Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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162 farther horizons
killing fi elds of Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur. After a lifetime
of observing human nature, Carl Jung concluded that “There is
a terrible demon in man that blindfolds him, that prepares awful
destruction” ( quoted in Jarrett, 1988, p. 1277). Historian and sociologist
Barrington Moore in his classic study Refl ections on the
Causes of Human Misery concluded similarly that “mankind can
expect to oscillate between the cruelties of law and order and
the cruelties of changing it for as long as it leaves the globe fi t
for human habitation” (Moore, 1972, p. 39). In Humanity: A Moral
History of the Twentieth Century, Jonathan Glover doubts that we
became worse than previous societies, but says: “Technology has
made a difference. The decisions of a few people can mean horror
and death for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of other
people” (p. 3). Looking beyond the carnage of the past century, he
proposes to defend the Enlightenment hope of a more humane
world, but concludes that “there are more things, darker things, to
understand about ourselves than those who share this hope have
generally allowed” (p. 7). He concludes by saying: “It is too late to
stop the technology. It is to the psychology that we should now
turn” (p. 414). Philosopher Tzvetan Todorov similarly believes that
the nature of evil has not changed, but its scale has grown, driven
by both fragmentation and depersonalization (Todorov, 1996,
pp. 289–290).
Now that we are facing our largest challenge, what do we
know of our own liabilities and potentials? It is easier to ignore
that kind of introspection, to focus on technology or policy or
anything else instead of looking inward to the complexities and
ironies of our own psychology. But I think Glover is right that
the job of building a decent world will come down to how well
we understand ourselves and how much we can improve the
“still unlovely human mind” (Leopold, 1949). The failure to do so
explains in large measure why many underestimate the scope and
scale of the human destruction of nature and trivialize its causes.
As if caught in a bad dream, we seem powerless to stop it. The