People who declare that homo sapiens is a doomed and fallen species, destined to dominate and destroy any habitat in which we live, believe they are merely being misanthropic in their pronouncements. In actuality, they are asserting a racist idea. To assume that the Western colonialist - or more generally, the empire-culture - way of living is the only way people have ever lived is not only wrong, it negates the reality of thousands of cultures that have not pursued extreme hierarchy and have not devastated their land bases. Many such cultures have existed across time. To express such a view as a US American is particularly absurd, given that most of the places we live on this continent were and are still inhabited by people who have pursued *radically* different lifeways than ours for thousands of years.
When people assume that all cultures pursue intense social verticality and habitat depletion, they are engaging in the typically lazy way of thinking of the racist. Such people believe that there only is and only has ever been one way for people to live: by pursuing hyper-individualism, avarice and extreme resource extraction. The idea is laughably wrong and it has two extremely harmful effects. It conceptually makes cultures disappear that have been around or were around for far longer than "Western civilization" and it limits what we can imagine as ways out of the omnicidal trajectory that we find ourselves on currently.
Blogger Gail Zawacki writes from this misanthropic perspective and labels anyone who questions her grim stance as engaging in "the myth of the noble savage." Again, this would be laughable if it were not so toxic. It is worth examining Zawacki’s claim. Historian Helen Gardner explains, "The modern myth of the noble savage is most commonly attributed to the 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. He believed the original ‘man’ was free from sin, appetite or the concept of right and wrong, and that those deemed ‘savages’ were not brutal but noble.” This othering conception of uncolonized people morphed in the 19th century to its opposite: Indigenous people were labeled as brutal savages by the people pushing westward across the American continents and by people participating in the Transatlantic human trafficking and slave labor enterprises in the Americas. Dr. Gardner describes how both conceptions of uncolonized people depend on invention and stereotyping, “Both typecasts relied on the idea that the Indigenous peoples of the world were in an original state, ‘primitive’, ‘backward’, the ancient ancestor to ‘modern man,’ the infants of humanity. Metaphors of time forged the social relationships of colonialism.”
The less sensational, but far more interesting truth is that people of all “races” (another conceptual invention of the Age of Imperialism that holds no basis in material reality, but that is used here because it is important to recognize the mentality of the social system within which we live) have pursued all manner of social organization and ways of relating to their land base and their fellow species over time. As humans living in the year 2021 in an industrialized consumer economy – as members of the Anthropocene – we live in the most ecologically destructive culture in the history of the world. It is also among the most psychologically corrosive, spiritually limiting, most violent and least communal in all of history. As jaded and frustrated as that may make us feel, it should not be a justification for assuming all humans have lived so foolishly and so cruelly.
Most US Americans need look only look toward the people who lived within the landscapes where we currently live or toward the non-empire-based cultures of our ancestors from other continents. There is nothing “edgy” or “radical” about damning the human species as some kind of a cosmic mistake. Rather, to do so is to engage in the dismally racist dominant thinking of The Age of Discovery a.k.a. Imperialism
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