Better off without us?

Not to be born at all is best, far best that can befall; next best, when born, with least delay, to trace the backward way. — Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

One occasionally hears the view that our world was a better place before humans evolved and will be so again when our species goes extinct … the sooner the better. That opening quotation from Sophocles dates from the fifth century BC, so it’s clearly an idea with some staying power.

Few have expressed it more starkly than Victorian realist Thomas Hardy in his poem “Before Life and After”:

A time there was — as one may guess

And as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell —

before the birth of consciousness,

When all went well.

None suffered sickness, love, or loss,

None knew regret, starved hope, or heart-burnings;

None cared whatever crash or cross

Brought wrack to things.

If something ceased, no tongue bewailed,

If something winced and waned, no heart was wrung;

If brightness dimmed, and dark prevailed.

No sense was stung.

But the disease of feeling germed,

And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong:

Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed

How long, how long?

One thing that has changed since Hardy’s time is that we now possess the means to bring about human extinction and universal nescience (a fundamental lack of knowledge or awareness) through several means. Which means we really ought to think harder and longer about whether the author of such beloved novels as Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd might have been on to something.

Granted, it is one of those questions that initially sounds less like philosophy than like the sort of remark made by somebody who just bet immoderately on Canada to upset Morocco in the Round of 16 after that stellar first half.

Would the universe have been a better, well, everything if conscious beings had never appeared? Conscious, that is, as Hardy meant it: in the peculiarly human, self-conscious manner of Galileo and Michelangelo and the surviving half of Milli Vanilli. Other animals are clearly conscious of their surroundings and capable of feeling pain or grief or happiness or affection, but we’re thinking here about next-level human thinking.

We’re not asking simply would we as humans have been better off? That question, while difficult enough and more Sophoclean, at least has the virtue of containing an identifiable subject. Me and you but no dog named Boo.

Nor is the question whether human beings have, on balance, improved the Earth, which tends to degenerate almost immediately into an exchange of graphs about carbon emissions, infant mortality, biodiversity, literacy, whale populations and whether the invention of indoor plumbing compensates for the invention of thermonuclear weapons or the soul stylings of Barry Manilow. Those arguments are worth having, but they are not this argument.

This argument is stranger.

It asks whether attaining consciousness itself was a mistake.

One notices, even in writing that sentence, an almost irresistible temptation to smuggle in assumptions that the sentence cannot possibly justify. A mistake according to whom?

One does not ordinarily accuse photosynthesis of having made an unfortunate career choice. Galaxies are not said to have exercised poor judgment in choosing spiral arms instead of elliptical ones. “Mistake” belongs to a vocabulary of agency, purpose and evaluation, all of which are precisely what become questionable the moment one starts talking about a universe before consciousness existed.

Consciousness was never a delusory goal of our unconscious precursors … which, by definition, didn’t have goals and weren’t big on teleological discussions.

But already the question has begun to behave oddly.

It is worth paying attention when this happens. Philosophy has a habit of disguising itself as grammar. An argument can proceed for several pages before anyone notices that all the interesting work has been done by a single adjective or preposition. Whole metaphysical systems have been erected on the foundations of words like is, because, same, real and nothing, whose apparent transparency often turns out to conceal alarming depths.

Hundreds of books and essays have been written by ethicists and theologians on the thorny question of how to get from an “is” to an “ought” with respect to human behaviour, or whether that’s even possible.

But for our purposes in this tranche of blither blather, the word that seems to be causing the trouble here is better.

Hardy wrote as though there had once been an age in which “all went well.” There was no grief because there was no one to grieve. No regret because there were no memories. No hope because there were no creatures capable of projecting themselves into futures that stubbornly refused to co-operate.

Then, as Hardy so memorably put it, “the disease of feeling germed.” (Memorably but, to my ears, infelicitously for a writer of his calibre.) Still, it is difficult to think of another line in English poetry that packs so much metaphysics into so few words. (And just as importantly from a poetic standpoint, “germed” rhymes with “reaffirmed.”)

