The Myth of Human Supremacy

by Derrick Jensen

  So, based on the clearly articulated and lived values of human supremacists, there’s no reason for human supremacists to regret anything that has happened so far, because there’s no reason to presume that they believe they’ve made any major mistakes, or that they think they should have done anything differently, or that they think that things could have gone better. After all, they have their computers and iPhones. Never mind that the oceans are being murdered. Who gives a shit, right?

  And human supremacists call themselves intelligent?

  I’m having trouble even granting them the phrase “aware of their surroundings.”

  * * *

  96 Mary Bates, “Rats Regret Making the Wrong Decision,” Wired, June 8, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/06/rats-regret-making-the-wrong-decision/ (accessed June 18, 2014).

  97 Ann Koh and Heesu Lee, “Arctic Ice Melt Seen Freeing Way for South Korean Oil Hub,” Bloomberg, July 23, 2014, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-22/arctic-ice-melt-seen-freeing-way-for-south-korean-oil-hub.html (accessed July 23, 2014).

  98 Terrell Johnson, “Climate Change Tourism Comes to the Arctic: $20,000 Luxury Cruise to Sail the Once-Unnavigable Northwest Passage,” weather.com, July 29, 2014, http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/melting-arctic-20000-luxury-cruises-climate-change-tourism-20140728 (accessed July 31, 2014).

  99 Johnson v M’Intosh (1823), http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3104237999990733260&q=johnson+v.+mcintosh&hl=en&as_sdt=2006&as_vis=1 (accessed June 19, 2014).

  Chapter Nine

  The Seamlessness of Supremacism

  White [and I would say human] supremacy is the conscious or unconscious belief or the investment in the inherent superiority of some, while others are believed to be innately inferior. And it doesn’t demand the individual participation of the singular bigot. It is a machine operating in perpetuity, because it doesn’t demand that somebody be in place driving.

  MICHAEL ERIC DYSON

  Male [and I would say human] supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

  ANDREA DWORKIN

  Let’s turn how we perceive the world back onto ourselves. A friend of yours tells me that you’re sentient, and that the two of you communicate. I don’t believe your friend. She insists that you two have conversations all the time. I laugh at her. She asks what it would take for me to believe you are sentient and that you and she communicate. I, following what that mechanistic scientist said to me so many years ago, tell her that it would take her telling you to do something that is against your nature, and you doing it.

  This is just the same old epistemology of control so well articulated by Richard Dawkins: we need to make these others jump through hoops on command. It’s also the same old naturalistic [sic] notion, based on the Great Chain of Being, that what humans suggest has meaning, purpose, function, and what nonhumans do has none.

  What gives me the right to propose those conditions? And what the hell are you supposed to do to prove me wrong? How should you go against your nature? Let’s say suddenly a swarm of aphids begins crawling all over you. Can you let the nearby trees know they should prepare defenses? Can you persuade a horde of ladybugs to rescue you? What? You say the trees and ladybugs can’t understand your muffled screams under the rising mound of aphids? Is that because the trees and ladybugs are too stupid to understand what you’re saying? Or maybe it’s because you can’t go against your nature and speak their language using pheromones. Maybe you’re the stupid one. Maybe you’re the one who can’t communicate. I mean, for crying out loud, a little baby tree could do that! And you can’t? What’s wrong with you?100 Or forget the aphids: maybe your friend can suggest you go against your nature by bashing your nose as hard as you can against a tree to make a small opening, and then using your tongue to pull a grub out of the hole. Or maybe you can dive naked into the Arctic Ocean and swim down to get some mussels to eat. If you can’t act against your nature in any of these ways, you must not be intelligent, and I’m sure that you and your friend don’t communicate at all.

  If plants were to construct a Great Chain of Being, something I have no doubt they would neither be stupid nor arrogant enough to do, I could then see them suggesting that such human languages as English or Mandarin are rudimentary because they rely so heavily on the mechanical energy of vocalization and because they so willfully give such short shrift to other complex and deeply influential languages, such as those that use pheromones.

  My point is that it is, once again, tautological to consider humans as somehow more intelligent or having lives more meaningful than others because our primary recognized languages use mechanical energy, as opposed to, for example, chemical energy. It’s completely absurd. And lazy. And arrogant. And self-serving.

  We can go through this same process for other arguments human supremacists use to rationalize their supremacism. But we all should be able to think our own way through these, right? Wouldn’t that be something members of the most intelligent species should be able to do?

  So I’m only going to go through three more arguments.

  •••

  The first is that humans are superior because we’re the only creatures who use tools. This is tautological. Here is a common definition of tool: “a device or implement, especially one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function.” Great! Humans, who have opposable thumbs, decide that a characteristic that defines them as superior is the use of tools, many of which require opposable thumbs. Yeah, and I’m superior because I wrote books and you didn’t, remember?

