It's a little late, but...

Modern Thought

                The humans in Avatar have a very mechanistic worldview, and they exploit the resources of Pandora to make money, not out of any altruistic sense of compassion for their fellow man. This mechanistic worldview is shown almost immediately in the film during Jake Sully’s flight to the human base on Pandora where there are shots of a huge piece of industrial equipment that appears to have some agricultural purpose. Also displayed are many smokestacks around the base, polluting the virgin world. It’s likely that the majority of humans on Pandora have this viewpoint and goal of progress because of the incredible expense involved in interstellar travel, even in the suture setting of Avatar, though it is probably not a stance echoed by the rest of humanity. Pandora’s scientists appear to simply want to observe how Pandora works as scholarly pursuits.

Parker Selfridge, as executive of the human presence of Pandora, displays a lack of deontological ethics and an exclusive view of humanism when he talks about trying to bring medicine, education, and roads to the Na’vi, in that he implies that all these attempts at good deeds are only to convince the natives to move the home tree because it rests atop a large deposit of a valuable mineral, rather than helping the Na’vi just to help them. He also engages Grace Augustine numerous times about the inner workings of the creatures of Pandora and uses dualisms to justify his behavior to himself (calling them fly-bitten savages, blue monkey, etc.) One memorable exchange occurs when Grace is attempting to explain to Parker the bonds in the trees, which are analogous to neurons of the human brain and can even contain memories, though this is at best Reductionism, because the neural network of trees on Pandora can account for many more feats than simply retaining memories, such as listening to and answering prayers, and moving a consciousness (such as Jake’s) from one body and into another. When Selfridge explains that “killing the indigenous looks bad,” this line implies that most of humanity on Earth still shares “A homocentric ethic (grounded in the social good) [that underlies] ecological movements whose primary goal is social justice for all people” (Merchant 64)

                The Na’vi, and Neytiri in particular, have a view that their world cannot be broken into parts, that everything is connected and there is a universal network of energy that flows between all living things. This is echoed by the fact that the individual Na’vi can form a biological link with other animals on Pandora and share some thoughts and nervous sensations. This notion is at odds with the human paradigms of anthropocentrism and atomism, because the Na’vi do not make much distinction between themselves and the animals, because they can literally share experiences with one another. These bonds are part of their master narrative, and their deity Eywa is the result of all this pairing between separate organisms. Though within the Na’vi’s master narrative there are accounts of a few individuals: the Riders of Last Shadow, a few Na’vi that have tamed the large flying beast that preys on the banshees of Pandora.