Purveyors of pop culture, indigenous movement leaders, renowned academics, literary giants, and powerful philosophers alike have admonished us that we humans need to change our evil ways. So given our amazing cognitive abilities and capacities to adapt our behaviors, why do we continue with our pathological parasitism?
Steve Best, Associate Professor of Philosophy at UTEP, and a leading philosopher in the animal liberation movement, suggested that perhaps humanity is, “A biological experiment with advanced primate intelligence gone horribly wrong, as if all of planet earth is an Island of Dr. Moreau set up by an evil God.”
While hopelessly anthropocentric apologists for humanity’s ongoing rape of the Earth and its inhabitants will probably dismiss Best’s observation as the ravings of a misanthropic animal fanatic, critical thinking people of conscience and humility will consider the possibility that Best may be right.
Certainly there is no dearth of evidence supporting the fact that the human evolutionary path has veered into a deadly and destructive cul-de-sac. Homo rapiens have succeeded Homo sapiens in humanity’s evolutionary development. How long can we sustain, or better yet, how long will the Earth allow us to sustain a “civilization” that is premised on violence, greed, over-consumption, endless growth, “success” and pleasure attained at the expense of the suffering of other sentient beings, narcissism, ego fulfillment, and a host of other nauseating grotesqueries? It doesn’t take much contemplation of the human race to leave one yearning for the companionship of Moreau’s Beast Folk.
Not unlike the Zionists in Palestine, the broader human race clings to an aggressive, violent and defensive way of interfacing with the world as a perverse reaction to having been vulnerable and victimized. We have maximized our frontal lobes, opposable thumbs, and capacities to engage in complex social behaviors in such a way that we are now uber-predators, so firmly astride the top of the food chain even were all non-human animals to somehow join forces and assail us, they’d be overwhelmingly defeated. Early hominids probably perceived their numerous predators as monsters. In collectively equipping ourselves to fight those ‘monsters,’ we have ignored Nietzsche’s cautionary aphorism and become more than monsters; we have morphed into world-destroying abominations.
Western Civilization (read Eurocentric, patriarchal, capitalist, speciesist, imperialist, and Christian), the most powerful perpetrator in the brutal and merciless assault on non-human animals and the Earth, codified its sociopathic license to rape by inventing an anthropomorphic deity that gave it the “divine right” to dominate and exploit. “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth,” proclaimed the Christian deity in an ancient tome written by a collection of largely unknown authors. And since many still hold the Bible to be sacrosanct, dominionism remains deeply embedded in our collective psyche.
As the sun set on monarchial rule and the Enlightenment unfolded, we humans entered what appeared to be a golden age of “liberal democracy,” reason, and free markets. Yet ironically, this transition marked the advent of the darkest and most psychopathic phase of Homo rapien existence. Kings were replaced by soulless corporations; Descartes’ mechanistic worldview assured us that non-human animals don’t consciously suffer, thus enabling guilt-free industrialization of their torture and murder; and capitalism spawned runaway growth, unbridled avarice, and a deep obsession with property and profits. Buttressed by new and powerful theoretical underpinnings, we began our relentless attack on the Earth and its inhabitants in a futile effort to slake our seemingly insatiable thirst for control, prosperity and security.
Catalyzed and sustained by the deep-seated terror of an animal sans fang or claw and by our most despicable attributes, such as gluttony, belligerence, self-centeredness, and mean-spiritedness (each of which has been validated in some way by the fundamental theologies and philosophies of our society), we have unleashed an apocalyptic Hell upon the rest of the world. Overpopulation, deforestation, Climate Change, nuclear waste, potential nuclear destruction, the Sixth Extinction, rampant pollution, potable water shortages, factory farming, and endless resource wars are the bitter harvest the world is reaping from the noxious seeds we’ve sown.
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