Human
exceptionalism is dead: for the sake of our own happiness and the planet we
should embrace our true animal nature
When
I visited my grandmother at the undertakers, an hour or so before her funeral,
I was struck by how different death is from sleep. A sleeping individual
shimmers with fractional movements. The dead seem to rest in paused animation,
so still they look smaller than in life. It’s almost impossible not to feel as
if something very like the soul is no longer present. Yet my grandmother had
also died with Alzheimer’s. Even in life, something of who she was had begun to
abandon her. And I wondered, as her memories vanished, had she become a little
less herself, a little less human?
These
end-of-life stages prick our imaginations. They confront us with some
unsettling ideas. We don’t like to face the possibility that irreversible
biological processes in our bodies can snuff out the stunning light of our
individual experience. We prefer to deny our bodies altogether, and push away
the dark tendrils of a living world we fear. The trouble for us is that this
story – that we aren’t really our bodies but some special, separate ‘thing’ –
has made a muddle of reality. Problems flow from the notion that we’re split
between a superior human half and the inferior, mortal body of an animal. In
short, we’ve come to believe that our bodies and their feelings are a lesser
kind of existence. But what if we’re wrong? What if all parts of us, including our
minds, are deeply biological, and our physical experiences are far more
meaningful and richer than we’ve been willing to accept?
As far
as we know, early hunter-gatherer animist societies saw spirit everywhere. All
life possessed a special, non-physical essence. In European classical thought,
many also believed that every living thing had a soul. But souls were graded.
Humans were thought to have a superior soul within a hierarchy. By the time of
theologians such as the Italian Dominican friar and philosopher Thomas Aquinas,
in the 13th century, this soulful view of life had retreated, leaving
humans the only creature still in possession of an immortal one. As beings with
a unique soul, we were more than mere animals. Our lives were set on a path to
salvation. Life was now a great chain of being, with only the angels and God
above us.
But, as
the Middle Ages came to a close in the 16th century, a fresh,
apparently rational form of exceptionalism began to spread. The origins for
this shift lie in the thinking of René Descartes, who gave the world a new
version of dualism. Descartes argued that thought is so different from the
physical, machine-like substance of the body that we should see humans as
having two parts: the thoughtful mind and the thoughtless, physical body. This
was religion refocused through a rational lens. The division between humans and
the rest of nature was no longer the soul – or, at least, not only the
soul – but rather our intellectual capabilities: our reason, our moral
sensibilities, our gifts for abstraction. He assumed, of course, that other
animals don’t think.
Enlightenment
figures such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant in the 17th and 18th
centuries developed this further. According to them, it was the fruits of
our intelligence that made us truly human. Through mental powers, humans live
more meaningfully than other beings. In other words, we humans
have a soulful mind. It was even suggested that we are our
thoughts, and that these phantasmal mental aspects of humans are more important
and even, daringly, separable from the impoverished biology
that we share with other animals.
In many
ways, Darwinism posed a threat to this intensifying vision of the human and our
place in nature. Charles Darwin disrupted both the idea of a neat divide
between humans and other forms of life, and also complicated the possibilities
for mind-body dualism. If humans had evolved from earlier, ancestral primates,
then our minds, too, must have emerged through ordinary, evolutionary processes
with deep roots in nature. It’s easy to forget today just how shattering
Darwinism was for a whole generation. Darwin himself wrote to his friend, the
American botanist Asa Gray, to express his acute fear of seeing humans as a
fully integrated part of a seemingly amoral natural world, where there’s ‘too
much misery’. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, to find the redoubling
of efforts to assert new forms of human redemption in the years after
publication of On the Origin of Species (1859).
One
such effort came in the form of the ‘human revolution’ – the idea that some
kind of cognitive leap took place in the recent evolution of Homo
sapiens that forever split us from other species. Another was in the
20th-century reworking of Enlightenment humanism that sought to find scientific
proofs of human exception, and to argue that only these ultimately matter.
Modern humanism promised to be about the ‘complete realisation of human
personality’ in an onward march ‘to move farther into space and perhaps inhabit
other planets’. The history of global philosophy on humans and other animals
might be mischievously summarised as a long study in mental bias.
