New thinking needed in the face of existential threats

DERMOT ROANTREE (from winter 2025 Studies editorial) :: At least since St Augustine’s account of the Earthly City in The City of God, human history has often been cast as a chain of crises and catastrophes. War, pestilence, natural disaster, famine, persecution – these were woven into the ordinary expectation of human life. The ‘state of emergency’, as Walter Benjamin put it, is ‘not the exception but the rule’. Yet for most of history, people assumed that such calamities, however devastating, would not last forever. There would eventually be a reprieve.

With the Cold War, however, a reprieve could no longer be taken for granted. Perhaps for the first time in history, people could reasonably fear a cataclysm from which there would be no return. Leaders and thinkers across the spectrum – Pope John XXIII, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Martin Luther King – warned of ‘unparalleled catastrophe’, ‘the abyss of annihilation’, ‘universal death’, ‘an end to the human race’. In 1961, between the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, after the Berlin Wall went up and as both superpowers raced to perfect thermonuclear weapons, Robert Lowell captured the mood in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop: there was, he wrote, ‘a half-apocalyptic, nuclear feeling in the air, as tho nations had died and were now anachronistic’. In his poem ‘Fall 1961’, he put it more starkly: ‘All autumn, the chafe and jar / of nuclear war;/ we have talked our extinction to death’.

This pervasive sense of existential threat changed public discourse in a significant way. Posterity – the fate of future generations – emerged as effectively a new moral category. Scientific progress and political action could no longer be judged without reckoning with their impact on those who came after, and on the physical world that they would inherit. Humanity, it seemed, had crossed a threshold, leaving older ethical frameworks unequal to new tasks at hand, a crucial shift that Pope Paul VI appeared to sense in his 1971 social encyclical Octogesima Adveniens:

Man is suddenly becoming aware that by an ill-considered exploitation of nature he risks destroying it and becoming in his turn the victim of this degradation. Not only is the material environment becoming a permanent menace – pollution and refuse, new illnesses and absolute destructive capacity – but the human framework is no longer under man’s control, thus creating an environment for tomorrow which may well be intolerable.

The vision here of out-of-control technology goes beyond the language of earlier papal social teaching, where technology mainly raised issues of workers’ conditions, their rights, and the fair distribution of resources generated by scientific progress – questions of the immediate present, that is. What the Pope is intimating is that future generations have a moral status too. Do they not impose duties and responsibilities on us, just as our contemporaries do?

For the German philosopher Hans Jonas, whose work The Imperative of Responsibility (1979) had a marked influence on the Green movement in Germany and elsewhere, the answer is a resounding yes. What was needed, he argued, was a ‘new ethics of responsibility for and to a distant future’ –a ‘future-oriented ethics’ absent from earlier systems, which limited themselves to the immediate circumstances of human actions and largely ignored long-term consequences. His case was compelling. The unprecedented power that technology brought – ‘over matter, over life on earth, and over man himself’ – produced a radical shift in humanity’s relationship to the world. Following his former teacher Heidegger, Jonas held that modern technology discloses the world, including nature and even humanity, not as beings in their own right but as resources for use and manipulation. Yet unlike Heidegger, he insisted that this transformation opens up ‘a whole new dimension of ethical relevance’.

In this novel situation, ethics could no longer remain anthropocentric or neutral towards the nonhuman world. It had to confront ‘the critical vulnerability of nature’ to technological intervention. The entire biosphere has now become subject to human power, and therefore has a moral claim on us – ‘for its own sake and in its own right’ . From this, Jonas derived his ‘new imperative’: Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life. Humanity has become a danger not only to itself but to the whole spectrum of life on earth. As a result, Jonas asserted, ‘a kind of metaphysical responsibility beyond self-interest’ has devolved on us in this latest stage of human existence.

No one can doubt that the existential threat to both humanity and the biosphere is starker now than ever. Even more than in the 1970s, when Jonas was writing, this threat arises not from a single cause but from a web of deeply interconnected factors – a ‘polycrisis’, in which ‘disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part’. Apart from runaway technological development and the climate breakdown and environmental degradation it has effected, we face the erosion of democratic institutions, declining solidarity between nations, debt crises, culture wars, and extreme wealth inequality, to name just a few factors. As Jonas would have it, new circumstances require new thinking. Faced with this unprecedented threat, we must be ready to revise and reshape institutions and practices across all sectors of society. Above all, given the future orientation of the threat, we need to rethink the very purpose and practice of education.

In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis emphasised the critical role of education in bringing about ‘deep change’ in prevailing mindsets. Calling for an ‘integral ecology’ that unites human and environmental concerns, he warned:

Our efforts at education will be inadequate and ineffectual unless we strive to promote a new way of thinking about human beings, life, society and our relationship with nature. Otherwise, the paradigm of consumerism will continue to advance, with the help of the media and the highly effective workings of the market.

Where, then, might such new ways of thinking arise? Given its institutional depth and intellectual resources, the university holds a uniquely privileged role in this task. Yet the path to progress here seems increasingly obstructed. In recent decades universities have indeed developed research programs and curricula that engage directly with global crises, and they have generated a rich academic discourse on critical themes across multiple disciplines; but at an institutional level they are often severely constrained by market-oriented values and metrics. Students are treated as customers seeking a return on investment in the shape of ‘human capital’ and ‘marketable skills’. Universities themselves function less as communities of scholars than as corporations, where what matters is ‘key performance indicators’, cost-effectiveness, and rankings. The internalisation of market logic undermines their capacity to respond – as they have the resources to do – to urgent social needs and the global common good. What is required, once again, is new thinking.