Whether one expresses things in Greek or Latin seems to make an enormous difference - at least to English speakers - when it comes to discussing who we are.
Only brave souls distance themselves from humanity or even humanism. These Latin coinages are normally seen in a positive light. This is why postmodern thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were at first treated to such fear and loathing when they were seen as "anti-humanist."
On the other hand, people seem more than happy to distance themselves from anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, Greek coinages. The same applies to the more recent coinage, anthropocene - and certainly on Clive Hamilton's recent pessimistic reading of the idea.
But what hangs in the balance in how the two great ancient Mediterranean languages refer to who were are?
The implied difference is metaphysical. The Latin coinages refer to features of a being that qualify it as human, whereas the Greek coinages refer to the projection of generically human features on beings that might not be otherwise seen as human. Thus, the two languages address, one might say, the depth and the breadth of "being human," respectively.
This is not just an interesting philological point, but one of profound political significance.
On the one hand, we might say that until we figure out what it means to be "human" (especially whether it is a good thing), we should restrict our usage of "human." On the other hand, we might say that only by extending our implicit sense of humanity to others can we make explicit to ourselves what it really means to be human.
In policy terms, the former adopts a precautionary and the latter a proactionary attitude towards risk - specifically, the risk involved in a pro-human agenda. So, while I don't dispute the empirical points that Hamilton makes about "man-made" climate change (except to note that use of the masculine seems to be fine when something bad is described), we disagree over the spirit in which those facts should be taken. What he sees as a threat if not an outright cosmic condemnation, I see as a challenge or perhaps even an opportunity.
Much depends on whether humanity is seen as partners with nature in some larger divine "project." (I put "project" in scare quotes because what God has always already done from the standpoint of eternity is something that we as fallen creatures might realize only gradually in the fullness of time - which is to say, as a "project.") If so, then the slide from humanist to anthropic is justified.
I shall return to this point below, but for now the relevant point is that Hamilton denies any such slide. He sees us clearly as a subordinate albeit morally interesting part of nature. In him travels the spirit of the more enlightened Hellenistic thinkers whom St. Paul failed to convert to Christianity. More to the point, Hamilton's position has no basis in Christian theology, where humanity's creation imago Dei is non-negotiable. To be sure, humans find themselves in a nature that is equally created by God - but not in his image. Moreover, our fallen state continues to be demonstrated by our failure to distance ourselves from nature in how we conduct our lives.
The current environmental crisis may be seen as the latest version of humanity's fallen state. But its resolution need not mean a return to nature in the sense of a scaled-back "reabsorption" or "restoration" to some imagined state of cosmic equilibrium. Rather, it means pushing nature to a level closer to what we hypothesize as a divine state of being.
Again, I do not wish to underestimate the risk involved, but risk is precisely what we are about as human beings. "Ye shall know them by their bets" might be a good contemporary way of putting the matter, which assumes that people know enough about the bets they're making on the future to take responsibility for them, even if they turn out to have been in error.
Put another way, it is exactly by taking bold calculated risks that we acknowledge that we are not fully in control of our fates, and hence pay homage to God. The early modern Christian idea of Divine Providence, which I raised in my previous response to Clive Hamilton, captures this sensibility. In the past three or four centuries, it has been popularized in various "self-help" ways as "you can't succeed if you don't try" and, more brutally, "no pain, no gain." In contrast, creatures who fail to embrace risk as a self-defining concept are never in a position to recognize - let alone take the full measure of - a force beyond their control; hence, we speak of their responses as programmed: they stay within their biologically prescribed limits. They have no sense of the transcendent.
As a metaphysical backdrop to this pro-human discussion, one needs to imagine that God is the source of logos - that is, "logic" in an extended sense that includes both computer and genetic codes, as well as physical laws. It follows that one can divide God's creatures into those capable of willing the logos for themselves ("human") and those capable of no more than conforming to the logos ("nature"). In that case, "the capable" must incorporate "the incapable" in order for humanity's divine entitlement is to be fully redeemed. From this standpoint, the radical otherness of nature - whereby it is seen as a threat to the human way of being - is no more than a dramatic reminder of our fallen yet corrigible nature.
Ecomodernism as the politics of theological optimism
Ecomodernism, the pro-human environmental movement which led Clive Hamilton to begin this exchange, has a distinctive way of gauging our alienation from nature. Contra Hamilton, who associates alienation with excessive detachment, ecomodernists associate alienation with excessive dependency - specifically, humanity's reliance on biomass as an energy source. As long as we need to fell trees to make and heat our homes or enslave and kill animals for transport, food and clothing, we have been unable to accord nature the respect it deserves - and in the process, we display our own fallen nature.
