Abstract
Acts of extermination are assaults upon the future.
Our jolly topic is doomsday, and this peril, especially, in its nuclear incarnation, is famous for repelling thought, even to the point of being considered “unthinkable.” People just love not to think about nuclear arms, for reasons both obvious and not so obvious. My conviction is that this difficulty has to do with the actual nature of the event–the removal of all human beings from Earth–and not merely with some defect in human psychology in the face of great disasters. So let me approach this question a little obliquely.
The danger of extinction by nuclear arms, sprung out of total secrecy in 1945, came as a shock that, more than a half-century later, still bewilders the world; yet it did have a historical context, which has continued to develop and expand. The event's antecedents were the increasing destructiveness of the instruments of war and the eruption of genocide as a modern political project in the first half of the twentieth century. The sequel has been the protracted awakening in the century's second half to the damage that human activity is doing to other species and to the terrestrial environment, damage that alters not just the human condition but the condition of all life.
In other words, historically, the peril of human extinction in a nuclear holocaust is the middle term that links genocide and ecocide.
The antecedents to the event of 1945, the event itself, and the sequel exhibit a common theme. All are acts of extermination, which is something quite specific, something quite new, that needs to be clearly distinguished from other evils.
Extermination almost always involves mass killing, but mass killing and extermination are not the same. Let us consider genocide. Although historically mass killing has been the chief instrument of genocide, the definition of genocide does not hinge on the numbers killed. It hinges on the intention to destroy utterly a particular, definable community, whether this might be a people, a race, or an ethnic group. The definition is rooted in the origin of the word, which means to kill a “kind”–a genus–of human being. Whether killing hundreds of thousands or millions of people could in fact be carried out without targeting a specific genus as a matter of state policy may be doubted. Nevertheless, formally speaking, while the murder of a few hundred people who constituted a very small genus–for example, a small tribe–might constitute genocide, the killing of hundreds of thousands of randomly chosen people might not.
Acts of genocide that lack killing entirely are theoretically, at least, imaginable. For instance, Raphael Lemkin, who led the campaign to establish the convention on genocide, argued that the annihilation of a tradition or culture through repression or expulsion of a people from their homeland, for example, should, even in the absence of mass killing, be considered genocide.
Genocide could also theoretically be accomplished by somehow destroying the regenerative capacity of a people by preventing them from reproducing.
Human extinction likewise could theoretically be brought about without any actual killing. Let us imagine, for example, that a universal plague destroyed the sperm cells of all human males. Not one person would suffer untimely death, but the species nevertheless would, in a lingering scene, be extinguished. Like the Australians in Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach, who know that a spreading cloud of radiation from a nuclear war between the Cold War superpowers has destroyed life in the northern hemisphere and await the same fate for themselves as the cloud descends southward, the last generation would know it was the last generation.
The same fate is, of course, possible for other species (although they are not capable of knowing it), some of which have become extinct chiefly because their reproductive capacity was harmed. What is more common in the natural world is that the environment that sustains a species is destroyed. If every panda on Earth is hunted down, the panda species (which now numbers about a thousand in their natural habitat in China) will be extinguished. It is more likely, however, that the environment that sustains pandas will be destroyed.
An ecosystem, if it is singular in character, is in one respect like a species: once destroyed, it can never be recovered. The ecosphere–the ecosystem of Earth–is, of course, the largest of the singular ecosystems, whose loss comprises all the others.
In other words, nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy, which actually trade on genocide for political purposes, called mutual assured destruction, threaten not just individual people, in however large numbers, but the order of creation, natural and human, and this is something new.
Let me quote something that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a few years ago about the possibility that Iran would obtain nuclear arms: “If they do acquire WMD [weapons of mass destruction] their weapons will be unusable, because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.” She did not threaten them with defeat, or even with regime change, but with “national obliteration”–a perfect synonym for genocide. But such threats have been the stock in trade of nuclear policy for more than 60 years.
One moral question such threats put on the table is whether, as now seems the case, we should be forbidden to commit genocide by every means except nuclear arms.
Even if one is not religious, I think a biblical perspective is helpful in coming to terms with all of the acts of extermination.
In Genesis, we read, “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. On the first day, he created light, on the second, the firmament, on the third, the seas. And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed and the fruit tree yielding fruit, after his kind’: and God saw that it was good…. And God said, ‘Let the water bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in firmament of heaven.’ … And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’”
Not until our time, when human beings acquired the power to unmake God's Creation–quickly through nuclear war, slowly through less drastic interventions in the natural environment–did these verses of Genesis become a political text. One way of looking at our predicament is to say that we threaten to run Genesis in reverse: removing, in a steady progression, each of the things that God is said to have created in the first week of the world.
This new peril requires a fundamental revision in thinking. In political thought, the Creation, for which the secular name is nature, had always been the given, the starting point for reflection. For more than two millennia, it was the modus operandi of Western political thought to reason forward from this “original” state, as it was called, in which the existence of human beings was an assumption, to how politics and the civil state arose among them.
In 1945, this givenness of human life and the rest of nature became conditional, which is to say that it became political. The new starting point of political thought had to be not the shadows of our dimly known beginnings but the unlimited darkness of the annihilation that humankind had prepared for itself and other living things. Now political thinkers were summoned not to reason forward from that original state but to reason backward from an all-too-real, possible final state, doomsday.
Although the idea of a bloodless human extinction seems farfetched as a practical matter, the possibility clarifies the defining feature of any act of extermination, which is not the death of the living but the cancellation of the unborn. Acts of extermination, although usually accompanied by slaughter in the present, are assaults upon the future. Whether we are speaking of genocide, the extinction of humankind, or the extinction of other species and ecosystems, however, the critical distinction is between that which is created and the power that creates it–between the loom and the cloth, the die and the product. Indispensable to the powers that sustain the regeneration of life, human or otherwise, are certain stable patterns, or forms. The stable forms that underlie individual species–the genomes–are the most sharply defined. The stable forms that underlie ecosystems–the fixed, or slow-changing interrelationships among species on which all depend for their survival–are likewise physically definable. The stable forms that underlie the cultures and traditions of peoples cannot be so easily identified, but are no less real for that. They give to culture some of the orderliness found in the regeneration of organisms.
It is the integrity and perdurance of these life-forms, which are truly the books of life, that endow each “kind”–whether this is one of the peoples that make up the human species, the human species itself, other species, or ecosystems–with an immortality that is unshared by their individual members. That is why it is appropriate to speak of an extinction as a second death. For a species or an ecosystem, like a human society, is an immortal body composed of mortal beings. To be mortal is not to be at risk of death, it is to be fated to die, which is why some pessimistic philosophers have said that life is an illness from which no one recovers; but the immortal bodies, though killable, are exempt from this fatality.
It is the immortal bodies, in all their tremendous yet finite variety, that acts of extermination destroy. In doing so, extermination attacks life at a level that killing, even mass killing, does not reach. Killing removes a sentient individual from life. Acts of extermination mutilate, deform, reduce, or destroy the living world from which killing removes the individual–a living world that is also the one in which and through which the individual lives and seeks fulfillment if left unkilled. None of this is to say that extermination is necessarily more awful than unsystematic killing. It is only to say that it is new and different, that it damages life on a new scale and at a new level, and therefore demands new thought and a new response.
Bye, bye biota
Mass extinctions are nothing new in the history of Earth. Is our doomsday crisis
any different? We asked paleontologist