The Myth of Human Supremacy

by Derrick Jensen

  Which is how you end up with discourse as absurd as this culture’s, with its talk of managing (read: killing) forests, managing (read: killing) oceans, managing (read: killing) wildlife, managing (read: killing) the entire planet.

  Not only does how you perceive the world affect how you behave in the world, how you behave in the world further affects how you perceive the world. Enslaving, torturing, and killing the world not only proceeds from but also helps create a religion, a science, a philosophy, an epistemology, a literature, and so on—in short, a culture—that declares humans to be superior to all others and human function to be real function and human meaning to be real meaning.

  It’s a very bad cycle. And it’s killing the real world.

  * * *

  89 “Ernest Duchesne,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Duchesne (accessed June 3, 2014).

  90 I of course would never do any of these, but you get the picture.

  91 “Fantasia,” IMDB, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032455/trivia (accessed June 15, 2014).

  92 David Fazekas, “What If Mosquitoes Were Annihilated?” Yahoo, May 29, 2014, http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/what-if-abc-news/what-if-mosquitoes-were-anihilated-194753142.html (accessed June 3, 2014).

  Two more things. The first is that nearly all of the comments below the article were in favor of this, simply because a lot of people find mosquitoes annoying. Only a few of the commenters were sane, describing what could happen to bats or others who consume mosquitoes, and describing the roles that mosquitoes play in natural communities. The other is that when I went to cut and paste the first quote from the article, there was a macro in the text that destroyed my entire book manuscript. Fortunately, and only because I’ve lost so much text so many times over the years, I belong to the religion of “backing up my files.” My point in bringing that up is that if something as simple as cutting and pasting text can destroy a manuscript, what can happen when you decisively interfere in something much larger and more complex, and living, like a forest? And further, if I understand the necessity of backing up manuscripts before making major changes, why can’t more people understand the necessity of not making large irreversible changes to the real world?

  93 “Oxytech ‘Negligent’ Over GM Mosquito Release in Panama,” Sustainable Pulse, February 12, 2014, http://sustainablepulse.com/2014/02/12/oxitec-negligent-gm-mosquito-release-panama/#.U44i1z9OXmQ (accessed June 3, 2014).

  94 Clare Wilson, “Baby’s First Gut Bacteria Could Come from Mum’s Mouth,” New Scientist, May 21, 2014, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25603-babys-first-gut-bacteria-may-come-from-mums-mouth.html#.U8rY3L7n_VI (accessed July 19, 2014).

  95 Jonathan Colob, “What is Snot?” The Stranger, December 21, 2011, http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/dear-science/Content?oid=11182785 (accessed June 4, 2014).

  Chapter Eight

  Regret

  In looking back, I see nothing to regret and little to correct.

  JOHN C. CALHOUN, WHITE SUPREMACIST AND FIRE-EATING PRO-SLAVERY SENATOR

  Rats experience regret when they make a wrong decision.

  Researchers at the University of Minnesota noticed this, and so decided to “design an experiment to induce regret in rats and then measure behavioral and neurophysiological markers consistent with regret.” The experiment was in itself benign, so let’s leave aside the ethics of intentionally and systematically attempting to induce regret in another, and leave aside what we would call such a person were he to do so to another human being, especially one whom he was holding captive, over whose life he has complete control. Instead, let’s for now accept this experiment’s unquestioned assumptions.

  The researchers differentiated disappointment from regret. Disappointment is a response to things not working out, they said, while “regret is the recognition that you made a mistake and if you had done something differently, things would have gone better.” Keep this definition in mind.

  The scientists trained rats to walk along a four-sided path. At each corner a short walkway led to a food station. Each food station had different flavored food, e.g, cherry- or chocolate- or banana-flavored pellets. Different rats, of course, had different food preferences. When a rat would reach a corner, a tone would sound indicating how long the rat might have to wait at that corner before receiving food. Rats would make reasoned decisions as to whether it would be worth their while to wait, for example, twenty seconds for a cherry-flavored pellet, or to move on to the next corner and hope the wait was shorter. The rats were generally willing to wait longer for food they liked more. All of this also, by the way, shows that rats have a sense of time; I know some people believe humans are the only creatures who have internal clocks, but that’s the sort of counterfactual insistence on absolute species uniqueness we’ve come to expect from members of this culture. It’s also important to note that the rats were able to decipher the time value of the different tones established by the humans. I wonder how often humans (including researchers) decipher messages rats establish for them. Or is this the same old human supremacist teleology, where humans are the only ones who create messages with meaning, while nonhumans at best react?

  The researchers mixed up the wait times, so the rats wouldn’t know at one corner what the wait would be at the next. They compared this to humans going to restaurants, not knowing until they got there what the wait would be for a table: “You can wait at the Chinese restaurant and eat there, or you can say, ‘Forget it. This wait is too long,’ and go to the Indian restaurant across the street.”

