Human (n. and adj.), now obs.
A human being, a person; a member of the species Homo sapiens or other equally extinct species of the genus Homo (see also: anthropos, animal rationale, zoon logon ekhon).
Humans were distinguished from their nearest primate relatives principally by skeletal modifications adapting them to erect bipedalism and by their greater cranial capacity.
Often used with the (definite article)
That which was human or which related to humanity. The average or typical human being; humans collectively, the human race.
Scientific definition and classification
A human was a bipedal hominin characterized by having a higher and vertical forehead compared with earlier hominins. The brain volume was about 1,400 cc. The teeth and jaw were smaller and the chin was prominent. Humans were the hominins capable of creating and using complex tools, solving problems by sense and reasoning, using symbols and language, and creating complex social structures.
Usage
Humans referred to themselves as people, especially when comparing themselves with (other) animals or machines.
A. Characteristics
It took humans a long time to develop a sense of their own historicity. The fact that one can look back at them as a species that is now extinct makes their evolution from the first primates to early hominins and hominids to homo a quite impressive but also somewhat tortuous journey. The other evolutionary development, namely that in its final stages there was only one subspecies of the variety of homo that survived, the one that somewhat narcissistically referred to itself as homo sapiens (sapiens), has long been seen as proof of its exceptionality, even though there might be much more mundane reasons for its sole survival, like climate change, disease or (a thesis that was strongly contested by the survivors) genocide. In any case, in their 30,000-year evolution, homo sapiens not only succeeded in adapting to their environment through ever more sophisticated techniques and technologies, they also managed to colonise almost the entire surface of their planet. They even became major agents of transformation at a planetary level, like the microbes that first started the chemical processes that caused the planet called Earth to develop a hydrosphere, an atmosphere, and a biosphere, which ended up supporting a huge variety of organic life forms, by adding another sphere, a technosphere, to the planet’s structure. It is believed that it is precisely this evolutionary success that in the end led to homo’s eventual demise and to the collapse of its survival structures called civilisations. These civilisations (also referred to as cultures) were exteriorised and materialised forms of what homo called consciousness – a form of self-awareness able to transcend the limitations of the life span of individual members of the species through forms of communication, transmission and inscription.
It is not quite clear what prompted this extraordinary step and achievement in the history of natural evolution. It was widely believed that it was human bipedalism, the erect posture, that allowed standing and moving on two legs that liberated the upper extremities, and developed into arms with hands and fingers. The latter prehensile organs allowed for holding and manipulating objects and thus became instruments called tools for transforming materials – which, in turn, was seen as the origin of culture. This extraordinary development transformed humans’ way of life from simple primate hordes into more and more organised groups, communities and societies (see below).
Another thing that the upright posture allowed for was the development of a comparatively large brain size for this species’ average height, which in turn favoured the development of more complex cognitive abilities, usually referred to as thought or intelligence. The price to pay for the increased brain and head size, it was believed, was that human cubs (usually referred to as babies), had to be born prematurely in order not to endanger the survival of their mothers giving birth through too small a birth canal. As a result, offspring were characterised by what was referred to as neoteny – a prolonged period of helplessness compared to other mammals, and which required many years’ of care and a social organisation that allowed for long periods of parenting. Parenting roles were usually distributed along gender and age: mothers doing the majority of rearing and educational work, together with older females who, due to their social usefulness, tended to survive older males. The role of the fathers was mostly one of protection and provision of food. At a social level this most often led to a form of organisation called family, based on the more or less monogamous cohabitation of one or more females with usually one, dominant, male and their offspring (even though alternative forms of organisation were available and sometimes tolerated).
A striking characteristic of humans was their nakedness (one of their kind even referred to his own species as the naked ape). It is believed that humans probably lost their fur as the result of an adaptation to new habitats (from woodland to steppe) and climate warming. Again, there was a price to pay for this evolutionary process, namely in that humans needed artificial protection against environmental phenomena like rain and sunshine, which led to the development of clothes. The use of clothes is also connected to a change in diet, which developed from being mostly plant-based to carnivorous and later omnivore. The hunting and killing of animals in hordes provided fur coats to protect human bodies and also served as symbols (fetishes or trophies) of human superiority over other animals. As this dominance grew, a major transformation in life style and social organisation led to domesticating and breeding certain animal species and to harnessing their power. This also caused a dramatic transformation of the vegetal landscape through tilling, sowing of seeds and harvesting – an activity referred to as agriculture – which gradually allowed humans to sustain their ever-growing numbers and their geographic spread.
