Stupid Human Tricks
Metadata
Highlights
- Furthermore, “no evidence from the natural world has arrived to support our [exalted] view of ourselves,” Challenger writes. “By and large, quite the opposite has happened.” Other animals continually mock our self-deceptions by proving that they can do much of what we do, as well as a dazzling multitude of things we can’t, like fly or breathe underwater. Wild birds know each other’s names. Elephants don’t just use tools but make them. Chimps have short-term memories far better than ours. Bacteria are capable of learning and can anticipate future conditions. For the most part, we’re undaunted
- “While humans have tended to have an idea of humanity as special,” Challenger writes, ominously and accurately, “they have not always agreed on who gets to be human.”
- A human’s notion—any human’s notion—of objectivity and reason is highly suspect by evolutionary design, which promotes selective empathy as a way of making us better predators and more cunning social operators. The capacity to divine what other individuals may think, feel, and do is indispensable for intra- and interspecific success, but “there are limits on our willingness to see into the lives of others, most especially if we want to use or attack them.” Any insight is sieved through the screen of our desire, whether it is to help, hurt, or deceive.
- As Challenger frames it, “all that we do, we do as animals. But we justify it as humans” with “the intuition of an animal whose greatest interests lie with its own kind.” This dissonance yields profound dysfunction, as the whole of How to Be Animal attests. It has led us to describe our bodies, our planet, and our fellow creatures as both inimical and extraneous.
- We are impermanence itself, a consciousness that flickers like a flame never fully formed, “the temporary watchers of a life force that somehow knows what to do in our absence” and in the absence that is our presence, too.