such as speaking out of turn, getting in the way, or demanding payment for wages.” We are the only law-giving animal on the planet, and look what we’ve done with it!
Should you suffer such a species to live? Perhaps it would be unfair to punish future generations for the sins of their fathers. Even though in all likelihood we will go on slaughtering each other and everything else, we might also reform.
Yet even if we beat our swords into ploughshares, misery would remain. Some of our finest philosophers and sages have argued that the problems of human existence run deeper than individual atrocities: human suffering and unhappiness are inevitable because they are baked into human life. As physical creatures, our bodies slowly break down, decay, hurt, and die, unless of course we die suddenly. As conscious creatures we know it, can foresee it, and yet are powerless to stop it. In the meantime, pleasures have diminishing returns and, if pursued too far, unpleasant consequences. Hence the Buddha says that existence is suffering due to desire, and Freud points out that no matter how much the id gets, it will always demand more. Freud thinks the human predicament is irresolvable, and to the Buddha it is only escapable through transcending the physical realm and obtaining a state of saintly enlightened non-existence, which sounds a lot of like death. Shouldn’t you just help it along?
When life isn’t frustrating, it’s often dull. Once the human animal escapes pain, it then faces the danger of confronting its own pointless existence and, with pointlessness, a deep and abiding boredom. See Pascal:
“Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, restlessness, vexation, despair.”
See also Schopenhauer:
“Behind need and want is to be found at once boredom, which attacks even the more intelligent animals. This is a consequence of the fact that life has no genuine intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion. But as soon as this comes to a standstill, the utter barrenness and emptiness of existence becomes apparent.”
Pascal was chronically ill, and Schopenhauer chronically unemployed, so they had a lot of time to meditate on boredom. But does busyness really save the rest of us? Often enough, the little distractions of daily life and work cannot quite keep the deeper monotony from overtaking the conscious mind. Life can become both frantic and dull—surely the worst of all possible worlds.
In sum, it makes little sense to go on living. It certainly makes no sense to make new human beings. If so, then fire up the incinerator, oh great and terrible one, or release the gas, and end the whole sad cycle.
II. The Virtuosity Defense
Before you do, though, I must ask you: in your survey of human history and societies, have you never been impressed?
The human animal is remarkably variable. Their individual uniqueness stems from a combination of a) genetics, which lay out the broad contours of their physical capabilities and temperaments, and b) unique life experiences, which are shaped by their cultures, the circumstances of their births, and their own conscious volition. That sense of agency is especially important because, although it is certainly shaped by the aforementioned genetic and cultural factors, it also allows for a degree of self-direction and self-fashioning. Exactly how much self-direction is a matter of debate.
Never mind that for now. The important thing is that if all of these factors align just right, then through natural ability and inclination and conscious cultivation of skill, a human being can become a virtuoso—of something. Such people have cultivated such a degree of skill in some activity that they appear, to the rest of us, capable of superhuman feats. Any area of skill admits of virtuosity. It is most immediately visible in sports and the arts. Tune in to our television broadcasts and you will surely be able to see remarkable athletic contests or, with a little more searching, educational programs that explore the world’s great art museums. If you are honest with yourself, wise and just as you are, are you not drawn in, even a little, by the skill on display here?
To snuff the human race would be to end these displays. Yes, you could watch old videos of the 1991 World Series, but then there would be no new instances of virtuosity in the future. A big part of the fun in going to a ball game or art museum is the possibility that, out of nowhere, you will see something extraordinary. Humanity is also forever inventing new games and forms of art. Blow up the planet, and you will never know what they will be.
Of course, you may note that very few human beings become virtuosos. Most of us cannot pitch no-hitters or paint something that ends of up in a Cathedral or the Tate. Does this mean you can eliminate the rest of us without loss?
