The Myth of Human Supremacy

by Derrick Jensen

  There is not one natural community on the planet that has been managed by human supremacists which that management has not either destroyed or is in the process of destroying.

  Human supremacists posit humans as the smartest beings around (in fact, really, the only smart ones). Members of this culture contrast themselves positively with members of other cultures, who are more “primitive,” less sophisticated, or let’s cut to the chase, less intelligent than they are. And scientists are often portrayed as the brainiest of the brainiacs in this culture, the smartest of the smart, the most discerning of the discerning, the sapiens of the sapiens. But I think it’s pretty fucking stupid to assume you’re the only one who can think, and it’s even more stupid to forget that your assumption is nothing but an assumption. And it’s even stupider still to continue to think you’re smarter than anyone else as your culture destroys life on this planet, fueled in great measure by your perception of yourself as the most intelligent and meaningful being in the universe. Actually the only intelligent and meaningful being in the universe.

  The scientist also used the word anthropomorphizing. The word means “to ascribe human characteristics to an animal, inanimate object, force of nature, etc.” So many of the insane unquestioned presumptions of human supremacism lie in one not-so-little word. Depending on the context, it presumes a human ownership of intelligence, the ability to communicate, the ability to suffer, the ability to feel emotions, and so on. Any perception of these among nonhumans is to be eradicated. Never mind that these are all natural attributes. The primary justification for this separation is the Great Chain of Being. Which is no reasonable justification at all.

  The use of the word anthropomorphizing as a slur by human supremacists and especially mechanistic scientists is even more ironic than their complaints about teleology, in that the human supremacists often use machine language when discussing nonhumans. The Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution are based on seeing the world as a giant machine, and nonhumans as “beast machines,” as Descartes put it. Modern scientific discourse is, as would be expected considering the basis of modern science, based on machine language. But machines are a uniquely human-made project. You can’t get more anthropomorphic than to describe the world in mechanistic terms, to project a human construct onto the real, living world. This is one reason I do not speak, for example, of ecosystems, but rather natural communities.

  Their use of the word anthropomorphizing is even more ironic and absurd than I’ve so far made it seem: isn’t it just a tad anthropomorphic to require that everyone else’s intelligence, response to pain, sorrow, joy, and so on, resemble one’s own?

  Or maybe it’s just narcissistic.

  Michael Pollan asked plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso “why he thinks people have an easier time granting intelligence to computers than to plants. ([Prominent botanist] Fred Sack told me [Pollan] that he can abide the term ‘artificial intelligence,’ because the intelligence in this case is modified by the word ‘artificial,’ but not ‘plant intelligence.’ He offered no argument, except to say, ‘I’m in the majority in saying it’s a little weird.’) Mancuso thinks we’re willing to accept artificial intelligence because computers are our creations, and so reflect our own intelligence back at us. They are also our dependents, unlike plants: ‘If we were to vanish tomorrow, the plants would be fine, but if the plants vanished . . .’ Our dependence on plants breeds a contempt for them, Mancuso believes. In his somewhat topsy-turvy [sic] view, plants ‘remind us of our weakness.’”51

  Mancuso’s point is a good one, to which we will return.

  The evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano wanted to determine whether plants are capable of learning. Given that industrial humans have destroyed or are destroying every natural community they try to manage (read, steal from and try to control), yet they still continue to try to manage (steal from and try to control) every natural community they can find instead of leaving them alone; and given that industrial civilization is killing the planet, and yet most industrial humans don’t seem interested in even acknowledging that industrial civilization is killing the planet, much less getting rid of it, and thereby allowing life on this planet to continue, I’d be more interested in determining whether industrial humans are capable of learning. Be that as it may, she came up with a fascinating way to conduct her experiment.

  Pollan writes, “She focused on an elementary type of learning called ‘habituation,’ in which an experimental subject is taught to ignore an irrelevant stimulus. ‘Habituation enables an organism to focus on the important information, while filtering out the rubbish,’ Gagliano explained to the audience of plant scientists. How long does it take the animal to recognize that a stimulus is ‘rubbish,’ and then how long will it remember what it has learned? Gagliano’s experimental question was bracing: Could the same thing be done with a plant?

  “Mimosa pudica, also called the ‘sensitive plant,’ is that rare plant species with a behavior [and I love the fact that he used the word behavior] so speedy and visible that animals can observe it; the Venus flytrap is another. When the fernlike leaves of the mimosa are touched, they instantly fold up, presumably to frighten insects. The mimosa also collapses its leaves when the plant is dropped or jostled. Gagliano potted fifty-six mimosa plants and rigged a system to drop them from a height of fifteen centimetres every five seconds. Each ‘training session’ involved sixty drops. She reported that some of the mimosas started to reopen their leaves after just four, five, or six drops, as if they had concluded that the stimulus could be safely ignored. ‘By the end, they were completely open,’ Gagliano said to the audience. ‘They couldn’t care less anymore.’

