Prologue

This book deals with one of the most troubling conditions that afflicts society at the present time: a sweeping failure of nerve. I am speaking of a deep-seated cultural malaise that reflects a waning belief in our species’ creative abilities. In a very real sense, we seem to be afraid of ourselves — of our uniquely human attributes. We seem to be suffering from a decline in human self-confidence and in our ability to create ethically meaningful lives that enrich humanity and the non-human world.

This decline in human self-confidence, to be sure, is not new. The ancient Mediterranean world fell into a period of declining moral stamina and self-worth that contributed to the onset of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ in Europe. Medieval Europe, particularly in the fourteenth century and after, was torn apart spiritually and materially by dislocations so formidable that, as François Villon, France’s greatest poet, lamented, roaming wolves from the countryside ‘ate wind’ in the dangerous and famine-stricken streets of Paris.

Yet in both of these periods, a sense of hope still lingered on in the human spirit, a belief in the moral and social redemption of humanity. Leprous as the human condition seemed to men and women in those demoralizing times, they shared a belief that our species was capable of achieving a better moral and social dispensation. Early Christianity, as it emerged from the dying ancient world, proclaimed the ultimate power of human virtue to achieve an earthly paradise and affirmed the existence of a providential design to guide errant souls. The Protestant Reformation that took form as early as the fourteenth century advanced a new message of individuality, self-certainty, and, in its more radical forms, the aspiration toward a sharing communistic society free of hierarchy.

In contrast to these earlier times, our own era, as the third millennium comes into view, proclaims a very different spiritual and social message. Even as technological advances offer the possibility of unprecedented material security, free time, physical well-being, and a reharmonization of our relationships with the natural world, a growing number of writers and speakers tell us that our very ingenuity in technology is really evidence of a chilling failure — resulting from our ‘innate hubris’ — to integrate our lives with the natural world. Indeed, we are asked to regard our remarkable human abilities for thought and innovation as attributes destructive of our very selves as well as the natural world. We are being taught to mistrust our abilities as human beings, to constrain our ‘preening arrogance’, presumably because we have set ourselves up as a species against the rest of the world of life. Such writers often personify our various institutional and technological achievements as demonic extensions of our own anthropocentric impulses and indifference to other living beings. Amid a farrago of essentially misanthropic proclamations, we are hard put to know whether our own achievements are our ‘friends’ or ‘foes’.

Yet in a certain sense some forces are demonic indeed — particularly giant corporations and nation-states. These very forces act oppressively upon own lives, effacing our faith in freedom and community by their commanding influence and complexity. The more intimate social life that: existed in villages, towns, and neighborhoods only a century ago has yielded to an overpowering institutional gigantism that determines all aspects of our lives, from the ordinary affairs of everyday life to great social upheavals on a worldwide scale.

Hence it is not surprising that social life appears to unfold like an inexplicable mystery, beyond our ordinary understanding and control. Whether we see ourselves as villains or victims, we feel ourselves sinking into a morass of commanding social forces, ideological as well as institutional, that define our behavior and drain our very ability for self-determination in personal and public affairs. Helplessly at the disposal of vast socio-economic cross-currents, we are manipulated by a Kafkaesque world too cryptic to fathom. Our domestic politics are becoming too national in scope to allow for local forms of intervention, even as our international politics are becoming too worldwide in scope to be comprehended amid the rhetoric of’global markets’ and ‘global dependencies’.

Our lives include even more grim realities, such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons and materials, the socially induced famines that plague the so-called ‘Third World’, the almost unimpeded destruction of aboriginal cultures and the biosphere, the spread of tyranny over much of the planet even as world leaders smugly extoll new advances in personal and social freedom. The list of contemporary malfeasances at every level of life could be extended endlessly, from the implosion of the inner cities to the destruction of the ozone layer. Hence the loss of self-certainty that marked popular attitudes only two generations ago and the susceptibility of the public to an inwardly oriented — often misanthropic — spiritualism and a privatistic withdrawal from public life into mystical or quasi- mystical belief systems.

