And that, really, is the essence of this book, and the essence of the ideological and physical war on which the future of life on this planet rests.
If your definition of superiority means that you are stealing from everyone else on the planet to make “comforts or elegancies” for yourself and the few generations who follow, leaving behind an impoverished or murdered world, then human supremacists really are superior.
If, on the other hand, your definition of superiority has to do with leaving the earth in better health than when you entered—if you value relationships more than power—then this culture fails completely.
•••
I’m not suggesting with this book that we shut off our imagination, creativity, or ingenuity. I’m not the one who said nobody could imagine living without electricity. I’m merely making the rather startling suggestion that we use our imagination, creativity, and ingenuity to serve the continuation of life, not use them to serve the concentration of power and the destructiveness that is leading to the end of life on this planet. And if you can’t figure out how to use your imagination, creativity, and ingenuity to serve the greater cause of life—in order to leave the world a better place because you were born—well, don’t blame me for pointing out that your self-perceived superiority is nothing more than a justification for your exploitation of those around you. And if you can’t figure out how to use your imagination, creativity, and ingenuity to make it so the world is a better place because you were born, surely you must understand why I can’t take seriously your claim of human superiority. To not be able to make it so the world is a better place because you were born does not seem very imaginative, creative, ingenious, or smart to me. And surely you can see why, if you are grievously wounding the world that is our only home, those of us who care about life would stop you, right?
•••
Scientists love to talk about how part of the way we learn things is by creating a theory or model, and then seeing how the application of that theory or model plays out in the real world (or at least in a laboratory). If the results are what you originally thought they would be, your theory or model may be correct.164
So they can come up with the theory that if they deafen mice who love to sing, these mice might no longer be able to sing. So they deafen the mice, and whaddya know, the mice can no longer sing. The theory is right! They’re all geniuses, and humans are superior! Oh, actually this is too small a sample size to be sure. Can we have some more grant money so we can deafen more mice?
On the other hand, if the results don’t match your model, the model may be wrong. So I could hypothesize that humans can live on Lucky Charms alone. If someone eats only Lucky Charms and eventually gets sick, I can presume my hypothesis is wrong.
Or here’s a hypothesis: the best way to improve a relationship with a lover is to comment scathingly on this person’s body each time she or he is naked. Try this out in the real world, and after seventeen exes (fourteen of whom left immediately after the comments but before any further sexual contact, with the other three sticking around only long enough to make certain they hadn’t misheard you) followed (after word got around) by thirteen years of celibacy, you might consider your hypothesis to have been effectively shown to be false.
This notion of verifying or falsifying a thesis provides a powerful argument against human supremacism.
How?
Well, for a while now the dominant culture has been acting on the hypothesis that natural selection is based on competition and hyperexploitation; and that just as the capitalists say, each being acting selfishly will (somehow) lead to a successful and resilient community. Result: the world is being murdered. Natural communities are falling apart.
Let’s go further back: for several thousand years the dominant culture has been acting on the hypothesis that the world was created for us, that we should go forth and multiply, and we were given dominion over the earth, and that all creatures should fear us. Result: the world is being murdered. Natural communities are falling apart.
Hypothesis: humans are superior to nonhumans. Nonhumans are not as smart as we are. The world consists of resources to be exploited. Result of actions based on this hypothesis: the world is being murdered. Natural communities are falling apart.
How insensate must we be to not see that these experiments are failing miserably?
Unless, of course, the point has from the beginning been to “reboot” the planet, to wipe it clean and for either God or science to remake it in our own image.
But it’s still failing, because without a living planet we will not be here, either.
If space aliens instead of human supremacists were conducting this grand open air experiment, we could see all of this, and see that these aliens are completely insane, but because we’ve been inculcated into this culture, and because we too have been made insane by this culture, we can’t see it.
•••
Here’s the thing: whether or not stones are actually sentient, whether or not redwood trees are smarter or stupider than humans (or whether, as I think is the point, their intelligence is so vastly different as to be incomparable, and cross-species measures of intelligence are both impossible and at best meaningless (and at worst harmful, as we see, when we use them to buttress pre-existing supremacisms)), whether rivers are simply vessels for water or beings in their own right, these are not the primary questions to ask.
Think about it: the Tolowa lived where I live now for at least 12,500 years, if you believe the myths of science; and they lived here since the beginning of time, if you believe the myths of the Tolowa. And they did not destroy the place. When the Europeans arrived here the place was a paradise. I’m not saying the Tolowa were perfect, any more than anyone else is perfect. I’m saying they were living here sustainably.
The dominant culture has trashed this place, as it trashes every place.
The biggest difference between Western and Indigenous worldviews is that Indigenous humans generally perceive the world as consisting of other beings with whom they can and should enter into respectful relationships, and Westerners generally perceive the world as consisting of resources to be exploited.
