Darwin
There is a strong feeling among social scientists and others that survival of the fittest is always right. “If it exists it must have survived.” End of argument. But humans can chose to not follow survival. If we look at history the strong seem always to win and the softer more artistic relationship-based societies lose out to the more powerful. The Dawn Of Everything has many relevant discussions of how the more humane loses out.
Let’s say we are in a predicament and two paths seem open: one chasing militarism and the other toward quality of life. The softer is more vulnerable but might be preferable. Is it worth taking the risk of chasing quality of life over survival? The choice can be made and often is (limiting military budgets). Sparta is the extreme example where every moment of every life seems dedicated to the military solution. As Toynbee points out, with its increasing population Sparta attacked its neighbors to get land for food while Athens chose to create colonies at long distances. Athens won (for a while) but Sparta lost.
In thinking about climate issues it seems to me important to not adopt a completely Darwinian view because that view supports the approach that surviving is preferred to quality of life and wins.(impoverishing the many in support of the rich) Many want to consider futures that have higher quality of life outcomes while accepting higher risks of failure.
Humans can make this choice.
Malthus who wanted to cull the poor inserted a harsher worldview into biological thinking and nudged Darwin to adapt the drama of survival into social thought. Because we are seeking ways forward, recognizing the strong tendency in contemporary thinking toward the mechanical, we see that survival and force are part of the modernist worldview. We need to free ourselves if we are to become open to alternatives, from the mechanical view of a universe of dead things.
The mechanic view supported the development of the commercial technical civilization that is killing us. Time for lots of serious rethinking.
Darwin concluded Origins with
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
A different culture from that stressing survival. Survival thinking biases the mind of the thinker as does “grandeur in this view of life .. endless forms more beautiful.”
Erich Fromm developed the idea that biophilia and necrophilia were major orientations of humans toward life.
I used to teach natural law, still do, sort of, at VassarBushmills.com, and found that the old axiom "God created Man and Colt made them equal" to be a key factor to Man's fitness for survival.
When confronted with complex issues and questions, I usually look about for a safe haven of context for the problem at hand. This response weakness of mine is totally manifested in the myriad of complex issues and questions regarding climate change.
If I place myself into the context of living in a cave of survival with other early humans I am joyous with the taming of fire and the immediate benefits that fire will bring to our cave's collective hygiene by our consuming of cooked, rather than raw, meat and our collective improvement in wellbeing brought forth by an enhanced, albeit artificial, thermal environment where we can survive inside our cave independent of the thermal environment outside the cave so long as we have access to adequate combustible materials.
However, my joy at this is without context in that, as an early human, I have no idea how big the world outside my cave really is and, as such, I have no sense of scope and scale for the impact of my burning tree limbs or handfuls of dried marsh peat to keep our environment viable and survivable.
At what time did the intersection of the abscissa and ordinate of survival needs of mankind against the capacity of the earth to support same arrive and take place.
Borrowing from the Watergate era, "what did we know and when did we know it?".
We had no context going into this paradigm but we will certainly require context to exit same.