why i am not human
18 October 2020 16:19![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cobaltdrgnFor me-- and for many other people in white Western societies-- the word "human" really means "apart".
To be human is to be not-animal, or at least more-than-animal. To be set aside from the "mere beasts", having some exalted place in the hierarchy of life. To be human, said Terry Pratchett, speaking as his character Death, is "to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape"-- a unique unity between heaven and sullied Earth. Sir Terry was an atheist, as are many who've said similar things. With or without gods, humanity cannot let go of the notion that it, and it alone, is special.
I reject this view from my very core. In fact, it outrages me. You're surrounded by blue whales and tiny gemlike beetles, leaf-shaped lizards and turtles that carry tiny ecosystems on their backs. You share this world with condors and tigers and marmosets and earthworms, elephants and magpies who perform funeral rituals, giant redwoods thousands of years old and creatures that have lived unchanged for far longer than your species has been alive. All around you, unseen processes are unfolding at microscopic levels, in every form of life and in things you consider "unalive", constantly changing and reshaping the world. You are, unavoidably, a part of this great Work. Yet you look around you and see only other humans, alongside a bunch of cute decorations that you can pick up or take down as you please.
I am not... that. I may be human in skin, but I will not ally myself with humanity. I ally myself with the natural world, with Earth as an ecosystem-- of which humans are a part. But until they start seeing themselves as a part, until they acknowledge that Homo sapiens is just another animal, until charity and compassionate behaviour are called by those names and not by "humanity", I will stand with the natural world. I embrace my animality.
I am proud of, and humbled by, the singing in my blood of ancient genes of reptiles past. I am proud of, and humbled by, my descent from a chain of molecular and metaphysical events that started before humanity and will end after humans are long gone. I am proud to be beast, lizard, dragon, reptile, a part of the whole. And I fight, foremost, in that whole's defence.
To be human is to be not-animal, or at least more-than-animal. To be set aside from the "mere beasts", having some exalted place in the hierarchy of life. To be human, said Terry Pratchett, speaking as his character Death, is "to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape"-- a unique unity between heaven and sullied Earth. Sir Terry was an atheist, as are many who've said similar things. With or without gods, humanity cannot let go of the notion that it, and it alone, is special.
I reject this view from my very core. In fact, it outrages me. You're surrounded by blue whales and tiny gemlike beetles, leaf-shaped lizards and turtles that carry tiny ecosystems on their backs. You share this world with condors and tigers and marmosets and earthworms, elephants and magpies who perform funeral rituals, giant redwoods thousands of years old and creatures that have lived unchanged for far longer than your species has been alive. All around you, unseen processes are unfolding at microscopic levels, in every form of life and in things you consider "unalive", constantly changing and reshaping the world. You are, unavoidably, a part of this great Work. Yet you look around you and see only other humans, alongside a bunch of cute decorations that you can pick up or take down as you please.
I am not... that. I may be human in skin, but I will not ally myself with humanity. I ally myself with the natural world, with Earth as an ecosystem-- of which humans are a part. But until they start seeing themselves as a part, until they acknowledge that Homo sapiens is just another animal, until charity and compassionate behaviour are called by those names and not by "humanity", I will stand with the natural world. I embrace my animality.
I am proud of, and humbled by, the singing in my blood of ancient genes of reptiles past. I am proud of, and humbled by, my descent from a chain of molecular and metaphysical events that started before humanity and will end after humans are long gone. I am proud to be beast, lizard, dragon, reptile, a part of the whole. And I fight, foremost, in that whole's defence.
no subject
2020-10-20 16:15 (UTC)At the core of my sense of species is a feeling of separation from the world. Even humanity is too large and oppressive and alien a collective for me to feel comfortable with.
I'm also deeply confused by the concept of considering other entities' welfare inherently valuable. How would one *tell* whether or not one believes this? Under what circumstances would *inherent* value cause one to make different decisions than *instrumental* value, and thereby tell one that the enlightened-self-interest reasoning one *thought* one was using was insufficient to explain what one actually wanted deep down?
(To borrow a phrasing, I want to save the world because *I'm* one of the idiots who *lives* in it.)
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I hope we can still be fellow travellers, even if we walk these paths for very different reasons. I remember you fondly from Tumblr, and I would like to be able to reconnect on this more user-aligned platform.
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You know, upon reflection, there's probably some interesting stuff here with my increasingly severe pollen-related environmental-sensitivity-NOS. My body--more often and more violently each year--rejects the natural environment. Plants spew oxygen and poison alike into the air, and while it's far better to have both than neither, it's hard to truly *love* such a mixed blessing.
(I went on a backpacking weekend when I was eighteen, and one of the reasons I agreed to it was that I wanted a chance to have that experience while making use of my youthful health: I would probably never be in as good a condition to bounce back from camping-related physical stresses again. I was *thinking* of things like healing overexertion injuries more quickly, but god I was right in more ways than I knew. Camping! I could never go *camping* now! Well, I could in a pinch, or if I timed it just right to hit one of the increasingly rare and narrow windows of breathable air, but I'll certainly never be able to *look at it* the same way I did back then.)
((On the, uh, bright? side?, my years of mask-wearing experience (to keep the pollen out) sure are coming in handy. Even my apparently-not-technically-allergies are occasionally twistedly useful, a canary in the coal mine to tell me when a mask is too low-quality or too badly configured to be safe. A warning shot from the air: "*this* time I'm going to fuck you up in a *non*-contagious way, but if you don't filter me better I make no promises about *next* time".))
no subject
2020-10-31 04:01 (UTC)My answer to "how does one tell": all is Maya, the dance. I reject the idea of "telling"; I believe it because I experience myself believing it; that's as real or fake as anything else that anyone believes, or says they believe. Enlightened-self-interest action that does the world good still does the world good, and so I don't fuss about it.
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But feeling that disconnection from all beings is something I understand, too. It took me a while to understand that there were beings I cherished, even if they mostly weren't human. Like I said, I don't find anything wrong with that viewpoint-- so yes, of course we can be.
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I've read an article saying that the reason plants spew more and more pollen every year is because it should be being absorbed by receptive plants (I don't really know plant sexes, but I'm going to assume male and female are simplifications just as they are in human biology), and not enough receptive plants are planted because humans value the look of the ones that flower, which are the pollinators. So one more thing to sigh at humanity for....
no subject
2020-10-31 14:56 (UTC)(I guess that makes sense, given the number of people who seem to think "morality comes down to self-interest" is a counterintuitive claim.)
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I've heard of anthropogenic pollen increases (though the stuff I was hearing placed the blame on climate change), but I suspect the pollen issues are *mostly* on my end, giving the speed and timing of their emergence. *Every* year is worse than the year before, starting around 2016.
If I were a person who thought that everything happens for a reason, I might think the point was to train me in protecting my airways. As it is, I'll take it as a silver lining.
(At first I thought that there was a causality the *other* way, that I had tried too hard to avoid germs and fucked up my immune system by not giving it enough to do. But all forty-seven of my allergy tests came back negative: as best we can tell, whatever this thing is it isn't operating through an immunological mechanism. The allergist told me to try exposing myself to pollen while on antihistamines and see if anything still happened, and either way I was going to discuss next steps with my primary-care doctor...but that allergist appointment was in January 2020, and the spring (indeed, the entire non-winter) of 2020 turned out to be a very bad time both for non-urgent medical appointments and for deliberately exposing yourself to things that induce early-stage-illness-like symptom(s).)