FRIDAY, MAR 4, 2022: NOTE TO FILE
Humanism vs. Nature
The viable, the hu-man, and the unkind
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: MEMES THAT WORK, FROM THE WIRES, WHAT NATURE SELECTS FOR AND AGAINST
Abstract: Humanists (e.g. secular and religious) view Nature as Other, including today's environmentalists who see themselves as followers of science and/or religion, who assert that Nature has intrinsic value or rights. Secular environmentalists see themselves as the true environmentalists (who truly see Nature's intrinsic value apart from which there can be no environmental solutions), unlike religious environmentalists who insist that without their religious seeing there can be no environmental solutions. The following missive is occasioned by an article in Free Thought, sister publication of the Center For Inquiry's (CFI's) Skeptical Inquirer magazine that focuses on pseudoscience/belief-based thinking (they are against) and critical thinking issues (based on evidence and reason, which they are for). Scientists and evidence-based scholars often view secular humanists as fellow travelers, as supporters in a world largely hostile to the matter-energy systems worldview of those who endeavor to listen to Nature (who has all the answers).
What those who endeavor to listen to Nature tend to overlook is that there are religious believers who are just as supportive, science literate, and who see themselves as compatiblist as the secular humanists see themselves, who also insist that without them there can be no real solutions to human problematiques. Humanists believe they can serve humanity, value progress, help grow the economy (sustainably of course), and celebrate human achievement (by viewing knowledge and technological progress as achievement), while also singing hymns at Nature's gate. All humanists are willfully blind in ways that no one who would listen to Nature can be. Christian, Islamist, Hindu, and secular humanists all fail to see that they cannot be both humancentric and naturcentric, and that to be humancentric creates a culture, a worldview, that selects for humanity's failure as a species (possible extinction), which is to be profoundly anti-human (pro short-term self interest and anti-posterity). Humanism, a belief system (boiled down) is Self over system. Science (not a belief system) is system over Self. In naturcentric love and understanding (the endeavor to know Gaia and to think well) is the preservation of the world (and humans as a viable, evolvable system/life-form).
COOS BAY (A-P) — Julian Cribbs offered a list of ten existential threats that includes 'mass delusion'. He recognizes four: Money, politics, religion, and the human narrative. The meaning of 'the human narrative' is less clear than the other three words, so I wondered if there is a word that references humancentric narratives about humans told by humancentric storytelling humans. The word is 'humanism' as told by humanists who truly believe in their narrative (that in some form always includes human exceptionalism), often with 'secular' added to distinguish their deeply held beliefs from those humancentric narratives told by religious storytelling animals. Unlike most religious and political (and the moneyed), humanists often view science as supportive of their views, and many scientists prefer secular humanism to other belief systems. Alas, science does not select for a humancentric view of the universe, but remorselessly selects for a naturcentric one that is anathema to 99.99+ percent of modern techno-industrialized humans.
Given the obvious/evident, that almost all humans are humancentric, the possibility, the extraordinary claim, that there are or could be (or have been) humans who were/are not humancentric is of interest. If being naturcentric is impossible, then the concept can reference nothing 'out there' and is an illusion, error, and expression of ignorance. I can cite no possible examples of a political ideology that could be misinterpreted as naturcentric. Some environmentalists, predictably, would claim that their believes/values are naturcentric, especially those who claim to be 'deep' (green, ecologists, militant resistors). Village level Daoists are humancentric, but Laozi's worldview is not clear so. S/he/they seem to resist the siren's call of me, myself, and I. If there is a litmus test for naturcentrism that some may pass, it may be in the answer to 'who do you listen to?' The bifurcation begins: do you listen to human narratives (e.g. as told by 'great' thought leaders—political, religious, philosophical, financial, spiritual, and other purveyors of deepities? Or do you (or any human you may listen to) endeavor to listen to Nature (Gaia, Aluna, Mother....) who has all the answers (about life, the universe, and everything)? All who would endeavor to listen to the still small voice of data, evidence, the what-is or may be 'out there' will remain silent or offer to tell stories about the ineffable before whom all words recoil given that the concepts/models are not the system described/modeled, i.e. the climate is not the models some clever humans may make of it. All models/concepts/guesses are false, but some models/concepts/narratives iterate towards the what-is as evidenced by remorseless testing/correction.
Those who assert certitudes are always wrong. This is a useful dictum. Every claim made by true believers, those who believe in belief, can be dismissed as error, expressive of ignorance and illusion.
