‘Playing animal’ reflects back our yearnings and repulsions | Aeon Essays
we need a worldview that acknowledges that humans, for the foreseeable future, will always be the powerful party, deciding what needs to be done. We need a narrative that brings together two seemingly contradictory facts. The first is that we are part of the animal kingdom: our evolutionary ancestors were nonhumans; we care about other animals; we ... See more
Human dominance is a fact, not a debate | Aeon Essays
Kojo added
Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth — our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves o ff from these other voices, to continue by ... See more
Claudia Chwalisz • Governing with the more-than-human world
Thomas added
What's an animal? It's a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists. What's a human? It's a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists—but a more stilted, stammering conversation than that of most wild animals. The conversations can become stories and acquire the shape and ta
... See moreSarah Malley added
Humans are part of the animal kingdom, and we have also come to dominate that kingdom. Denying either reality will prevent us from ever taking full responsibility to care for it.
Human dominance is a fact, not a debate | Aeon Essays
Kojo added
Human beings are a part of the animal kingdom, not apart from it. The separation of ‘us’ from ‘them’ creates a false picture and is responsible for much suffering.It is part of the in-group/out-group mentality that leads to human oppression of the weak by the strong as in ethnic, religious, political, and social conflicts. Let us open our hearts to... See more
Human dominance is a fact, not a debate | Aeon Essays
Kojo added
“We’re all remarkably adept,” Bogost noted, “at ascribing human intention to nonhuman things.” We do it all the time. Consider the related tendency to see human faces in non-human things, a specific subset of the phenomenon known as pareidolia, which is the tendency to assign meaning to seemingly random patterns.
there are two simple but powerful hu... See more
there are two simple but powerful hu... See more
L. M. Sacasas • LaMDA, Lemoine, and the Allures of Digital Re-enchantment
It is a beautiful illustration of the kind of decentring of ourselves and of human experience at which we must become adept in order to live better and more responsibly in a more-than-human world. This decentring, an admission that the human race is not the only game in town, does not correspond to any reduction of our world.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
We have always been capable of speaking to, and with, animals. Our goal should not be to master their languages, but rather to better understand animals’ lives in context, and thereby to alter our relationships with them in ways which are mutually beneficial.