Post-Speciesism: We are all in the mush pot

Hurray, a look at systems thinking! So we as humans have finally spentenough time breaking down ideas, objects, and life forms into compartmentswith labels and drawers, trying to master the natural world. Its finallytime to destroy the compartments and build everything back up into a wholesystem, complex, difficult to command, unpredictable, and deserving of ourunyielding respect. The world doesn’t revolve around you, me or us, none ofus are the winners or losers. We are all swimming around in the mush pot,with our dependencies, equilibriums, predators, cooperations and so forth.

The return to the system is apparent in all of the readings. In Lingis’s TheReligion of Animals, we look to the entire animal kingdom to find theattractions and repulsions within human response to other humans. InBestiality, a search to find more parallels in human and animal emotionalresponse. As if we need to be reminded that we are animals too, our bodiesmust survive the earth’s gauntlet every single minute of the day. We arevulnerable. Donna Haraway’s article goes further to look at our position as“partial connections” and the great amount of interspecies mingling thatoccurs without our conscious knowledge. And It all comes full circle (as itoften does when looking at systems thinking) with John Dewey’s The LiveCreature. Even in 1934 he stresses a need to de-compartmentalize, to lookinto oneself before projecting outward, in creating more questions thananswers.

Like Lingis says, the Brazil nut is a hard one to crack and so is systemsthinking. We have to retrain ourselves to undo how we have been conditionedto think since entering the world. It is especially hard because we don’tlike uncertainty, unfinished stories, loose ends. Well TOO BAD. I agreewith the authors. Humans are not superior to the entire earth (universe)system; there is no value judgement to be made because we can’t even graspwhat we are, where we live or who we live with.