Is Green Misanthropy a Uniquely Western Affliction?

How the West Learned to Hate Humanity

In Cixin Liu’s mind-bending sci-fi trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, a Chinese physicist named Ye Wenjie invites the Trisolarans, an advanced alien civilization, to conquer Earth and pass judgment on humanity. Ye is a tragic figure who has grown to disdain humanity. Traumatised by the Cultural Revolution, she initially hopes the wise extraterrestrials will deliver cosmic justice but fails to grasp (or suppresses the thought) that they intend to wipe out human civilization altogether. She eventually establishes the Earth-Trisolaris Organisation (ETO) with some fellow scientists—a sort of terrestrial fifth column that assists the invaders in carrying out their planned anthropocide. Their motivation? A radical strain of environmentalism that regards humans as a blight on the planet.

This is hardly the first science-fiction story to deploy the trope of the radical tree-hugger who believes Earth would be better off without Homo sapiens. The green rationale for human extermination was memorably summarised by Keanu Reeves’s alien in the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still: “If the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the Earth survives.” Or as Agent Smith put it in The Matrix: “You’re a plague, and we are the cure.” But Cixin Liu uses an interesting plot device to catalyse the protagonist’s disenchantment with humanity: as a young woman, Ye stumbles upon a copy of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, a book banned by the Communist Party as a reactionary screed against industrialisation. Reading the forbidden book in secret—and eventually being apprehended by Party cadres—she becomes radicalised by eco-pessimism. Liu is not subtle about the pivotal role played by Silent Spring in her ideological awakening: “Ye’s rational consideration of humanity’s evil side began the day she read Silent Spring”. And at the end of Ye’s life:

“[i]n her last moments, Ye Wenjie would recall the influence Silent Spring had on her life. The book dealt only with a limited subject: the negative environmental effects of excessive pesticide use. But the perspective taken by the author shook Ye to the core. The use of pesticides had seemed to Ye just a normal, proper—or, at least, neutral—act, but Carson’s book allowed Ye to see that, from Nature’s perspective, their use was indistinguishable from the Cultural Revolution, and equally destructive to our world. If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil?”

It is this disillusionment with humanity, sparked by reading Silent Spring, that drove Ye to send her fateful message bringing about humanity’s doom.

A Plague from the West?

It is tempting to dismiss this story as little more than anti-Western propaganda from an avowed Chinese nationalist. For a start, Rachel Carson is not the anti-human prophet she’s often made out to be both by her detractors and some of her followers. In fact, she was not even opposed to pesticides and the chemical industry per se—she just warned against the reckless and profligate spraying of new chemicals, often by the planeload, which ravage fragile ecosystems that we barely understand (and she was mostly right on that count). Still, even though Carson was not a misanthrope, she has become a patron saint of an intellectual current in the West that is profoundly anti-progress and anti-human. And Liu may be right that the most effective way to render the strange motivations of his misanthropic antagonists intelligible—especially to a Chinese audience—is to frame them as a Western import.

Consider, for instance, the second report of that very Western think tank the Club of Rome, which states that “[t]he world has cancer, and the cancer is man,” precisely the metaphor used by the villains of Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Depicting humans as parasites, plagues, or pests has become a recurring trope in Western environmentalism. The British NGO Population Matters likens humanity to a swarm of locusts: first we devour everything we see, then we starve and die off. Even the mild-mannered Sir David Attenborough has called humanity a planetary “plague.” During the pandemic, a common refrain among radical environmentalists framed humanity as the “real” virus, with COVID as Mother Nature’s way of healing herself. Pope Francis described the pandemic as “nature’s response” to our ecological sins. If that’s not radical enough for your taste, how about the Human Voluntary Extinction Movement, founded by an American environmentalist, which calls on humans to abstain from procreation to bring about the gradual extinction of our species?

Much of this misanthropy may amount to little more than posturing—a form of covert self-aggrandisement concealed behind the grammar of the “self-excluding we.” When flagellants declare that “we” are a cancer on the planet, they quietly exempt themselves and other environmentally enlightened individuals. As Nietzsche understood, someone who despises himself “nevertheless esteems himself thereby, as a self-despiser.”

Cultural Just-So Stories

All of which raises a pertinent question: is environmentalist misanthropy a uniquely Western affliction that we have exported to the rest of the world? Most influential environmentalists belong squarely to the Western intellectual tradition and are often trained at Western universities. Then again, Western civilization has been so globally dominant over the past few centuries that nearly all ideologies with worldwide impact—including liberalism, communism, and Nazism—originated in the West.

