I’m a pro people person. I think that there’s something very special about humans. Ancient religions besides their countless dogmas and misconceptions, they did got this one piece of truth. They had this tradition of putting humans at the center of rituals, they appreciated and acknowledged this human specialness. Anthropocentrism, the view that humans are the center of it all, that defends this human superiority and moral standing. They appreciated so much humans (of course themselves) that they even thought that the earth was the center of everything (literally), that they were on the center of the universe, the geocentric theory. Of course it turned out this theory was replaced by a better theory but it did contained a deep truth, a kind of metaphysical truth about humans. It has become more main stream with the years a kind of anti human philosophy emerging. This comes in many forms like Degrowth or environmentalism. The main premise of these views is that the relationship between humanity and the natural world is out of balance and some radical changes need to be done to achieve this balance. They advocate for the humanity getting back in time where we live in harmony with nature and with all it’s species, a kind of naturalistic utopia that aims to minimise people impact on the environment. Only by having fewer children, consuming less energy and overall releasing less carbon into the atmosphere that’s achievable. Degrowth ultimately means not only slowing down the rate of progress but completely “eliminating” all the progress humans have made during the last thousands of years. Furthermore, only progress is sustainable in the long run because only progress prevents disaster just like only the growth of knowledge prevents ignorance and only wealth prevents poverty. What degrowthers fail to appreciate is that only us, human beings, can ultimately save our beloved planet. And indeed we’re the only ones who eventually might be able to save every species (if we want to) from death. If one day we can’t live on Earth anymore, it will be our scientific and technological advancement that will allow us to expand to the cosmos, and take every other species with us. The only reason why a cow would be living on Jupiter would be because of human knowledge, not any other thing. But that can only happen with more progress, technology and more creativity flowing. More people means more creativity which directly affects the number of problems we can solve. Only in a sufficiently advanced society (technologically) we will be able to eventually save the earth from a perhaps inevitable sun collapse. Not only this is a self defeating idea but it’s even immoral because a state without technological and scientific knowledge is a state where people live in poverty and shortly, imagine going back even 10 years in time and lose all the technology, medicine, knowledge, would that be desirable? Of course not! Degrowth and environmentalism are fundamentally pessimistic ideas. They reject the power that human knowledge can have on the world, and they don’t acknowledge that all problems are soluble. With a optimistic outlook of the future, people will always come up with solutions for their problems and we shall never avoid problems in the very first place. I feel like the word problem has a negative connotation, when people hear it they automatically assume something is wrong. This is not true, having the opportunity to find problems we’re interested in and solving them is what Deutsch would call of happiness. Being in a continual state of problem solving can be indeed the best it gets.
We are special because we have a capacity to create explanatory knowledge. Deutsch in “the beginning of infinity” writes about two kinds of knowledge, explanatory knowledge and non explanatory knowledge. We are the only species that can create explanatory knowledge, through conjecture and criticism. All other species are limited to non explanatory knowledge, that is knowledge inserted in our genes. Knowledge is the most fundamental force with an infinite reach. If it ever happens that we’ll save other species through taking them with us when we expand to the cosmos, it is ,again, knowledge that took them to wherever they would be, and there’s no limit to to where that same piece of knowledge could go and it’s effects on the physical world. Humans can do everything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics, given the right knowledge. We can populate the entire galaxy, we can live 500 years and so on.
Degrowth and environmentalism are scary ideas and a threat to the western civilisation. It’s incredibly ironic how we can be the first species to exterminate itself, like how is it possible that we have some people trying to reduce the amount of people on the planet? So, I wonder that with the decline of traditional religion, there’s no “institution” that acknowledges this human specialness and this tradition of anti humanism just keeps arising.