Let me tell you a story. I have as many as there are combinations of words to string together. 'Tell let you, let a as me story...' is a non-random story told by mapping pi onto the first 8 words of this paragraph, which will always be the same story told in any base ten counting system anywhere in the universe (but that's another story). I'm guessing that if I repeated mapping pi onto text of enough missives (especially political and religious), that unimaginably profound deepities would be forthcoming. I am certain of it. But none of them would be 'out there', and so of questionable interest. The stories humans tell are slightly less random and may be Liked or Shared. Some map better into being meaningful.
To stand up without falling over, I alway do so by being in line with the path an apple takes when I hold it out and drop it. I've come to tell a story that apples always fall down. but if I let go of one and it goes up or in any other direction but down, then I'll perhaps be surprised, but I'll change my story (easily as I don't believe any stories are 'true'). I'll repeat the experiment and come to tell a different story about why sometimes apples don't fall down.
Human behavior is more complex than apple behavior. Humans tell stories about why humans are different in kind from apples. Nature does not. Nature doesn't care what humans like or dislike, believe or disbelieve, or deeply feel to be true. So why should I? Nature is unkind. Humans can cease to persist in any form. Does listening to human stories as sources of information about the complex verbal behavior of a storytelling animal (and nothing more) make me inhuman? I may enjoy tales told by idiots that signify nothing, but Nature doesn't care and you shouldn't either.
Some tales may help humans to persist as the millennia pass, while others select for failure (e.g. those of modern monetary techno-industrial culture). If humans persist, they will come to tell better stories (as Nature alone determines to be better). Humans are free to believe any story they want (and to go extinct). Listening to Nature by not listening to the voices in our heads (or those coming from other heads) may be adaptive.
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Last paragraph of Free Thought article cited first:
If environmentalism is to continue as a successful movement—and, for all our sakes, it needs to—then it must continue to be driven by science. By all means, religious leaders should use their power and influence to raise awareness of the ecological crisis and urge action. But they have no grounds to treat environmentalism as their prerogative. Environmentalists of all beliefs must therefore resist these religious efforts to reshape environmentalism as a fundamentally spiritual endeavor. Were these efforts to succeed, it would sound the death knell for effective environmental action.
Environmentalism has never been a successful movement, i.e. despite Earth Day 1970 and all the fine words from 1962 on and celebrated victories (e.g. rivers no longer catch on fire and a ready substitute for chlorofloro carbons happened to available), the pace of planetary destruction has not been slowed. Note: The Fundamental Failure of Environmentalism — David Suzuki. True believers, political, religious or secular, have no solutions. Any complex society based on belief has so far proved non-viable, so why expect a different outcome this time?
Both religious and secular humanists are living within a worldview of their own making, a conceptual landscape of remorselessly humancentric and self-serving narratives, a world of subjectively satisfying social constructs that is not out there. Science is an endeavor, marginally successful, to tell as objective a story (a likely story) of the nature of things as possible from Nature's point of view, i.e. to iterate towards forming as objective (read minimally subjective and self-serving) a narrative as humans can tell by remorselessly asking Nature (who has all the answers) about the what-is via a guess then test modus operandi (aka science). Both forms of environmentalists (political/religious) are at best strange bedfellows to one another, but from my error, ignorance, and illusion-based POV, they are fellow pundits (i.e. solemn pretenders to learning) who sometimes agree to have a battle. Both see themselves as part of any solution and not as being the problem.
THOSE WHO DREAM OF THE BANQUET WAKE UP TO LAMENTATION AND SORROW.
How do I [Zhuangzi] know that love of life is not a delusion after all? How do I know but that he who dreads death is not as a child who has lost his way and does not know his way home?
The lady Li Chi was the daughter of the frontier officer of Ai. When the Duke of Chin first got her, she wept until the bosom of her dress was drenched with tears. But when she came to the royal residence, shared with the Duke his luxurious couch, and ate rich food, she repented of having wept. How then do I know but that the dead may repent of having previously clung to life?
Those who dream of the banquet, wake to lamentation and sorrow. Those who dream of lamentation and sorrow wake to join the hunt. While they dream, they do not know that they are dreaming. Some will even interpret [tell stories about] the very dream [story] they are dreaming; and only when they awake do they know it was a dream. By and by comes the great awakening, and then we find out that this life [worldview] is really a great dream. Fools think they are awake now, and flatter themselves they know—this one is a prince, and that one is a shepherd. What narrowness of mind! Confucius and you are both dreams; and I who say you are dreams—I am but a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a Sage may arise to explain it; but that tomorrow will not be until ten thousand generations have gone by. Yet you may meet him around the corner.
"The pure [abelieving] men of old did not know what it was to love life or to hate death [or believe in belief]."
