Sunday, June 29, 2014

Just a thought …

In a review of Gaia Vince's Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made, Bryan Appleyard makes a most interesting point: "Humans do what humans do and our activities are as 'natural' as any other creature’s. We are pretty much incapable of saving anything — carbon emissions continue to soar and even the greatest nature reserve in the world, the Serengeti, is being squeezed and plundered — so it is best to assume the worst."
After first wondering if Gaia was Ms. Vince's given name, the thought came to me that there isn't any plausible naturalistic argument for any human obligation to take care of  the world, except to the extent that doing so is conducive to survival. The founding principle of Darwinism is survival by means of natural selection. This is the principle from which any others must be derived. Which is to say all behavior must be reducible to explanation by means of the aforementioned first principle. Given that life, as actually experienced, offers a good deal more than mere survival, this seems an impoverished view of things, somewhat on the order of reducing literature to ink and paper (the pen is problematic because it interjects purpose, attention, and skill. Either those, or colossal good luck.

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