A Humanist point of view centers human exceptionalism. In Timothy Morton’s Humankind, he talks about how humans decided that animals need to be correlated in order to be made real. 1 The human is the correlator, and is the one who makes the animal real. Within correlation, the animal exists only in relation to the human. Obviously, non-human animals would exist and thrive in the absence of humanity, but the act of correlation brings up the issue of point of view. This imposed need for correlation stems from how at some point, humans became separated from the “natural” world.  This “severing is a foundational, traumatic fissure between… reality (the human -correlated world) and the real (ecological symbiosis of human and non-human parts of the biosphere). Since non-humans compose our very bodies, it's likely that the severing has produced physical as well as psychic effects, scars that rip between reality and the real.” 2 This severing is in part why humans consider themselves distinct from their environment and all other beings within it.

 

Eurocentric, colonialist humanity manufactured the severing to elevate one group of people over the rest, with those most discriminated against labeled as “subhuman” at the bottom of the hierarchy. Within an oppositional and exclusionary system, a rigid binary understanding of “us” versus “them” dictates an uneven relationship. This fabricated and perpetuated “reality” eclipses the “real” of the actual human relationship to their environment.