Humanity Erased?
Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash
A recent issue of Atlantic (January/February 2023) offered an article by Adam Kirsch, “The End of Us.” It is a reflection on current theory and speculation about “the end of humanity” as the culmination of the environmental crisis. The article reflects thought since the verdict of Michael Foucault, “Man could be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.” The most helpful book I know on this hard subject is by my friend, Timothy Beal, When the Time is Short: Finding our Way in the Anthropocene, 2022).
Kirsch divides into two interpretive camps those who anticipate, and to some extent welcome, the erasure of humanity. On the one hand, there is “anthropocene anti-humanism” that sees that humanity has engaged in self-destruction by the exploitation of creation. Humanity has used up and exhausted planetary resources, and now has brought upon itself the failure of human extravagance. This perspective believes that humanity is beyond rescue, and that its destruction is its deserved outcome for its unrestrained self-serving action. There is, in this perspective, no hope or possibility for the saving of the human project.
On the other hand, there is “transhumanism” that shares the view that the present ordering of life is beyond rescue or recall. This perspective has transcendent confidence in scientific and technological capacity and the reliance upon reason. It believes that given sufficient time, however, human rationality can devise new forms of possible life that are not limited to the destructive propensities of present practices. There is in this perspective a kind of “Dr. Strangelovian” seduction that strikes me as highly promethean. In the end this view shares with “anthropocene anti-humanism” a deep pessimism concerning any positive prospect for the present human enterprise. Both views foresee the inevitable termination of the present human project, the anthropocene, that has imagined for a long time the mastery and domination of all creation by human wisdom and rationality.
These scientific speculations are well beyond my competence. But because the scientific, technological, and rational aspects of these carefully informed opinions spill over well beyond scientific, technological, and rational matters into more ultimate transrational questions, it seems fair and reasonable to try to see what linkages to the Anthropocene (and its failure and termination) might be made to the tradition of scripture. By way of a probe into these connections, in what follows I will consider a trajectory (in four parts) that probes the mystery and vocation of our human personhood. Two things are clear at the outset. First, all thought in scripture concerning human mystery and vocation is penultimate before the mystery of the holy God. Second, human mystery and vocation remain beyond decoding and explanation, and so invite continued probing. I will consider in turn four texts on the theme.
1. The first text is the familiar doxology of Psalm 8. We may note first of all that the Psalm is framed in verses 1 and 9 by a grand doxology to YHWH who is acknowledged to be sovereign and majestic. Everything else in the Psalm is subordinate to this grand claim. In verses 1b-3 the Psalmist probes the wonder of creation, its spectacular scope, and the capacity of the creator God to mobilize modest human folk to confound foes, enemies, and avengers.
Only in verse 4 does the Psalm come to the specificity of humanity. And when the subject is mentioned, it is as a question. The parallelism of the verse requires careful attention. In the first line, the “man” is ’ish, the male human player in all of its weakness. In the tightly linked parallel in the second line, mention is made of the son-of-man, here “adam,” “man” in his generic nobility. This latter usage is likely a reference to Genesis 1:26-27, and thus includes “male and female” in their power. I assume that the interface in the parallelism of ‘ish and ’adam is not to stress gender as much as it is to reference humanity in its weakness and in its strength, that is, in its insoluble riddle. This curious combination of man-in-weakness/man-woman in strength is a modest creaturely reality in the midst of the grandeur of all creation. The place occupied by humanity in creation is modest at best. That human creature, moreover, remains an unanswered question.
In verse 4, however, we get a great rhetorical reversal on which the Psalm pivots. The conjunction that introduces verse 5 challenges the conclusion of verse: Yet! Given such a modest place in creation, YHWH has nonetheless crowned humanity to lack little from being gods. (In the Hebrew, all of that is said in one verb!) The second line of verse 5 has an inverted word order for the sake of accent:
Glory and honor…you have given him!
The two nouns are uninflected and absolute. The verb “crown” is an active performance. Humanity (in weakness/in strength) is now fully acknowledged to rule over creation. The inventory of creatureliness that follows in verses 6-8 intends to be all-inclusive with the range of species that evokes the work of the creator in Genesis 1:
You have put all things under their feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the sea (Psalm 8:6-8)
Humanity is given governance, dominion, and control. The matter is a wonder because the Psalmist (and Israel) knows about humanity in its feebleness. These verses do indeed sound like the Anthropocene. And so it would be except for the doxological framing of verses 1 and 9. Given that framing doxology, human domination is clearly penultimate. The creator God has not abdicated or abandoned sovereignty. Every move of governance by the human agent is responsive to and subject to divine governance that has not been revoked. It is doxology that precludes any would-be anthropocene. When doxology and its practice of awe, wonder, and praise are abandoned, we will get the Anthropocene.
