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[roadtorubedo]

Val Plumwood (1939-2008)

Australian-born philosopher who critiqued western dualistic and anthropocentric thought.

Anthropocentrism: the worldview that human beings are the most important entities in the universe, and prioritizes human needs, interests and perspectives over that of other living beings or the natural environment.

Dualistic thinking: a way of understanding the world through dividing concepts, ideas and phenomena into two opposing categories such as good vs evil, right vs wrong, mind vs body, humanity vs. nature. It is very black and white; complexity and nuance are overlooked or minimized.

Crocodile Attack survivor

In 1985, Val was on a canoeing adventure in an Australian National Park when suddenly she found herself in dangerous crocodile territory. She was stalked and subsequently bitten and submerged. The crocodile forcefully twisted and rolled her body 3 times before it miraculously released her. The injured & bloody Val crawled through the crocodile-infested water for miles before getting rescued by a passing park ranger.

This encounter changed her life. In her book, The Eye of the Crocodile, Val describes how during the attack she found herself rejecting the experience: how could the crocodile not see that she was a complex and special member of the untouchable human species? It was dehumanizing to have her body treated as meat, completely negating the reverence of what made her special as a human — her mind. She was not just a piece of meat to be eaten and preyed on.

Anthropocentrism in Modern Culture

In post-processing, Val arrived at a realization: modern humans, having conquered most of our predators, are like the winners of a war writing history through a biased perspective. We’ve made ourselves out to be special and above the rest of nature, becoming completely detached from the reality that we are equal members of a complex ecosystem that includes myriad creatures and environments. We are not better or worse. We are merely the biased authors of history and we’ve ingrained our narratives deeply into our philosophies, religions and culture.

“…human chauvinism, the groundless belief, amounting to nothing more than prejudice, that only human beings mattered, morally speaking; to the extent that anything else mattered at all, according to this attitude, it mattered only because it had some kind of utility for us.”

Humans believe they are made out of “mind stuff” and that makes us special and superior; we’ve lost touch with the fact that we are embodied beings.

We want to believe this so wholly that we justify containment and elimination of animals which pose a threat to humans — not only for the sake of our safety, but also because we psychologically cannot cope with the existence of predators who remind us of our mortality and the reality of the vulnerability that comes with being embodied entities.

Elimination of our predators leads to our maintaining a delusional echo chamber: “we intensity and reinforce illusions of superiority and apartness.”

“Predation on humans is [considered] monstrous, exceptionalised and subject to extreme retaliation”

Val proposes that humans should come to term with ourselves as part of the natural kingdom, and not just spectators of it. Rather than doing our best to preserve our bodies after death, why not allow the earth that nurtured us to reabsorb us?

Root of prejudice

The same superiority that caused humans to value the mind, consciousness and rationality and dismiss embodiment and emotionality, this is what leads to the viewing of certain groups as inferior. “Women, slaves and ethnic others (so-called ‘barbarians’), partake of this lower sphere to a greater degree, through their supposedly lesser participation in reason and greater participation in lower ‘animal’ elements such as embodiment and emotionality.” —Val Plumwood.

Invitation to question western values

Val highlights how modern liberal individualism leads us to believe that our lives and bodies belong to ourselves, that we do not owe anyone anything, not even our own mothers. And if this is the case then would we owe anything to a “nebulous earth community”?

Instead, moving towards more of a connectedness mindset will allow us to honor that we humans are all intertwined with one another and with the earth.

Perhaps if, like many indigenous communities, we can begin to view ourselves as part of nature, then we would begin to see death as a part of life, a form of recycling into the cycles of the earth and as a return to the land that nurtured us.