It is not difficult to spin a just-so story that frames environmentalism as a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition. More than most religious systems, Christianity preaches humility and dwells on human rottenness and depravity. We are born sinners and must atone for our corruption. In his green encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis wrote that the “misuse of creation begins when we no longer recognise any higher instance than ourselves, when we see nothing else but ourselves.” In support of this ethic of ecological humility, he cited Scripture and the Church Fathers.

And yet, in a famous article for Science, the historian Lynn White advanced almost the mirror image of this argument. In White’s historical account, the ruthless domination of nature begins with Christianity (and Judaism), specifically with the divine injunction in Genesis to “subdue” the Earth and “rule over” it. He contrasts this legacy with pagan animism, which tends to regard nature as “sacred” and is more attuned to humanity’s place within it. So, which is it? Does Christianity license a lust for domination, or does it cultivate humility and reverence toward the natural world?

With a bit of creativity, we could concoct a corresponding story that explains why Chinese civilization failed to produce its own tradition of anti-human environmentalism. Perhaps Confucianism, with its emphasis on harmony and balance, tends to search for the proper place of humanity in the cosmic order? Perhaps Chinese philosophy is all about moderation rather than radicalism of any kind? Yet in an intellectual tradition spanning multiple millennia, you can surely find some strands that resonate with Western environmentalism. Taoism, for instance, dissents from Confucian humanism and denies that humans occupy a privileged place in the cosmic order. A philosopher like Zhuangzi in the 4th century BCE cultivated an affinity with nature and often drew attention to animals and plants precisely to deflate human self-importance. By the late Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), the tradition of landscape painting expressed a longing for cultivated men to “escape their quotidian world to commune with nature.” Sure, this gentle nature worship and critique of human self-conceit is not nearly as radical as the Human Voluntary Extinction Movement, but it shows that ecocentrism is by no means alien to the Chinese tradition.

A Deeper Explanation

It would be implausible to deny that the Judeo-Christian tradition has left its fingerprints on modern environmentalism, especially in its more misanthropic forms. Some ostensibly secular environmentalists display an unmistakable affinity with the Christian flagellants from the Middle Ages, who whipped their own skin as a form of penance. In their apocalyptic prophecies of ecological doom, one hears echoes of Christian eschatology, in which humanity is arraigned before a higher tribunal. We have sinned against Mother Nature, and we will suffer her wrath.

But explanations like these only take us so far. In cultures saturated with Christian imagery, it is hardly surprising that doomsday narratives echo biblical imagery; that does not necessarily make Christianity their root cause. After all, Christianity became the world’s most successful religion in part because it resonated with pre-existing human intuitions. Chief among these is the belief in a just universe, in which good deeds are rewarded and evil deeds are punished—a notion that long predates Christianity and appears across religious traditions, from karma in Indian thought to Maʿat in ancient Egypt.

I want to suggest a different explanation for the West’s susceptibility to environmentalist misanthropy—one that may be less comforting to advocates of human progress and modernity. First, we should bear in mind that the human brain is equipped with what the late philosopher Daniel Dennett called the design stance: a tendency to interpret the world in terms of purposes and goals. This capacity is indispensable for understanding man-made artifacts and nature’s designs. The living world abounds in the appearance of design, with each species occupying a niche and sporting ingenious adaptations for survival and reproduction. From there, it is just a short step to the belief that nature, as a whole, is governed by a single grand design. And for creatures endowed with moral intuitions, it is tempting to conclude that the natural order is good, and that departures from it are bad. The naturalistic fallacy, in other words, was not invented by Christian theologians scandalised by homosexuality.

It took thousands of years for one member of our species (or two if you count Alfred Russel Wallace) to finally comprehend where all that apparent design originated. Darwin’s universe leaves no room for any overarching purpose in nature, let alone one with moral significance. Instead, we have millions of interlocking purposes and goals, some of which are aligned but most of which are in conflict. Even so, the intuition that nature itself has a purpose is a hard one to resist. Today, millions of educated people who profess an acceptance of Darwinian evolution cling to versions of the Gaia hypothesis—the belief that nature forms a harmonious whole in which every species has a useful role to play. In short, the belief in natural harmony has always been with us.

In almost all human societies until very recently, however, this belief was tempered by the harsh reality of everyday life. Nature inspired awe and terror in our ancestors because they were exposed to its bloodthirsty predators, flesh-eating parasites, capricious weather, and infectious diseases. Nature was therefore seldom confused with a nurturing mother, even metaphorically. It commanded respect because it could take your life in an instant or starve you gradually. Preserving a vision of a morally ordered universe required a belief that either existing humans are awful and deserve to be punished, or that our ancestors screwed up somehow and we inherited punishment for their sins. This goes a long way to explaining why belief in supernatural retribution is nearly universal across cultures.

