17 Jul We Can’t Be Posthuman
Just as human exceptionalism and superiority were conceptualized and have been practiced by humans, so too are any and all attempts to go beyond them, to dig our way out of the anthropocene and inhabit a non human-centric world. For any such attempts will be our (human) conceptions and practices. Even if we could invite the oceans, earth, living (and dying) animal, plant, marine and insect species into our deliberations, it would be us (humans) doing the inviting. And even if the non-humans were to participate, we (humans) couldn’t understand them and would be the ones interpreting their behaviors and determining their meanings. We (humans) would still be running the show.
We cannot be post human.
But more important, we don’t need to be in order to live more harmoniously and respectfully.
We don’t need evidence that animals have feelings before we treat them as living beings. We don’t need evidence that trees communicate with each other to treat them as living things. We kill animals and cut down trees despite what we know of their capacities. They feed and shelter us. With some cultural exceptions (for example, cows in India, dogs and cats in most but not all Westernized countries, and “endangered species” in all the continents), these practices are accepted, even as gratuitous killing (for profit or pleasure), torture and cruelty are widely frowned upon and, in some cases, illegal.
We are told and shown (in hundreds of YouTube videos) that elephants mourn the death of one of their kind. Supposedly, this is evidence for two claims—that they experience empathy and how they are increases our empathy for them. Both claims, obviously, rely on a belief in empathy. We attribute the feelings we have watching these videos to our ability to feel what the elephants are feeling, i.e., to empathize. But we cannot feel what an elephant is feeling any more than we can feel what another human being is feeling. We are, for better or worse, solipsistic when it comes to empathy. We cannot help filter another’s experience through our own. We cannot, I contend, be empathetic. We can be kind, compassionate, sympathetic, and responsive.
The alternative to empathy, the ethical alternative, involves attempting to be in relation to worlds clearly not our own (like the elephant’s) and making more vivid the living being-ness of the non-human.
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