I’m carrying on a mostly-cordial argument over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable with a fellow named Michael M, an Objectivist and admirer of Ayn Rand.
I’ve been an admirer of Ayn Rand too – I think she was brilliant in the extreme – but I don’t revere her, as some people surely do. Some things, in my opinion, she simply got wrong.
This is my most recent answer to one of Michael’s points, that humans have reason and free will whereas animals have nothing but instincts.
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Okay, this is absolutely, positively my last 2,000 words on the subject. 🙂
Seriously, one of the problems with replying to the arguments of a, for instance, anti-evolution type, is that they can pop out with a single sentence that contains three major mistakes, each of which can take pages to explain and correct.
So I’m focusing again on a single issue:
Both personification, as you use it here (“personifying”), and the related term “anthropomorphism” contain the mistaken view of a bright line between “humans” and “animals.”
There’s just about nothing that humans have that isn’t present somewhere in the collection of our fellow critters. Make a list of all our traits and compare it with the list of traits available in chimpanzees or apes, and the difference will be something like the difference between two identical houses, one painted blue and the other unpainted. The paint is the exclusively human part, and it ain’t that much.
What I mean is, most of our traits are not specifically “human” traits, but are instead various beastly traits. Your elbow, for instance, is not a human elbow – you can find that same joint as far back as early amphibians. The wrist you think is a human wrist is so common you can find it in raccoons and squirrels.
Search through the human body for totally unique physical attributes and you won’t find many. Livers, lungs, 4-chambered hearts, eyes, ears, testicles in a bag outside the body – these things are different only in size, loose general shape, and biochemical details. And even the biochemical details are extremely close. We’re so like “animals” biochemically that our young can drink their milk, our diabetics can use their insulin.
Assuming there’s nothing mystical about us – and there isn’t – and assuming a similarity that extends to brain morphology, which there is, this same sharing of physical traits has to extend into the mental. And it does.
Animals have personality. Recent experiments say they do, but this is something even children can notice. Animals can have memory as good as, and in some cases, better than ours. To one degree or another, they can have our same set of feelings. They can have pattern recognition abilities as good as ours. Animals can have the ability to make decisions.
Think momma bear gently licks her cubs the way she does, rather than eat them, because clockwork mechanisms in her head – instincts – tell her to? Not quite. Sure, biochemical pathways kick off mothering behavior, but it’s the same sort of biochemical pathways that human mothers experience, the behavior and feelings we call motherly love.
Think a squirrel dashing across a lawn and up a tree to escape a pursuing dog does it because a series of automatic triggers in its head – its “survival instinct” – forces it to do that? Actually, you’re probably right, but those same triggers happen in a man fleeing up a tree to escape that momma bear. We have a survival instinct too, and from the inside in such a situation, the triggering of that instinct FEELS to us like fear.
There’s little reason to suppose it feels any different to the squirrel. The brain structures are there, the brain chemistry is there, the revealing behavior is there. From inside, the operation of all those automatic behaviors produces feelings. We can know this as surely as we know other humans have feelings (and note that this knowing is not always a sure thing, which suggests to me that denial of the possibility of feelings in animals is the same sort of denial of feelings we all too often use against each other).
We have certain gifts that are different in degree from animals – the one we always brag about, for instance, higher intelligence, and the one we always forget about, higher compassion (our extreme capacity for which is unmatched elsewhere in the “animal” kingdom). But differences that are sharp and vast, we have very few.
Even language, a subset of the broader set of “communication,” the second you start looking for it among animals, you find it. For social animals, there’s very little they do in the company of their fellows which is NOT a communication of some kind or another. Communication is so common even bees and ants do it. No, it’s not the full grammatical subject-predicate-etc. sentences we think of when we think of communication. But it is the conveyance of meaning and mood, one creature to another. Research says not only is this so, but that in a number of species, the individuals communicating in both directions, “talker” and “listener,” both know it.
Conversely, for communication between humans, quite a lot of that is also not specifically language. We gesture, we shift our posture, we project meaning and emotion with our faces, we even use vocal nuances which are an added sideband to the spoken words. With these sidebands we can even convey meaning which is directly opposite to the spoken words: “Oh, I just LOVE that dress. It’s just PRECIOUS.”
Much, probably most, of the thinking that goes on in our own brains is not linguistic. I’m damned good with language … but I also know from observing my own thought processes that non-linguistic thought is as common as dirt. I translate a certain amount of what goes through my head into language, but I can spend hours thinking about fairly sophisticated specifically-human things without using words – just as an athlete, a race car driver, an automechanic, a sculptor, a mathematician, a physicist, a ballet dancer, or even an actor, can. Each of those people can carry out very human, very thoughtful activities, and do them for long periods of time without using language.
