Traydio | Mary-Jayne Rust on Anthropocentrism

7 comment(s)

1 2

Page size:

select

Rob Barratt wrote at 10:34:14 PM on Oct 25, 2009

As sympathetic as I am to the environment, nature and the ideals of the Eden Project (I'm a local and visit regularly) I just can't believe that people are taken in by this pseudo-religious stuff. Whether it's born-again Christians, life coaches or Anthropocentrists, the approach is the same - a softly spoken man or woman who tries to lull you into thinking that he or she are just another normal person whilst trying to conceal the fact that they have an irrational off-the wall belief and who usually says, "I'd like to tell you a story" (Max Bygraves was more convincing!!) Of course the stories of animals being around when people were about to die were coincidences. Animals are often around. What about the number of times when there are no animals around and people die? Of course we are the most usefully intelligent life form on Earth otherwise we wouldn't be the top species but that doesn't stop us from screwing up the planet. How do you know that dolphins or ants wouldn't make just as big a mess of things if they got to the number one position? Shamanism and all forms of belief systems have tried to make sense of the world around them since time immemorial. They have invented gods or superstitions, magical powers, signs, divine beings, and most of all superstitions and unlikely correlations to explain the inexplicable and the statistically unlikely. It serves to cement their society together but it doesn't make it real or true. People have fallen for this con since we first developed the language to ask the question, "What are we here for?" The organised and pseudo religions (such as Antropcentrism, I fear) trade on the child-like innocence of a lot of people to swallow this poorly thought out nonsense. I'd love it all to be true, because it would make life simpler. but it's not. Most of us love the things in the natural world that inspire us and appreciate the need to preserve it (Except for Jeremy Clarkson and the strange followers of his green-hating cult). I hope that the Anthropocentrics in Iceland, Norway and Japan will lobby their governments about whaling and over-fishing as well as meeting in conference centres trying to convert people.

OK, so I only lasted for 10 minutes listening to this, but I got the gist. I just couldn't listen to any more.

Rob Barratt (Bodmin)

Report as abuse

Like it! (0)

Sandra White wrote at 08:29:34 AM on Oct 27, 2009

Rob, as someone who was at the Eden conference, contributed a workshop there and was in the audience for Mary-Jayne’s talk, I’m interested in your use of the phrase “top species” and would like to unpack that a little. I don’t know about dolphins, but my understanding about ants is that, in terms of numbers, they outnumber humans by many, many billions. One of the things that interests me is that the way they lead their lives feeds and maintains the eco-systems of which they are part, whereas what humanity is doing is destroying both our local and global eco-systems of which we are, equally, part. Now, it is true that human beings have evolved attributes that appear to distinguish us from other species on Earth. It seems to me, though, that this proposition itself needs careful examination. Studies of different species show that many others use tools to achieve aims that support the good of the species; perhaps all that is true is that we have developed those capacities to greater degrees of sophistication. The vital question, it seems to me, is why have the ways in which we have developed them led us to the degree of destruction that we are wreaking on the planet? Mary-Jayne’s talk is one attempt to help us to think about this. Had you listened on, you would have learned that what she was addressing was the underpinning ideas that shape our culture which have directly contributed to us pursuing our civilisation in ways which sanction our destruction of the rest of life on Earth. This belief in human superiority, indeed this belief that “Of course we are the most usefully intelligent life form on Earth”, has led us to believe that we are both separate from and superior to life on Earth and entitled to create our technologies and comforts in such ways which destroy the rest of life. We believe that this is a model of success. We are in a moment in history when we are discovering that this belief is mistaken. When I say “we believe”, of course not all of us do as individuals and what I am describing are perhaps now unconscious propositions that have guided the West’s behaviour for centuries and Anthropocentrism is a word which summarises those beliefs. This is all they are – beliefs. Now is the time to re-examine them. I, for one, think that belief in the primacy of rational thinking (a central, guiding principle of Western culture) is, equally, something that needs to be re-examined. Rational thinking, with its central characteristic of “either/or” thinking, is highly developed in many modern humans and has fed our technological revolution, which we have needed and which we also need now as part of our response to the ecological crisis. My own view is that an unintended consequence of “either/or” thinking is that it feeds psychological identification with superiority. The imagination, equally a human endowment from our evolutionary journey, feeds instead our capacity for “both and” thinking and it is a capacity which we vitally need at the moment, alongside and in a creative relationship with rationality. In my view, our capacity to “Live and let live” is rooted in a strong imaginative capacity. What naturalists tell us is that the flourishing of biodiversity is what is needed for the planet’s systems to regain health. This is why, for all their numbers, ants do not destroy their eco-systems; where there is sufficient biodiversity to hold everything in balance there is a symbiosis in which the way each local species lives contributes to, instead of destroys, what other local species need to flourish. All of our dominant economic and manufacturing systems produce the opposite and Mary-Jayne was proposing that one reason for this is because they are rooted in the anthropocentric ideas touched on above of human superiority and separation from nature. I would express it thus: “Live and let die” – or “Live and kill” is the ultimate extension of “either/or” thinking. In pressing the “off” button after 10 minutes and in advocating the superiority of rationalism through what you have posted on the blog, I suggest that you, too, are involved in metaphorically killing off a form of life (a set of ideas) that is just different from yours – not inherently inferior to it. Bill McDonough – an architect who is spreading ways of building which enhance biodiversity instead of killing it – in his seminal book “Cradle to Cradle” proposes that what we need now is not a new revolution but rather a “re-evolution”. “Mid-course Correction” by Ray Anderson – one of America’s most established international capitalists who for more than a decade has been developing carpet technologies and sales techniques that uphold and restore the living systems of the planet – tells the story of how he discovered a vital quality which Mary-Jayne was exploring particularly at the start of her talk. This quality is reverence for the extraordinary sophistication, magnificence, beauty and, indeed, mystery of the Earth of which we are part. This is, to me, what re-evolution looks like – finding our way back into an understanding that we live inside the Earth’s whole system, not outside and above it, and discovering a different order of inspiration there. For me, imagination is the vital human endowment which enables us to value (rather than feel ashamed of) the fact that we are evolved from the Earth itself and remain a vital part of it. What “use” is all our “intelligence” if we apply it to kill other species which, just like us, have taken billions of years to evolve, out of a mistaken set of beliefs in human superiority rooted in an over-valuing of rationality? To do what Mary-Jayne was doing – to imagine other ways of thinking about life, which can lead to ways of living inclusively and upholding the right of all life to flourish with us on Earth, which is what will safeguard the future of the human species – is far from “simpler”. To awaken a different set of desires is far from “simpler”. To construct new forms of manufacturing and economics, as Ray Anderson is doing out of reverence, is far from “simpler”. At the moment, the necessary re-evolution actually seems beyond most of us and, in my view, this demonstrates our collective failure in imagination. Perhaps what our civilisation needs most at this moment in history is precisely the kind of suspension of disbelief that you so despise …

