Chapter 16: Why it matters that you are a human animal

Greeting, hypothetical newborn baby!  I have returned with yet another lesson on a most ambitious topic: the meaning of life . . . Just kidding. That would be so very pretentious because I don’t even claim to understand that question.  Instead, I’m here once again to teach you some of the many Life Lessons I was forced to learn at the School of Hard Knocks. These are ideas that I constantly lean on in order to navigate my way through life so far, and I’m in my 65th year, which ought to be worth something. This is my sixteenth lesson and you can find all my lesson here. 

Back in Chapter 4, I broke it to you that you are an animal. Back in Chapter 11, I further broke to you that you are not some sort of half-ethereal magical hybrid. You are not a god who burps and farts. You are a humble yet honorable ape about to strut your way across a cosmic stage that is about 80 years long.

Here are three very important things about you, all of them related to your animality:

• The mind is inherently embodied. 
• Thought is mostly unconscious.   
• Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical and see here.

We’ve discussed all of these things a bit but we are nowhere close to being done with these hot topics.  In fact, they are so incredibly hot that many people complain that reading them makes it feel like their heads are about to explode. Most of these complainers aren’t comfortable that they are made of biomass. They know in a very personal way that they are animals, because they eat and poop and procreate in ways similar to many of the animals they see on David Attenborough’s nature documentaries  They know all of this, but they don’t like it one bit, which will be explore in a later chapter on Terror Management Theory. Large numbers of people want to pretend that their thought process somehow floats over their bodies, boundless and free to think thoughts entirely unrelated to the exquisitely complex operation of their three-pound brains. They prefer to think of themselves as gods with pimples and anuses and smartphones.

This common attitude that it is icky to be an animal is rather unhinged. There is nothing bad about being an animal, except that we will someday all be dead. Everybody you see tomorrow will be dead in 200 years. Maybe it’s true that dead animals are icky. Fair enough.  But all living human animals should be thanking their stars that they appeared here on this planet, a matter of profound luck. They get to live lives using their amazing animal bodies. That is not enough for many people, however. They don’t have any problem calling animals animals. Not until they get to human animals.  This insistence that we should make an exception for our own species is called the “human reticence effect,” described here by Evolutionary Psychologist Gad Saad on one of his feisty podcasts:

The human reticence effect: It’s perfectly okay to apply evolutionary principles to explain one million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine species, but if you apply to study one species called humans, well then, you are Himmler and you’re a Nazi. And so E.O. Wilson, in daring to apply incredibly rigorous and profound evolutionary principles to explain incredible animal behavior, including some very puzzling animal behavior, once he used that framework to apply it to human behavior, then he was a persona non grata which, of course, is exactly what you see 45 years later with evolutionary psychologists. If you apply a principle to study the evolution of mating behavior of the salamander then, bru!, you’re a great scientist! If you apply the exact same mechanism, the same methodology, the same epistemology, to study the evolution of human mating in humans, well then, “Come on, bro’” that’s just faux science. It’s “Nazi science” it’s “pseudoscience.” I have written about why people have these emotional and cognitive obstacles to accept the application of evolutionary principles to the study of human behavior in much of my scientific work.

I would recommend that you read some Gad Saad once you learn how to babble, say words and learn how to hold a spoon of crushed smushed carrots. BTW, kudos on the honesty you will be showing for at least your first few years on Earth. If you don’t like those smushed carrots, you will look straight at those big people who handed them to you and you will tell them what you think in a loud and unvarnished baby way!  Please never give up that ability to say what you are thinking, from now until you become a cranky old neotomous primate, OK?

Primatologist Frans de Waal, who has seen a lot of apes in his life, would concur with Gad Saad.

Darwin wasn’t just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes—he didn’t go far enough . . .  We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament.

We do all the things the other animals do—just go read John Alcock’s most recent textbook on animal behavior  and you will, with minor tweaks here and there, the story of you. Hanging onto this belief that you are an animal (based on irrefutable evidence, including your many vestigial ancestor physical features) will protect you from unending fear-based cultural mischief.

About 20 years ago, I made a friend uncomfortable when I mentioned many of the things I’m telling you. She thought that it detracted from our human-ness that we were animals and that we were figuring out, more and more, how cognition works. She felt that we were pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz and that this act ruined the magic. I feel the opposite. I feel that by having a deeper understanding it enhances the magic. It’s the same way I (because I’m also a musician) more fully appreciate the talent and complexity of great musicians and the techniques and theory that they employ to move us with their sounds.

