The first essay of Issue 1 is one in praise of Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), an American poet whose works have seen something of a rediscovery over the past two decades, half a century after his death. According to the author of this essay, J. M. Greer, the reason for Jeffers’s fall into relative obscurity is due to the “troubling nature” of many of his poems. Indeed, this iconoclastic figure rejected modernism early on (around the time of WWI) and developed an aesthetic theory he called “inhumanism”:
‘It is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness. […] Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit, to the vast life and inexhaustible beauty beyond humanity. This is not a slight matter, but an essential condition of freedom, and of moral and vital sanity.’
In other terms, Jeffers rejected anthropocentrism, to adopt an “ecocentric” standpoint: “One in which nature takes centre stage, not as a receptacle for human activities, emotions, or narratives, but as itself, on its own inhuman terms.”
Decades before the environmental movement even took off, he was already prescient of the environmental crises that we have grown so terribly used to nowadays. Greer sees Jeffers’s inhumanism as an inevitable perspective for our species, if it is to survive much longer on the surface of this planet — meaning that the environmental movement itself will have to ditch the anthropocentrism that lies at its heart. Inhumanism might therefore “offer a glimpse at the foundations on which human thought will have to rebuild itself.” Indeed, as he points out, even the vision of our species as “a uniquely destructive ravager of nature,” is “just as anthropocentric as portraying it as the uniquely creative conqueror of nature.”
Greer’s article becomes less convincing when he argues that anthropocentrism is also at the heart of our failure to consider the problem of “Peak Oil” seriously enough (because as a “cultural narrative,” contrary to climate change for instance, it does not “celebrate human power” but “warn about human limits”). Not a particularly cogent argument — especially from today’s perspective, when enormous new oil reserves are still being found around the world and the overarching issue to think about is that of how to keep it all in the ground as much as possible (historically, the Peak Oil movement has more largely focused on the possible social implications of peaking oil production in the world). But after all, Greer has long been a prominent champion of the Peak Oil narrative, so perhaps it was inevitable for him to mount his hobbyhorse in this essay, too.
(I won’t even dwell on his otherworldly opinion that an industrial civilisation cannot possibly thrive on the “sparser and less concentrated energy flows the Earth receives from the Sun”… Perhaps it seemed unbelievable in 2010, but in 2016, China and India do expect to increasingly meet their gargantuan energy needs by means of this “sparse” energy, among other renewable sources. Civilisation as we know it will face natural limits to its growth, but it now seems unlikely that raw energy production will be the most stringent one.)
Greer’s attempt to strike at the heart of anthropocentrism is more worrying when he compares human-induced climate change, as it is happening currently, with shifts of global temperature that have taken place in other geological eras — apparently shrugging off the whole thing under the pretext that “the Earth’s long history is full of such events.” While there have undoubtedly been even greater temperature shifts in the geological past, long before the advent of industrial civilisation, statements like his completely obfuscate the issue of the moral responsibility of humanity, especially that of the fraction whose activities actually do cause climate change, vis-a-vis the millions of species that are going extinct due to climate-change-related transformations of their ecosystems — and regarding, of course, the billions of human beings who already suffer or will suffer from these phenomena. Coming to grips with this responsibility is fundamental. Does this necessarily entail adopting an “anthropocentric” approach? Isn’t humility, on the contrary, an attitude essential to the creation of new ways of life, that would help prevent or mitigate the devastation that climate change (and other forms of human destructivity) hold in store?
According to Greer, Jeffers’s most precious insights is that inhumanism can be the civilisational equivalent to a person’s coming to terms with the inevitability of his or her own death. We must realise that our species is bound to go extinct sooner or later, like any other, and therefore, we should get past self-blame as well as self-praise. “Humanity cannot and need not bear the burden of being the measure of all things”:
Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine
beauty of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that.
Amen to this.