"It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just
now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The
old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into
it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story."
--Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth
"That's the premise of your story: The world was made
for man. Your entire history, with all its marvels and catastrophes, is
a working out of this premise."
--Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
As the current scene shows, social life is fragmenting
into various forms of "identity politics" involving issues such as race,
gender, religious outlook, national background, and sexual preference.
There is yet another major form of identity currently under
contestation, involving the identity of the entire human species.
As human beings continue to explore their evolutionary
past and gain a more accurate knowledge of the intelligence of the great
apes and other animals, as they further probe the depths of the cosmos
in search of life more advanced than themselves, as they develop
increasingly sophisticated computers and forms of artificial
intelligence and artificial life (self-reproducing "digital DNA"), as
they cross species boundaries and exchange their genes with other
animals, as they clone various life forms, and as they move toward
bionic bodies, the question arises inexorably: Who is homo sapiens? Are
humans unique in any way?
Since Aristotle's celebrated notion of the "featherless
biped," Western culture has struggled, and failed, to attain an adequate
self-understanding. The specificity of human nature has been clouded in
numerous ways, ranging from religious and anthropocentric attempts to
define us as possessors of soul made in the image of God, to
sociobiological efforts to deny human beings any uniqueness from insects
and other DNA-bearing organisms. Traditionally, the riddle of human
identity has been resolved through religion; today, however, we know the
answer to this question depends on science, yet it requires a return to
cosmological thinking and a new kind of spirituality.
Human identity in Western culture has been formed
through the potent combination of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Greek
and Roman humanism, Medieval theology, Renaissance humanism, and modern
science. All of these sources, whether religious or secular, concur in
the belief that human beings are wholly unique beings, existing in
culture rather than nature, and therefore are radically separate from
the earth they inhabit and the animal life surrounding them. No doubt,
the most pervasive influence on Western human identity has been the
biblical story of dominion, whereby human beings take possession of a
world made just for them, an earth in which their proper role is to
seize command of nature through technological prowess.
Since the sixteenth century, however, this geocentric
and anthropocentric identity has been dealt a series of powerful blows.
Beginning with the Copernican revolution that posited a sun-centered,
rather than earth-centered universe, continuing with Darwin's theory of
evolution, and culminating with Nietzsche and Freud who overthrew the
primacy of consciousness in favor of desire, instinct, and will, human
identity has been radically decentered. Despite the heliocentric
theories of Copernicus and Galileo and the development of a secular
scientific culture, human beings nevertheless could feel comfortable in
their alleged radical novelty and superiority in relation to "brute
beasts." Comfortable, that is, until 1859, the publication date of
Origin of Species, for Darwin's critique alone posed a real challenge to
anthropocentrism. Only since 1859 have human beings begun to understand
the forces of life and their own origins at all. Moreover, it was not
until 1960, when Jane Goodall made her historic journey to Gombe,
Tanzania, that human beings acquired any real knowledge about the higher
apes, specifically the chimpanzee, our closest evolutionary relative.
Human beings split from a common ancestry with chimpanzees some six to
eight million years ago. Structurally, behaviorally, and genetically (a
96.8% match), human beings and chimpanzees are remarkably alike; in
fact, chimpanzees are genetically closer to us than they are to
orangutans.
Without an accurate comparative basis to our closest
biological relative, we could not have produced an adequate
understanding of ourselves and we have been living, to borrow a phrase
from Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, in the "shadows of forgotten ancestors."
Until Jane Goodall's work, the identity of homo sapiens still had some
security: only we were homo faber and homo loquens; only we could make
tools, use tools, and linguistically interact; only we lived in
behaviorally complex communities.
Through Goodall's research, however, we have learned
that chimpanzees also make and use tools, and through the work of Roger
Fouts and others, it has been demonstrated that chimpanzees and other
higher apes can learn American Sign Language, that they have developed a
working vocabulary of hundreds of words, that they can communicate their
thoughts and emotions to us, and even that they can, on their own
accord, teach this language to their young.
