On his book The Chemical Age: How Chemists Fought Famine and Disease, Killed Millions, and Changed Our Relationship with the Earth
Cover Interview of September 02, 2020
Lastly
The Chemical Age ultimately tells a story both about humanity’s
courage in the face of adversity and moral decay during times of great evil. Through
chemistry, we have fundamentally altered our world. We have forced famine and
infectious diseases to retreat, thereby vastly improving our ability to live
fulfilling lives. We have increased the lethality of war to such an extent that
we are now capable of destroying all humanity, rather than just the neighboring
village. We have so thoroughly altered the chemical makeup of the environment
that biodiversity is in a state of free-fall and we will forever live in a
world degraded of its natural diversity.
But a deep understanding of this history also gives us the
means to improve our trajectory—to keep famine and disease at bay while
avoiding war and cleaning up the environment. Humanity sits at a tipping point,
poised for a future when either the destruction in the 20th century will be
viewed as the beginning of a long slide into misery or the end of a period of
hubris that future generations will find hard to comprehend.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
Lastly
The Chemical Age ultimately tells a story both about humanity’s courage in the face of adversity and moral decay during times of great evil. Through chemistry, we have fundamentally altered our world. We have forced famine and infectious diseases to retreat, thereby vastly improving our ability to live fulfilling lives. We have increased the lethality of war to such an extent that we are now capable of destroying all humanity, rather than just the neighboring village. We have so thoroughly altered the chemical makeup of the environment that biodiversity is in a state of free-fall and we will forever live in a world degraded of its natural diversity.
But a deep understanding of this history also gives us the means to improve our trajectory—to keep famine and disease at bay while avoiding war and cleaning up the environment. Humanity sits at a tipping point, poised for a future when either the destruction in the 20th century will be viewed as the beginning of a long slide into misery or the end of a period of hubris that future generations will find hard to comprehend.