Academics From South Africa

"Capitalism is not necessarily more immoral than previous social systems with regard to cruelty to humans and the gratuitous destruction of nature. As a mode of production and a social system, however, capitalism requires people to be destructive of the environment. Three destructive aspects of the capitalist system stand out when we view this system in relation to the extinction crisis: 1) capitalism tends to degrade the conditions of its own production; 2) it must expand ceaselessly in order to survive; 3) it generates a chaotic world system, which in turn intensifies the extinction crisis."

"I see my role as one primarily of mentorship. To pass on my knowledge and experience to younger scientists – to share my passion for the fungi and for research with others that might build on what I have been privileged to do – not only via this award – but linked to my career as a scientist."

"This is mostly because we have a powerful plant pathology community and that most plant diseases are caused by fungi."

"This award has come to me in the latter part of my career. Maybe that is mostly the case for awards of this type that have huge prestige and likely would not go to early-career scientists."

"We need to know a lot more about the world around us in terms of microbes – where they are in the natural environment and what threats they pose to us."

"This, we need to know more about – where are they? What are the long-term threats? Knowing such things prepares us for a more secure future."

"I hope to at least explore those opportunities and to get this process started."

"There are advantages and disadvantages of technology. But the advantage of technology is that it is much easier to fix the technology than to fix the human."

"If you look at issues of education, technology is key. In rural schools, where qualified teachers are not available, can't we use online platforms to teach and bring education where there is no capacity. Can't we connect people to rural schools?"

"And technology is central in achieving gender equality. How does technology reinforce some of the biases that we observe? For example, I was reading about a big US company that had a résumé sorting algorithm that was discriminating against women."

"Poverty is a human-nature disaster. We have to understand the broad context of poverty and climate change, and the impact of both on humans and nature. We must look at ending poverty from a much broader scope than just social justice. Both poverty and climate change require a fight against all forms of injustice."

"The social and economic impacts affect the poor disproportionately. They are less likely to withstand, cope and recover. Climate change is exacerbating poverty and inequality in society. We need to deal with global warming in an unequal and unjust world."

"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work…"

"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work… Black man cleans the streets but mustn’t walk freely on the pavement; Black man must build houses for the white man but cannot live in them; Black man cooks the white man’s food but eats what is left over."

"We’d never really known father before. And now living close to him and seeing him at close quarters, I realised that his face was unlikeable."

"When they were not working they had children without being able to secure a man they could really call a husband."

"You’ll come back and be able to look after yourself and the two you’re leaving behind."

"In Abacha Reef Home, you were kept as safe as humanly possible—assuming it is safe to be bored out of your wits."

"“I want to find out who is supplying items to a government agency. Is there an easy way to find out?” The librarian folded his handkerchief into a square on his palm before he answered. “This is Brazil. There is no easy way to find out anything.”"

"“The real question you should be asking is quite different: Why is Section able to function at a time when the larger Agency is paralyzed?” I said, “I don’t like riddles. Why is it?” “Because, for centuries, Section has kept its files on paper, not inside a machine. Muller couldn’t wipe them out…. “We’ve learnt that you cannot control information once it’s in electronic form. You can trust a key; you can trust a lock because it has a defined physical location. It can be made in such a way that it is difficult to duplicate. Numbers, no matter how difficult they are to guess, can be copied perfectly. We use physical objects.”"

"The Mother Superior came forward and put her hand out to me. She was as tall as me, her stony-green eyes highly dilated. No doubt she was under the influence of one or another compound meant to enhance the quest for divinity and ready the soul to make a reckoning. The religious orders were legendary for their chemical dependencies."

"I prayed that, for once, the predictions of the brassheads would turn out to be as hollow as the ravings of forgotten saints and prophets, medicine men and bone throwers. Everybody wanted to know the future but it made us miserable when we did."

"The power of prime numbers: the key to the new world and the solution to the mysteries of the infinite."

"Controlling the leakage of information is always the key to success in counterintelligence."

"I wondered how he could be so trusting of the universe to lie asleep in the middle of it."

"The twentieth century had actors and actresses. They didn’t rely on acting algorithms or fantasize about digital actors. For all its cruelty, I find the old world sympathetic for that reason alone."

"The contemporary Western emphasis on the supreme value of intelligence has tended to suppress certain forms of consciousness and to regard them as irrational, marginal, aberrant or even pathological and thereby to eliminate them from investigations of the deep past."

"Art and the ability to comprehend it are more dependent on kinds of mental imagery and the ability to manipulate mental images than on intelligence."

"Life is meaningless, but it also has meaning—or, more accurately, meanings. There is no such thing as the meaning of life. Many different meanings are possible. One can transcend the self and make a positive mark on the lives of others in myriad ways. These include nurturing and teaching the young, caring for the sick, bringing relief to the suffering, improving society, creating great art or literature, and advancing knowledge. We are nonetheless warranted in regretting our cosmic insignificance and the pointlessness of the entire human endeavor. As impressed as (some) humans often are about the significance of humanity’s presence in the cosmos, our absence would have made absolutely no difference to the rest of the universe. We serve no purpose in the cosmos and, although our efforts have some significance here and now, it is seriously limited both spatially and temporally. Even those who think that we ought not to yearn for the greater meaning that is unattainable must recognize the immense tragedy of beings who suffer such existential anxiety over their insignificance. That suffering is indisputably a part of the human predicament."

"There are some who will characterize my view as “nihilistic." Left unqualified, that characterization is false. My view of cosmic meaning is indeed nihilistic. I think that there is no cosmic meaning. If I am right about that, then calling me a nihilist about cosmic meaning is entirely appropriate. However, my view is not nihilistic about all meaning because I believe that there is meaning from some perspectives. Our lives can be meaningful, but only from the limited, terrestrial perspectives. There is a crucial perspective—the cosmic one—from which our lives are irredeemably meaningless. In thinking about meaning in life, two broad kinds of mistakes are made. There are those who think that the only relevant meaning is what is attainable. They ignore our cosmic meaninglessness or they find ways either to discount questions about cosmic meaning or to minimize the importance of cosmic meaninglessness. The other kind of mistake is to think that because we are cosmically insignificant, “nothing matters,” where the implication is that nothing matters from any perspective. If we lack cosmic meaning but have other kinds of meaning, then some things do matter, even though they only matter from some perspectives. It does make a difference, for example, whether or not one is adding to the vast amounts of harm on earth, even though that makes no difference to the rest of the cosmos."

"Our lives contain so much more bad than good in part because of a series of empirical differences between bad things and good things. For example, the most intense pleasures are short-lived, whereas the worst pains can be much more enduring. Orgasms, for example, pass quickly. Gastronomic pleasures last a bit longer, but even if the pleasure of good food is protracted, it lasts no more than a few hours. Severe pains can endure for days, months, and years. Indeed, pleasures in general—not just the most sublime of them—tend to be shorter-lived than pains. Chronic pain is rampant, but there is no such thing as chronic pleasure. There are people who have an enduring sense of contentment or satisfaction, but that is not the same as chronic pleasure. Moreover, discontent and dissatisfaction can be as enduring as contentment and satisfaction; this means that the positive states are not advantaged in this realm. Indeed, the positive states are less stable because it is much easier for things to go wrong than to go right. The worst pains are also worse than the best pleasures are good. Those who deny this should consider whether they would accept an hour of the most delightful pleasures in exchange for an hour of the worst tortures. Arthur Schopenhauer makes a similar point when he asks us to “compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.” The animal being eaten suffers and loses vastly more than the animal that is eating gains from this one meal. Consider too the temporal dimensions of injury or illness and recovery. One can be injured in seconds: One is hit by a bullet or projectile, or is knocked over or falls, or suffers a stroke or heart attack. In these and other ways, one can instantly lose one’s sight or hearing or the use of a limb or years of learning. The path to recovery is slow. In many cases, full recovery is never attained. Injury comes in an instant, but the resultant suffering can last a lifetime. Even lesser injuries and illnesses are typically incurred much more quickly than one recovers from them. For example, the common cold strikes quickly and is defeated much more slowly by one’s immune system. The symptoms manifest with increasing intensity within hours, but they take at least days, if not weeks, to disappear entirely."

