‘SPECISME SEXISME RACISME LES VRAIS INVISIBLES!
While I was walking around the city of Bourges, which is forty minutes north of the village where I have my house in central France, and from where I’m writing this post, I noticed this prominently sited mural. It says on the left: ‘SPECISME SEXISME RACISME LES VRAIS INVISIBLES! (Species-ism, Sexism, Racism The True Invisibles!)
What especially struck me was the presence of the first term, which I hadn’t really considered so obviously a characteristic dimension of the ‘systemic’ prejudices blighting society. But because of humanly-driven climate change we are certainly going to hear much, much more about how our inter-species violence also extends to the trans-species - and beyond. When you line up ‘species-ism’ alongside ‘sexism’ and ‘racism’ you’re enlarging the case against humans to take into account violence not just against other humans but against other animals.
An online dictionary defines ‘species-ism’ or ‘speciesism’ as: “the assumption of human superiority leading to the exploitation of animals.” In this sense, it’s used by radical vegetarians who declare, for example, that ‘meat is murder’. But why stop at what we’ve done to fauna? Why not extend the condemnation to flora as well? Even to rocks and minerals and things like rivers and seas? After all, wide-scale environmental abuse is why we are now calling the epoch the Anthropocene. In the current cultural context, ‘species-ism’ is actually a sub-set of the wider malign legacy of civilization: anthropocentrism. We humans adopt an exploitative position in relation to the world by putting the interest of our own species first - at the centre. For millennia we have certainly been lording it over non-humans – other animals - but also the entire biosphere. The result is that we have brought the Earth to a potentially catastrophic precipice.
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Humankind certainly seems to have a general tendency towards anthropomorphic projection. As the French anthropologist Philippe Descola observes, humans have “a propensity to interpret phenomena and behaviour observable in their natural environment by endowing non-humans with qualities that are similar to those of humans.” Indigenous peoples practice anthropomorphic projection, but as anthropologists have shown, they are not aggressively anthropocentric. For them, seeing the world anthropomorphically also means having specific obligations in relation to non-humans, the possibility of opening social relations with them. Descola describes what he terms “identification”:
It results from the fact that humans arrive in the world equipped with a certain kind of body and with a theory of mind, i.e. endowed with a specific biological complex of forms, functions, and substances, on the one hand, and with a capacity to attribute to others mental states identical to their own, on the other hand. This equipment allows us to proceed to identifications in the sense that it provides the elementary mechanism for recognising differences and similarities between self and other worldly objects, by inferring analogies and distinctions of appearances, behaviour and qualities between what I surmise I am and what I surmise the others are. In other words, the ontological status of the objects in my environment depends upon my capacity to posit or not, with regard to an indeterminate alter, an interiority and a physicality analogous to the ones I believe I am endowed with. I take interiority here in a deliberately vague sense that, according to the context, will refer to the attributes ordinarily associated with the soul, the mind, or consciousness – intentionality, subjectivity, reflexivity, the aptitude to dream – or to more abstract characteristics such as the idea that I share with an alter a same essence or origin. Physicality, by contrast, refers to form, substance, physiological, perceptual, sensory-motor, and proprioceptive processes, or even temperament as an expression of the influence of bodily humours.
Anthropocentrism is something else altogether. In effect, it drives a wedge between humans and everything else. This is how the Australian environmental philosopher Freya Mathews ( a recent discovery for me) describes it in The Dao of Civilization (2023) “ Anthropocentrism was the groundless belief, amounting to nothing more than a prejudice, that only human beings matter, morally speaking; to the extent that anything else – animals, plants, ecosystems, the natural world generally – matters, it does so only because it has some kind of utility for human beings.” Mathews traces anthropocentrism to as long ago as the Neolithic agrarian revolution, so as to understand how the animist focus of anthropomorphism, which is still evident in Indigenous cultures today, became perverted into anthropocentrism. As she writes in her most famous book, The Ecological Self (1991) once anthropocentrism was wedded to the mechanistic scientific worldview in the seventeenth century Europe, the recipe for ecological disaster was prepared: ‘from a mechanistic perspective, Nature is itself devoid of interests and is therefore indifferent, so to speak, to its own fate. Nothing that happens to it matters to it. It is in this sense, in itself, devoid of value.” A dualistic relationship was established between ‘nature’ (the non-human) and ‘culture’ (the human) within which ‘civilization’ became inherently exploitative and violent.
Clearly, an anthropocentric worldview is not so much the opposite of anthropomorphism as described by Descola in relation to the Indigenous worldview but rather a possible deviant consequence of anthropomorphism, one where the human capacity to project onto and identify with the world carries with it feelings of separation, superiority, and aggressive entitlement. The key point is that anthropomorphism in itself is surely a ‘good thing’ and certainly does not preclude the recognition that humans and non-humans are separated by differences of degree, not of kind. But how can we restore to anthropocentrism a less arrogantly controlling and more generously reciprocal attitude to the world within which we live?
Mathews and other environmentalists and ecologists urge us to shake of this malign anthropocentric relationship to the world and become instead ‘biocentric’ or ‘ecocentric’. The former stance implies we recognize living things carry equal and inherent value, while the latter extends this recognition to indicate that environmental systems as wholes carry inherent value. Both ‘-isms’ clearly seek to displace humans from the centre, where the centre is deemed to confer unique and superior status.
but I’m not sure making reference to the trio of species-ism, sexism, and racism is the right way forward. After all, wedding speciesi-sm with the other two potentially feeds the very anthropocentrism we’re supposed to be overcoming. In fact, one could argue that the more we ring our hands over the human cost to the environment, the more we draw attention to ourselves. So, in this sense, all we are indulging is a negative anthropocentrism. Maybe even nihilistic anthropocentrism. Also, when you think about it, calling a whole geological time period the ‘Anthropocene’ can seem like an extreme case of anthropocentrism: “Wow! We made it! We’ve finally put ourselves at the real centre. Well, at least, the centre of planet Earth.” Thankfully, there’s still a whole galaxy out there which knows absolutely nothing about a messed-up species of bipedal animals descended from apes.
REFERENCES
The Philippe Descola quote is from his essay ‘Human Natures’ in Quaderns (2011) 27, available on-line at: https://www.raco.cat/index.php/QuadernsICA/article/download/258367/351466
The Freya Mathews quote is from The Dao of Civilization. A Letter to China, published by Anthem Press, 2023. https://anthempress.com/on-the-dao-of-civilization-a-philosopher-s-letter-to-the-supreme-leader-pb
The Ecological Self is published by Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Ecological-Self/Mathews/p/book/9780367705183