Chamber005
Carbonite Member
Good point.
In the end, though, man en masse is never going to really change as it regards speciesism. Every single body of ancient text, everything we've ever learned or understood about what it means to be human, everything that defines us and our position at the "top" of the food chain has helped to make us what we've become -- a wholly self-interested society (with perhaps a minority of bacteria that views mankind as not the most important thing on the planet).
No matter how much we evolve, no matter how many laws we rewrite, on a genetic level, depsite our capacity for critical thinking, we will be until our extinction a species that defines itself by its achievements -- achievements rated and funded on their ability to assist ourselves. And although there will be times when our own preservation coincides with the preservation of other species (both plant and animal), historically mankind's developments and achievements have done nothing but to improve mankind while destroying pretty much everything that isn't the almighty us.
That's why we won't survive, because we aren't a people of exploration (as our third grade teachers would have had us believe), we're a people of greed and ownership, pillage and plunder. For all of our brilliance we don't have the genetic moral capacity to care what happens to a bee or a coral or a tree or anything else that actually sustains our ability to breathe and live and thrive. We're more concerned about the ongoings of Brad Pitt and Britney Spears or our mother's tumor or our child's psychosis, so self-interested and content in the human experience that we fail to see that the entire experience in every facet will be gone in a universal blink of an eye because we simply can't get over ourselves.
Hopefully, though, 20 million years from now there will be a new humanoid species that doesn't care about and fear death as much as ours does, that views itself as an aspect of a greater thing rather than the thing itself, a species that doesn't design itself around the concept of self-importance, a species that might co-exist with one or two or seventeen other equally advanced species so that one cannot view itself as any more or less important than the other species it interacts with, regardless of their intelligence level, so that the cat and the dog and the humming bird, while "less advanced" than a homo-sapien doesn't mean it has less rights.
But let's face it, if animals had the same rights as people our human society would collapse. If I run over a young squirrel I should face the same penalities as if I ran over someone's three year old niece? Not likely. And that is why, eventually, our human society *will* collapse, because it is not sustainable for one species to be master over an entire planet -- because that one species is not self-sustainable. We *must* have trees, we *must* have animals, we *must* have all that the oceans provide, but we *cannot* give these things the same importance and so we are destined to go extinct so that another race can achieve prominence.
The human experiment failed, and some of the comments here have pretty much been posters for that failure. On an ecological scale, humans matter the least and at the same time do the most damage. It's all fine and good that we can play music and draw pretty pictures, but in the end the only thing we're really giving back for all our drama is a bit of fertilizer. Compared to your average oak tree or spider, we're an eye sore, a bit of itchy genital wart on the big blue.
But hey, eventually my cat's ancestors will rule the world, so they'll have the last laugh. Or, ya know, *meow*.
