The Hubris of Man   

Expounding Thoughts of Centrality 

J. A. McCreery

“Man in his arrogance thinks of himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity. [Yet it is] more humble and, I believe, true to consider him created from animals.”

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

In the field of social psychology, illusory superiority is a condition of cognitive bias whereby a person overestimates their own worth and ability in relation to the shared qualities between them and others. Apply this to man and his competitors; smarter, more adaptable, more resourceful, more imaginative, more cooperative, more calculated. Under this guise of superiority it is difficult to imagine humanity not having a higher calling, a higher imposition which gives the power and right to attain the global dominance enjoyed. Yet was the lion in the jungle a descendant of God until the day man took his Kingdom? 

Humanity has a long history of assuming centrality, for thousands of years Earth was thought of as the centrepiece of the universe, all else literally and metaphorically revolving around it – the control of said centrepiece thus lending importance, ascendancy. Geocentricity is a natural conclusion, it plays heavily on our inevitably individualised experience; a newborn infant must learn through experimentation, sensation and ultimately thought, that he is a part of the world, not the entirety. It was not until 1543 when the ‘radical’ work of Nicolaus Copernicus detailed Earth’s subsidiary role, one of many, often much larger planets, revolving around the Sun. This theory, regardless of the sound scientific backing, took more than a century to become widely accepted – it’s hard to let go of one’s importance. 

Cosmologically speaking again, the Homo sapiens civilisations are smaller than a pin dropped amongst the Pacific Ocean, this perspective we have received as a result of our intelligence is startling. When we gaze up at skyscrapers and the Giza pyramids, their height is humbling yet they themselves are dwarfed by the Earth which, in turn, is nothing more than a molecule in the incomprehensibly vast (ever expanding) cosmic sphere. It is much safer, warmer, to simply believe one’s self and their planet is the centre of the Universe, God (or another) building a world, a brilliant creation, to simply serve and please the self. 

This thought is often coined the anthropic principle and it holds that if the phenomena of the Universe differed at all – the gravitational constant, the exact electric charge of a proton, the mass of electrons or neutrons – life would cease to exist, and as such it all must have been fine tuned for humanities continuance, nothing so inconceivable could occur by chance. Who is to say whether such conditions weren’t simply engineered, or otherwise, to give rise to the mice in our floorboards or another Alien species entirely? It is just as conceivable to think that the universe exists for another, and the appearance and proliferation of Homo sapiens was an unanticipated side effect, a ‘collateral benefit’ (D. Barash – Ph. D.).

But what is our fate if this is the case? Are we meaningless? Just strange hyper-immense, neuroplastic arrogant blobs stuck in a web of chemical reactions and chance events which drive us onwards, onwards to nothing. The speculation of arrogance is difficult to pin down, the ambiguity of philosophy overwhelming, it is a task in and of itself to simply define the morality from which we judge – however those who hold dearly to their divine right, a so-called superiority, must be ready to face the calming hand of science, the science which “is a willingness to accept facts even if they are opposed to wishes” – Emanuel Maldenberg.