The Myth of Human Supremacy Read online

  The creation of these ideologies of domination not only eases or erases the consciences of the perpetrators, but makes resistance to these perpetrators seem futile. In the case of Christianity, for example, it’s hard enough to fight the king and all who believe in his divine right of kingship without adding in the possibility that you’re going against the Big Man Himself. And so far as science, I’ve often commented that science is a far better means of social control than Christianity, in that if you question Christianity you’re merely consigned to a hell you don’t believe in, but if you question science you must be just plain stupid.

  So here’s the point. It’s extraordinarily useful for those whose lifestyles are based on the systematic exploitation of others to pretend that this exploitation is natural. Thus they needn’t worry their consciences about this exploitation, which they no longer perceive as exploitation, and no longer perceive even as “just the way things are,” but rather as completely expected. Inevitable. Natural.

  And when your way of life is predicated on narcissism and community-destroying sociopathy—to the point of perceiving yourself the only one who really matters on the planet, killing the planet, and then using this planetary murder to validate your own self-perceived superiority—it’s extraordinarily useful to pretend that evolution itself is driven by supremely narcissistic individual actions, and that community not only is not central but plays no effective role in evolution, and that any evidence to the contrary must be either ignored or derided as “speculation,” “philosophizing,” or, with an entirely-to-be-expected narcissism, “anthrompomorphization.” Thus it becomes easy to pretend plant communication is soliloquy, and thus it becomes easy to destroy forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, oceans, the world.

  It has long been clear to me that the most important elements in evolution—which really means in life—are biotic communities, who are themselves living beings. Just as your own body is made up of other living beings, some of whom share your DNA and the vast majority of whom do not, so, too, the larger living bodies of forests and grasslands and ponds and streams and rivers and oceans are made up of other smaller living beings, living beings whose lives are as precious to them as the larger being’s is to it, and as yours is to you. And these smaller beings affect the health of the larger being. And just as your body is permeable, so, too are the bodies of these others. A river flows into a forest; water enters the body of the forest. The river flows out; water leaves the body of the forest. Both the river and the forest are alive. And when salmon spawn and die in this river, this is the river, these salmon, feeding the forest. And when trees drop their leaves into the water, this is the forest, these trees, feeding the river. When the river floods, the river and the forest feed each other.

  What can seem destructive may not be. Bears girdle trees, which kills them. But forests need standing dead trees as homes for some of those who live there.56 And dead trees can continue to feed everyone else, by slowly becoming soil as they are eaten by animals, fungi, other plants, bacteria, and so on, and in other ways as well.

  Have you ever heard of what are called “Mother Trees”? These are big old trees who are connected to swaths of forest through the mycelial networks, and who help to feed and maintain the other trees—especially the younger ones—in that part of the forest. Even after the trunks die, the mother trees continue to feed these others as long as they can. As one enthusiastic description has it: “Counter to Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ theory,57 Mother Trees do not compete for resources; rather, their presence ensures the healthy survival and diversity of younger, newer trees [and other plants], as they actively transfer vital nutrients and forest wisdom via an overlapping, interconnected, fungi-rich web of shared roots. If a Mother Tree is to die, she will consciously transfer her resources to her interlinked community of living trees before she fully collapses, knowingly ‘passing her wand’ to the next generation.”58

  If all the talk of “wisdom” and “consciously” and “passing her wand” freaks you out, we can instead speak the language of forestry: “Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia have made a major discovery: trees and plants really do communicate and interact with each other. They discovered an underground web of fungi connecting the trees and plants of an ecosystem. This symbiotic web enables the purposeful sharing of resources, that consequently helps the whole system of trees and plants to flourish. ‘The big trees were subsidizing the young ones through the fungal networks,’ Simard says. ‘Without this helping hand, most of the seedlings wouldn’t make it.’ Dr. Simard was led to the discovery by the observation of webs of bright white and yellow fungal threads in the forest floor. Many of these fungi were mycorrhizal, meaning they have a beneficial, symbiotic relationship with a host plant, in this case tree roots. Microscopic experimentation revealed that the fungi actually move carbon, water and nutrients between trees, depending upon their needs. At the hub of a forest’s mycorrhizal network stand the ‘Mother Trees’—large, older trees that rise above the forest, a concept illustrated in the movie Avatar. These ‘Mother Trees’ are connected to all the other trees in the forest by this network of fungal threads, and may manage the resources of the whole plant community. Simard’s latest research reveals that when a Mother Tree is cut down, the survival rate of the younger members of the forest is substantially diminished.”59

  Forests, and the trees who live in them and are parts of them, know how absurd it is to ask, “Why should one plant waste energy clueing in its competitors about a danger?”