I hope not. First, virtuosos often come from undistinguished parents, so you will get to enjoy more of them if you leave the rest of us alone. Also, although virtuosity can be a source of resentment, it is more often a source of fun and fascination, as evidenced by the great crowds at stadiums and famous galleries. Virtuosity may be rare, but appreciative spectatorship is not. It is one of the great joys of human life. To go further, I would like to suggest that even the most ordinary of us can carry a little bit of virtuosity around with us as we go about our daily business.
An example is in order. Last winter, as the omicron variant of COVID-19 swept across this globe, I found myself once again working from home. The house I was renting had a five-disk CD changer, and an extensive music collection, including operas.
One day, while working, I put on “Die Zauberflöte” (“The Magic Flute”). Its effect on me was first electrifying and then addictive. In the past six months, I have listened to it dozens if not a hundred times. It is full of memorable chorus numbers and duets, but the real show-stopper is “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” (“Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart”), an aria by The Queen of the Night. On paper, the aria confirms every accusation you could level against us. It is written in D-minor, the saddest of all keys, and in it the Queen instructs her daughter to murder her father (the Queen’s former lover) or be disowned forever. So here we have violence and terrible cruelty, too.
And yet, there is a moment in my recording (by the Vienna State Opera Chorus and Vienna Philharmonic, 1969), when the soprano playing the queen, Cristina Deutekom, transports me. Listen for yourself. My favorite part occurs at 0:18-0:26. As this section begins, Mozart is preparing to modulate D-minor into its relative major (F). He does so by means of chromaticism, which creates a feeling of tension, like a race car revving its engines and spinning its wheels in place. Equal to the moment, Duetekom leans into the syncopated rhythm, holds her half note an extra moment, and then she springs from the C to her high A, rocketing along the score like that racecar down the track. There is such exuberance in her voice, in Mozart’s music, and in what her artistry can add to Mozart’s music, that I forget all about her character’s murderous intent. Joyful virtuosity is all I hear.
There is a real sense in which there is nothing going on there but some air being compressed through fluttering folds of skin. That’s what singing is. But isn’t such a description, although physiologically accurate, qualitatively wrong? It is the same with a bare description of the dull and painful facts of human life. If suffering and frustration are baked into human life, so is our ability to create moments when the downsides of life seem like distant memories. Every time I hear Deutekom’s performance, I marvel at it, and its marvelousness seems inexhaustible. It expands my sense of what the human animal can be or do. I live to find out.
The perfect match of composer and artist is no accident. Mozart actually composed the aria for his sister-in-law, who could hit those high Fs. Oh, can you imagine great ZØltr∆n, being there in Vienna at the 1791 premiere? Arriving with no idea what was about to hit you, and then…
A species whose latent potential includes Mozarts and Deutekoms is worth preserving. In fact, even the unskilled can realize a bit of their brilliance, as when I myself sing snatches of the queen’s aria while driving my car to and from work. Sometimes, when I need to pick up something for dinner, I continue my performance in the grocery store. It is like calling a bit of Mozart’s genius into my daily life, whether my fellow shoppers appreciate it or not.
Will I eventually tire of this aria and the opera as a whole? Probably so, but then there are other Mozart operas to explore, and other composers besides him. The truth is that after 5,000+ years of human culture, there is more brilliant music, art, and literature than any of us will ever be able to enjoy. (That’s the real tragedy, I think.) So even if the pleasure we take in an individual artwork may fade, there will always be more, waiting to astonish us. We need never be bored.
Virtuosity is also a talisman against boredom on a more profound level. Boredom and anxiety are indeed as terrifying as Pascal and Schopenhauer say, but the careful patience necessary for achieving a little skill, in anything, gives direction and purpose to our time. Artistic, athletic, and intellectual pursuits carry their own intrinsic standards, and their accomplishments are no illusions. Over time, they turn the vertigo of human potential (we could be or do almost anything) into something solid, satisfying, and shareable. That process is as worthwhile as can be.
