The Myth of Human Supremacy Read online

  What I do know is that when my animal friends have died, they have always come to me in dreams three nights later, happy and playing. Perhaps this is what I will tell my mother, that she will close her eyes, and three nights later I will see her, and she will no longer be in pain, no longer be functionally blind, no longer have a broken neck and shattered forearm, and she will be with those, like her parents, whom she loved and loves.

  •••

  Lobsters, hydras, planarians, bacteria, and many others don’t have to worry about all of this. They don’t have to die.

  As if all that weren’t enough of a blow to the human supremacist ego, another massive blow can occur when first we recall that bacteria outnumber human cells ten to one in “our” body, and then we realize that many of these bacteria will outlive us.

  Think about it.

  If these bacteria had a supremacist mindset, they may have considered themselves to have merely hitched a ride in us, exploited our big, juicy bodies for as long as it gave them pleasure to do so, then when we died, consumed as much as they could before discarding what’s left, just as they would discard the useless hulk of any other inferior being: with some of the most arrogant of the bacteria supremacists stridently objecting to the use of the word being to describe humans, because it’s clearly a projection of bacteria features and being-hood onto those, like humans, who that do not subjectively exist and who that consistently fail every test of intelligence or self-awareness bacteria devise. These insignificant others—like humans—only exist, the bacteria supremacists assert, as mobile resources to be exploited.

  •••

  Nah, bacteria are too smart to believe something so stupid and community-destroying. And they’ve been around long enough for them not to have this worldview; a supremacist worldview is not sustainable, as it leads to the Cheat behavior described so eloquently and accidentally by Richard Dawkins. I’ll be clear: mechanistic scientists love to yammer on about how evolution is based on traits that facilitate survival, and how traits that do not facilitate survival are selected out by causing the bearers of those traits to go extinct. Well, a supremacist mindset is maladaptive, in that it does not facilitate survival, for reasons that are becoming more clear by the moment. Likewise, a perception that natural selection is based on ruthless competition—which is closely allied to and interdependent with a supremacist mindset—is maladaptive. Both lead to behavior that destroys the landbases on whom those who hold these mindsets depend. And if you destroy your landbase, ultimately you destroy yourself; you cannot survive without the source of your life. The fact that I even have to say this is a measure of this culture’s insanity.

  While human supremacists are busy destroying life and asking why any being would “waste energy” helping “competitors,” bacteria are busy helping each other gain resistance to antibiotics, helping each other to survive.

  •••

  Lately I’ve learned I have a heart condition, and that has me thinking about teleology. It also has me thinking about false solutions to environmental problems. Let’s talk about the second one first.

  The symptoms of heart problems sometimes resemble symptoms of heartburn, or acid reflux. A few days after I started feeling pain in my chest I got a resting electrocardiogram, and it was normal. I was going to get a stress test (where they stress your heart by making you walk faster and faster on a treadmill) but the testing machine at my doctor’s office was broken. That’s unfortunate, because there the test would have cost two hundred dollars, and the same test at the local hospital was over eleven hundred. I had no insurance. So I decided the problem must be heartburn. I know that’s stupid logic, especially when a heart attack can kill you, but such is how people without health insurance sometimes make life-and-death decisions.

  I’m generally a good patient, and the pain in my chest was severe enough to make me the best damn patient around. I took my heartburn medicine regularly, and made sure to be sitting up for two hours after eating.

  The pain lessened. Or did it? Sometimes it was better, sometimes not. Yes, it was better. A lot better. Oh, wait, it still wasn’t so great. Actually it was pretty bad.

  I kept up with my regimen.

  Six weeks later I became one of those people for whom Obamacare works as intended. I got great insurance. The next day I went for and completely failed a stress test, revealing heart disease.

  My point is that it didn’t matter how rigorously I followed my treatment regimen for acid reflux when the problem was actually my heart. We all see the larger lesson, right? If your diagnosis is wrong, it doesn’t matter how carefully you follow the prescription. And this, of course, applies to the murder of the planet as well; any solutions to environmental problems following from a misdiagnosis won’t, except I suppose by sheerest accident, lead to useful solutions. And since unquestioned assumptions are the real authorities of any culture, any solutions to environmental problems that emerge from a human supremacist mindset will, not surprisingly, serve human supremacism and not, once again except by sheerest accident, the real, physical world.

  The heart disease also has me thinking about teleology, and how in this culture only human-created function counts as true function, which really means that only consciously-created function counts as true function, since our bodies aren’t considered “human,” but only animal matter; our minds are what’s important.

  Here’s why I’m thinking about this. After the stress test, I went to see a cardiologist (and used my sparkly new insurance card; how cool is that to walk into a hospital, hand a receptionist a piece of plastic that is not a credit card, and get to have someone help you to be healthy?). He explained to me that we needed to do more tests, but preliminary indications were that one of the arteries into my heart is partially clogged. This means I’m getting insufficient blood flow to my heart, which deprives my heart of oxygen. This causes many problems, including the pain and breathlessness. Oh, did I forget to tell you I was breathless? I tried to forget that symptom as well, even as it was happening. . . . Not that we’ve ever seen anyone attempt to forget any symptoms on a larger, ecological scale . . .

