There is a great deal to be said for stepping aside to see the oddity of the things we most insistently assert. It is so healthy for the mind that it can even cause laughter. But it is an unsettling approach, and not many are comfortable with it. If a scientist or an historian tells us something, a large portion of the population will accept it uncritically, another large portion of the population will call it a conspiracy, and only the tiniest sliver of the sophisticated nations of our day will allow themselves to accept it with incredulity, or believe it and laugh at themselves for doing so. But it is precisely the historians and the scientists who say the most unbelievable things, and if they say much that is incredible they say more that is implausible, and there is a great deal to be said for the liberty to laugh at it all. Not to deny it all: but at least to be careful not to forget the natural response to the paradoxes these estimable intellectuals propound. I have an example, but to show it in the clearest possible light you must imagine the kinds of context in which you will meet it. So let us visit a laboratory first.
Doubtless an image comes readily enough – it is white, and cubic, and sterile, and immaculately clean. Deck it out, if you will – the dissection table, the display cabinets, the tubes of flowing fluid, the greyish vats containing human remains. One of these latter, we are not told, was Geofrey Splitliver, and another was perhaps Emily Eldrich, both generous donors. But they are to be considered in the purest abstraction, as if they were something more akin to Platonic Ideas than slabs of flesh – for that is what science means, and we are in the temple of science. The exhibits have little plaques, to remind us that they are not there purely to upset the stomach, but rather to expand the intellect. For the scientist himself, you will not go far wrong if you start by picturing a poor dress-up attempt at a saint’s garb. Err on the side of plastic, and despair of the halo. But we know the real meaning of his crinkly white robe: they are the livery of science, and they are the aspiration of the best and brightest of our age. He really is a saint, in a way. He is certainly the highest production the universe has achieved to date, from a cerebral point of view.
Now, to state briefly and bluntly the burden of our inquiry, we want to know what he thinks of us. Why come all the way here for that? Because only he can tell us what he thinks of us, and, besides, he professes to be a professional on the matter. So we ask, and this walking antithesis of all brutishness will tell us something like this: ‘The human species is most similar to the ape, biologically; but even there there are some important distinctions, which I would be more than happy to explain, if you have the time.’
Scientists have their ways. Historians do too. Let us go to the museum: it is not too far a leap, after all. Darken the colour palate, exchange the anthropoid exhibits for animals and bones and rocks, dispense with the liquid and the tubes, and you have already done most of the work. The plaques may be a little more poetic, with that kind of crude poetry that consists in heaping up years by the millions and writing ‘roamed the earth’ for ‘existed’. Some vaguely realistic, but highly speculative, representations of ancient human beings, to fill in the unfortunately inadequate picture presented by the skeletal remains, would not be out of place; and they must be consistent with the received idea that barbers of the neolithic were not what they are today. In these hallowed halls of history we will find the historian, and he will be vested in the paradoxically parochial attire of his era: a button up shirt, a tie, trousers and a blazer. For all we know he ardently desires to be decked with a cape and hood, but then he might be confused with his subjects, and that would not do. The bones and bricks and pendants represent the real thing, and he represents the theoretical side of it. When we ask him our question, what he thinks of us, we may expect a response in this strenuous and emphatic vein: ‘Our species is unique in many ways – indeed remarkable, in many ways – and the real adventure in studying the palaeolithic era is that here, for the first time, we see human beings distinguishing themselves from their mammalian cousins.’
It is strange how similar the historian and the scientist have become. They are even amusing for the same reasons. I am no scientist, and my history does not go back further than the Pharaohs, so I shall confine myself to stating the obvious. I really have no academic quarrel with the opinions of these gentlemen, but the irony of their assertions must be evident even to them. The scientist, when, in his scientific getup, in his scientific setting, he is as far from the ape as imaginable, tells us that we differ in some small ways from apes. The historian, for all his refinement and modernity, manifests a fraternal sympathy for the half-brutal creature he has deduced we once were. Every lover of mankind knows how rich and uproarious the joke is; and that though the intelligentsia might be quite within their rights calling human kind a ‘species’ or referring to it as an unusually developed animal, they ought to allow a lull for the audience to laugh afterwards. It might be correct, but it is certainly funny. And equally bizarre, absurd, and mind-boggling are the various inferences we are pleased to draw from the idea that we are a kind of animal. It hardly matters that most of them are false. They are all stated in so serious a tone, with such assurance of their sophistication, that one wonders whether the people who say them have fully realised the audacity of the idea. When someone says that mankind is the only animal that makes tools, they are almost correct: but that they do not smile at the thought of themselves as animals is astonishing. Take the following two examples of an even more extensive irony.
