This is the twelfth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode confronts the thorny topic of human supremacy. My intention is not to rile folks up, but some of that may be unavoidable. It’s something we must face to understand modernity.
As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.
Introduction
This is the usual short naming of the series, of myself, and the topic of this episode (human supremacy) as part of our effort to put modernity into context.
A Menu of Labels
The concept of this episode can go by a number of labels.
Anthropocentrism
Anthropocentrism is a bit of a mouthful, but it’s a fine label. It’s the preferred term in academic circles and among polite company. It tends not to produce an emotional response, so is a safe, non-triggering term—if you can get your mouth around it.
Human Exceptionalism
Human Exceptionalism conjures (for me as an American, anyway) the notion of American Exceptionalism. At one time, this was a self-compliment among Americans but is now understood to be problematic: an attitude of manifest destiny whereby any dubious action could be justified by the glorious and divinely-inspired achievements that might result. It was in this problematic spirit that I originally adopted the term when I first recognized this phenomenon as a fundamental curse.
I have stopped using Human Exceptionalism for two reasons. First, it is not inherently problematic for all—still carrying a complimentary ring to it. “My, you are looking exceptional today” is not likely to get the slap that “My, you look supremacist today” might earn. Second, humans are exceptional, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. To acknowledge humans as exceptional is not supremacist when also pointing out that every species is exceptional in its way—able to do things humans, or other species, cannot.
Human Supremacy
Human Supremacy (or Supremacism) is my preferred term. It’s edgy, instantly problematic, and accurate. The problem isn’t being an exceptional product of evolution. The problem is thinking we’re the pinnacle of evolution: that we’re better than the rest; somehow transcendent so that we are not mere animals. Ironically, it is in distancing ourselves from animals that we become monsters.
The Human Reich
This provocative and triggering term is one I reserve for special occasions, when I feel the audience is ready to hear it. I first encountered the term (along with “Lord Man”) in an excellent essay by Eileen Crist. I’ll return to this framing at the end, where I invite readers to come up with their own parallels between the Third Reich and modernity. It’s shockingly easy to do.
Agricultural Roots
I won’t be foolish enough to proclaim that no human or culture had human supremacist beliefs prior to agriculture. But, it was not the prevailing or dominant attitude, and agriculture is when it really took root to become a staple crop, found universally in agriculturally-dominated cultures.
The first step was in controlling what grows and what doesn’t grow; what lives and doesn’t live. It’s playing god with life. We label some plants “weeds” and some animals “pests.”
Then, we strip the land of its ecological complexity, stomping out biodiversity to simplify into something better matching our limited cognitive capacity. We want tidy rows of a single crop in dirt that does not volunteer other forms of life.
In this way, we dominate the landscape, driving out biodiversity and wildness. Aerial views of cropland show geometrical patterns of “domesticated” earth—devoid of hints that it was once wild space supporting a community of life. The attitude is one of dominion; control; ownership; manipulation; mastery.
I’ll just say it: it’s weird.
Monotheistic Origins
Monotheism wasn’t a prevalent religious belief system until when? Correct! Not until after the agricultural revolution. In some cases, agriculture amplified human supremacist foundations by way of monotheism. Working backwards, my framing goes like this:
- A male ruler of creation began to make sense when…
- A male king ruled the region, which emerged from…
- Patriarchy: males as holders of power at the village and family level, which arose from…
- Hereditary passage of property and possessions along male blood lines, which only made sense when…
- Property rights and material possessions became common, which only happens when…
- People live in settlements and can sit with their land and stuff, which becomes possible under…
- Agriculture: tended fields that can’t be carried around.
In monotheistic belief systems, humans, of course, were made in God’s image: almost gods themselves. In our own convenient fabrication of the word of God, we were (self-) appointed as rulers of the earth, with the explicit words:
…dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth
As I said in an earlier post, that decree gives me the creepeths. My apologies for the repeat, but I still enjoy tittering over that one.
