Godtricks

Reading the post-humanist theorist Donna Haraway's When Species Meet, where she refers to refusing the temptation to play godtricks - I like this reduction of so many of our grand intellectual structures - the structures that justify human exceptionalism  - to various kinds of "godtricks." They are numerous enough - the most famous of them being the Christian/Cartesian cut between mind and matter that helped to lay the groundwork for science, technology, and general modernity.  Another is D.H. Lawrence's entertainment complex, a godtrick that, like most of them, is useful in the short-run and lethal in the long-run. Another, more prosaic, would be Western conceptions of property, by which we become the lord-gods of whatever bits of matter, even living matter, we can stake our claim to, generally by the exchange of bits of paper between our human selves,  irrespective of the prior independent existence of that piece of land or animal or lumber or metal.  It is ours, we are its god, and we have the legislation to prove that we can do whatever we will with it.  And of course there is that belief, that trick we have, of thinking that all of this, this world, is here for the one single purpose of providing us human with a living, that we are owed it, that we have a human right to food, shelter, gasoline and wi-fi.