To what extent, therefore, is inexorable economic growth good for humanity? Is it perhaps inimical to human needs (Gough, 2018)? The total human population on planet Earth some 2,000 years ago would probably have been no more than 0.03 billion, though by the 1800s ce it would have expanded to around 1 billion. But then in just 200 years it rocketed to around 7 billion and is projected to rise to somewhere between 10 and 13 billion by 2100 ce (Bacci, 2012; United Nations Population Division (UNPD), 2017). It is in the context of historical development that matters of social policy and social development come into focus. The dramatic increase has resulted from effects associated with industrialisation, medical and technological advances, increased longevity and rising living standards. It may in time be tempered by declining fertility, but the demands the human population is already placing on the Earth’s natural resources and the environmental degradation, pollution and fundamental changes to the planet’s climate associated with human activity can’t be sustainable without policy intervention (Brundtland, 1987; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2018). We may already have entered a new era, the Anthropocene era, in which the Earth’s geology and eco-systems have been fundamentally altered by the human species (see http://www.anthropocene.info/).
The immanent imperative of the evolutionary process is the need for species survival. And yet the human species – while uniquely capable of comprehending that imperative and of innovating to provide for its needs – demonstrates a tendency for self-destruction: first, because of its potentially fatal impact on the ecology of the planet it inhabits (Lovelock, 1979); and secondly, some would suggest, through its own revolutionary digital technologies. These technologies are impacting, perhaps unstoppably, upon the culture of human societies; not only are they providing new ways of automating the production of tangible goods and services; they are also facilitating the infinite mobility of capital as the intangible store of conceptualised wealth upon which ‘growth’ is postulated to depend. They are capable of generating new forms of artificial intelligence that portend the possibility that human beings may eventually be superseded by intelligent machines (Kurzwell, 2005). Thirdly, we can’t conclude this hasty overview of the human species’ development without some mention of its propensity for violence among its own members and the possibility that it has developed the capacity to destroy itself through thermo-nuclear war. It must be acknowledged that there is some limited evidence of occasional killings of humans by humans during the prehistoric era of hunting-gathering societies, including disturbing incidents of both infanticide and senilicide (that may have been, if not necessary, instrumental to the survival of foraging groups). But human history has since, of course, been replete with violent struggles, armed conflicts and wars, and in this respect the species is wholly unique.
In the overall scheme of things, homo sapiens is a young and precocious species, that within a staggeringly short period of time has transformed both itself and its natural environment. It has wrought destruction on itself and the planet. But its needs and the ways in which it both succeeds and fails in meeting those needs are a complex function of the essential characteristics of the species itself.
The thumbnail sketch of the human species that has just been presented is one premised on a two-fold humanist assumption: first, that the human species was not divinely created but has naturally evolved; second, that it is unique and fundamentally different from other naturally evolved creatures. Humanism – or humanisms – has taken a variety of ideological forms, some of which accommodate themselves with religious beliefs and others that claim to assert principles they believe to be somehow ordained by nature, or which they contend to be self-evident. Humanism can be manifested as an implicit form of human arrogance – an assumption of superiority over other species and of dominion over the planet and its resources; or else as an explicit quest for a secular alternative to religious beliefs and religiously inspired and/or supposedly apolitical value systems (see, for example, Cave, 2009).
The earliest humanists were to be found among the classical Greek philosophers, and in Chapter 3 we shall pay particular attention to Aristotle’s thinking about human nature and human well-being. The philosophers of the ‘Enlightenment’ era took the thinking of their Classical forbears in different directions; directions that we may associate directly or indirectly with the principal competing ideologies of the modern era that followed (Hamilton, 2003; Harari, 2011; 2017).
Liberal-individualist humanism would become the most enduring modern orthodoxy. Central to its emergence has been ‘Cartesian dualism’: the seminal distinction drawn by Descartes (1637) between the human body and the human mind, and the conception of a person not merely as a natural living organism, but in a very separate sense as an individual thinking being. The emphasis upon essential individuality and freedom of the human being spawned the supposition that it is through reason and the senses that human beings can divine for themselves the universal moral rights and duties that should govern relations between individual members of the species (Kant, 1785; Locke, 1689). Liberal individualism – premised on empiricist philosophy – can take many forms, but as will be seen in later chapters, it has been a hegemonic influence within the international world order. It continues to underpin the assumptions of market economics and, as we shall see, a particular understanding of human rights.
Solidaristic humanisms, of which there are several, have a more ambivalent attitude to the individuality of the human subject, illustrated initially, perhaps, in the manner that the romantic philosopher, Rousseau