  A while later I asked him, why, if the problem was my heart, did taking the heartburn medicine seem to help? I went from debilitating chest pain as I was gasping for breath—and yes, I should have gone to the emergency room, but many of us don’t always respond appropriately to emergencies and instead hope the crises go away on their own, not, once again, that we’ve ever seen anyone ignore crises on a larger scale either—all the way down to reasonably serious discomfort and a mere shortness of breath.

  He said, “It wasn’t the heartburn medicine. The improvement came because your body performed its own bypass surgery.”

  What did he just say?

  “It sensed you weren’t getting enough oxygen, so it grew new capillaries to go around the clog to supply oxygen to your heart.”

  I couldn’t keep from exclaiming, “Just like plants know where to grow limbs and roots!”

  I don’t think he heard me. Or maybe he was just polite enough to pretend. In any case, he said, “It’s not all good news, though, since sometimes these capillaries aren’t stable or strong enough to not blow out. But they’re certainly the body working to repair itself.”

  “Teleology!” I said.

  Actually, no I didn’t. This was my first meeting with this doctor, and I didn’t want him to think I was crazy. If it would have been my third or fourth visit, no problem.

  Think about it: how do the capillaries decide where to grow? Who makes those decisions?

  Why is it that when humans consciously conduct heart bypass surgery, we perceive it as miraculous and a sign of our superiority as a species, but when our bodies do it without our minds’ conscious intervention, we don’t see this as a sign of superior intellect on the parts of our bodies?

  And why did I just identify with my mind and not my body?<
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  It all comes back to that belief that only human functionality is true functionality. And in this and many other cases, “human” doesn’t include even our own bodies.

  •••

  I just read that sperm whale feces are central to the overall health of the South Pacific Ocean. This is because, as opposed to oceans where nitrates might be the limiting factor for the growth of plankton and so on, in the South Pacific the limiting factor is iron. And it ends up that sperm whales individually and collectively move massive amounts of iron from deep waters to the surface, where it becomes available to the plankton. How? By eating and then defecating. Sperm whales are known for being able to dive very deep in order to feed on squid, who are, evidently, iron rich. The whales swim back to the surface, then defecate, to the delight and health of just about everyone in the region.88

  Whaling operations harmed the populations of sperm whales, and consequently, the health of the entire community.

  This is what happens every time we forget that the natural world is full of intelligence, and knows far better than we do what it is doing.

  •••

  Today I had an engaging conversation with one of my neighbors, a genuinely good man who is the local Seventh-Day-Adventist pastor, and who has the wonderfully Dickensian name of Mason Philpot. I told him about my heart condition, and about my body throwing out these new capillaries.

  He responded, “People often tell us that political and economic issues are too complex for us to understand, but I think mainly the problem is that those in power hide facts from us, and if we knew more, we would understand more, and we would be able to better respond to them.”

  I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. I feared he was going to add his voice to the chorus of human supremacists who argue that if we just had more information about “how nature works” then we would be able to better manipulate the natural world.

  I needn’t have worried. He’s a good and humble person. He went another direction entirely, and said, “But that’s not what happens with our bodies. Honestly, the more I learn about our bodies, or about nature, the more I’m filled with awe at the beautiful, complex mystery of it all. It’s all so powerfully and incomprehensibly beautiful.”

  Just wait till he hears about the role of sperm whale feces in the health of the South Pacific . . .

  * * *

  70 Leonard Finkleman, “Peas and Quiet,” Rationally Speaking, March 11, 2012, http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/05/peas-and-quiet.html (accessed March 19, 2014).

  71 For example, the comedian Alan Davies lost ten points for saying that Julius Caesar was born by Cesarian section. I’d always heard that, but it ends up it’s not true. At that time, the women always died in the operation, but Caesar’s mother lived into his twenties, meaning he couldn’t possibly have been born this way. I know we’ve also been told this is the etymology of the word Cesarian, but see Wikipedia for an interesting discussion: “Caesarian Section,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesarean_section (accessed March 23, 2014).

  72 QI, Series B, episode 6, “Beavers,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Njfk0qqM24 (accessed March 21, 2014).

  73 “Bacteria Communicate to Help Each Other Resist Antibiotics,” Science Daily, July 4, 2013, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130704095130.htm (accessed March 25, 2014). I find it extremely interesting that scientists seem to have less difficulty using words like “communicate,” “language,” and “help” concerning bacteria than they do concerning plants.

  74 Melinda Wenner, “Quiet Bacteria and Antibiotic Resistance,” Scientific American, April 20, 2009, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bacteria-antibiotic-resistance/ (accessed March 25, 2014).

