The Anthropocentric Illusion

Abstract

Anthropocentrism constitutes a mix of cosmotheological, biological, and ecological beliefs that reciprocally interpenetrate, engender, and imply each other. This chapter focuses mainly on the ecological belief which claims man has an adaptive relationship with his habitat that is predominantly active, whereas other animals have a predominantly passive adaptive relationship with their respective habitats. While this is historically true, it is no less true that there is a limit to the habitats’ adaptation to humans. Beyond this limit, adaptation becomes counterproductive, meaning something that, rather, could be called a counter-adaptation, since the resulting habitat will probably be more unfavorable to humans than the previous one. Beyond a certain degree of interference of economic activity in the Earth system, the more man tries to submit nature to his law, the more she submits him to hers. The great mental block that we are victims is the illusion of mankind’s exceptionality in the web of life. In summary, what appears little by little in the counterproductive effects described at length in this chapter is that unrestricted potentiation of energy, production, and consumption does not suppress or even diminish the adversities of nature that the techno-scientific reason enthroned by capitalism proclaims to be able to combat: scarcity, climatic rigors, disease, and human aggressiveness. Rather, it only progressively transforms these adversities into worse forms of scarcity, climatic rigors, diseases, and human aggressiveness.