11.7: Becoming Reflexive: Rethinking ‘Who’ We Are, Breaking Free of a Constricting Paradigm, Ending the ‘War’

Congratulations—if you’ve read this far into the chapter, you already have insight into how we might begin to live more intelligently on our planet, and thus make all of our lives much more secure. You have achieved a degree of reflexivity, the ability to see yourself, together with all of us in our global human society, engaged in the active process of constructing our social reality. You now realize we’ve got a lot more choices than we’re currently allowing ourselves to imagine! We are biological organisms, one result of a long process of life unfolding on this planet. We know we are NOT mechanistically determined to continue to behave in predictable patterns like the billiard balls in simplistic physics experiments, nor dissociated rational minds that are ‘locked into’ following chains of linear logic regardless of where they lead. We see that, as behaviorally flexible primates, we have many more degrees of freedom through which we may exercise moral agency over what we choose to do. Moreover, we realize that we can also choose who we are—we can become the humans who choose NOT to wage this war against nature any longer. Since it is largely our socially reinforced set of beliefs, expectations, mental imagery, and attitudinal orientation that keeps us on our current path, undercutting our own security in a ‘war’ that makes no sense, once we get past our denial we can strive consciously to undo some of the mental straightjacketing we have been inflicting on ourselves, along the lines discussed in the previous section. Even if we don’t succeed in stopping all the destruction that’s already been set in motion, if we can start being honest with ourselves about what went wrong, and why, and take a shot at fixing things—well, at least we will have tried.

In this chapter, we have examined, in a quick overview, some salient aspects of what is currently known about living nature, conceived as life flowing over space and time, and traced the likely path of how we humans came to be doing the kinds of things we are doing to nature now, many of which can be conceptualized as waging a ‘war’ against it. As close relatives of the chimpanzees (let’s not forget our equally close relationship with bonobos, however), it is likely that we all inherited a dualizing tendency arising out of the need of a social animal to defend its ‘own’ group by sharply differentiating it from all ‘others.’ Moreover, we do possess characteristics that make us different from other animals, one being our exceptional facility with symbolization, a difference that has probably always been recognized in human cultures around the world. An orientation that seems to have developed especially strongly within cultures affected by Western thought, however, is one that conceives of us humans being not only distinctive but metaphysically separate from and superior to the rest of the living world, a dualistic opposite to what is often conceived as a dead, lifeless backdrop of ‘resources’ expressly for our use or a biological machine having no other purpose beyond supplying us with ‘services.’ This overall orientation—the engagement of attention in exploitation of a backgrounded ‘other’—can be discovered at work within the intraspecific human relationships of colonization, racism and other group-on-group oppression,^[14] but it has been flourishing with little or no widely recognized critique as yet when turned against nonhuman beings and nature more generally. The roots of this orientation apparently trace to which cognitive connections happen to be dominant in our brains, within neural networks that may have considerable potential for flexibility. Whatever its neuropsychological underpinnings, however, this way of framing the world has found resonance with quite explicit philosophical positions and is constantly reinforced by ubiquitous misleading metaphors that need to be updated. Our backgrounding of the ‘other’ in order to enjoy the privileged position of dominance is often a maneuver about which we prefer to remain in denial, so perhaps, it’s time to name this attitude explicitly; it’s known as anthropocentrism, a constricting paradigm asserting, of just about everything, ‘it’s all about us,’ a narrowness of vision that has become a shackle on our thinking.

