Notes
Whatever its chronology, the use of ‘humanism’ to mean a crude anthropocentric and technocratic use of the planet in Ntrictly human interests (often socially unspecified) has its contemporary origins in Martin Heidegger’s Brief uber den Humanismus (Letter on Humanism), written in 1947, which gained favor among t he postwar French philosophes of the existentialist and later postmodernist vintage. Heidegger’s very flawed and sinister Brief is a masterpiece of misinterpretation and irresponsible reasoning. The humanist—antihumanist dichotomy has its historical roots primarily in the postwar cynicism and nihilism of the 1950s and 1960s. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982; republished, with new introduction, by Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991). The accusations within the antihumanist camp that their own members are enveloped in t... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Epilogue
Epilogue What alternatives do we have to the antihumanistic moods percolating through Euro-American culture today? To exude nothing but optimism would be as simplistic as the pessimism I have criticized in this book. Whether a rational choice is possible before the present market society exhausts itself in a frenzy of destruction is certainly debatable; capitalism — whose corrosive workings are abetted, not determined, by an ever more powerful technology — is spreading into the remotest areas of the planet. Europe and North America are not alone in being shaken to their foundations by the system they spawned less than two centuries ago. Today, large parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America have also been swept into its fold. Capital has become as ‘rhizomatic’ as anything treasured by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose concepts play neatly into the imagery of global capitalism. But whatever may be the possibilities for a rati... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 9 : Re-enchanting Humanity
Chapter 9: Re-enchanting humanity To the extent that space and possibly the patience of the reader allow, I have tried to critically examine an historic shift away from the Enlightenment to an antihumanist oudook that incorporates a postmodernist celebration of mysticism and anti-rationalism, and very significantiy, a subsuming of any social issues, intellectual critique, and moral criteria by a crude biologism of one kind or another. By no means is my account of this shift complete; diere are far too many antihumanisms abroad for me to include them all. Nor is it clear what forms this shift will take in the years ahead. As we have seen, major antihumanist tendencies seek in varying degrees to reduce human behavior to the morality of the gene, and human beings to intelligent fleas that feed on a mystified Gaia, or to fruit flies competing with each other in a mindless biological struggle over limited means of life in the macabre play of Malthusian demographics. (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 8 : Science and Anti-science: Anything goes
Chapter 8: Science and anti-science: anything goes Postmodernism is a concept that has been applied not only to philosophy but to architectural, literary, cultural, and behavioral styles as well. To be postmodern is to be ‘hip’ today, to an extent that the word has become part of the very contemporary culture it professes to criticize. This might render it quite harmless, indeed ludicrous, were it not for its impact on what has been called the sociology of science. In the scientific realm, relativistic moods nourished by postmodernism’s antihumanism are corrosive not only of popular attitudes toward scientific research but, as we shall see shortly, toward reason itself. By science, let me emphasize, I am referring to the real stuff: physics, chemistry, biology, physical anthropology, and their offspring, such as astrophysics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and archaeology. What minimally defines these disciplines as sciences is the... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 7 : Postmodernist Nihilism
Chapter 7: Postmodernist nihilism The most academically entrenched attack upon humanism, the Enlightenment, and reason are the highly influential philosophical tendencies that go under the name of postmodernism. It is arguable whether this name adequately encompasses such disparate, even idiosyncratic views as those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and a constellation of former French leftists such as Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard, to cite the most well-known to an Anglo-American readership. Yet certain basic commonalities, I believe, justly designate their work as postmodernist or poststructuralist (the two words are often used interchangeably). To be sure, Nietzsche and Heidegger belong to a time when anti-Enhghtenment sentiments were still rooted in the romantic reaction to the effects of the French Revolution and the emergence of industrial capitalism. Although these two thinkers... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

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’ ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Myth of the Primitive
Chapter 5: The myth of the primitive There is a perverse irony in the fact that, after a virtual consensus has been reached about the abuses that European colonialists inflicted on aboriginal peoples, the possibility of attaining a realistic and sympathetic view of ‘the primitive’ is being gutted by assorted ecomystics, anticivilizationists, and more generically, self-avowed primitivists who have made ‘the primitive’ into a postmodern parody of the noble savage. Today Euro-American primitivists have grossly distorted our understanding of the lives and cultures of aboriginal peoples by attributing to them suprahuman, paradisiacal dimensions. By turning ostensibly primitive lifeways into models for ‘simple living... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Becoming Human
Chapter 1: Becoming human Until recently, the belief that the human species is qualitatively different from non-human life-forms has been one of the most abiding notions of nearly all sophisticated civilizations. The nature of this difference, to be sure, was defined in a great variety of ways. Human beings generally assigned to themselves the possession of souls, moral sensibilities, immense technical powers, and remarkable mental faculties. These traits were often melded into various combinations and ascribed to some social strata by others to distinguish various strata from one another and from the proverbial beasts in the field. Even tribal peoples, who professed to see similarities between themselves and the animals around them, indire... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Technophobia and its Tribulations
Chapter 6: Technophobia and its tribulations From the eighteenth century onward, enlightened humanism advanced three basic ideals that it identified with progress. The first and most important of these ideals was a renewed focus on reason: the use of logical thought in dealing with reality. Since the time of the classical cultures of ancient Greece and, to some extent, Rome, reason had been relegated, at best, to a handmaiden of theology. Since that time, social arrangements, not to speak of the natural world, had not been explained in rational terms. Feudal hierarchies and royal power were looked upon as God-given, while social inequities were seen as the unchallengeable dispensation of a deity whose judgment was taken on faith. This outlo... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

A caveat to the reader Today, when environmentalism is under assault by Republican reactionaries in the United States, Tory reactionaries in Britain, and apologists for corporate interests everywhere, I wish to reiterate my emphatic support for all environmentalist tendencies that seek to preserve biotic diversity, clean air and water, chemically untainted foods, and wilderness areas. Much of my life — some forty years as a writer, lecturer, and activist in various movements — has been and remains assiduously committed to these environmental goals. It would be gross demagogery for antihumanists, misanthropes, and primivitists — who in my view are seriously damaging the environmental cause — to identify their own regr... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)