"Might Makes Right"

The ideology that underlies our extreme injustice toward non-human life.

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. — Thucydides, Athenian historian and general

Woe to the conquered. — Chieftain Brennus (to the Romans)

Photo by Jansen Yang on Unsplash

In recent essays, I spoke in protest of our civilization’s genocide against the living world. The word genocide, in my view, is the only one in the English language that comes anywhere close to accurately describing the ongoing global slaughter and annihilation of non-human life.

The word derives from the ancient Greek genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing). Human applications of the term are clear and well publicized. It is unsurprising that genocide is almost never applied to the extermination of other “races” or “tribes” of living beings not of our species.

The reason without question has much to do with our talent at conveniently dividing the world into two sharp categories, the superior one being humans, the inferior one the rest of the living world. Nonetheless, if we can make the moral jump to treating other people as deserving of life and justice, certainly there is some hope that we can make the greater leap to moral inclusiveness for more-than-humans.

So, there’s hope. Not optimism, but hope. We see that today’s world culture is changing at warp speed. The reason has much to do with modern communications, the extraordinary power of mass media, and the growing influence of social media. Change could possibly flip in the right direction.

In western civilization, the doctrine of “justice as fairness” goes back to at least Plato and Aristotle. Contemporarily, it is often attributed to John Rawls, an American political philosopher. Contrarily, as Thrasymachus of Plato’s Republic declared, “justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.” Likewise, the modern French philosopher Paul-Michel Foucault found no distinction between power and justice.

Still, many modern liberals remain committed to Enlightenment ideals. They reject Foucault’s grim assessment but fail in one important way. They limit “justice” to “social justice” as if humans exist apart from the rest of life.

Today’s society often extols the virtues of Indigenous people given their history of relative harmony with nature, but falls far short of demanding that we emulate them in terms of limiting our impacts on the natural world.

Yet, traditional Indigenous wisdom combined with Enlightenment virtues could offer a seed of hope for ending today’s widespread genocide against other members of Earth’s community of life.

Nonetheless, for such hope to flourish, a lot of kind people will have to break the anthropocentric chains that constrain their minds and enslave the natural world.

Let’s get started by insisting it must be done.

A hopeful Wood Stork anticipating a meal (Photo by Tony Povilitis)

Notes:

1. The quote “Might Makes Right” is attributed to the American pacifist and abolitionist Adin Ballou.

2. My thoughts here were inspired by a recent interview of social philosopher Susan Neiman broadcast on Unherd, an excellent program on Youtube that offers reasoned discussion and debate of hot topics.

3. Latest proof of global genocide against other-than-human life appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "The total weight of Earth’s wild land mammals – from elephants to bisons and from deer to tigers – is now less than 10% of the combined tonnage of men, women and children living on the planet."

   The Reason: "The figures demonstrate starkly that humanity’s transformation of the planet’s wildernesses and natural habitats into a vast global plantation is now well under way – with devastating consequences for its wild creatures. As the study authors emphasise, the idea that Earth is a planet that still possesses great plains and jungles that are teeming with wild animals is now seriously out of kilter with reality. The natural world and its wild animals are vanishing as humanity’s population of almost eight billion individuals continues to grow."

   The Solution: Should be obvious to those without their heads in the sand.

Enlightenment (Photo by Tony Povilitis)