DECEMBER 22, THURSDAY

THE END OF HUMANS

I read another article on Apple News this week that made me wonder. The article is an Atlantic Magazine article entitled “The People Cheering For Humanities End.” The author quotes a line from Michel Foucault who said that one day “man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea,” an idea that he finds freeing.

As science discovers more and more about the origin of an endless universe filled with stars constantly dying with new stars constantly being born it appears that we are lost in time and space and that our sun and planets will certainly flame out one day.

Two responses to this are, first, those who feel that through overpopulation and over production humans, who are now determining global warming and have the power to blow ourselves up, will in one way or another cause our own destruction. And these people feel that this would be a good thing. Nature will be better off without us. We are a malignant force that will be better off extinct.

But, secondly, there are transhumanists who believe that humans will move beyond their human bodies into some from of virtual existence that we are well on the way to reaching. In this case our essential human nature will continue to exist and even to evolve without being tied to a human body.

What does an ordinary human like me, who is just trying to keep his head above water and make it through life, make of this? First of all, in one way it doesn’t matter to me whether humans continue to exist beyond my grandchildren and other people I know and care about. I am living within my own little bubble of experience which is all that I really know and that is difficult enough. I am making my way along the best that I can and am not going to spend my time speculating about the end of humanity and what comes afterward.

But in another way the knowledge that human existence is finite and that we are lost in space and time with little likelihood of encountering any other form of intelligent life gives me the that feeling that I live within a slowly evolving earthly bubble of life on earth and within a much smaller bubble of human experience and imagining, a bubble that humans fill with understanding of all kinds, belief in conventions and systems of all sorts, with all kinds of music and art and poetry and philosophy, none of which are ultimately significant. As humans we dream all of this up and project it out into a marvelous multi colored bubble of belief, and then the bubble will be pricked leaving nothing at all, a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.

The effect of perceiving humanity this way is completely the opposite of what we have just been celebrating at Christmas. Eternal and all encompassing God gives birth to his son as a human messiah whose lived example is what it is to be fully human and fully divine. The endless universe shrinks to insignificance, time and space don’t matter. All that matters is the divine life force, the Holy Spirit, which gives meaning to everything and can make us radiantly alive.

The second approach reminds me of the life giving illusions that drive Don Quixote in his mythic journey. The first approach seems to me to be that of Sancho Panza, realistic, common sense, irrefutable and empty.

And since I seem one moment to be an 85 year old Don Quixote riding into the sunset of his imminent death cheerfully nuts, and the next moment realistic Sancho Panza seeing things as they are and trying to keep Don Quixote from falling down the steps, I feel caught between the two, choosing one in the morning and the other in the evening and not knowing how to deal with either.