How To Think Sensibly About Apocalypse and Catastrophe

Phil Torres is a scholar of "global catastrophic risk," meaning that he studies the various ways in which terrible things could happen to humanity: nuclear war, global warming, asteroids, killer robots, pandemics, etc. His books include The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse and Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks. Both are available free on his website. His upcoming book is Human Extinction: A History of Thinking About the End of the World.

On today's episode, Phil joins to talk about how we can think rationally about the risks we face as a species, and figure out what to prioritize.

Over the last decade or so, many more scholars have turned to thinking seriously about global catastrophic risks, trying to determine what threats we need to address. As Phil discusses, it's in many ways a good thing that more people are taking catastrophe seriously. As we can see from the COVID-19 pandemic, often we overlook these things until it's too late, and failures of preparation lead to millions of avoidable deaths.

But Phil has also become critical of some of the popular ways of thinking about "existential risk." Institutions like the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford and the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge have sprung up, and and many in Silicon Valley have started taking an interest in these questions. Certain tendencies associated with the "rationalist" or "effective altruist" movements claim to be interested in "existential risk," but Phil argues that they end up drifting into a kind of techno-utopianism rather than thinking seriously about how to stop the real harms that we face in the near future. Phil has argued, including in an article for Current Affairs, that while you may often hear people like Elon Musk talking about "existential risks to humanity" and about our "long term future," when you closely examine what they mean by this, it turns out to be a bizarre and dangerous secular theology. Phil, who was previously aligned with the effective altruist and rationalist movements himself, has become stingingly critical of those he sees as misusing rationalism and thereby taking the study of catastrophe in a deeply concerning direction. (He wrote a popular article last year for Salon about the New Atheists, in which he documented the ways in which many of them present right-wing prejudices as mere "reason.")

In this conversation, Phil explains why he became interested in "global catastrophic risk," how he came to reject some of the mainstream approaches to studying it, and what he thinks the most important threats facing humanity are. There could not be a more important subject, and Phil Torres is one of its most serious and reflective scholars.

The song at the beginning is "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" from the 1972 Evangelical Christian horror film A Thief In The Night (about which you can read a Current Affairs article here.)

Edited by Tim Gray.