Sublime

many “anti-natalists believe that a world without humans, or with significantly fewer of them, would eventually revert to a pollution-free paradise with abundant natural resources. As one human extinction proponent put it in January 2020 in a letter to his local paper, ‘In approximately 20,000 years after human extinction, this magnificent

To explain this apocalyptic trend, Shellenberger borrows from The Denial of Death, a 1973 book by American anthropologist Ernest Becker (1924–1974). Fear of death, Becker wrote, is a core part of our subconscious. We realize our own mortality early in our lives and spend the later part dealing with it, often subconsciously. One way we deal with

. . . a steep winding-down of the size of the industrial economy. It strips away its burdens and complications, nurses the human ecology back to health, builds local competence and discovers a sense of place. . . . This is managed descent. . . . The shock is as gentle and as survivable as foresight can make

If we are to rehabilitate progress, Enlightenment, modernity, growth and ambition—prometheanism—we need to ask where the left took a wrong turn. And when we do, we cannot avoid the recognition that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, completed in 1944 and published in 1947—one of the seminal texts of critical theory and

“Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life,”45 and sometimes the solution: we need a “Marshall Plan for the Earth.”