How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human - Softcover

Challenger, Melanie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143134353 ISBN 13: 9780143134350

Verlag: Penguin Books, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

“A remarkable combination of biology, genetics, zoology, evolutionary psychology and philosophy.” —Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory

“A brilliant, thought-provoking book.” —Matt Haig, New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library
 
A wide-ranging take on why humans have a troubled relationship with being an animal, and why we need a better one

Human are the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive, and baffling animals on the planet. But we are also an animal that does not think it is an animal. How well do we really know ourselves?

How to Be Animal tells a remarkable story of what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our existence is a profound struggle with being animal. We possess a psychology that seeks separation between humanity and the rest of nature, and we have invented grand ideologies to magnify this. As well as piecing together the mystery of how this mindset evolved, Challenger's book examines the wide-reaching ways in which it affects our lives, from our politics to the way we distance ourselves from other species. We travel from the origin of homo sapiens through the agrarian and industrial revolutions, the age of the internet, and on to the futures of AI and human-machine interface. Challenger examines how technology influences our sense of our own animal nature and our relationship with other species with whom we share this fragile planet.

That we are separated from our own animality is a delusion, according to Challenger. Blending nature writing, history, and moral philosophy, How to Be Animal is both a fascinating reappraisal of what it means to be human, and a robust defense of what it means to be an animal.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Melanie Challenger works as a researcher on the history of humanity and the natural world, and on environmental philosophy. She is the author of On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature. She received a Darwin Now Award for her research among Canadian Inuit and the Arts Council International Fellowship with the British Antarctic Survey for her work on the history of whaling. She lives with her family in England. Challenger is the host of the  “Enter the Psychosphere” podcast, where she dives into the world of the diverse intelligences that exist on the planet in conversations with guests like Peter Godfrey Smith and Daniel Dennett.

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The Indelible Stamp

 

Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system - with all these exalted powers - Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

 

Charles Darwin

 

The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn't think it's an animal. And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn't want to be an animal. This matters. From the first flakes chipped from stone in the hands of walking apes at least several million years ago, history has arrived at a hairless primate with technologies that can alter the molecules of life.

 

These days, humans are agents of evolution with far greater powers than sexual selection or selective breeding. Thanks to breakthroughs in genomics and gene-editing technologies, the biology of animals, including humans, can be rewritten in various ways. We have created rodents with humanised livers or brains partly composed of human cells. We've made salmon that grow to our timetable. Scientists can sculpt DNA to drive lethal mutations throughout a whole population of wild animals.

 

Meanwhile, the rest of the living world is in crisis. In our oceans, our forests, our deserts and our plains, many other species are declining at unprecedented rates. In geological terms, we're an Ice Age, a huge metamorphic force. Our cities and industries have left their imprint in the soil, in the cells of deep-sea creatures, in the distant particles of the atmosphere. The trouble is we don't know the right way to behave towards life. This uncertainty exists in part because we can't decide how other life forms matter or even if they do.

 

All that humans have tended to agree on is that we are somehow exceptional. Humans have lived for centuries as if we're not animals. There's something extra about us that has unique value, whether it's rationality or consciousness. For religious societies, humans aren't animals but creatures with a soul. Supporters of secular creeds like humanism make much of their liberation from superstition. Yet the majority rely on species membership as if it is a magical boundary.

 

This move has always been beset by problems. But, as time has passed, it has become harder to justify. Most of us act according to intuitions or principles that human needs outrank those of any other living thing. But when we try to isolate something in the human animal and turn it into a person or a moral agent or a soul, we create difficulties for ourselves. We can end up with the mistaken belief that there is something non-biological about us that is ultimately good or important. And that has taken us to a point where some of us seek to live forever or enhance our minds or become machines.

 

None of this is to say that there aren't clear differences between us and everything else. Our conscious encounter with the world is a breathtaking fact of how life can evolve. We chat together about abstract concepts and chip images of ourselves out of rock. Like the beauty that a murmuration of starlings possesses, our experience seems to be more than the sum of our parts. From childhood onwards, we have a sense of identity, a kaleidoscope of memories. The sorts of skills and knowledge we bring into play in living and reproducing include the ability to fantasise and deceive, control certain urges and imagine the future. Through a blend of senses, emotions, hidden impulses and intimate narrative, we dream and we anticipate. The human mind is an amazing natural phenomenon. Yet our kind of intelligence - having a subjective consciousness, among other things - does more than just enrich our experience of life. It provides far greater flexibility in our behaviour than might be possible without it, most especially with each other.

 

Little wonder then that we have spent much of history asserting that human experience has a meaning and value that is lacking in the rigid lives of other animals. Surely there is something about us that can't be reduced to simple animal stuff? Some might say that stripped of culture we become more obviously akin to the other creatures on Earth, relying on wits and body to get the energy to remain alive. Many works of art have aimed to teach that lesson, needling the imagination with the image of a human at the mercy of the forces of the natural world. But even so, we recognise that this individual has a potential for awareness that is unique in what we know - so far - of life in the universe. Here we have it. The exhilarating oddness of being something so obviously related to everything around us, and yet so convincingly different.

 

We are the mythical being our ancestors once painted on rock - a therianthrope, part animal, part god. There is the animal body, the bit of us that bleeds and ages, and then there is the exceptional bit that seems to come from our intelligence and self-awareness, our spirit. As American political scientist George Kateb has written, we are 'the only animal species that is not only animal, the only species that is partly not natural'. This idea can be found everywhere. We are animals as we embrace and as our bloodied newborns slide from the bodies of women but not when we make vows. We are animals as we bite into the flesh of our meal but not in the workplace. We are animals on the operating table but not when we speak of justice. This split in the human condition, we are told, has not only saved us from the meaningless lives of other creatures but forms the basis of the world we inhabit. It has raised us to the highest position in a hierarchy of life. It has left us with the impression that the human world is rich while the animal world is its pale shadow. And this has opened the way to a worldview in which our flourishing is the ultimate good.

 

It is, of course, perfectly possible to believe that humans are animals with no special origin or meaning, even peculiarly rapacious animals that the world would be better off without. But people rarely behave in accordance with this view - in other words, they usually continue to live as if the human world has meaning and rules of conduct that can be better or worse.

 

Perhaps it ought to end there. Yet we remain haunted. Many of our most common beliefs spring from an underlying refusal to accept that we are organic beings. Our kind of awareness has left us uncomfortable with the facts of an animal life. Animals suffer and die according to random events. Being a creature related to everything from an oak tree to a jellyfish brings with it threats like pathogens, injury, physical change and - for us - moral uncertainty. All that we love and value must be tugged out of an untamed landscape. This is both frightening and confusing. From this perspective, being animal is an embarrassment. Worse still, it is a danger.

 

Yet history has given us hope that we are different from the rest of the earthly rabble. What we truly are will save us from the fate of animals. Where other animals must suffer and perish, we have the gift of deliverance, whether into heaven, a glorious future or even merging with machines. We can be more than our animal bodies or our organic nature. What is important about us is somehow protected from the natural forces over which we fear we have no power. But this creates a strange amnesia. In convincing ourselves that there's a real and radical dividing line between us and all other organisms, we seem an impenetrable mystery.

 

Because of this, our relationship with being an animal is nothing less than bizarre. Most of us feel a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0143134353
• ISBN 13: 9780143134350
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 260
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Harder; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland