The Myth of Human Supremacy

by Derrick Jensen

  “The greatest distance we’ve tested has been about three hundred miles. Astronaut Brian O’Leary, who wrote Exploring Inner and Outer Space, left his white cells here in San Diego, then flew home to Phoenix. On the way, he kept track of events that aggravated him, carefully logging the time of each. The correlation remained, even over that distance.”

  “The implications of all this . . .”

  He interrupted, laughing. He said, “Yes, are staggering. I have file drawers full of high quality anecdotal data showing time and again how bacteria, plants, and so on are all fantastically in tune with each other. And human cells, too, have this primary perception capability, but somehow its gotten lost at the conscious level.”

  “How has the scientific community received your work?”

  “With the exception of scientists at the margins, like Rupert Sheldrake, it was met first with derision, then hostility, and mostly now with silence. At first they called primary perception ‘the Backster Effect,’ perhaps hoping they could trivialize the observations by naming them after this wild man who claimed to see things missed by mainstream science. The name stuck, but because primary perception can’t be readily dismissed, it is no longer a term of contempt.

  “What’s the primary criticism by mainstream scientists?”

  “The big problem—and this is a problem as far as consciousness research in general is concerned—is repeatability. The events I’ve observed have all been spontaneous. They have to be. If you plan them out in advance, you’ve already changed them. It all boils down to this: repeatability and spontaneity do not go together, and as long as members of the scientific community overemphasize repeatability in scientific methodology, they’re not going to get very far in consciousness research.

  “Not only is spontaneity important, but so is intent. You can’t pretend. If you say you are going to burn a plant, but don’t mean it, nothing will happen. I hear constantly from people in different parts of the country, wanting to know how to cause plant reactions. I tell them, ‘Don’t do anything special. Go about your work; keep notes so later you can tell what you were doing at specific times, and then compare them to your chart recording. But don’t plan anything, or the experiment won’t work.’ People who do this often get equivalent responses to mine, and often win first prize in science fairs. But when they get to Biology 101, they’re told that what they have experienced is not important.

  “There have been a few attempts by scientists to replicate my experiments . . . but these have all been methodologically inadequate. . . . It is so very easy to fail. . . . And let’s be honest: some of the scientists were relieved when they failed, because success would have gone against the body of scientific knowledge.”

  I said, “For scientists to give up predictability means they have to give up control, which means they have to give up Western culture, which means it’s not going to happen until civilization collapses under the weight of its own ecological excesses.”

  He nodded, then said, “I have given up trying to fight other scientists on this, because I know that even if the experiment fails they still see things that change their consciousness. People who would not have said anything twenty years ago often say to me, ‘I think I can safely tell you now how you really changed my life with what you were doing back in the early seventies.’ These scientists didn’t feel they had the luxury back then to rock the boat; their credibility, and thus their grant requests, would have been affected.”

  I asked if there were alternative explanations for the polygraph readings. I’d read that one person suggested his machine must have had a loose wire.

  He responded, “In thirty-one years of research I’ve found all my loose wires. No, I can’t see any mechanistic solution. Some parapsychologists believe I’ve mastered the art of psychokinesis—that I move the pen with my mind—which would be a pretty good trick itself. But they overlook the fact that I’ve automated and randomized many of the experiments to where I’m not even aware of what’s going on until later, when I study the resulting charts and videotapes. The conventional explanations have worn pretty thin. One such explanation, proposed in Harper’s, was static electricity: if you scuffle across the room and touch the plant, you get a response. But of course I seldom touch the plant during periods of observation, and in any case the response would be totally different.”

  “So, what is the signal picked up by the plant?

  “I don’t know. I don’t believe the signal, whatever it is, dissipates over distance, which is what we’d get if we were dealing with electromagnetic phenomenon. I used to hook up a plant, then take a walk with a randomized timer in my pocket. When the timer went off, I’d return home. The plant always responded the moment I turned around, no matter the distance. And the signal from Phoenix was just as strong as if Brian O’Leary were in the next room. Also, we’ve attempted to screen the signal using lead-lined containers, and other materials, but we can’t screen it out. This makes me think the signal doesn’t actually go from here to there, but instead manifests itself in different places. All this, of course, lands us firmly in the territory of the metaphysical, the spiritual.”

  I said, “Primary perception suggests a radical redefinition of consciousness.”

  “You mean it would do away with the notion of consciousness as something on which humans have a monopoly?” He hesitated a moment, then continued, “Western science exaggerates the role of the brain in consciousness. Whole books have been written on the consciousness of the atom. Consciousness might exist on an entirely different level.”

  I asked whether he had worked with materials that would normally be considered inanimate.

