Should We Go Extinct? It’s a controversial title—one that, when I went to see my boyfriend’s family for the 4th of July, made his mother gasp.
“No!” she said, in the middle of making boiled corn on the cob. Putting down tongs she was using to examine the corn’s yellowy readiness, she covered her mouth with her hands. “Absolutely not!”
Okay, but actually—should we go extinct? Todd May’s latest is a slim volume, weighing in at just 148 pages. Small, yes, but mighty: it’s a dense and heady read, and although possible solutions are thrown around, the titular question is never completely answered; maybe this is why the author refers to his work as a “philosophical dilemma,” and not, for example, “a self-help book.” So, cards revealed: as both a reader and someone concerned with my own morality, what I secretly wanted was a self-help book. How else can I know for sure if humans should go extinct? How can I be sure I am making all of the right choices, all of the time? Come on, Mr. May, reveal your secrets. Don’t you know exactly how to live your life in the most morally just way you can in the 21st century, and couldn’t you tell us all about it?
The answer was no, no he did not, or maybe no, no he would not. And that was not his writerly intention—I think what he wanted was to give us a space to dwell in the possibilities of the question.
And dwell we do—whether we like it or not—on thinking about all sorts of thrilling (read: terrible) worldwide crises that humans have contributed to, like climate change! Woohoo! Killing animals unfairly! Great! Do you know how foie gras is made? I didn’t either until I read this book! Fantastic! Now it’s time to become a vegan! These, by the way, are some of his arguments in the pro-human extinction camp, growing more and more depressing by the page.
“But this is what I signed up for,” I told someone I was playing volleyball with, “the athletics of the mind.”
“A beach read!” she said in response. Yes, exactly.
I am a fan of rethinking, but May’s arguments were effective in that they had me not only rethinking, but considering ideas I’d never considered before. Because of his aforementioned arguments, I now see why human extinction could be a viable solution to the wreck we’ve caused the planet and its non-human inhabitants. But I also see why humans should remain on planet Earth. May discusses happiness, love, and other emotional states that we think could be limited to a human-centered experience—are our human levels of happiness greater than that of other animals’, he ponders, for example, in chapter three, and is that something that would be lost if we went extinct?
These flashes of positivity are often brief, and coupled with some kind of philosophical puzzle. In terms of human happiness, for example, May posits that perhaps the human happiness deforestation brings is lower than the “suffering deforestation might cause.” Depressing, right? But helpful for rethinking and reexamining—if that’s your cup of tea, (or husk of boiled corn). I think his arguments are effective if you want them to be, (which I understand is a weird thing to say), but I think books of philosophy can be like this: you might have to want to accept that the information you’re receiving may be out of your comfort zone, or even just, like my boyfriend’s mother’s reaction, initially feel wildly outlandish.
So should we go extinct? To steal from May’s playbook, perhaps a little of column A, a little of column B.
NONFICTION
Should We Go Extinct?
By Todd May
Crown Publishing Group
Published August 6, 2024