Having
a humanlike mind has become a moral dividing line
Today,
our thinking has shifted along with scientific evidence, incorporating the
genetic insights of the past century. We now know we’re
animals, related to all other life on our planet. We’ve also learned much about
cognition, including the uneasy separation between instinct and intention, and
the investment of the whole body in thought and action. As such, we might
expect attitudes to have changed. But that isn’t the case. We still live with
the belief that humans, in some essential way, aren’t really animals. We still
cling to the possibility that there’s something extrabiological that delivers
us from the troubling state of being an organism trapped by flesh and death. In
the words of the
philosopher Derek Parfit, ‘the body below the neck is not an essential part of
us.’ Many of us still deny that human actions are the result of our animal
being, instead maintaining that they’re the manifestation of reason. We think our
world into being. And that’s sometimes true. The trouble comes when we think
our thoughts are our being.
There
are real-world consequences to these ideas. Having a humanlike mind has become
a moral dividing line. In our courts, we determine what we can and can’t do to
other sentient beings on the basis of the absence of a mind with features like
ours. Those things that look too disturbingly body-centred, like impulse or
agency, regardless of their outcomes or role in flourishing, are viewed as
lower down on the moral scale. Meanwhile, the view that physical, animal
properties (many of which we share with other species) have little significance
has left us with the absurd idea that we can live without our bodies. So it is
that we pursue biological enhancement in search of the true essence of our
humanity. Some of the world’s largest biotech companies are developing not only
artificial forms of intelligence but brain-machine interfaces in the hope that
we might one day achieve superintelligence or even mental immortality by
downloading our minds into a synthetic form. It follows that our bodies, our
flesh and our feelings – from laughing with our friends to listening to music
to cuddling our children – can be seen as a threat to this paradigm.
Why is
this animal-denialism so entrenched in the human psyche, across cultures and
millennia of time? The orthodox (if, still, speculative) story from
evolutionary biology, as suggested by
figures such as the American zoologist Richard Alexander in the 1970s, is that
our subjective, imaginative mind has its origins in a bundle of adaptations for
social cognition. As primates who lived in groups, our ancestors needed one
another to survive; yet their social environment was also competitive, making
the need patchy enough to empower the kind of cognition that gives us our sense
of ‘me’. Add to that the need to gather insight into our own motivations and
those of others, and to incorporate a rich, layered memory of experience, and
we’re left with a staggering attention to internal states and external stimuli
– the exact flavour of which consciousness researchers endlessly battle about.
These many biological routes to attention gift us our selfhood.
Unfortunately
for us, this self-salience has left us with the bizarre sensation that who we
really are is some kind of floating mind, our identity a kind of thinking, or
rather, a thinking about thinking, rather than the whole feeling,
sensing, sometimes instinctual colony of cells that makes up the entire unit of
our animal being. Our selfhood gives rise to the sensation that we’re a thing
trapped inside a body. And we can speculate that several things flow from this.
We have a heightened awareness of the threats we face as animals – not least an
awareness that we’ll die one day. As W B Yeats put it in his poem
‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1928), we are ‘fastened to a dying animal’. And,
because we feel as if we’re somehow more than our bodies, we’re reassured that
we can escape the frightening limits of our flesh. In other words, our
sensation of mental distinctiveness becomes our hope for salvation.
But
humans don’t only have selfhood – we also have insight into other selves. By
making sound judgments about the internal states of others and communicating as
we do, we have an extraordinary network of exchanges available to us. When the
pathogen SARS-CoV-2 hit our societies causing havoc and heartbreak, we
nonetheless had systems of communication, healthcare infrastructure, and
methods for understanding the virus that would be impossible without the
biological mechanisms that encourage us to work together for shared benefit.
One of the glues of our cooperation is our ability to think into and make
judgments about each other’s minds, experiences and intentions.
The
ideas that bring us together have physical consequences
There’s
still more evidence for the adaptive nature of cooperation in something we’ve
come to call ‘social buffering’. This is the way that measurable stress can be
reduced by proximity to a member of our community. Closeness and good
relationships affect our wellbeing, modulating the release of stress hormones
such as cortisol that can suppress our immune systems. A hug, the holding of a
partner’s hands during a tough situation, access to our group in times of
stress – all these create measurable effects on our health, and improve our
ability to cope with the knocks of life. These benefits accumulate across a
lifetime and have been found elsewhere among group-living animals, especially
mammals.
But
it’s a little more complicated for an animal like us. We use ideas to bring
about the kinds of buffering responses created by our relationships. Where
other social animals gain support by physical proximity to a relative or
group-member, humans gain this through psychological proximity as well. In
other words, the ideas that bring us together have physical consequences. This
buffering is active for any worldview or ideology that facilitates
group-belonging – and that might be something as innocuous as a local football
team.
But
there’s a little twist in this tale.
Evidence
shows that social buffering often involves ranking the minds and skills of our
own group (including the largest set, the Homo sapiens) as higher
than those of others. Research by the Dutch psychologist Carsten De Dreu
has revealed how
some of the beliefs about the superior mental content of our own groups affect
oxytocin, reinforcing our bonds with each other and increasing our commitment
to the thoughts and feelings of our compatriots. Elsewhere, the work of the
Italian psychologist Jeroen Vaes has demonstrated how
fears and dangers prompt people to renew their group bonds, and this includes
seeing group members as more human than those outside the group (with ‘more
human’ measured as individuals with higher intelligence and greater signals of
secondary emotions such as empathy or pride). In other words, we see the minds
of our own group as superior to the minds of those on the outside, and when we
want to reinforce that – especially, if we feel under threat – we increase our
beliefs in the superior judgment of our own centre of belonging, and can
denigrate anyone or anything that contradicts this. While that ‘group’ is often
the culture or ideology with which we identify, for humans that group can also
simply be us.
Intriguingly,
recent studies have shown that the idea that we’re not really animals – and
especially the idea that humans are hierarchically superior forms of life – is
one of those profoundly reassuring ideas that we favour. Nour Kteily, a
researcher at Northwestern University in Illinois, studies the ways that groups
of people interact. He has developed the
‘ascent of man measure’, which exploits the progressive idea of humans rising
to the top of a biological hierarchy. What he found is that stress or the
presence of threats can prime us to favour human uniqueness. This generates a
curious paradox, of course, if we view being animal as a threat in and of
itself.
So why
does this matter now? Nobody is denying that humans are exceptional. The
concept of human uniqueness is only a problem when we deny the beauty and
necessity both of our animal lives and the lives of other animals. No matter
whether our origin stories tell us we’re possessors of spiritual properties or
our courts tell us we’re ‘persons’ with dignity, we privilege the transcendent
over the physical. The root word for ‘exception’ is the Latin excipere,
which means ‘to take out’. We have always longed to be saved, to be ‘taken out’
from what we dislike or fear of our animal condition. But the pursuit of escape
becomes more serious once we have powerful technologies to engineer and exploit
biology.
These
days, there is substantial investment in different technical routes to escape
the limits or dangers of being animal, whether through DNA repair or stem-cell
treatments or the transfer of more and more of ourselves to synthetic or
machine forms. Google, Amazon and Elon Musk’s Neuralink are just three of the
major corporations working in some of these areas. These are all part of a
general trend to control and technologise more and more of our animal life.
But, in seeking ways to enhance ourselves, people rarely acknowledge what we’d
be leaving behind. As we start to use these new powers, it’s imperative that we
dwell on what we stand to lose. The point here is not to argue that we ought to
act as animals but rather that we are animals, and that a huge
amount of the quality of our experience lies in a fully embodied animal life.
Some of
the most important stages of life happen in the womb and in the early bonds
with our carers in the weeks and months after birth. And the quality of those
bonds and the wellbeing of our mothers can have lasting effects on us and the
people we come to be. As the Israeli psychologist Ruth Feldman has written: ‘Later
attachments … repurpose the basic machinery established by the mother-offspring
bond during early “sensitive periods”.’ These crucial years in human
development involve crosstalk between hormones, environment and touch that
influence how the baby’s neural networks are organised. The central nervous
system, the resilience to stress, all bear the marks of the early, deeply
embodied years of our lives. When a parent and child embrace, the effects are
staggering, regulating body temperature, heart rate and respiration. People in
a temporary alliance, whether queer or straight, old or young, conservative or
liberal, synch in ways that are measurable, from hormonal shifts to
oscillations of the gamma and alpha rhythms of our brains, and these nourishing
alliances reservice those first intimate, mammalian bonds.