Finally, I will mention our species’ natural virtuosos: children. I mean more than the obvious precocious spelling champs. Every child is a virtuoso, at least in its parents or guardians’ eyes. We think so not only because we are probably evolutionarily programmed to be besotted with them, but also because we witness every step of their development, all of which seem impossible until one day, miraculously, they happen. A child’s first step or word can hit a parent with all the bewildering force of a great aria. It makes the potential in each human life seem limitless, and beautiful, and well worth the steep price of admission.
III. The Kindness Defense
If virtuosity alone will not convince you to spare us, perhaps kindness will. It, too, can justify our continued existence. I do not expect you to take my word for it, of course, but fortunately I can offer you more eloquent testimony than mine. Consider the author and poet Robert Louis Stevenson, thanking a friend for his letter:
“It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters, multiplying, spreading, making one happy through another and bringing forth benefits, some thirty, some fifty, some a thousandfold, I should think be tempted to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.”
Persuasive to me on its own! You, however, may require less poetry and more analysis. What, indeed, is kindness?
Kindness has been largely neglected by philosophers. It does not fit easily into traditional categories like ontology or epistemology, or even ethics, as ethicists tend to favor discussions of rules, countable outcomes like utility, or meta-conversations about the linguistic meaning and usages of good, right, bad, etc. There is little time left over for something so seemingly simple as being nice. Perhaps due to its etymological relationship to kin, kindness seems like something so ordinary—feelings of fondness and little acts of care and generosity—that it deserves no special attention.
The most analytical treatment of the subject I know is Aristotle’s. Instead of discussing kindness in his treatise on ethics, he places it in book II of his Rhetoric, along with other emotional dispositions like calmness and anger, friendship and enmity, fear and confidence, shame and shamelessness, cruelty, pity, indignation, envy, and emulation. Kindness, writes Aristotle:
…may be defined as helpfulness towards some one in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped. Kindness is great if shown to one who is in great need, or who needs what is important and hard to get, or who needs it at an important and difficult crisis; or if the helper is the only, the first, or chief person to give help.
As paradigmatic examples of kindness, Aristotle offers giving food to the hungry, or shelter to the banished. These kinds of human need he dubs “natural cravings,” and kindness is any acts that fulfills them, although we could surely add emotional cravings, too: for comfort, encouragement, and affection. (Among the natural cravings that kindness can assuage, Aristotle also includes sex.) In all cases, the greater the need, the greater the kindness.
Hard to quibble with Aristotle, but I think that a small act of kindness can also be a great one, albeit in a different way. Note that kindness will require an ability to discern others’ needs or wants and then meet them in a way that removes the need, or at least assuages it for the moment. So, as always in Aristotle, the faculty of discernment is crucial. We must have a kind of vision that can recognize a need when it appears before us, physical or emotional, and then the intelligence to know how to meet it. Entirely apart from the size of the need being met, there is also something impressive about our ability to pick up on each other’s subtlest signs of need, and to settle on equally subtle ways of meeting them. I think of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (which you should read, if you have not, as a good example of virtuosity in literature), and how she can always recognize what her friends and family members need better than they can themselves. This, I submit, is another way in which kindness can be great.
Once one starts looking for them, subtle acts of kindness are taking place all the time, in the most ordinary interactions. Take it from the normally dyspeptic Friedrich Nietzsche. In his Human, All Too Human, he insists that humble wohl-wollen [fellow feeling] has done more for human happiness and civilization than the more heralded virtues of benevolence and self-sacrifice. Fellow feeling, he thinks, is a form of kindness that makes human life worthwhile and, in its familial form, it is essential for human life to flourish at all:
“Those manifestations of friendly disposition in intercourse, that laughter of the eye, every hand pressure, every courtesy, from which, in general, every human act gets its quality. … It is the perpetual well spring of humanity, like the waves of light in which everything grows; thus, in the narrowest circles, within the family, life blooms and flowers only through this kind feeling. … Much more happiness is to be found in the world than gloomy eyes discovery: that is, if the calculation be just, and all these pleasing moments in which every day, even the meanest human life, is rich, be not forgotten.”