  Who are the intelligent ones?

  •••

  One of the most elegant arguments I’ve seen against ruthless competition as the central driving force of evolution came, oddly enough, in the book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins’s hymn to ruthless competition; it’s a projection onto the natural world of the same mindset that gave us neoliberal capitalism. At one point in the book he proposes a thought experiment in which a population of creatures coexists with ticks. These creatures cannot groom themselves, and if they don’t have the ticks removed through groomings, the ticks can kill them. He writes, “Let the population consist of individuals who adopt one of two strategies. As in Maynard Smith’s analyses, we are not talking about conscious strategies [of course, since mechanistic science is all about projecting a lack of consciousness onto the entire universe], but about unconscious behaviour programs laid down by genes [of course, since so much of mechanistic science is about naturalizing oppressive and exploitative behavior, in this case by blaming genes for selfish, community-destroying behavior]. Call the two strategies Sucker and Cheat.60 Suckers groom anybody who needs it, indiscriminately. Cheats accept altruism from suckers, but they never groom anybody else, not even somebody who has previously groomed them. As in the case of the hawks and doves, we arbitrarily assign pay-off points. It does not matter what the exact values are, so long as the benefit of being groomed exceeds the cost of grooming. If the incidence of parasites is high, any individual sucker in a population of suckers can reckon on being groomed about as often as he grooms. The average pay-off for a sucker among suckers is therefore positive. They all do quite nicely in fact, and the word sucker seems inappropriate. But now suppose a cheat arises in the population. Being the only cheat, he can count on being groomed by everybody else, but he pays nothing in return. His average pay-off is better than the average for a sucker. Cheat genes will therefore start to spread through the population. [Please note that he presumes the cheater does so not because of personality, deformation of personality through trauma, or deformation of personality through narcissistic philosophy, but rather because genes told him to; the net effect of his language is to naturalize exploitation.] Sucker genes will soon be driven to extinction. This is because, no matter what the ratio in the population, cheats will always do better than suckers. For instance, consider the case when the population consists of 50 per cent suckers and 50 per cent cheats
. The average pay-off for both suckers and cheats will be less than that for any individual in a population of 100 per cent suckers. But still, cheats will be doing better than suckers because they are getting all the benefits—such as they are—and paying nothing back. When the proportion of cheats reaches 90 per cent, the average pay-off for all individuals will be very low: many of both types may by now be dying of the infection carried by the ticks. But still the cheats will be doing better than the suckers. Even if the whole population declines toward extinction, there will never be any time when suckers do better than cheats. Therefore, as long as we consider only these two strategies, nothing can stop the extinction of the suckers and, very probably, the extinction of the whole population too.”61

  Dawkins then goes on to describe a third strategy he calls “grudgers,” who will groom others when they first meet, but without reciprocity will never groom that individual again. This strategy ultimately wins out in his model, with “suckers” being eliminated and “cheats” being reduced to a small percentage.

  But for me the real point had already been made, in his story of how “cheats” destroy previously stable communities of “suckers.” I first read (and hated) The Selfish Gene in 1990. As I read that passage, in a park on a warm late-summer day in Spokane, Washington, I loudly exclaimed, “That’s it exactly. Doesn’t everyone else see it?” The other people in the park evidently did not, since they merely looked at me like I was a crazy man.

  Despite the fact that Dawkins is with his work arguing for a selfish gene-induced innate sociopathy and a lack of communal responsibility, it seemed perfectly clear to me that Dawkins was here, combined with current events, making an elegant and concise argument in favor of cooperation as a primary mover of evolution, and the community as evolution’s primary unit.

  Do you see it? Do you see how his example of suckers and cheats makes the opposite point—as powerfully as is possible—to what he intended?