Clothes, agriculture, herding and breeding were just some forms of technology invented by humans to master their environment (often referred to as nature and to be distinguished from the purely human-created sphere called culture). As more time became available for activities not directly related to basic subsistence, more and more manual tools were invented, making ever more sophisticated use of the already mentioned development of hands. These instruments, like tools for hammering, cutting, projecting, and so on, apart from affording the development of techniques and providing extensions or prostheses of human hands and other extremities and organs, also served as protective shields as well as both defensive and aggressive weapons. But there were also other tools not designed for material transformation which gradually even became most characteristic for humans. These were all based on symbolic and hence at least partially immaterial activities. The prime example here is what was called language. Communication was of course not a uniquely human invention – on the contrary, virtually all other species had ways of using their various sensoria to make sense of their environments and also to a certain extent share this with others. However, what the human species maybe discovered by chance and subsequently developed to a unique level of sophistication was a way of making sense that also and systematically functioned in the absence of material tracks and traces, and was purely based on a transformation of materiality into immaterial or psychic signs. This added an almost infinite number of layers of meaning that by being shared through an agreed code (language) led to a different level of understanding, already referred to above as consciousness (a kind of higher mental awareness of their environment and themselves that also went beyond their physical presence, affording an increased ability of projection and remembering; see, also, below).
This non-physical level of symbolic activity that allowed for consciousness, and which was based on a process of (mental) interiorisation, usually produced self-awareness, and combined with the extensive tool-making abilities of the species, translated into social, i.e. shared, practices like drawing, singing, or praying – practices also used to differentiate between individual members of the species through specialisation, often with the effect of creating hierarchies among them. However, again there was a price to pay for these evolutionary advantages (mostly understood as progress), in the form of the development of an unconscious. Consciousness came with an awareness of finality and the anxieties, desires and questions this raised. It also came with repression (a kind of wilful forgetting) giving rise to strategies of avoidance. While it is safe to assume that all species have avoidance strategies for finality and other instincts, higher-level consciousness and its symbolic-semiotic transmission technologies (often referred to as media), humans were able to reflect on, transform, and share their experience and thus to develop, accumulate, and pass on knowledge to other species members, even sometimes long after their individual deaths – especially once more sophisticated recording systems became available, in particular, material encoding techniques called painting or writing.
The unconscious and the uncontrollable psychic activities this produced (especially dreams), became the repositories of repressed anxieties, desires and instincts whose repression was necessary to overcome the immediate memories of other life forms of animality deemed lower and crude, in order to create and maintain higher levels of (self-)consciousness. The downside was that by repressing these now prohibited (or abjected) levels of animality, instinctiveness and affectivity were not really defeated or expunged but merely stored out or reach of consciousness. In fact, they were sometimes made even more powerful through repeated repression because of their continued, strangely absent, presence that led to a constant reminder of them in barely disguised form, often referred to as haunting. Both psychic and external stimuli were constantly able to remind humans of the repressed and call for renewed and intensified psychic defence mechanisms, sometimes causing compulsively repetitive forms of behaviour considered pathological (including auto-destructive mental states like depression and self-annihilating behaviour like suicide, for example).
The undeniable success of the human species, however, can be seen in the development of ever more sophisticated social structures, more efficient agricultural technologies in combination with the harnessing of biochemical and genetic processes, civilizational developments like sanitation, the development of social institutions, and medical care systems allowing for a dramatic reduction in stillbirths, and a substantial rise in life expectancy (even though all these were not equally distributed across the species at a global level, due to big differences in service availability, quality, and lifestyle, depending on geographical, socioeconomic, and political factors often mapped along the dividing line between a privileged global North and a disadvantaged global South – a disparity in wealth historically explicable by the effects of colonialism, imperialism and extractivism in mainly African and South-American and some South-Asian regions by their Northern oppressors). Economically and environmentally, these civilizational achievements were nevertheless often dearly bought through what humans referred to as industrialisation and modernity – both highly contested processes or epochs driven by Western colonial powers especially located on the continent called Europe (later superseded by North America and, even later, China).
