The Protagorean Fallacy.

It was the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Protagoras (c.490-c.420 BCE), numbered among the 'Sophists' by Plato, who coined the phrase 'Man is the measure of all things', taken up enthusiastically by the Renaissance humanists. Plato believed him to be denying the existence of objective truth, and this is borne out when one examines the Protagoras quotation in full: 'Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not.'

The Greek version of this reads: 'pantōn chrēmatōn metron estin anthrōpos, tōn men ontōn hōs estin, tōn de ouk ontōn hōs ouk estin.' A rather less sexist English translation would read: 'Humans are the measure of all things: of the things that exist, and of the things that don't.'

This is the idea that reality is purely subjective, and that whatever appears to be the case for any given individual is true for that person. So, if the weather is cold for one person, but hot for another, then it is cold for the one and hot for the other: there is no 'objective' measure of temperature, according to Protagoras. Such radical relativism is surely unsustainable. As Bertrand Russell says, in his book on Relativity, 'If everything were relative, there would be nothing for anything to be relative to.'

Plato thought this was nonsense; so did Aristotle, and so have most philosophers since. Common sense rejects it. My concern here is not, however, with the relativism, or with the issue of objective truth, but with the first part of Protagoras' dictum, to quote its non-sexist version: 'Humans are the measure of all things.' My emphatic response is: NO, they are not!

The reason we are in the absolute mess we're in now, the dire calamity we're all facing because of the climate emergency, the biodiversity crisis, acute water shortages and the impending collapse in food production (caused in part by modern farming methods) just as the human population has reached 8 billion as is heading for 9 billion, is precisely because we, in our supreme, hubristic arrogance, regard ourselves as separate from, and superior to, nature, the natural world and everything in it.

This is displayed, at the most trivial level, by English local councils, who demonstrate their hatred of the natural world by cutting down trees and rooting up wildflowers and hedgerows on an almost daily basis. Cambridgeshire County Council want to destroy an orchard (at Coton View) to make way for a busway, and are doing so, so they claim, for the sake of tackling the climate crisis! They appear to be blissfully unaware that trees absorb CO2, whereas buses emit the stuff! (Even the 'optically guided electric buses' Cambridgeshire propose to use, along with so-called 'hybrid' buses, which will produce CO2 anyway, will entail CO2 emissions in their manufacture, and if the electricity they operate on isn't renewable, they will be emitting CO2 as they run, as well!)

All this is, alas, entirely predictable, and the behaviour of humans seem to be getting worse, rather than better. That great unsung prophet of our age, Lynn White, said much of what needed to be said in 1967, but few, if any, have even heard of him, let alone taken heed of his words.

'[O]ur present combustion of fossil fuels threatens to change the chemistry of the globe's atmosphere as a whole, with consequences which we are only beginning to guess. With the population explosion, the carcinoma of plan-less urbanism, the now geological deposits of sewage and garbage, surely no creature other than man [sic] has ever managed to foul its nest in such short order.'

Bear in mind White was writing this in 1967! He continues:

'What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny - that is, by religion... The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture... the forms of our thinking and language have largely ceased to be Christian, but... Our daily habits of action, for example, are dominated by an implicit faith in perpetual progress which was unknown either to Greco-Roman antiquity or to the Orient. It is rooted in, and is indefensible apart from, Judeo-Christian teleology... We continue today to live, as we have lived for about 1700 years, very largely in a context of Christian axioms.'

White asks, 'What did Christianity tell people about their relations with the environment?' (He has already pointed out that modern science and technology are uniquely Western phenomena, originating in Western Europe in the late 13th/early 14th Centuries CE.) His answer is:

'God planned [his creation] explicitly for man's benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes. And, although man's body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made in God's image. Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.' (My emphases. I have left the 'man' in without comment quite deliberately: the egregious patriarchalism of Judeo-Christianity is only-too-apparent. As White says, Eve was an afterthought!)

What White has to say is confirmed by what the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) had to say regarding the sociology of religion, and, in particular, in his monumental study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For Weber, capitalism came into its own when Protestants (Calvinist Protestants, especially) applied their work ethic - the Protestant work ethic - in their daily lives.

Capitalism, as I have said elsewhere, is an engine driven by the imperatives of economic and population growth, in its insatiable demand for higher revenues and profits, dividends for shareholders, interest for lenders, and rents for owners of land and capital resources. It needs ever-increasing consumption and production of goods and services, and thus requires more and more energy each year, which no increase in renewable energy can supply. Hence, OPEC may well be entirely correct in its forecast of a 23% increase in oil production by its members by 2045 to 110 million barrels a day = 40.15 billion barrels a year. They seem to be blithely unconcerned about the amount of CO2 that will be emitted in consequence!

The stark truth is this: it is capitalism or humanity, not capitalism and humanity.

