Attempts to prevent extinction aren’t liberal univeralism-acknowledging we are totalized by the risk of extinction still allows interrogating questions of different scale.

(Daniel, Kainos Anthropos: Existential Precarity and Human Universality in the Earth System Anthropocene new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics Lawrence & Wishart Volume 107-108, 2022)

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul the Apostle writes of his Messiah: ‘He himself is our peace, who has made the two groups [Jews and gentiles] one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace.’70 In this passage Paul is describing the radical reconciliation of both Jew and gentile in the creation of one universal communion for all humankind. The phrase translated here as ‘new humanity’ is Kainos Anthropos (καινός άνθρωπος).71 In 2000, Paul Crutzen announced the arrival of another form of human universality. Like his namesake, however, Crutzen was merely the messenger; the apostle of a gospel whose central tenets had already been established decades prior.72 Crutzen had expressed his frustration that day in Cuernavaca that Earth System scientists presenting their findings at a meeting of the IGBP could continue to blithely discuss the Holocene as if they did not know that ‘the people of the Earth are no longer simple spectators to the drama of Earth evolution but have become active participants on a worldwide scale’. Had they not heard the bad news? Far from being an innovation, Crutzen’s declaration that ‘we’re in the Anthropocene!’ was ‘conceived as more of a rhetorical prod,’73 a reminder, and a convenient shorthand for designating the pervasive planetary impact being caused by human beings as seen from the perspective of Earth System science. In the resulting Anthropocene there are neither Jews nor gentiles, but instead a tangle of human systems bound by (highly asymmetrical and inegalitarian) flows of matter, energy and information that inextricably link them to their environment and one another.74 A new humanity emerges within this welter: a Kainos Anthropos that reconceives human totality in terms of universal planetary connection as components of a single system whose mutually sustaining interactions only tail off somewhere in the near-void of space. Born in the post-cybernetic systems milieu of the 1980s, the Kainos Anthropos of the Anthropocene hails from a paradigmatically different point of origin; one that has very little to do with the Aristotelian world of primary substances, secondary qualities and specific differences that inspired over two millennia of Western humanist endeavours to universally define what a human being essentially is by Nature. Here, the emphasis instead shifts away from endless taxonomic and definitional questions regarding the true nature of humanity and towards interrogating the systemic structure of the planet-scale flows that sustain eight billion human lives in highly unequal and ecologically ruinous relationships. By this point, I hope to have impressed the possibility that the Anthropos of the Earth System Anthropocene does not simply represent the tradition of all the dead generations of humanists returned to weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living. Ironically – tragically, even – it often seems to be the many vocal academic anti-humanists themselves who continue to raise this spectre so that they can proceed to banish it once more, perceiving in the human totality of the Anthropos the image of their old foe: the Enlightenment universalist definition of ‘European Man as model and ideal’ with all his constitutive exclusions, hierarchies and repressions.75 The Kainos Anthropos of the Anthropocene does not, as feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti says of ‘the human of Humanism’, ‘stand for normality, normalcy and normativity’ or ‘function by transposing a specific mode of being human into a generalised standard, which acquires transcendent values as the human: from male to masculine and onto human as the universalised format of humanity’ (The Posthuman, pp26-28). Instead, it seeks to express the interactions that the sum total of human beings have with their planetary environment – continually shaping and being shaped in a dynamic dance performed on the edge of an ecological cliff. It approaches ‘humanity’ in the functional terms of combined human activities and the vernacular of systems science, not normatively in the venerable Western language of philosophical anthropology or Aristotelian metaphysical biology.76 As the authors of The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach aptly observe, ‘If human systems have for the first time ever transformed the Earth System, then the old humanist ideas about who we are, what we can change and what we can’t, and what we might hope to achieve are recast …’77 Because the universalism of the Kainos Anthropos departs so markedly from the traditional concerns of Western humanism, it should come as no surprise that many well-established forms of anti-humanist critique risk missing much of what is newest and most urgent in the image of human totality furnished by Earth System science. As the authors quoted above further note, ‘No consideration of what being human means can ignore the vision of the anthropos as the sum total of human impacts on the planet. Yet this singular figure does not erase the many other anthropo[i] operating at multiple scales of time and place, contributing differently to the Anthropocene trajectory, and suffering its effects unequally’ (The Anthropocene, p197). In other words – and this is crucial – although one of the first lessons of the Kainos Anthropos is that all humans are appreciably connected, both to one another and the rest of earthly life, this awareness in no way precludes the possibility of scaling down to address specific clusters or kinds of human activities and the wildly disproportionate roles that they play in sustaining the wealth, prestige and power of some; the expropriation, exploitation and exclusion of many; and the potential extermination of all. There may ultimately prove to be many politically sound reasons for choosing to reject the designation ‘Anthropocene’ in favour of other more diagnostic propositions such as the (m)Anthropocene, Eurocene or Capitalocene.78 However, the reflex to reject all discussion of humanity in universal terms and redirect attention towards familiar culprits such as patriarchy, European colonisation or capital risks reducing the starkly novel challenges of perspective and scale that have arisen since the mid-twentieth century.79 While the idea that ‘everything is connected’ may be ancient, the ability to begin to map, represent and model those connections in detail is barely a half century old, bringing with it a radically new set of resources for reconceiving the terms in which political thinkers frame human universality and totality. Those alive today have still barely begun to explore the political tensions that open up in the ontologically alien world of complex planetary interconnection furnished by Earth System science. I believe that it would be a tragic mistake to forego the present opportunity to develop a cartography of the Kainos Anthropos of the Anthropocene and the novel political potentials and pitfalls of its unfolding terrain, in favour of instead offering yet another critique of capitalism or colonialism (however crucial these remain).80