  The core of the experiment, according to science writer Mary Bates, was that “researchers wanted to know what would happen when a rat skipped a good deal and then found out the next restaurant was a bad deal. (In one example, a rat that [sic] had an 18-second threshold for both cherry and banana skipped the cherry option when the wait was only 8 seconds. Then it came to the banana option and the wait was 25 seconds.)

  “In these situations, the rat stopped and looked back at the previous restaurant it had passed on. ‘It looked like Homer Simpson going, “D’oh!”’ says [researcher] Redish.

  “Steiner and Redish compared the behavior of the rats in regret conditions (skipping a good deal only to find themselves with a worse deal) to what they did in disappointment conditions (they made the right choice—taking a good deal or skipping a bad deal—but the next restaurant was a bad deal, anyway). The rats showed three behaviors consistent with regret. First, the rats only looked backwards in the regret conditions, and not in the disappointment conditions. Second, they were more likely to take a bad deal if they had just passed up a good deal. And third, instead of taking their time eating and then grooming themselves afterwards, the rats in the regret conditions wolfed down the food and immediately took off to the next restaurant.”

  The scientists also recorded neural activity, and found it was similar to that in humans experiencing regret. Both journalist and scientist were quick, however, to make sure we remember that there remains a chasm between humans and nonhumans: “That doesn’t mean regret is the same in humans and rats; as Redish points out, deliberating over the choice of flavored food pellet is not the same as deliberating over which college to attend, and we don’t see rats doing the latter.”96

  Of course we don’t see rats doing the latter. Rats aren’t given a choice as to which college they will “attend,” that is, in which cage they will be imprisoned. They aren’t given a choice as to whether the experiments they participate in will be ones where they’re given a choice of different flavored pellets; or ones where they’re intentionally traumatized, made to inhale lavender oil, then pickled alive before having their brains dissected to see if the lavender oil helped reduce their anxiety; or perhaps ones where they’re put into jars of water to see how long they can swim before they give up and drown; or experiments where rats are turned into alcoholics, and the
n stressed to see if this makes them drink more (and by the way, many studies include scientists addicting rats to various drugs; it ends up, however, that whatever validity these studies may have extends only to imprisoned rats, because wild and free rats aren’t interested in becoming addicted, as they presumably have better things to do; and what does that say about our way of life?); or experiments where they’re given hideous diseases or grievously injured; or the $2.6 million 2009 study at New York University where infant rats were given electric shocks while being overwhelmed with the smell of peppermint (in the hopes that the infants would associate this smell with their mothers, and so perceive their mothers and not the scientists as being their torturers), then after weeks of this and other torment (which included stressing the mother so much that she in turn abused the infants), they were put into pools of water with no way to get out so the researchers could time how long the rats swam before giving up, then pulled out of the water just before death so the scientists could implant electrodes into their brains that released the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms, then put back into the water until they once again gave up, after which they were killed and dissected.

  Of course rats don’t regret what school they’re killed at, nor do they regret never being able to touch the ground, nor that they’ll never have natural interactions with their friends and relatives. They regret none of that, because they were never given those choices. Human supremacists don’t care about choices made by free rats; we don’t know if under natural conditions rats routinely regret roads (and cheeses) not taken. Their lives were under the complete control of someone else, with their “choice” reduced to which artificially-flavored pellet they may eat as a reward for performing tricks their owners lay out.

  Now that I think about it, that’s not so different from the choices made by many humans.

  But there’s a bigger question here than whether rats can feel regret over this or that wrong choice. The real question is, can humans feel regret? Do humans have the capacity to have that “recognition that you made a mistake and if you had done something differently, things would have gone better”? If they have that capacity, why the hell don’t they manifest it? Oh, I don’t mean over questions like whether to eat cherry- or chocolate-flavored pellets, or whether to attend this or that college. I mean real questions having to do with the real world. I don’t see a lot of regret over the extermination of great auks, passenger pigeons, or Eskimo curlews. The only regret I see over the multiple decimation of the cod is that they’re no longer there in numbers sufficient for profitable exploitation. I’m not seeing a lot of regret over actions that are leading to the murder—oh, I’m sorry, reorganization—of the oceans. What, by and large, has been the cultural response to the melting of the icecaps? Regret? Hell, no. The overriding response has been the money-lust of the few who will profit from the newly exploitable minerals and oil and from the much-anticipated Northwest Passage (typical headline: “Arctic Ice Melt Seen Freeing Way for South Korean Oil Hub”; typical quote: Korea “plans to add tanks for storing almost 60 million barrels of crude and refined products by 2020, about the same as Singapore’s current capacity. The nation also seeks to leverage its energy infrastructure, which includes five refineries, to become Northeast Asia’s oil hub, said Kim Jun Dong, the deputy minister of energy and resources policy.”97 And another typical headline: “Climate Change Tourism Comes to the Arctic: $20,000 Luxury Cruise to Sail the Once-Unnavigable Northwest Passage.”98)

  And how much regret is the dominant culture manifesting over land theft and genocide against Indigenous humans? Certainly not enough to give back the land. Not enough to overturn a United States Supreme Court ruling that said, in essence, that if this way of life is based on land theft and genocide, then such land theft and genocide “becomes the law of the land, and cannot be questioned”99 (and truer words have rarely been written by a Supreme Court Justice, nor have there been many more explicit articulations of the role of law in justifying atrocity and the legalization of both exploitation and unquestioned beliefs). Not regret enough for the United States to not have a national holiday named for the first European slaver to reach the Americas, on the anniversary of the beginning of the American Holocaust. Not enough to stop the ongoing land theft and genocide against Indigenous humans that is happening as you read this.

