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.
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.”
