The Myth of Human Supremacy

by Derrick Jensen

  As we see.

  * * *

  109 Eli Strokols, “Judge Overturns Fort Collins Five-year Fracking Ban,” Fox31 Denver, August 7, 2014, http://kdvr.com/2014/08/07/judge-overturns-fort-collins-five-year-fracking-ban/?mc_cid=b6a58e25f9&mc_eid=83a5da071d (accessed August 9, 2014).

  110 Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture, 5, no. 1 (Winter 1964): 2.

  111 Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” 3–4.

  112 G. K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories (London: BBC Books, 2013), 84.

  113 Once again, how do you think the world became so fecund and beautiful in the first place, if not by the actions of those who live here? Contrary to the beliefs of human supremacists of flavors both monotheistic and scientific, the world didn’t just somehow become this wonderful all so we can destroy it. As accustomed as I unfortunately am to this culture’s insanity, it still never ceases to amaze me that while almost no sane people of good heart believe the capitalist conceit that selfish individuals ruthlessly trying to exploit each other will, through the magic of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, lead to healthy, functioning, vibrant communities, yet a lot of seemingly sane scientists of seemingly good heart can without flinching project the same nonsensical capitalist conceit onto the natural world and believe that selfish individuals ruthlessly trying to exploit each other will, this time through the magic of random actions, lead to healthy functioning natural communities, or as they call them, “ecosystems.”

  114 Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” 4.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Divine Right of Machines

  The State of monarchy is the supreme thing on Earth. . . . As to dispute what God may do is blasphemy, so is it treason in subjects to dispute what a king may do.

  KING JAMES I

  Years ago my friend Frances Moore Lappé told me she derives a certain amount of optimism from the question, “Why did people stop believing in the Divine Right of Kings?” Her answer? “They just did. At one point they believed that kings were put on the throne by God, and then at some point they didn’t. My optimism comes from the fact that they just stopped believing in this destructive notion. We can do that with other destructive notions as well.”

  I wish I shared her optimism. But it seems clear to me that people have not, in fact, stopped believing in the Divine Right of Kings. This belief, and the Great Chain of Being that rationalizes it, runs our culture more now than ever before; it is just that the insanity, megalomania, power-lust, feelings of specialness and superiority, and claims to unbounded power that used to be associated specifically with royalty have now spread to the widest reaches and most formative depths of this supremacist culture. The Divine Right of Kings has not been abandoned. It has morphed into the Divine Right of Humans, especially the Divine Right of Industrial (“Developed”) Humans. Even worse, it has morphed into the Divine Right of Machines.

  •••

  Mumford again: “That authoritarian technics has come back today in an immensely magnified and adroitly perfected form. Up to now, following the optimistic premises of nineteenth century thinkers like Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, we have regarded the spread of experimental science and mechanical invention as the soundest guarantee of a peaceful, productive, above all democratic, industrial society. Many have even comfortably supposed that the revolt against arbitrary political power in the seventeenth century was causally connected with the industrial revolution that accompanied it. But what we have interpreted as the new freedom now turns out to be a much more sophisticated version of the old slavery: for the rise of political democracy during the last few centuries has been increasingly nullified by the successful resurrection of a centralized authoritarian technics—a technics that had in fact for long lapsed in many parts of the world. Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might be in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that has now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual cost to life.”115

  •••

  Actually, things are much worse than either Mumford or I have so far presented.

  It should be clear by now that authoritarian technics run the society, such that the culture as a collective cannot imagine living without, for example, industrially-generated electricity; and such that when faced with the murder—sorry, reorganization—of the planet through global warming, this culture’s response is to continue the burning of oil, gas, and coal; and to continue constructing dams, cutting down forests for “biomass,’ and constructing industrial wind and solar, all of which harm the planet. Those who care could keep adding to this list of authoritarian and destructive technics that rule this society until the world is dead. And even up to the last moment, most people won’t care, so long as they can somehow still rationalize their own feelings of superiority.

