A Humbler Vision of the Human Station

IN 2019, The New Yorker published an essay by Jonathan Franzen titled “What if We Stopped Pretending?” Franzen’s premise was simple—climate change is here, and no power or populace is making the sacrifices to stop it. His essay was met with an outcry that it is not too late, but since then that consensus has eroded. Bill Gates may still write books like How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, but the people who were doing that work while Gates was making his billions have come to darker conclusions.

Timothy Beal’s new book, When Time Is Short: Finding Our Way in the Anthropocene, is, as he states in the introduction, a “‘what if it’s already too late?’ book.” That we have a hard time accepting this possibility, Beal believes, is rooted in “our denial of the mortality of our species.” Those of us formed in an Enlightenment-capitalist frame simply can’t imagine the world without us. And that lack of imagination is one source of the very systems of exploitation and extraction that brought us to this point.

Beal, a religion professor and Hebrew Bible scholar, argues that our denial of death is in large part rooted in a particular (mis)reading of Genesis 1. There, humans are given dominion over creation and named as exceptional creatures in God’s own image. That exceptionalism, read through Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Bacon and John Locke, became what Bacon called the “charter of foundation” of the colonialist project. Unprecedented exploitation and extraction followed. Indigenous cultures were uprooted from the land because Locke and others believed they had “forfeited by not fully subduing and maximally using its natural resources.”

Working from Stuart Brand’s famous statement that “We are as gods and might as well get used to it,” Beal traces human exceptionalism from believing that we are like gods to the wildest dreams of a transhuman future in which we are gods.

The problem comes when we run against the ground of reality, the literal soil to which we will return. Beal draws on the seminal book The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker. Becker explained our denial as the conflict between our divine consciousness and animal bodies. We are “gods with anuses” who know that we will die and rot. So, we in the techno-capitalist world take on “immortality projects” to help us look away, whether it’s nationalist wars or hope in the latest innovation. Beal borrows from Becker’s vision to understand our broader denial of the “potential for human extinction.” If instead we recognize that our time is short, we can live into what Beal calls a “palliative hope.” Like hospice care, this calls us to focus on what ultimately matters—the truth about who we are.

Beal offers a humbler vision of the human station, more in line with the worldview of many Indigenous cultures, including those of the Bible. Drawing on Genesis 2 as a counterbalance to Genesis 1, he explores a variety of Hebrew Bible texts to argue for an “earth creatureliness” that accepts that we are not gods but humus beings, “literally, inspired mud, animate soil.” We are of earth and to earth we will return.

Beal’s book is a critical contribution to the conversation we must have as ecological disasters surround us. It is not a book of acquiescence but a humble call to live and act on a properly human, creaturely scale. Time is short: We must stop pretending and begin becoming the humus beings we were always made to be.

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