In an essay featured in the journal Science during the closing weeks of 2018, a time during which many of us were still absorbing the shocking news concerning the planet’s plummeting biodiversity, Eileen Crist targeted ‘a pervasive worldview’ that legitimizes and sustains ‘the trends of more’—more people, more consumption, more concrete—that are driving our assault on nature. Human supremacy–’the belief system of superiority and entitlement’–is manifested in such assumptions as ‘the human is invested with powers of life and death over all other beings and with the prerogative to control and manage all geographical space’; it is “the underlying big story that normalizes the trends of more, and the consequent displacements and exterminations of nonhumans—as well as of humans who oppose that worldview” (Crist, 2018, p. 1242). Who is it that is fighting our war against nature? Whatever its combination of contributory factors, the war is fought under the banner of this sort of anthropocentric anthropocentric self-glorification, or from within its shadow, the part of us that would prefer to stay in denial about what we’re doing and why it might matter. Crist calls on us to ‘reimagine the human,’ in such a way that we no longer identify ‘human greatness’ with the domination of nonhumans, individually or within ecosystems. We have it within us to make the ‘rational response’ to this ‘present-day ecological emergency’ (Crist, 2018)—it’s clearly a matter of “scaling down and pulling back” (Crist, 2018, p. 1243)—and it is also the ethical response, evoked as we begin to more fully apprehend life on Earth.

As Ben Mylius has pointed out, the anthropocentric paradigm seriously constrains our ability to take in what is out there in the world before us; even a purely descriptive form of anthropocentrism, one that stops short of making claims about moral superiority but that, for example, restricts the definition of terms like ‘consciousness’ to conditions applicable only to the human case, constitutes a “failure of conceptual imagination,” “a failure to work hard enough for a truly capacious frame of reference” (Mylius, 2018, p. 187), thereby curtailing what we are prepared to discover in the world around us. The message from science, moreover, as researchers have begun looking into it, is that there is tremendous continuity as well as diversity in the world of life, and no evidence at all for a sharp discontinuity that could justify humans proclaiming some sort of metaphysical superiority over everything else. It becomes a failure of moral imagination as well, of course, when we try to justify harms to nonhuman nature by mentally erasing or psychologically denying the inner lives of other living beings. As Crist observes, this worldview ‘blocks the human mind from recognizing the intrinsic existence and value of nonhumans and their habitats’; it also, as she recognizes, deprives us of the ability ‘to experience awe for this living planet’—something that we all might undergo if we opened ourselves to the immensity and magnificence of life as it has manifested over the last four billion years—and an experience that, she claims, should it be rediscovered, “would galvanize the world into action” in opposing the mounting mass extinction currently in progress (Crist, 2018, p. 1242). Anthropocentrism, in the widest sense, means we humans are always the center of every focus, that there is nothing greater than our burgeoning human enterprise. But there is something greater–the Biosphere, of which we are but a part. And thus the larger question before us, as we head farther and farther into the Anthropocene, is not whether we are endangering ‘human civilization’—of course we are—but rather just how far down the anthropogenic extinction spasm now in progress is going to knock life on Earth.

Perhaps most seriously in terms of its consequences for us, however, is the effect of our presumed human supremacy in blinding us to ‘the wisdom of limitations,’ as Crist puts it. If every binary choice between human and nonhuman interests must always be made in favor of the human, and if every human life is always seen as much, much more valuable than any nonhuman life, then it should not be surprising that we have ended up with the astoundingly skewed ratio of almost 50 times as much biomass tied up in our single species plus our livestock as is found in all the remaining wild terrestrial mammals on this Earth (Bar-On et al., 2018). But how can there be ‘too much of a good thing,’ when it’s supposed to be the best kind of thing of all? One gigantic ‘elephant in the living room’ when it comes to our war on nature, a topic that the forces of denial have for all too long made taboo in polite conversation, is the unsustainable trajectory of our human population growth, which is now in itself crowding out nonhuman nature in many parts of the world (Crist et al., 2017), and which, when multiplied by the growing per capita consumption of ‘resources’ made possible by increasing affluence, is going to be a focus of increasing concern as we approach 2050; the situation does not bode well for any of the planet’s lifeforms, human or nonhuman alike. But our concern in this chapter has been with addressing the processes that gave rise to and perpetuate the war against nature, for the purpose of ending it; its current scope and predictable future consequences are topics for Chapter 12.