The Exception of Western Modernity

Which brings us to the distinctive exception of Western modernity. Modern societies are the first in which citizens are not forced into a relentless confrontation with nature. When Thomas Malthus warned in 1798 that population growth would inevitably culminate in mass death through starvation and disease, he was correct about every society that preceded him. His predictions proved to be wrong only because Europeans were on the verge of creating an entirely new kind of society—the first to escape the Malthusian trap. Child mortality plummeted to a hundredth of its historical levels. Material abundance reached previously unimaginable heights, and famines receded into memory. For the first time in history, it became possible to live a life largely insulated from nature’s terrors, from plagues and floods to droughts and crop-destroying storms. Material security became so plentiful in Western societies that many citizens became “post-material,” in Ronald Inglehart’s term.

Economists have since observed that the relationship between economic development and environmental degradation often follows an inverted U-shape, known as the Environmental Kuznets Curve. As societies climb out of poverty, pollution initially rises as an unavoidable by-product of industrialisation. When survival is at stake, dirty air and degraded landscapes are a secondary concern. But as incomes grow and basic needs are met, societies can afford to care about environmental degradation—and eventually about non-material values such as wilderness and biodiversity. This combination of abundance and safety, as I recently argued in Quillette, is precisely what enables modern people to romanticise nature to an unprecedented degree.

Post-industrial Westerners like to imagine that indigenous peoples possessed a preternatural wisdom to live in harmony with nature, a belief reflected in Hollywood movies like Avatar and Pocahontas. However, this is mostly projection on our part. It is modern people who romanticise nature, precisely because they no longer have to endure its daily hardships. The more thoroughly we are buffered from the dangers of the natural world, the more estranged we become from it. With the comforts of contemporary life always at hand, it is easy to indulge the fantasy of a primordial harmony with nature that we supposedly lost along the way.

It is also worth recalling that the large-scale domination of nature by the industrialised West is itself historically unprecedented. The ambition to subdue and conquer nature did not originate in Europe (or in the book of Genesis), but modern Western societies have been extraordinarily adept at this task, which helps explain the intensity of the backlash. From railways and steamships to skyscrapers and concrete dams, from planes to vast canals linking oceans, the industrial revolution enabled transformations of the natural world on an unprecedented scale. The results were not always pretty, especially for societies still climbing the upward slope of the Environmental Kuznets Curve.

The Wagon Train

If this hypothesis is correct, it explains why the worship of nature—with eco-misanthropy as its radical outgrowth—has so far been a predominantly Western phenomenon. It may simply be a matter of time before China and the rest of the world catch up. In a recent essay for the Breakthrough Institute, Seaver Wang, Ted Nordhaus, and Vijaya Ramachandran sought to dampen the curious enthusiasm expressed by Western greens about China’s expansion of clean energy. “There is little reason to think,” they write, “that China’s energy development will be much shaped by that most Western and parochial of modernization characteristics, namely environmentalism.”

They are probably right—at least for now. But I think it would be a mistake to assume that environmentalism will permanently remain a uniquely Western concern. As China approaches the post-material stage of development, it may become more receptive to environmentalist creeds. And if wealthy Chinese people forget about the horrors of the natural world they escaped—just as many of us did—they may end up falling for the same myth of a long-lost natural harmony, providing fertile ground for the green seeds of Rachel Carson to germinate.

One of today’s most prominent academic advocates of degrowth is Kohei Saito, a Japanese philosopher at the University of Tokyo, who argues that we must impoverish ourselves to “save the Earth.” Is it merely a coincidence that Japan was the first non-Western nation to industrialise and join the ranks of affluent societies? If you plot the geographical distribution of degrowth papers based on author affiliation, the greatest hotspots are in Western Europe, unsurprisingly, but there is growing activity in non-Western countries as well, including Japan. A 2022 paper in Nature Sustainability calling for a “post-growth” food system has no less than ten authors with Japanese affiliations.

In The End of History, Francis Fukuyama invites us to imagine humanity as “a long wagon train strung out along a road.” Some wagons are stuck in ruts while others have paused or even turned temporarily in the opposite direction. But the vast majority are ambling toward the same destination. Because the wagons are spread far apart, however, we tend to exaggerate cultural variance. As Fukuyama notes, “the apparent differences in the situations of the wagons will not be seen as reflecting permanent and necessary differences between the people riding in the wagons, but simply a product of their different positions along the road.” For those who believe in material progress and modernity, this explanation may be depressing. If Fukuyama is right, it may be only a matter of time before China—and the rest of the world—brings forth its own generation of green prophets of anti-modernity and anti-humanity, without any encouragement from the West at all.

Maarten Boudry is a philosopher of science and an amateur jazz pianist.