Goodbye, Animism
Prior to agriculture, the most prevalent belief system, robust throughout the world, was one of animism. In animistic traditions, the world is alive. Everything has a spirit. Nothing is static, and everything has relationships with everything else. I’ll just say: it’s not wrong. Even a river is a dynamic entity: always changing, evolving, sustaining all manner of life, exhibiting cycles, expressing moods, inextricably bound in countless relationships with many forms of life.
Modernists disparage such belief systems as primitive and childish (noting that human children display a built-in tendency to imbue life in everything around them until such tendencies are shamed away as being silly). But compared to monotheistic belief systems, animist beliefs can be extraordinarily complex, and map more faithfully to the actual complex living world—helping us navigate and sense-make for our survival. The comparatively sterile religions of today mirror the tidy and rigid mono-crop agricultural styles. Practitioners of animism are more comfortable with ambiguity. A story might be true sometimes. Complex life works like that.
Not surprisingly, human brains appear to have gotten smaller, on average, than was the case 10,000 years ago. That’s what abandonment of wild complexity will do for you, by trying to reduce our world to logic and rules.
Heroes and Hubris
People are often the heroes of their own stories. And we can tell a lot about a person or a culture based on choice of heroes.
Animist stories tend to emphasize the perils of hubris, narcissism, and attempts at domination. Cooperation is often central. Other common elements are relationships, cycles, kinship, and the primacy of more-than-human life as our best teachers. Humility is important: humans are just one species in a rich world of interconnected and interdependent life.
After agriculture took hold, stories turned to those of conquest, mastery, victory, and a sort of transcendence. Supremacist values were woven into the lot.
It is worth some reflection on who the heroes are in our culture (or personally), as these choices tend to showcase the values we elevate to the top. Are those values anthropocentric? Are they about mastery? Or do they foster ecological health of the entire community of life? These last kinds of heroes are quite rare in our culture. But animist (e.g., pre-agricultural) stories often have heroes doing exactly that: selfless sharing for the good of the entire community of life.
As products (captives?) of modernity, we are trained to value hubris: masters and conquerors; victors and geniuses (narrowly defined). We look for reinforcing evidence that we are superior to other life. We’re trying to win something. It comes off as a little petty.
In essence, we flatter ourselves as self-styled gods. The Earth belongs to us, we tell ourselves, and we were meant to rule it. Science and fossil fuels fanned the flames until these “tenets” are self-evident to those born into our culture.
Recall from Episode 8 that this moment in Earth’s history is extraordinarily unusual. I wonder how our stories and heroes will change after modernity inevitably fails.
We Forgot Ourselves
Brains, brains, brains, brains, brains. We’ve got brains. We’re all about brains. You’d think we aren’t even corporeal beings anymore: that we don’t have to eat, sleep, poop, and die. People are offended by the notion that our head-meat is no more than an evolved organ to help us operate in the world. We’re not satisfied with that mundane description—we consider it to be beneath us—and insist on transcendent properties that make us more than an elaborate arrangement of matter (e.g., neurons) evolved to function well in an ecological context.
We imagine that we’re more capable than we are. We are proud of our inventions and accomplishments—one of which is the sixth mass extinction (perfect for résumés). We distance ourselves from our evolutionary past. Why else are people surprised to learn that we share a third of an amoeba’s 13,000 (to our 20,000) genes? How could we have much in common with mere slime?
In the effort to differentiate ourselves from our heritage, we separate humans from the community of life, proclaim superiority, declare ourselves to be the pinnacle of evolution, and justify our deserving everything on Earth for ourselves. Convenient, huh?
Modernity is the worst sort of roommate: intolerably arrogant, self-aggrandizing, inconsiderate, and entitled. Our distorted self-image blinds us to ecological realities that are poised to deliver a crushing message: one that our ostensibly-omniscient brains have somehow failed to register, as a whole. We flatter ourselves on how masterful our brains are.