It is precisely these belief systems that this book seeks to examine and sharply criticize. I am acutely aware that many apparently similar books have already appeared, deriding the innovative ideas generated by the radical 1960s and calling for a conservative cultural retrenchment to traditional family values, religious beliefs, conventional virtues, and right-wing political ideologies. We have more books these days on ‘virtues’ — cultural and social — than we know what to do with. As a lifelong social radical, I have no intention of adding to the regressive litany of woes presumably caused by radical lifestyles and values, or calling for the revival of established traditions, many of them repellent. In the ‘cultural wars’ that American conservatives have proclaimed in recent years, I stand basically with their opponents: women seeking full equality in a largely patricentric society; the underprivileged and victims of racial discrimination; environmentalists who are seeking to rescue our life-sustaining planet from corporate depredation; and the diminishing number of radical people who are seeking to create a rational society.

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It is largely because of my commitment to these people and causes, in fact, that I have written this book. I am deeply disturbed by the conservative literature that invokes a ‘traditional’, usually hierarchical, hidebound past. But paradoxical as it may seem, I am also deeply disturbed by its pseudo-radical complement:, the so-called ‘new paradigm’ or genetically ‘New Age’ literature that ‘disenchants’ us with our humanity, indeed, that summons us to regard ourselves as an ugly, destructive excrescence of natural evolution — whether as a species, a gender, an ethnic group, or a nationality.

Like its conservative and traditionalist counterpart, the New Age mentality that demonizes human beings in whole or in part is not necessarily unified or coherent. Unlike many conservative traditionalists, New Age mystics celebrate the contradictions of their ‘paradigm’, its languid intellectual irresponsibility, and its seeming pluralism. More than one proponent of the view that humanity is a delinquent species in an otherwise amiable biosphere or ‘circle of beings’, as the Reverend Thomas Berry puts it, will sharply disclaim my characterization of their views.

Yet one does not have to look too far beneath the surface to find a common underlying theme that unites the highly particularistic, theistic, biocentric, postmodernist, misanthropic, and genetically mystical literature. What I believe brings them together — and many of them express their views in the same journals and anthologies — is a common deprecation of the remarkable features that make our species unique in the biosphere. Whether explicidy or implicidy, they deride humanity’s ability for innovation, its technological prowess, its potentiality for progress, and, above all, its capacity for rationality. I have thus found it appropriate to call this ensemble of deprecatory attitudes antihumanism.

Antihumanism — in sharp contrast to the humanistic ideologies advanced by rationalism, various socialisms, and some forms of liberalism — is a world view that places litde or no emphasis on social concerns. The message it offers is primarily one of spiritual hygiene, personal withdrawal, and a general disdain for humanistic attributes such as reason and innovation in impacting upon the natural and social wodds. It offers no serious challenge to modern secular power. Rather, it tilts, when it does not tumble headlong, toward self-oriented nostrums — and disturbingly regressive ones at that. Antihumanists commonly extoll an intuitionism supported by the mythopeic mentality of the distant, preliterate past of our species. In varying degrees, they demean civilization, progress, and science, denying either their reality or their value as goals worthy of respect.

Above all, antiliumanists deprecate or deny humanity’s most distinctive hallmark — reason, and its extraordinary powers to grasp, intervene into, and play a guiding role in altering social and natural reality. Many antihumanists harbor a static mindset, partly the result of their reverence for a mythologized ‘Nature’ — sometimes seen as a realm of cyclical ‘eternal recurrences’ — in which they strive to passively dwell rather than actively live as innovative beings; and partly, too, the result of their entombment in a pantheistic ‘cosmic womb’, a ‘night in which all cows are black’ (to use a favorite aphorism of Hegel’s), imbued with an outlook that dilutes active selfhood and social involvement. So wide-ranging and multifarious, in fact, are the antirational moods in contemporary Western culture that they often defy clear characterization apart from their shared antipathy for reason and the mostly intuitive nostrums with which they propose to replace it.

In exploring these moods, the reader will often be obliged to deal with criss-crossing ideas that are poorly formulated or directly expressed. Indeed, some antihumanists do not hesitate to invoke science, a bête noire to the more naive antihumanists, in support of their views. Nor will the reader encounter many spokespeople who synthesize coherence in their antihumanism. Elusiveness, prettified as pluralism and diversity, has become a well-cultivated art in the world we shall be entering.

Invoking the simplest rational canons of logical discourse is fiuidess in a realm that regards reason as such as a form of tyranny or ‘logocentricity’. Not infrequently, antihumanist moods are viscerally predisposed not toward discovering truth but toward gaining ritualistic and non-rational ‘insights’. Apart from the extravagant use of words like oneness, interconnectedness, cosmic, and ecological, the antihumanist vocabulary is almost willfully vague. Quite often, in a dazzling display of eclectic pluralism — a euphemism for contradiction — almost anything goes, without any regard for consistency or clarity.

