Disenchanting the Rhetoric: Human Uniqueness and Human Responsibility

The human “trial” before “a congress of all beings” is, as David Orr puts it “a heuristic device” borrowed from Joanna Macy and Jonathan Seed. Such tales remind us of Aesop’s fables, where we see ourselves in fur and feathers, like the fox and the raven, or personified as the plodding tortoise versus the fast and overconfident hare. That such tales have continued for millennia testifies to their effectiveness. Orr reports such effectiveness with his students in his introductory environmental studies classes. So if it works, go for it. But this trial does require us to “stumble through the unreality of the scenario. ” Unlike Aesop, this tale is rather different. We are not just seeing ourselves in fur and feathers, but trying to see the critical differences between ourselves and those in fur and feathers. “What defense might be made on our behalf? ” His students “conclude that no good defense can be made on any terms. ” If his introductory students so conclude, some of his more advanced students will be less convinced; not about the environmental crisis, for that point is well taken. The question is the case to be made for humans being at the apex (“the pinnacle”) of evolutionary natural history. Is there an argument to be made at this trial for human uniqueness and human responsibility? Or have we humans usurped pride of place among the council of all beings and do we need to be put back in place as one among equals? The parable is so impossible that it restricts what it can effectively teach us about human uniqueness and privilege. The presiding judge is a wise owl and the prosecuting attorney a cunning fox. We can tolerate that in Aesop, because everybody knows we are not describing animals but just personifying humans with wisdom or cunning. To take such personifications seriously would be to live in an animistic world, an enchanted world reminiscent of prescientific and aboriginal worldviews, the original provenance of such tales. Science no longer permits such anthropomorphisms, nor did the Greeks take Aesop as more than fable. We will have to strip out all such enchantments and pretense before we begin to understand whether and how humans differ from the rest. And when we do this, there is only one species left at this council of all beings. Humans alone “ponder and often worry about such things as justice, fairness, and decency” for which reflection and concern there is no precedent in nonhuman nature. “We, a young species compared to many of you, are beginning to fulfill our promise for wisdom, compassion, and foresight. ” Truth is, of course, that there is only one species capable of such concerns. Humans alone on Earth can take a transcending overview of the whole; humans alone can know they are on a planet. Humans alone have escalated their powers to the point of placing the welfare on the planet in jeopardy. Humans are standouts on Earth. That does give us prominence of place, both of privilege and of responsibility. “Humans live beyond the limits and laws of nature and believe this to be their right,” asserts the fox. No one can break the laws of nature in the law-of-nature sense, we concede; but humans do transcend many of the limits imposed on all the other species. We are not naturally selected to occupy an ecological niche; our cumulative transmissible cultures, unique on Earth, do make us remarkably different. Ian Tattersall (1998: 3) puts it this way: “We human beings are indeed mysterious animals. We are linked to the living world, but we are sharply distinguished by our cognitive powers, and much of our behavior is conditioned by abstract and symbolic concerns. ” So we can, as we are doing here, envision a council of all beings, and wonder whether and how we might defend ourselves there. Here is the “defense” from Terrence Deacon: “Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have produced hundreds of thousands of species with brains, and tens of thousands with complex behavioral, perceptual, and learning abilities. Only one of these has ever wondered about its place in the world, because only one evolved the ability to do so” (Deacon 1997: 21). We are the only species privileged to be at such a council. Even the great apes are not yet there. Michael Tomasello and his colleagues find that “chimpanzees . do not conceive of others as reflective agents—they do not mentally simulate the perspective of another