Such an "us versus them" attitude towards nature speaks to humanity's inability to rise above nature's own default mode of being. Thus, we engage in zero-sum struggles for resources. The sort of scarcity-based economics first advanced by Reverend Thomas Malthus and later generalized by Charles Darwin into a theory of natural selection has been based on a Hamilton-like pessimism vis-a-vis our prospects for overcoming this predicament. At most, we will be the supreme predatory animal for a brief moment in cosmic history.
Ecomodernism speaks unequivocally against this entire line of thought, and in so doing aims to reclaim our divine entitlement. If history teaches one overarching lesson, it is that humans have gradually but clearly "decoupled" their own survival needs from those of the rest of nature. In other words, we have discovered - and, increasingly, invented - "energy-dense" resources. Such resources typically involve significant human intervention, if not outright creation, yet the overall result is to leave more of nature unexploited. In the twentieth century, artificial fertilizers and nuclear energy stand out in this regard. However, these achievements are often not fully appreciated because they have allowed very many more people to flourish, even though the burden that each person places on nature is less than before these innovations, when many fewer people inhabited the planet.
The long-term tendency to "energy density" can be understood theologically as humanity's attempt to approximate the Abrahamic deity's creation of everything out of nothing. Moreover, the comparison has never been far from the minds of scientists or the scientific public. Indeed, the first advertising campaigns for artificial fertilizers, which involved the chemical harnessing of atmospheric nitrogen, spoke of "food from the skies" - a secularised allusion to "Manna from Heaven." Around the same time (the 1920s), divine creation itself was assimilated into secular science as the "Big Bang" - courtesy of the Belgian Jesuit cosmologist, Georges Lemaitre.
At one level, comparing even a world fed by artificial fertilizers and powered by nuclear energy with creatio ex nihilo looks crass and sacrilegious. But at another level, the sort of reasoning and processes associated with the pursuit of energy density have provided the material conditions for human beings first to treat each other, then animals and finally nature as a whole with dignity - as less biomass-based energy is required to achieve comparable results. In this respect, efficiency can be a great emancipator, not only of those who now can do more with less, but also of those whose lives no longer need to be exploited and hence may join those allowed to do more with less.
Nevertheless, even someone like myself who endorses ecomodernism realizes that it faces two interesting problems that are largely of its own creation. The first is "easier" in the sense that it is more readily recognized and dealt with, albeit perhaps too superficially for critics. The second is "harder" in the sense of questioning whether the anthropic agenda can be pursued indefinitely.
The first problem is that humanity might become victim to the success of an ecomodernist agenda, as too many of us inhabit the planet for too long. Against this gloomy forecast is that lower infant mortality rates typically mean fewer offspring. Indeed, thanks to improvements in healthcare, education, nutrition and hygiene, global birth rates have declined over the past forty years. But that only takes care of the material problem, not the spiritual one.
Ruptures in the history of human thought and action have often required new generations unburdened with the experience of their elders. Will such independently minded cohorts exist in the future, especially as we develop biomedical resources to enable, say, today's adults to pursue healthy lives indefinitely? The sorts of aspirations that in the past might have been invested in children - due to one's own mortality - might eventually disappear.
Of course, there are ways around this prospect of radical zero population growth. One is simply to create a social and legal environment friendlier to rational suicide. The other is to provide incentives for healthy older people to leave the Earth to their young successors, while they navigate the cosmos, spreading their wisdom to all and sundry. Here we arrive at an important motivation for the "space ark" that first piqued Clive Hamilton's concerns about ecomodernism.
The second problem, in a way, addresses how such a space ark might be organized and governed. It also highlights the common progressive agenda shared by ecomodernism and transhumanism. As in Noah's biblical ark, the space ark promises to carry some representative sample of humans and other creatures - albeit not for forty days on Earth but for an indefinite extent of time and space. Is the ark, then, supposed to preserve as much of our current ecosystem as possible or to be a literal floating laboratory of organic transformation? The latter seems scientifically more plausible - and existentially more interesting, as the space travellers are continually challenged to redefine the distinctly "human" in what would become an ever more artificial version of the "human condition."
Expanding the scope of the human in search for the divine
But the task ahead is hardly insurmountable. Indeed, arguably we have been always engaged in it, even on Earth. After all, "humanity" is a normative category that has been extended only with great difficulty to all members of Homo sapiens - and, arguably, that task has yet to reach completion. And each time a new class, gender, race or religion has been incorporated, the meaning of "human" has changed, typically by shifting the default position of what counts as "normal." (And along the way there were those who regarded these extensions as perversions.)
