"LIFE ETC."

Towards Super-Equality? / Part I

By 2050, there will be more than 9 billion people in the world, if we manage not to kill each other for the sake of few more drops of water.1 Such a situation was the biggest concern of Thomas Hobbes: how human beings would try to destroy each other to reach what they want/need in the state of nature. But for Hobbes, it was a matter of scarcity, not a matter of crowdedness. He did not live in a time in which billions of people literally milked, exploited and enslaved the globe. The population of the globe in the17th century wasn't more than a few hundred million.

I might sound like an active environmentalist or a Greenpeace volunteer, but I'm not. I don't believe in such humanitarian trademarks. I'm just trying to point to a problem we'll deal with often in the future.

Last year, in this column, I wrote about our unlimited "bona fide" interference in the lives of non-humans, such as preventing a cat from eating a bird, or killing wild grass. "Those who claim that they're nature-lovers enjoy killing hundreds of plants in order to make their gardens look better. We talk about liberation and freedom all day long while we try to impose a dictatorship over other species," was the topic of my article "To Accuse a Cat of Murder."2

But that article was just about the problem. It wasn't an attempt to analyze the infrastructure that creates such a schizophrenic human identity that glorifies life and nature, and kills other species for aesthetic purposes at the same time.
The main source for this dilemma is our traditional belief in the supremacy of human beings over other beings. For instance, at the beginning of his book
The Politics, Aristotle states that the "real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, just and unjust, etc."3 Likewise, you can find many parts in religious texts explaining what makes human beings superior to others and why human beings can/should rule the rest of the world.4