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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 5/16/09

Minding the Animals: Ethology and the Obsolescence of Left Humanism

By Steven Best  Posted by Jason Miller (about the submitter)       (Page 6 of 10 pages) Become a premium member to see this article and all articles as one long page.   No comments
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The rationalist view of human beings as information processors whose choices and actions reflect preferences mediated and moderated by reason and logic is as false as the Cartesian and behaviorist views of animals as creatures of instinct and deep genetic programming devoid of intelligence and complex behaviors and social life. To be sure, in avoiding the fallacy of dualism, which radically separates human from “animal,” so we must avoid leaping to the opposite extreme and committing the fallacy of monism, whereby we reduce humans to the broad category of “animal” and lose the uniqueness and specificity of “human” characteristics and traits. But how “unique” are we? And what is the moral upshot of our specificity, such as it pertains to our self-assured right to exploit “inferior” animals for our “higher” purposes and “superior” nature?

Certainly, no other species, to my knowledge, has written sonnets or sonatas, solved algebraic equations, or meditated on the structure of the universe. There is no comparison between the counting skills of a bird and the mathematics of Einstein, between the rock used by a chimpanzee to crush a nut and the atom smashers devised by human engineers. But humans are not unique in their possession of a neocortex; of complex emotions like love, loneliness, empathy, and shame; of sophisticated languages, behaviors, and communities; and even of aesthetic and moral sensibilities. Human beings stand out in the degree to which they have developed capacities and potential for reason, language, consciousness, aesthetics, ethics, culture, and technology far beyond chimpanzees and other animals.

Not only do nonhuman animals have culture, art, technology, and morality, they invented them (or were active agents of their development) within their social context, environmental conditions and constraints, and evolutionary dynamics. Humans are animals and any human capacity or potential pre-existed in other animals, and humans could only enjoy these capacities as they do because of the vast sweep of evolutionary development and animal dynamics that existed prior to Homo sapiens and our ancient ancestors. Humans are ingrates who withhold due credit to their primate and animal ancestors for “human” traits; in a perverse irony characteristic of a self-serving, violent species always in bad faith, humans deny these traits ¯ even in some rudimentary form ¯ to nonhuman animals in order to legitimate the exploitation and extermination of fellow beings, all perfectly legal in the global speciesist system that views animals as property, resources, and commodities, and little else.

Before going too far down the road of human singularity, let us not forget that nonhuman animals have traits that humans do not have and, indeed, that they sometimes possess these in more advanced form. Just as so often animals are faster, stronger, and more agile and graceful than humans, so in some ways they are smarter and morally superior. The speciesist assumption is that the dumbest human is more intelligent than the smartest animal. Yet African Gray parrots, pigeons, and chimpanzees easily outperform children and adults alike in numerical, memory, spatial, and categorization![40] Further, one might consider animals morally superior in the sense that they often exhibit more kindness and altruism than humans and rarely engage in organized violence, systematic cruelty and torture, warfare, and mass killing. Animals prey on, eat, and kill one another, but, with the rare exception perhaps of chimpanzees ¯ not coincidentally our closest biological relatives ¯ they are not pathologically obsessed with control, power, domination, violence, killing, warfare, status, and wealth.

Human beings are bipedal, big-brained, language-using, toolmaking mammals; they are descendents of apes, who acquired sophisticated reasoning and linguistic skills. Humans belong in the same genera as other apes, for after chimpanzees and bonobos we are the “third chimpanzee” (Diamond). Humans are the sole heir of their Genus: the species Homo sapiens sapiens (humans in their most recent form) that distinguished itself 40,000-50,000 years ago with its enlarged brain, advanced technologies, and ruthless penchant for violence, aggression, and war. We current humans, then, are descendents of the “winners” of an evolutionary competition in which Neanderthals and other humans or human-like species were the “losers,” and countless nonhuman animal species were bludgeoned into extinction along the path of our fabled “ascent” to the “top of the food chain” and the sovereign kings overseeing the Earth and their animal servants.

The definition of humanity usually produces paeans of cultural brilliance through millennia of myth, religion, philosophy, art, music, literature, dance, architecture, and science. The praise of humanity’s multi-faceted achievements is well-deserved, but this stunning radiance also has a macabre and dark side that is an inseparably part of human history and nature; it involves an equally long history of violence, warfare, massacres, genocide, hierarchy, domination, colonization, environmental destruction, and extermination of other species. Astonishingly, the very same species that produced rock paintings in the caves of Lascaux, the Parthenon, Hamlet, the Sistine Chapel, and the Eroica Symphony also operated the ovens of Dachau, dropped atomic weapons on civilian populations in Japan, and fertilized the killing fields of Cambodia with bones and blood. As Homo ambiguous, we are a Janus-faced species capable of good and evil, creativity and destruction.

