The Affliction of Human Supremacy

www.ecologicalcitizen.net LONG ARTICLE The affliction of human supremacy This article dissects the motivations behind and consequences of the worldview of Eileen Crist anthropocentrism, or human supremacy. Firstly, the author presents the just-so stories arising from the notion that the impact of humanity stems from our species’ essence. Instead, About the author the author argues, it is socio-cultural conditioning – specifically, the human-supremacist Eileen has been teaching credo propagated by the dominant culture – to which we must turn in order to properly at Virginia Tech in the understand humanity’s impact. Next, the typical beliefs arising from human supremacy Department of Science and are exposed, as are examples of its products: ideational and physical displacements. The Technology in Society since 1997. She has written and author also discusses the wisdom of limitations, the danger of shifting ecological baselines co-edited numerous papers and general ignorance of the current mass extinction event. Finally, after cautioning against and books, with her work the cult of techno-fixes, a brighter future is presented, which would be made possible by focusing on biodiversity rejecting the human-supremacist credo. loss and destruction of wild places, along with pathways to halt these trends. Eileen 2013 Economist article titled By contrast, the positive version of is a Consulting Editor to “Robochop: An Automated Jellyfish human nature as underlying driver of the Journal and lives in A Exterminator Takes to the Sea” planetary impact insists that we are after Blacksburg, VA, USA. reported a problem: innumerable jellyfish all special, perhaps even god-like. But so clogged the pipes of a Swedish nuclear far, this storyline continues, humans have Citation power plant, forcing it to shut down. been like reckless gods, so we need to get Crist E (2017) The affliction The article also reported a solution: the better at being all-powerful; above all, of human supremacy. The Ecological Citizen 1: 61–4. deployment of a fleet of killer robots that we need to use our science, technology, turn jellyfish into mush. These devices and managerial skills to put our problems Keywords follow a lead robot, and working in behind us. Then humanity can get on with Anthropocentrism; human formation can chop up to 900 kilograms of its destiny as a truly distinguished species. supremacy; shifting jellyfish an hour. In this article I direct the spotlight on baselines; techno-fixes Here’s a two-word rejoinder to this anthropocentrism – or what I prefer to call techno-fix ‘solution’:how disturbing. human supremacy – as a way of getting around the pitfalls of both these views * * * * * About this article about human nature. The pitfall of the This piece is taken from a In facing the huge ecological problems negative view is that it inclines us to shrug forthcoming book edited by our shoulders in the face of humanity’s we have created, we encounter a notion Trevor Goward and entitled that the impact of humanity stems from uncontrolled expansionism, and let nature Speak to the Wild: Gaia in Mind our nature – from our species’ essence. (supposedly) ‘red in tooth and claw’ take its (https://is.gd/nMLWMi), There are negative and positive versions inevitable course. The pitfall of the positive intended as a hand-up for of this belief. The negative version view is its implicit or open invitation to Millennials attempting to come to terms with a world asserts that humans are greedy, selfish embrace the colonization of the planet and much diminished and a and aggressive by nature. Or, along the the domination of nature as humanity’s future much compromised same lines, that the human impact is manifest destiny. by decisions still being made, an expression of a ‘Darwinian’ process, But focusing our critical gaze on human above all, by their forebears and that like any other multiplying supremacy shifts attention away from in the Baby Boomer and Gen X generations. The book species with nothing to check its growth, various just-so stories about human nature will be published by Regina to the far more relevant issue of socio- human beings are over-exploiting the University Press in 2018. environment and heading for a self- cultural conditioning. We must focus on the The piece has been edited inflicted crash. paramount role of the human-supremacist minimally for house style. The Ecological Citizen Vol 1 No 1 2017 61 The affliction of human supremacy www.ecologicalcitizen.net credo that the dominant culture propagates: There has been no shortage of proposed the credo that affirms that human beings distinguishing attributes: reason, language, are superior to all other life forms and morality, civilization, technology and free entitled to use them. will, among others. These attributes have In our time the human supremacy been offered again and again as traits complex has come to manifest as three of human distinction. They have also invisible, widespread beliefs: that the enjoyed