  How you perceive the world affects how and what you feel. It affects whether and what you regret. So of course if your way of life is based on privatizing benefits and externalizing costs, and if you are raised to believe that it is not only acceptable but desirable and indeed natural and inevitable to exploit others, or that others were put here or are just here for you to exploit, you’re probably not going to feel a lot of regret as atrocities are committed in your name against them. Exploitative behavior has become “the law of the land, and cannot be questioned.” In other words, if you’re a sociopath you’re probably not going to have a lot of regret over harm you do to others, except insofar as it harms your ability to further exploit them.

  Regret the extirpation of a species? Not on your life. Regret our not being able to exploit them further? Now we’re talking.

  This is one reason nearly all news articles about an endangered species must include reference to this species’ financial value to the economy. From the perspective of human supremacists, financial value is value. The inherent value of the other—the value of this other to itself and to its family or community or larger biotic community—is either going to be ignored, or at best, grossly undervalued.

  Only if there is no available substitute for the supremacist to exploit (until the substitute too is endangered, then disappeared) will the supremacist concern himself with this other’s continued existence. And only in that case might the supremacist perceive this other’s endangerment as at least a trifle worrisome.

  To be clear, what supremacists regret is almost never the decisions they make that lead them to exploit and commit atrocities against others, nor the effects of their atrocities on everyone but themselves (and possibly members of their ingroup), but rather they regret only ways that prior exploitation has decreased their current capacity to exploit.

  The scientists I just cited reasonably defined regret as the “recognition that you made a mistake and if you had done something differently, things would have gone better.”

  Let’s talk about how some “things” have gone because of actions taken by this culture, and let’s talk about whether this culture regrets these actions.

  Let’s talk about topsoil. It’s gone. Around the world. The Levant. China. Southern Europe. Africa. Even places where this culture is a relative newcomer, like the American Midwest and the Canadian prairie, have lost up to 98 percent of their topsoil.

  And how has this topsoil gone? Primarily through agriculture, and also through other forms of removing vegetation, like deforestation. For six thousand years agriculture and deforestation have been carving their way across the planet, and for six thousand years the planet has been losing topsoil.

  Do humans regret these actions?

  Not by any important measure. They certainly don’t regret them enough to stop destroying topsoil. In fact, the murder of topsoil—you do know that soil is alive, and is the basis of all terrestrial life, right? Oh, but I forgot, only what humans do can have true function, so soil has no true function—is accelerating.

  Forests, 98 percent gone. Do human supremacists regret murdering forests? Not enough to stop.

  Prairies, 99 percent gone. Do human supremacists regret murdering prairies? Not enough to stop.

  Wetlands, 99 percent gone. Do human supremacists regret murdering wetlands? Not enough to stop.

  A stable climate. Gone. Do human supremacists regret destabilizing the climate? Not enough to stop.

  Indigenous human cultures. Do human supremacists regret murdering Indigenous humans (for remember: Indigenous humans are, to human supremacists, bel
ow the human/nature divide in the Great Chain of Being)? Not enough to stop.

  I could go on and on and on. Unfortunately, that is what human supremacists are doing when it comes to murdering the planet: going on and on and on.

  Can human supremacists experience regret? I’m not seeing much evidence for that.

  Maybe some rats should set up an experiment.

  Nah. What’s the point? When it comes to harming others, we know human supremacists can’t experience regret.

  •••

  Of course human supremacists don’t regret the ongoing murder of the planet, else they would stop it. Whatever regret they may eventually feel will only be because they wished they could have made a couple more bucks before the planet died. And of course they will regret that the wretched stupid weak goddamn Earth betrayed them by spitefully dying, which made it so humans could never reach our magnificent potential as the most glorious beings in existence, the ones whose brains are the most complex phenomenon in the known universe, the ones to whom every being should sing (to the tune of the famous doxology), “Praise Man From Whom All Meaning Flows, Praise Him all creatures here below, Praise Him ye heavenly host.” Fucking ungrateful treacherous Earth robbed us of what we could have been, all by dying. And what the hell did we ever do to the earth to deserve this?

  Apart from all that, human supremacists don’t and won’t regret the murder of the earth. Why should they? They still have televisions and computers and iPhones. These are clearly more important than a living planet. In fact, a living planet is only important insofar as it makes these other things possible. Televisions, computers, and iPhones have meaning. Zebras, musk oxen, water fleas, and sulfur shelf mushrooms do not.

  The scientists defined regret as “the recognition that you made a mistake and if you had done something differently, things would have gone better.”