Industrialisation meant a number of things: more and more people moved from agriculture into the mass production of goods in factories in or around cities, leading to a concentration of housing, sanitation, and civic facilities, as well as a lifestyle increasingly structured by consumerism. This process of modernisation linked to technological and social development also led to the creation of public and increasingly compulsory education and to a rise of literacy. It also generated new media like newspapers, together with a reading culture and a public sphere for the liberal exchange of ideas, closely linked with the development of more democratic political systems. Later, other mass media like film, television and most recently the internet, together with the establishment of dedicated leisure time and a better work-life balance produced an increasingly individualist self-understanding of humans and led to calls for increased personal freedom and universal and inalienable human rights.
However, all these developmental feats did not really solve the important metaphysical (some would say spiritual) problems the human species had created for itself. The question of what it meant to be human was being asked with more and more urgency, especially as any spiritual answers were discredited due to scientific and sociological developments and a generally accepted materialism, which explained life and human nature exclusively in biochemical and psychosocial terms. This caused many identitarian crises since it was becoming increasingly difficult to define human nature, humans’ essential difference or identity against other biological and geological entities (nonhuman animals, plants, microbes, minerals etc.), as well as against material and increasingly immaterial (i.e. ‘virtual’) technological objects and processes (machines, digital objects, software based on information, data and algorithms). There was in fact no agreement on what made humans special and what, in turn, justified their exceptional positionality, and hence no real legitimation for the absolute power over planetary resources humans had assumed.
Most often used as justification for human exceptionality, however, were their cultural technologies, like philosophy, their science, and maybe in particular their art, architecture and literature, seen as undeniable achievements and as signs of human aspirations towards perfection, as well as continued moral improvement (a set of values often referred to as humanism). These were also thought to be able to serve as protection against all forms of natural and human-made adversity. Nevertheless there were evils, as they were called, that continued to haunt and mire human civilizational and social progress: violence was a particular problem, whose origin could not be adequately explained by humanists, and which had been causing wars, immense suffering of both humans and nonhumans, as well as an unbelievable squandering of resources, including the destruction of many natural and cultural habitats. Most important, however, was that the underlying principle of humans’ modern economy and its associated liberal politics was that of competition – a distribution of the means of production functioning according to principles referred to as capitalist. It is true that the concentration of capital in the hands of entrepreneurs and the specialisation of a workforce greatly improved productivity and lifted a growing number of humans out of basic poverty, but the price for this was a very unevenly distributed access to privileges, wealth, and power, as well as growing psychological alienation of humans from their immediate natural and social environment. The principle of competitiveness was also turned into a general social principle which led to generalised mistrust, a decline in many previous forms of solidarity and to aggressive variants of individualism.
One fundamental and possibly fatal error the human species committed was that quite early on in their endeavour to systematically understand their metaphysical position in what they referred to as the universe or the cosmos, they tended to think of themselves as being within a triangular relationship of distinction between animals and machines (a triangle that until quite late in their history was dominated by a fourth and transcendent entity called God). This resulted in a number of so-called binary oppositions (mutually exclusive categories) that were nevertheless unstable and ultimately untenable, and which caused all kinds of misconceptions and violence. The distinction human/animal was used to justify the exploitation and lawful killing (slaughter, hunt, medical experiments, and so on) of animals based on the declared superiority of humans over (nonhuman) animals, despite the fact that biologically, human bodies were clearly classifiable as mammals and therefore part of the animal kingdom. To radically distinguish human animals from nonhuman animals, and the unlawful killing of humans (murder) from the lawful putting-to-death of nonhuman animals, a spiritual or religious reasoning was used that granted humans souls, spirits, minds or consciousness denied to nonhuman animals. The downside (for humans) was, however, that the resulting violence against nonhuman animals could also be used against some humans, as long as these were deemed to be or to act like animals (if they were not corresponding to constructed social norms, for example, which led to practices identified as racist and/or sexist both based on and working, often intersectionally with and in analogy to speciesism).
The other boundary, namely between humans and machines, objects or technology more generally, was in fact found to be equally ‘leaky’ for a number of reasons: in the process of trying to establish an abyss between humans and animals, both human and animal bodies in fact came to be considered as machines (according to a belief system called mechanism). The idea was that some higher power (i.e. God, see above) with superior engineering knowledge had devised biological entities thought to be natural and alive, and which were functioning according to mechanistic i.e. technical principles, like clockwork. However, the special ingredient making humans superior in their mental capacities to all other creatures could only be explained by some immaterial, i.e. spiritual or divine element, not reducible to biology or physics. As humans began to develop more and more sophisticated technologies and self-moving objects that were increasingly able to replicate processes that used to be thought to be the sole domain of the human mind (i.e. thought, intelligence, consciousness, and so on), the boundary between human and machine and the associated differences between biological or organic life and mineral or inorganic (‘dead’) matter also began to break down. The result was a great conceptual mess which caused a lot of anxiety in humans (especially of the humanist kind), producing more and more desperate attempts at finding new ways to consolidate human power in the face of its erosion and the associated haunting return of both its repressed animality and technology.
As a result of its continued narcissistic obsession with its own identity and exceptionality, the human species was ultimately not able to rid itself of certain endemic violent tendencies, which can be seen in what humans called history and which, if read between the lines, is basically a recording system of processes of repressive practices, colonialism, slavery, war, catastrophes, and killing, often reinterpreted as cultural achievements (scientific breakthroughs, inventions and other outcomes of creative thought and practice). This, in the end, led to the demise of an undeniably talented and often quite promising species but one which tended to be motivated by hubris and arrogance, and a lack of compassion and altruism (see section 2, below).
It is therefore despite all their best intentions, which can be seen in social inventions, ideas and practices like law and justice, an appreciation of beauty, practices of mindfulness and benevolence that humans contributed to their own disappearance and the general deterioration of the biosphere of the planet. What was particularly curious, maybe, was that while justice was an idea or even an ideal universally recognised as one of the highest and most noble principles of social organisation among humans, social practice in applying this principle through self-imposed rules and regulations referred to as laws almost always inevitably betrayed the very principle of justice. In this sense, humans must necessarily have experienced their own disappearance as a cosmological act of injustice, which at least some of them desperately sought to either redress or overcome before their final demise and extinction, unfortunately without much avail.
B. Reasons for human decline and extinction
Overpopulation
What hastened the decline and the eventual extinction of the last homo species was, ironically, its evolutionary and reproductive success. Some even compared its spread and its adaptation to every single natural habitat of the planet, its thriving but also its predatory and destructive behaviour, to that of a virus.
The species developed from an originally nomadic existence (hunter-gatherers) to a sedentary one (establishing agriculture and breeding nonhuman animal species to exploit). In its final stages it displayed accelerated migratory patterns due to economic, socio-political and climatic disparities, usually involving large flows from the Global South towards the more affluent and temperate Northern parts of the planet – flows that were of course violently resisted and channelled elsewhere (sometimes referred to remigration).
Increasingly, the motivation for migration shifted from political and economic reasons towards ecological ones as more and more parts of the planet became inhospitable and uninhabitable due to climate change and global warming caused by the economic and extractive activities of humans. As the species began to realise that it had become a major, maybe even the dominant, geological agent responsible for irreversible atmospheric changes and the extinction of more and more nonhuman species (or a dramatic decline in biodiversity), it had no better idea than celebrating its power by naming its final period (or epoch) the Anthropocene. In choosing a geological period name based on the root of anthropos, however, it at the same time explicitly recognised the ultimate responsibility for this decline caused by a very specific part of humans and human ways of life referred to as Western, and derived from its ancient Greek roots extended to its late European and Anglo-American descendants.