Far
from being solely the product of our brains and self-direction, then, humans
are intimately affected by their whole physical being and its environment. Some
devastating evidence for
this comes from the children of Romania’s orphanages, who were abandoned with
little physical or sensory affection by the cruelties and excesses of the
country’s leader Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime. This neglect left them with lifelong
struggles, extending to language delays and visual-spatial disruption. These
are painful reminders that our ability to flourish and express ourselves is
profoundly influenced by the way our bodies are treated and valued in the
earliest stages of our lifecycle.
Time
online crowds out time spent in physical contact with others and in contact
with the physical world
And
that should matter to those who seek ways to define what’s important about
human life. There’s the exciting possibility to some in the research and
business community that we might soon exploit new biotechnologies such as the
CRISPR gene and genome-editing tool, or have access to a kind of embryo
‘agriculture’ through frontier reproductive tools such as in-vitro
gametogenesis (a technology that enables the switch from something like a skin
cell into a stem cell), and thereby select the most disease-resistant or
intelligence-scored embryos as our children. It’s of note, however, that the
pursuit of this would disrupt and industrialise human life from its inception.
In other words, we wouldn’t make our babies through sex, and nurturing might be
done by engineering rather than by love and touch.
In less
dramatic disruptions, we’re increasingly turning over our lives to our
smartphones, with little attention paid to how our whole bodies influence who
we become and how we thrive. The fact that children learn better through
physical movement and gesture, including language acquisition, is ignored by
those who want to operationalise teaching online. The research community is
troublingly divided on how time online affects our mental and physical
wellbeing. Studies from equally reputable sources announce that social media
doesn’t affect mental health at the same time as another provides convincing
evidence that it does. But a little common sense is useful here. What we can
say for sure is that time online crowds out time spent in physical contact with
others and in contact with the physical world. Only a belief that our animal
lives are somehow less important than our mental lives can allow us to minimise
what that reduction of our physical experience might mean.
And
this is to say nothing of what our denigration of being animal means for the
other animals. We have spent thousands of years arguing that we’re the moral
overlords of our world. That’s looking harder to justify now that we’re the
agents of extinction and pollution. For centuries, we have tamped down these
contradictions. But it’s no longer possible to ignore the long shadow we cast.
Mammal sizes have been shrinking on our watch, and are now the smallest they’ve
been since dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Our planet’s biomass of mammals now
breaks down into a mere 4 per cent wild species, around 30 per cent
humans, and the rest are animals we produce for food.
Of
course, as we explore our animal being, we’re confronted by the inconvenient
possibility that these animals that are disappearing have worlds of experience
that ought to press on our moral circuitry far harder than we’ve allowed up to
now. Life on Earth is full of diverse forms of intelligence and purpose. We’re
only at the beginning of scientific discoveries about the way memory and
intentions grip animal bodies from tip to claw. Eventually, we’re going to have
to reckon with the true complexity of the other lives that surround us. The
more we learn about other animals, the more we recognise other experiences that
ought to matter if, by this logic, our own do.
It
might well be in the rallying of our own bodily resources that our greatest
opportunities lie. When we reconsider all that we gain by being animals, we’re
confronted by some powerful resources for positive change. Just think of the
gobsmacking beauty of bonding. If you have a dog beside you as you read this,
bend down, look into her eyes, and stroke her. Via the hypothalamus inside your
body, oxytocin will get to work, and dopamine – organic chemicals implicated in
animal bonding – and, before you know it, you’ll be feeling good, even in the
dark times of a pandemic. And, as it happens, so will your dog, who will
experience a similar physical response to the bond between you both. Oxytocin
is produced in
the hypothalamus of all mammals. In other words, our bodies might well be our
best and most effective tool in the effort to strike a new balance between
humans and the rest of the living world. If we can tip ourselves more into a
bonding frame of mind, we might find it easier to recognise the beauty and
intelligence that we’re hellbent on destroying. By accepting that we’re animals
too, we create the opportunity to think about how we might play to the
strengths of our evolutionary legacies in ways that we all stand to gain from.
If we can build a better relationship with our own reality and, indeed, a
better relationship with other animals, we’ll be on the road to recovery.
To
be fully human, we must also be fully embodied animal | Aeon Essays
