What Makes Us Human?
So last night I tweeted that I needed a break from humanity and was gonna watch some good ol’ David Attanborough nature documentaries. I selected the classic “Trials of Life” series and went for the episode on Living Together. I figured some inspiring examples of inter-species cooperation would be just what the doctor ordered. It worked wonders.
Then this morning I check my email and find my daily question from the Gaia social network that’s crafted to illicit a thoughtful bit of daily blog writing on the service. I usually pass, but today’s was “What makes us human,” so I just couldn’t resist. Below is my response:
SImply, our desire and ability to call ourselves as such. As long as there are those who choose to identify with the myriad of traits, habits, and physicality known as human, then there will be humans.
For me, what makes us alive would be a more interesting and satisfying question than what makes us human. No doubt, humanity as a species has managed what would seem to be a unique feat in its ability to perceive and adopt nearly every evolutionary strategy we observe in the world. But it remains that none of these strategies, abilities, or modes of being were invented by humanity. We have simply collected all of life’s/evolution’s hard-earned knowledge and experience into a single vantage point.
This could be considered exceptional, but it could also be seen as selfish, greedy, arrogant, a fatal flaw even. In the words of Sir David Attenborough when speaking of the many species that have learned to live cooperative existences with other species, “We ourselves have very few such relationships, voluntarily, with other species of animals. Except of course with those animals that we have domesticated and enslaved. But back in our evolutionary past we doubtless had many. Today maybe, we think we’re so powerful, or have become so detached from nature that we think we no longer need them.”
I would say that it is our need to identify as human, to separate ourselves and consider our species as somehow something more than all the forms of life that is our tragic, perhaps fatal flaw. As in the timeless story of King Lear, it is only naked ambition and blind pride that allows one to believe the earth is one’s own to cast dominion over, to divide up, to offer as a gift to our offspring, and for this, a day of reckoning surely awaits.
