Climate anxiety featured in an article in a recent issue of the ‘New Yorker’ concerning “the morality of having kids in a burning, drowning world.” Our public health infrastructure groans under the weight of a lingering pandemic and we are told to expect similar or worse contagions. Some of the directors of the board of the company which developed ChatGPT think that artificial intelligence could soon threaten humanity with extinction.

Meanwhile, with diminishing birthrates in so many countries, some are warning of imminent population collapse. Elon Musk, has called it “a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Politicians speak openly about the possibility that conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East could spark World War III.

We are seeing the early results of global warming in the extremes of heat and storms. Extinction Rebellion believes that the human species could be on its way out, extinguished by our own selfishness.

None of this, however, is new. Apocalyptic anxieties have long afflicted human culture. The experts say however that they tend to come in waves. In response to rapid changes in science, technology and geopolitics, they spike into brief but intense extinction panics - periods of acute pessimism about humanity’s future - before going back into the background noise as those developments prove to be less problematic than imagined.

Bible-based fear of the apocalypse at the end of time has waxed and waned as new sects have come to prominence and then faded away. After all, if you want to establish yourself with the wider public, predicting the end of the world is not a bad place to start. It’s what the Christian church did in the 3rd century. And it’s what the evangelical wing of the church in the USA is currently working towards with its support both of Trump and of Israel.

But in our recent past misinterpreted science bears some of the blame. New palaeontological and geological evidence of apparent extinction events stoked the fires of extinction discourse in early-19th-century England. Experts told us of their fears both of famine and population explosion in the 1960s and ’70s. There was paranoia about nuclear war during the Cold War. As a teenager, I remember being very worried about the 1962 Cuba crisis. Nearly every generation has thought it might be the last, and yet so far, our history has not proved to be a long suicide note, but rather a record of our survival despite everything.

In fact, a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities to today are striking. The 1920s were a period when the public - traumatized by the recent flu pandemic (for which there was no vaccine), an unprecedented world war and startling technological developments - was turning to the view that humanity was so flawed it was destined to die at its own hand. The irony is that this sort of feeling of helplessness impedes our ability to respond constructively.

Of course, these days we think of the years immediately after World War I as a period of good times and exuberance - Flappers, the early cinema and the Charleston. In fact though, dark clouds remained. The dread of impending disaster - whether from another world war, from another plague or the prospect of automated labour - was all too present.

And those warning of doom were not on the fringes. Winston Churchill was one such.

In 1923 he published the first instalment of  “The World Crisis,” a history of World War I that laid out, Churchill’s “milestones to Armageddon.”. In September 1924, he published an equally bleak essay entitled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” Against a background of the first appearance of tanks on the battlefield, he argued that new war machines may soon wipe out our species: “Certain sombre facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.”

He went on to ask, “Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings — nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?” He concluded by asserting that the war that had just consumed Europe might be “but a pale preliminary” of the horrors to come. He said that “the story of the human race is war” and told us of his dismay at “the march of science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities”

At about the same time, the well-known socialist and science fiction writer H. G. Wells, expressed a similar outlook. “Are not we...still just as much adrift in the current of circumstances as we were before 1914?”. Wells predicted that our inability to learn from the mistakes of the Great War would “carry our race on surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries and social debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to a degradation beyond our present understanding.” Humanity, was rushing headlong into a “scientific war” that would “make the biggest bombs of 1918 seem like little crackers.”

Other prominent interwar intellectuals worried about developments in non-military technologies. Many of the same fears that now keep A.I. engineers up at night – how to programme thinking machines to respect human values, concern that our growing reliance on technology might sap human ingenuity and worry about a robot takeover - made their debut in the early 20th century. Robots were invariably depicted as hating human-kind.

And now, as an echo to all this, Geoffrey Hinton, the A.I. godfather (who quit his job at Google so he could warn the world about the very technology he helped create) said, “What we want is some way of making sure that even if these systems are smarter than us, they’re going to do things that are beneficial for us.”

But of course, even though we portray ourselves as heading down a slippery slope and have had terrible wars, as a species we seem to have dodged the bullet. We have the United Nations which, despite its lack of actual power, has often mitigated excesses. There are normally back-channel communications even between enemies. We have had treaties banning the use of poison gas – mainly adhered to – although principally because there may always be a change in wind direction as they found out in the 1st World War. We don’t seem to want to engage in nuclear war, despite the recent sabre rattling, probably because even those threatening it see the end result as disastrous for everyone, including themselves. During the cold war, we had the acronym ‘MAD’ - Mutually Assured Destruction. Although I may be wrong, I have the feeling that our specie’s instinct for self-preservation is very strong.

And there are other reasons to be cheerful. Since 1900, world-wide average life expectancy has gone from 32 years to 73 years. Even better, we can show some degree of international altruism. As a world, we cooperated in bringing a vaccine against our Omega 19 to most of the world’s peoples. Oxfam tells us that the poor are getting poorer. They fail to explain that this is only as compared to the very rich – people like Musk. In fact, the UN told us a little while ago: “...progress towards extreme poverty eradication over the past three decades has been remarkable. The share of the world’s population living on less than $1.90 per person per day has fallen from 35 per cent in 1990 to 9 per cent in 2017, with the number of poor living below that threshold decreasing from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 689 million in 2017”. Since then it has gone down further. And we are now embarking on what will be an effective vaccination programme against malaria, mainly in the areas worst affected by poverty and so likely to have a major beneficial effect on health and education there. And this, funded in large part by the mega-rich donors to the Gates Foundation. Other amazing medical advances continue to be reported every week.

So then, Apocalypse now?  Maybe later...

Paul Buckingham

29 January 2024