  “Was it just fatigue? Apparently not: when the plants were shaken, they again closed up. ‘“Oh, this is something new,”’ Gagliano said, imagining these events from the plants’ point of view. ‘You see, you want to be attuned to something new coming in. Then we went back to the drops, and they didn’t respond.’ Gagliano reported that she retested her plants after a week and found that they continued to disregard the drop stimulus, indicating that they ‘remembered’ [and I see no need for scare quotes] what they had learned. Even after twenty-eight days, the lesson had not been forgotten. She reminded her colleagues that, in similar experiments with bees, the insects forgot what they had learned after just forty-eight hours. Gagliano concluded by suggesting that ‘brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning,’ and that there is ‘some unifying mechanism across living systems that can process information and learn.’”

  As Cleve Backster said, “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.”

  He underestimated the power of denial. By now we can predict the response of the supremacists. One scientist’s reasoned response was “Bullshit.” And the tautologies. Oh, the tautologies. Only animals can learn because, well, only animals can learn. Plants can “evolve adaptations” but never learn. Never mind that we don’t normally talk about beings evolving adaptations within a single generation, unless you want to say that children, uh, evolve an adaptation into reading when parents read to them, in which case we’re back to learning, only using fancier words. Further, as Gagliano said, “How can they be adapted to something they have never experienced in their real world?” She noted that some plants learned faster than others, evidence that “this is not an innate or programmed response.” Another scientist said that there’s nothing to discuss, because no matter what happened, “it’s not learning.” And why is it not? Evidently because, well, it just isn’t. So there.

  The relevant question is whether these scientists are capable of learning. Perhaps we can devise an experiment where we drop them from a height of fifteen centi
meters every five seconds until they change their behavior.

  Pollan continues, “Someone objected that dropping a plant was not a relevant trigger, since that doesn’t happen in nature. Gagliano pointed out that electric shock, an equally artificial trigger, is often used in animal-learning experiments. Another scientist suggested that perhaps her plants were not habituated, just tuckered out. She argued that twenty-eight days would be plenty of time to rebuild their energy reserves.”

  Gagliano has been trying to get the article published, but so far ten journals have rejected it. Pollan quotes her saying, “‘None of the reviewers had problems with the data.’ Instead, they balked at the language she used to describe the data. But she didn’t want to change it. ‘Unless we use the same language to describe the same behavior’—exhibited by plants and animals—‘we can’t compare it,’ she said.”52

  This makes me happy.

  * * *

  40 Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 16–17.

  41 This is all so similar to what the person said about slugs. If trees share one of our traits, not good for the ego, eh? Well, not if your ego is so fragile as to require you to be “more special” than everyone else.

  42 Kat McGowan, “How Plants Secretly Talk to Each Other,” Wired, December 20, 2013, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/12/secret-language-of-plants/ (accessed January 20, 2014).

  43 Ibid. And can you imagine how horribly various pollutants must affect their ability to perceive?

  44 Ibid.

  45 Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant.”

  46 “Teleology,” Oxford Dictionaries, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/teleology (accessed January 21, 2014).

  47 “Define Teleology,” AskDefine, http://teleology.askdefine.com/ (accessed January 21, 2014).

  48 Bob Drury, “Darwinism Can Survive Without Teleology,” Catholic Stand, http://catholicstand.com/evolution-design/ (accessed January 21, 2014).

  49 For an enlightening exploration of Francis Bacon and his hatred of both nature and women, see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), especially pages 64–91.

  50 Marianela Jarroud, “Where Would You Like Your New Glacier?” Inter Press Service, http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/02/like-new-glacier/ (accessed March 4, 2014).

  51 Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant.”

  52 Ibid.

  Chapter Five

  Value-Free Science

  Capitalism as we know it couldn’t exist without science. And science as we know it has been formed and deformed by capitalism at every step of the way.

  STANLEY ARONOWITZ

  If feminist psychology is correct, the very concept of scientific “objectivity” as a disciplined withdrawal of sympathy by the knower from the known, is a male separation anxiety writ large. Written, in fact, upon the entire universe.

  THEODORE ROSZAK

  I’ll tell you two things about much of this plant research, however, that break my heart. The first is that even a few of the researchers themselves—and I’m certainly not talking about Mancuso or Gagliano—believe that the plant communication they’re studying could not actually be plant communication. Oh, sure, they understand that plants disperse and receive and respond to various chemicals—and Mancuso, who’s trying to make a dictionary of these chemicals, estimates a vocabulary of about three thousand terms,53 which frankly compares favorably with some humans I’ve known—but then insist for ideological reasons that this communication could not be any sort of communication. As science journalist Kat McGowan writes, “For both [plant researchers] Karban and Heil, the outstanding question is evolutionary: Why should one plant waste energy clueing in its competitors about a danger? They argue that plant communication is a misnomer; it really might just be plant eavesdropping. Rather than using the vascular system to send messages across meters-long distances, maybe plants release volatile chemicals as a faster, smarter way to communicate with themselves—Heil calls it a soliloquy. Other plants can then monitor these puffs of airborne data.”54

  Wait! What just happened? Remember that curse word of scientists: anthropomorphization? Now let’s get this straight: some middle-aged white males believe that when plants speak, they’re mainly doing this to hear themselves talk, and if anyone else happens to derive benefit from their ramblings, that’s all just coincidental? Middle-aged white males saying this? Project much?