I love the suggestion that a friendly disposition gives actions a special “quality,” like a sheen of brilliant light. This quality is indeed consequential. It is possible to meet someone’s needs for bread or shelter with the same act, but with very different qualities. How different it is to give with friendliness than it is to give with contempt! This type of kindness, expressed in light touches and laughing eyes, is every day and everywhere around us, as omnipresent as waves of sunlight—visible if only we know how to look. So yes, recorded human history is a slaughter bench, but the largely unrecorded history of the human race consists in “all these pleasing moments,” which fill up and overflow even the lives of history’s victims. This is no excuse for our crimes, of course. It means, however, that the human animal is kindlier than it often appears. Surely better to befriend it than end it.
As Nietzsche also suggests, kindness can be great fun. The exuberance of old friends, meeting each other once again after a long absence, is something to behold. Often unable to sit still, full to bursting of good cheer, they are all passionate energy, brightness, contentment, and joy, neither wanting nor depending on anything the other cannot give, wholly sufficient to each others’ needs in that time and place. Such meetings are a surefire antidote to Pascalian boredom.
Let us dwell next on kindness in family life. Nietzsche’s rhapsody on familial kindness might seem surprising, given his eventual rejection of his pious Lutheran upbringing, but his metaphor of light and flowers strikes me as apt. Parental affection is probably as necessary for human life as sunlight is for plants. Without it, I have a hard time imagining that many infants could receive the attentive care that they need to survive, and yet, despite all their noise and messes, the vast majority of them do, and their haggard parents, though perhaps not having a good time, are usually overjoyed. I hasten to emphasize that parental affection is more than a biological imperative, as adoptive parents feel it too.
As infants cannot satisfy their own vital needs, their parents will have endless opportunities for Aristotelian kindness. In fact, parents often become more skilled in kindly discernment over time, at least where their own children are concerned. When an infant arrives, new parents have almost no idea how to care for it. They require assistance from doctors, nurses, grandparents, and friends, who have all held and comforted infants before. But, I have observed, parents quickly learn their infants’ needs and they are soon able to comfort the little monsters better than anyone. Lest I be misunderstood, I am not saying that parents are kinder or better human beings than those without children. But being one is almost inevitably a training ground for kindness, a crash course in learning the needs of others and attending to them with all the sleep-deprived strength one can muster. If all goes well, the child starts blooms and repays kindness in kind, both in childhood and in later years, and the human comedy continues.
Of course, there are darker possibilities in family life. If it is the training ground for kindness, it must be the training ground for cruelty as well. Where else do we learn so well how to perceive what will hurt people and how to do it? But, on balance, there must be more kindness than cruelty in the vast majority of families. It seems to me that given the amount of kindness necessary for a child’s survival, it could hardly be otherwise. The same goes for the human race as a whole. The fact that humanity is still here at all suggests that kindness is more common than cruelty. On the whole, then, we deserve to be here, and to eliminate us must offend your sense of justice. It makes sense to let us go on living and even make more of ourselves. The world must stay peopled.
IV. A Final Plea
If I have not convinced you yet, awesome ZØltr∆n, I will make one last appeal. Spare us at least for a few months, until you have a chance to see “The Magic Flute” live on September 7th in Vienna. It is not the 1791 premiere, I know, but who knows what happy surprises this and other future performances may hold? Exterminate us, and you will never find out.
Naturally I would appreciate a ride. The show starts at 7 pm, and given that Minnesota is seven hours behind Vienna, you should probably pick me up around 11 am my time. We could arrive in Vienna incognito or, if you would prefer to cause a sensation, we could land your spacecraft on the open Heldenplatz in front of the grand Hofburg Palace, and then promenade down the street to the Wiener Staatsoper, arriving just in time for the show.
I sincerely hope you would not regret it,
Paul