Toward a Sociology of Human Supremacism


Nicholas Scott, Simon Fraser University

How did so many humans come to think that their species was better than all the rest? Why do Canadians obsess about artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, yet ignore the astounding intelligences of other animals, plants and fungi? What social and moral implications arise from our species causing a mass extinction? If human, humanism and humanity fail as inclusive conveyors of moral worth, unjustly denied to many marginalized humans and detrimental to even more other-than-human beings, what alternatives can re-animate and re-frame moral worthiness? Can the supremacist’s tools––citizenship, denizenship, sovereignty and territory––be used to disassemble the supremacist’s house? Can sociologists really challenge hate and sustain “shared” futures without problematizing the interlocking and intersecting practices, institutions and infrastructures of violence and denigration weighing down both human and other-than-human persons in mutually reinforcing, if differential ways? What can sociologists learn from trees, fungi, wheat, crows, dogs, orcas, cats, bees and multispecies communities about challenging fascism and cultivating liberal democracy? With cutting edge western science and multiplicitous Indigenous knowledges both presenting powerful evidence of complex intelligence, consciousness, personhood, subjectivity, linguistic prowess and ethics in other species (and not just animals) on a daily basis, why do so many sociologists still hoard and hold onto society, social practices, social processes, sociality and, of course, “the social” as something sole-authored by, and for, humans? What exciting and weird moral possibilities and ecological–political powers await a sociology (and a “Canada”) that dares to remove its crusty, anthropocentric blinders? These and many other questions are explored in a sociology seminar I am teaching in winter 2024 called “The Death and Life of Human Supremacism” at Simon Fraser University. I’m using the course as a way to start my new research program on human supremacism, which grew quite organically out of my erstwhile research on everyday cycling, nature, and the common good. This paper, after a brief theorization of human supremacism, will focus on results of the seminar, aiming to foreground the lived experiences of the seminar’s participants through a form of collective autoethnography. The seminar is unique, I think, by employing speculative methods to imagine possible futures and anticipatory pre/histories of human supremacism as a way to creep up on, and defamiliarize, the sheer taken- for-grantedness of human supremacism in our present day politics and society.

This paper will be presented at the following session: