When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent, but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.
― Bell Hooks, from The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
Domination culture is grossly misaligned with our responsibility to protect the earth and all of its inhabitants. Humans are just beginning to emerge from a long history of dominator culture in which groups of humans are pitted against one another and humans are pitted against nature.
Despite its substantial cost in human lives, pervasive misery, animal suffering, and environmental degradation, going through the “dominator” phase of culture may have been an unavoidable step in human development. Its continuation today, however, is both unnecessary and perilous.
Today, the potential for an exchange of nuclear weapons, the release of a deadly highly contagious bio-engineered virus, or some other massively destructive and deadly consequence of human conflict looms over humankind as never before.
For humankind to survive this most dangerous period we need to create a new non-dominator culture that ceases rationalizing inequality and elevating some above others. To get beyond our unstable winners verses loser’s world, rejecting blame and judgmental thinking, a key aspect of Naturalistic Humanism, could make a significant difference.
With regard to our relationship with animals, the harm we do has severe consequences, not just for the animals but for humankind as well. As long as we remain indifferent to the suffering of our fellow living creatures we cannot become the type of people that will treat each other with the love and kindness necessary to stabilize our world and avoid a catastrophic outcome.
In the past we might have justified our abusive relationship with animals assuming that that they did not have conscious experiences and/or were incapable of experiencing pain. Today, a majority of scientists know this to be false.[1]
[1] In 2012, a group of neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, asserting that “The weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”↩