foundational status in hierarchical Earth belongs to humanity; that the planet narratives about life that have dominated in consists in resources for the betterment the history of Western civilization. of people; and that human beings are The most enduring of such narratives, ‘obviously’ superior to all other species. threading through very different traditions These beliefs are invisible in the sense that of thought, has been the Great Chain of they are rarely explicitly stated. Yet they Being, with man at the top, minerals at are clearly discernible as the underlying the bottom - and we all know how to fill assumptions according to which people act the space between. This hierarchical order in the biosphere. has not only been about the nature of being The invisible operation of this belief (what philosophers call ontology), but it has system is the consequence of a long history also imposed a moral order sanctioning of anthropocentrism – a history that man’s unrestrained use of everything reaches back to classical antiquity and has supposedly beneath him. its roots in the birth of civilization. We are The physical displacements are all too Human supremacy “ the inheritors and products of this history. familiar. Before the civilized conqueror, is not just a Our impact on the biosphere derives from forests have given way, and so have worldview, not just this supremacist legacy – and not from grasslands and wetlands, and rivers and a story about how any inherent demonic flaws or god-like lakes, and more recently the seas. Wild things are: it is a attributes of human nature. animals have been killed, enslaved, forced To look at the legacy of human supremacy to remote and shrinking areas, and driven lived worldview. is to zoom in at who and what have to regional or total extinction. Indigenous It constitutes an been displaced to the periphery: namely, people have been labeled ‘savages’ or actionable credo indigenous people (‘uncivilized’ people), ‘animals’ and endured genocides and that has carved the wild non-humans and wild nature overall. subjugations. The displacements can be grouped in Human supremacy is not just a worldview, world we inhabit, two broad categories. First, there are the not just a story about how things are: it is a both mentally and ideational displacements, involving belittling lived worldview. It constitutes an actionable physically.” ideas about non-humans, about so-called credo that has carved the world we inhabit, savages and about the wild. Such ideas have both mentally and physically. For a long enjoyed cultural pre-eminence. Second, snapshot of what that worldview is capable there are the physical displacements, having of, consider the 19th century takeover of the to do with geographical conquests that have American Plains. Neither supremacist ideas exterminated and dislocated others. nor technological power, by themselves, can Ideational displacements are tied to a explain the brutality with which the buffalo, leading motif in Western thought that the Plains Indians, the prairie species and contemplates the phenomenon of the the grasslands themselves were treated. human by posing the question, “How are But the alliance between the superiority human beings different from other species”? delusion and the technical prowess of the Political scientist John Rodman called this civilized conqueror, the lived worldview pervasively posed question the Differential of human supremacy, sheds light on this Imperative, and identified it as the and so many other crimes civilization has Western cultural proclivity for searching committed against the living world. and acclaiming those characteristics that So far I have covered the ideational ostensibly distinguish the human from all and physical displacements that human other life forms. supremacy has effected. I turn to briefly 62 The Ecological Citizen Vol 1 No 1 2017 www.ecologicalcitizen.net The affliction of human supremacy consider what this lived worldview does to A phenomenon profoundly indicative human beings who come under its spell. I of this alienation is what is known as the touch on two momentous consequences for shifting ecological baseline. Ecological humanity: firstly, the inability to discern impoverishment has generally increased any reason for limiting expansionism; with each generation, yet each generation and secondly, the loss of appreciation ta kes t he i mpover i shed cond it ion t hey fi nd as and gratitude for the planet’s stupendous ‘normal’. Ever since wild beings have ceased richness and beauty. being neighbors, neither their presence nor On the first point, it needs to be said their local or regional disappearance has, “No mainstream that the wisdom of limitations belongs to for the most part, warranted recording. politician, media or peoples who respect their non-human and Amnesia about the living world is the non-governmental human neighbours. It is that respect that existential condition that we have reaped gives rise to restraint.

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