Anthropocene Antihumanists
January 25, 2023 § 4 Comments
An article in the January/February 2023 issue of The Atlantic by Adam Kirsch titled “The People Cheering for Humanity’s End” has me returning to my apocalyptic theme. At one point Kirsch writes: “The revolt against humanity . . . is a spiritual development of the first order, a new way of making sense of the nature and purpose of human existence.”
I myself have met people who react to the various apocalypses that are bringing in this new Anthropocene age* with this kind of glib nihilism—well, we’ll be destroyed, but the earth won’t be; she’ll go on. I hear this especially among despairing environmentalists. This annoys me greatly.
It’s a postmodern mashup of, on the one hand, some dark emotions, mostly fear and guilt and a perverse kind of spiritual pride in the knowledge, a grandiosely condescending attitude that fallen humanity will finally get its come-uppance and we told you so. In this, they are in league with Christian apocalypticists, who also see both humanity and the world as fallen and deserving of its disastrous fate.
The other half of this mashup is a lack of compassion that verges on schadenfreude for the suffering of all the other beings we’re bringing down with us, not to mention the suffering of countless human beings. Among Christian apocalypticists, this schadenfreude, the sense of pleasure felt at the pain of another, is on full gloating display. Even the suffering of those left behind after the rapture will have glorious meaning; what’s a thousand years of suffering in the eyes of a just and jealous God?
Meanwhile, the apocalypses are piling up and ramping up. It’s natural to seek solace and meaning somewhere. Where will Friends look as things get worse, as they inevitably will? When climate migrants storm the southern border and lots of people, and not just fascists, demand its militarization? When melting ice caps flood our major coastal cities, including Washington, D.C., and virtually all of Florida? When water shortages reduce our food supply? When the federal government is no longer able to rebuild communities built in the face of annual hundred-year storms and wildfires? When we can’t make any more computers because China has decided it needs the world’s only supply of rare earths for itself?
We desperately need a testimony that speaks to these crises. That is, we need to sink down in the Seed in prayer and worship, as individuals and especially as meetings and yearly meetings, to see what God wants from us, to see what love can do.
* “Anthropocene” is the title that some are giving the new geological age that humans are bringing us into with climate change and species extinction. We’re currently in the Holocene, from the Greek holos, whole (as in holocaust, wholly burnt), and kainos, new—holocene means wholly new. The anthropocene is the age in which, as Thomas Berry puts it, humans take evolution off of auto-pilate and take over manual control. Never mind that we have only small parts of the operating manual, our instruments are unreliable, and we are flying blind.
Through the Flaming Sword 
Pio Nino (Pope Pius IX) baned voting as God ordains our leaders as the elect who deserve to lead us. St Teresa of Avila said sex with priests is the Rapture and Bellarmine concurred. Democracy is the libertine way of Anglomagoguery from their Hun, Lapp, Fin, Viking, and American Indian lineage.
I’m not sure where this comment comes from or where it’s going, but it’s interesting.
ultrarich supply of rare earths in coalmine tailing residue in WV & PA.
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 10:21 AM Through the Flaming Sword < comment-reply@wordpress.com> wrote:
Not a comment… Your spellchecker somehow missed “autopilot”
[You might want to mention “being drunk” among our difficulties?]
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 7:22 AM Through the Flaming Sword < comment-reply@wordpress.com> wrote: