The Myth of Human Supremacy Read online

  •••

  I just read an article about how chimps consistently outperform humans in certain sorts of games that require they pay close attention to, and recognize patterns in, what the other player is doing.

  The game the article describes is basically a matching game, where each player secretly chooses left or right on a computer screen the other can’t see, and if the players match, then player A wins, and if they don’t, then player B wins. Chimps imprisoned in laboratories outperformed sixteen university students from Japan and twelve men from Guinea. The chimps moved more quickly in each case to optimal strategies than did the humans. There was no difference in ineptitude between the humans from Japan and Guinea.

  What possible implications might one draw from this?

  Well, the first implication I might draw could be that chimpanzees seem to be better than at least non-Indigenous humans at paying attention to the behavior of others, and seem to be more sensitive to these others’ actions. The article even quotes a behavioral economist from Caltech as acknowledging, “It seems like they’re keeping better track of their opponents’ previous choices. You can see, compared to the human subjects, they’re just more responsive. They’re keeping better ‘minds’ on what their opponents are doing.”

  Please note his dismissive use of scare quotes around the word “minds.” In the “minds” of human supremacists, only humans have minds; the best anyone else can hope for is “minds.”

  Doesn’t the insistence on our separation from all others ever get tiring? Doesn’t it all start to seem a little desperate?

  The next implication I might draw could have to do with one of the definitions routinely used to declare humans über-intelligent, which is that intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns. But, uh, the chimpanzees are better than we are at recognizing patterns in the play of their opponents, which means, uh, well, maybe we’re not number one. Damn it all.

  But of course, neither of those are the implications the scientists and journalists draw from all this. The Caltech behavioral economist quoted above concluded, “One theory is that the humans are overthinking it, and the chimps have a simpler model.”

  Extraordinary. He just turned the fact that chimpanzees outperformed humans in this game into evidence that humans are more complex thinkers. Or maybe it’s not so extraordinary. Isn’t it what we would expect from narcissists?

  This behavioral economist won a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2013. So I guess this means that if I want to show myself a more complex thinker than this “genius,” I need to play games with him and make sure to lose. Following his “logic,” me losing would be evidence I overthought, while him winning would be evidence that his “mind” uses a “simpler model.”

  Despite, or perhaps because of, the self-serving stupidity of the genius’s comment, the editor of the newspaper that printed the article used that comment as a pull-quote.

  Of course the editor did.

  The conclusions of other human supremacists are equally ridiculous. As the article states, “Researchers believe the different outcomes could be the byproduct of a cognitive trade-off in the course of evolution. Humans left the trees and developed language, semantic thought and cooperation, while our distant cousins kept right on doing what made them so successful in the first place: competing, deceiving and manipulating.”62

  Yes, that’s right. They just turned evidence for an increased sensitivity and responsiveness toward their playmates—the chimps were, after all playing a game, which is not quite the same as, say, stealing someone’s land and extirpating them, which someone we could name has done once or twice or a million times—into evidence that chimpanzees are deceitful and manipulative.

  Please note also some of the other propaganda in that paragraph. First, it’s irrelevant that humans “left the trees”; how does leaving trees for grasslands imply the development of “language, semantic thought and cooperation”? The phrase “left the trees” pretty clearly is used here as shorthand to signify humans separating themselves—psychologically and spiritually, since of course it’s not possible physically—from Nature. Second, nonhumans have highly developed “language, semantic thought and cooperation,” which means, much as we humble narcissists like to think we invented everything, that humans didn’t “develop” them. Third, it is this culture that is refusing to cooperate with the rest of the world, but is instead projecting its own competitive mindset onto reality (Selfish Gene, anyone?). Salmon, forests, and rivers seem to cooperate just fine. The paragraph is really just a recapitulation of the Great Chain of Being, nothing more than the tired re-assertion that “At some point in the past, humans crossed some otherwise impassible chasm that now separates Humans from Nature, stopped being another animal that is red in tooth and claw, stopped being matter, and became mind, became elevated, filled with abstract thoughts (never mind that the chimpanzees were playing this game on a computer, and you can’t get much more abstract than that) and became (cue the swell of violins to drown out the screams of this culture’s human and nonhuman victims) cooperative.”

  The original paragraph would be far more accurate if it read, “After some humans metaphorically ‘left the trees’ by defining themselves as separate from and superior to Nature—and to maintain this self-definition they must put themselves in perpetual opposition to Nature—they developed patriarchy, wars of extermination, and ecocide; and they traded cooperation for competition, domination, and manipulation; while these humans’ ‘distant cousins’ have been thrown off their lands, ripped from their families and friends, and subjected to stupid lab tests.”

  It doesn’t really matter whether any of the human supremacist assertions make sense, so long as they serve our sense of superiority. Chimpanzees are better than are humans at these games, which then somehow means humans are superior, smarter, and more cooperative. And besides, chimps are deceitful and manipulative. They must be; it couldn’t actually be that they are better than we are at something. The big cheaters. So there.