  Using a broader definition of tool as “an item or implement used for a specific purpose,” humans, of course, aren’t the only beings who use tools. But as we’ve seen—and this is obviously not unique to human supremacism—ideology nearly always trumps reality in how we make sense of the world around us. When we learn of nonhumans who use tools, we nearly always—just as with the discussion concerning the relationship between brain size and intelligence, or the discussion concerning plant communication—change the discourse terms to make certain that we remain number one. It doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about crows or fish or dolphins (who’ve been known to use tools to masturbate) or chimpanzees, or woodpeckers, or beavers, or bees building honeycombs, there’s always a reason the tool usage isn’t real tool usage. And it frankly all boils down to this: if humans do it, it’s meaningful and real and shows true function; if nonhumans do it, it doesn’t.

  But there’s another point to be made here, beyond this, and it has to do with sneezing, and with diarrhea.

  If you’ve ever sneezed or had diarrhea, then you’ve probably been used as a tool, that is, as “an item or implement used for a specific purpose.” You could and probably would argue that you’re not an item or implement, so by definition couldn’t be a tool, but my argument is that nobody is an item or implement; trees are just as alive and just as much subjective beings as are you. You could also argue that people don’t use trees as tools; they use wood, and just as someone could carve one of your bones into a tool, that’s not the same as using you as a tool. I could then turn your argument around and say that it’s one thing to use some thing as a tool, and quite another and more impressive task to get a subjective being to do your bidding, and even more so to get this being to like it.

  And when you get right down to it, viruses, bacteria, amoebae, and so on basically use you as a sprinkler to broadcast their babies. When you sneeze, what are you doing? You’re sending whomever caused you to sneeze out into the world, to find new food, I mean, tools, I mean, wonderful splendid unique human beings whom they can infect. And what is diarrhea? Remember how the bacteria can collectively decide it’s time to make you poop? And to do so explosively, meaning you spread your feces (and the little darlings who caused it) all around, all the better to find new homes? And the thing is, in
the case of sneezing, they get you to like it. In the case of diarrhea, probably not so much.

  In my books Songs of the Dead and Dreams, I explored at length the question of how various parasites change the behavior of their hosts, and asked the question of who is really in charge in those situations. When a dog or skunk becomes rabid, he or she in some cases starts snapping at others while drooling; the parasite’s new generation is in the saliva, and the parasite is causing the behavior changes, so the potential bites can infect another. I’ve already mentioned in this book the parasites who cause fish to swim to the surface and flash their bellies, making it easier for sea birds to ingest the fish, and thus the worms. Or there are liver flukes who move into the bodies of ants, take over their minds—or, for you human supremacists, their “minds”— leading the ants each night to climb to the top of a blade of grass and clamp down hard, then wait there till morning, in the hopes that overnight a cow or sheep will ingest the grass, and thus the ant, and thus the liver fluke, who then takes up residence in the ungulate. Or there are parasites who cause snails to climb to the tops of rocks and wave their shells around, drawing the attention of birds, who eat the snails, and thus the parasites.

  And don’t think humans are immune to this. We are, no matter how much we may pretend we are not, animals and parts of larger natural communities. Remember that the next time you sneeze or get diarrhea. Or the next time you scratch your butt; pinworms can live in our intestines, and breed near our rectums. In the early morning, the females will crawl out of the anus and lay eggs. The eggs make us itch. If someone uses his finger to scratch this itch, he gets the eggs on his finger. If, as some children do, he later puts his finger in his mouth, the eggs are home free. But even if he doesn’t put his finger in his mouth, all is not lost. If he touches, say, an item of clothing or a piece of furniture, and someone else later touches this clothing or furniture, then later touches his or her mouth, the pinworms have found a new home.

  Face it. They’re using you. You’re a tool. No, not that way. Literally.

  And we can’t pretend that the results of being used can be fatal for nonhumans, but not humans. Dysentery, caused by amoebae or bacteria, killed more people in the American Civil War than did bullets. Right now three-quarters of a million people die each year from dysentery.

  •••

  The point is that it’s nonsense to say that humans are the only creatures who use tools, especially when humans are routinely used as incubators, sprinklers, means of conveyance, food, and so on by nonhumans.

  •••

  There’s a sense in which it’s already easy for modern humans to accept that we’re used as tools. No, I’m not suggesting modern humans would accept we’re being used as tools by mere nonhumans. Not at all. We could never accept that.

  But most people accept that the capitalist system uses them as tools. And for decades now Richard Dawkins and others have been making the argument that humans are basically the tools of selfish genes. He says that these selfish genes “swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots [by which he means you and me and everyone else], sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”101

  The selfish gene theory is extremely influential, with tremendous acceptance (acknowledged or not) within both the scientific community and the general (non-Christian) public. So on one level we’re fairly used to being considered tools.

  The point I’m interested in making here is not the one I’ve made so many times before, which is that the selfish gene theory so well serves the dominant culture by naturalizing oppressive and harmful and exploitative behavior. Some of the tag copy for Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene lays it out plainly: “This book tells of the selfish gene. A world of savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit.” No wonder it’s so popular; it’s basically libertarianism and capitalism projected onto the natural world.

