Shortly before the publication of the sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on April 4, the respective books of neurobiologist Sébastien Bohler, Human Psycho. How mankind became the most dangerous species on the planet (Bouquin, 280 p., €19) and cognitive psychology researcher Thierry Ripoll, Why are we destroying the planet? Is the brain of Homo sapiens able to preserve the Earth? (Le Bord de l’eau, 268 p., €20) helped to stir up trouble.
“In less than thirty years, the Earth will be partly unlivable and in eighty… Game over”, Professor Sébastien Bohler, at the beginning of Human Psycho – the alarmist tone punctuates this punchy book. The starting point: humans have become aware of their harmful influence on the planet but do not resolve to change their behavior. To explain this dysfunction, the neuroscientist compares humanity to a “to be global” devoid of orbitofrontal cortex, which apprehends the world as a mechanism – Homo sapiens instrumentalized animal species and natural resources, “like a predator”. This “superorganism” takes on the personality of a psychopath: a feeling of superiority, a tendency to manipulate and exploit others, a lack of empathy and an inability to take the future into account to set limits to its actions. It exerts increasing violence against its victim, nature.
Drastic measures
With the same evolutionary approach to the human brain, the two authors decline drastic measures which, according to them, would lead to a lucid management of the environmental crisis. Based on this diagnosis, Sébastien Bohler prescribes two “treatments”. The first : “contain humanity” to reduce the interpenetration of man and nature; limit demographics; show sobriety. Objectives that regulatory states could support. “It’s a world that smells like Aldous Huxley, assumes the neurobiologist. Either humans will continue to consume more and the planet will become uninhabitable, or humanity will have been incarcerated. The world will endure, but individuals will adopt other behaviors. » The second treatment: an “obligation of care”, by changing the scientific, religious and media discourse on humans, to lead to a revolution in the vision they have of themselves. The guidelines: stop manipulating; create a global regulatory body on “the productions of humanity” ; recreate empathy by doing “so that humanity can recognize the suffering of the living” and by provoking “an empathetic reaction within economic, social or governmental structures”; finally, thinking about the future – through an instance “guarantor of the long-term compatibility of political decisions with the preservation of the planet”.
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