LIVING BEINGS AS CENTER
The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit towards animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit. – Ashley Montagu
According to another meaning of biocentrism living beings are the center of our planet. Since ancient times, and in practically all religious frameworks, human beings have occupied a centrality in Creation that is believed to have been bestowed upon them by the Creator. Whether this is actually so or not, this has been the conviction of most people, not only because it is psychologically comforting, but also because it seems to conform to our common sense experiences. As the earth was pictured to be the center of the universe, Man was imagined to be the center of all life-forms. This idea is described as anthropocentrism.
William Cowper wrote in Alexander Selkirk:
I am monarch of all I survey;
My right there is none to dispute;
From the center all round to the sea
I am lord of the fowl and the brute.
Over the ages a number of thoughtful people have tried to transform this perception which is regarded as one of pride, arrogance and short sight. The removal of Man from the center of all life forms is prompted by at least two considerations.
First is the idea that the position of privilege – to the extent that it may have some evolutionary origin – imposes on humans a burden of moral responsibility. Just as we believe that God is merciful and generous towards us, we in turn need to be likewise towards creatures we regard as lesser animals. We have an even greater obligation in this regard, given that the animal kingdom has served us well over the ages: as beasts or burden, as sources of food, for conveyance, for plowing the fields, and more. We know too that countless plants and tress, grains and fruits – all biological entities – have been feeding and sustaining us since time immemorial. Thus, our presumed centrality is based on a superficial feeling of power: In fact, we are, always have been, ever so dependent on the animal world for our existence. So, from a reality-perspective, the center of the living planet is not anthropos (man), but bios (life). This is one recognition that leads to the idea of biocentrism.
There is another incentive for biocentrism: the ethical. We are not mechanical robots that only eat and drink and propagate. We are reflecting beings with ethical systems that transcend our dire physical needs. We have notions of right and wrong, good and evil. Refined ethical attributes also include kindness and compassion.
Kindness and compassion are impulses that shift the center of interest from oneself to the other. They expand our concerns from personal wellbeing to that of another: this may extend to family, community, nation, and to humanity at large. At a still higher level it would include all creatures great and small. One of the finest examples of this may be found in the Jaina ethical frame-work which calls for caring and respecting each and every life form, to an excess, some would say. As Albert Einstein put it, “Our task must be to free ourselves… by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
Recall the words of St. Francis of Assisi:”If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will also have men who will do likewise with fellow men.”
Albert Schweitzer expressed a biocentric view when he wrote, “A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.”
The urge for biocentrism in the modern world arose from our awakening to ecology: the recognition that all life forms are inter-connected in a complex web whose overall health and existence depend on the relevant role that each species plays in the balance of nature. Many important ideas, values and movements have arisen from this biocentric view. They include calls for animal-rights, the notion of endangered species, protection of prairies, and moves to arrest deforestation.
All ideas, good and bad, have originated in the minds of individuals and propagated through effective preaching and persuasive books. In the case of biocentrism in the modern world one may refer to many thinkers. In particular, the writings of Peter Singer and Paul Taylor made the tenet of biocentrism relevant and powerful in the modern world.
Like all perspectives, biocentrism has also been expanded, exploited, and sometimes exaggerated. But the central core of biocentrism is to build an awareness of our our existence in an enlightened framework of human life, not as a fleeting favor for selfish ends, but as yet another flower in the bouquet of terrestrial animation that is special, not in any intrinsic greatness it has, but in the responsibility that is imposed on it by virtue of its strengths arising from biological as well as cultural evolution. In other words, the biocentric view does not deny the uniqueness of Homo sapiens in some ways, but grants such uniqueness to other species as well in their own special ways.
As with all –isms there have been dissenters to biocentrism too. Some have argued that Man is indeed special and superior to monkeys and mountain lions, that he has every right to dominate over them for Nature has endowed him with the skills and capacities to do so, and that if he had granted equal rights to rabbits and reindeer he could not have built townships and cities; that we need to experiment with cats and dogs to find cure for diseases, that we have to exterminate some microbes and viruses to protect our species, no matter what Jains believe in. Some have gone so far as to say that if man were to become extinct by his self-serving dominance, so be it because the emergence and extinction of life on earth is all part of the evolutionary game in which we are all but pawns.
Any perspective can be taken to absurd extremes. The goal of biocentrism is not to ignore or curtail human wants, but to set limits to them when they callously impinge on the needs and survival of other earthlings, and to civilize our basest cravings for excitement and hurtful pleasure, such as in fox-hunting, cock fighting and the triumphal march of the toreador.
More importantly, the biocentric vision reminds us that at the level of human communities, nationalistic pride, convictions of superiority of one’s own race, religion, or culture are shallow when we belittle others, and can become dangerous with the illusion that this world was made for just you and me.
As Michael J. Vandeman wrote: “With our population increasing rapidly, it is more important than ever to give wildlife what they want, which is also, therefore, what they need: freedom from the pressure, irritation, infection with diseases, and outright danger of the presence of humans.”
Spurts of Thought 