  “I’ve shredded some things and suspended them in agar. I get electric signals, but not necessarily relating to anything going on in the environment. It’s too crude an electroding pattern for me to decipher. But I do suspect that consciousness goes much, much further. In 1987 I participated in a University of Missouri program that included a talk by Dr. Sidney Fox, then connected with the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution at the University of Miami. Fox had recorded electric signals from protein-like material that showed properties strikingly similar to those of living cells. The simplicity of the material he used and the self organizing capability it displayed suggest to me that bio-communication was present at the earliest states in the evolution of life on this planet. Of course the Gaia hypothesis—the idea that the earth is a great big working organism, with a lot of corrections built in—fits in nicely with this. I don’t think it would be a stretch to take the hypothesis further and presume that the planet itself is intelligent.”

  I asked how his work has been received in other parts of the world.

  “The Russians and other eastern Europeans have always been very interested. And whenever I encounter Indian scientists—Buddhist or Hindu—and we talk about what I do, instead of giving me a bunch of grief they say, ‘What took you so long?’ My work dovetails very well with many of the concepts embraced by Hinduism and Buddhism.”

  “What is taking us so long?”

  “The fear is that, if what I am observing is accurate, many of the theories on which we’ve built our lives need complete reworking. I’ve known biologists to say, ‘If Backster is right, we’re in trouble.’ It takes a certain kind of character and personality to even attempt such a questioning of fundamental assumptions. The Western scientific community, and actually all of us, are in a difficult spot, because in order to maintain our current mode of being, we must ignore a tremendous amount of information. And more information is being gathered all the time. For instance, have you heard of Rupert Sheldrake’s work with dogs? He puts a time-recording camera on both the dog at home and the human companion at work. He has discovered that even if people come home from work at a different time each day, at the moment the person leaves work, the dog at home heads for the door.

  “Even mainstream scientists are stum
bling all over this bio-communication phenomenon. It seems impossible, given the sophistication of modern instrumentation, for us to keep missing this fundamental attunement of living things. Only for so long are we going to be able to pretend it’s the result of ‘loose wires.’ We cannot forever deny that which is so clearly there.”

  •••

  Faced with what Backster was saying, I had several options. I could believe he’s either a crackpot or lying, as is everyone else who has ever made similar observations. I could believe that what he was saying is true, which would validate many things I had experienced but would require that the whole notion of repeatability in the scientific method be reworked, along with preconceived notions of consciousness, communication, perception, and so on. Or I could believe that he had overlooked some strictly mechanistic explanation. But seriously, static electricity, humidity, a loose wire? Are those the best excuses the human supremacists can come up with?

  Or, and here’s the real solution, I could see for myself.

  •••

  Backster hooked up a plant. We chatted. I watched the paper roll out of the recorder. I couldn’t correlate the movement of the pen with anything I was feeling, or with the conversation. A cat started to play with the plant. The oscillations of the pen seemed to increase in magnitude, but I couldn’t be sure. Halfheartedly, I suggested burning the plant. No response from the plant. Cleve responded, “I don’t think you really want to, and besides, I wouldn’t let you.”

  We moved to another part of the lab, and he put yogurt into a sterilized test tube, then inserted a pair of sterilized gold electrodes. We began again to talk. The pen wriggled up and down, and once again seemed to lurch just as I took in my breath to disagree with something he said.

  But I couldn’t be sure. When we see something, how do we know if it is real, or if we are seeing it only because we wish so much to believe? The same is true, of course, for not seeing events.

  Cleve left to take care of business elsewhere in the building. The line manifesting the electrical response of the yogurt immediately went flat. I tried to fabricate anger, thinking of clearcuts and the politicians who legislate them, thinking about abused children and their abusers. Still flat. Either fabricated emotions don’t count (as Cleve had suggested), or it’s a sham, or something else was terribly wrong. Perhaps the yogurt wasn’t interested in me.

  Losing interest myself, I began to wander the lab. My eyes fell on a calendar, which on closer inspection I saw was actually an advertisement for a shipping company. I felt a surge of anger at the ubiquity of advertising. Then I realized—a spontaneous emotion! I dashed to the chart, and saw a sudden spike corresponding to the moment I’d felt the anger. Then more flatline.

  And more flatline. And more. Again I began to wander the lab, and again I saw something that triggered an emotion. This was a poster showing a map of the human genome. I thought of the Human Genome Diversity Project, a monumental study hated by many Indigenous people and their allies for its genocidal implications (Backster is not affiliated with or particularly a fan of the program; I later found he simply likes the poster). Another surge of anger, another dash to the chart, and another spike in the graph, from instants before I started to move.

  •••

  If your experience of the world is at variance with what this culture inculcates you into believing should be your experience of the world, what do you do?

  •••

  Many people respond by denying their own experience.

  Of course. That’s the point of a supremacist philosophy.

  •••

  I just read a blog account of someone who was “suffering from a serious slug problem” in her kitchen. One night she accidentally stepped on one, getting its guts all over her bare foot. So, “traumatised and utterly disgusted,” she “went on a revenge-driven, murderous killing-spree with the sodium chloride.”