  The point I’m more interested in at the moment is how much easier it seems to be for many people to accept Dawkins’s language than it might be for many of us to accept that nonhumans use us, and more broadly, that nonhumans are capable of using tools.

  It’s very simple, I think. It has to do with what Mancuso said about so many people having trouble accepting that plants are intelligent, but these same people seeming perfectly willing to accept “artificial intelligence,” because computers are our creations, and so reflect our own intelligence back at us. As opposed to plants, whose intelligence is other.

  Reread the quote above by Dawkins. It is saturated with machine language. Hell, he calls us “machines.” It is pure projection of machine onto the real world. And I think that is why people in this human supremacist culture so eagerly accept his logic (apart from the fact that it rationalizes exploitation and the destruction of community). Sure, I’ve got no problem saying we’re controlled by machines. And in fact, I’ve got no problem saying those little bacterial gene machines give us big ol’ lumbering robots the runs.

  But what if we turn it around, say that communities of bacteria decide it’s time to send some of their young into the great unknown in an explosive and exuberant spray, in some great diaspora, and they use your muscles, your body, to do it?

  Suddenly, faced with the notion of an animate universe, the barriers go up: No fucking way; you’ve got to be shittin’ me, man.

  •••

  The second human supremacist argument is the one that really blows all of my arguments out of the water. Instead of something like brain size, you could say, why don’t we go straight to one of the central definitions of intelligence and talk about an ability to solve problems? That’s pretty much checkmate, isn’t it?

  I agree. I don’t think any intelligent person would expect a penguin to be able to adjust a carburetor. Of course, no intelligent person would expect me to be able to adjust one, either. But the fact remains that humans excel at solving problems. Let’s ask that penguin to solve analytical reasoning problems of the sort we ourselves might try unsuccessfully to solve on the Graduate Record Exams and see how it does . . .

  Question 1 (and these are real questions from a practice exam website): “A person starts walking north, stops after 15 km, then turns 45 degrees right. Next, this person turns 135 degrees in an anti-clockwise direction. How far is this person from the starting point and in which direction is this person facing?”

  A penguin wouldn’t be able to . . . oh, wait, actually a penguin probably could answer this question, and could also answer it while swimming in varying ocean currents, catching fish or krill, and avoiding leopard seals.

  Question 2: “I promised my mother that I would meet her in the month of October, but it should be a Sunday. Thursday morning my mother called me up and reminded me to meet her by stating that ‘Today is the 21st of August and September is coming very soon.’ On which of the following dates could I meet my mother?”

  So you’re right: a penguin probably couldn’t answer that one, although I’m guessing a lot of penguins see their relatives a lot more often than this person seems to.

  But I get your point. Humans solve problems. That’s how we got to where we are today, by solving problems. And I’m sure you know what I mean by “where we are today”: on a world being murdered. And I’m sure you know that unfortunately, most people don’t see it that way, when they see it at all, which is a problem these human supremacists can’t seem to solve. Humans are great because we can solve problems that couldn’t have been solved (read: created) by penguins, whales, octopi, bald eagles, tallgrass prairies, estuaries, mountains, or moonlight. You can’t argue with this.

  But I’m going to anyway. I have at least three prob
lems with it. The first is that the notion that humans are superior because we solve problems is once again and as always tautological; humans define themselves in part by their ability to solve problems, or rather, some problems of a certain sort, solved only in certain ways; humans define intelligence and superiority as based in great measure on their ability to solve these particular problems in these particular ways; humans have therefore defined humans as having intelligence and being superior. Isn’t it wonderful how it always seems to work out that way?

  But it’s even worse than this, because as I alluded to, it’s all based on very specific and limited definitions of problems and solutions.

  When I think about people who conflate intelligence with solving more or less meaningless problems in logic, the first person I think of is Marilyn vos Savant, whose website states she was listed for five years in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the highest IQ. The most well-known way she uses her intelligence is in a weekly column in Parade Magazine where people ask her brain teasers kind of like the ones above.

  My main problem with her is not that sometimes when answering her questions she throws in her fundamentally authoritarian, misogynist, and pro-capitalist politics. My main problem is that for many years I’ve wanted to send her a couple of questions of my own, formed into sort of a story problem: “Decades ago a friend said to me that if the universe gives you a gift, and you do not use this gift in the service of your community, in the service of life, then you are not worth shit. I immediately saw the truth in what he said, and changed my actions accordingly. So, if you really have the world’s highest (human) IQ, and if having the world’s highest (human) IQ really means you are extremely intelligent, why are you using this gift to play parlor games, especially those where the real point seems to be for you or others to show off? The world is being murdered, oceans are being murdered, rivers are being murdered, mountains are being murdered, Indigenous human cultures are being murdered, hundreds of millions of women living right now have been raped, industrial civilization is causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet, and this is how you choose to use your gift? If you really have been given this extraordinary gift by the universe, explain to whatever humans may be living in the wreckage of the world fifty years from now why they should not hate you for misusing and abusing your gift in this way, for completely failing to use your gift in the service of life.”