Would have the professor reconsidered his opinions, if he knew where
such ideas can lead? I would like to say yes, but I don’t believe it. I think he
could have known, but refused to. Worse, perhaps: he knew, but didn’t care
—or knew, and was headed there, voluntarily, in any case.
Self-Appointed Judges of the Human Race
It has not been long since the Earth seemed infinitely larger than the people
who inhabited it. It was only in the late 1800s that the brilliant biologist
Thomas Huxley (1825-95)—staunch defender of Darwin and Aldous
Huxley’s grandfather—told the British Parliament that it was literally
impossible for mankind to exhaust the oceans. Their power of generation was
simply too great, as far as he could determine, compared to even the most
assiduous human predations. It’s been an even shorter fifty years since
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring ignited the environmental movement.^168 Fifty
years! That’s nothing! That’s not even yesterday.
We’ve only just developed the conceptual tools and technologies that
allow us to understand the web of life, however imperfectly. We deserve a bit
of sympathy, in consequence, for the hypothetical outrage of our destructive
behaviour. Sometimes we don’t know any better. Sometimes we do know
better, but haven’t yet formulated any practical alternatives. It’s not as if life
is easy for human beings, after all, even now—and it’s only a few decades
ago that the majority of human beings were starving, diseased and
illiterate.^169 Wealthy as we are (increasingly, everywhere) we still only live
decades that can be counted on our fingers. Even at present, it is the rare and
fortunate family that does not contain at least one member with a serious
illness—and all will face that problem eventually. We do what we can to
make the best of things, in our vulnerability and fragility, and the planet is
harder on us than we are on it. We could cut ourselves some slack.
Human beings are, after all, seriously remarkable creatures. We have no
peers, and it’s not clear that we have any real limits. Things happen now that
appeared humanly impossible even at the same time in the recent past when
we began to wake up to our planet-sized responsibilities. A few weeks before
writing this I happened across two videos juxtaposed on YouTube. One
showed the Olympic gold medal vault from 1956; the other, the Olympic
silver medal vault from 2012. It didn’t even look like the same sport—or the