"Consider another analogy. If you are worried about your father’s health, it does not make you less worried about his health if you are told that your mother is entirely healthy. It is obviously good that your mother is healthy. If she were not, you would worry about that too. However, being told that you need not worry about her health does not diminish your worry about his. Similarly, while things would be much worse if our lives lacked any meaning, those who are concerned about the absence of cosmic meaning are not consoled about that by the observation that at least some kinds of terrestrial meaning are attainable. The point can be expressed another way. I may derive some meaning from helping another person, and that person may derive some meaning from helping a third person, but that provides no point to our collective existence. We can still say that human life in general is meaningless sub specie aeternitatis. There would be something circular about arguing that the purpose of humanity’s existence is that individual humans should help one another. Moreover, even if an individual human’s life has some terrestrial meaning (perhaps by helping others), it does not follow that that individual’s life also has cosmic significance."

"Consider an analogy. If one is playing a game of backgammon, it is entirely reasonable to make various moves. Indeed, one is not playing backgammon unless one is making (permitted) moves. There are justifications for this move and for that one. It is an entirely different matter to ask what the point of backgammon is, whether one should be playing backgammon at all, and whether one should pass it on to the next generation (by teaching it to children—or by creating children to whom one can teach it). Similarly, it can be entirely reasonable to relieve headaches and prevent harms to children and yet worry that one’s life as a whole—or human life in general—has no cosmic purpose. The absence of cosmic meaning may provide one with a reason to regret one’s existence or to desist from perpetuating the whole pointless trajectory by abstaining from bringing new people into existence."

"Meaning from the cosmic perspective would be good for extensions of the same reasons that meaning from the other perspectives is good. People, quite reasonably, want to matter. They do not want to be insignificant or pointless. Life is tough. It is full of striving and struggle; there is much suffering and then we die. It is entirely reasonable to want there to be some point to the entire saga. The bits of terrestrial meaning we can attain are important, for without them, our lives would be not only meaningless but also miserable and unbearable. It would be hard to get up each day and do the things that life necessitates in order to continue. One writer has sniffed at this suggestion, saying that the “idea that the natural consequence of finding one’s life meaningless is to commit suicide is somewhat ridiculous.” In fact, however, failed social belonging is, at least according to some, the most important factor in predicting suicide. Failed social belonging is one consequence of perceiving one’s life to have no meaning from the perspective of some other humans."

"Things are also stacked against us in the fulfillment of our desires and the satisfaction of our preferences. Many of our desires are never fulfilled. There are thus more unfulfilled than fulfilled desires. Even when desires are fulfilled, they are not fulfilled immediately. Thus, there is a period during which those desires remain unfulfilled. Sometimes, that is a relatively short period (such as between thirst and, in ordinary circumstances, its quenching), but in the case of more ambitious desires, they can take months, years, or decades to fulfill. Some desires that are fulfilled prove less satisfying than we had imagined. One wants a specific job or to marry a particular person, but upon attaining one’s goal, one learns that the job is less interesting or the spouse is more irritating than one thought. Even when fulfilled desires are everything that they were expected to be, the satisfaction is typically transitory, as the fulfilled desires yield to new desires. Sometimes, the new desires are more of the same. For example, one eats to satiety but then hunger gradually sets in again and one desires more food. The “treadmill of desires” works in another way too. When one can regularly satisfy one’s lower-level desires, a new and more demanding level of desires emerges. Thus, those who cannot provide for their own basic needs spend their time striving to fulfill these. Those who can satisfy the recurring basic needs develop what Abraham Maslow calls a “higher discontent” that they seek to satisfy. When that level of desires can be satisfied, the aspirations shift to a yet higher level. Life is thus a constant state of striving. There are sometimes reprieves, but the striving ends only with the end of life. Moreover, as should be obvious, the striving is to ward off bad things and attain good things. Indeed, some of the good things amount merely to the temporary relief from the bad things. For example, one satisfies one’s hunger or quenches one’s thirst. Notice too that while the bad things come without any effort, one has to strive to ward them off and attain the good things. Ignorance, for example, is effortless, but knowledge usually requires hard work."

"Debates about the existence of God are interminable (...) In my view, though, the persistence of this debate is not surprising for one reason only: the depth of the widespread human need to cope with the harsh realities of the human predicament, including but not limited to the fact that our lives are meaningless in important ways. Upton Sinclair famously remarked that it “is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” It is similarly difficult to get somebody to understand something when the meaning of his life depends on his not understanding it."

