Book Review: On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End by Ben Ware

Philosophy is not my strong suit. Most of my knowledge of thinkers like Kant and Freud comes from the sitcom The Good Place. As such, there were many times when I was reading Ben Ware’s On Extinction that I was acutely aware of the material going over my head. Luckily, his authorial style is still pleasing to read, feeling comparable to a well-written New Yorker article, and his arguments are well-explained.

A member of the psychology department at King’s College in London, here he uses the writings of great philosophers to examine our society’s growing sense of impending doom, as the signs of climate change continue to appear in growing numbers with each passing year. He opts not to comment on the current mass extinction or global warming directly, instead offering up a “philosophical and psychoanalytic critique of our damaged times,” to mostly fascinating effect, even for someone who is unfamiliar with the writings being examined.

With such heavy subject matter, one would be forgiven for thinking that the book will be filled with doom and gloom. To the contrary, while there is certainly some of that in these pages, the overall message seems to be one of hope for a new beginning to arise from this apparent end. He argues that we as a species must learn to look at our situation differently and works through our likely feelings on the matter by comparing them to a mix of major works of philosophy and pop culture like the movie Melancholia.

He is able to find flaws with many ways of thinking but is especially critical of capitalism. A particularly thought-provoking section on Walter Benjamin’s eerily prescient 1933 text “Experience and Poverty” discusses the ways that new technologies will lead to a novel kind of “poverty of human experience” befalling mankind, that “is characterized by excess rather than lack: a suffocating abundance of new ideas and styles that produce a feeling of generalized exhaustion; a sense that, from culture to people, everything has now been ‘devoured.'” He posits however, that this shouldn’t be seen as necessarily a bad thing, instead it should inspire us to try and “begin again” (emphasis his).

It’s all too easy to look at the world around us and slip into despair, but Ware’s book serves as a bit of a balm for such feelings. We as a species are facing an inflection point of our own devising, and it is critical that we make the right decisions with how we face it. In this brief but well-thought and articulated book, Ware makes a strong case for us to “begin again, and begin again with laughter.” ★★★★