If fossil fuels are to go, which they must, and in short order, then the entire politico-economic system which depends on them, and which sustains them through enormous annual global taxpayer subsidy, which will amount to 7.4% of global GDP by 2025, according to the IMF, when the latter will be $116.44985 trillion, according to Statista. 7.4% will therefore be just under $8.6173 trillion p.a., an enormous sum, equal to $273,252.79 every second!

What may amount to an even starker truth is that humanity must curb, not only its consumption, as it gets rid of the economic system that drives its consumption, namely, capitalism, but its reproduction, and allow the average death rate to exceed the average birth rate, letting the global population fall substantially. This is not an optional extra, but absolutely essential: if it is not done by humans voluntarily, and humanely, it will be done by nature, compulsorily, and inhumanely.

We are facing what will amount to a Malthusian catastrophe of proportions that not even Thomas Malthus himself, in his most dreadful nightmares, could possibly have envisaged. Adverse climate change, acute water shortages caused by climate change and excess demand for water, and modern farming methods, entailing monoculture and the intensive use of artificial fertilisers and chemical pesticides, the two former degrading soils and the latter killing insect pollinators, are combining to bring about a decline in food production over the coming years, just as the global human population is peaking. At the same time, consumption of so-called 'bushmeat', and other phenomena, have led to a rise in zoonotic diseases, such as SARS-Cov-2. The 'other phenomena' include biodiversity loss and globalisation: see Aguirre, 2017.

It is very clear the Roman Catholic Church will oppose any moves to reduce population size, but so, too, will most, if not all, Protestant denominations. Natalism is common to them all, as has been seen in the US Supreme Court's 2022 decision, in Dobbs vs. Jackson's Women's Health Organization, to overturn Roe vs. Wade and Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, swiftly followed by anti-abortion legislation in Republican-controlled States throughout the Union.

The Justices' vote to overturn the earlier SCOTUS rulings was 5-4, with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett all in favour, and Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and the US Chief Justice, John Roberts, against, although he had voted with the majority on the issue of Mississippi's abortion law.

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett were all nominated by President Donald Trump. Alito was nominated by President George Bush, Jr. Thomas was nominated by President George Bush, Sr., as was Chief Justice Roberts. Alito, Coney Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Thomas are all Catholics, as well as Republicans.

If one packs the US Supreme Court like that, the outcome can surely come as no surprise at all!

That one does not have to be a Catholic to be a natalist is, however, confirmed by the example of Elon Musk. His religion may be no more than the ardent worship of the great god Mammon, to which he dedicates so much of his time and energy, but, as a zealous capitalist, he knows there can be no economic growth without population growth, and vice versa. Indeed, he has said as much, and is on record as calling for an increase in the supply of humans: 'There are not enough people,' he says, 'I can't emphasize this enough, there are not enough people... If people don't have more children, civilization is going to crumble.'

What he means, of course, is that capitalism is going to crumble, because capitalism needs more and more consumers to consume its ever-increasing output, and - for the moment, at least - more and more workers to produce that output, although what it will do when artificially intelligent robots are doing most of the work is anyone's guess. One can envisage a situation where there is an elite, highly educated, trained and skilled workforce, earning high salaries and paying taxes, and a large majority population of unemployed, living on a meagre universal basic income, paid for by the taxes of the resentful elite. This one can, at least, foresee in developed countries - the outsourced workers of outsourced manufacturing in developing countries will probably be expected to go on slaving away for pitiful wages until such time as the Malthusian catastrophe I envisage kills them all.

Musk's natalism has its economic justification, but it is interesting to note the religious one supplied by Catholics and Protestants in terms of parents' duty to God and/or the Church. This is a classic example of what Karl Marx (1818-83) was talking about when he referred, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), to an element of the politico-ideological superstructure reflecting, and reinforcing, the relations of production of the economic base (ökonomische grundlage) of capitalist society, which were, in turn, dependent on developments in technology.

The Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) developed Marx's ideas on this point with his concept of hegemony, which is defined as: 'political leadership based on the consent of the led, a consent which is secured by the diffusion and popularization of the world view of the ruling class' (T.R. Bates, 'Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony,' Journal of the History of Ideas 36(2):351-366, April-June 1975, DOI: 10.2307/2708933, p.352, my emphasis).

Later, Steven Lukes (b.1941) used this idea to develop his theory of the three 'faces', or 'dimensions', of power, building on the earlier work of theorists such as Dahl, Polsby, Bachrach and Baratz, who had discussed the first two such 'faces', or 'dimensions' of political power.

The first such face is the straightforward one of a person's ability to get another person to do X or Y they would otherwise not do, if they had any choice in the matter. This form of power comes in two forms, already discussed much earlier by Max Weber (see above): the illegitimate (mugger holds gun to someone's head and says 'Gimme your money!') and the legitimate (police officer says 'You're under arrest!').

