Category: Misanthropy

Remembering Lenny Skutnick

Last night's  mid-air collision over the Potomac reminded me of January 1982 and the heroism of Lenny Skutnick:

On a bitterly cold and snowy day in January 1982, Air Florida flight 90 took off from Washington D.C. heading to Tampa, Florida.

Immediately after takeoff the plane began experiencing problems from the ice that had formed on its wings. It plummeted, skipping off Washington’s 14th Street bridge and crashing into the icy waters of the Potomac River.

The ensuing rescue effort was broadcast on local television. Frigid temperatures and bad weather hampered the first responders. With time running out to save the crash victims, a bystander named Lenny Skutnik suddenly jumped in and saved flight attendant Priscilla Trijado, who had twice fallen back into the water after slipping away from rescue lines.

A speechwriter for Ronald Reagan named Aram Bakshian was watching the coverage. He immediately thought Skutnik’s story would resonate with the American people and decided to include it in his draft of Reagan’s upcoming State of the Union address.

Here is Reagan's SOTU tribute to Skutnick.

The low level of humanity tempts some of us to misanthropy. But there is no denying that heroes walk among us. Daniel Penny is another. And there is no denying that the White House from time to time is graced with a truly worthy occupant. Reagan, and now Trump.

The Paradox of the Misanthropic Naturalist Animal Lover

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, man and man alone among living things has a higher origin and a higher destiny. Made in the image and likeness of God, and the only creature so made, he comes from God and is called to return to God for his ultimate felicity and fulfillment. He is, to be sure, an animal, but one called to theosis and thus an animal qualitatively different from every other type of animal. 

In that now languishing tradition, man had a calling, a vocation.

But God is dead, culturally speaking, at least among the the elites of the West, and since 1859 the qualitative superiority of the human animal is no longer much believed in. Man is back among the animals, 'in series' with them, just another product of evolution, whose origin is measly and whose destiny is extinction.  Man on a naturalist construal is at best quantitatively superior to his non-human progenitors.

Now consider a naturalist about the human species who is also a misanthrope and an animal lover. He hates man while loving animals even though he holds that man is just an animal. He hates man because he is destroying the earth and the flora and fauna upon it.

There is something paradoxically selective about our naturalist's misanthropic love of animals. He is out to save the whales but doesn't give a rat's ass about prenatal human animals . . . . He loves animals except for the species of animal of which he is a specimen.

The misanthropy goes together with nature idolatry.

Unable to worship God, and unable to appreciate man's greatness, he makes a god of nature and its irrational beasts.

You may recall the case of  Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. 

In an Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the unmistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or  some other 'icon.'

Deny God, devalue man, and end up bear shit. Way to go 'man.'