  75 With about 1,400 different strains of bacteria living just in your navel.

  76 Vittorio Venturi and Sujatha Subramoni, “Future Research Trends in the Major Chemical Language of Bacteria,” HFSP Journal, 3, no 2 (April 2009): 105–116, published online March 4, 2009, doi: 10.2976/1.3065673; United States Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2707791/ (accessed March 26, 2014).

  77 Anthony Trewavas, “The Green Plant as an Intelligent Organism,” in Communication in Plants: Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life, ed. Frantisek Baluska, Stefano Mancuso, and Dieter Volkmann (New York: Springer, 2006), 6.

  78 Cobbled together from a number of websites, including, among others, “Tardigrade,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade; Helen Pow, “Meet the Toughest Animal on the Planet,” Daily Mail, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2280286/Meet-toughest-animal-planet-The-water-bear-survive-frozen-boiled-float-space-live-200-years.html. “How Long Does a Tardigrade Live?” Fluther.com, http://www.fluther.com/3530/how-long-does-a-tardigrade-live/ (accessed May 10, 2014).

  79 Traci Watson, “Bdelloids Surviving on Borrowed DNA, Science Now, November 15, 2012, http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2012/11/bdelloids-surviving-borrowed-dna. Site visited (accessed May 10, 2014).

  80 John Graham Dalyell, Observations on Some Interesting Phenomena in Animal Physiology, Exhibited by Several Species of Planariae: Illustrated by Coloured Figures of Living Animals (Edinburgh: The Archibald Constable & Co., 1814), 32, http://www2u.biglobe.ne.jp/~gen-yu/pla_classic_e.html (accessed May 1, 2014).

  81 Teresa Coppens, “What is Negligible Senescence?” http://hubpages.com/hub/What-is-Negligible-Senescence (accessed May 14, 2014).

  82 Ker Than, “‘Immortal’ Jellyfish Swarms World Oceans,” National Geographic, January 29, 2009, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/01/090130-immortal-jellyfish-swarm.html (accessed May 14, 2014).

  83 Ibid.

  84 And how do they know this? Because they injected acid into the mole rats’ paws.

  85 As well as many other religions. Some say it is the origin of all religions.

  86 Unless, of course, the religion considers life in heaven to be, well, heaven; and life on earth to be hell, in which case planarians, lobsters, and bacteria are clearly sinners being punished; but I can’t imagine how any religion would be ridiculous enough to consider this wonderful gift that is life on earth to be even remotely hellish.

  87 Or there’s this not atypically narcissistic language from “futurist” Jason Silva, who says, “The mindset of an Immortalist is simple and straightforward: death is an abhorrent imposition on a species able to reflect and care about meaning. Creatures that love and dream and create and yearn for something meaningful, eternal and transcendent should not have to suffer despair, decay and death. We are the arbiters of value in an otherwise meaningless universe. The fleeting nature of beautiful, transcendent moments feeds the urge for man to scream: ‘I was here; I felt this and it matters, goddamn it!’ In the face of meaningless extinction, it’s not surprising that mankind has needed to find a justification for his suffering. Man is the only animal aware of his mortality—and this awareness causes a tremendous amount of anxiety.”

  In the same essay, he writes, “The time has come for man to get over his cosmic inferiority complex. To rise above his condition—to use technology to extend himself beyond his biological limitations. Alan Harrington reminds us: ‘We must never forget we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everybody.’ While Ernest Becker identified our need for heroism and our extensive attempts to satisfy it symbolically, Alan Harrington proposes we move definitively to engineer salvation in the real world; to move directly to physically overcome death itself: ‘Spend the money, hire the scientists and hunt down death like an outlaw.’

  He concludes, “The Immortalist point of view, then, could be described as a project that uses technology to ‘Individualize eternity, to stabilize the forms and identities through which the energy of consci
ous life passes.’ This is hardly a stretch for human beings, as Harrington proclaims: ‘We have long since gone beyond the moon, touched down on mars, harnessed nuclear energy, artificially reproduced DNA, and now have the biochemical means to control birth; why should death itself, “the last enemy,” be considered beyond conquest?’”

  From Ian Mackenzie, “The End of Death: Further Conversations with Jason Silva,” Matadornetwork, August 6, 2009, http://matadornetwork.com/bnt/the-end-of-death-further-conversations-with-jason-silva/ (accessed January 23, 2015).

  88 Alex Kirby, “How Whale Feces Slows Down Global Warming,” Alternet, http://www.alternet.org/environment/whale-feces-helps-slow-antarctic-warming?akid=11658.202899.PjfwM4&rd=1&src=newsletter976470&t=25&paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark (accessed April 6, 2014).

  Chapter Seven

  Narcissism

  Narcissism falls along the axis of what psychologists call personality disorders, one of a group that includes antisocial, dependent, histrionic, avoidant and borderline personalities. But by most measures, narcissism is one of the worst, if only because the narcissists themselves are so clueless.

  JEFFREY KLUGER

  If I killed them, you know, they couldn’t reject me as a man. It was more or less making a doll out of a human being . . . and carrying out my fantasies with a doll, a living human doll.