What I’m really here today to tell you some of the main reasons that it’s important for you to understand that you are a human animal.  OK, here we go. Here’s why it is important for you to take it to (your animal) heart that you are 100% animal. Philosopher Mark Johnson will be our tour guide for this adventure based on Chapter 12 of Mark Johnson’s new book, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding.  Here are my closes paraphrases of Johnson’s main points:

1. 1. Mind and body are not two things. The mind “is not a mysterious metaphysical guest that just happens to drop in for a temporary visit at the home of the body.” A human being is not a body plus a mind. Rather, it is a “body-mind.”
   2. Human meaning is embodied. It is possible to understand meaning only because we learn meanings “at the most primordial bodily level. Things are meaningful by virtue of their relations to other actual or possible qualities, feelings, emotions, images, image schemas and concepts.” We never cease accessing meaning through feeling, even while we communicate using abstract concepts.
   3. Understanding and reasoning are embodied. Ideas don’t float over our heads. Our meaning-making capacities are entirely embodied and infused with emotion, as we discussed in Chapter 11. “Our resources for making sense of our world are based primarily on our sensory motor capacities, which have neural connections to other parts of the brain responsible for planning, deliberating and reasoning.
   4. Human beings are metaphorical creatures. Johnson, a co-author of Metaphors We Live By (1980), reminds us that “conceptual metaphor is a nearly omnipresent part of the human capacity for abstract conceptualization and reasoning. As Johnson and co-George Lakoff have brilliantly and repeatedly shown, “metaphor shows up in virtually all our abstract thinking.” The fact that we depend on conceptual metaphor must be contrasted with “literalism” causes people to reject the importance of conceptual metaphor. Literalism claims that all our concepts can be spelled out clearly, which is false, misleading and very dangerous [because] literalism lies at the heart of fundamentalism.”
   5. There is no absolute truth but there are plenty of human truths. Johnson makes a strong case in this book, and elsewhere, that “human life does not require absolute truths.”  Neither science, nor morality, nor philosophy, nor politics, nor spirituality really need absolute truths, even though most of our traditional theories in these areas assume that they are founded on absolute (disembodied, universal, eternal) truths. Human truth, by contrast, arises in the context of human inquiry, relies on embodied meaning, and is relative to our values and interests. We need far more than a brain to understand each other. We need our entire bodies, and meaning reverberate down to our bones.
   6. Human freedom. Johnson challenges the idea of the Kantian notion of “radical freedom.” This is Kant’s view that “we are, or possess, a transcendent ego that is the locus of our capacity to negate any bodily, social, or cultural influence, habit or tendency.” Many people believe in this radical freedom because it supports their notion of moral responsibility and religious aspirations. This belief is disproved by a simple experiment you can do in 10 seconds.  OK, you just had a thought. Did you consciously decide to think that thought? You know that you didn’t decide this in any coherent meaning of the word “decide.” Johnson argues for a “naturalistic idea of the body-mind as [giving us] a modest freedom to contribute to transformations of our situation, and therefore to self-transformations.”
   7. The person you are cannot survive the death of your body. Johnson recognizes that this is a “controversial and distressing” idea for many people. To the extent that anything survives your death, Johnson argues that “it could not be the you that we know and love,” because that you is possible only due to the workings of your human brain engaged with its human-related environment.  Johnson points out that a brainless soul “would lack your memories, your experience, your emotions and your grasp of the meaning of things.
   8. Embodied spirituality. Johnson rejects “vertical transcendence,” which he describes as the “alleged capacity to rise above and shed our finite human form and to ”plug into the infinite.”  Johnson would allow for “horizontal transcendence,” the ability to sometimes “go beyond our present situation in transformative acts that change both our world and ourselves.” Horizontal transcendence relates to our ability to see ourselves as part of a broader human and more-than-human ongoing process in which change, creativity, and growth of meaning are possible. Faith thus becomes faith in the possibility of genuine, positive transformation that increases richness of meanings, harmony among species, and foraging, not just at the human level, but in the world as an ongoing creative development . . . none of this is grounded in the infinite, but rather in the creative possibilities of finite human experience. It gives each of us more good work to do than we can possibly realize within our lifetime.  In short, we can leave our imprint in this world after we die, but it’s only because of the work we’ve done on earth before our brains die.  No hovering.  No ghostly meddling post-death.
   9. Philosophy as a search for meaning. Johnson recognizes that we are seriously limited as embodied creatures. We delude ourselves to the extent that we search for “absolute truth.” Embodied meaning and mind limit us to reflecting on “the fullest, richest, deepest meaning of experience,” as a way of helping us deal with the real problems of human existence that define our existential condition. This is the hallmark of genuine pragmatist philosophy, which is about “discerning the full meaning of experience and transforming experience for the better.”

So there you have it, even though this information came at you hard and fast, in summary form. We will be discussing many of these things more in coming chapters.

When you get older, you will have dental hygienists working on your teeth. These chapters are your brain-flossing. I am helping you to get clear on some amazing reality-based foundational thoughts. If you take these thoughts seriously, you will be preparing yourself  to hear and reject endless streams of fear-based nonsense that adults are gearing up to jam into your brain in coming years.  They would prefer that you parrot their stories in fear, gathered and facing inward like a big circle like emperor penguins.  In a thousand ways, they will demand that you say that you are not “merely” an animal, as though it is an insult to be an animal. Look in your play-station mirror every day and try to say this: “I am an exquisite human animal with an exciting life ahead of me!”

Now go hither and keep doing human animal things, because those are the only types of things any human animal has ever done.