Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
Human exceptionalism is a term for this kind of arrogant anthropomorphism, a mindset which fragments us, separates us from the natural world. For centuries Christianity has taught that we are separate from nature, our earthly biosphere but a stage upon which we are to strut our stuff, to take what is rightfully ours, ultimately headed for something better. Reinforced by antiquated religious dualism, we continue to believe that we are made in the image of the gods – the star player amongst all natural beings, partly of the divine (i.e. supernatural), the main focus of god’s creation. Indeed, the whole point of it! This supercilious self-conception is both inaccurate and highly problematic.
Human exceptionalism undoubtedly predates Christianity, even animist and pagan beliefs, stretching deep into our evolutionary past. Basic concern for one’s own type above others is a natural, evolved strategy for many species. Without some form of this instinctive self-regard hard-wired in, many would not have lasted long. Human exceptionalism is in our nature. But it is also another example of the many ways in which Christianity ‘piggy backs’ upon our cognitive weak spots, nurturing and reinforcing cognitive biases and similar such instinctive inclinations through indoctrination, beginning in our highly vulnerable infancy.
As natural as it may be, human exceptionalism is significantly nurtured by two millennia of Christian cultural dominance. The Abrahamic religions nurture exceptionalist instincts which are detrimental to our long-term well-being, beliefs which are not in sync with scientific reality or objective truth and, as a result, are ultimately unsustainable. This reinforcement of human exceptionalism undoubtedly plays a significant role in our problematic self-conception, and the belief that we are the apex of all earthly life, separate and superior, the earth’s resources here for us to do with as we will. The familiar passage introducing this essay is but one example of this hubris, this excess of pride which is ubiquitous throughout both scripture and America’s highly Christian culture.
The shift towards a more scientific, knowledgeable, rational and secular perspective, increasing over the centuries since the Christianity-dominated dark ages, is helping us to develop an understanding of ourselves as natural, evolved organisms, simply another species of animal, deeply interconnected with all known life forms, with our planet itself. Charles Darwin, and the theory of evolution in particular, has helped us to begin formulating this new self-conception. This is our ‘New & Improved’ origin story – secular, science-based and freed of the supernatural and mythological.
On this road, this passage from the old to the new, Darwin and the theory of evolution have had to confront two major misconceptions reinforced by the Abrahamic religions. These misconceptions warp our understanding of human being, the how, what, and why of our species’ existence. Like a religious hangover, they remain intact, to varying degrees, in spite of the progress we have made.
The first misconception built into our Abrahamic origin myth is that the supernatural is necessary to explain human life, the world, everything. From the creation of the universe, to our purpose and place on this planet, to what makes us special, many of us continue to look beyond the real, to god or some otherworldly place, for answers. This is no longer necessary. The theory of evolution effectively freed us from this enormous, erroneous and disempowering fiction. Darwin’s successful application of scientific methodology helped free us from such ignorance and magical thinking, significantly improving our understanding. This paradigm shift created a template for the further expansion of reason, scientific epistemology and human knowledge itself. Despite all of these advances in our understanding of the real world, many of the devout and pious persist in science denial, dismissing our increasing knowledge of everything, including the ‘big bang’, abiogenesis and evolution itself. However, denial does not change what we know is true.
The second major misconception – human exceptionalism – is proving even harder to shake. For the faithful, god made us in his image. For we atheists and humanists, this is backwards – it is we humans who imagine the various gods in our likeness. We recognize how the god of Christianity and the Bible is essentially a surrogate male human, writ large, naively and arrogantly projected across the cosmic canvas.
After two millennia of Christian cultural dominance, this second misconception is so deeply embedded that even the secular and scientifically-informed often fall prey. The assumption of our top dog status has been hard to shake, even for those of us who no longer believe in supernatural agency. For centuries we were taught that we were the ‘crown of creation.’ This hierarchic model should also have been rendered obsolete by a recognition of the logical ramifications of evolutionary science. Unfortunately, we simply morphed into the ‘pinnacle of evolution,’ retaining our position at the apex of a hierarchic model. But the more objective, scientific truth is that we are, in fact, the ‘pinnacle of nothing.’ (Tattersall 2015)
The late Stephen Jay Gould summed it up most eloquently:
Evolution still floats in the limbo of our unwillingness to face the implications of Darwinism for the cosmic estate of Homo sapiens…
…mental accommodation toward pedestal smashing, has scarcely begun…we have managed to retain an interpretation of human importance scarcely different in many crucial respects from the exalted state we occupied as the supposed products of direct creation in god’s image.
—Stephen Jay Gould, 1995
We maintain such arrogant beliefs through a fundamental misinterpretation of the process of natural selection itself, failing to properly understand what it means to be 100% natural, to be an animal, to be a product of evolution. This pervasive exceptionalism helps explain our rapine relationship with the nonhuman world, the very biosphere which created us, within which we are intimately interconnected, and upon which we depend utterly in order to thrive and survive. Our under-acknowledged dominance mindset underpins our disastrously dysfunctional relationship with the environment, our malaise of indifference, and our contemporary sense of isolation and fragmentation from ‘nature.’