Ask any dancer what dance is, and I’ll bet every one of them will tell you dance is communication. The dancer performs a specifically human monologue before her audience, not one “word” of which is words. Even if she were talking to herself nonstop “Okay, now leap over there, now spin this way, now move my arm like this, now jump up and down in that funny, crooked way,” the message projected at her audience is not linguistic.
The problem behind this whole discussion is this:
There was an invisible bias woven into our shared conceptual set during our earliest recorded cogitations of animals, the bias of “They’re vastly different from us.”
We had to choose one or the other, I guess. Either “they’re vastly different” or “they’re really similar.” Did we pick the one that made the most sense, or only the one that made us feel the most unique and special?
I suspect it was a bias that was less prevalent when we were nomadic, or hunter-gatherers – when we lived among animals – and only appeared when we moved into cities. The romantic notion of Native Americans calling a bear or a bison “brother” is a remnant of what was probably the original view. We lived among animals as another animal, both predator and prey, and were bright enough to have a certain amount of sympathy and empathy for the ones we had to kill to survive. Because we ourselves sometimes suffered in the same way.
Having worked with cattle and horses and dogs, I can tell you they all have feelings. Really. At base, just like the ones we have. It’s likely those feelings feel to them pretty much the same way ours feel to us. A cow separated from a calf on branding day doesn’t just bawl to hear its own voice – it does it because it FEELS anxiety. Whether a city person can read their expressions or notice their feelings, or not, is a complete side issue to the core reality. Elephant trainers are extremely aware of the feelings of elephants … because the day a trainer ignores the feelings of his 5-ton charge is the day he might just find himself squashed into bloody muck.
One result of this city-dweller bias was the concept of anthropomorphism, the accusation that the observer is attributing to animals certain traits which are understood to be exclusively human … until proven otherwise.
If that earlier view had instead been “They’re really similar to us,” we wouldn’t even have the concept of anthropomorphism. Everyone would recognize that the person who accused you of projecting “human” traits onto an “animal,” was himself making the mistakes of, first, attributing exclusively to humans these traits which are older than the human species and broadly shared out among our beastly cohort, and second, wrongly accusing YOU of misappropriating them and sharing them unjustly with animals.
To give one example, it’s astonishing to me that a woman can experience sex, pregnancy, birth and then breastfeeding, and NOT see the extreme commonality she shares with almost every other female mammal on the planet. For a man to experience the range of feelings and athletics associated with sex and not to believe that bulls and boars, hamsters and horses experience something very much the same is just … incredible. All the practices and sensations we experience might make us feel that we’re in some absolutely exclusive club, but other than explicit verbalizations such as “Oh God, oh God, oh God!” or “Who’s your daddy!? Who’s your daddy!”, little of human reproduction is exclusively human. We believe otherwise because we’re city people, too disconnected from fellow species to be able to see things clearly.
The simple fact is that “animals” share a lot of our supposedly “human” traits. The continuity suggested by – shouted by – evolution demands it. Recognizing those shared traits is not anthropomorphizing. It’s just seeing what’s there.
As to those other exclusively human traits, reason and free will:
We have both … in potential. But you and I both know that many people, possibly even most people, don’t use them. We have the POTENTIAL for reason, but a lot of us don’t use it … because reason takes a certain amount of training and a lot of difficult, continuous work. We have the POTENTIAL for free will, but most of us allow ourselves to be puppets … because free will is also very hard work.
Take an overweight young man who smokes and is a mild alcoholic, a sports fanatic who watches three hours of ESPN a night, listens to nothing but country music, agrees with everything Rush Limbaugh says, jumps into every new fad that comes along (he’s finally given up his mullet but he now has face piercings and ten tattoos, and he STILL won’t drive anything but a Ford pickup), can you really say he’s a reasoning human being? Or that he has anything recognizable as free will? I’m not 100% sure you can. At times I’m not even sure the term “conscious human being” is entirely accurate. We ourselves call such follow-alongs “sheep” – and we’re not kidding.
And again, this assertion that “humans have no instincts and animals have nothing but” has never been accurate, but it also no longer enjoys scientific acceptance.
If you believe it, it’s worth doing some reading on recent discoveries in animal cognition and psychology, because you have a seriously mistaken idea. If you base broader arguments on it, those arguments are also likely to be faulty.
It doesn’t matter how strongly you want to hew to Objectivism or Ayn Rand, or how internally consistent your personal philosophy is.
What matters, I’d think, is what’s true and real.
Brilliant as she was, Rand got a few things wrong — some of them because she wasn’t in possession of all the facts. I’m not disagreeing with all of it. Just this one small part: She was wrong in some ways about animals and instincts.