2. The well-known question of Psalm 8:4 is reiterated in Psalm 144. This Psalm begins in verses 1-2 with a statement of complete confidence in and reliance upon YHWH, the rock. These verses are dominated by the first person pronoun, “my”:
My rock,
my hands,
my fingers,
my rock,
my fortress,
my stronghold,
my deliverer,
my shield.
The one who speaks (David) is a mighty warrior who provides a full commentary on what it means to be strong and effective. All of that, however, is here recognized as derivative from the reality of God. In this assertion of self, there is full acknowledgement of penultimacy.
Our point of interest occurs in verse 3. The terms of Psalm 8 are reiterated, this time in reverse order, first human beings in power (‘adam), and then in weakness (‘ish). Again the Psalm is in awe that this great creator God could know and think about humanity at all. The Psalmist, even the great warrior, recognizes that human agents are like a passing breath or vapor that has no staying power at all. The Psalm does not linger over the question, but moves on promptly to address God in petition (v. 5). The “ask” is for a theophany not unlike that of Sinai (vv. 5-6). Or alternatively, it is a bid to be saved from social troubles (vv. 7-8). The speaker places self in complete dependence upon YHWH, the rock.
The “new song” of verse 9 is a fresh doxology to God. It acknowledges YHWH as a God who rescues kings (who cannot rescue themselves) (v. 10). And then the Psalmist prays for rescue (v. 11). The one who speaks presents himself as one who cannot do for self what needs to be done. This is the posture of a king who in helplessness is not adequate to the crisis to be faced.
And finally, in verses 12-15, there is a sweeping wish (petition!) for all the blessings of creation that only the creator God can give. It is a prayer that recognizes and gladly acknowledges creaturely dependence upon the creator. In sum, we can see that the momentary glance at humanity in verses 3-4 scarcely disputes the need for and the wonder of God. The human enterprise is fully submitted to the wonder of the creator God. Thus the framing doxology of Psalm 8:1 and 9 is here even more decisive. The human enterprise is fully enveloped in awe before God in a way that encompasses both human wonder and human need.
3. A third usage of our presenting question occurs in the speech of Job (Job 7:11-21). Job resolves to speak honestly, fully, and openly of all that vexes him so deeply (v. 11). In verse 12 his question indicates that God’s surveillance of him is overstated and overwrought. He is weary of being monitored and supervised. His sleep is restless (vv. 13-14). He wants only to be left alone in his exhaustion, left alone that he may die (vv. 15-16). In verse 17 we have yet another version of our defining question:
What are human beings, that you make so much of them,
that you set your mind on them? (v. 17)
Here we have only one term for humanity, ‘ish, human persons in frailty. But the “man in frailty” is excessively supervised (gdl) by the creator God. God makes humanity too much of a subject of attention, causes him to be monitored too much. Job wants to escape such divine attention that seems to expect too much of him.
In verses 19-21 Job prays to be left alone, to be disregarded by the creator God, so that he may live his life in neglected obscurity. The divine gaze expects too much, monitoring every time he swallows his own spit, maybe every time he inhales or exhales. God is a “watcher of humanity,” and no one can bear to be under such constant surveillance. It is enough that Job can wish own death, or his non-being. It is the only way he knows to escape the daily review of his life as God’s creature. Note well: there is nothing here of human splendor or grandeur, no thought of a governing anthropocene. Thus the doxological splendor of Psalm 8 and the needy petition of Psalm 144 have settled into resentful compliance. Who wants to be the “creature in God’s image” anyway? Certainly not Job; certainly not anyone who knows God’s presence as a supervisory scorekeeper. Perhaps Job has misjudged God and misconstrued himself. Even so, this is a moment in the ongoing mystery of human personhood. Job speaks for all those who know that they cannot measure up to the expectations imposed by the creation itself and, by inference, by the creator God who keeps creation under daily review. At best this is a failed Anthropocene!
4. Finally we come to a fourth usage of our question, one that comes to us as a surprise. In articulating a weighty priestly Christology, the writer of Hebrews 2:6-8 quotes Psalm 8:
What are human beings that you are mindful of them,
or mortals, that you care for them?
You have made them for a little while lower than angels;
you have crowned them with glory and honor,
subjecting all things under their feet (Hebrews 2:6-8).
