My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #8, August, 1996

ONLY HUMANS

This is our mission: to be the darlings of God Shriekback

When we screw up, we like to excuse ourselves by saying that, after all, we're only human. Except that all our actions make it clear that, really, what we want to be is more than human. We seem to need to believe our species is the top of the world, the pinnacle of creation. We want to say, with Carl Sandburg, "We are the greatest city, the greatest nation, nothing like us ever was."

Consider the amount of mind power that has been exerted throughout history in asking and answering the question, how are human beings different from (and greater than) other species. The question has been dealt with by theologians, philosophers, and scientists. During the Renaissance, our greatest thinkers accepted the notion of a "great chain of being" in which human beings were above all the other animals, but below the angels, archangels and God.

The problem here is that the more scientists learn about other species the more it becomes apparent that we are a lot more like other animals than we thought. For a long time, we considered ourselves superior by virtue of our toolmaking abilities--until we learned of animals that use sticks as tools to dig ants out from inside trees. We boasted of our intelligence, until we saw far too many examples of intelligent action in the animal kingdom. (I think of my elderly cat who, outraged by having a kitten introduced into his household, showed his disfavor by depositing his deceased prey on the neighbors' front porch instead of ours. A clear statement that, if he could be replaced in our affections, well, so could we in his.)

We could claim music, but it is not uniquely ours--the birds outdo us all the time. We could claim art and architecture, but what do we say then about the exquisite constructions of spiders and ants? We could claim our families and tribes and governments, but then we have to explain how they differ in any significant way from colonies of gorillas or lions.

We believed our language capabilities were unique. But then a psychologist taught a gorilla to use sign language (as detailed in the book The Education of Koko). The gorilla learned not just to use words, but to rearrange them in new, but still grammatical, patterns, and used this new ability not just to ask for food but to make jokes, and even to teach another gorilla signs. This whole experiment caused desperate anxiety and denial among linguists, who insisted that this was, nonetheless, not "language" Koko was using, but some reflexive sort of mimickry.

Still, all this desperate denial suggests we really need to find that distinction that makes us superior to all other life forms. So, for the gratification of the fragile human ego, I offer a few humble suggestions:

1. We may well be unique in seeking to expunge dirt. After all, dirt is part of all the natural world. Such gods as may exist appear to look with equal favor on humans, cockroaches and slime molds, creating an abundance of them all. Mother Nature herself is an appallingly messy old broad, strewing flower petals, seeds, and dead leaves around with Abandon (her evil twin). Yet only human beings have been moved to invent the mop, the broom, the vacuum cleaner, and dishwashing detergent. (Well, female human beings, anyway. Little boys are firmly on Mother Nature's side of this equation.)

2. We may not be the only tool-using creatures, but we are surely first and foremost in our love of gadgets. Only humans play with electric trains; only humans invented the Erector set; only humans fall in love with things that flash lights and go beep. Therefore only humans came up with the computer and the internet. (And yes, we are primarily talking about male human beings here.)
   
   
3. We are as far as we know the only creatures that write our language down, and thus can pass our knowledge to people we will never meet--people who are not yet born, people who live in other countries, or even other worlds. When you are asked the old desert island question, if you were stranded on a desert island, what ten books would you like to have along, would your answer not include a treatise on how to build a raft or sailboat? And in the event of the total breakdown of all electronic calculating systems, as sometimes posited by science fiction stories, would you not like to have a book about how to use a slide rule? (If you are under 30 you may have to go ask a grown-up what a slide-rule is.)
   
   
4. We may not be the only species to make music, but we did perfect the rock concert, the music video, the string quartet and the opera. We may not originate the concept of music, but we sure do organize the hell out of it. Not to mention making money at it.
   
   
5. We move stuff around. Unlike animals, who have to be within reach of their food and water, we arrange for our food and water to pretty much come to us. We divide our labor so that some folks pump water, and some build pipelines for it and some dump chemicals in it to purify it and some install and fix the faucets the rest of us get it out of. And of course, some do rain dances and pray for it to fall from the sky.
   
   
6. We are the creators of images. As far as we know, from our earliest days in the caves, we painted pictures and carved sculptures of ourselves and of our world and of our gods. We still do, only now we do it with photographs and motion pictures and videos (the gods someplace along the line turned into Arnold Schwarzenegger and Cindy Crawford). And the rest of us, the audience for images, began to try to remake ourselves to match these images.
   
   
7. We created Godiva chocolates, and New York Cheesecake, and carrot cake and chocolate bourbon pecan pie. We figured out what yeast was good for, and all over the world, we independently discovered how to make breads--pumpernickel, challe, stollen, bagels, corn bread. We created pizza and nachos and goulash and matzoh ball soup. I ask you, could an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of kitchen counters come up with all of that?
   
   
8. We're inventive. Of course, we had to be. We didn't start life with fur, so we had to figure out clothes. Our natural, inborn weapons--cold feet and toenails--are pathetic, so we had to figure out things like fire and spears and guns to scare predators away. We figured out how to store and preserve our food so that we didn't have to drift from place to place, munching on everything in sight until we'd eaten it all (nowadays it's only our teenagers that do this).
   
   
9. We are the meaning-makers. We endlessly go around asking why--why death? why me? why does the sun come up in the east? We create images of gods, perhaps to have someone to ask our questions to. We need to believe that things make sense, that there is an order in the world, that, if we can only understand it, we can also control it. (This is why, when our computers do crazed things, we blame ourselves and not God or Bill Gates--but I repeat myself). And, as far as we know, dolphins and cows do not go around asking themselves in what ways they are superior to all other life forms.

I'm not sure why it's so important to us to think we're better than other life forms, or why we need to believe we are the darlings of God. But, if it makes us feel better, the human attributes I've listed do make us unique.

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