Humans as “cockroaches”? One Way of Reading Scientific Naturalism

Humans as “cockroaches”? One Way of Reading Scientific Naturalism June 16, 2020

 

Gedenkstein in Braunau
The memorial stone in front of Adolf Hitler’s birthplace in Braun-am-Inn, Austria
(Wikimedia Commons public domain). It says nothing about the Führer. It doesn’t so much as mention his name. Instead, and wisely, the inscription reads: “For peace, freedom, and democracy. Never again fascism. Millions of dead admonish [us].”

There exists an obscure, mostly-ex-LDS-turned-atheist message board where my buffoonish and dishonest but angrily hateful depravity has been chronicled and lamented virtually every day — literally and without exaggeration, virtually every day — for the past fifteen years or so.

 

For no very good reason, I decided last Friday morning to visit the board and to count the Peterson-related threads on its first page.  (There is one permanent general thread always pinned at the top, and then 49 others complete the total of 50.)  At that time, perhaps about 8:30 AM, every single one of the first eight threads was about me, and fully nineteen of the 49 threads on the first page were either directly or indirectly about me or my horrific works or, in three cases, about someone very closely associated with me.  I find this inexpressibly weird.

 

One of the current themes is deliciously appalled horror at my fanatical eagerness to dehumanize those who disagree with me.  For example, with one or two others, I’ve recently addressed this blog’s resident dogmatic anti-theistic commentator as a “cockroach.”  This has driven several of those who monitor my actions here and elsewhere every day and who faithfully report over there to their smelling salts.

 

I’ve wondered for years about how much of the continual shock and astonishment over at that board results from genuine (hostility-fueled) incomprehension and how much of it is just flatly disingenuous posing.

 

Take the matter of cockroaches, for example:

 

Sic et Non‘s good-natured house atheist occasionally likes to refer to himself and other humans as “meat wads,” “advanced simians,” and the like, which seems (to a simple soul like me, anyway) fairly “reductionist.”  Once, specifically replying to my summation of the ideological baggage that too often accompanies some expositions of evolutionary thought — “that life is pointless, that there is no God, that the cosmos is ultimately mindless, that humans and other organisms are essentially gene-replicating machines, and so forth” — he happily chirped that “You might be surprised to discover that everything you mentioned in your litany of soulless existence is exactly right.”

 

I wasn’t surprised.

 

For a brief while, I playfully addressed our anti-theistic friend as “Meat Wad,” using the term that he himself had introduced as a description of all of humankind.  Predictably, the Peterson Obsession Board, as I sometimes call it, erupted in indignation at the mean-spirited epithet that I was cruelly hurling at the poor, harmless fellow.  They seemed unaware that the term was his.  But, since they scour every line that I post and everything that I write and say in an ever-hopeful search for outrageous offenses, it seems unlikely that they could have missed that.  And it seems improbable that they could have failed to notice that, in referring to him as a “meat wad,” I was only applying a descriptor to him that he had previously applied to everybody.

 

The same thing is now playing out with the term cockroach.

 

Yesterday, our village atheist announced in a comment here that “There’s nothing about humans that puts them in a different category than monkeys or cockroaches.”  He also pronounced humans no more than “a pile of sentient goo.”

 

So I and at least one other person responded by referring to him (along with his main fellow-traveler here) as “Cockroach.”

 

Outraged at that, one of the participants at the Peterson Obsession Board has pointed to an example of what my vicious hatred can lead to:

 

“In Rwanda, We Know All About Dehumanizing Language: Years of cultivated hatred led to death on a horrifying scale.”

 

But the term cockroach was introduced and applied to people by our resident atheist, not by me.  The reductionist dehumanizing is his, not mine.  I’m the person who is gently mocking and protesting it.

 

I’m quite aware of the impact that dehumanizing language can have on our behavior toward others.  There is, for example, the justification given by a certain William Reynolds of the murder of the ten-year-old Latter-day Saint boy Sardius Smith at Haun’s Mill, Missouri, on 30 October 1838: “Nits will make lice, and if he had lived he would have become a Mormon.”  And there is the time that one of my students in Jerusalem saw an Israeli soldier beating a little Palestinian boy with the butt of a rifle.  “How can you treat people like this?” my student asked.  “These aren’t people,” the soldier replied.  “These are animals.”

 

And then there’s Adolf Hitler, who was, pretty clearly, a “social Darwinist.”  The leader of the Third Reich described human beings as nothing more than “a ridiculous ‘cosmic bacterium’” (eine lächerliche ‘Weltraumbakterie’).  Not surprisingly, therefore, as his biographer Ian Kershaw observes,

 

Human life and suffering was . . . of no consequence to him.  He never visited a field-hospital, nor the homeless after bomb-raids.   He saw no massacres, went near no concentration camp, viewed no compound of starving prisoners-of-war.  His enemies were in his eyes like vermin to be stamped out.  But his profound contempt for human existence extended to his own people.  Decisions costing the lives of tens of thousands of his soldiers were made . . . without consideration for any human plight.  [Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000), 500-501.]

 

This is a distasteful but not entirely unreasonable consequence of viewing humans as “meat wads” on a par with monkeys, cockroaches, and “piles of sentient goo” — a view that is emphatically not mine.

 

 


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