Beginning in the sixteenth century, however, the dominionist, anthropocentric, speciesist, theocratic, and geocentric worldview of Western society suffered a series of powerful intellectual blows that decentered humans from their cosmological throne and self-assigned position of power and privilege. Each conceptual bomb destabilized the medieval cosmological picture in which God is the center of all things, the Earth is the heart of the universe, “Man” is the core of the Earth, and the soul or reason is the essence of the human. Over the last five hundred years, this cosmology ¯ which can be visually depicted as a series of concentric circles ¯ has been overturned through a series of “discontinuities.” These involve intellectual, scientific, and technological developments that shatter the illusory privilege, harmony, and coherence that human beings vaingloriously attempt to establish between themselves and the universe. Whenever a rift opens in their narcissistic map of reality, humans are forced to reevaluate the nature of the universe, to rethink their place in it, and to restore philosophical order. Invariably, this process occurs by reestablishing their alleged privilege and uniqueness in a new way. Of course, while many push for change amidst the destabilization of paradigms, others resist it, and opposing viewpoints clash and struggle for the power of truth and the truth of power.
As a strong reaction to theism, the hegemony of theology, and the oppressive and hostile stance the Christian Church took toward scientific and technological advance, humanism sought the unleashing of the powers of science and industry, it sought to replace the domination of nature over humans by the domination of humans over nature, and urged humans to seize command over the natural world and use it improve human life.[4] This Promethean outlook tended to further separate culture and nature, and despite an expanding scientific optic it further polarized the “animal” and “human” worlds, such that animals were unthinking beasts contrasted to the luminescence of human reason. The rationality, technology, culture, and other core attributes of humans were defined not as elaborations of the animal world but as arising ex nihilo as singular phenomena utterly and radically new in history.
In his book, The Fourth Discontinuity, Bruce Mazlish identifies four ruptures in the medieval picture of reality brought about by dynamic changes in the modern world.[5] The first discontinuity opened with the Copernican revolution in the sixteenth century. In place of the dominant geocentric worldview that situated the Earth at the epicenter of the universe and claimed that the sun revolved around it, Copernicus, and subsequently Galileo in the seventeenth century, argued that the sun occupies the center of the universe and the Earth revolves around the sun. Under the spell of the Ptolemy and medieval cosmology, human beings had to confront the fact that their planet is not the physical center of the universe. Not only did this fact contradict official Church dogma, the spatial decentering entailed a psychological decentering, moving the Earth and possibly humanity itself from the center of the picture to the margins. Of course, science has since demonstrated that there is no center to the universe, that its limits are endless. There have been rich speculations, moreover, that alien species exist that are far more intelligent and advanced than humans, that there may be other or “parallel” universes, and that humankind inhabits a “small planet attached to an insignificant star in a backwater galaxy.”[6]
But rather than a blow to human supremacism, some modern thinkers saw this first decentering or discontinuity as an opportunity for humankind to assert itself even more boldly in the universe. As J.B. Bury writes,
Finding himself in an insignificant island floating in the immensity of space, [“man”] decides that he is at last master of his own destinies; he can fling away the old equipment of final causes, original sin, and the rest; he can reconstruct his own chart and, bound by no cosmic scheme, he need take the universe into account only in so far as he judges it to be his own profit. Or, if he is a philosopher, he may say that, after all, the universe for him is built out of his own sensations, and that by virtue of this relativity “anthropo-centrism” is restored in a new and more effective form.[7]
Thus, one should never underestimate the narcissistic capacity of human beings to assert and re-assert the belief that their species is the meaning of reality and that all things exist for their purpose, pleasure, and profit. The dialectics of decentering and recentering would recur many times over. Heliocentrism was part and parcel of a new empirical science that was a crucial catalyst for modern humanism, a veritable secular religion in which humanity elevated itself to divine status and sought possession of the Earth for its advancement. The mechanistic theories of Thomas Hobbes and Julien Offray de Le Mettrie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, were potential counters to human supremacy, by rejecting Cartesian dualism, stripping away the soul, leaving nothing but the body as machine, but religion, science, and philosophy were united in asserting human supremacism by any and all avenues.
