One of the areas we examined in our report about the Auburn Dam www.arpps.org was the fervent opposition to technological solutions to human problems from the fundamentalist environmentalist movement which appeared to be based on a somewhat malevolent view of human civilization, particularly its continued progress and growth.
This article also touches on that in its reflections on the threats facing humanism.
An excerpt.
Wednesday 1 November 2006
Putting the human back into humanism
The real threat to humanism today does not come from religious cranks and creationists, but from an army of secular misanthropes.
Frank Furedi
Too often we hear people warn that the human race is ‘running out of time’. We hear alarmist predictions about catastrophes lurking around the corner, alongside denunciations of human arrogance.
Apparently, the very fact that the human species has been so successful in surviving in difficult circumstances, and has managed to continue growing, is proof of our arrogance. So instead of celebrating the arrival of the 300millionth American last month, many commentators complained about the danger of ‘overpopulation’. Charles Westoff of Princeton University’s Office of Population Research summed up this mean-spirited attitude when he stated: ‘The world does not need more people.’
Sections of the environmentalist movement are motivated by the aim and desire to reduce human life on Earth. Inevitably, such sentiments tend to be accompanied by a profound hatred for the legacy of humanism. Some ecologists, like New Age author Charlene Spretnak, regard humanism as the principal enemy of ecological politics (1). For others, a desirable ‘ethics of responsibility’ must include a rejection of what they refer to as the ‘overhumanisation of the world’ (2). The reputation of humanism, both in its Renaissance and Enlightenment forms, is also under attack in the social science and humanities faculties in universities around the world.
