values

More than once I've seen a small child squealing with delight when given a few dollars. But, when presented with a spider or beetle, the same child will often squash it without hesitation. To me, this illustrates the absorption of a twisted set of values.

The values that encourage our assault on the natural world and each other are relentless in our culture. We are taught that the planet is inert, plants are insensate, and animals are incognizant. We are taught that our own bodies are crude and inappropriate. This fallacious bifurcation of the mind from the world it inhabits encourages all manner of destruction. The essential assumption of our society is that intelligence, that most characteristic trait of humankind, earns our species the right to strive for complete mastery over the physical world.

This idea, that it is the special purview of humanity to own the land, control its resources, and command the very forces of nature, drives us to extremely self-endangering behavior. Vital ecological systems are dismantled in the name of human growth and it isn't perceived as problematic because the human mind is something other than the rest of the world--something higher. The casual threads that connect us to the rest of the whole aren’t truly acknowledged and we can therefore act upon the planet without seeing how we ourselves are affected.

The perceptual disjunction of humankind from the world is embodied in so many of our philosophies and institutions it is all but invisible by virtue of its ubiquity. Politicians and economists refer to complex communities of interrelating life as “resources” and nearly all of the major religions write the Earth off as a prologue to an infinite afterlife or call it a painful illusion to be transcended. We reduce the global community of life that molded our species to abstractions and in denying its subjective existence make it that much easier to behave as if the whole of creation was set into motion for our sole benefit. Among the results is an anthropogenic mass extinction on a scale equal to that of an asteroid impact with all that that implies for the future welfare of humanity. Clearly what we value is not life—neither our own nor that of the rest of the biosphere.