Notes On Instinctual Anthropocentrism

You are not aware of your own anthropocentrism in the same way you are not normally aware of the air you're breathing. Only in extraordinary circumstances where the air is very thin or almost absent would you become aware of the invisible oxygen which keeps you alive. On Earth, in the case of anthropocentrism, there are no analogous extraordinary circumstances at this time. The natural world is thus entirely at our mercy with no exceptions until that inevitable time in the future when ... never mind.

Anyway, anthropocentrism is irreducibly instinctual in the human animal.

There is abundant evidence that we are heavily prone to perceiving and interpreting other components of the world, besides ourselves, in anthropocentric terms. As a result, we may impose complexity on a system that lacks it (or at least lacks the kind of complexity we usually attribute to it). In the case of the social brain hypothesis, we may inadvertently have used primates as a kind of tautological instrument: we have told them what we want them to be in order to validate our own view of who we think we are...

An anthropocentric stance is something from which, to a large degree, we cannot retreat: by definition, neither can we see the world in anything other than human terms nor can we describe or discuss it in anything other than ordinary human language.

Inescapable anthropocentrism necessarily implies that humans can only see the natural world in strictly human terms. In particular, humans can only see the natural world as something to exploit for their own purposes. It can not be any other way, as I discussed in the 2nd Flatland essay. Anthropocentrism underlies all the delusional nonsense humans invent when they discuss the fate of the natural world.

Only in recent times did those few humans who "care about" the natural world, or understand its fundamental importance find a way to make that world visible to humans—they put a price tag on nature (Radiolab, season 13, episode 3). And thus we get observations like this at the 11:00 mark:

I want to say, and this is based on my experience working in developing countries, that when you don't put a value on these [ecosystem] services, basically [those services] don't get counted.

That observation holds true in developed countries too of course. And any "sustainable" practices put in place by pre-industrial humans would only have been enacted to safeguard successful future exploitation. 

I would like you to listen to that Radiolab program in the hope that you will experience it in the same way I do. In particular, at no point did the various humans involved manage to take a non-anthropocentric view of the natural world. For example, the host Jad Abumrad keeps referring to the "aesthetic" value of nature, and seems to confuse this with the natural world having intrinsic value. (This is not the same as priceless). But the "aesthetic" value of nature must lie in the mind of the human beholder.

At the end, J.B. McKinnon, who I quoted in the second essay, said this after the 19:45 mark:

Abumrad — Is there another way to think about the value of nature in a way that's not economic and therefore shortsighted and all about us, but also not simply about the aesthetics and the beauty because that can be sort of limiting too. Is there another way?

McKinnon — The best I was able to do in thinking about this was, when it struck me that in a way, all this biological diversity that's out there, all these wonderful and amazing and alien things that other species can do, is like an extension of our own brains. There's so much imagination out there that we simply could not come up with on our own, that we can think of it as a pool of imagination and creativity from which we as humans are able to draw. 

And when we draw down on that pool of creativity and imagination, we deeply impoverish ourselves. In a sense we are doing harm to our own ability to think. And to dream. 

There you go—inescapable anthropocentrism.

Comments

[Robert]

Spot on, Dave, and expressive of the narcissism of this species. The great irony of a species evolving with not only the capacity for but the inclination toward parameterizing and delimiting the universe of which they are a product is, to me at least, nowhere more poignantly expressed than in the euphoric proclamations of science populizers Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson "We are a way for the universe to know itself.'

It still makes me shiver with disgust when I hear it.