End of the Anthropocene?
© Howard Gardner 2025
Remarks made at the Symposium on Tectonic Changes in our Lifetime and our Lives since 1965, for the 60th (and final) reunion of Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, Class of 1965
Until a few years ago, I had not heard the word “Anthropocene”—and, indeed, there is still disagreement about how best to define it and how to invoke it appropriately.
For today’s purpose, I will define it as the era of geological history during which human beings, homo sapiens, have been the dominant creatures on the planet. Our species has had the most power, assets, and control over both other living creatures—plants and animals—and much of the inanimate environment—minerals, inorganic elements—though not, alas, of weather cycles, or occasional upheavals like tornadoes, or volcanoes, or wandering comets.
When my classmates and I first arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1961, it did not dawn on us—certainly not on me, a studious and sheltered youth from Northeastern Pennsylvania—that the domination of our species would ever be called into question.
And indeed my self-concept—and that of most peers—was even more focused, more restricted than that. While never thinking of myself as a misogynist, I—and I believe most of my Harvard classmates—still assumed that it was a “man’s world” and it was likely to remain so indefinitely. Indeed, the first protest in which I ever engaged was to picket Lamont Library—the then recently-opened undergraduate library, where women were not allowed to study or check out books.
The extent of my provincialism is underscored by two slides:
In 1965, I participated with enthusiasm in creating a course for middle schools about the social sciences. It was called Man: A course of study, and I don’t think that we thought twice about this sexist name.
And five years later, I co-authored a textbook in social psychology. It was called Man and Men—the cover featured silhouettes of a dozen heads, all presumably males.
As you have heard from our panelist Ilene Lang, at about the time that most of us had left Cambridge, the women’s movement was beginning in earnest. And even though it has clearly had its ups and down—two steps forward, one step back—not even our more sexist contemporaries would wish to return to a time when only men were featured in titles, silhouettes, and theatrical leads. Indeed, in 2025, we instead encounter scores of books, movies, podcasts, and websites that portray the diminution and degradation of the male identity, to the point where some predict its imminent dissolution or disappearance.
However, the phrase “the End of the Anthropocene” does not denote the denigration of male identity and prominence.
Rather, it refers to the time, the period, the epoch when human beings—our entire species—is no longer hegemonic. And the almost universally designated replacement—substitute, successor, next in line—is not another animate species. It is the rise, growth, and ultimate hegemony of computational systems—called variously AI, generative AI, Large Language Models, ChatGPT, Generalized Intelligence, or even Generalized Super Intelligence.
Experts (and pundits) differ in their estimates of when this will happen, how it will happen, how decisive it will be, and what will be the next “act” for our once dominant species, let alone our once dominant or dominating gender.
As an educator, I’ve thought and written a good deal about this—and those who are interested are encouraged to get in touch with me or to visit my website.
But let me close with a hint about my current thinking.
While I think that Jerome Bruner’s social studies curriculum was not well-named, I enthusiastically endorse the three questions that it posed to middle-schoolers, and, indeed, that it can pose to all of us:
What makes human beings human?
How did we become that way?
How can we be made more human—more humane?
Our planet will spin and spiral, our era will yield to the next—“the older order changeth, yielding place to new,” as the poet Tennyson phrased it. But as long as our species exists, we should concern ourselves with these questions...and, working along with entities that may be smarter—and perhaps wiser—than we are, come up with the best possible answers.
An article on the symposium can be found in this Harvard Magazine article, “The Harvard and Radcliffe Classes of ’65 Reflect at Reunion: These octogenarians look to the future with hope, and a sense of responsibility” by Vivian W. Rong (link here).