Despite the heliocentric theories of Copernicus and Galileo and the development of a secular scientific culture, humanity nevertheless could feel comfortable in its alleged separation from and superiority over the “brute beasts” of the Earth. Comfortable, that is, until the second discontinuity, which opened up in 1859, when Darwin published his world-shaking treatise, The Origin of Species. This seminal work dealt a fatal blow to the Platonic metaphysics informing Western thought, which denied the reality of change and sought truth in a transcendental and timeless realm of ideas or “Forms.” During the nineteenth century, numerous thinkers explored the idea that nature changes and evolves toward greater diversity and complexity. But it was not until Darwin’s breakthrough insight into natural selection that key mechanisms of biological change and speciation were understood, effecting a conceptual revolution that inalterably changed the human understanding of the natural world, of time and change, and of itself.
Darwin demolished a litany of propositions taught by mainstream interpretations of the Old and New Testaments, such as: God made humans in his image; God put animals on the Earth for human benefit; God created the animals after he created humans; and each act of creation was unique and unrelated to the other. Yet Darwin showed, and science subsequently has confirmed, a set of counter-propositions: one can explain the universe without positing God, there is no inherent purpose in the universe, animals lived for billions of years before humans, and all life evolves in a continuum from the same primordial conditions. Over a century a half after the publication of The Origin of Species, however, much of the world still cannot confront the facts of evolution and the animalic origins of human life.
In scientific quarters, however, the Darwinian theory of evolution grew increasingly influential and became a dogma in its own right. Yet, as scientists had strong psychological investments in speciesist values, along with career and economic investments in vivisection, they either ignored Darwin’s emphasis on the continuum of evolution and the intelligence of nonhuman animals, or they interpreted Darwin in regressive ways that promoted speciesist, classist, racist, and elitist agendas. Beginning with Herbert Spencer (nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog” for his aggressive defense of natural selection theory), thinkers in the natural and social sciences, anthropologists, and sundry social elites transformed “Darwinism” ¯ a theory about the mechanisms of biological evolution ¯ into “Social Darwinism.” This ideology involved a vulgar application of natural selection theory to society in ways that naturalized hierarchy and conflated differences between the natural and social worlds. Exquisitely suited for a class-divided society, capitalists seized on Social Darwinism to legitimate and naturalize their exploitative rule over labor. Invoking pseudo-ecological concepts such as “competition,” “struggle,” and the “survival of the fittest,” defenders of a bastardized Darwinism used natural selection theory to frame social life as a contest, battle, and war, with the spoils going to the victors (i.e., the capitalist elite). Social Darwinism and the “might is right” ideology filtered into mass consciousness to bolster not only the domination of some humans over others, but also all humans over animals. For with their wits, alleged superior intelligence, and technological powers, humans “clawed their way to the top of the food chain,” as the popular phrase goes, and their power was “right” by virtue of its might, irrespective of the circularity of such reasoning.
Thus, rather than interpreting Darwin’s theory in a way that relates and reintegrates human beings with other species and natural processes, conceptual corruptions of natural selection have worked to alienate humans from one another, other animal species, and the natural world, while providing crude justification for violence, exploitation, and unrestrained extermination of nonhuman animals. Darwinism was not unambiguously progressive in its impact upon both human and nonhuman animals, but rather, cut both ways. Some interpretations emphasize animal intelligence, the evolutionary continuities of nonhuman and human animals, and the deep animalic roots of Homo sapiens. Other readings, however, toss out everything Darwin wrote about animal emotions and intelligence to return to the Cartesian view of animals as objects rather than subjects (see below). This regressive, humanist version of Darwinism shredded his conceptual quilt work uniting all sentient life. It demeaned nonhuman animals in order to deify human animals as omnipotent demigods for whom all things exist in relation to humans as a mere means to their ends.
Still grappling with Darwin’s blow to the geocentric and anthropocentric worldview, Western culture had to confront the facts and consequences of a third discontinuity opened by the theory of the unconscious mind, such as advanced in the nineteenth century by Friedrich Nietzsche and, above all, in the early twentieth century by Sigmund Freud. Against the Christian/Cartesian view of the self as governed by a rational command center and the body as a temporary housing for the immortal soul, Freud demonstrated that rationality and conscious thought are products of the body ¯ epiphenomena of the subterranean, unconscious realm of existence governed by primordial instincts, desires, drives, and the sexual and violent urges of the Id.
