An antidote to how to#

This is a far more dangerous delusion than anything dreamed up in a church. Yet now we’re told that everything should make way for humankind’s greatest invention: artificial intelligence. If we no longer see into the lives of other animals, it’s not because they don’t have minds or we can’t. It’s common to hear that while science tells us that we are animals subject to the same laws as other organisms, humans are “uniquely unique.” In this way, scientists swallow Darwinism but remain immune to its effects.Ī century after Henry Beston wrote of other animals that “in a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” Challenger considers how we grew so blind to the dazzling gifts of our kin and so antagonistic of our very kinship in an epoch when we have come to identify more with our machines than with our fellow creatures: Solace could be found in the possibility that, as Thomas Huxley put it, we may be “from them” but we are not “of them.” This has been repeated in different forms ever since. One solution was to redirect the emphasis on to becoming human. Each scientific or intellectual threat to our singular status has been followed by a fracturing of existing beliefs and renewed efforts to ground the basis of our separation from the rest of life. History shows us that knowledge doesn’t necessarily lead to enlightenment but only to the search for a different source of light. Observing that the numinous cosmogony of hunter-gatherer cultures did not survive the transition to large agricultural societies, which turned nature from kin to resource, Challenger examines the origin of our destructive delusion of exceptionalism: Art by Isabelle Simler from The Blue Hour The human species is an integrated part of the life on our planet, not an exceptional creation by itself… If a kind of magic quickens the sinews of living things, then humans simply possess a share in a sacred cosmos. Instead, we are an animal that finds itself aware of being an animal bound into the dark tissues of time and energy. We know not only that the Earth is not the centre of the universe but that we are not the centre of life. This is a difficult thing to admit if we are raised on a belief in our distinction.Įchoing Loren Eiseley’s insistence that “nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness each one of us… repeats that miracle,” she adds: The truth is that being human is being animal. We are a creature of organic substance and electricity that can be eaten, injured and dissipated back into the enigmatic physics of the universe. Opening our eyes, we face the truth of what we are, a thinking and feeling colony of energy and matter wrapped in precious flesh that prickles when it’s cold or in love. We live behind a hidden membrane through which - at any moment - one of us may tumble to find ourselves on the other side. Art by Guridi from The Day I Became a Bird

An antidote to how to#

In How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human ( public library), poet turned environmental historian and philosopher of science Melanie Challenger traces our slow self-alienation from our own nature and invites an urgent recalibration of the organizing principles by which we perceive, respond to, and reverence the world. And yet in an age when we have come to see ourselves as disembodied intellects channeled by machines, we seem to have forgotten that there is a soft animal of the body, that it purrs with agency in every aspect of our lived experience, from hunger to love we seem to have forgotten that our intelligence is not the crowning curio of nature but just one particular accoutrement of one particular animal, while all about us are creatures “aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom… far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.” “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” Mary Oliver wrote in one of her finest poems.