Technoeuphoria
In their relationship to their own evolutionary development, humans eventually came to blame themselves for creating what some referred to as their own ‘successor species’. What was understood as technology (at least in Western but also globalised international culture) started off as a tool or instrument serving humans to extend and intensify their power over their environment (which included basic materials, but also other species and other humans, as well). Some would even claim that the relationship between human development and these instruments was so closely related that one could say that it was technology that constituted the essence of what it meant to be human. Humans and their technologies were seen as co-evolving in their increasing sophistication and their power. Others, on the other hand, saw the rise of technology as a danger for human autonomy, implied a connection with more and more violent and destructive ways of resolving conflicts or wars, and believed that technology was a major driver of ecological degradation and resource depletion.
Humans who referred to themselves as progressive tended to see a strong correlation between technological development and the improvement of social and individual living conditions. In fact, this was identified as the very engine of the period called modernity, where humans believed in something they called future, to designate times that remained to come; while it was technology that was supposed to make sure this time would actually arrive. Nevertheless, as technologies became more and more powerful and invasive, to an extent where they were threatening to outperform humans even at the immaterial level of intelligence and cognition, and as, at the same time, the biochemical living conditions of organic life were deteriorating because of technological development and its associated modern lifestyles, human opinion began to split into what could be called techno-sceptic and techno-euphorian visions (or world views) regarding the future.
The techno-euphorians, who also referred to themselves as transhumanists, continued to believe that only further technological development could ensure the survival of intelligent life, even if that meant that humans were to be replaced by some inorganic successor species (often referred to as artificial intelligence, or simply, AI). Homo, they believed, was now solely responsible for the survival of intelligent life not only on the planet called Earth but possibly in the entire universe, since the (admittedly rather restricted extent of) space travel that humans and their technology had been capable of had not provided any evidence of other forms of life and intelligence on other planets than Earth. Some therefore advocated replacing the biosphere as much as possible with a technosphere and finding (geo)engineering solutions for planetary and atmospheric problems. Others, however, believed that their planet was beyond repair and poured more and more resources into ways of discovering, reaching and colonising exoplanets believed to be out there in the universe waiting to be colonised.
This led to a global fight for the necessary resources either to preserve, re-engineer or to disseminate human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic life. Technosceptics usually acknowledged that some progress had been made by technology and that technology functioned not only as an instrument to serve human interests, however they insisted on placing technology in its wider social, economic and political context. First of all, technology understood as a way to control one’s environment was not a human invention but was instead developed by much older nonhuman species. What was problematic, rather, was the particular way humans had used technology to distance themselves from and insulate themselves against their natural habitats and, in doing so, had depleted resources and colonised spaces that were not really theirs. What these technosceptics in the end criticised was the idea that in their final stages some humans would even go so far as to outsource their most intimate and most vital characteristics to artificial forms of agency (like so-called social media, social robots, and so on), which led not to the creation of ever easier and more comfortable lifestyles (except for the owners and developers of these, while the majority suffered from unemployment) but actually exacerbated a process of mental impoverishment and civilizational regression.
Some humans who became more and more sceptical of this kind of human self-replacement by technology and technological media and who instead insisted on the link between capitalist practices involved in the development of new technologies and the deterioration of the living conditions for organic life forms on the planet, referred to themselves as critical posthumanists to signal that they believed that human self-centredness (humanism, based on anthropocentrism) was to blame for all this and that more sustainable and more just modi vivendi needed to be found to enable the survival of as many human and nonhuman species as possible. They also believed that technological development should not be used for the economic profit of only some humans, but instead should acknowledge the essential correlatedness (also referred to as entanglement) of human, nonhuman animal, environmental and technical forms of agency or subjectivity. They usually referred to this as the need for a recognition of a more-than-human world.
Capitalism
Even more specifically, the demise of humans was hastened, as already suggested, by one particular form of socio-economic organisation that had gained planetary dominance, which was called capitalism, and which was in the end responsible for the collapse of world civilisation (in fact, it was prompted by the disruption of the capitalist world economy and its intensified integration process called globalisation). The slogan TINA (an acronym for ‘there is no alternative’) proved correct but not in the way anticipated by capitalists themselves, namely as an ideologeme designed to keep anti-capitalist protest in check, but by demonstrating that capitalism was ultimately a self-destructive system based on unsustainable consumption and ever-increasing alienation.