The western civilized worldview is unsustainable. A belief in human superiority—and the beliefs that nonhumans aren’t fully sentient, that rivers aren’t beings, and so on—is not sustainable. The fact that it is unsustainable means it is terminally maladaptive. The fact that it is terminally maladaptive means it is an evolutionary dead end. The fact that it is unsustainable makes clear to me that it is also inaccurate: an accurate perception of one’s place in the world and actions based on this perception would seem to me to be more likely to lead to sustainability; while an inaccurate perception of one’s place in the world, and actions based on this perception, would seem to me to be more likely to lead to unsustainability. As we see.
I don’t know why more people don’t understand this.
I guess because unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of any culture.
And I guess because most members of this culture have been inculcated into not caring about life on this planet.
That last sentence alone is enough to damn a belief in human supremacism.
•••
But you want humans to be superior at something? I’ll give you something at which human supremacists excel. Rationalization.
I mean this in two ways. The first is in the way rationalization is usually meant. Rationalize: “to attempt to explain or justify (one’s own or another’s behavior or attitude) with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate.” Or, “to think about or describe something (such as bad behavior) in a way that explains it and makes it seem proper, more attractive, etc.” Or, “to provide plausible but untrue reasons for conduct.” Or, “to attribute (one’s actions) to rational and creditable motives without analysis of true and especially unconscious motives.”
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Sound familiar?
This describes human supremacism, which is an “attempt to explain or justify (one’s own or another’s behavior or attitude) with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate.” Human supremacism is an attempt to explain or justify atrocious and world-destroying behavior. And then so much of this culture’s philosophy, its religion, its economics, its epistemology, its science, are all attempts to explain, justify, and/or facilitate human (and other) supremacisms.
We’re really good at rationalizing our behavior.
Remember that Timur the Great was able to rationalize his behavior. Hitler was able to rationalize his behavior. The head of ExxonMobile is able to rationalize his behavior.
We are currently rationalizing the murder of the planet.
But rationalization means something else, too, at which human supremacists also excel. In terms of “scientific management,” rationalization can be seen as the deliberate elimination of information unnecessary to achieving an immediate task. So the process of frying a hamburger at a fast-food restaurant can be said to have been “rationalized” if all extraneous movements and considerations have been removed.
Another way to say this is that human supremacists excel at figuring out “solutions” to discrete “problems” by ignoring everything but the specific “solution” to the discrete “problem.” This is essentially the point of the scientific method: you try to eliminate all variables but one. Which is a functional problem with the scientific method, and why science is functionally so very good at making matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and simultaneously so very destructive of communities.
Step by step, that’s how this culture has built itself up. Step by step, the rest of the world has suffered because of it. Other cultures, other species. The entire world.
A human supremacist sees a river. His factory requires electricity, which means he perceives himself as requiring electricity. From his perspective, water flowing to the ocean is serving no “beneficial purpose.” So he uses the collective knowledge of this culture to build a dam that generates electricity (actually, he has another problem, which is paying for the dam, and the solution of course is to get taxpayers to pay for it).
So, having had the dam constructed for him, he has “solved’ the “problem” of “needing” electricity. Humans and nonhumans who lived on the now-inundated lands above the dam pay the costs. Fish who lived in the river pay the costs. Those who ate the anadromous fish who spawned above the dam pay the costs. Those who lived along the lower banks of what was a free-flowing river pay the costs. Those who lived below the dam who require annual flooding pay the costs. Ocean beaches starved of sediment pay the costs. And on it goes.
Of course, in order to get to the point of building a big dam, other discrete problems had to be solved first, such as inventing concrete and steel, but the same process held for each of these, as “problems” were “solved,” with each “solution” leading to consequences to be foisted off onto others. And on it goes.
We can go through that same exercise for every significant invention of this culture, where every brilliant “solution” to every pressing “problem” emerges in part or in whole through ignoring the harm done to others by this “solution.”
Pesticides. Automobiles. Agriculture. Cities.
I don’t mean to discount this ability. The ability to rationalize has allowed members of this culture to accomplish extraordinary things. But these extraordinary things have come at extraordinary costs.
And to this day the self-styled most intelligent being on the planet, whose brain, they say, is the “most complex phenomena in the universe,” is unable or unwilling to perceive the enormity of these costs. For the most part, the best we can hope for from human supremacists is that they think that whatever costs they perceive are (of course) more than made up for by the benefits accruing to themselves and others of their class.
After all, that’s only befitting of those who are so high on the Great Chain of Being.