Human beings are unique in the degree to which they
possess intelligence; no other species, last time I checked, has written
books of ethics, solved algebraic equations, or meditated on the meaning
of life. But humanity is not unique in its possession of a neocortex
(which enables abstract thought); of complex emotions like love,
loneliness, and shame; of sophisticated behaviors and communities, and
perhaps even of an aesthetic sense. Human beings are immensely complex
beings, with both a penchant for both violence and compassion, egoism
and altruism, but they have overstated their uniqueness and separated
themselves from the community of life on the earth, both conceptually
and existentially. This is our main failing, and the central reason
behind the environmental and spiritual crisis human beings currently
confront.
Like any other identity issue, "homo sapiens" is an
identity politics. Human beings differentiate themselves from other
groups in order to gain their identity. In the case of human identity
politics, the "other" involves different species. The construction of
human identity, more so in the Western world, has been inseparable from
anthropocentrism, a human-centered worldview, and from "speciesism." As
analyzed in Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, speciesism follows the
same logic as racism or sexism: it establishes an absolute gulf between
one group ("humans") and another ("animals"), it claims the former is
superior to the latter, and it concludes that the superior group has the
right to exploit the inferior group. Interestingly, in every case of
human domination, both within and outside of the human species, the
inferior group is designated "non" or "subhuman," and therefore a
complex politics emerges around the discourse of "the human."
The politics of human identity involve who gets to count
as "human"; what privileges subsequently accrue; and whether or not the
"human," however broadly or progressively defined, is an adequate marker
for the boundaries of the moral community. Human identity is identity
politics writ large, and the consequences of human separatism and
fragmentation from other species are far more consequential than any
form of identity politics separating human from human (unless this
should be so volatile as to erupt in nuclear war).
Thus, there is a desperate need for a new consciousness,
for new cosmopolitan identities, in the broadest and most literal sense
of the term. Human beings must begin seeing themselves not as citizens
of one nation or another, but of the earth, indeed, of the cosmos
itself. Accordingly, human identity can only be properly perceived in
the context of cosmology and new ecological stories. The old geocentric
and anthropocentric stories are false, limited, dysfunctional, and
dangerous, wholly unsuited for the destructive power of a
technologically advanced civilization. Homocentric dramas need to be
superseded by cosmological narratives that situate human life in the
larger evolution of the universe. As Thomas Berry writes, "The story of
the universe is the story of the emergence of a galactic system in which
each new level of expression emerges through the urgency of
self-transcendence." Despite the religious overtones, this new story can
be understood in strictly scientific terms of dynamic, evolving matter,
leading to ever greater complexity of life.
The new cosmological narratives often seek to reconcile
science and religion, using science to explore the physical nature of
the universe while retaining religious sentiments as a source of meaning
and reverence for life (re-ligere means "to re-connect"). Unlike the
mechanistic science of the modern period which disenchanted the world,
reduced nature to objects of manipulation, and estranged human beings
from the process of life, the postmodern science developing in the last
few decades is telling a new story, one that reintegrates humanity into
the entire drama of evolution, while bringing science into contact with
ethics and values, which previously science had eschewed in the name of
"objectivity."
It is a promising sign that science, which has done so
much to eradicate our ties to life, is beginning to help rebuild these
connections through new holistic and ecological theories. We truly are
"in between stories," and a key task for the future is to continue to
write a new story of creation, a cosmic narrative that emphasizes our
responsibilities in the larger community that engulfs us, the
biocommunity in which we are only one of millions of interdependent,
co-evolving species.
While we are free to write our own social and ethical
laws, we have yet to learn that we must conform to the laws of nature.
These are the laws of ecological balance that are inconsistent with our
burgeoning population, insatiable consumption levels, and ideology of
limitless growth. The new story will inform us that humanity survives
and flourishes not by opposing itself to nature, as the old story has
it, but rather by harmonizing itself with all that has come before it in
the multi-billion year odyssey of evolution.
This article originally appeared in "Life Giving
Choices", the newsletter of the Vegetarian Society of El Paso (VSEP).
Go on to Animal Law
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