  •••

  Noam Chomsky and others, for example Ernst Mayr, have argued that intelligent life is not sustainable. In an essay entitled “Human Intelligence and the Environment,” Chomsky writes that Mayr “basically argued that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation. And he had a good argument. He pointed out that if you take a look at biological success, which is essentially measured by how many of us are there, the organisms that do quite well are those that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or those that are stuck in a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. But as you go up the scale of what we call intelligence, they are less and less successful. By the time you get to mammals, there are very few of them as compared with, say, insects. By the time you get to humans, the origin of humans may be 100,000 years ago, there is a very small group. We are kind of misled now because there are a lot of humans around, but that’s a matter of a few thousand years, which is meaningless from an evolutionary point of view. His argument was, you’re just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won’t find it here for very long either because it’s just a lethal mutation. He also added, a little bit ominously, that the average life span of a species, of the billions that have existed, is about 100,000 years, which is roughly the length of time that modern humans have existed.

  “With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we’ll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.”116116

  Chomsky is a brilliant thinker and writer. He has done more than almost any other person in the last fifty years to expose United States imperialism. But these statements—and this is true for many of Chomsky’s comments on the natural world—reveal how decisively unquestioned beliefs in human supremacism affect discourse.

  We shouldn’t be surprised that Mayr and so m
any others believe intelligence is lethal. This culture teaches us that the way we know something is true is by controlling others: by forcing matter and energy to jump through hoops on command. The dominant cultural narrative tells us that our greatest achievements are those that facilitate our domination of others. This culture conflates “cooperation” with top-down organizational systems that have as their function the multiplication of power. Is it any wonder, then, that members of this culture believe that intelligence is “lethal”?

  But how can we stop the murder of the planet if leading intellectuals label intelligence itself as “lethal,” and say that the murder of the planet is a result of this intelligence?

  I want to deconstruct a few of these comments before I get to the main point of bringing this up. In the essay I’ve been quoting from, Chomsky writes, “If you take a look at biological success, which is essentially measured by how many of us are there . . .” But this is not an appropriate or realistic measure of biological success. Instead it is one that is based on this culture’s model of overshoot and conquest. We’ve all been taught that life is somehow like a computer game, where your success is measured by how many points you rack up; or like Risk, where your success is measured by how many little plastic armies you have and how much of the map you control. But this measure of biological success is simply the same old Biblical commandment to go forth and multiply projected onto the natural world. It’s also, since they come from the same imperative, a projection of the dominant economic mindset onto the natural world, a capitalist mindset where your success is measured by how many dollars or how many franchises you own. Switching terms again, but still coming from the same imperative, it’s a projection onto the natural world of a colonialist or imperialist mindset where your success is measured by how much of other people’s land you take over for your own use and to increase your numbers. That’s the definition of a colonialist mindset. And it is precisely how this culture has maximized its numbers—succeeded, according to this metric—by taking over someone else’s land (in this case, land needed by both Indigenous humans, and nonhumans).

  So many anti-imperialists understand all this when it comes to economic and social policy, but it is a measure of the hold that human supremacism has over our minds and our discourse that these same anti-imperialists—and, in fact, most of us—cannot see that the definition of biological success they use is precisely the measure of success for colonialism or empire. In this case it is simply human empire, or more precisely, an empire of authoritarian technics.

  I would argue that a far better measure of biological success would be whether the presence and population of a given species improves the health and resilience of the larger biotic community of whom it is a member and on whom it relies for sustenance, thereby ensuring its own species’ survival as well as the survival of other members of its biotic community. How would we act differently if we allowed this definition of ecological success to influence our social policies?

  Next, please note the phrase “up the scale.” That is directly from the Great Chain of Being. But there is no Great Chain of Being that goes from unintelligent nonhumans to lethally intelligent humans.

  Now to the point, which is that I’m really uncomfortable with intelligence being labeled as lethal, mainly because I don’t think it’s accurate, but also because it naturalizes the destructiveness. This is why, as every anti-imperialist knows, colonizers nearly always attempt to justify as right or natural their status at the top of the hierarchy they themselves created. (It’s funny, isn’t it, that the ones who create, then articulate these “natural” hierarchies so often end up at the top. What are the odds?) I’m also uncomfortable because it doesn’t make any sense to me that even when we do literally the stupidest thing possible, which is to kill the planet that is our only home and that supports our lives, it is a sign of our intelligence. We’re so damn smart that we’re maladaptive.

