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46 J. Value Inquiry 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi46 and id is 1 raw text is: J Value Inquiry (2012) 46:1-12 DOI 10.1007/s10790-012-9328-y Critical Points for Civilization, Intelligence, and Value Thomas Magnell Published online: 20 April 2012 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 1 Destructive and Constructive Ways of Thought With only a few thousand years of recorded history behind us, we might, as a species, be said to have just recently emerged from our infancy. About a hundred generations separate us from the time of Socrates, less than two hundred from the beginning of the Xia dynasty in China. Apart from religiously motivated figures with apocalyptic visions and their followers, an admittedly large cohort, most people suppose that we, as a species, have many years ahead, with future human generations to be reckoned in the thousands, if not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, to continue the course of civilization. There is, however, reason to think that the supposition is wildly wrong and that civilization as we know it may be a flash in the pan. Natural factors external to us that could spell our doom, such as large meteor collisions, multiple volcanic upheavals, or world-wide pandemics, while possible, are too unlikely to take seriously. Dinosaurs may have been done in by a meteor strike, but mammals survived, and dumb ones at that. Krakatoa may have killed forty-thousand people and sparked an anti-Western uprising among Muslims in Jakarta, but despite other volcanic eruptions in the 1880s, the course of human events was hardly affected. Europe recovered rapidly after the fourteenth century plague even without the medical resources readily available today, as was the case for other major plagues. Such natural disasters are simply too small or too unlikely for the scale of cataclysm requisite to undermine human civilization, much less put an end to Homo sapiens. Nor is the currently popular source of global concern, global warming or climate change due to our emissions of carbon dioxide, likely to bring down the curtain. The real reason for concern is more basic. The fault is in ourselves, not in our cars. The end of human civilization will likely result from what T. Magnell (E) Department of Philosophy, Drew University, Madison, NJ 07940, USA e-mail: tmagnell@drew.edu I Springer

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