We don’t often like to admit that we are animals by nature. ‘Men are dogs,’ the cliché goes; ‘women are…’ well, a different kind of dog, I guess, if you want me to be real crude about it. But we don’t like those associations. That’s the moralist in all of us—the social force of politeness and good that separates the dirty, narrow-minded beasts from us, the civilians. To what extent are we truly separate from the animals we cast beneath us? I may have fallen down the rabbit hole (as I do) about a week ago in researching the cerebral state of animals, so here are my findings: many experts now believe that most higher-level mammals are conscious. Some animals have even passed the mirror test, a psychological assessment developed in the 1970s to measure self-awareness in animals. The test is this: scientists put animals in front of a mirror, then take them away, draw a mark somewhere on them with scentless paint/marker, and finally put them back in front of the mirror to see how they react. If they recognize themselves, moving around to better see the mark or alternatively touching it to try and remove it, those would be indications that the animal has a sense of self. So far, most of the great apes have passed, as well as Asian elephants and, surprisingly, ants (http://animalcognition.org/2015/04/15/list-of-animals-that-have-passed-the-mirror-test/). But self-awareness is no definitive indication that animals possess self-consciousness: the capacity to contemplate one’s actions and one’s purpose, or even the ability to selectively recall memories for the sole purpose of witnessing them again.
So we’re not convinced that animals are like humans. Most would agree that there is a part of animals that is sheerly animal, though, as Annie Dillard documents in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: the way female praying mantises bite the head off their mate after doing the dirty deed (58), the grotesque tricks of the many parasitic insects I will spare you descriptions of (228-233), the way that gourds have an expanding pressure of 5000 pounds per square inch, or just over 340 atmospheres. (In other words, you would have to bind a growing gourd with the pressure of 340 skies in order to completely thwart its growth; 164). Nature characteristically suffers from extravagance, too, through the cruelty of evolution. What a creator we must have, Dillard muses, that to find the proper species to survive the world, myriad must be born and die helplessly, only pawns in an experiment. Think even of the leaves on the trees, never consumed to their fullest extent before being shed to the ground: it is “a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital” (65). Thus is Nature: animals commit cruel acts of violence, hurting others just in living their daily lives—sometimes out of necessity, sometimes by accident, and sometimes out of an instinct to destroy, or so it seems. They reproduce in multitudes as soon as they can (if they can), and then they grow insatiably—not letting anything get in the way of their progress—and then they die, maybe without realizing that they had ever lived.
Perhaps the biggest question is, to what extent are we like them? To what extent do we squander our lives growing insatiably, poisoning and consuming each other? Certainly, you say, the ideologies of society have tamed us, pushed aside our brutal instincts with its ethical impulses. We do not kill without need—not any true citizen of the world, anyway. But maybe we have only converted that violence to metaphor, driven the hunting and killing mentality underground to the very sub-structure of society, so that, as one Eskimo shaman put it, “men’s food consists entirely of souls” (239).
Look—I try hard not to be a cynic. I try to believe that there is good and bad in each of us, as long as we believe in those concepts at all. Perhaps there is a story behind every bad deed; we do wrong because we have been wronged. But it’s impossible to ignore the unceasing accounts of the immorality of human nature, from that of Thomas Hobbes to Niccolò Machiavelli. In the contemporary day, we see big business restricting people’s access to medications just to turn a profit, sometimes cutting short their lives in a thrust for power; far too many accounts of sexual abuse, like some kind of sick and primal outlet; and blatant discrimination towards fellow Americans to promote white European superiority, as if to threaten another species that had begun to compete for our niche. On an everyday scale, we devour each other with insults and jealousy and deceit, sometimes for revenge or power, and sometimes unwillingly, for expression of our pain; “I wonder how many bites I have taken, parasite and predator, from family and friends” (23). It’s what animals do, and it’s an important part of the natural system: we take what we need to make us feel alive and in control. To an extent, it is meant to be taken. It’s the natural order; all that lives shall die to preserve another life. The difference is that we humans are far more powerful than we can possibly imagine; we can destroy on a scale that animals can’t. That means destroying each other, as well as the world around us—anything that seems to hinder our growth, our control, and our superiority. And those instincts often outweigh the voice within us telling us it’s wrong.