Education and legislation were the original enhancement strategies for upright apes, but over time we have developed more physically invasive and perhaps more direct ways of achieving many of the same effects - along with some new and unexpected ones, to be sure.
To appreciate the challenge ahead, let us return to the significance of the Greek anthropic, which implies an extension of the human to the non-human. Consider two English words derived from this root, whose meanings are often conflated: anthropocentric and anthropomorphic. The former concerns the human as the conceptual framework in which knowledge is created; the latter the character of the knowledge that is so created.
It follows that science is an anthropocentric enterprise that aspires not to be anthropomorphic. However, politics (especially in the cosmic terms entertained here) is an anthropomorphic enterprise that aspires not to be anthropocentric.
The former point has been captured well in the history of science in terms of nature's "intelligibility": the fact that nature is tractable to human intelligence - not only in the bits that we normally experience but also in the vast majority of it that we don't experience. Our success in launching spacecraft based on imagined physical laws underwritten by exclusively earthbound evidence proves the point. But of course, whatever is learned about the cosmos by such divinely inspired human intelligence need not itself be human in character, and hence not anthropomorphic.
This then opens the difficult political question of how to treat any creatures we discover that have an existence independent of our own. While this question is especially relevant to animals, it potentially extends throughout cosmic nature - not least whatever hybrid life-forms might be bred on the space ark.
The bottom-line question is this: What is the appropriate relationship between humanity and nature? Clearly, it should not be absolute submission, either of the natural to the human or, for that matter, of the human to the natural. Humans are not merely upright apes and nature is not just raw material. The right relation is a kind of integration. But unlike certain fashionable eco-friendly versions of "theistic evolution," the human and the natural are not equal partners in the work of divine creation. Rather, the human is the superior partner by virtue of being the place where the divine is manifest in nature as a whole, as epitomized in Christianity by the person of Jesus. (After all, God could have communicated by means of other aspects of our material being - not necessarily the specifically human.)
It is here that ecomodernism reveals its theological orientation to be closer to intelligent design theory than theistic evolution. Creatio ex nihilo - or the "Big Bang" - is not simply a break point between a mysterious deity who happens to create everything out of nothing and a nature that evolves in a way that points to humanity's ultimate extinction, perhaps with some promise of an equally mysterious afterlife. Rather, the deity's creative capacity is a model for human emulation, a central feature of human redemption from sin; hence, the theological significance of efficiency.
But this suggests a further challenge, one that the space ark brings into sharp relief. Put in ecomodernist terms, even once humanity is fully "decoupled" from nature in terms of energy needs, there will remain the challenge of whether we are learning sufficiently from nature to enhance the human condition.
Humanity is already going down this trajectory. The first stage is, broadly speaking, biomimicry - that is, the technological modelling, if not outright reproduction, of functional properties of natural things. Thus, we have been fascinated by how birds fly, fruits hold their contents and ants carry vast loads. To be sure, our inventions have strayed significantly from nature's own designs. Yet, arguably, these uses remain intellectually exploitative of their natural models: after all, what do we give back to the birds, fruits and ants that inspire our inventions - other than simply permitting them to live?
I can only sketch a responsive strategy here. It goes by the general name of uplifting, after a series of science fiction novels by David Brin. Brin envisages a cosmos in which a wide variety of species are cognitively "uplifted" so as to communicate not only with humans but also - at least in principle - with each other. This opens up new realms of social, political and economic relations, as well as attendant risks. The strategy is clearly anthropic in inspiration, yet it clearly goes against the usual imperial image of anthropomorphism. Indeed, one possible outcome is that humans might themselves become more adept in ways of knowing and being that were formerly limited to particular non-human species.
In this vein, the Canadian political philosopher Will Kymlicka, long known for his work on multicultural justice, has even begun to entertain the concept of zoopolis to capture a regime in which a set of mutually binding laws could be enforced to govern a biodiverse ecosystem modelled on a city. At the extreme end of this line of thought lies what the visionary architect behind the space ark project, Rachel Armstrong, calls "protocell architecture," whereby sustained study of the life-like properties of complex molecules - such as Butschli oil droplets - could lead to the design of ultra-smart environments which would condition us to explore creatively the possibilities that a dynamic ecosystem opens up, not least different physical forms in which "humanity" itself might be expressed.
It is common nowadays both among the secular and the religious - even among Christians - to reduce the value of being "human" to the value of life itself. Clive Hamilton belongs to this ancient tradition that is currently en vogue. However, for those who still appreciate the centrality of the human Jesus as the form of divine self-disclosure in Christianity, there is everything to play for, as we stretch our imaginations and our capacities in search of what it means to be "human" - not only on Earth but across the cosmos.
Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick. His latest book is Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History.