While discussing the Middle East crisis in the December 2006 issue of International Humanist News, IHEU President Sonja Eggerickx concluded that our world “is indeed a mad world”. The label of a mad world is justified – and sadly there are many more crises in addition to the one in the Middle East.

On April 3, 2006, the weekly magazine Time ran a cover story on global warming with the title “Be worried, be very worried”. As the temperature of the planet is now at its highest since the tenth century, the duration and intensity of wildfires have increased, category 4 and 5 hurricanes are more common, and the sea-level has risen.
Thirty-five per cent of the planet’s forests have been lost since the Middle Ages, and the unprecedented 35 per cent loss of our planet’s biodiversity has mostly occurred in our time – after surviving for the last 65 million years. The changes in the environment are extensive and often irreversible. These ongoing adverse effects occur today in our own backyards, they are not merely projections of what might happen a few decades later. (Science magazine, 18 August, 2006).

The sixth mass extinction of life on the planet has been in progress for quite a long time. The final episode could be a war with weapons of mass destruction, as the final episode of the fifth mass extinction of life on the planet may have been the collision of a meteorite with the earth leading to the extinction of dinosaurs.

Today, humanity’s very existence is jeopardized.

It’s our Fault

The causes of the crisis are anthropogenic and it is remarkable that human behavior as the main cause of the crisis is rarely discussed or analyzed – it is even played down .

Can we stop the process of this sixth mass extinction? Most scientists and politicians look to scientific research and breakthroughs that will discover new sources of energy – beyond carbon – so that greenhouse emissions could be eliminated. The September 2006 special issue of Scientific American was focused on “How to power the Economy and still Fight Global Warming- Energy Future Beyond Carbon”. And the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco this February will discuss “Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being”.

The research for sources of energy beyond carbon is intense and promising, but it will probably take several decades for world-wide application of the new energy technologies. And how will we enforce it anyway in a deeply divided world? How will we prevent a war with lethal weapons of mass destruction?

A Question of Priorities

Our Humanist movement, with millions of active members, has decisively contributed to our cultural development. Now, the strategic plan of IHEU 2007—2011 aims to defend human rights, to promote human values world-wide, to emphasize education, to support science against religious fundamentalism and to fight the scourge of untouchability. All these noble goals are essential for the development of our culture.

There is now, however, a pressing question of priorities. Human existence is at stake, we are facing an ecological disaster and we all live under the terror of a global war with means of mass destruction.

For us the problem is political, but traditional political alignments cannot handle the global crisis nor will short-term planning help in the face of a rapidly deteriorating environment. The most significant issue in the problem is also the key to it – human nature. Human nature, this terrible mixture of humanity and inhumanity, has created, throughout eons, history that has continuously swung from the most wonderful achievements in the sciences, technology, biology and the arts, to the most terrible barbarism, catastrophes and genocides.

New Approach

Understanding human history diachronically and knowing modern biology and the sciences related to human nature, are prerequisites for an effective management of the crisis. A Darwinian socio-political movement with knowledge of human history and biological awareness could fulfill these requirements. This Darwinian political movement would adopt an anthropocentric, biological, evolutionary world view and direct applied sciences to a planned integration of homo sapiens into an optimized ecosystem as an integral part of a controlled evolution of life in the planet. Ethics would be the compass used for steering an optimal course between the interest of homo sapiens and living nature as a whole. This is a new biological concept and a new approach to the social and ecological crisis.

The vision of a Darwinian movement includes a new role for medicine. Hippocratic medicine, being practiced for more than 2000 years, has impressively improved our lives. Today – in the western world – we live longer, we live better and we suffer less. Yet, at the level of population and ecology, Hippocratic medicine has anti-biological effects which have caused and maintained defects in the human genetic material and have led to the population explosion. Hippocratic medicine increased life span without adjusting reproduction.

Medicine in its new role has to be applied at two levels. At the level of population and the ecosystem, healthcare would have the primary aim of restoring our genetic material to health, bringing reproduction under control and integrating homo sapiens in the optimized ecosystem of the planet. The study of human behavior, predicated in part on neurophysiology, is a prerequisite. At the second level – the individual – curative medicine should be applied for the benefit of the individual patient.

Descartes’ Error

However, medicine alone cannot heal a sick civilization, wrote Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes’ Error. The social and ecological crisis is a historical crisis because it questions the foundations and presuppositions on which our civilization is built. The crisis calls for an inter-disciplinary approach.

This should be our approach to the planetary crisis: an approach that is biologically aware and one which has an understanding of human history. This does not exclude other approaches.

Terje Emberland, again in the December 2006 issue of International Humanist News, suggested that we open ‘New Fronts’ for Humanism and that “The Humanist Movement has to be perceived as more than just an organization for anti-religious activities”. The rapidly deteriorating environment, the risk of human extinction, the deep social crisis and the present-day barbarous intra-species wars and genocides could be the provocative ‘New Fronts’ for our Humanist Movement.

As President Sonja Eggerickx stressed, “we must always dream of a better world - but we need not just dream about it, we could also act to make it better”

Dr. Dennis V. Razis is President of IHEU’s Greek member organization Delphi Society, and a distinguished medical doctor.