That doesn’t mean we don’t struggle with it. From the days of mythic tribes, we have been grappling with the idea that to live, something must die: the meat we consume, the trees we cut down for shelter, the insects that fall beneath our feet. Many are at odds now with the society we’ve created, tormented by the fact that there are so many who are not free and can never be free, according to the way we’ve come to define it. We can’t cope with our own nature. We’ve implemented our own food chain into society, and we can’t deal with it, because we are forced to devour each other in the process. We have even put ourselves above Nature, not only in viewing animals as less than ourselves, but in polluting the very world that gave us life. The same way that animals kill to preserve their ways, we have killed to preserve ours—but in doing so, we have killed Nature. It is a bitter irony that, in dominating Mother Earth, we have at once played into the violent, domineering structure we were born out of and also repudiated it entirely. Through all of it, we resent ourselves for giving into our instinct to dominate and destroy.
Animals, on the other hand, partake in the natural order without complaint or restriction, even until their last end. After contemplating the gruesome parasites of the world and the copious amount of death experienced by creatures lower in the food chain, subject to the brutal force of evolution, Dillard questions, “Do the barnacle larvae care? Does the lacewing who eats her eggs care? If they do not care, then why am I making all this fuss?... It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death—emotions that appear to have devolved upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence” (178). They do not know what it means to live and die. How do we reconcile the dichotomy, navigate the unique sorrow of a creature never having lived enough to mourn its own death, or to love enough to mourn the death of others? What is the meaning? Perhaps their deaths hurt us more than them; perhaps they are at peace. That means that, in killing the Earth, we are really just killing ourselves, over and over again, living through the death of all animals in this ethical struggle, witnessing it over and over again with every polar ice cap that melts, until, of course, Mother Earth comes for us at last. We’d better save the Earth or learn how to die with it--learn how to subject ourselves to the new force of evolution we’ve created, like all the other animals will have to.
But through it all, they will not understand, and perhaps they will not care. In truth, life’s apotheosis—the only peace—is the absence of those existential questions at all—of any question, really. Oh, to be a barnacle: to live in the Real and not think about what that means, not even think about the fact that it’s real, or that it may live and die in our hands. I wonder if that’s a better existence, without the golden apple: a life characterized by absence, an ever-present. We can appreciate freedom in comparison to oppression—but likewise, they have a freedom which we can never fully understand, since they are unaware both of what freedom is and what its opposite looks like. No hate and no love, no compassion and no crime.
But we can’t un-eat the golden apple. Ideologies can be strong, but there is no ideology powerful enough to completely rob all people of their senses of self, once they’ve been bestowed upon us. Besides, that’s the final problem with consciousness: if it’s a curse of one, it’s a curse of all. If we chose to live without a self, we would be relinquishing our right to fight. We would be taken advantage of, hunted and killed and oppressed by those driven by only their instincts who refused to play by the rules. We would be subject to the cruelty of evolution and the natural order—only we wouldn’t see it as cruelty. But we have been blessed and cursed with this bitter game we cannot bring ourselves to quit: we are obliged to fight for our rights, to strive for the impossible dream, and to struggle endlessly with who we are in comparison to who we ought to be.
I wonder if there’s a way to walk both worlds, to appreciate the pennies we find scattered on city streets (15), have them fill us with delight while understanding that they are only fabrications of an artificial world. Maybe we can embrace duality. All we really know is that we are here, and that that isn't good or bad. But within our own consciousnesses, these tensions between good and evil, domination and coexistence, ethics and instinct, are ones we will have to learn to live with—or to die with.
So I leave you with this: “Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest…. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part” (270).
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