  •••

  Let’s be very clear on what just happened. The human captors devised a game, and when captive chimpanzees beat humans at this human-devised game, the human captors accused the prisoners of being deceitful and manipulative.

  And the captors are also claiming that they themselves excel at cooperation. As they hold these others captive.

  What a fucking surprise.

  •••

  Doesn’t that remind you of when you were in elementary school, and in every grade there inevitably seemed to be this one spoiled kid who invented games with rules that made it so he was always supposed to win, and then whenever someone else would start to win he’d change the rules, then change them again, and when he lost anyway, he’d whine that the other kid must have cheated?

  When a child does this, it’s unpleasant and pathetic, but sometimes at least understandable in a more-to-be-pitied-than-censured sort of way. When an adult does it, it is very much, as a dear psychologist friend of mine is fond of saying, “diagnostic of something very wrong with the person’s emotional and mental health.”

  •••

  Not only must human supremacists make the world jump through hoops on command, they must make their own perception of the world jump through hoops on command. This is one manifestation of cutting the vocal cords of the planet. The planet, from this perspective, doesn’t really exist. The only reality they can accept is the one they create. Which does not correspond to reality at all.

  This is why even when the chimps win, they lose. This is how “knowledge” or “exploration” or “research” works in this culture of human supremacism. Primary purposes of “knowledge” or “exploration” or “research” (as well as, of course, philosophy, religion, ideology, law, and so on) in a supremacist society include increasing the supremacists’ beliefs in their own superiority; and even more so, increasing their control over all those the
y perceive as inferior; which also, not coincidentally, once again increases their beliefs in their own superiority.

  Thereby staving off, if only for a little while, the nagging fear that they may not be separate and superior after all.

  •••

  We’ve all heard of the Milgram experiment, where participants were led to believe they were taking on the role of “teacher” in a study on the relationship between pain and learning. An authority figure told the teacher to administer electric shocks to a “learner” when the learner gave incorrect answers to questions. Unbeknownst to the teacher, the learner—who was in another room and could be heard, but not seen—was in on the experiment, and there were no electric shocks. But as the strength of the “shocks” would increase with each wrong answer, the learner would moan and scream as if in pain, and cry out about his heart condition. The authority figure would push the teacher to deliver ever stronger shocks to the learner. Toward the end the learner might begin banging on the wall, and then go ominously silent.

  Most people believed that nearly everyone would stand up to the authority figure and not harm another human being. But most people were wrong: in reality, more than 60 percent of the subjects obeyed the authority figure and tortured the helpless victim to the very end.

  Now here’s my point: when researchers set up an experiment where a rat received food by pressing a lever, and then added the twist that pressing the lever shocked a rat in a nearby cage, the rat refused to press the lever. Different researchers replicated this experiment with rhesus monkeys, who also refused to torture their fellows. One monkey refused to eat for twelve days, literally starving himself instead of causing another pain.

  And who are the cooperative ones?

  •••

  Scientists conducted an experiment in which they starved one capuchin monkey while those in cages nearby were fed (we can certainly ask what sort of sadist would conceptualize such an experiment, but we already know the answer). To their surprise, they found the starved monkey didn’t lose any weight. They could only conclude that the other monkeys were surreptitiously sharing their food.

  And who are the cooperative ones?

  •••

  Whalers have long known that if they kill or wound one sperm whale, other whales will come to try to help their comrade. The whalers then kill the rest of the pod.

  Who are the cooperative ones?

  •••

  Hunters knew that if they killed or wounded one Carolina parakeet, the parakeet’s friends would hover around to protect the wounded one. The hunters then killed the rest of the parakeets. In fact they drove them extinct.

  Who are the cooperative ones?

  •••

  The other thing that breaks my heart about the plant research is that, unsurprisingly, most of it is done not to help plants, but explicitly to support agriculture or industry: to take without giving back. For example, in the article cited earlier in this chapter about Mother Trees, the author of the article writes, “The concept of symbiotic plant communication has far-reaching implications in both the forestry and agricultural industries. This revelation may change the way we approach harvesting forests, by leaving the older trees intact to foster regrowth. In agriculture, undisturbed mycorrhiza systems enhance plants’ ability to resist pathogens, as well as absorb water and nutrients from the soil, bringing into question common practices that disturb these underground networks, such as plowing.”

  Given the destructiveness of this culture, and given our complete unwillingness to address the depth or insatiability of this destructiveness, I guess we should be glad the author at least acknowledges you can’t take every last tree from a forest, and that the plow—the invention upon which agriculture (and indeed, the entire culture) is based—might not be particularly benign.

  Another article on plant communication segues from asking whether plants communicate or give soliloquies directly to, “The possibility that plants routinely share information isn’t just intriguing botany; it could be exploited to improve crop resistance to pests.”63 It’s always about exploitation, isn’t it? In this case, it’s about exploiting this newfound human understanding of plant language specifically so members of the dominant culture can more efficiently exploit the plants they call crops. This is standard behavior by those who conquer: learn enough of the local languages to facilitate enslavement and exploitation of those whose land they’ve occupied.

