The Myth of Human Supremacy



When an unlucky person has been swept away by the brainwashing of a wacko cult, concerned friends or family members sometimes seek the assistance of a skilled deprogrammer to exorcize the demons.  It’s a painful process.  The scrambled soul is blasted with a fire-hose of strong rational arguments, hour after hour, hammering away at the many contradictions in the cult’s beliefs.  Ideally, the shining power of truth blasts away the illusions, and opens the door to healing.

I was reminded of this while reading Derrick Jensen’s book, The Myth of Human Supremacy.  In his story, the wacko cult consists of human supremacists, zombies who have been indoctrinated to believe that humans are the miraculous conclusion of the long evolutionary journey.  Humans are the one and only species that is sentient, self-aware, intelligent, and able to make tools and communicate.

The cult of human supremacy has grown rapidly, and now includes a large portion of humankind.  The zombie mobs are mindlessly destroying the living planet that everything depends on for survival.  Jensen puts a spotlight on the demon: “Unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of any culture.”  We are bombarded with supremacist ideas from early childhood.  They define our understanding of normality, and encourage us to live like there’s no tomorrow.  Only humans matter, a living planet does not.

By definition, human supremacy is about hierarchy: the white male God, white kings, white men, white women, minorities, mammals, birds, plants, insects, bacteria, etc.  Most of the community of life is inferior to you, resources for you to exploit or destroy.  The supremacist worldview has no concern for ecological health.  Civilization is a space station where all of our needs are magically met.

Jensen devotes many pages to revealing the cult’s creepy narcissism.  Research is discovering that plants and nonhuman animals are sentient, self-aware, intelligent, and able to make tools and communicate.  Slime mold can learn and remember, displaying more intelligence than a number of world leaders.  Plants do react when damaged, disproving the cult’s belief that organisms without brains can feel no pain.  The cult believes that communication means making funny noises with human lips, but trees communicate using chemicals.

Humans spray neurotoxins on their food, while boasting that we are the only ones who possess intelligence.  “Intelligence” is a slippery word.  From the supremacist perspective, it’s intelligent to create an industrial society that blindsides the planet’s climate.  Thanks to this intelligence, 98% of old growth forests are gone, 99% of prairies, 99% of wetlands, 90% of large oceanic fish.  “When others besides human supremacists look at us, they see the worst thing that has ever happened to this planet,” says Jensen.  “If animals could conceive of the devil, his image would be man’s.”

For thousands of years, agriculture has had a well-documented history of transforming healthy ecosystems into wastelands via deforestation, soil mining, wetland destruction, and water mining — a process that still continues.  Agriculture can never be sustainable.  “Plows are probably the single most destructive human invention ever, and agriculture was the single biggest — and least intelligent — mistake any creature has ever made.”  Humankind is in extreme overshoot right now, as the population skyrocket keeps zooming upward.

There are two flavors of technology: authoritarian and democratic.  Authoritarian technology is produced by complex, hierarchical civilizations.  This technology tends to control the society.  We must have electricity, electronics, sequestered carbon, and transportation devices to participate in modernity.  Consumers are hardcore electricity addicts.  Jensen screams!  Lack of imagination is a primary cause of the Earth Crisis.  We can’t imagine living without electricity, but we can imagine a world without rhinos or tigers.  Oy!

It takes imagination to challenge the unquestioned beliefs that inspire insane behavior.  Jensen’s doctor says that there can be no cure without a proper diagnosis.  Unquestioned beliefs often make an accurate diagnosis impossible.  They tell us that renewable energy, nuclear power, and geoengineering are brilliant solutions.  So, every unquestioned belief must be mercilessly questioned, and the dodgy ones sent to the shredder.

Democratic technology, on the other hand, is stuff that anyone can make, like a basket or bow and arrow.  Chimps use sticks to fish for yummy termites.  Vultures throw stones to crack ostrich eggs.  This is sustainable.  It doesn’t rock the boat.  But authoritarian technology is big juju.  Too often, even green activists have vivid fantasies of a sustainable future, whilst keeping many of the unsustainable goodies of civilization.  The line between naughty and nice can be blurry.

