The End of the Human Age
Image Credit: Cavan
Why It Feels Like Things Are Unraveling for Our Civilization — And Where We Go Next
by umair haque
One of the ways I’ve begun to think about now, this era, goes like this. It’s simple, straight to the point, and maybe a little chilling. This is the End of the Human Age.
Now, if you keep up with your climate change literature, you know about a concept called “the Anthropocene.” That means that this is the geological era — Paleocene, Eocene, etcetera — where, for the first time, human beings have altered the planet, in drastic ways. That’s not quite what I mean. I mean something…at once bigger, and yet a little closer to home. Let me try to explain.
Think of some of the great, rising forces of now. Extinction — not as in Mad Max, we all die tomorrow, and hundred foot tsunamis race across the globe, but as in, deep history’s Sixth Mass Extinction Event, thanks to rapidly rising temperatures. Then there’s AI. And finally, there’s the ongoing death of democracy, which is happening much, much faster than people really know, think about, columnists write about, our intellectuals fully yet understand.
What do all those add up to? The End of the Human Age.
There are two ways to think about this little concept. The first one — the easy one — goes like this. For an age now, this has been…about…us humans. This sense of “The End of the Human Age” is material, biophysical, geospatial. During the Human Age, we became the planet’s dominant species, by a very long way. We displaced all the rest, strip mined the earth, called the stuff we made out of its resources “goods,” first invaded and conquered one another for them, not to mention the slaves who made them, and then traded them on global markets.
But now? Think about what happens next — biophysically, geospatially, socioeconomically. Now we’re on the retreat. As our cities and states and regions and towns become uninhabitable, of course, we will face difficult choices. Do we build seawalls around them? Abandon them? How long can you really stop…an ocean…a never-ending drought…crop failures… season after season? Animals are already fleeing to the poles — one of the most striking findings of recent science. So, too, will we have to — or at least to habitable regions, as large parts of the world become Fire Belts, Flood Belts, maybe even Plague Belts.
Then there’s the way AI is already reshaping our world. You can already see people beginning to…just…replace…humanity. Before, “technology” meant “things that replaced human or animal muscle” — so cars replaced horses, cotton gins replaced slaves (even if they were operated by more slaves), combustion engines replaced steam engine coal-shovellers, software programs replaced “computers,” which is what the original operators of today’s computers were called — way back when, in the 50s, “computer” was a job.
That should be a little eerie, because today, it’s pretty obvious that a lot of jobs are about to go exactly that route — and this time, it’s not just muscle that technology’s replacing, it’s humanity, period. The mind, the heart, the soul. The average person couldn’t care less — weaned on a diet of Netflix and Marvel Movies — if there’s a real person writing a book, film, or song, or not. They just want some escape from the dreariness, pain, and relentless empty horror of life at the end of capitalism.
Add to that the not-so-slow death of democracy. Do we even treat each other like human beings anymore? Take a hard look at America. It’s struggled for generations to try to become a modern country — and then along came Trumpism. Trumpists don’t just not believe in democracy anymore, really — worse, Trump’s inheritors, like Ron DeSantis, and his ilk across the country, don’t really think of huge swathes of people as…human beings…at all. So women aren’t to have rights, teachers and doctors are to be criminalized, books are to be banned, entire ways of living are to be attacked as impure. They’re groomers and pedophiles! They’re not really people! This form of politics is now open in its real agenda: dehumanization.
Democracy’s dying at the rate of about 10% a decade. That gives us, LOL, just a few decades until it’s gone. Sure, if we’re lucky, that rate will slow. But if it doesn’t? Then this form of politics — hate, violence, dehumanization — which is more or less fascistic will take over. And if that’s the future? All we’re doing is trying to take one another’s humanity away, and I don’t mean that in abstract terms, but in hard ones — rights, personhood, public goods, protection under the rule law, equality, basic freedoms.
The End of the Human Age. Now maybe you can see how those three threads tie up. Our dominance over the planet is over. It proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. The planet is reclaiming itself, as it burns and floods, writhing in pain. Our civilization has reached its limits, geospatially and biophysically. It’s highly, highly unlikely that ever again are we going to straddle the globe the way we do, because, well, have fun living in a region that’s a Fire or Flood Belt. Technologically, we’re crossing a critical threshold — one where technology replaces us completely, not just in the form of muscle, but in the form of mind and heart and soul, even if it’s just pretending. And democratically? The future looks a whole lot like a sudden, turbo-charged rewind, through fascism, all the way back to feudalism. Together, those three forces mean the End of the Human Age — biologically, materially, economically, and sociopolitically.
If that sounds scary, well, it is. But the point of these posts isn’t to frighten you. It’s to discuss, to think, to converse about where we’re going and why. And to me, these days, it seems increasingly that..well…let me try it this way.