I find it particularly ironic that at a time when so many of these anti-humanistic books and articles exalt the need to ‘re-enchant Nature’, the ‘Planet’, indeed the entire ‘Cosmos’, the most pronounced effect they have had is to ‘disenchant’ humanity itself: specifically, its unique potentiality for rationality.

Which raises a central concern of this book: the assault antihumanism has mounted against the rational faculties that make us human. For it is not specific traits of individual human beings that antihumanists attack but the general and unique attributes that define human beings as a species. In the end, it is our claim to be able to reason and to rationally intervene in the world around us that is under siege. The special features that make us remarkable products of natural evolution are in one way or another viewed with acute suspicion or forcefully maligned.

To unravel the ensemble of convoluted, contradictory notions that can be characterized as antihumanist, with their tangled roots in a highly intuitive psychology, is the task of this book. Each form of antihumanism, be it cultural primitivism, mystical ecologism, or a variety of postmodernism, must be examined on its own terms. Suffice it to say here that far too many antihumanists see the malaise that afflicts modern society as rooted not in irrationality, be it in the spiritual or material sphere of life, but in precisely the opposite: in rationality and a humanistic ‘anthropocentrism’. Beyond this basic premise, antihumanism strays in every conceivable direction such that it defies clear categorization and logical coherence. Normally this modus operandi would be regarded as an intellectual failing, but antihumanism cherishes it as evidence of flexibility.

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One word in particular needs explication if this book is to be properly understood. Inasmuch as I argue for a secular and naturalistic view of the world, I feel obliged to justify my use of the word ‘re-enchanting’ in the tide of this book. This word, after all, suggests a mystical bewitchment consistent with views held by many antihumanists, not humanists. My reasons for employing the word are simple: I am using it pardy as a spoof, and pardy as a metaphorical expression of my respect for what the human species could be and what it could achieve if it applied its intellectual faculties to the creation of a rational society.

I do not mean ‘rational’ here in a purified, abstract, merely philosophical sense, but rather in the sense of a lived rationality that, at its best, fosters cooperation, empathy, a sense of responsibility for the biosphere, and new ideas of community and consociation. A society guided by this existential form of reason must replace the present predatory society tiiat I am convinced threatens the survival of human and most non-human life. It is this socially critical vision that I hope to commend to the reader, a vision I have held in more than six decades of struggle against oppression, domination, hierarchy, class rule, and the debasement of life to a mere resource for personal enrichment and greed.

For this book advocates no compromise with the status quo and the mentality it fosters. I am as much opposed to a humanism structured around self-aggrandizement and plunder as I am to an antihumanism structured around humanity’s self-effacement in a mystical all-embracing ‘cosmos’.[1] While human beings differ fundamentally from other life-forms in their ability to bring meaning and reason to the world, precisely because of these remarkable abilities they are ethically obliged to develop a firm sense of responsibility to non-human beings and the planet as a whole.

Indeed, this book advances a view that is based on neither a Pollyanna philanthropos nor a repellent misanthropos, but on a transcendence of both of these one-sided views. There is, I submit, an outlook that goes beyond the dichotomy of an angelic and demonic humanity to a sublation that gives due emphasis to humanity’s affinities with non-human life on the one hand and to the satisfaction of its own special requirements on the other.

The current literature all too often offers readers either one extreme or another — either the biocentric or the anthropocentric — rather than a wide spectrum of views that allows for a sense of social and ecological responsibility. It is the one-sided, mutually exclusive dogmas exemplified by these two ‘centricities’ that I emphatically wish to transcend. Tragically, more and more people today agree with one or the other of the extreme, nonsensical notions: that human beings are inherently deleterious to almost everything around them, or that everything around us was ‘created’ exclusively for human use. I would hope that these pages provide a better map to negotiate the conflicting centricities in the modern cultural landscape.

More specifically, the void created by these extremes must be filled by a new humanism based on an ‘ethics of complementarity’, as I called it in my 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom.[2] There are many reasons for frustration and anger about the human condition, but there are none, I submit, for demeaning humanity, let alone for viewing its unique rational abilities as demonic. Indeed, there are good reasons to cherish our species for the splendors it has achieved, often against incredible odds, and that it certainly can achieve if reason in all its fullness can be brought into the world — most particularly, into the management of social and ecological affairs.

February 1995