Misanthropy is all the rage these days, Daahling. We have the animal rights crowd and bioethicists disdaining human exceptionalism as “speciesist.” The Darwinists think species distinctions are really fiction since we all evolved out of the ooze. The radical environmentalists take it further, branding us as the villains of the planet.
And now the atheists apparently are jumping on the human unexceptionalism bandwagon. From an atheist blog, “Why I Am Not a Humanist:”
The cult of Man with a capital M is only a slight improvement on the cult of God. It still leaves a lot to be desired, women for instance. If seedbox the Christians’ idea that they belong to the same exclusive club as the creator of the universe sounds to us infidels as monstrous conceit, I can only add that I find almost as pompous and egotistical the notion that man is some marvellous pinnacle of evolution; that because Homo sapiens has produced Einstein and Michelangelo we can forget about the Nazis, the Crusaders and the Khmer Rouge; or that a Gothic cathedral, an air-conditioned office block or the mausoleum of some ancient megalomaniac justify our destruction of the world’s forests, some of the most biologically valuable and breath-takingly beautiful places on earth.
Worse still, the adulation by some humanists of the human intellect (unique as it appears to be) encourages the old-fashioned nonsense that men and women are specially set apart from other living organisms and, worst of all, that the human race has an evolutionary destiny (formerly God’s permission) to conquer and subdue nature.
“Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things” wrote Swinburne, my favourite poet. The words are marvellous rhetoric, intended to shock mid-nineteenth century piety, but today, if taken seriously, they would be a recipe for an ecological nightmare. If any other species of animal had caused a quarter as much destruction of life (including annihilation of whole species), degradation of landscape, fouling of the seas and pollution of the air as humanity has, we would have declared such an animal - however smart and intelligent - to be dangerous vermin and would be spending vast resources on destroying it.
Oh, yawn. At first thought this might be something different. But it’s just the same old, “human hubris will destroy the planet “claptrap, but believing we are “just part of nature” will convince us to be humble and usher in a new Eden. (See the last paragraph.)
But if we are not exceptional, why should we care what we do to the planet? Or to put it another way, if being human is not what gives us the duty to treat the planet responsibly, what on earth does? Hmmmm?