Modernity as the Human Reich?
Nine times out of ten, to completely make up a statistic, comparisons to Nazis are unjustified: hyperbolic, offensive, extreme, theatric, unnecessary. But when talking about human supremacism, other forms of supremacism would seem to be fair game. Moreover, when a whole culture is founded on supremacist ideology, it seems unavoidable that the Third Reich would come to mind. Thus, a Human Reich framing seems at least worth exploring, as our culture routinely exterminates populations of non-humans, driving many to final extinction. It’s ugly out there.
Are We Evil?
I see little point denying that our culture is deeply founded in a sense of human supremacy. That means most people we encounter are born and raised as human supremacists. I definitely grew up that way, and spent most of my adult life solidly in that camp. But, in making a comparison to the Third Reich, am I saying that most of us are evil, like the Nazis?
No. I wouldn’t say so. Most people are unaware of the supremacist foundation of society. It’s like the air we breathe: invisible, yet fundamental. I will point out as an aside that students were often surprised to learn that air has mass, and that the air in the classroom would be too heavy for them to lift, in fact. It’s a forgivable oversight.
Likewise, it would strain reasonableness to conclude that all—or even most—Germans in 1940 were evil. Even those who were enthusiastic about promises of the Nazi party were just tired of post-WWI hardships and were beginning to enjoy the perks of a powerful new regime. It’s easy enough to be unaware of the evils, to deny the rumors, or simply ignore them as too big to process. Our situation today is little different.
Buy-In
But didn’t the Nazi supporters basically buy into the supremacist narrative? I assume many did. If immersed in a culture that says your people are the best, well, gosh—do go on.
The youth are especially vulnerable. Being born into a system based on a self-flattering ideology makes it very hard to see things differently. Note that all of us reading this were born into a world dominated by inherently-supremacist modernity. Most of us know no other way, and traveling the world does not tend to yield a substantively different perspective when it comes to human supremacy. Only when learning from less-assimilated Indigenous groups who have managed to preserve a fair bit of the old ways is one likely to get whiffs of a different mentality.
Counterfactual Future
Now, imagine that the Nazis had prevailed in WWII, and are 900 years into their 1,000 Year Reich. In this scenario, every country on Earth now holds Aryan Supremacist beliefs. Dissenters have long since been silenced: assimilated, eradicated, or enslaved (as happened to the vast majority of Indigenous people; and also to those unfortunate enough not to be human).
Given the global uniformity of this ideology, where would exposure to other ideas possibly come from? The cultural default is ubiquitous, so that subscription is essentially automatic. Being born into the well-established culture is all it takes: stories then reinforce the beliefs. What are the stories of modernity, and who are its heroes?
Justified?
Here is the crux of the matter. Let’s take a true-believer Nazi in 1944—perhaps rising from Hitler Youth ranks—who is convinced beyond any doubt that the Aryan race is superior to all others. Is this person justified in any act against other races if it advances the Aryan race?
Of course not! It should be obvious that self-elevating beliefs are not sufficient justification.
Okay, so let’s try the parallel case. Is a Human Supremacist justified in displacing, eradicating, or subjugating other species for the betterment of the human race?
The answer must be the same, right? It must be: Of course not! It should be obvious that self-elevating beliefs are not sufficient justification.
It is hard to build a compelling argument against this point without basically embracing and espousing human supremacist views. Seems like check mate to me.
Why So Easy to See?
The Nazi case is painfully easy to see as wrong—even (or especially?) for human supremacists—in large part because the victims are other “superior” beings (humans). Think about why the atrocities are easier to see when levied against humans, and what this means about our biases.
It might be jarring to use the Human Reich framing, but doing so provides a window to even those who have a hard time seeing value beyond humans. The Reich framing might still fail to break through the barriers, but at least perhaps some glimmer of parallelism might be appreciated.