Lately, I’ve been reading about the Aztecs.  In 1492, Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) was one of the biggest cities in the world, with a population of about 200,000, five times larger than London.  They had no horses, oxen, plows, or metals.  The fields were tilled with digging sticks, and fertilized with human poop.  It was a highly sophisticated and authoritarian Stone Age civilization famous for cutting the beating hearts out of thousands of prisoners at a time.

Words can be slippery.  Throughout the book, Jensen frequently uses “stupid” when discussing the quirks of civilized humans.  Stupid means unintelligent, having a limited ability to learn and understand, an incurable handicap.  Maybe "ignorant" would have been more precise.  It means a lack of knowledge — a somewhat curable shortcoming.  Methinks that ignorance plays a major role in the bad choices we make.  In many ways our education system remains lost in a dream world of yesteryear.

Anyway, Jensen tackles and paddles many unquestioned beliefs.  We all suffer from them, to some degree, he says.  It’s hard not to, living in this culture.  Questioning is a powerful medicine that should be used daily.  When it comes to innovation, we are terribly clever.  At the same time, we are tropical primates, engaged in a phenomenally ignorant adventure in violating as many of the laws of nature as humanly possible, for no good reason.

The myth of human supremacy asserts that we are rational, moral, and ethical.  Wild animals have no interest in reason, morals, or ethics because they have no need for them.  They live sustainably by simply remaining in balance with the community of life.  They have no need for powerful 20-20 foresight, because they stay on a stable time-proven path.  Supremacists are ravaging Earth, but they look awesome in their smiling selfies.

Jensen's book reminds me of a defibrillator, the gizmo used when someone's heart stops beating.  Its two paddles are placed on the chest, and then a powerful electric shock is blasted into the victim, in an effort to restart the heart.  He doubts that his book will convince many of the living dead supremacists to question their beliefs.  Its main purpose is to encourage the pilgrims who understand that civilization is killing the planet.  We need to save as many species as we can.

The book is also something like a hearing aid.  It heightens readers’ ability to hear the supremacist voices that barrage us every day.  It’s helpful to better recognize the tireless jabber from the lunatic asylum.  And so, Jensen waves and rides off into the sunset.  “The more I learn about the real world, the more wonderful I think it is, and the more honored I am to be here.”

Jensen, Derrick, The Myth of Human Supremacy, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2016.

Straw Dogs

When the philosopher John Gray looks out over the world, he sees a bloody madhouse, a hell broth of deranged magical thinking.  In his bestselling book, Straw Dogs, he turns into a ruthless vigilante who tirelessly pounds the stuffing out of ridiculous ideas that condemn us to mindless self-destruction.  What might happen if we ever succeeded at clearing the decks of loony whims?  Would this make it easier to think clearly, and move onto a path with a future?

By the time you get to the end of the book, not one sacred cow is left standing.  He rubbishes our entire belief system.  Readers who are thoroughbred critical thinkers may not find much to disagree with, but those who uncritically accept everything they are told by society will foam at the mouth and scream obscenities.  To some, he is an honorable and dignified iconoclast, and to others he is a super-pessimistic misanthrope.  Reader comments at Amazon are all over the place, and quite interesting.

Gray’s thinking is an unusual swirl of intellect and animism, minus mysticism.  In his analysis of our current predicament, the two primary culprits are humanism and progress.

Humanism is the illusion that humans are apart from, and superior to, all other beings in the family of life.  We have no obligation to obey the laws of nature, because they don’t apply to us.  Our sacred species does not really belong in the natural world, because we are so much better than filthy wild animals.  Humanism is a notion that we picked up somewhere on the path to civilization.  It has been passed from the Platonists, to the Christians, to the Enlightenment, and to modern secular humanists.

Life never stops getting better and better.  As long as we can maintain a fervent blind faith in scientific progress, there is little need for us to exercise our thinkers.  Witness the fact that nearly all of those who graduate from the most prestigious institutions of higher learning — and most other people too — cling to a magical belief in perpetual economic growth, a nutjob superstition.