  I’m making a joke, kind of, but the fact remains that these scientists are projecting their worldview onto the plants. They asked, “Why should one plant waste energy clueing in its competitors about a danger?” This question manifests pretty much everything that’s wrong with this culture, wrong with science, wrong with this culture’s relationship with the natural world, and wrong with relationships between humans in this culture. This question succinctly shows why and how this culture is killing the planet.

  I’ll answer the question. Why should one plant “waste” energy clueing in its “competitors” about a danger? Because the plants are smart enough to understand that they’re not the only creatures on the planet, and that their very survival requires the well-being of all these others. Plants in a redwood forest, for example, understand that a redwood forest consists of more than just redwoods, that it consists also of alders and cedars and firs and ferns and fungi and bears and otters and salmon and caddis flies. Industrial humans, including these researchers, don’t seem to understand that. And industrial humans, including especially foresters, don’t seem to understand that a tree farm of Douglas firs is not a forest. These plants understand that life is not a game of Risk, and they understand that the point of life is not for one group to eliminate every other group and conquer the world. They know that to do so would be immoral, insane, suicidal, and stupid. They know enough not to measure “superiority” by the ability to destroy all “competitors” but rather by the ability to improve the capacity of the landbase to support them. They understand something understood by Indigenous humans but understood by almost none of the civilized, that, as the Dakota writer Vine Doloria wrote, “Life is not a predatory jungle, ‘red in tooth and claw,’ as Western ideology likes to pretend, but a symphony of mutual respect in which each player has a specific part to play. We must be in our proper place and play our role at the proper moment.”

  My niece is visiting. I read her the scientists’ question, “Why should one plant waste energy clueing in its competitors about a danger?”

  She threw her hands into the air and exclaimed, “These people! Don’t they understand the importance of community?”

  Evidently not.

  I shared the quote (and the rest of the analysis) with another friend who responded, “This says everything you need to know about their worldview, and nothing about the real world. Why don’t they use the word neighbor instead of competitor?”

  Probably because they’re members of this exploitative culture. It shouldn’t surprise us that members of the same culture that gave us capitalism as the dominant economic model—based as it is on the insane notion that selfish individuals all attempting to maximally exploit each other will somehow create stable and healthy human communities (never mind that it never has and functionally cannot)—would give us variants of the selfish gene theory as the dominant biological model—based as it is on the equally insane notion that selfish individuals all attempting to maximally exploit each other will somehow create stable and healthy natural communities (never mind that it never has and functionally cannot). Both are justifications for what the dominant culture does: steal from everyone else. Absent is the reality of how communities survive and thrive. These must be absent, if members of our culture are going to feel good about themselves as they s
teal from and destroy everyone else, and as they ultimately kill the planet.

  It’s actually worse than this: not only must the reality of how communities survive and thrive be absent, acknowledgment that communities even exist must be fundamentally absent. In the 1980s, neoliberal icon Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” How different is this, really, than scientists believing that the most important unit of evolution is the individual (or even more perversely, the individual gene that happens to be carried by this individual, that happens to be within some larger collection of individuals, whom this individual is driven to exploit by selfish genes), and not communities. Communities don’t exist, except as collections of individuals from whom (or rather which) we must steal. It’s capitalism projected onto the natural world.

  But wait, I can hear the scientists say, this is not capitalism projected onto the natural world, because we’re just describing how the world really works. We’re not philosophizing or speculating or projecting or anthropomorphizing. This is reality!

  Just yesterday I heard a scientist say on television, “Science is truth.”

  And of course that’s one of the problems with science. It allows exploiters to pretend they’re describing reality when they’re speculating and projecting with the worst of them. And part of the point of any exploitative philosophy is to make the exploitation seem natural or inevitable. Thus it is pleasing for kings and their allies to propagate the notion that kings are placed on thrones by a God who looks quite like them. It is pleasing for men and their allies to propagate the notion that they are placed on their smaller more familial thrones by a God who also looks quite like them. It is pleasing for those who wish to steal land from American Indians to propagate the notion that it is their Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent, and it is pleasing as well for them to believe their way of life is superior to all of these others. It is pleasing for those who wish to exploit others to create a Great Chain of Being and to place themselves at its earthly top. It is pleasing for those who wish to “exploit natural resources” to create a philosophy, a worldview, an ideology, and a theology which declares the world to consist of “natural resources,” not other beings, and to deride evidence to the contrary as “speculation” or “philosophizing” or “anthropomorphizing.” It is pleasing for those who perceive themselves as superior to all others to create various and mutable rationales for this superiority, whether it is to generate a mythology where you’re created in the image of an omnipotent God or to create a mythology where your notion of what is true is based on your ability to enslave others, as Richard Dawkins puts it when he says that “science bases its claims to truth on its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command,” in other words, when he makes clear that the very epistemology of this culture is based on the ability to enslave. It is pleasing to those who wish to exploit others to declare, as writer Charles Mann does, about a world “run by human beings for human purposes,” that “anything goes. . . . Native Americans managed the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same.” But there is a world of difference between indigenous peoples forming long-term relationships with their landbases, and ExxonMobil drilling for gas.”55