The Greek has a double use of anthropos that can translate ‘adam or ‘ish or both. There are two matters of note in these lines. In the parallel line, the Greek inserts a definite article before “son of man.” The effect of this article is to make the given phrase “son of man” into a specific reference to Christ as “The Son of Man.” Second, the NRSV neglects the point and translates the parallel line as “mortals.” Thus in translation the specificity of the Greek is disregarded. The reference is then followed in the epistle with an anticipation that this “Son of Man” will face “suffering and death” and “face death for everyone” (v. 9). Thus the poetic lines of the Psalm are refined as a declaration of the death of Jesus, and then the resurrection of Jesus who is “now crowned in glory and honor.” The writer, moreover, concludes that God left nothing outside their control,” even if that subjection is not yet seen everywhere.
When we consider this four-fold usage of the same phrasing, we can see that its claim is a poor offer for the production of the Anthropocene. In Psalm 8, the generous recognition of “man/son of man” is situated amid grand doxologies to God in verses 1 and 9. In Psalm 144 the formula concerning “man/son of man” is a bare mention in a poem that celebrates YHWH, the Rock, praises God with “a new song,” and prays to God concerning the resources necessary for life. In Job 7:17, we have the weak man (‘enosh), without any parallel, with a death wish because God is too much surveillance for the living of his life. And in Hebrews 2, the “man/son of man” faces suffering and death. In none of these texts is there a masterful Anthropocene. In every case, the reality of the anthropos is as penultimate to the reality of God who is variously celebrated (Psalm 8), seen as essential for life (Psalm 144), hard to bear (Job 7), and entrusted to the son who must suffer and die. It should be evident enough that this textual trajectory offers a decisive alternative to any venture of Anthropocene governance, whether that governance is welcomed or repelled. It belongs to the communities of faith that are responsive to this textual tradition to resist and refuse any reduction of lived reality to the promotion of the Anthropocene age.
Having found in scripture a resolved alternative to Anthropocene reductionism, we may consider in turn the claims of anthropocene anti-humanism and transhumanism amid the vistas of scripture. It seems obvious enough that anthropocene anti-humanism can be readily and deeply linked to the Deuteronomic conviction that blessing comes to the obedient, and curse comes upon the disobedient. Anthropocene anti-humanism is the claim that it is the practice and policy of humanity that is resulting in the destruction of the natural environment. Thus humanity has acted in ways that evoke the destructive curse that is structural to created reality and that is the response of the creator God to such conduct. The simple calculus of Deuteronomy is unambiguous:
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity…Choose life so that you and your descendants may live (Deuteronomy 30:15, 19).
See also the recital of curses in Deuteronomy 27:15-26, and the fuller recital of blessings and curses in Deuteronomy 28:1-68). The creator God presides over the processes of blessing and curse, but their implementation is intrinsic to creation itself. The matter is put succinctly by Hosea:
Swearing, lying, and murder,
and stealing and adultery break out;
bloodshed follows bloodshed.
Therefore the land mourns,
and all who live in it languish;
together with the wild animals
and the birds of the air,
even the fish of the sea are perishing (Hosea 4:2-3).
Disobedience causes nothing less than the shriveling of the earth in drought!
Perhaps the fullest, most direct articulation of this process wherein disobedience leads to destruction is in the wondrously symmetrical poem of Jeremiah:
I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void,
and to the heavens, and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,
and all the hills moved to and fro.
I looked, and lo, there was no one at all,
and all the birds of the air had fled.
I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,
and all its cities were laid in ruins
before the Lord, before his fierce anger (Jeremiah 4:23-26).
These lines are commonly seen as a deliberate counterpoint to the creation liturgy of Genesis 1. Thus the creation is step-by-step dismantled in response to the unbearable conduct of Israel. That is, the practice of this community in contradiction to the creator will bring an end to God’s life-giving creative order. No anthropocene anti-humanism could make a claim stronger than this! That leaves us to ponder the caveat of v. 27:
Yet, I will not make a full end (v. 27).
From the mouth of the creator, not a full end! Is this verse only a pastoral softening of the harshness that precedes it? Is it wishful thinking of the faith community? Or is it a last minute reserve of the creator? We do not know; but it may give us pause.