Darwin drove a stake through the heart of the humanist fantasy, demonstrating that humans were simply animals, like all the rest, and we have survived by luck alone.  The humanists were not amused.  They pulled out the stake, seized Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest, and proclaimed that our remarkable success was indisputable proof that we are, without a doubt, the greatest!

Gray looks outside his window, perceives thousands of serious problems, and concludes that catastrophes are on the way.  Humanists look out the window, disregard thousands of serious problems, and see reality as an unfinished masterpiece — our species will be saved once we are all fully illuminated by precious reason.

He acknowledges that there has been real progress in science and technology, but sees little progress in morals and ethics.  While progress does reduce human suffering in some ways, it is simultaneously inventing bigger and better weapons for killing people.

In 1543, Japan had more guns than any other nation.  In that year, they banned firearms, and the nation was gun-free until 1879, when Commodore Perry arrived from the modern world, and frightened Japan into a process of rapid industrialization.  Their era of isolation was over, and they understood the diabolical law of civilization:  “Any country that renounces technology will become the prey to those who do not.  There is no escape from a world of predatory states.”

The greatest atrocities in human history have been enabled by advances in modern technology.  Innovation is impossible to control.  Horrid inventions that are banned in many countries will be eagerly produced by others.  Some technology, like biological weapons or cyber warfare can be pursued in the shadow world, unknown to governments or corporate entities.

At the same time, the traditional concept of warfare as being nation versus nation is dissolving.  With the rise of movements like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, that exist entirely beyond government control, we’re seeing a revival of religious warfare, where there are no standing armies or front lines.  The woman standing beside you might be a bomb.

Humanists envision a secular world that is educated, rational, and ethical, but few societies are secular today.  In primitive countries, like the U.S., millions of educated people reject the notion of evolution.  Millions of fundamentalists, of every variety, insist that their specific interpretation of sacred texts and visions is the one and only correct way to live, and that the rest of humankind must be converted to their beliefs — or else!

With regard to the Earth Crisis, Gray does not assign all blame to agriculture and civilization.  He believes that our problems began far earlier.  “There was never a Golden Age of harmony with the Earth.  Most hunter-gatherers were fully as rapacious as later humans.  But they were few, and they lived better than most who came after them.”  Throughout our long journey, the cost of every “advance” has been ecological injury.

He acknowledges that some cultures did manage to live sustainably for long stretches of time.  An essential component of their success was restraint.  They used practices like infanticide, geronticide, and sexual abstinence to limit the size of their clans — no crowding, no scarcity, no conflict.  These brilliant hunters clearly understood that, in a world of finite food sources, perpetual growth was dumber than a box of rocks.

Unfortunately, farmers threw restraint out the window.  Growing population forced us to become deeply addicted to agriculture, and we burned our bridges behind us.  Today, a return to living in balance is obstructed by our enormous population.  We could greatly reduce our misery by reducing our numbers, but this will never be done voluntarily on a global scale.  We’ve entrusted the remedy to Big Mama Nature, who will effectively clean up the mess without mercy.  The human herd might shrink at a rate as rapid as its explosion.

Throughout the book, Gray is a tireless fire hose of criticism.  He tells us that consciousness, reason, and self-awareness are highly overrated; Homo rapiens bears a striking resemblance to cancer, and so on.  This does get tiresome.  Is he a dark man with an unhealthy mind, or is he a sane man who is clearly and competently describing a dark reality?  He encourages us to turn on our thinkers and reexamine our beliefs, a pastime that can often be quite profitable.  The book has been a best seller.  It’s short and easy to read.

Here’s a line that intrigued me:  “It is not of becoming the planet’s wise stewards that Earth-lovers dream, but of a time when humans have ceased to matter.”  Gray bets that humankind will succeed in our crusade of self-destruction, at which point the healing process can begin.  Earth will forget us, and life will move on.  On the other hand, modern folks spend their lives wearing their freaky Master of the Universe masks, which conceal their ordinary animal faces.  In theory, humans could “cease to matter” by taking off our masks, abandoning our achievements, humbly returning to the family of life, and disappearing into the crowd.

Gray, John, Straw Dogs — Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Granta Books, London, 2003.