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Life without Limits: The Delusions of Technological Fundamentalism
Jensen, Robert
http://dissidentvoice.org/2018/01/life-without-limits-the-delusions-of-technological-fundamentalism/Date Written: 2018-01-03 Publisher: Dissident Voice Year Published: 2018 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX21907 In a routinely delusional world, what is the most dangerous delusion? This delusion is not limited to one country, one group, or one political party, but rather is the unstated assumption of everyday life in the high-energy/high-technology industrial world. This is the delusion that we are -- to borrow from the title of a particularly delusional recent book -- the god species. Abstract: - Excerpt: This ideology of human supremacy leads us to believe that our species' cleverness allows us to ignore the limits placed on all life forms by the larger living world, of which we are but one component. What we once quaintly called "environmentalism" -- which too often focused on technical solutions to discrete problems rather than challenging human arrogance and the quest for endless affluence -- is no longer adequate to deal with the multiple, cascading ecological crises that define our era: climate destabilization, species extinction, soil erosion, groundwater depletion, toxic waste accumulation, and on and on. Playing god got us into this trouble, and more of the same won't get us out. This inability to accept the limits that come with being part of "nature" – a strange term when used to contrast with "human," as if humans were somehow not part of the natural world – was on my mind as I read two new books about controversial topics that typically are thought of as social, not ecological, issues: Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body, edited by Heather Brunskell-Evans and Michele Moore, and Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation, by Renate Klein. Subject Headings |