On Treehugger, Ilana Strauss wonders whether we’re fitting into the Universe – or just pushing everyone else off-stage:
In his books “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus,” Israeli world history professor Yuval Noah Harari points out that human spiritualism has gone through a series of stages. While humans were hunter-gatherers, people stuck to animism — a belief that humans, animals, plants, rocks and everything else has a soul and is an important player in the grand story of life.
As humans started practicing agriculture, the human world stopped being about animals and become more about humans and their crops. Polytheism and monotheism ushered in an era of humans and gods. Animals were relegated to the sidelines. Now that religion is fading, gods are disappearing too, and humans are alone, kings of an empty castle. Welcome to humanism.
“The world was now a one-man show,” wrote Harari. “Humankind stood alone on an empty stage, talking to itself, negotiating with no one and acquiring enormous powers without any obligations. Having deciphered the mute laws of physics, chemistry and biology, humankind now does with them as it pleases. When an archaic hunter went out to the savannah, he asked the help of the wild bull, and the bull demanded something of the hunter. When an ancient farmer wanted his cows to produce lots of milk, he asked some great heavenly god for help, and the god stipulated his conditions. When the white-coated staff in Nestlé’s Research and Development department want to increase dairy production, they study genetics – and the genes don’t ask for anything in return.”
Here’s my question: If humans think we’re the only relevant things in the universe, what’s to stop us from dehumanizing everyone else?
Generally, a bigger bully.
While I understand Ilana is dismayed by how we treat other species, and I tend to be as well, I’m more than a little wary of her reference to Harari. I cannot help but think of the American Indian’s buffalo runs (a little research suggests that buffalo jump may be the preferred term), in which entire herds of buffalo were guided over cliffs for slaughter. The past was not a Golden Age, and it’s a common error to assign better qualities to more primitive people than they have earned.
It’s worth considering that the difference between today’s people and yesterday’s people lay not in their wisdom or lack thereof, but in their capability for destruction. Even sending a buffalo herd over a cliff doesn’t compare to opening a manufacturing plant with some sort of toxic pollution spewing into a river or lake that your children happen to enjoy using for swimming.
And we can do that with a little simple-minded planning & a bit of trivial construction work.
So the question becomes, if we handed an aboriginal people the same power as we currently possess, would they really be all that much wiser using it?
PS Add overpopulation to the mix as well.