Think on it…
I encourage you to spend time seriously considering modernity as a Human Reich and its parallels to dark times in recent history. What parallels to the Third Reich do you come up with? I’ll bet it’s more than a few. It is easiest to identify a practice from the Nazi regime and ask what our culture might do along similar lines when extending consideration to the entire community of life.
This exploration can help lead you to better understand prevailing cultural attitudes and beliefs that connect to a human supremacist foundation.
Finally, I want you to imagine someone who rejects the comparison outright, perhaps
saying: “It’s not at all the same when it’s not humans being eliminated.” What justification might they possibly mount that itself isn’t human supremacist in nature?
A Common Embrace
In our culture, embrace of human supremacy is not exactly rare, but it is too seldom explicitly acknowledged or recognized—again, like the air we breathe. I would rather see honest, open ownership of human supremacy where it exists so we’re not fooling ourselves. Nazis at least paraded around in arm bands so everyone knew what they stood for and who they were.
Closing and Do the Math
This was a tough subject to confront. Next time will be a little easier as I discuss a concept from Wes Jackson that humans are “a species out of context.” Having found the written companion to the video, the encouragement at the end to do just that is not meant for your ears.
Views: 2259
100% It really is human supremacy, everywhere.
Only today, I looked out the window to see a man spraying 'weeds'. Disgusting chemical death aka 'herbicide', made using (wasting) large amounts of energy and resources, all to kill harmless plants because… aesthetics? Can't have any life poking through the sterile layer of quarried stone chips that exists where a garden once would have. (Also, it's lazy – it would be less traumatic for the plants to simply uproot them. Why poison the environment just to save a few microjoules of 'effort'? Profit.)
I watched on TV a bit (as much as I could stomach) of the acme of the Human Reich, the Olympics. People getting big, gold medals for running fast, throwing spears, climbing etc. All abilities which, ironically, would have actually been useful in the pre-modern, 'prehistoric' world, before everything was made easy for the stupid…
In comparison to all the multitudinous forms of life, isn't humanity like just a single hair on a horse?
There are weeds; they're called non-native plants, and they're very harmful to the natives. Did you know that non-natives are one of the major causes of the current extinction crisis?
Yes, I included invasive species on my list of factors in the ecological nosedive post.
To be clear, I strongly oppose human chemicals including pesticides. The only exception is where pesticides are the only effective way of getting rid of non-natives, in which case the good overrides the harm.
'Non-native'
Where do you draw the line? Should we try to eradicate grey squirrels? Potatoes? Australians?
Trying to control Nature is what produced the Human Reich.
The good overrides the harm = the end justifies the means. That's been used to justify a lot of stuff, from blowing up mountains to extract metals from the rubble to make wind turbines, to animal experiments, to the Iraq war etc. etc. etc.
Well said, James.
It's mind-boggling that non-native species-A and non-native species-B can both arrive in a new environment, promptly followed by species-A deciding that it has the right to determine that species-B shouldn't be there, and must be eradicated. Ironic, considering it is often species-A that brings species-B along for the ride to the new destination in the first place. That is the depth of human hypocrisy on display; we're the ultimate non-native species, but have never applied that label to ourselves. We've decreed that humans have a "right" to be anywhere and everywhere we please, yet certain other species do not.
Surely the invasive "weed" being pulled has the same right to be there as the human does. If a 'World Council of Weeds' got together, and in their charter of "weed rights", they determined they could get rid of the dangerous humans, we wouldn't put up with that for very long. What's good for the goose is definitely not good for the gander 😀
(hey…this is my first ever internet comment. Go easy on me!)
Looking forward to the remainder of the series, Tom!
Dean
A very poignant video/post considering some of the extremist ideology on display in England at present. You can protest against the consequences of modernity – forced migration, cost of living, pollution – as long as it doesn’t inconvenience others. When it does – like the JSO activists discovered last month, you face prison sentences up to six years for just planning such a protest. The establishment is the primary guardian for the status quo.