"[T]he somewhat good news is that our lives can be meaningful—from some perspectives. One reason that this is only somewhat good news is that even by the more limited standards, there are some people whose lives either are or feel meaningless. Moreover, the prospects for meaning generally diminish as the scope of the perspective broadens. That the prospects tend to diminish in this way does not imply that lives that are meaningless from a more limited perspective are never meaningful from a broader perspective. There are those, for example, who have no family left or who have no meaning for their family or community, perhaps because they have been shunned, but who make an impact at a broader level. Another reason why the news so far has been only somewhat good is that even those whose lives have meaning from more expansive terrestrial perspectives are rarely satisfied with the amount of meaning their lives have. Not only do people typically want more meaning than they can get, but the most meaning that anybody is capable of attaining is inevitably significantly limited."

"It would indeed be wonderful if there were a beneficent God who had created us for good reason and who cared for us as a loving parent would for his or her children. However, the way the world is provides us with plenty of evidence that this is not the case. Imagine you were to visit a country in which the evidence of repression is pervasive: There is no freedom of the press or expression; vast numbers of people live in squalor and suffer severe malnutrition; those attempting to flee the country are imprisoned; torture and executions are rampant; and fear is widespread. Yet your minder tells you that the country, the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” is led by a “Great Leader” who is an omnibenevolent, infallible, and incorruptible being who rules for the benefit of the people. Other officials endorse this view with great enthusiasm. There are impressive rallies in which masses of people profess their love for the Great Leader and their gratitude for his magnificent beneficence. When you muster the courage to express skepticism, citing various disturbing facts, you are treated to elaborate rationalizations that things are not as they seem. You are told either that your facts are mistaken or that they are reconcilable with everything that is believed about the Great Leader. Perhaps your minder even gives a name to such intellectual exercises—“Kimdicy.” It would be wonderful if North Korea were led by an omnibenevolent, infallible, and incorruptible ruler, but if it had such a leader, North Korea would look very different from the way it does look. The fact that many people in North Korea would disagree with us can be explained by either their vested interests in the regime, by their having been indoctrinated, or by their fear of speaking out. The presence of disagreement between them and us is not really evidence that deciding the matter is complicated. Not all of earth is as bad as North Korea, but North Korea is part of “God’s earth”; so are Afghanistan, Burma, China, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, and Zimbabwe, to name but a few appalling places for many to live. Even in the best parts of the world, terrible things happen. Assaults, rapes, and murders occur, injustices are perpetrated, and children are abused. Fortunately, the incidence of such evil in places like Western Europe is lower than in worse places on earth, but my point is that they all occur within the jurisdiction of a purportedly omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God. Nor should we forget the horrific diseases from which people suffer around the globe, or the fact that every day, billions of animals are killed and eaten by other animals, including humans."

"Moreover, it is thought that there is something absurd about the earnestness of our pursuits. We take ourselves very seriously, but when we step back, we wonder what it is all about. The step back need not be all the way to the cosmos. One does not need much distance to see that there seems something futile about our endless strivings, which are not altogether different from a hamster on its wheel. Much of our lives are filled with recurring mundane activities, the purpose of which is to keep the whole cycle going: working, shopping, cooking, feeding, abluting, sleeping, laundering, dishwashing, bill-paying, and various engagements with ever-expanding bureaucracies. Even if these mundane activities are thought to serve other goals, the attainment of those goals only yields further goals to be pursued. There is plenty of scope for questioning the significance of even the broader goals of one’s life. This (personal) cycle continues until one dies, but the treadmill is intergenerational because people tend to reproduce, thereby creating new mill-treaders. This has continued for generations and will continue until humanity eventually goes the way of all species—extinction. It seems like a long, repetitive journey to nowhere."

"A pessimistic book is most likely to bring some solace to those who already have those views but who feel alone or pathological as a result. They may gain some comfort from recognizing that there are others who share their views and that these views are supported by good arguments."