The original capitalist idea was that what was referred to as barter economy (goods in exchange of other goods or services) would become a lot more efficient through symbolic exchanges, especially money. Some materials, especially gold, were deemed rare, special and valuable and could be exchanged for goods and services, and accumulated. Later forms of payment became increasingly virtual as value was underwritten by institutions like banks, big corporations and social organisations like nation states, while money which was first metal, then paper based finally became immaterial through digitalisation. Capitalism was in the end no longer even based on (symbolic) exchange; instead wealth was created virtually through ‘speculation’ (a form of ‘wagering’ on gains and losses of values, only slightly regulated, but instantly recorded and traded, and as some would therefore say, produced, by stockmarkets). In the end, since more and more value was being generated through debts (i.e. deferred payments) the virtuality on which the whole system was based collapsed, wiping out not only assets but also any accumulated ‘capital’ as such.
The other capitalist characteristic that led to its downfall was its idea of work. Since power was already unevenly distributed before the transition to capitalist economies, wealth (which also represented the legitimation of power) was produced by workers who would sell their time, manpower, and know-how, to those who owned land and later to those who owned what was referred to as the means of production (esp. factories, machines, and technological apparatuses, and later media platforms of all kinds). The workers in selling their time and accumulating wealth for the owners (capitalists), while more and more technological development was leading to specialisation and fragmentation of the production processes, became more and more alienated from their own products and processes. One could also say, that they became even more estranged from their realities by being turned into customers who would be paid a salary so that they could buy (‘back’) the products they had themselves helped produce. This process was accelerating to an extent that consumption became more and more important in (esp. Western and affluent societies which created social classes who had managed, through education, inheritance, or acquired knowledge, or skills, to gain advantages over the so-called working class) and eventually overtook production as the principal way of profit making. To hide the real conditions of disparity and dependence this created, institutions and powerful elites who stood to profit most from this system used what was called ideology and, increasingly, marketing to create and feed the increasing desire for more commodities (often completely superfluous objects and services). The downside was that this caused overproduction (and hence waste), and accelerated resource depletion and pollution. Capitalism finished, one could say, by consuming its own base and annihilating its own subjects (i.e. human consumers).
Occasionally, the cycle of production and consumption would hit upon crises which led to unemployment and poverty among workers, and the destruction of the means of production through either natural or planned wastage, like new technologies, fierce competition, followed by bankruptcies and further rationalisation, or simply through violent destruction like wars. However, destruction was always also presented as an opportunity since reconstruction had to occur, which boosted demand, spurred technological innovation, and so on, and which it was hoped gradually would also produce some (although dearly bought) social progress as a benefit, since some new and more efficient forms of production also meant a gradual increase in leisure time, improved health care, and so on. Unfortunately, these cycles were becoming more and more destructive as technology became more powerful and wars became more devastating. This, in the end, led to what some humans would call a two third/one third society in which the third part of society was basically excluded from full participation in social life for lack of skills and access to the necessary means to participate in the consumption process. It also meant, together with earlier crises, as well as the problem of the constant devaluation of money and assets due to overproduction (i.e. inflation), that disillusionment and depression, social isolation and so on were a constant companion to humans under capitalism and further increased the pressure on each human to compete, to be productive and to consume as much as possible.
