Nihilistic Pandas

Pandas are nihilists.

When confronted with humanity’s eventual destruction of everything that supports their life, they looked squarely at the biological imperative of adapt, procreate, or die and thought, nahhhh.

That’s either a level of Zen acceptance beyond human understanding, a ballsy sense of self-confidence, or wilful self-delusion and ignorance. Even with human intervention, the big, lazy fluff-balls only exhibit any sense of determination by racing towards extinction, dreamily raising a middle finger to Darwin along the way. All the food you can eat, safety, health care – all you have to do is have sex.

Meh.

They don’t even have the drive to actively hasten the process, making them less self-determined than a lemming, although equally as intelligent. It’s as if they, as a species, asked the question, what’s the point? Here we are, a large mammal evolved to the point that survival depends on being hand fed our own body weight in just one type of food every day. What else is our purpose? Being cute? It didn’t help baby fur seals or minks much, did it? We’re so niche we are an evolutionary dead end!

Having evolved to the tip of their branch of the tree of life, pandas stagnated, and because nature hates a lack of change, it went to prune that stick and move on, but humanity, against all expectation as nature’s most efficient garden shears, wouldn’t let it. Being kept from extinction wasn’t the pandas plan, no one asked them, so they just gave up.

As far as we know, their inability to breed may just be a stubborn, stoic acceptance that we just cannot share. As far as we know, the monochromatic look with dark eyes and pale face may not be the only thing they share with the pasty, nocturnal, goth  subculture that ‘wear black on the outside, coz black is how I feel on the inside’. Finding no point or purpose in existence, these goth bears prefer to go extinct, so no new panda has to suffer as miserably as they do with this all of this unlimited food, care, and encouragement to have sex.

This view was shared by Peter Wessel Zapffe, a Norwegian philosopher who wrote quite beautifully about the pointlessness of life but also promoted the idea that the human race has had just about enough of it.

Zapffe was not an epiphenomenalist – a fantastic word to pull out at parties, but don’t whip it out without knowing how to explain it. An epiphenomenalist is someone who believes that your inner thoughts and mental activity, that is your consciousness, has no effect or impact on the world. The paradox of course is that believing in something implies it has an effect on your physical life.

Zapffe believed that the evolution of consciousness was a wrong turn on the evolutionary path that led us backstage to see all of the levers and pulleys that created the show we all thought was real. This, he said, made us believe that there was a reason behind it all. If it all depended on itself to such a degree and all worked according to some pattern, then there must be a point to it beyond just being. This is the view of the universe-as-a-machine, of course. The problem was that there was no point to the machine, so the evolution of consciousness just allowed us to become aware of our own pointlessness.

“Man is the ultimate tragic being, because he has learned enough about the Earth to realise the Earth would be better off without the presence of humankind.”

Zapffe saw the Existentialists’ resentful acceptance and the Absurdists’ rebellion and considered them equally as pointless in dealing with this suffering. Humanity had evolved beyond its own ability to peacefully exist in this world and in his opinion, bearing children into it is akin to bringing wood into a burning building. The only answer was to understand this and promise to not inflict it upon another generation by passively going extinct.

I mean, it’s bound to happen sooner or later anyway….

To most people, nihilism runs contrary to what is seen as a natural imperative, but Zapffe saw it from a greater biological perspective than just the humanistic. It is a well-known biological fact that any species that outgrows or overuses its environment is naturally culled to restore balance, or the whole ecosystem collapses. The comparison between humanity and a virus that kills its host have been made innumerably.

Calhoun’s famous Universe 25 experiment on mice demonstrated the evolutionary regulating of a species to its environment took place naturally within species too. Even in a utopian society with unlimited resources apart from space, mice breeding expansion led to a mouse society breakdown, the creation of sub-groups and violence. In the end, the abundant mouse ecosystem regulated and limited its population growth and health through murder and cannibalism. Again, the comparison with contemporary society has been made where limiting the development of consciousness by favouring conflict and consumption stands in place of gruesome muricide.

The biologist Edward Wilson believed that the problem with humanity was that we have a paleolithic psychology stuck in social structures more suited to a medieval, agrarian society and the God-like technology able to wipe all life from the planet. It’s the equivalent of finding a grade 3 class of school students, gossiping in cliques, violently clashing and reciting rote-learned facts while in charge of the Large Hadron Collider.

Evolution may have increased our intelligence and even our consciousness, but we trap our species in the ill-fitting, but familiar clothes of our ancestors. The Neanderthal peasant to an absent feudal lord jabbing their finger at the pretty flashing light of the nuclear launch button. While some have faith that humanity has the tools to change their context to suit and expand their collective consciousness, others believe this disjointed evolution is the signal that we’ve overshot our potential. 

Zapffe uses the example of the now extinct Scottish deer who evolved spectacularly massive antlers as the symbol of the dominant male with mating rights. Competition meant bigger and bigger antlers until the poor bastards couldn’t even lift their heads, let alone mount a doe. The very thing that inspired breeding led to the extinction of the species. Now that, Alanis Morrisette, is irony.

It seems ridiculous, but how many attempts has humanity made on its own species? Perhaps this is the natural cycle that we firstly hastened with our development of consciousness and then prolonged when all indications suggested that we’ve evolved beyond our environment. The noble thing, Zapffe believes, is to sacrifice any further suffering on our part by no longer imposing our species on the remainder of life on this planet.

As the great philosopher Humphrey B. Flaubert said, “Do you want to save the world? Then don’t recycle garbage.” Zapffe wasn’t quite as cool as the TISM frontman, but he did put it more beautifully in his essay The Last Messiah when he said,

The mark of annihilation is written on your brow. 

How long will ye mill about on the edge?
But there is one conquest and one crown, 

one redemption and one solution:
Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.