Homo sapiens is a brash, brilliant, arrogant, and violent species that has evolved rapidly and grown exponentially. In the short time of its existence, human beings have colonized the earth; they have depleted its resources, decimated other species, mowed down its rainforests, denuded its land, befouled its air and water, and even altered its global temperature. From precarious origins on the African continent to global domination, humans survived ¯ whether due to superior intelligence, ability to adapt, or just ruthless cunning and conquering ¯ where other Homo species perished. Moving from prey to predator, from hunted to hunter, human populations grew, expanded, and swarmed planet Earth, as they now embark on the project of terraforming other planets to carry their evolutionary adventure into the infinite depths of space, just as the ground is crumbling everywhere around them on terra firma.

In the era of planetary ecological crisis signaled by phenomena such as species extinction, rainforest destruction, desertification, resource shortages, and global warming, the advanced intelligence that inspired the appellation “wise man” turns this marker into a satire or tragic irony. If intelligence and wisdom entails the ability to survive, exercise foresight, and adapt to one’s environment, then dolphins, whales, and countless other species are far more intelligent than human beings. Dinosaurs lived for hundreds of millions of years, and Homo erectus endured for over a million years, but Homo sapiens sapiens, after only fifty thousand years of existence, may not survive another thousand years, or even another century or two.

For all their sophistication, human beings are still primitive animals. Their neocortex ¯ the seat of language, creativity, and abstract thinking ¯ rests on the ancient limbic and reptilian areas of the brain that evolved millions of years before reason and still condition thought and behavior. Humanity’s fancy philosophies and social contract theories are erected upon social relations and behaviors established by their primate ancestors. All too often, humans are guided by “jungle” directives, unable to develop compassion, to cooperate, to share, to create community, to co-exist with otherness, to use reason, and to resolve conflicts with dialogue and negotiation rather than through war and violence. However influential their sophisticated social norms, conventional rituals, and cultural overlay, humans remain primates who carry within them a long evolutionary history shaped by natural selection, tribalism, and survival-oriented xenophobia predicated on the dichotomy between “Us” and “Them.”

Whether cooperating with one another, adhering to the Golden Rule, or forming gangs and waging war, our primate past could well be an influencing factor and rather than prohibit consideration of it as politically incorrect and “reactionary,” it is far more important we confront it head-on in order to develop new behaviors and learning strategies that can at least dampen some of our primordial Machiavellian machinations and proclivities toward aggression, power, and hierarchical control, as well as temper any utopian fantasies about perfectly harmonious and peaceful societies, and the socialist “human engineering” programs that often have accompanied these Rousseauian visions.[41]

Animals: The Missing Element in the Radical Equation

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

–Alvin Toffler

After successive intellectual revolutions and paradigm shifts over the last few centuries, Homo sapiens has been knocked off its pedestal repeatedly, and now flails about in the winds of uncertainty and the tempests of irrevocable change, whipped up all the more powerfully by scientific breakthroughs and technological revolutions.

We cannot overlook an amazing paradox. It is an odd but revealing phenomenon that a species which so arrogantly prides itself in its alleged unique skills in reason and communication has not yet attained an accurate understanding of itself. This advanced “intelligence” of humans, moreover, is in the advanced stages of exterminating our closest biological relatives, along with millions of other animal and plant species, thereby ensuring that Homo sapiens will die as it was born ¯ in ignorance of its own nature and the other animal species vital for an accurate self-understanding.

“Throughout recorded history,” Armesto rightly notes, “almost every supposedly distinguishing feature by which humans have identified and differentiated themselves from other creatures, classified as non-human, turns out to be mistaken or misleading.”[42] Humans have clouded the analysis of their nature with irrational beliefs, religious fictions, primitive mythologies, God-complexes, narcissism, logical fallacies, philosophical illusions, and scientific dogmas. Speciesism, carnivorism, patriarchy, rationalism, Social Darwinism, Eurocentrism and other ideologies emanating from hierarchical thinking and social institutions have created a distorted view of history and of human nature, and of animals and the Earth as well. Although recent advances in science and scholarship have refuted numerous myths about human nature and nonhuman animals as well, falsehoods persist because they promote elitist agendas, stroke the frail human ego, comfort human vanity, reinforce anthropocentrism, and, certainly, promote and legitimate the agendas of animal exploitation industries whose filthy lucre is derived from the blood and suffering of tens of billions of animals every year, a number that tragically continues to rise in numerous sectors, including vivisection and ¯ above all ¯ consumption of animals for food.

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Jason Miller, Senior Editor and Founder of TPC, is a tenacious forty something vegan straight edge activist who lives in Kansas and who has a boundless passion for animal liberation and anti-capitalism. Addicted to reading and learning, he is mostly (more...)
 
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