Wrong to Sit Upon a Chair

Evolutionary, Because Its Stupid

Over one hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton saw plainly the connection between humanitarianism and human-hating Greenism (although Greenism did not exist formally as a cause back then).  He wrote:

We constantly hear a particularly cosmic creed from the modern humanitarians; I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity. . . . I am here only following the outlines of their argument, which consists in maintaining that man has been progressively more lenient, first to citizens, then to slaves, then to animals, and then (presumably) to plants.

I think it is wrong to sit on a man.  Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse.  Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair.  That is the drive of the argument.  And for this argument it can be said that it is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or inevitable progress.  A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer things might--one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency, like that of a species to produce fewer and fewer children.  This drift may be really evolutionary, because it is stupid.  [G. K. Chesterton, "The Eternal Revolution,"  Collected Works, Volume I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 316.]

And so it has come to be that the modern Greenist is profoundly anti-human and pro-crustacean.
  All human exploitation of the environment for the good of humanity must be stopped at once for the sake of the snail darter.  A prolonged drought in California must be forborne and endured even to the creation of a massive dustbowl where once the nation's fruit bowl could be found, lest the humble smelt be sat upon.

Here in New Zealand, five species of whitebait are at risk of being made extinct in New Zealand rivers and waterways.  It is a delicacy.  But clever entrepreneurs and farmers have worked out a way to commercialise the production of the fish.  They are growing it in tanks and selling it.  They are also re-introducing the increasingly rare fish to the waterways.  One of the best ways to preserve increasingly rare creatures is to farm them commercially.  Greenists are aghast.

The more Nature is regarded as our mother, the more humans make themselves step-children.

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother.  Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as mother, you discover that she is a step-mother.

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.  We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. . . . Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.  [Ibid., p. 317.]

There is a relentless logic in Unbelief.  It is a degenerative logic.  The more Nature or matter is deified, the more we rush to abuse and degrade and enslave humanity.  "Humanitarianism" becomes a curse to us all.  In its name we would extirpate our children and the aged amongst us.  In its name we would rather degrade all humanity to impoverishment than see it well-nourished, well-fed, and well-housed.  In its name we would curse humanity for its cruel overpopulation of the world, leading to the oppression of Nature, our mother.

One never ceases to wonder at the brutish stupidity of our Age of Unbelief.