  Please note that in addition to the redundancy—killing sprees by definition involve murder—she is the one who is traumatized—never mind the slug she crushed—and she is the one who must seek revenge on the others of the species for one member having the temerity to happen to put its body in the path of her foot. This is a window into the hatred of nature that accompanies human supremacism. It is analogous to those ranchers who kill every wolf they see because one wolf ate one calf the ranchers were running in the wolf’s home. Or more accurately, it’s analogous to a rancher killing every wolf he sees, then tracking down and killing the rest of a pack when a wolf bleeds on him.

  Back to the woman with slugs in her kitchen. Watching “the slugs writhe around for several minutes following administration of the salt treatment” further traumatized her, because “it looked painful; death by dehydration seems like a pretty unpleasant way to die.”

  How to deal with the trauma? Supremacism, once again, to the rescue: “In an attempt to alleviate my contrition I tried to tell myself that it killed them reasonably quickly and they didn’t suffer for long. Then I began to wonder . . . do they actually suffer at all? Do slugs and other such gastropod molluscs actually have a nervous system that is sufficiently developed to generate the sensation of pain as we know it?”

  Although the author acknowledges that “higher [sic] invertebrates—some worms, flies and our friend Limax—have quite highly developed nervous systems, believe it or not—only a few notches down the evolutionary ladder from ourselves. [Please note the Great Chain of Being reference, in full human supremacist glory.] They have highly developed sensory organs which send nerve impulses along sensory neurones to clusters of neurones in the head. These are called central ganglia, and are essentially a very primitive brain. Information is then relayed to muscles in different parts of the body through a nerve cord (not dissimilar to the vertebrate spinal cord) that runs from head to tail of the animal, and allows changes in behaviour. So, actually, the nervous system organisation in these invertebrates is rather similar to our own. Not great for the ego, eh?”

  It’s not great for the ego if you base your self-worth on having nothing in common—not even the rudiments of your nervous system—with other residents of this planet.

  The author went searching for experiments where scientists had tortured mollusks, ostensibly to determine whether the nonhumans felt pain. She discovered that “the first thing to happen when you roast a snail is that it retracts into its shell to minimise immediate damage. Secondly, if the snail remains on the hot-plate for more than 30 seconds or so, it will protract from its shell, secrete a thick, insulating, yellow mucous, and display searching movements—very sensible—in an attempt to get to somewhere that is not as hot. These searching movements involve contraction of the foot (the part in contact with the hot-plate), and repeated turning of the body from side to side.” She acknowledges that this fits with what humans would do in a similar situation, and fits as well with what she had observed in the slugs: “The first thing that the slugs do is contract their bodies to about half of their normal length, and curl up at the edges. Then, they begin their characteristic writhing around that I described; moving their gait rapidly from one side to the other in an attempt to find somewhere less salty. Death comes too swiftly to allow the secretion of a mucous, but I bet that if you were to put the slugs on a non-lethal salty surface, there would be a mucous secretion, just like in snails.”

  Her conclusion comes in standard nonsensical human supremacist fashion: “My own feeling is that slugs DON’T feel pain in the sense that we know it, and my reasons for thinking this are thus. The sensation of ‘pain’ is not generated directly at the area of damage. In vertebrates such as ourselves, damage stimulates pain receptors in tissues, and electrical impulses are sent to the brain. The brain then integrates and interprets the information, and makes you feel pain in the area that you’ve damaged. But there’s the key point—pain is a feeling that is generated by the brain: specifically, if you’re interested, in two regions
known as the periaqueductal grey matter and the nucleus raphe magnus.”

  I’m so glad we have science to tell us not to believe the writhing that is happening before our eyes.

  The author even acknowledges that morphine has an effect on the pain response of other creatures such as lobsters, but then lets us know that this doesn’t mean that lobsters feel pain. It just means that morphine affects their responses to pain (which, according to her, they don’t feel).

  Don’t bother trying to figure out the logic. It doesn’t really hang together. It doesn’t have to. Neither logic nor evidence were ever going to be allowed to lead where they may, but rather were going to be tortured into shape to serve her supremacism. Near the end the author reveals the real point of the whole damn article: “At least, I can sleep safe in the knowledge that I did not cause the slug the most unbearable agony that I initially thought I had.”39

  •••

  This, succinctly stated, is the central point and most important function of any supremacist philosophy.

  * * *

  36 The Wired article is Mark Brown, “Fish Photographed Using Tools to Eat,” Wired, July 11, 2011, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/fish-tool-use/ (accessed January 6, 2014).The Field & Stream article is Chad Love, “Fish Learn to Use Tools,” Field & Stream, July 11, 2011, http://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/field-notes/2011/07/rise-planet-fish-theyve-learned-use-tools (accessed January 6, 2014).

  37 Joh R. Henschel, “Tool Use by Spiders: Stone Selection and Placement by Corolla Spiders Ariadna (Segestriidae) of the Namib Desert,” Ethology, 1, no. 3 (January–December 1995): 187–199, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1439-0310.1995.tb00357.x/abstract (accessed January 6, 2014).