The reason why capitalism (at least in the West) was so successful and considered to be without alternative is that it managed to ally itself to an ideologically very cunning political system called liberal democracy. Democracies proved superior to previous socio-political forms of organisation and governmentality in that they created subjectivities (ways of understanding that allowed each human to be able to take part in social processes and to be addressed or interpellated by other humans and institutions to do so) that were based on a notion of individuality, uniqueness and self-identity. Humans could be taught through institutions like schools but also through marketing strategies to think of themselves as free individuals who were responsible for their own development and their place in society, and for making sure they fulfilled their potential and thus repay society the investment it had made in them (an ideology sometimes referred to as liberal humanism). This led to a self-understanding that produced an unrealistic idea of self-worth in many cases and also translated into a certain arrogance (cf. hubris below) with regard to other humans but, more importantly, it shored up a belief of superiority in humans over their material environment and nonhumans. It also made sure that the competitiveness needed by the economic system functioned both at an individual and social level, as well as between national systems, since democracies were administered along historically formed cultural entities called nations, and which each believed itself to have some privileged access to and rights over its territory, together with a set of values, acquired knowledge, memory, artefacts, and so on, that would produce a collective identity or spirit, often invoked in times of crises like wars against other nations who would think of themselves in similar (or usually even superior) terms. There was thus a strong correlation between capitalist practices, political organisation, and individual self-understanding – all of which favoured a notion of false superiority and autonomy which led to the repression or the forgetting of the fact that any achievement, any social practice, any technological development, any way of life was always the result of relationality, rather than autonomy, and that systems in the end would be measured against their ability to acknowledge, sustain, and justly distribute the benefits achieved through their correlativity (i.e. human, nonhuman, environmental, and so on, co-implication), and not against their ability to extract resources most efficiently (from humans, nonhumans, environments, and so on).
Imperialism
Even though there were serious attempts at criticising this system and at organising political resistance to it, most notably by movements like communism, socialism, anarchism and, more recently, the already mentioned critical posthumanism, unfortunately, this all proved to be too little too late. The dominance of this cultural and economic system (capitalism, liberalism, humanism…) supported by the West (see above) – a remainder of a historical period usually referred to as colonialism, in which one civilisation that thought of itself as superior and as the expression of divine selection, called Europe (later superseded by one of its own former colonies, America, and which for a while managed to dominate at a global level as a so-called superpower, before entering into a downward spiral and competition with other emergent superpowers like China or India), attributed to itself the (God-given) right to ‘discover’, take possession of, and extract human and nonhuman resources (by practices like slavery, mining, and so on) from other areas and populations on the basis of what they called their own civilizational and technological advance.
The interesting thing about the justification for the associated practice of imperialism, i.e. building empires by extending physically conquering territories, colonising their inhabitants, taking possession of their resources, imposing their power structures and value systems and so on, is that it was based on strategic misconceptions that interpreted otherness as both desirable and threatening. Humans, like most organic species, learnt to perceive through their senses to distinguish themselves from an environment in which they were placed and within which they could move, and which they to some extent could control. This fundamental distinction produced a sense of self as opposed to not-self or other. This concept of otherness, projected onto the perception of difference and subsequently exaggerated as radical or absolute (which led to the construction of what humans called binary oppositions (see above), i.e. differences between perceived entities or ideas that were mutually exclusive, of which the self/other binary seemed to have been the most fundamental one) was often mapped onto hierarchies and values. Others, which could be other humans, nonhumans, material objects, or even immaterial ideas, were used to construct and consolidate knowledge which could be used to exercise control over the entities that lay behind the coat of otherness, so to speak. Unfortunately, this control was dearly bought because it also involved a necessary misconception about the true nature of these others, which could lead either to overly positive and desirable representations, but most often translated into negative and debasing visions, usually referred to as stereotypes. The process of increasing one’s self (or shoring up one’s identity against such otherness provoked by perceived differences) led to violent practices connected to the experienced desires and anxieties as a result. They were then used for justifying oppressive behaviour against others.
Imperialism – or, the ‘discovery’ of ‘others’ and the uncertainty of how to classify them, thus ‘calling’ for practices of domination and control under the names of ‘civilisation’ and ‘education’, often perceived as a mission – was thus in fact an extension of a fundamental way of operating among humans. This could also be seen in other social areas in which differences (real, perceived, or projected) could be used for what came to be known as othering (which is basically a radicalisation of difference to produce and protect a me or self as opposed to a ‘not-me’ or other, as well as, at a social level, an inclusive us as opposed to an exclusive them). Differences were thus ‘established’ between sexes, races (but also classes, see above) and species, for example, which led to the associated discriminating practices of sexism, racism (as well as classism) and speciesism (often intersecting, as mentioned) and which were basically unfounded power systems that used these largely constructed differences to justify hierarchies and to regulate access to power. Human societies were full of these power structures and despite valiant efforts by feminists, anti-racists and animal rights protesters, communists, anarchists, and so on, the otherness behind the differences was so significant that it ultimately constituted the very idea of what humans thought it meant to be human, and in doing so it could thus be used to justify a superiority of (some) humans over everything else.
