Western Civilization and Humanity Are Not the Same Thing
In an op-ed published this week by the New York Times, Clemson University philosophy professor Todd May poses the question: “would human extinction be a tragedy?” His examination of this question is based on the idea that humanity — as a whole — has caused such incredible harm to the planet that the removal of our species from it would not, altogether, be a bad thing:
“Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it. This is happening through at least three means. First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems, as the recent article on Yellowstone Park in The Times exemplifies. Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwise be intact. Third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways.” (May 2018)
As an advocate for climate change response and environmental justice, I don’t take any issue at all with most of what he’s saying. Climate change is anthropogenic. Efforts at economic development or expansion of human living space often comes at the cost of pre-existing ecosystems. But are these really the fault of humanity as a whole? Is it our species that needs to go away for the planet to thrive? Or is it the way that we live?
In his article, May exaults the wonders of Western civilization: Shakespeare, science, the Louvre. He makes the argument that these are the qualities that redeem humanity, as if humankind were not worth saving prior to the writing of “The Taming of the Shrew”. What he ignores, of course, is that both the things he puts into the category of humanity’s sins and humanity’s redemption all stem from the same sort of world: Western civilization, colonization, capitalism. For too long and in too much of the dialogue, the sins of the Western world are laid upon the head of humanity as a whole, as if these are what define our species rather than a specific mode of approaching the world, based in very specific ideologies.
In indigenous circles, we have come to regard climate change as another form of colonization. Just like colonization, climate change poses a direct threat to many of the traditions and ways of life that have sustained our cultures for thousands of years. Just like colonization, climate change is a threat that indigenous cultures have mostly had nothing to do with. Just like colonization, it is indigenous cultures who pay the price for climate change first and hardest. While there are definite instances of indigenous cultures participating in activities that degrade the environment, these are largely the result of those communities trying to survive in a capitalist system with limited resources, unable to rely on historical methods of self-sufficiency. This is similar to the way that India and China are not historically thought of as being part of Western civilization, but is any globalized economy engaging in trade and business with Western-owned corporations free from that influence now?
The Menominee forest, where I live and grew up, is held worldwide as an example of how human beings can live with nature and exist in a capitalist society without having to destroy the place where we live. Our foresters employ clear-cuts and prescriptive burns to aid in our logging practices, and yet the forest is so healthy, robust and biodiverse(especially compared to the rest of the state) that its aerial image is used to calibrate satellites. Our people hunt and fish and the animals that thrive here are among the healthiest in the state. Time and time again, we come together to fight for the health of our waterways against harmful extraction practices — not just for the harm it could do to our way of life, but the harm it would do that to water itself. Do we deserve extinction for “humanity’s” sins, despite our myriad efforts to combat them? Are we not human too? What about the Sami, the Pacific Island Warriors, the Amazonian tribes, the Standing Rock Sioux and the many nations who rallied to support them, the Ojibwe, the countless Western US and Canadian tribes, all putting their bodies on the line to stop the harmful extraction of earth’s resources in the name of climate change and environmental justice? Are we not human too?
A philosophy instructor at the College of Menominee Nation once posed this question to our sustainable development class: why are we here? What purpose do human beings serve? A classmate from the Stockbridge-Munsee tribe suggested that we are here to protect nature. “Protect it from what?” I asked. “We’re the ones doing the harm. Are we just here to protect it from ourselves?” He took it as if I were pointing out a logical fallacy, but in truth, it was a genuine question.
It is clear to anyone who bothers to think about climate change that one way or another, something is going to change. There are many ways to live on this planet, and not all of them rely on Judeo-Christianity’s god-given dominion of the world and its creatures, capitalism’s tireless exploitation of resources, or colonization’s ruthless determination to expand. Are we really willing to let these experiments in how to live — which have only existed as organizing principles for a fraction of human history — determine our ability to continue living at all? Are we really willing to let one extremely toxic way of approaching the world define and damn our entire species?
In most tragedies, the tragic hero of the story is often unaware of their own flaw despite countless direct warnings to take heed. It’s this lack of self-awareness that often leads to the hero’s tragic demise. In the story of our species, climate change is the ghost, the prophecy, the oracle, who bows a crooked finger and shows us what future awaits us if we refuse to change our ways. The question now is whether or not we are willing to see, accurately, what it’s trying to show us.