  But this is one of the ways supremacisms control our thought and discourse: no matter what evidence is presented, even if it is damning to the supremacist’s in-group, we’ll find some way to use it to reinforce our sense of superiority.

  •••

  Here’s another thing that kills me about the notion that intelligence is lethal, or that humans are killing the planet because we’re so damn smart. At the same time that some humans have been killing the planet, and through many of the same processes, and for many of the same reasons, those same humans who have been killing the planet—the civilized; those who are enslaved to authoritarian technics—have been killing Indigenous humans, overrunning, committing genocide against, and often exterminating them. If you were to look at a time-lapse map of worsening ecological conditions and superimpose upon it a time-lapse map of the expansion of civilized, agricultural peoples, and over that a time-lapse map of land stolen from Indigenous peoples, you would find that the maps were pretty much the same. Yet somehow, public intellectuals—and a lot of them—can get by saying that the destruction is caused because humans as a species are so damn smart. And a lot of listeners in this human supremacist culture nod their heads and thoughtfully rub their chins, NPR-style. But the same processes that led, and lead, to the murder of the planet also led, and lead, to land theft from Indigenous humans (in the former case it’s land theft from nonhumans, and in the latter it’s land theft from both the humans and the nonhumans with whom they live). How would these same listeners respond if the public intellectuals said that some humans, by which they meant civilized humans (including, ahem, whites), have been able to overrun Indigenous nations (including those made up of, ahem, people of color) because of the superior intelligence of the conquerors? “Oh, the Europeans conquered North America and destroyed hundreds of Indigenous cultures because the Europeans are far more intelligent, and intelligence is a lethal mutation.” How would that sound? Because that’s really what they’re saying.

  •••

  Ah, but what if they have a point? What if “intelligence,” as defined by human supremacists, is lethal? I’m not saying that civilized humans are smarter than Indigenous humans (or, for that matter, anyone else on the planet). I’m saying, what if the primary form of intelligence we recognize, we reward, we encourage, we worship; what if that form of intelligence is lethal?

  •••

  There are at least two other problems with blaming “intelligence” for the murder of the planet. The first—and this is, of course, one of the reasons it’s done—is that it fuels this already-supremely-narcissistic culture’s narcissism. This is the worst thing you can do with a narcissist. “Oh, we’re killing the planet because we’re so smart? How kind of you to say that. Of course it’s nothing less than what we deserve. . . . We’re completely fabulous, don’t you agree? Even the oceans agree. And if they don’t, we’ll kill them. The planet just cannot handle our raw intelligence.”

  The second reason is that saying our “intelligence” is a “lethal mutation” transforms the murder of the planet from the ongoing result of lots of very bad and very immoral ongoing social choices, which we can name, and which provide benefits for some classes of people at the expense of others, into something beyond our control, into something we can do nothing about, into a classic tragedy, with us starring (of course) as the tragic hero whose tragic flaw is that he is just too damn smart for this world.

  I’m sure that would play well to the right audience.

  I’m not sure Indigenous humans or nonhumans, though, would like it very much.

  The notion of being so smart that we kill the planet is pretty much the ultimate oxymoron (emphasis on moron). I know I’ve said this before, but I’m going to keep saying it because we as a culture are clearly collectively not getting it: there is no action any species could take that would be more completely, fundamentally, unforgivably stupid than to harm the capacity of the planet to support life. The planet that is our only home.

  It takes world-class stupidity t
o foul the entire planet.

  And that’s really the point here. By calling the murder of the planet an act of intelligence, one is encouraging that destructiveness. Smart is good, right? We’d rather be smart than not smart, right?

  How would our society as a whole act differently if, instead of portraying the acts of destroying forests or killing oceans as signs and validations of our intelligence, we were to speak honestly about them, and say that they are acts of mind-boggling stupidity? How would we act differently if public intellectuals argued that this culture is killing the planet because we’re so fucking stupid? Wouldn’t that change our behavior?

  Of course if someone were to argue that humans are killing the planet because humans are lethally stupid, I would still point out that plenty of Indigenous cultures did not destroy their landbases. So I would argue that it is not that humans are stupid, but that this culture makes people stupid, in fact so stupid that they would rather kill the planet that is the source of our lives and the lives of all these other beautiful beings with whom we share this planet, than to acknowledge that they are making stupid social choice after stupid social choice.