Sandra White (Hertford)

Report as abuse

Like it! (1)

Mark Brayne wrote at 09:34:39 PM on Oct 27, 2009

Very well explained, Sandra... Could have used some paragraphs, but hey - the content is precisely on target. Rob, I look forward to your response.

Report as abuse

Like it! (0)

ian russell wrote at 09:13:30 AM on Oct 28, 2009

A quick response as I'm interested in what's been said, maybe more later when I've had more of a think...

I'm with Rob (though perhaps not with as much emotion). Maybe the advantage of recorded media over the live event is the ability to do some beneficial editing. A bit like arranging paragraphs? ;o)

The swan business I didn't understand which led me to feel I hadn't understood the point of view of anthropocentrism: is it good, or bad? I wasn't entirely sure and, like Rob, I couldn't make it to the end of the lecture because of this.

Anthropocentrism, it seems, is double edged. the idea of human superiority in intelligence, imagination, reasoning, and action, the devices which lead us into ''destruction'', are surely the same things that we now adamantly believe will lead us away from destruction. This is like a pendulum swinging in a vain attempt to find a point of balance. The problem with both sides is the belief that we understand how life on earth works which we don't. It's one thing to realise you've broken the machine but another thing entirely to know how to put it back together. Before we embark on possible iatrogenic remedies I think we shouldn't be fooled by equal and opposite conceitedness but admit we don't know.

Report as abuse

Like it! (0)

Fiona Simpson wrote at 09:24:45 PM on Oct 28, 2009

Top species?! It would be funny except it describes one of the core dynamics of ecological devastation. Rob’s comment is a perfect example of Anthropocentrism, and indeed the religion-like conviction of it. He couldn’t have illustrated Mary-Jayne’s talk better (perhaps he’s a plant? ..apologies to the photosynthesising kind).

But seriously, I am not surprised Rob couldn’t listen to more than 10 minutes, as to be even a teeny bit open to the possibility of what Mary-Jayne describes – how we are woven into an exquisite tapestry of intelligence and meaning expressed by the other than human world beyond our tiny reasoning brains – would have caused him to topple from his top pinnacle. And even though ultimately that kind of knowing may bring relief and joy, I imagine the prospect of falling (and falling in love?) from such an elevation would be painful and very very scary…

Report as abuse

Like it! (0)