People working in quite different fields with different methodologies and research agendas nevertheless often shared a veiled antipathy, trying to keep their distance from the implications of two ideas : Our minds are just what our brains non-miraculously do, and the talents of our brains had to evolve like every other marvel of nature. Their effort to keep this vision at bay was bogging down their thinking, lending spurious allure to dubious brands of absolutism and encouraging them to see small, bridgeable gaps as yawning chasms.
Throughout human history, people have pondered their relationship to the living and nonliving components of the environments in which they have lived: Where did we and all the other living organisms around us come from? How long have we been here ? In what ways are we different from other species? How should we relate to them ? Do we have any responsibilities to them? If so, what are they?
Human cultures have generated a rich variety of answers to these and similar questions. Most of these answers reflect the intimate contacts people had with nature because nature, both benign and terrifying, influenced the consequences of most of their activities. Moreover, our ancestors could not have failed to notice the many striking similarities between themselves and some of the other species that shared habitats with them. For people lacking knowledge of both the age of the Earth and the processes by which life evolved, such similarities must have seemed puzzling.
The dominant view throughout Western intellectual history has been to posit an unbridgeable gap between humans and other animals. This belief has often been combined with the position that other species were created specially with human needs in mind :
It was with human needs in mind that the animals had been carefully designed and distributed. Camels, observed a preacher in 1696, had been sensibly allotted to Arabia, where there was no water, and savage beasts "sent to deserts, where they may do less harm." It was a sign of God's providence that fierce animals were less prolific than domestic ones and that they lived in dens by day, usually coming out only at night, when men were in bed. Moreover, whereas other members of wild species all looked alike, cows, horses, and other domestic animals had been conveniently variegated in color and shape, in order "that mankind may the more readily distinguish and claim their respective property. " The physician George Cheyne in 1705 explained that the Creator made the horse's excrement smell sweet, because he knew that men would often be in its vicinity.2
In striking contrast, the sharp division between humans and other animals that has dominated Western thought is alien to Eastern philosophy. In some of those traditions a reincarnated human soul can take many shapes and forms. A human can become a fish ; a fish can become a God. Thus, all living things are spiritually connected. Lacking a religion that grants souls only to one species, Eastern philosophers readily accepted the notion that our species is historically linked to others.
Even in the West, most children do not share the view that a great gap exists between humans and other animals. "Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals. Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals. Uninhibited as they are in the avowal of their bodily needs, they no doubt feel themselves more akin to animals than to their elders, who may well be a puzzle to them. "3
The fact that human bodily functions are shared with animals is, not surprisingly, one of the many challenges to the belief in an unbridgeable gap between humans and other animals. One response has been to propose that other fundamental differences trump the obvious metabolic similarities. One interesting 'solution' was to suggest that physical modesty about bodily functions distinguished humans from beasts. A passage in the diary of New England clergyman Cotton Mather, written in 1700, illustrates this perspective :
I was once emptying the cistern of nature, and making water at the wall. At the same time there came a dog, who did so too, before me. Thought I; "What mean and vile things are the children of men.... How much do our natural necessities debase us, and place us... on the same level with the very dogs."
My thought proceeded. "Yet I will be a more noble creature ; and at the very time when my natural necessities debase me into the condition of the beast, my spirit shall (I say at that very time! ) rise and soar"....
Accordingly, I resolved that it should be my ordinary practice, whenever I step to answer one or the other necessity of nature to make it an opportunity of shaping in my mind some holy, noble, divine thought....
In the nineteenth century, one of the great arguments against vaccination was that inoculation with fluid from cows would result in the 'animalization' of human beings. Why eating other species, a nearly universal practice among those who opposed vaccination, did not have the same effect was never explained! Bestiality became a capital offense in Britain in 1534 and, with one brief interval, remained so until 1861. Incest, by contrast, was not a secular crime at all until the twentieth century. Though these and other beliefs about the gap between humans and other species may seem quaint to us now, some of today's defenses of the gap will probably seem equally quaint to our descendants.
Labels: Nature and human nature