And speaking of dubious verbs, maybe “packs” is out of place here. The line does not argue. It infects. One finishes the poem with the uncomfortable suspicion that consciousness may indeed resemble a disease, not because it destroys life but because it transforms the conditions under which life is experienced.

Before consciousness there could be injury, but not injustice. Death, but not tragedy. Predation, but not cruelty. The world contained events but not evaluations.

Which sounds plausible until one asks what Hardy means by “went well.”

Not, that is, what he intended to mean. Literary criticism is full of people who mistake biography for argument. The more interesting question is whether the phrase survives inspection.

Suppose there were no conscious creatures anywhere in the universe. Would things be going well? Again, there’d be no one to offer an opinion or render a verdict.

There is still a curious impulse to answer yes, almost before one has understood the question. No suffering. No terror. No loneliness. No child dies of leukemia. No refugee camps. No solitary confinement. No panic attacks at three in the morning because one suddenly realizes that one grows old, one grows old, one shall wear the bottoms of one’s trousers rolled.

This seems compelling. Until one notices that the list is composed entirely of absences. Nothing hurts. Fine. Does it follow that things therefore go well?

Imagine an utterly lifeless universe: stars burning, planets cooling, galaxies colliding with a grandeur that would be breathtaking if there existed anything capable of breath or awe. Would such a universe be good?

The temptation is to reply that it at least would be better than ours.

But better for whom?

This is not one of those irritating philosophical questions that merely changes the subject. It is the subject. Because if there are literally no conscious beings, there are also no preferences, no disappointments, no fulfilled ambitions, no aesthetic judgments, no loves, no envies, no acts of forgiveness, no scientific discoveries, no mathematics, no music, no jokes, no embarrassment, no gratitude, no consolation, no wondering whether consciousness was a mistake in the first place.

There is, in other words, no standpoint from which the word better can do any work. It’s off vapin’ in the boys’ room and shooting craps or playing pinochle with two ne’er-do-wells named Lenny and Squiggy.

This may seem a trifling semantic objection. It is not. Or at least I don’t think it is, though experience has taught me that whenever I become convinced a semantic point is carrying the whole weight of an argument I should probably become suspicious of myself. Former philosophy grad students are notorious for discovering profundity in grammar à la Wittgenstein or Chomsky, much as conspiracy theorists discover hidden messages in bathroom linoleum or airport carpeting.

Still. Suppose the last conscious organism dies tomorrow.

The oceans continue. Mountains erode. The rings of Saturn cast exactly the same shadows they cast the day before. The universe loses nothing physical that it had yesterday, except a few kilograms of carbon and calcium. And even they’d be recycled.

Has it become better?

The difficulty is not that the answer is no. Nor that the answer is yes. The difficulty is that the question appears to have quietly dismantled the very machinery needed to answer it.

That seems important.

Or rather — and this is one of those irritating but perhaps necessary corrections one occasionally has to make in the middle of a line of thought — it seems important to me, which is not obviously the same thing. You might find the whole exercise boring and pointless. You might also have a more defensible position than Hardy’s.

Every philosophical essay eventually reaches the point where it has to decide whether it is making a claim about the world or merely about the habits of its author’s mind. One hopes for the former while privately suspecting the latter.

But hey.

Maybe this is itself a clue. Maybe consciousness is not merely one phenomenon among others but the peculiar phenomenon in which the universe first acquires the capacity to ask whether anything is good or bad. If so, Hardy was exactly right that consciousness introduces the possibility of wrongness.

What is less obvious is that it introduces rightness at precisely the same moment. The two arrive together in separate limos, like the bickering members of Fleetwood Mac at Bill Clinton’s first inaugural ball. Why not think about times to come?

So yeah. Let’s do that.

If we off ourselves through internecine warfare or idiotically engineering new viruses or irrevocably messing with the planet’s climate or untethering AI killing machines and overlords, the universe would not celebrate our disappearance. It would not mourn it.

Only we can do either.

Which seems to me to be the strongest argument, not for our innocence, nor even for our indispensability, but for the strange and terrible privilege of being the part of a universe that can ask whether it would have been preferable had we never existed at all.