Why We Still Struggle to See Ourselves as Animals?

Champions of exceptionalism say humans hold a unique moral status. Yet there’s only one species recklessly destroying the planet it needs to survive.

At first light in Massachusetts bay, a North Atlantic right whale threads the shallows with her calf tucked into her slipstream. She surfaces, and the V-shaped breath – two brief feathers of vapor – vanishes in the cold air.

The calf is roughly three months old, about the length of a small truck, still learning the rhythm: rise, breathe, tuck back into mother’s wake. They are doing what every mammal mother and baby do: moving toward food and a safer place.

Across the same water, a different logic hums. Tankers and container ships steer by timetables set by a faceless executive an ocean away. Boston’s approach lanes have been shifted once to reduce whale collisions, but the traffic still keeps human time: fixed routes, double-digit knots, arrivals measured in profit and delay.

Seasonal speed limits exist, yet large vessels routinely ignore them as commerce sets the pace to satisfy us as we collectively demand fast shipping. We should have what we want when we want it, shouldn’t we?

Many of us say we love whales, but for this endangered species, already down to only a few hundred individuals, this yielding to human desires can mean vanishing entirely.

Every threat they face – speed, noise, nets – traces back to the same root assumption: that our needs matter more than theirs.

This belief has a name: human exceptionalism. It is the conviction that humans are not just different from other life, but morally superior to it – and therefore entitled to first claim on space, speed, resources and survival.

This belief underwrites what we eat and how we raise it; the habitats we clear for housing, highways and Dollar Generals; the way we extract, ship and burn; the emissions we send into the atmosphere, warming oceans and melting glaciers. Exceptionalism is so embedded in daily life that we barely feel it operating. It is a system constantly humming in the background – efficient, invisible yet devastatingly consequential.

It is a sobering thought, for we could use our powerful brains to choose otherwise.

Many cultures have modeled another stance. For the Māori of Aotearoa (New Zealand), people are kin with rivers, mountains and forests through whakapapa (genealogy). The saying “Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au” – “I am the river and the river is me” – captures that reciprocity.

In Lakota philosophy, Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ – “all are related” – frames animals, plants, waters and winds as relatives rather than resources.

In the Kumulipo, the 2,100-line Hawaiian creation chant, life emerges from Pō – the deep darkness – and the humble coral polyp is honored as an ancient ancestor, anchoring a spiritual genealogy that binds people to the natural world.

Westerners could admit at any point that we have misread our place in the cosmos and shift toward this older, still living worldview: humans not as commanders of the natural world but as kin, interconnected equals among other beings and systems.

This suggestion might sound sentimental and naive in a political moment when even extending compassion to other humans meets resistance. Refugees are being turned away at ports of entry – grim proof of how easily our empathy falters. But new ideas are hard precisely because they threaten the story that keeps our lives coherent. It is natural for our minds to leap to defend old ways before testing new ones.

Psychologist Erik Erikson, writing in the shadow of the world wars, described our human tendency towards pseudospeciation – the desire to split the world into “us” and “not us” – in order to justify mistreatment. Pseudospeciation grants us the psychological distance to degrade other beings we deem inferior without troubling our conscience. That psychological distance becomes a powerful permission slip.

But humans are capable of self-reflection and growth, and I believe this point in the Earth’s history requires us to use those abilities and begin to question the ways we center human experience. In fact, our very ability to use the best of our social human traits – and advanced scientific knowledge – could alter the course of life on Earth.

- Author: Megan Mayhew Bergman, The Guardian

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