What a wonderful essay about the fallacy of human supremacy! Humanity is different from non-human life and those differences need to put in context. We can define evil as the conscious, willful violation of the appropriate boundaries of people, life, and minerals.
Unless trained otherwise, my dog doesn't violate appropriate boundaries, so how is she different from me? While my dog thinks, feels, and senses the world and its experience, (such as knowing when its hungry), she doesn't know that she knows she's hungry. Humanity's self-reflexive mirroring of it's own experience is what makes us consciously self-aware. Among other things, this self-reflexive awareness can even be aware of its ONENESS with existence.
In addition to self-awareness, humans naturally develop Egos to help us differentiate and give our individual presence a meaningful name. Egos help young children form into beautiful, unique individuals. Somewhat similar to losing baby fat or baby-teeth as we mature, humans fully mature when they choose to lose their own Egos and participate in the extraordinary ONENESS of existence. It's Ego which causes us to violate appropriate boundaries of people, life, or minerals. When Ego is permanently gone, our experience of life dramatically changes.
Most people don't know Ego is not set in stone and can be permanently eradicated. All major spiritual traditions agree Ego must be identified, sidelined, seen-through, tamed, and even annihilated so an individual can live maturely in permanent ONENESS.
What differentiates humanity from other life is we can become consciously aware of the horrors we perpetuate violating appropriate boundaries–and we can do something about these horrors by choosing to participate in the annihilation of Ego.
To the discerning eye, our sciences and religions are grossly contaminated by Ego. A Non-Egoic scientist or spiritual practitioners sees, knows, and lives in ONENESS. Non-Egoic humans are the animals who use all their intelligence and skill caring for all life and minerals with the goal of ensuring millions of generations of children have a beautiful, safe, resilient, and meaningful home–a home that the Egoic mind can't even conceive.
Um, actually egos are a major part of the problem. Spirituality teaches us to try to attain ego death, which is a utopian goal that could never be attained without evolving beyond a corporeal existence. But it should be sought nevertheless, because ego is the exact OPPOSITE of oneness.
Great episode Tom! This series is continuing to impress me. Keep up the good work.
Funny that even for overshoot aware people, this subject still has to be treated like walking on eggshells. The Myth of Human Supremacy by Derrick Jensen is the best thing I ever read that helped me see how deep the supremacy rabbit-hole goes. And you turned me on to Eileen Crist a while back, which helped as well.
Another excellent essay. I've almost finished "Exterminate all the Brutes" by Sven Lindqvist. As he says, if you want to understand the origins of the twentieth century genocides, start with the colonial nineteenth century African genocides. Particularly interesting as well for the details of Joseph Conrad's life, and the background to his writing "Heart of Darkness ". Horrifying , really, what we have done to our fellow beings and other life forms throughout history, without it seems a backward glance .
Insane as well. Witness all the nuclear weapons in existence. The chances are about 100% that someone will start a nuclear war, by mistake or otherwise (There's been several close shaves already . ) We're definitely too smart for our own good. Too smart for the planet's good health, as well
Now turn attention beyond human suffering to the indiscriminate killing we enact on whole populations of non-humans. Not illegal, yet more devastating (can lead to extinction).
Tom, you compare the way humans treat animals with what nazis did with people they considered being of less value than the Ayrans. To compare this with the way humans treat animals is a quite good thought.
Most of us who have grown up and as adults lived being surrounded by the idea that humans are superior to any animal, wild or domestic.
For myself I find it have been a journey in time to become aware of what humans really do to the animals and to change my way of life when it comes to how humans treat animals. It took me years to quit eating meat and fish and some more years to become a vegan. I excuse myself with that is was long ago.
The language is full of expressions such as e. g. someone has been treated like an animal meaning treated bad. A good start is to quit using such expressions.
I am not familiar with the US laws stating rules for keeping animals but I assume it is about the same in the US as in EU and Sweden.
