The Banality of Extinction

The phrase “the banality of evil” comes from Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” In the book, Arendt, a German Jew who fled Germany as World War II began, reports on the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann, “the architect of the holocaust.” Israeli agents had found him hiding in Argentina, captured him, secretly brought him to Israel, and put him on trial for crimes against humanity. In his defense, Eichmann made some version of the “I was just following orders” argument. He joined the SS, he said, not necessarily to rid Germany of Jews — what he nearly ended up doing — but to further his career.

Arendt was impressed by how average he seemed. He was not evidently antisemitic or sociopathic. He appeared to care less about the results of his actions than about doing his job well. Yes, he’d abdicated his “moral responsibility” by not questioning inherently immoral orders, Arendt argued, but really, he was a bureaucrat—supremely banal.

Great evils, she concluded, were not necessarily perpetrated by raving, frothing psychopaths, but by scarily ordinary-seeming people — by people just doing their jobs.

What’s any of this got to do with fish? Not much, directly. But Arendt’s “banality of evil” concept has unsettling parallels in industrial scale fishing. I’ve begun to call it the “banality of extinction.”

In the world of fishing, there’s no Nazi party hell-bent on “purifying” society and dominating the world, of course. In fact, there’s no agenda at all. There’s only the market, a place people who want things go to find people who have the things they want, a place where money exchanges hands.

But if you follow, say, the supply chain that brings endangered bluefin to a high-end restaurant in Tokyo, London or New York, you might find a banality similar to that observed by Arendt. Not raving lunatics, but, from fisherman to boat captain to fishmonger to waiter— I’ll omit the consumer for now — you’ll likely find people simply trying to pay rent, doing their jobs.

And yet, although everyone along the way is just trying to get by, the end result can be, if not horrifying in the sense that the Holocaust was, at least absurd — mortifyingly surreal in a Kafkaesque way.

Take Brandon’s example: Bluefin may go commercially extinct for the same reason that limited-edition Gucci handbags sell out overnight: human ostentation. That’s what’s driving an 1800-lb-reaching, many-thousands-of-miles-ranging, 50-MPH-swimming, hunting marvel into oblivion. Ditto with rhinos and tigers.

And that got me wondering: Is there a good — i.e. excusable — reason for humans to drive another living thing out of existence?

Let’s start at the beginning, the megafaunal extinctions of the past 50,000 years. Scientists have long noted that as humans migrated out of Africa, large animals seemed to disappear left and right in our wake. In Australia about 45,000 years ago, many gigantic marsupials, some of which were carnivorous, bite the dust.

In the Americas around 13,000 years ago, so do mastodons, camels, horses, and the giant wolves and cats that prey on them. In both cases, that’s when people are thought to have arrived. There are confounding factors, of course, climate change being No. 1. And yet, these species had weathered interglacial warm spells before. What was different this time?

A bobble-headed, spear-wielding hominid newly arrived from Africa, that’s what.

So while scientists generally hesitate to attribute these megafaunal extinctions entirely to hunting by Homo sapiens, they also generally accept that hominid hunting couldn’t’ have helped.

My question: Were these extinctions excusable? I don’t know, but to the degree that we overhunted because we were hungry, at least they’re understandable. When you’re hungry, you’re hungry, the future be damned.

Was it smart? That depends on HOW hungry we were, I suppose. But in retrospect, it certainly would be nice to have mastodons still wandering the arctic tundra. And if I could lobby my mammoth-hunting ancestors, assuming I have any, I’d definitely ask them to consider that. I’d say, “Would you consider NOT killing that last herd for your great great grandchildren’s sake?” Still, if they said no, I’d have to understand.

But let’s fastforward to the last 500 years. With more globalization and the emergence of the modern market, the tenor of overhunting and -fishing changes. I mentioned the American bison before; by the end of the 1800s, 40 million animals gone to satisfy, among other non-essential things, a new fad for buffalo skin coats. Beaver and otter both experience unprecedented slaughter for similar reasons — hats and capes. The North Atlantic right whale is commercially extinct by the mid-1700s. The slow-swimming cetacean is hunted for its meat, yes, but also for its oil, which fills lamps across Christendom for a few centuries.

Is that a good reason — light — to drive an animal extinct? (The North Atlantic right whale still exists, but has yet to fully recover. Some 300-400 remain.) I don’t know, but if I had to compare with the presumed excuses of the paleolithic — direct consumption in the interests of survival — I’d err toward ‘no.’

And as we move closer to present day, the excuses just become less tenable, more and more like reasoning from some theater of the absurd.

Take what’s happening these days to amphibians around the world. They’re in trouble everywhere — the Jambato toad gone from Ecuador, various species gone from Caribbean islands, the golden toad and golden frog gone from Central America, and major declines in North America. Scientists don’t really known why, but they suspect the chytrid fungus, short for Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis.

And they think that chytrid may have come from southern Africa. How’d it spread? A certain clawed, aquatic frog known as X. laevis was used in human pregnancy tests in the early part of the 20th century. (Urine from pregnant women induced the frogs to produce certain pre-egg cells, revealing the secret.) When the pregnancy test was developed, African frogs were captured and exported around the world, presumably with the deadly chytrid fungus in tow. Oops.

Bye-bye New World amphibians. So was knowing if you’re pregnant a good reason (and yes, I’m aware the spread of chytrid was accidental, but still…) for laying into not just one or two species, but an entire class of animals? Hmmm…

Posted by Moises Velasquez-Manoff

Mammoth photo courtesy of Encyclopedia Britannica