.
Hinchman (2001) not only argues that present-day environmentalism springs from The Enlightenment, but, more importantly, that the Western environmental ethic is undergoing a paradigm shift. This paradigm shift is analogous to the change in viewpoint Enlightenment thinkers advocated for European society vis -vis other non-Western societies, i.e. an extension of Lockean rights to all people. Hinch (2001) sees evidence that similar existential rights are beginning to be extended to other organisms and even to other abiotic aspects of the biosphere. Hinch (2001) inadvertently provided me with a context in which I could better understand the Judeo-Christian environmental ethic. I began to recognize that the Judeo-Christian environmental ethic is connected to a broader societal process that is transforming Western culture's relationship with nature. .
My research journey from polemic to paradigm shift might have made Hegel giggle, but I, nevertheless, gained significant intellectual benefit from the transfiguaration of my bias to insight by the research dialectic.
JUDEO-CHRISTIANITY & NECROPHILIA.
Fromm uses the term "life-negating- when an idea or action thwarts life, and refers to people whose psychical character is dominated by life-negating tendencies as having a necrophilic character type. Fromm (1976) describes character-based necrophilia, in its most extreme form, as:.
"the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures."".
According to Fromm, most people possess necrophilic character traits, but Fromm points out that, amongst the general population, a far more attenuated manifestation of necrophilia is the norm. Fromm designates Hitler and Stalin as examples of individuals with extreme necrophilic characters.