But the same pattern is repeated here: the destabilizing effects of a discontinuity and decentering process forces Western theorists ¯ elaborating ideologies that are anthropocentric, speciesist, rationalist, and humanist ¯ to mend the conceptual tear that threatens to decenter the privileged place of the human in the universe. Damage control begins immediately through a series of ad hoc, increasingly threadbare justifications for clinging to one element or another of the premodern world picture. Thus, despite the revolutionary implications of Freudian theory, and the paradigm shift that established the primacy of the unconscious and body over the rational self, scientists and thinkers from various quarters reasserted rationality (along with related traits that included language, tool-making, and culture) as the essential and unique trait that separates humans from animals. These reactionary humanists constructed a double-sided fallacy, one that exaggerates the role of rationality in human animals as it minimizes the intelligence of nonhuman animals. Condemned as reactionary, Marxists and others did not trouble themselves with the Freudian provocation or the question of human animality in general.
Finally, Mazlish notes, a fourth discontinuity surface during the mid-twentieth century, with the rapid development of computer technologies and artificial intelligence. After confronting their separation from the cosmos, their animal origins, and the primacy of their subconscious being, humans were forced to reconsider their relation to machines. Just as Christians and other believers in God and immortality are repelled by the thought of their animalic origins, so too ¯ being special creations of God with privileged status ¯ they loathe being likened to machines. Contrary to the mechanistic philosophies of Hobbes and La Mettrie, humans want to be ensouled, immortal, and privileged in some way. From sublime thinkers to laypersons, humans have a need to feel wholly other to animals and machines, to be radically unique in their reason and self-consciousness, and to exist as stunningly singular in their possession of free will.
Yet, as the artificial intelligence of computers grows ever-more sophisticated and continues to surpass the capacities of human minds in many ways, people are forced to question yet another alleged ontological divide, the one separating humans from machines. Even “machines” are no longer mechanisms as traditionally described, since they are ever more closely approximating the biological operations of the brain through neural nets, parallel processing, evolutionary hardware, and the like. Moreover, when the self-ascribed “essence” of the human is stripped away, and human beings begin to merge intimately with their machines, fusing flesh with steel and silicon chips, human identity comes into question in disturbing ways.
As we create human-like computers and robots, we ourselves become ever-more like cyborgs by incorporating technology into the human body. While many resist the implosion of biology and technology, a bold cadre of technophiles, visionaries, futurists, and transhumanists embrace it as the next and inevitable stage in human evolution. In one variant of this scenario, our merger with machines would dramatically increase human intelligence, happiness, and longevity, thus in effect creating a new posthuman species far superior to our current carbon-based model. In another version, humans will soon be able to create “spiritual machines” (Kurzweil) or “mind children” (Moravec) that constitute a new posthuman species far superior to our current carbon-based model.[8] Radical technophiles like Moravec envision humanity moving to a higher state of being and attaining immortality by merging their minds with computers. Far more than theories of evolution, these techno-utopias represent neo-Cartesian assumptions that mind is substance and body is an accidental trait as well as secular manifestations of the Christian quest for immortality.
The Human Chimpanzee
As a strong reaction to theism, the hegemony of theology, and the oppressive and hostile stance the Christian Church took toward scientific and technological advance, humanism sought the unleashing of the powers of science and industry, it sought to replace the domination of nature over humans by the domination of humans over nature, and urged humans to seize command over the natural world and use it improve human life.[4] This Promethean outlook tended to further separate culture and nature, and despite an expanding scientific optic it further polarized the “animal” and “human” worlds, such that animals were unthinking beasts contrasted to the luminescence of human reason. The rationality, technology, culture, and other core attributes of humans were defined not as elaborations of the animal world but as arising ex nihilo as singular phenomena utterly and radically new in history.
In his book, The Fourth Discontinuity, Bruce Mazlish identifies four ruptures in the medieval picture of reality brought about by dynamic changes in the modern world.[5] The first discontinuity opened with the Copernican revolution in the sixteenth century. In place of the dominant geocentric worldview that situated the Earth at the epicenter of the universe and claimed that the sun revolved around it, Copernicus, and subsequently Galileo in the seventeenth century, argued that the sun occupies the center of the universe and the Earth revolves around the sun. Under the spell of the Ptolemy and medieval cosmology, human beings had to confront the fact that their planet is not the physical center of the universe. Not only did this fact contradict official Church dogma, the spatial decentering entailed a psychological decentering, moving the Earth and possibly humanity itself from the center of the picture to the margins. Of course, science has since demonstrated that there is no center to the universe, that its limits are endless. There have been rich speculations, moreover, that alien species exist that are far more intelligent and advanced than humans, that there may be other or “parallel” universes, and that humankind inhabits a “small planet attached to an insignificant star in a backwater galaxy.”[6]
But rather than a blow to human supremacism, some modern thinkers saw this first decentering or discontinuity as an opportunity for humankind to assert itself even more boldly in the universe. As J.B. Bury writes,
Thus, one should never underestimate the narcissistic capacity of human beings to assert and re-assert the belief that their species is the meaning of reality and that all things exist for their purpose, pleasure, and profit. The dialectics of decentering and recentering would recur many times over. Heliocentrism was part and parcel of a new empirical science that was a crucial catalyst for modern humanism, a veritable secular religion in which humanity elevated itself to divine status and sought possession of the Earth for its advancement. The mechanistic theories of Thomas Hobbes and Julien Offray de Le Mettrie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, were potential counters to human supremacy, by rejecting Cartesian dualism, stripping away the soul, leaving nothing but the body as machine, but religion, science, and philosophy were united in asserting human supremacism by any and all avenues.
Despite the heliocentric theories of Copernicus and Galileo and the development of a secular scientific culture, humanity nevertheless could feel comfortable in its alleged separation from and superiority over the “brute beasts” of the Earth. Comfortable, that is, until the second discontinuity, which opened up in 1859, when Darwin published his world-shaking treatise, The Origin of Species. This seminal work dealt a fatal blow to the Platonic metaphysics informing Western thought, which denied the reality of change and sought truth in a transcendental and timeless realm of ideas or “Forms.” During the nineteenth century, numerous thinkers explored the idea that nature changes and evolves toward greater diversity and complexity. But it was not until Darwin’s breakthrough insight into natural selection that key mechanisms of biological change and speciation were understood, effecting a conceptual revolution that inalterably changed the human understanding of the natural world, of time and change, and of itself.
Darwin demolished a litany of propositions taught by mainstream interpretations of the Old and New Testaments, such as: God made humans in his image; God put animals on the Earth for human benefit; God created the animals after he created humans; and each act of creation was unique and unrelated to the other. Yet Darwin showed, and science subsequently has confirmed, a set of counter-propositions: one can explain the universe without positing God, there is no inherent purpose in the universe, animals lived for billions of years before humans, and all life evolves in a continuum from the same primordial conditions. Over a century a half after the publication of The Origin of Species, however, much of the world still cannot confront the facts of evolution and the animalic origins of human life.
In scientific quarters, however, the Darwinian theory of evolution grew increasingly influential and became a dogma in its own right. Yet, as scientists had strong psychological investments in speciesist values, along with career and economic investments in vivisection, they either ignored Darwin’s emphasis on the continuum of evolution and the intelligence of nonhuman animals, or they interpreted Darwin in regressive ways that promoted speciesist, classist, racist, and elitist agendas. Beginning with Herbert Spencer (nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog” for his aggressive defense of natural selection theory), thinkers in the natural and social sciences, anthropologists, and sundry social elites transformed “Darwinism” ¯ a theory about the mechanisms of biological evolution ¯ into “Social Darwinism.” This ideology involved a vulgar application of natural selection theory to society in ways that naturalized hierarchy and conflated differences between the natural and social worlds. Exquisitely suited for a class-divided society, capitalists seized on Social Darwinism to legitimate and naturalize their exploitative rule over labor. Invoking pseudo-ecological concepts such as “competition,” “struggle,” and the “survival of the fittest,” defenders of a bastardized Darwinism used natural selection theory to frame social life as a contest, battle, and war, with the spoils going to the victors (i.e., the capitalist elite). Social Darwinism and the “might is right” ideology filtered into mass consciousness to bolster not only the domination of some humans over others, but also all humans over animals. For with their wits, alleged superior intelligence, and technological powers, humans “clawed their way to the top of the food chain,” as the popular phrase goes, and their power was “right” by virtue of its might, irrespective of the circularity of such reasoning.