This ignorance-based schism has been a growing area of concern in more recent times. The industrial revolution, our extreme dependence upon fossil fuels, overpopulation and the growth of the American consumerist lifestyle have all combined to increasingly wreak havoc upon our global biosphere.
John Muir witnessed our interconnectedness with the natural realm, observing that:
When one tugs at a single thing in nature,
one finds it attached to the rest of the world.
Rachel Carson, in her paradigm shifting work “Silent Spring,” observed how:
In nature nothing exists alone.
These were admonitions, warnings from those who could see, to those of us who could not as yet. Such insights were a springboard for the ‘hippies’ and their significant, if naïve and under-appreciated, advocacy for a ‘back to nature’ mindset and lifestyle. Such counter-cultures brought awareness of our fragmentation, consumerism and our exceptionalism as well, closer to mainstream social consciousness.
As a neo-hippie myself, coming of age in the 70’s, I can distinctly recall idealizing elements of Native American cultures and traditions. The adulation of their more nature-centered lifestyles, as rife with romantic naivete as it may have been, nonetheless represented a step closer to the concept of sustainability, a step in the right direction. Even today, many – particularly among the non-atheist nones, the ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ crowd – imagine that what humanity needs is a more nature-centered spirituality to heal our relations with our earthly biosphere.
But the element which has brought humanity so very much progress in the last few centuries has not been ‘spirituality,’ old or new. It has been science. It is our shift away from the supernatural, from Christianity’s conservative emphasis upon tradition and the past, from the illiterate provincialism, indoctrination and mythology which dominate religion and ‘spirituality.’ Our progress has been the result of increasing freedom from religion and magical thinking, increasing literacy, secular and scientific education, and an increasingly borderless, multicultural, global sophistication.
The problem is that religion and spirituality merely plug fictitious and unfalsifiable answers into the gaps in our understanding. What we do NOT need, in order to repair our fragmented relationship with our natural biosphere, is yet another messiah, religion or spirituality. What we Homo sapiens – the quintessential learning animal – really need, what we thrive and progress upon, are evidence-based, falsifiable answers. Naturalism, science and education are the keys to a better, increasingly sustainable future.
Unlike mythology, secular answers are based entirely upon real-world evidence, facts and truth regarding our biosphere and our own non-hierarchic, intimate interconnectivity with all earthly life forms, with the biosphere itself. Our new and improved, science-based understanding of ourselves, as animals, as eusocial organisms that thrive within complex natural interconnectivity, offers us borderless, universal and sustainable solutions to the array of environmental problems we face.
Human exceptionalism is not merely a problem for our relations with the ‘external’ ecosystem. It is also at the root of what we think of as ‘internal’ schisms, of psychological and cognitive fragmentation. Antiquated Abrahamic origin mythology continues to reinforce belief in a divine god as the source of the good, while the ‘natural’ within continues to be associated with the lowly, beastly, evils of the world.
Even secular thinkers are susceptible to the anti-nature perspective so long encouraged by Christianity. Violence, rape, selfishness, lust, greed, literally our poop and pee and boogers and farts, are all traditionally associated with the ‘animal’, the beast within – i.e., the natural. The ‘good,’ or ‘higher,’ stuff about human being – justice, morality, creativity – these continue to be associated with some inexplicable beyond, be it secular or spiritual. This is a terrible misconception with real-world implications. Human excellence is not given from beyond. It is 100% natural. All is of the animal.
Be it the brilliant creativity of a DaVinci, the moral exemplar of the Jesus archetype, or the ideal of justice, guiding yet eluding us from the ever-receding horizon – these are all evolved traits, resulting from the evolutionary processes within a specific species of bipedal, intensely social, highly intelligent hominids. Primatologists, like the late Frans de Waal, even observed the roots of such excellence in the proto-justice of our closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos. Such findings would not have surprised Charles Darwin, who long ago deduced that human and ape intelligence differed only in degree, and not in kind.
Christian doctrine, taken as quasi or entirely literal, as it often tends to be, represents a harmful form of pseudoscience that reinforces exceptionalism, and is disempowering and disrespectful of human autonomy. Contrary to millennia of prescientific thought, human excellence is within the realm of the falsifiable, something which we can learn about, increase our knowledge of. This means that we can choose to reinforce that which brings it forth. In this and other ways, atheism, secularism, humanism and freedom from religion are deeply empowering.
Darwin gave us what we needed. Properly understood, his work frees us from the supernatural. But it also tells us that we are not the pinnacle, the ideal, nor the lowly or most evil of earthly life forms. The hierarchic conception of humans as the apex of earthly life is a product of the human mind, not a characteristic of the natural world. This knowledge can empower us to overcome the exceptionalist predilections both pre-wired and indoctrinated into our brains. We can bridge the gap between ourselves and the natural, materially, cognitively, psychologically and socially.
This does not mean normalizing our inner brute or going back to nature in some regressive sense. Rather, it is the beginning of our progression towards a new, evidence-based self-conception which will increasingly relieve us of our long-standing, fictitious and highly problematic fragmentation from reality. Progress towards a more accurate self-conception, and the increasingly sustainable lifestyle that goes hand-in-hand with it, begins with increased secular thought, scientific knowledge, freedom from religion and the concomitant rejection of religious dualism, supernaturalism, hierarchic paradigms and, most importantly, human exceptionalism.