It is not as obvious to me how transhumanism may be linked to scripture. I suggest that we may find a linkage between scripture and transhumanism in the way in which wisdom thinking in ancient Israel evolved into apocalyptic thought and writing. Almost alone, Gerhard von Rad has insisted that apocalyptic thought emerged from wisdom teaching and speculation. Von Rad’s thought is that it was in wisdom that Israel developed an awareness of manageable, identifiable “ages” that are distinct and follow in sequence. That is, the wise were those who knew what time it was. Thus we are able to discern a real “end” to an historical period. We may see this succession of “ages” in the dream recital of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 2:31-45). Von Rad cites the wisdom reflection of Ben Sirach as a case in point:
Rule over the world lies in the hands of God,
and he sets over it the right man for the time.
Power passes from one nation to another,
because of arrogant acts of violence (Ben Sirach 10:4, 8).
Then Von Rad comments:
Of absolutely central significance for apocalyptic is the looking to an end to the present course of events, to a judgment and the dawning of a time of salvation, that is, its thoroughgoing eschatological orientation (von Rad, Wisdom in Israel, 278).
Just so, transhumanism concludes:
It believes that the only way forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligent life that will no longer be Homo sapiens. Some transhumanists believe that genetic engineering and nanotechnology will allow us to alter our brains and bodies so profoundly that we will escape human limitations such as mortality and confinement to a physical body. Others await, with hope or trepidation, the invention of artificial intelligence superior to our own (Kirsch, “The End,” 60).
While we may readily take transhumanistic confidence in rationality and technology as a form of Promethean pride, we may also see it as the bold work of the wise in anticipation and reception of what is to come next, namely, an alternative life that is not dependent upon present human fragility. Such thinking at least has the virtue of being fully distinctive from what has gone before and failed, a distinctiveness that the sapiential apocalyptacists of old would have welcomed.
I conclude my comment on this remarkable reflection on the Anthropocene age and its ending by Adam Kirsch by focusing on his conclusion. Kirsch observes that both of these trajectories of human destiny, Anthropocene anti-humanism and transhumanism, share a conviction:
The revolt against humanity has a great future ahead of it because it appeals to people who are at once committed to science and reason and yet yearn for the clarity and purpose of an absolute moral imperative. (Kirsch, 65).
And then this:
[This revolt] says we that we can move the planet, maybe even the universe, in the direction of the good, on one condition—that we forfeit our life meaning by giving it up (65).
This is a strong and unexpected echo of words that are most familiar to us in the gospel narrative:
For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who will lose their life for my sake will find it (Matthew 16:25).
Kirsch’s final paragraph is stunning:
But both call for drastic forms of human self-limitation—whether that means the destruction of civilization, the renunciation of child-bearing, or the replacement of human beings by machines. These sacrifices are ways of expressing high ethical ambitions that find no scope in our ordinary hedonistic lives; compassion for suffering nature, hope for cosmic dominion, love of knowledge. This essential similarity between anti-humanists and transhumanists means that they may often find themselves on the same side in the political and social struggles to come (65).
The capacity for self-limitation is important. Kirsch refers to “our ordinary, hedonistic lives.” But our “ordinary lives” do not need to be hedonistic, and for many people are not hedonistic. This accent on compassion for suffering nature, hope for cosmic dominion, and love of knowledge are all welcome. Thus believers in the gospel may go a long way with such a sentiment and summons. What are lacking here to which we pay attention as well are the elemental mandates of the gospel to love God and love neighbor. Thus transhumanists do not have God in their calculus, and do not regard the neighbor as a defining feature of our common life. We may indeed embrace Kirsch’s mandate to compassion, but extend it to suffering humanity. We may be glad to hope with him for cosmic dominion, but recognize that sustainable dominion requires the emptying of self-regard. We may share his love of knowledge, but we know that our true love is not knowledge, but God and neighbor.
It may be that we face the erasure of the human. But an ethic more radical and more demanding than that of Kirsch may matter decisively. This is not the first time a community with a radical, demanding ethic has gone beyond our best rationality to deep risk. Our rationality, submitted to the cost of discipleship, in policy and in practice, is to refuse and resist human erasures one at a time, or all of us together. This is not an invitation to obscurantism or a denial of reality. Rather, it is an assertion that created reality is pliable and open to amendment. Such amendment may amount to nothing less than yielding of ourselves for the sake of creation, its creatures including its human creatures. We remain before the tricky question, “What is a woman or man”? What is humanity? The answer we give to that question is that we humans are “lord of all, servant of all.” I suspect that Kirsch and his company would and could to some great extent share that conviction. The hard part is living it out, and thereby creating futures that are beyond technological rationality. That hard work is the reason we gather regularly around the news of dying and being raised to new life.
Walter Brueggemann
April 25, 2023
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles. He continues to be a highly sought-after speaker.
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