Thus, rather than interpreting Darwin’s theory in a way that relates and reintegrates human beings with other species and natural processes, conceptual corruptions of natural selection have worked to alienate humans from one another, other animal species, and the natural world, while providing crude justification for violence, exploitation, and unrestrained extermination of nonhuman animals. Darwinism was not unambiguously progressive in its impact upon both human and nonhuman animals, but rather, cut both ways. Some interpretations emphasize animal intelligence, the evolutionary continuities of nonhuman and human animals, and the deep animalic roots of Homo sapiens. Other readings, however, toss out everything Darwin wrote about animal emotions and intelligence to return to the Cartesian view of animals as objects rather than subjects (see below). This regressive, humanist version of Darwinism shredded his conceptual quilt work uniting all sentient life. It demeaned nonhuman animals in order to deify human animals as omnipotent demigods for whom all things exist in relation to humans as a mere means to their ends.
Still grappling with Darwin’s blow to the geocentric and anthropocentric worldview, Western culture had to confront the facts and consequences of a third discontinuity opened by the theory of the unconscious mind, such as advanced in the nineteenth century by Friedrich Nietzsche and, above all, in the early twentieth century by Sigmund Freud. Against the Christian/Cartesian view of the self as governed by a rational command center and the body as a temporary housing for the immortal soul, Freud demonstrated that rationality and conscious thought are products of the body ¯ epiphenomena of the subterranean, unconscious realm of existence governed by primordial instincts, desires, drives, and the sexual and violent urges of the Id.
But the same pattern is repeated here: the destabilizing effects of a discontinuity and decentering process forces Western theorists ¯ elaborating ideologies that are anthropocentric, speciesist, rationalist, and humanist ¯ to mend the conceptual tear that threatens to decenter the privileged place of the human in the universe. Damage control begins immediately through a series of ad hoc, increasingly threadbare justifications for clinging to one element or another of the premodern world picture. Thus, despite the revolutionary implications of Freudian theory, and the paradigm shift that established the primacy of the unconscious and body over the rational self, scientists and thinkers from various quarters reasserted rationality (along with related traits that included language, tool-making, and culture) as the essential and unique trait that separates humans from animals. These reactionary humanists constructed a double-sided fallacy, one that exaggerates the role of rationality in human animals as it minimizes the intelligence of nonhuman animals. Condemned as reactionary, Marxists and others did not trouble themselves with the Freudian provocation or the question of human animality in general.
Finally, Mazlish notes, a fourth discontinuity surface during the mid-twentieth century, with the rapid development of computer technologies and artificial intelligence. After confronting their separation from the cosmos, their animal origins, and the primacy of their subconscious being, humans were forced to reconsider their relation to machines. Just as Christians and other believers in God and immortality are repelled by the thought of their animalic origins, so too ¯ being special creations of God with privileged status ¯ they loathe being likened to machines. Contrary to the mechanistic philosophies of Hobbes and La Mettrie, humans want to be ensouled, immortal, and privileged in some way. From sublime thinkers to laypersons, humans have a need to feel wholly other to animals and machines, to be radically unique in their reason and self-consciousness, and to exist as stunningly singular in their possession of free will.
Yet, as the artificial intelligence of computers grows ever-more sophisticated and continues to surpass the capacities of human minds in many ways, people are forced to question yet another alleged ontological divide, the one separating humans from machines. Even “machines” are no longer mechanisms as traditionally described, since they are ever more closely approximating the biological operations of the brain through neural nets, parallel processing, evolutionary hardware, and the like. Moreover, when the self-ascribed “essence” of the human is stripped away, and human beings begin to merge intimately with their machines, fusing flesh with steel and silicon chips, human identity comes into question in disturbing ways.
As we create human-like computers and robots, we ourselves become ever-more like cyborgs by incorporating technology into the human body. While many resist the implosion of biology and technology, a bold cadre of technophiles, visionaries, futurists, and transhumanists embrace it as the next and inevitable stage in human evolution. In one variant of this scenario, our merger with machines would dramatically increase human intelligence, happiness, and longevity, thus in effect creating a new posthuman species far superior to our current carbon-based model. In another version, humans will soon be able to create “spiritual machines” (Kurzweil) or “mind children” (Moravec) that constitute a new posthuman species far superior to our current carbon-based model.[8] Radical technophiles like Moravec envision humanity moving to a higher state of being and attaining immortality by merging their minds with computers. Far more than theories of evolution, these techno-utopias represent neo-Cartesian assumptions that mind is substance and body is an accidental trait as well as secular manifestations of the Christian quest for immortality.
The Human Chimpanzee
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
