Relativism Gone Relative to the Point of Madness:

The New York Times asks: “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?

Our species possesses inherent value, but we are devastating the earth and causing unimaginable animal suffering.”

 [By Mr. Todd May, a professor of philosophy at Clemson University; Dec. 17, 2018] And so what? Well, publishes the New York Times, we should be indifferent to the extinction of all human babies…

Mr. May reveals himself to be incapable of distinguishing a human being from a shrimp. We have seen it all before. The Nazis highly valued such people, affected with similar inhuman lack of discernment: they had plenty of tasks for them.

Many common philosophers have sunk so low, they ask, to earn their pittance by ingratiating themselves to, and be published by the plutocratic media: would killing all humans be a tragedy? By that token of abysmal questioning, Auschwitz was not even an appetizer for a pleasant smoke-out. With, or without Heidegger, Nazism got many children. Or is it an infection, a pandemic?

One mistake those who want deep down inside to see humanity gone make, is that they claim humanity causes suffering of all conscious beings, and that’s tragic (Mr. May’s main argument).

However, the consciousness of a shrimp, or a sheep, doesn’t equate to human consciousness. Different consciousnesses are not like different frames moving relative to each other. One neuron does not equate ten billion neurons, just like a space with one dimension does not equate with one with ten billion dimensions. 

That a whale swallows millions of shrimps doesn’t make it a Hitler swallowing millions of Jews. Humans are no shrimps, even though some professional philosophers are hard to distinguish from shrimps:

Hitler and Helga Goebbels. After Hitler’s death, Helga , then 12 years old, was forced fed poison (a Soviet autopsy revealed). She resisted to the point of facial injury. The Goebbels’ parents hated non-Nazi humanity with all incandescent hatred.

Even non-human predators know this, how exceptional human beings are… something all too many professional philosophers deny (so that they can become famous and well-fed): a wolf will kill sheep, just because he can, but will respect a human being, just because he can look at the human in the eye, and recognize intelligence and fellow high level consciousness. I have personally made that experience in the wild with both wolf and lions. There is no doubt wolves and lions hesitate before inflicting pain to a creature with superior intelligence and consciousness.

Not all creatures are fellow: superior sentient animals know this perfectly well, because it’s an imminently practical notion: their lives depend upon it. Superior animals are clever enough and knowledgeable enough to know that injuring a highly social and competent human being will have bad consequences.

By the same token, the environment has no consciousness, it doesn’t suffer as a sentient creature.

The Nazis went down that same exact road, passing all sorts of laws for animal welfare, to better relativize human lives… by respecting rats… Respecting rats in a showy fashion makes it easier to kill humans. In the very lethally racist caste system in ancient India, courtesy was extended to cows and other beasts, to better deny the most basic humanity to lower caste human beings.

All too relative philosophers play the role of dynamic red herrings, capturing feeble minds with fascinating outrage, and nonsensical jargon. Yes, they say, people are no better than shrimps, be good to them, shrimps, and the masters of the world applaud… 

Patrice Ayme

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Here is an extensive quote from the theoretician of mass lethal imbecility in the New York Times, to show I am neither distorting nor exaggerating what was published there:

“To make that claim less puzzling, let me say a word about tragedy. In theater, the tragic character is often someone who commits a wrong, usually a significant one, but with whom we feel sympathy in their descent. Here Sophocles’s Oedipus, Shakespeare’s Lear, and Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman might stand as examples. In this case, the tragic character is humanity. It is humanity that is committing a wrong, a wrong whose elimination would likely require the elimination of the species, but with whom we might be sympathetic nonetheless for reasons I discuss in a moment.

To make that case, let me start with a claim that I think will be at once depressing and, upon reflection, uncontroversial. Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it. This is happening through at least three means. First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems, as the recent article on Yellowstone Park in The Times exemplifies. Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwise be intact. Third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways. There is no reason to think that those practices are going to diminish any time soon. Quite the opposite.

Humanity, then, is the source of devastation of the lives of conscious animals on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.”

Well, what’s hard to comprehend is that, 73 years after the Nuremberg trial of the Nazis, this sort of deep criminal trash, where human lives are equated to flies, is still wildly publicized!

 

Tags: Extinction Humanity, Moral Relativism, Nazism