1) “Human beings are the only animal that specialises.” – Says an engineer, or a baker, with some taste for abstract thought, as he reclines on a couch in a mood of conspicuously unspecialised reflection. The statement is surprisingly common. But as a matter of fact, one of the most remarkable circumstances attendant on the human race is its curious lack of specialisation. Many of us are good at one thing, and bad at others – much as the drone is good at one thing, and the queen bee at another, and the lion and the lioness tend to divide the work between them. I will not press the point, though I think there are a number of other examples of specialisation in the animal world. But I am sure that specialisation is not the mark of the human race, because the human race is the least specialised of all species. Whatever individual bevers may specialise at, beaverkind specialises at doing beaverish stuff: which means swimming and building dams and so forth. Whatever individual cheetahs may specialise at, cheetahs in general specialise at being cheetahs: running fast and eating meat and all that. But we, we must have our finger in every pie; we must swim and build dams and run fast and eat meat; and also eat plants and fly and move slow and make canals; as well as doing whatever it is that Homo Sapiens is supposed to do: and we insist on one-upping the animals in every art. Our planes must soar higher than the birds, our music must be better than theirs. While the every department of the animal kingdom sticks to its own traditions, content to contemplate the impossibility of eating their cakes and having them too, we have decided to eat every cake – and while we’re at it have them too. A good argument could be mounted that human beings are not animals because our species does not specialise, as other animals do: and meanwhile the most sophisticated human beings happily theorise that human beings are the only animal that does specialise.
2) “Man is a political animal.” It was the master of them that know said this: give him a little grace. He lived in an era much like our own, when politics was identity and religion, though in those days unlike ours they allowed that religion could be somewhat more than just politics, and that politics might be a matter of chance not choice. You might be born Athenian and be, as a result, an Athenian animal, and your opinion of Athens was expected to follow from that. Furthermore, we must bear in mind that we are translating, and much may be lost in the misalignment of languages. His word ‘animal’ as easily suggests that man is something spiritual, as the bear is spiritual and the whale is spiritual; our word ‘animal’ suggests that man is something natural, as the bear is natural and the whale is natural. And the word ‘political’ is an even looser translation of the Greek, though certainly a closer transcription; and what Aristotle meant by it, you will have to consult Aristotle to discover. For the moment what concerns us is that the statement taken at face value is shockingly counterintuitive, and were it not for what we know about Aristotle’s style, we might assume he was not fully serious. For if man is an animal, he is almost the least political of them all. The locus classicus on this matter is The Once and Future King, which is almost the crowning glory of the Arthurian tradition. There you will find an unanswerable case for the political advancement of ants, fish, birds, and the like. A bee, as Mr White shows, is a political animal, not only because its politics is more successful than human politics, but also because its politics is purely animal instinct. Animals are politicians: it is humans who are anarchists. It is humans who get so distracted from pure politics as to be intolerant on moral or ideological matters; it is humans who are so resentful of politics as to institute tolerance on such matters. Animals are realists, only humans are idealists; so animals believe in politics, and humans disbelieve in it. If you meet ten people in the road and ask each of them what their views are, you will find that most of them think that politics is not what keeps the world in order, but what keeps it out of order. If you take ten random people from the last ten centuries, you would be lucky to find that five of them had any interest in being mixed up in the ruinous stageplay called politics. If man really is a political animal, he is an animal that desperately wishes he was not political – and in that regard, at least, he is not an animal. There are no democratic bees trying to undermine the ancient hierarchy of the hive, and there are no gentle-souled wolves striking in conscientious objection to the violence of the system. With us, on the other hand, all our best ideals are anti-political ideals: world peace, individual liberty, and equality; and what we fear in the encroachment of politics on our individual rights, is the prospecting of becoming nothing more than a herd – if I may, becoming political animals.
My point, in all this, is not that these statements are false, and certainly not that they are indefensible. My point is that they are exceedingly improbable, counterintuitive and paradoxical. I am even willing to grant that the most paradoxical part of it all is also the most probably correct: that human beings are in some sense analogous with animals. A scientist or an historian might be compelled to talk that way, because scientists and historians are compelled to say a great many strange and unbelievable things. But so far as I can tell, they do not for the most part realise the whimsicality of the idea. Let them see it though the eyes of a philosopher, and they will understand how it seems to an ordinary person.
Where will we find a philosopher? Not in the white cube of a laboratory; not in the dark cube of a museum. You are more likely to find him in a kind of literary cavern: dim the lights, set up a fire (Descartes talks of a fireplace in his Meditations), introduce an upholstered armchair, and some cushions, and bury the walls in books. Without disrespect, we might consider this arrangement somewhat more evocative of the primitive conditions of our kind, who, sure, had no books, but probably had fairly rough walls; and, if they no fireplace, probably had a fire, and certainly had no electric lighting; and might not have had cushions, but certainly had chairs and carpets and tapestries. I will not call the philosopher primitive. But he is at least, by the demands of his trade, simple and forthright. If we ask him what he thinks of us, he will tell us, without any of the ironies or mystifications of the scholars, what we are.
