An Adequate Explanation For The Sixth Extinction

Friday, 28 November 2025, 2:12 pm
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

I devoted the first 15 years of my adult life to understanding how humans, who evolved in nature along with all other animals, could be destroying nature. “Human exceptionalism” just doesn’t cut it.

It’s painfully ironic to read that “there is no principled boundary around ‘human’ emotion and intelligence,” and that “the refusal to see this is a blindness to humanlike traits in other animals, and animal-like traits in us.”

The intention in such an claim is to cover-up and camouflage the underlying cause of our lack of affinity with other animals by extending human emotions to them, rather than to quiet our clamorous minds and empty our cluttered hearts.

Darwin was correct of course that human feelings and their outward signs are evolutionary continuities shared with other animals. But the proscription against anthropomorphism arose because of the very thing that so many people are attempting to do today: extend to wild animals the family feelings they extend to their pets.

Philosophically, academics and global media have to do better to explain why Home sapiens, a sentient and potentially sapient species, has started the Sixth Extinction.

Borrowed from the now laughable notion of American exceptionalism, the phrase “human exceptionalism” is a straw man erected against an ideology that few believe anymore. The juggernaut of man’s decimation of animals and the Earth continues unabated.

As humans we have a need for explanations, yet also as humans we are prone to irrational beliefs and superficial explanations. “Human exceptionalism” is an inadequate explanation for our separation from and destruction of the other animals with which we share the Earth.

Our animal inheritance, with our 98.8% DNA congruence with chimpanzees, belies a cognitive leap that occurred in fully modern humans over 100,000 years ago, which even our closest human relatives such as Neanderthals did not fully make.

There were perhaps a half dozen human species in the world when “fully modern humans emerged,” from Neanderthals to Denisovans to the “Hobbits” on an island of Indonesia.

Fully conscious symbolic thought is what allowed Homo sapiens to intentionally or unintentionally drive our human cousins into extinction, just as we humans are doing with a huge percentage of animals today.

Mediocre thinking adheres to the fashions of the day. And two prevailing fashions today are romanticising indigenous people, and believing right living is a matter of right choosing.

With respect to the former, one popularizer cites the Maori of Aotearoa, idealising how “people are kin with rivers, mountains and forests through whakapapa (genealogy),” which is epitomised by the saying, “Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au’– ‘I am the river and the river is me.”

Such lived expressions of indigenous people seize the imagination of westerners alienated from nature, who fool themselves into believing they are “connecting with my animal nature” through them.

At one time all people lived in nature and so were close to nature. They intuitively realised that humans aren’t separate, and their myths and stories reminded them of that truth. They weren’t so naïve as to believe humans did not operate differently than other animals, but at some level saw that the separative abilities of thought had to be restrained.

At this point of human history, it’s absurd to maintain that our separation from and fragmentation of the Earth could be “easily healed by westerners admitting at any point that we have misread our place in the cosmos and shift toward this older, still living worldview.”

The roots lie far deeper for this remedy to be anything but wishful thinking. The suggestion that a simple narrative shift in our stories is adequate to meeting the human crisis is “sentimental and naive in a political moment when even extending compassion to other humans meets resistance.”

All restraints on “higher thought” are off now, and we cannot go back, or live the old ways of geographically isolated cultures. Like it or not, all humans belong to one divided and chaotic family now. There is no choice but to understand the inherently separative movement of thought within us, and learn how to quiet the fragmenting and fragmented mind.

Yet another philosophical fad of today rules. It’s captured by the assertion that “we could use our powerful brains to choose otherwise.”

We face choices all the time, but if we choose we lose. “Agency” is the trendy word for the vanity of the self that it freely chooses. In truth, the self always chooses from separateness and conditioning, and therefore goes from confusion to confusion.

When we’re clear, we don’t choose, we act, because with clarity there is no division between seeing and doing. Thus the insistence on choosing belies a basic lack of understanding of the human mind and our selves.

We can tell ourselves that “humans not commanders of the natural world but as kin, interconnected equals among other beings and systems.” We can satisfy our urge to understand man’s destructiveness with superficial explanations like “human exceptionalism.” But these are philosophical placebos that change nothing, and make no difference.

Biologist EO Wilson observed: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

That’s true as far as it goes, but the real problem of humanity is that the human mind has not changed since Paleolithic times. It’s the lack of insight into symbolic thought that has produced the rampant individualism and rapacious capitalism of our time that has polluted and deadened our feeling, and given a few billionaires godlike technology that humankind is unable to use wisely.

After the philosophical obsession of my early adulthood to understand the anomaly of man in nature was satisfied by new insights into the human condition, I saw that no explanation, however accurate, could ever change the explained. My focus shifted to bringing about a radical change in consciousness, beginning within oneself.

The content of our consciousness has been accumulating not just over our lifetimes or the lineages of our families, but include the traditions of the prehistoric tribe overlaid by the contemporary tribe – the nation. And the content has reached a point of such saturation and darkness that it is suffocating the human spirit.

The urgent leap of consciousness we must now make is not back to some Rousseauian past where humans all people lived in balance with nature. Rather it is ahead, through the darkness of modern man, into the light of insight into our unique but inseparable place on this beautiful planet.

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail