Much contemporary advocacy is obsessed with deconstructing human exceptionalism.
Animal rights — which is distinct from animal welfare — is an ideology that claims people and animals are equal because both feel pain. The nature-rights movement goes to an even greater extreme, advocating that quasi-personhood and enforceable rights be granted even to nonliving entities such as rivers. Some even embrace the irrational idea that the earth is a living being and should be so treated to prevent the planet’s supposed looming destruction at our hands.
Lately, as scientists unlock the complexity of plant biology, we are witnessing equivalent advocacy with regard to plants. The latest example of such radical anthropomorphizing comes to us in a long article just published in Aeon that discusses “plant philosophy.”
This term, of course, doesn’t mean that plants can philosophize — only humans are so capable, demonstrating our exceptionalism — but that we should elevate the moral status of flora based on their complexity and capacities to adapt to changes in their environments. There’s a problem with accomplishing that. If one seeks to claim, essentially, that plants are “persons” too — as a column published some years ago in the New York Times did or that plants have individual “dignity,” a concept embedded in the Swiss Constitution — then, the plain meaning of words and terms are going to have to be remade to fit the agenda.
Take intelligence. According to Merriam-Webster, “intelligence” is defined, in relevant part, as:
- The ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations, also: the skilled use of reason
- The ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests)
- The act of understanding
Plants don’t do any of that. So, plant philosophy seeks to change the definitional understandings of “intelligence.” From “Seeing Plants Anew” by philosophy professor Stella Sandford:
The redefinition of some terms more usually associated with philosophy than with the sciences — terms like ‘intentionality’, ‘action’ and ‘purpose’ — is already underway in the interpretations of plant behaviour according to the new paradigm. The idea of plant intelligence is central to this . . .
It is perfectly possible to provide definitions of intelligence that apply to plant behaviour, and we already apply the word to nonliving things. If intelligence for biological individuals is defined as ‘adaptively variable behaviour within the lifetime of the individual’, distinguished from genetically determined, developmental processes, then it makes sense to describe plant behaviour as intelligent. . . . Examples of this adaptively variable behaviour in plants include directional root growth towards water sources, phototropism (the orientation of a plant towards light) and the release of volatile chemicals as a response to herbivore attack.
Toward what end? To elevate the moral status of plants:
The advocates of the new paradigm for the understanding of plants are not just proposing a new research programme but attempting to build a new picture of plant life with a set of concepts drawn from philosophy and other disciplines. I call this the ‘plant advocacy literature’ because, in addition to its scientific underpinnings, it advocates for and on behalf of plants. Its aim is not just to advance plant science but to make us think differently about plants, to value plant life and accord it more respect.
What “more respect” for plants would mean isn’t described, with the author claiming that “the questions are wide open.” But it seems to me that plant philosophy’s goal — like the animal- and nature-rights movements — is to knock humans off the pedestal of exceptionalism so that we perceive ourselves merely as another aspect of the natural world, nothing more.
Why do that? To destroy the philosophical basis of Western civilization. Think I’m overreacting? From the article:
For it is not just that philosophy is interested in plants; we discover that plant life, or the specificity of plant being, challenges some of the cherished assumptions that have dominated the Western tradition for centuries, if not millennia. Plant philosophy is about more than plants. It is also about how the peculiarities of plant life challenge us to think about our own being in new ways . . .
In his book Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), the philosopher Michael Marder goes so far as to say that plants ‘explode’ Western metaphysics simply by existing: ‘in its very being the plant accomplishes a lived destruction of [Western] metaphysics.’
Some may roll their eyes and chuckle. But that is a mistake. The values of the West are under a multifront attack — particularly among elites. Redefining concepts such as “personhood” and “rights” beyond the human realm is part of that agenda to corrode our philosophical embrace of the unique dignity of man by reducing our perceived moral status to that of flora and fauna. The real-world consequences that would result are horrific to contemplate.