Infinity War, Human Exceptionalism, and the Ultimate Resource
This classic ID the Future resurfaces just in time to celebrate human creative capacity, and a blockbuster movie, for Labor Day weekend. Host Robert Crowther talks with Rachel Adams about Thanos, the arch-villain from Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War, and a couple of real-life thinkers, Eric Pianka and Paul Ehrlich, who share the villain’s view that the world would be a better place with far fewer humans. Thanos, Pianka, and Ehrlich appear to share a materialistic view of the human person, one that ignores the inherent dignity and worth of every person as well as humanity’s capacity to generate solutions and new resources through creative labor, growing the resource pie. Thanks to this, life is not a zero-sum game. The human species is, as Julian Simon put it in his excellent book, the ultimate resource.