While open imperialism as an aggressive military practice gradually gave way to more indirect cultural forms of dominant influence over other territories and populations (while the economic need for the extraction of resources form others’ territories continued to grow with intensified industrialisation and global development), capitalism demanded an ever more expanding network of production, consumption, and services spanning across national boundaries, working towards delocalising, and interconnecting production processes, global and instantaneous money flows based on virtualisation and speculation, all this depending on a process called digitalisation and datafication. By transforming everything into electric signals that could be transmitted almost at the speed of light, information could be shared and used instantaneously, for educational and entertainment but mainly for economic and socio-political reasons. This global sharing platform based on digital information and its flows was called (the) internet and it became the main platform of social exchange through so-called social media. Unfortunately, these latter were owned by a new breed of capitalists who came to be the dominant and most powerful class of humans, amassing huge wealth with which they could influence (national) governments as well as (international) organisations while reaching an almost global community of prosumers (humans who would both produce and consume content and teach (ro)bots or algorithm-based software to emulate human meaning production, which would then feed this information back to them in repackaged form). The dream of a global ‘free’ society with instant and ubiquitous access to all the knowledge and the ‘best’ of human achievements (a huge data bank or archive) leading to a period of global understanding, prosperity and peace, as a result, was therefore ‘unfortunately’ scuppered by the very liberal humanist values that had produced this cosmopolitan vision and its geopolitical economic (i.e. global capitalist) practices and decisions. Authoritarian regimes rightly perceived the free circulation of knowledge and ideas as a threat to their legitimation of power and attempted to control and filter information, restrict access, or disseminate misinformation, by hacking into digital infrastructures and damaging vital institutions, as well as influencing humans by spreading what was called fake news. More and more violence was therefore committed at a global informational level which led to the proliferation of acts of so-called cyberterrorism, info-war and the wide-spread acceptance of post-truth politics.
In the end, the combination of global capitalism and the internet did not produce an increase and an improvement of sociality, as the phrase ‘social media’ might suggest, but actually led to a generalised state of war (very much the opposite of the original idea of cosmopolitanism, of course).
Hubris
The ultimate downfall of the species, however, was probably due to a moral problem, namely its hubris, or the overestimation of its own powers and its excessive pride based on the belief in its own cosmological significance (cf. the notion of anthropocentrism above). In fact, the human species perished (taking most of the biosphere with it) because it was not able to come to terms with its own finality and its co-relationality with nonhuman others, or, in other words, its lack of a realisation and acceptance that it was living in, depending on, even while being responsible for, a more-than-human world. Instead, especially in its final phases, (some) humans even accelerated the demise of the species by disseminating imaginary scenarios of its own end as a desperate way of repressing the inevitable maybe, to a point where narratives were invented (the present one, arguably, included) that provided hypothetical retrospectives of the species often addressed to unknown and unknowable aliens or future time travellers hitting upon the recorded memory of the human species (who referred to itself as humanity) in the hope of receiving at least some form of cosmic justice après coup, so to speak, or at least some vindication and absolution. Maybe these bottled messages were also to serve as a warning to other life forms from unknown planets visiting Earth even though none of these were discovered during human life time despite its efforts in space exploration, usually carried out by a privileged human group called astronauts, cosmonauts, and so on.
All in all, one can say that what caught up with the species in the end was, ironically, its consciousness, which was achieved at the (too) high cost of repressing its own animality, and which turned into violence against all its others. Despite all the attempts at deanimalisation like education, civilisation, social progress and cultural ‘refinement’, and due to a largely irresponsible use of technologies and resources (one might say ‘poor housekeeping’), humans eventually had to experience their own disappearance, thus confirming one of humans’ old sayings that pride comes before the fall.