"The prospect of one’s own death, perhaps highlighted by a diagnosis of a dangerous or terminal condition, tends to focus the mind. But the deaths of others—relatives, friends, acquaintances, and sometimes even strangers—can also get a person thinking. Those deaths need not be recent. For example, one might be wandering around an old graveyard. On the tombstones are inscribed some details about the deceased—the dates they were born and died, and perhaps references to spouses, siblings, or children and grandchildren who mourned their loss. Those mourners are themselves now long dead. One thinks about the lives of those families—the beliefs and values, loves and losses, hopes and fears, strivings and failures—and one is struck that nothing of that remains. All has come to naught. One’s thoughts then turn to the present and one recognizes that in time, all those currently living—including oneself —will have gone the way of those now interred. Someday, somebody might stand at one’s grave and wonder about the person represented by the name on the tombstone, and might reflect on the fact that everything that person—you or I— once cared about has come to nothing. It is far more likely, however, that nobody will spare one even that brief thought after all those who knew one have also died."

"The (nonhuman) animal predicament is particularly revealing. Confronted with the awful spectacle of billions of animals being eaten, often alive, by predators, humans typically do not attempt to propose any cosmic meaning to those lives. Indeed, the usual monotheistic response is to say that the (or at least one) purpose of animals is to be eaten by others higher up the food chain. It is hard to reconcile that with the existence of a purportedly benevolent God, who surely could have created a world in which billions did not have to die each day to keep others alive."

"Even the extent to which our desires and goals are fulfilled creates a misleadingly optimistic impression of how well our lives are going. This is because there is actually a form of self “censorship” in the formulation of our desires and goals. While many of them are never fulfilled, there are many more potential desires and goals that we do not even formulate because we know that they are unattainable. For example, we know that we cannot live for a few hundred years and that we cannot gain expertise in all the subjects in which we are interested. Thus, we set goals that are less unrealistic (even if many of them are nonetheless somewhat optimistic). Thus, one hopes to live a life that is, by human standards, a long life, and we hope to gain expertise in some, perhaps very focused, area. What this means is that, even if all our desires and goals were fulfilled, our lives are not going as well as they would be going if the formulation of our desires had not been artificially restricted."

"Certainly in the case of the treatment of animals, the scales are heavily weighted against us. Although it is true that some humans do some good for animals, much of this is merely rescuing animals from the maltreatment of other humans. At the level of the human species such benefits cannot be used to offset the harms. If there were no humans to inflict the harms, these benefits would not be necessary. Of course, humans do bestow some other benefits, such as veterinary care for their companion animals. However, the number of animals affected and the amount of good done is massively outweighed by the harm the human species does to non-human animals."

"Some of the harm that humans cause to other humans and to animals is mediated by the destructive effect that humans have on the environment. For much of human history, the damage was local. Groups of humans fouled their immediate environment. In recent centuries the human impact has increased exponentially and the threat is now to the global environment. The increased threat is a product of two interacting factors–the exponential growth of the human population combined with significant increases in negative effects per capita. The latter is the result of industrialization and increased consumption."

"Humanity is a moral disaster. There would have been much less destruction had we never evolved. The fewer humans there are in the future, the less destruction there will still be."

"Life's big questions are big in the sense that they are momentous. However, contrary to appearances, they are not big in the sense of being unanswerable. It is only that the answers are generally unpalatable. There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror."

"People’s coping mechanisms are so strong that the pessimist has a difficult time getting a fair hearing. Bookshops have entire sections devoted to “self-help” volumes, not to mention “spirituality and religion” and other feel-good literature. There are no “self-helplessness” or “pessimism” sections in bookstores because there is a vanishingly small market for such ideas. I am not seriously advocating self-helplessness. I think that there are some matters about which we are helpless, but even on a realistic pessimistic view, there are things we can do to meliorate (or aggravate) our predicament."

"We are ephemeral beings on a tiny planet in one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe (or perhaps the multiverse)—a cosmos that is coldly indifferent to the insignificant specks that we are. It is indifferent to our fortunes and misfortunes, to injustice, to our hopes, fears, values, and concerns. The forces of nature and the cosmos are blind."

"Humans may exceed other animals in their sapient capacities, but we also surpass other species on our destructiveness. Many animals cause harm, but we are the most lethal species ever to have inhabited our planet. It is revealing that we do not refer to this superlative property in identifying ourselves. There is ample evidence that we are Homo pernicious – the dangerous, destructive human."