The second face is far more subtle, and was discussed by Bachrach and Baratz in theory, and Matthew A. Crenson, in The Unpolitics of Air Pollution. A Study of Non-Decisionmaking in the Cities (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971) in practice. It is the exclusion, deliberately or otherwise, of issues from the political agenda, so they are never discussed or debated in the first place, at least not in any forum where any decision can be made to bring about actual political, social or economic change at any level.

The third and final 'face' of political power is the ideological face: the ability of the ruling class, or elite, to get the rest of society to accept decisions that may very well not be in their interests at all, but only those of the rulers, because they accept the ruling class or elite's world view, as if it was 'God-given', or a simple given, a donnée.

Religious ideology is part of this - but only a part. Consumerist materialism is an ideology that capitalism promotes at every opportunity, and with obvious, self-serving relish. It was noteworthy that, in a recent opinion poll conducted in Europe, those surveyed reported themselves generally favourable towards policies to remedy adverse climate change, but not if any of those policies meant making sacrifices in their material standards of living (see Guardian).

If we continue with business as usual, with an ever-growing global economy and population, and growing demand for energy to match, then the situation is completely hopeless, because we will see the demand for fossil fuels continue to increase, a continuation in deforestation and the destruction of wetlands, and yet more loss of wildlife habitats and biodiversity. We will also see more destruction of other parts of the environment, and more pollution of the air, soil, and water (both salt and fresh).

The Earth, will, in short, become less and less habitable - thanks to us. We are a species still fouling its one and only nest, and we are destroying, and have already destroyed, many, many other species in the process!

'Humans are the measure of all things?' NEVER! Never! Never! Never! Rather, they are the scum - the very dregs - of the entire Universe! They are the most destructive species that has ever walked on the face of this planet, and if they do bring about their own extinction, they will have richly deserved that fate. There are too few exceptions, either now or in history, to warrant any other judgement.

No human life is worth more than any non-human animal's life. The preservation of the rest of the biosphere is now far more important than preserving the future of humanity, which far too many humans have proved they care nothing for, preferring to sacrifice it for the sake of profits in the here and now. The biosphere can, and must, have a future, and will have, come what may.

Through our own actions, however, the likelihood is that that future will be one, if not altogether free of humans, containing many billions of humans less than now, and may, indeed, have less than a billion human souls, as I predicted in my paper, 'Optimum Population Size Revisited'.

I continue to hope that my young relatives will be among the survivors, and that I, myself, will not be alive to witness the impending apocalypse of the twenty-first century, but my anger with so many of my fellow humans for their collective turpitude remains unabated.

But what, people will say, of the great art, architecture, music, science and technology of humans - are they worth nothing? Are they not to be placed in the credit side of the ledger to defray the debit side? The technology has added to the debit side! The huge increase in both population and greenhouse gases began with the Industrial and Agrarian Revolutions: that is a historical fact. As for the other things - the Sun's luminosity increases by 1% every 110 million years, or 10% every 1.1 billion years, as noted by Schröder and Smith, 2008, p.3, pdf. As a result, all the liquid water on the Earth will turn into steam, and there will be a runaway greenhouse effect, leading to soaring surface atmospheric temperatures, beyond anything tolerable to any form of life, all of which will become extinct (see Leconte et al, 2013; Science Daily).

The Sun is currently 4.58 billion years old (Gy = 'Gigayears'), according to Schröder and Smith (p.3, pdf.). When it is 10 Gy, in 5.42 billion years' time, i.e., 4.32 billion years after all life on Earth has become extinct, so they tell us, it will end its main-sequence life-span, and begin to swell into a Red Giant star, with solar radius 37% larger than now, and which, over the course of the following 2 Gy, will continue to grow, and consume Mercury, Venus and Earth - by then a molten remnant (p.5, pdf.).

Keats, in his Epithalamion, proclaimed that 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever,' and in his Ode on a Grecian Urn informs us that 'Beauty is truth,/Truth beauty'. Neither proposition is true: nothing of beauty, at least nothing of beauty on Earth, either natural beauty, or the kind created by humans, will survive.

'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.' Alas, even Shelley's words, from Ozymandias, are false, for no works, even of the mightiest of us, shall remain for any to gaze upon.

All the works of our hands, and of our minds, are destined to perish, to vanish and be as evanescent as the dew. They will first crumble into dust, and then be vaporised by the 'all-conquering Sun' (Sol invictus, as the Romans called it - 25th December was originally the feast day of its 'birth', the Dies natalis Solis invicti), which itself will perish, as will the Universe, defeated, in the end, by entropy, and the inexorable Second Law of Thermodynamics.