Anthropocentrism

And even here these days I may some people still believe That Earth is at the center of God's own universe

And they won't leave their shell that is humankind They refuse to leave their shell that is humankind The myth, the myth is the crown of God's creation With the excuse to deplete the Earth till death The myth, the myth is the crown of God's creation The box, a prison, anthropocentric misconception

The title track of Anthropocentric there, released in November 2010, the companion volume to Heliocentric, which had been released earlier that year in April Anthropocentric featured three songs entitled The Grand Inquisitor Parts One to Three, inspired by Dostoevsky's novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

Two years later, The Ocean released an EP with those three tracks and a fourth and final part, Exclusion from Redemption.

[metal music] Are you ready to face your greatest mistake? The wall that seals humanity's fate.

So I need you to do that there.

Okay, now there's a word that's going to come on the screen that's called anthropocentric.

Anthropocentric.

Come on, can we say that together? After three.

One, two, three.

Anthropocentric.

Now this Greek word is really, really important.

Don't switch off because I didn't come for an industry lesson.

Yeah, that hierarchy is deeply embedded in the way we consume and evaluate almost all forms of human expression.

We operate under this philosophical framework of human exceptionalism.

Human exceptionalism.

Okay, let's unpack this.

Well, it's the idea that human agency, intellect and emotion are the sole sovereign drivers of art.

And if we're not careful, it could disappear before we really understand it at all.

There's a book that was recently reviewed in New Scientist called The Arrogant Ape that takes on the myth of human exceptionalism directly.

The argument, in broad strokes, is one that I think about a lot, that we have systematically underestimated the minds and the inner lives of other animals, particularly other primates, in ways that have been convenient for us and costly for them.

The review describes it as a book that takes an axe to the idea that human intelligence is categorically different in kind rather than different in degree from other primate intelligences And honestly, everything we've talked about today lands right in the middle of that argument.

Very good.

But you know, something else too that I think is really interesting is kind of going to the other end of the spectrum in terms of the implications of this work, and, and, and this is where I think you're, you're gonna have a lot of fun weighing in because this really does highlight human exceptionalism, right? You know, if you think about it, human beings are the only species that are capable of characterizing the world through this tool of science, and then using that insight to develop new technology.

And, you know, uh, you know, it's true that human beings began with primitive technology, but look at what we've done in 150,000 years.

We're to the point where we're, we're actually building protein motors, that we actually know that inside the cell there are protein motors, and that we're now trying to replicate that ourselves.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That again is human exceptionalism, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And being anti-bias, which I see in your article as well as something that's very resonant with a kind of a Christian worldview.

And then we might get on to what about human exceptionalism and is nothing sacred? And we can get into that with your article.

But before I ask you to kind of take us through it, is there an overlap in some of the concerns of your article? and the concerns of effective altruism in, I guess, consequentialism might be a kind of an overlapping area of concern.

And obviously, the effective part of effective altruism is about putting a number on things and being able to aggregate things, being able to weigh things and trade them off against one another.

But from an unabashedly human exceptionalist point of view, that we do so because we have God-given dominion over the world, that the world has wild potential, and that humans are a gift to the environment, are a gift to creation, which we often turn out to be the environment's worst nightmare, but we are meant to be.

stewarding creation towards a goal that it could not achieve by itself.

What do you make of human exceptionalism, for instance? Is that just a slogan that Christians bandy about that doesn't really survive much scrutiny? How do you feel about when Christians talk about human exceptionalism?

So, I mean, certainly there's a lot that's exceptional about humans.