  Or there’s this: “Research on plant communication may someday benefit farmers and their crops. Plant-distress chemicals could be used to prime plant defenses, reducing the need [sic] for pesticides. Jack Schultz, a chemical ecologist at the University of Missouri, who did some of the pioneering work on plant signaling in the early nineteen-eighties, is helping to develop a mechanical ‘nose’ that, attached to a tractor and driven through a field, could help farmers identify plants under insect attack,64 allowing them to spray pesticides only when and where they are needed [sic].”65 Always more efficient ways to exploit, not to know or relate or help any others on their own terms.

  Even someone who loves plants as much as does Stefano Mancuso, someone who has devoted his life to understanding and helping them, is not immune to the highly contagious mental illness that is human supremacism. Michael Pollan writes, and I quote this at length (broken up by my responses) because it is, to me at least, so completely heartbreaking and horrifying: “If we could begin to understand plants on their own terms, he [Mancuso] said, ‘it would be like being in contact with an alien culture. But we could have all the advantages of that contact without any of the problems—because it doesn’t want to destroy us!’”

  Well, I think that at this point if we were to begin to understand plants on their own terms, the first thing they would tell us is to stop enslaving everyone, and to stop murdering the planet. If plants send chemical messages letting their neighbors know their leaves are being eaten by caterpillars, what chemical messages might they send when entire forests, including Mother Trees, are clearcut, when marshes are drained and paved, and when grasslands are plowed under and planted to corn?

  I’m sure from the perspective of plants, we are the “aliens” who want to destroy them. If we understood plants from their perspective, we would know this.

  Within the context of this exploitative and destructive culture, what Mancuso’s comment really means, especially in practice, is that we would gain tremendous advantages from this “understanding” not because the plants “don’t want to destroy us,” but far more accurately, because they don’t fight back as we exploit and exterminate them; they continue, to use Dawkins’s term, to be “Suckers.” From this perspective, the hope is that our understanding of plants will allow us to become more effective Cheats, to more effectively and with ever greater impunity steal from them.

  Finally, if space aliens did conquer the earth, we all know what their relationship to human languages would be. At first they would deny that humans have language, and then when they finally did allow that possibility, they would learn our languages specifically so they could use that knowledge to facilitate our further enslavement and exploitation. Sound familiar?

  Pollan continues, “How do plants do all the amazing things they do without brains? Without locomotion? By focusing on the otherness of plants rather than on their likeness, Mancuso suggested, we stand to learn valuable things and develop important new technologies. This was to be the theme of his presentation to the conference, the following morning, on what he called ‘bioinspiration.’ How might the example of plant intelligence help us design better computers, or robots, or networks?”

  Really? That’s why you want to learn more about plants? So you can help humans to more effectively dominate the natural world?

  Imagine for a moment that we’re living in the alien contact scenario Mancuso mentioned above. In this scenario the aliens really do want to enslave, exploit, and destroy us.
In fact, the drive to enslave, exploit, and destroy us is so strong among these aliens that even the most gentle and kind of them—even those who genuinely love us (insofar as these bizarre aliens are capable of what we humans would recognize as love)—attempt to learn about our physiology, our languages, our relationships, not so they can help us resist the alien exploitation, nor so we can better be left alone, nor even out of simple curiosity, but instead so they can learn how our skin and bones and bodies and minds and organs are made up, so they can design ever more efficient alien computers, robots, and networks, so they can make ever better ways to exploit us, to enslave us, to make us jump through hoops on command, so these aliens can attempt to come closer to taking complete control of our lives and turning every bit of the planet to alien use, and in the process, destroying life on the planet.

  And they will call that getting to know our perspective.

  Pollan continues, “Mancuso was about to begin a collaboration with a prominent computer scientist to design a plant-based computer, modeled on the distributed computing performed by thousands of roots processing a vast number of environmental variables.”

  These aliens will dissect our brains, trying to figure out how we think, so they can design human-based computers (after all, some humans claim human brains are the most complex phenomenon in the universe) that will facilitate alien commerce and industry, and ultimately alien control of the planet.

  “His collaborator, Andrew Adamatzky, the director of the International Center of Unconventional Computing, at the University of the West of England, has worked extensively with slime molds, harnessing their maze-navigating and computational abilities. (Adamatzky’s slime molds, which are a kind of amoeba,66 grow in the direction of multiple food sources simultaneously, usually oat flakes, in the process computing and remembering the shortest distance between any two of them; he has used these organisms to model transportation networks.) In an e-mail, Adamatzky said that, as a substrate for biological computing, plants offered both advantages and disadvantages over slime molds. ‘Plants are more robust,’ he wrote, and ‘can keep their shape for a very long time,’ although they are slower-growing and lack the flexibility of slime molds. But because plants are already ‘analog electrical computers,’ trafficking in electrical inputs and outputs, he is hopeful that he and Mancuso will be able to harness them for computational tasks.”