•••
You’ve probably noticed I haven’t talked about the origins of human supremacism. Some say it began with the domestication of nonhuman animals, as we came to think of these as our dependent inferiors, as our slaves, our beasts of burden. Some say it began with agriculture, where the entire landbase was converted to human use. Some say the model for human supremacism is male supremacism: women are physically differentiable from men, and some men decided that differentiability meant inferiority, and validated their own superiority by repeatedly violating and controlling women; this model was then applied across racial, cultural, and species differences. Some say human supremacism really got its start with the creation of a monotheistic sky god and the consequent removal of meaning from the material earth.
These questions of origins, while interesting and on some levels important, are not vital to the current discussion. Right now this narcissistic, sociopathic human supremacist culture is killing the planet, and we need to stop it. Asking where it started feels a bit to me like wondering about the childhood traumas of the axe murderer who is tearing apart your loved ones. Sure, it’s a discussion to be had, but can we please stop the murderer first?
•••
Because human supremacism—like other supremacisms—is not based on fact, but rather on pre-existing bigotry (and the narcissism and tangible self-interest on which all bigotries are based), I don’t expect this book will cause many human supremacists to reconsider their supremacism, just as books on male or white supremacism don’t generally cause male or white supremacists to reconsider theirs. The book isn’t written for them. This book is written to give support to the people—and there are a lot of us—who are not human supremacists, and who are disgusted with the attitudes and behaviors of the supremacists, who are attempting to stop the supremacists from killing all that lives. It is written for those who are appalled by nonhumans being tortured, displaced, destroyed, exterminated by supremacists in service to authoritarian technics. It is written for those who are tired of the incessant—I would say obsessive—propaganda required to prop up human supremacism. It is written for those who recognize the self-serving stupidity and selective blindness of the supremacist position.
It is written for those who prefer a living planet to authoritarian technics. It is written for those who prefer democratic decision-making processes to authoritarian technics. It is written for those who prefer life to machines.
•••
I’m sitting again by the pond. The wind still plays gently among the reeds, plays also with the surface of the water.
This time I do not hear the sound of a family of jays softly talking amongst themselves. This time I hear the sound of chainsaws.
The forests on both sides of where I live are being clearcut. I don’t know why. Or rather, on a superficial level I do. The people who “own” both pieces of land had a “problem” they needed to “solve.” “Problem”? They needed money. Or they wanted money. Or they craved money. It doesn’t matter. “Solution”? Cut the trees and sell them.
Never mind those who live there.
So for weeks now I’ve been hearing the whine of chainsaws and the screams of trees as they fall. For weeks now I’ve been feeling the shock waves when the trees hit the ground.
Such is life at the end of the world.
•••
We end on the plains of eastern Colorado, where as I write this a friend is trying desperately to protect prairie dogs. A “developer” wants to put in a mall on top of one of the largest extant prairie dog villages along Colorado’s Front Range. The village has 3,000 to 8,000 burrows.
Prior to this human supremacist culture moving into the Great Plains, the largest prairie dog community in the world, which was in Texas, covered 25,000 square miles, and was home to perhaps 400 million prairie dogs. The total range for prairie dogs was about 15
0,000 to 200,000 square miles, and population was well over a billion.
Now, prairie dogs have been reduced to about five percent of their range and two percent of their population.
Yet because yet another rich person wants to build yet another mall (in this economy, with so many empty stores already?), much of this prairie dog community will be poisoned. That community includes the twenty or more other species who live with and depend upon prairie dogs. The prairie dogs (and some others) who are not poisoned will be buried alive by the bulldozers, then covered with concrete. This includes the pregnant females, who prefer not to leave their dens.
If you recall, prairie dogs have complex languages, with words for many threats. They have language to describe hawks, and to describe snakes, and to describe coyotes. They have language to describe a woman wearing a yellow shirt, and different language for a woman wearing a blue shirt. They have had to come up with language to describe a man with a gun.
Do they, I wonder, have language to describe a bulldozer? Do they have language to describe the pregnant females of their community being buried alive?
And do they have language to describe the murderous insatiability of human supremacists? And do others? Do blue whales and the few remaining tigers? Do the last three northern white rhinos, all that’s left because some human supremacists believe their horns are aphrodisiacs?165 Do elephants? Did the black-skinned pink-tusked elephants of China? Did the Mesopotamian elephants? And what about others? What about the disappearing fireflies? What about the dammed and re-dammed and re-dammed Mississippi? What about the once-mighty Columbia? What about the once-free Amazon? Do they have language to describe this murderous insatiability?
•••
And perhaps more to the point, do we?
•••
By the time you read this, the prairie dogs my friend is fighting to protect will probably be dead, killed so someone can build yet another cathedral to human supremacism. And by the time you read this, yet another dam will have been built on the Mekong, on the upper reaches of the Amazon, on the upper Nile. By the time you read this there will be 7,000 to 10,000 more dams in the world. By the time you read this there will be more dead zones in the oceans. By the time you read this there will be another 100,000 species driven extinct.
The Myth of Human Supremacy Page 38