He will allow that Homo Sapiens is a ‘tool-making animal,’ but in much the same way as a mountain is a ‘rooted vertebrate,’ or the Loch-Ness Monster is a particularly advanced specimen of the spotted toadstool. Both are possible, but only with a little taxonomical sleight of hand. Animals being, in common parlance, the sentient spawn of the earth, human beings are, to all intents and purposes, completely alien to the earth. They may never have lived elsewhere; but that is a trifling technicality, compared with the more salient facts of the case. Here is one. Every animal is at home on earth: Homo Sapiens is not. Animals are comfortable to live on earth and forget about it: not so with us. In almost every regard we make it plain that we are not natives but tourists. How else do you explain the universal human practice of carving out pockets of space that bear no resemblance to the ordinary lodgings provided by planet Earth? Even the philosopher in his gloomy antre cannot be said to have deliberately dressed his home to resemble a cave; and even the most advanced environmentalists do not disguise their offices as forests. We plaster and paint and square and insulate our homes. We are so bent on removing nature from our sight that we cannot bear the dust of our feet on the floor. And then – when we have secured ourselves from the least intrusion of anything earthly, we begin to allow ourselves brief forays into ‘nature,’ as a tourist, having located their hotel and deposited their belongings, begins by fits and starts to explore a city. Even then, we do not venture forth without a whole foreign apparatus – clothing, at least, and backpacks and cell-phones and other prodigies of a completely unearthly cast. In moments of dark reflection we realise that this is not normal. ‘Naked I came into the world, and naked shall I leave it,’ we remind ourselves; this is not how animals speak, for the simple reason that animals remain naked, and quite content to accept the conditions nature imposes on them. We prefer to ease our way through our brief stay with frequent reminders of whatever strange place we came from. We wear clothes on earth for the same motives that might move a Japanese person to wear a kimono in Erfurt. Homo Sapiens are so much the tourists that we would expect them at any moment to whip out cameras and start snapping photos of earth for postcards and family gatherings – but that is exactly what they already do!
I have addressed myself so far (says the philosopher) only to the most grossly material aspects of the case. The more striking side of the matter is the intellectual side, and it can be most clearly seen in those who most neglect the material side. There are smaller sects of more naturalised – in that regard more advanced – human beings who live on earth as though they belonged to earth. But they have not naturalised themselves to live like animals, and that is the crucial point. Even if they do not make homes, they make art. If they do not talk of scientific progress they talk of ancient deities. The city-folk see the natural world as something exotic because they see it so seldom, the indigenous tribesfolk see it all the time, and persist in viewing it as something exotic, and full of gods. They have seen snakes and frogs, but they have never seen the Rainbow Serpent or Tiddalik, spiritual ideas, not natural. Animals do not see the need for art, or religious ritual, or science, or indeed anything that is not strictly logical, and strictly earthly. The only acceptable philosophy for an animal is a kind of instinctual hedonism, and the animal that refuses to obey its instincts is the one that holds up the pack and is charged with sybaritic self-indulgence. Human beings will have beliefs, and ideals, and taboos, and traditions, which they did not get from here, or at any rate, they got them from somewhere animals can’t get to. And we pride ourselves on this. The very existence of the word ‘nature’ implies that we are sure we are something different from the rest of the world. Animals do not talk about ‘nature.’ They have nothing to contrast it with. If a tiger were to inform me that she was going on ‘a nature-walk,’ instead of just ‘a walk,’ I would be sure to commend her to the psychiatric ward before commending myself to the same.
The scientists, the ones with the penchant for this little jest about Homo Sapiens and the Kingdom Mammalia, would lead the laughter if a politician were to mount the podium and declare that certain inborn instincts are urging him toward socialism, and the crowd ought to follow; or if they solemnly suggested that evolution has conditioned us to reduce fossil fuels, and this alone is reason enough to do so. Politicians will talk all sorts of unearthly quaff, invoking justice and liberty and happiness and duty, talking of rebellion and suffering and compassion, much as a Londoner in Madrid speaks wistfully of Big Ben and St Paul’s Cathedral. In short, there is nothing natural about the way human beings live, act, think or talk; and it is in the nature of an animal to be natural.
So speaks the philosopher. And isn’t there something in it? Is it not strange how easily the truths of science have made us forget the natural instincts of our intellects? If the whole affair were approached with a little more levity we would have a better assurance of the sanity of society. I do not despair of hearing, one day, at some naturalists’ soirée, a man of wit and learning will raise his glass and begin a speech as so: ‘Ladies and gentlemen! I am about to make some piercingly rational remarks such as we admire in the scientific world. But lest you feel intimidated by my intelligence, I shall begin by showing that we, too, can be whimsical, and say, Homo Sapiens the only animal…’ – (laughter from the audience) – ‘Suspend your disbelief, please! We are about the great imaginative adventure of science, at present. Now, as I was saying – Homo Sapiens is the only animal that drinks champagne.’
theparsnipoftime 