It is legal to separate cows kept for milk production from their calves before the calf is 24 hours old. Milk from the calf’s mother should be used only for human consumption. The calf is placed in an 1 m2 large box where it is fed with synthetic food. Compare that with how human babies are taken care of.
Tens of thousands of e. g. chickens and hens are legally kept crowed which means that contagious diseases easily spread through the lot and the owner kills them all whether they have got infected or not. Health problems with domestic animals are solved by killing the animals.
The standards of emergency exits for animals are far from the standards for buildings meant for humans. Huge stocks of any animal kept for food production in the same building are caused enormous suffering in case the building catches on fire.
Cats can legally be kept indoors even in a small apartment during their whole lives. Prisoners have at least in Sweden a right by law to daily spend some time outdoors.
In some of the EU-countries the law allows cows to be kept inside their barn from birth until its time to be transported to the slaughterhouse.
Enormous numbers of innocent animals get killed every day all over the world without anyone thinks of the suffering it causes to all the animals who are born just to be killed in various cruel ways.
There are more examples of how bad animals are treated but I stop here. Just think of horses.
Two things: first, check out my post called They Didn't Stand a Chance (https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/03/they-didnt-stand-a-chance/) echoing similar stories to yours above. I often wonder about the babies who starve to death because their mother was hit by a car, or whatever.
On domesticated animals (think horses, cows, goats, pigs, etc.), the common response is that the animals receive better care than they would in the wild: guaranteed food, medical attention, shelter, etc. So we're doing them a favor, the argument goes. We're saving them from a brutal existence in the wild (revealing our distorted views on wild living). My suggestion: then take down the fences and let them decide whether they prefer to stay or live wild and free. Otherwise it's slavery. Sure, some human slave owners also provided consistent food, shelter, and medical attention to their slaves. I guess that makes it okay, then? Again we find that a comparison to humans suddenly throws the issue in sharp contrast for human-supremacist-conditioned brains.
And to continue, the counter-response can be: "But they are too dumb to know what's good for them. They probably would indeed wander off, to a life of suffering." Okay, so it *is* possible that animal husbandry has bred animals to be non-viable in the wild. In this case I return to the human slavery comparison. If slaves have been in bondage and bred by their masters for so many generations that they're "dumbed down," does *that* suddenly justify the practice of keeping them as slaves? But besides that point, I'll bet you'd be surprised how capable animals are at re-finding their livelihoods in the wild. Of course, releasing our domesticated animals at this point would be an ecological disaster of rampant "invasive" species let loose. Not a proposal, but a way to think about the situation.
I had already read the post They Didn't Stand a Chance but I read it rather fast since I always get very sad when reading about animals who meet hardship in one way or another.
However it is not a solution to let all domestic animals free, to tear down all the fences at once. In some parts of the world domestic animals can not even survive in the winter if someone doesn’t feed them. But still all cattle are treated very bad in different ways.
We must all become vegans but that’s easier said than done. Everyone who agrees with that the breeding of cattle must come to an end can contribute by spreading knowledge how to do vegan cooking. One way is to write letters to the editor in the local newspapers while another way is to arrange meetings with neighbors in order to teach them about vegan cooking. During such meetings it is possible to also give information about that neither growth nor renewable energy are possible ways out of the Earth’s predicament. Hopefully for the animals it will not take too long.
The necessary changes must be initiated by ordinary people since there will be no help from politicians or big business.
To be clear, I was not proposing a literal liberation of domesticated animals, which would not go well. It's just a way to think about our situation. Ideally, we would phase out the practice through more natural means (dial down reproductive replacement).
All organisms, from single-celled bacteria to complex multicellular organisms, can alter their environment. This modification can take many forms, such as through the release of chemicals or the physical restructuring of their surroundings. These actions are bound by the fundamental principles of physics and the laws of thermodynamics, which dictate that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only transformed from one form to another. Therefore, any changes made by living organisms must comply with these physical laws.
