The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (The CBC Massey Lectures)

by Astra Taylor

Only an insecure creature, or perhaps an insecure culture, would need to puff itself up with such a pompous self-image, an act of defensive narcissism taken to a society-wide extreme. A secure creature, I like to imagine, could celebrate its own unique abilities while also respecting other forms of intelligence and perception; a secure creature could marvel at its own amazing thumbs without denigrating the paws, hooves, claws, webbed feet, and fins that other beings possess. If that were the case, we would perhaps also be more inclined to recognize the ways our grasping hands have gotten us in trouble. The idea of human supremacy has lent credence to the idea that nature is a storehouse for our kind to own and exploit, an attitude my sister, the disability studies scholar Sunaura Taylor, calls “suicidal anthropocentrism.”