  Let’s try this then. Instead of one species with two strategies, let’s pretend we have a hundred different populations of different species within some natural community. All of these species are, to for a moment use Dawkins’s term, suckers, who groom others. But here this grooming can take the form of many actions besides pulling off ticks. So why don’t we just call them “givers”? Perhaps this giving comes in the form of a fish, who, having ingested a certain species of parasite, follows the parasite’s instructions to swim to the surface of the water and flash its belly to the sky. This makes it easier to catch, and a seabird ingests the fish as well as the parasite. The bird gives by pooping out the parasite’s children, who are then eaten by someone else who is eaten by a fish, who then swims to the surface and flashes its belly. And the parasite gives by allowing the birds to eat: without them it would be too hard to catch fish and the birds would die, and the entire community would begin to unravel. Or let’s take salmon. They give their bodies to a forest. The forest gives wood and soil to the river. The river gives soil and food to the ocean. The ocean gives water to the air (and food in the form of anadromous fish to forests). The air gives water to the forest. Everyone gives. The Mother Trees give. The voles who eat mushrooms in the forest give the spawn in their poop to the soil. The spawn in the soil joins with root tips of Douglas firs. The firs and the fungi feed each other, and together grow a tree who is a home for the voles, and the owls who eat the voles. Bears girdle the tree and kill it. Now it becomes homes for others. All give. From each according to its gifts, and the needs of the community. To each according to its needs and the needs of the community. These gifts can include their lives. For many, especially for the very young of some species, their lives are their only gift, as among tadpoles or many others, the overwhelming majority of them give gifts of their lives in the form of food not long after they are born.

  Can you imagine a model of ecological sustainability like this? And can you see where I’m going with it? Even Richard Dawkins states in The Selfish Gene that a community of givers (or to use his term “suckers”) would be ecologically stable, so long as it encountered no “cheats,” whose presence would destabilize and then destroy the formerly stable community. In fact, a community of all “suckers” would be the richest and most fecund, as all would receive the most benefit.

  Humans are in this gift economy, too. They give just as everyone else does. From each according to its gifts, and the needs of the community. To each according to its needs, and the needs of the community. Humans are completely integrated into the community. This was, for example, how the Tolowa lived where I live now. When humans are integrated they all, as Dawkins says in his example, “do quite nicely.” And indeed, the word “sucker” does seem inappropriate.

  Now, what does Dawkins’s model state happens when cheats move into a previously stable community where givers live, to a forest, to a bay, to a grassland? Because these cheat are “getting all the benefits” and “paying nothing back”—and does this sound like the behavior of anyone we know?—they will deplete the “suckers” (the givers) until there is nothing left.

  As we see.

  The cheats will prosper at the expense of the givers, and eventually the cheats will so destroy the givers that they will destroy their own ability to cheat, and thereby wipe out themselves as well.

  As we see.

  Here’s the thing: Dawkins has perfectly described what this culture of cheats is doing to the planet. If a primary argument for selfishness is that a world filled with givers would collapse when a cheat arrived, and the dominant culture is clearly a cheat who has arrived and is causing the world to collapse, wouldn’t that in fact be an argument that prior to the arrival of the cheat the world just might have been full of givers?

  And how did he think there got to be so many salmon in the first place, so many fecund forests, rich grasslands, vibrant marshes, rivers and oceans full of fish? Where did these come from? They came from the members of these forests, grasslands, marshes, rivers, oceans living and dying and making their homes better places by their lives and deaths. By all this giving.

  And now the world is doing what his model predicts. What else does he think is happening, as salmon populations collapse, as do those of migratory songbirds, and as the oceans die?

  Why doesn’t everybody see this? I guess the answer might be that any culture that would kill the planet would use any means necessary, including, of course, philosophy, to avoid perceiving the consequences of its actions, and to ignore even the most straightforward logic.

  As we see.

  •••

  Please note in addition to all of this that even according to the model used by Dawkins, the “cheats” need not be more intelligent nor in any other way superior to the “suckers” in order to effectively drive both of them to extinction. The “cheats” do so merely by cheating.

  I’ll be explicit: the fact that members of this culture have through cheating gained a competitive advantage over other humans and nonhuman beings in no way implies any form of greater intelligence or any other form of superiority. It implies what it is: cheating gains a competitive advantage at the cost of future extinction of those from whom the cheater is taking, and then also the cheater himself.

  •••

  How you perceive the world affects how you behave in and toward the world. If you perceive competition as the world’s guiding principle, compete you will; if you perceive the world as being full of ruthless competitors you must overcome and exploit, you will do your part to ruthlessly overcome and exploit them. If, on the other hand, you perceive the world’s guiding principle to be that of giving to the larger biotic community, you will give to the larger biotic community; if you perceive the world as being full of others who give to make it stronger, healthier, more alive, then you will do your part to make it so.