The biggest issue by far regarding animal agriculture and domesticated animals is the harms they cause to the native and naturally-evolved species, and to ecosystems & habitats for those beings. Cattle grazing has become one of the biggest destroyers and killers on the planet, and cows are not naturally evolved animals, which means that they have no place in any ecosystem and therefore shouldn't even exist. After having cats but then learning that they kill billions of birds each year (to list just one example of the great harms that domesticated animals do), I've come to realize that humans need to just leave wild animals alone, and should never domesticate them (I really struggle with this regarding horses; my first horse was my closest friend ever). Personally, I'd love to live on a planet where we could pet wild animals instead of the plants & animals all eating each other, but that's not reality.
We're on the same page, here.
This is an excellent and badly needed essay. I need to say that I was the first to say that humans are the Nazis of the species however. 🙂
Human supremacism is the worst attitude problem on Earth, and it's killing the planet and all the native & naturally-evolved life here. The cause is humans' failure to evolve mentally and spiritually, and to instead obsess on ego, intellect, and unnaturally & very harmfully manipulating the natural/physical world, unfortunately to the detriment of all the other life here and to the Earth itself. See this book outline for details: https://rewilding.org/fixing-humans-by-expanding-our-consciousness/
And yet, humans are capable of incredible and miraculous creativity – despite and especially those not conforming to social ideals and narrative. Two night ago I sat outside with my guitar and a few minutes later a stranger appeared and started to listen. He is 19 y/o, severely autistic and blind, yet has the amazing capacity to memorise the lyrics and melody of any song he hears – just once – and can sing with the intonation of the original artist.
If this was the direction of human supremacy, I would be an avid supporter.
https://youtu.be/DGVnk6orsWU?si=ofB1a0tOp6yJnTv7
My understanding that modernety will end was when a cardiologist posted «just stop oil». What about pharmaceuticals then? As an anesthesiologist I understands that this will end soon.
And people wants more and more healthcare.
I cant say this to our medical students?
Its difficult, but I understand what you are saying.
The structure on which you built an ideological basis for human supremacy in your historical revisionism seems questionable to me, but beyond the roots I agree with the facts…we live in an undeniable human supremacy.
But, the problem of the origin of this behavior is key to me: killing a cow "because I'm hungry" is not the same as justifying it with "fu** the cows, we the human race prevail" I mean many of our endeavours are founded on a real needs not in an ideological plot.
I want to emphasize this point because it's fundamental: to stay alive you will need to consume…an indigenous in complete harmony with his ecosystem by instinct of self-preservation will kill animals and cut down trees, what is not necessary is this hyper-consumerist lifestyle that constantly generates false needs added to a heavy planned obsolescence that has plundered half the planet to sustain itself.
Finding a middle ground seems to be hard: neither a human supremacist nor a vegan who tries not to breathe so as not to emit CO2…just take only what you need and try to give something back, period. If you try to give a historical/theoretical/social/religious/political and technical framework to this, that's when people start to disagree and get off the boat.
Still, I want to thank you for sharing Eileen Cris essay, I found it totally impressive, beautifully written, I wish I could talk to her privately because, although I find the essay fascinating, I can't help but think that her ideas taken to the extreme imply that we should erase ourselves from this planet…not a happy ending thought to close my comment but I wonder what would have been Eileen's first reactions to the rise of COVID?, maybe I don't want to know?
There's never an end to it.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/12/hidrovia-brazil-pantanal-biodiversity-carbon-wetland-dredging-ports-paraguay-river-industrial-waterway-aoe
Is anyone here familiar with Michael Dowd's work?
Mr. Murphy, you do not need to turn to animism to see the problem with hubris. Christianity has thought all this through before. Cain, the first farmer, after murdering his brother, immediately founds the first city. https://youtu.be/yony_mXPvdg?feature=shared&t=1268