Tag: radical compassion

• Radical compassion in Patricia MacCormack’s “The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene”

  “In order to dismantle the dominance of the human, I have sought to no longer argue like a human, with other humans.”¹

  

  Radical compassion, in Patricia MacCormack’s The Ahuman Manifesto is a practice for dismantling human dominance –it is grounded in the rejection of human exceptionalism and species hierarchy, and the recognition of humanity’s complicity in the destruction of life and ecosystems. MacCormack calls for a critical reexamination of the systemic and individual ways in which human agents prioritize their own interests over the wellbeing of nonhuman lives and ecosystems. Practicing radical compassion requires confronting the inhuman, and the unsettling narcissism of Anthropos.

  MacCormack advocates for transformative actions grounded in the practice of radical compassion as active care. Central aspects of this practice are rejecting human exceptionalism, adopting abolitionist veganism, embracing antinatalism, and co-creating non-anthropocentric ways of relating to and understanding the world. An important focus of MacCormack’s text is the necessity of rethinking and redefining fundamental human categories and concepts such as life, death, birth, joy, and pain.

  At the outset, MacCormack states that she has no interest in offering a rational, academic analysis of how the cultures and practices of anthropos fuels ecocidal tendencies, rather she desires to “make manifest an alternate way of writing, reading and ‘doing’ ahuman work.”² Thus, the suggestions presented in this work are radical and provocative, as they aim to challenge cemented beliefs about human exceptionalism and species hierarchy, and inspire ethical, ecological, and existential shifts.

  This manifesto may seem to hate humans. It does not. It simply seeks different trajectories to the more typical political, academic human versus human arguments. It is a manifesto of doing something right now, individually, collectively, artistically. It is a manifesto of joy. But the joy is for all life, not only ours. It is a manifesto that repudiates hierarchy, that refuses that some human rights should be privileged over others, and that human rights should be privileged over nonhuman.³

  1. Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, ix. ↩︎
  2. Ibid. ↩︎
  3. Ibid., x. ↩︎

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  tags: human dominance, patricia maccormack, radical compassion, species hierarchy, the ahuman manifesto

  

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