Anthropomorphism Is No Longer The Issue; Misanthropy Is

As the human prospect continues to dim, an increasing number of people avoid feeling disturbed by placing humanity’s extinction in the comforting context of the vastness of time and space. It doesn’t wash.

For example, one hears risible things like, “the extinction of humanity – an increasingly inevitable prospect – is the meditative core” of the “de-anthropomorphism” movement.

The intention is to make “bold post-human gestures that dethrone the human as linchpin of both history and evolution.” However it’s a spiritual and philosophical mistake of the highest order to escape man’s self-importance by deferring to incomprehensible scales of time and space. We cannot refute anthropomorphism with reactive ideas of human insignificance.

How can serious human beings take solace in “the eradication of our species and the decay of everything material we’ve produced” because humankind is “just a ripple in the history of our earthly co-matter?”

A woman I met during my perambulations in the park put the underlying truth of this mindset less floridly: “I love the earth, but I hate humanity.”

You can’t hate humanity without hating the earth, and you can’t hate the earth (as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Brian Niccol and their super-rich ilk do) without hating humanity.

Man is not an evolutionary mistake, but an evolutionary conundrum, stuck in a developmental cul de sac. But it isn’t over, and it’s utterly irresponsible to preemptively take comfort in abstractions about human extinction. Donning a false humility of human insignificance and taking refuge in the vastness of time and space is unbefitting a human being.

Man is a self-centered, destructive primate, but the human brain has infinite spiritual potential. It’s our responsibility as human beings to face the former and awaken the latter.

It comes down to whether you believe that life on earth, which gave rise to the most complex neuronal organ on this planet, is an entirely random, mechanistic and meaningless phenomenon. Or whether you have direct experiencing of the brain’s capacity for silent awareness of the numinous, irrespective of man’s fragmentation of the integrity and destruction of the diversity of life on earth.

The misanthropic desire for the extinction of the human race, under the pretense of humility and the deconstruction of anthropocentrism, belies a deep disrespect for life and evolution.

Humans aren’t the center of life on earth, much less the universe. There is no center in the universe. But the human brain matters. It is the pinnacle of creation on earth. And it holds the potential for the full emergence of consciousness against a backdrop of celestial and terrestrial awareness.

Consciousness is intrinsic to the universe, which is in a state of meditation. But the human condition is egocentricity and pointless chatter. We can only resolve that contradiction within ourselves.

Extinction in nature is an inherent aspect of evolution. But human extinction would mean that we utterly failed as a species to live in harmony with the earth and each other on this extraordinarily beautiful planet. It would have cosmic significance, since the evolution of a brain that holds infinite potential for awareness was wasted on this astonishing globe.

It doesn’t occur to proponents of de-anthropocentrism that collective self-centeredness is completely distinct from questions about the human brain’s capacity for true consciousness.

The newfound religion of human insignificance in the universe is just the flipside of millennia of religious belief that humans are the purpose and center of creation. It isn’t that “the truth lies somewhere in between,” but that it isn’t to be found at the silly scale at all.

Life evolves through random processes, but life is not random, anymore than the laws of physics are random. Mechanism in physics, chemistry and biology is the means of evolution, not the essence of creation.

Scientists are close to declaring that microbial life existed on Mars, and may still exist in subsurface pockets around the planet. Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, spews organic matter into space, and probably has microbial life under its crust. If even single-celled life exists anywhere else in our solar system, then it means that life is intrinsic to the universe, found wherever there is liquid water.

The question then will no longer be, is the universe “fine-tuned” for life, but is it fine-tuned to produce creatures capable of cosmic consciousness?

The human brain has that potential, but we are stuck at the level of symbol-based consciousness. Our dilemma is that “higher thought” is both the threshold for complete consciousness, and a tremendous impediment to it. We can and must urgently resolve that quandary.

The human brain is the only brain on this planet that has the capacity to receive and be a vehicle for the immanent intelligence of the universe. When the mind as thought is completely still in unguided attention, the brain is suffused with the silent awareness and intelligence of ongoing creation, which is synonymous with non-personal love.

Anthropomorphism is no longer the problem; misanthropy and selling evolution and life short are.

Martin LeFevre
lefevremartin77@gmail

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