AnthropologyThe real question posed in this clumsily titled but stylish and thought-provoking little book is not rhetorical. Where, the author asks, do we draw the line between human beings and the rest of nature?
He opens by remarking the paradox that while over the past 30 or 40 years we have invested a great deal of thought and energy to notions of human values, rights, dignity and life, in the same period, "quietly but devastatingly, science and philosophy have combined to undermine our traditional concept of humankind", with the result that "our understanding of what it means to be human is now in question".
He adduces six main sources of challenge: the accumulating evidence from primatology of our closeness to apes; the animal rights movement's demand for justification of our claim to privilege over all other living creatures; the question from palaeoanthropology - yes, there are a lot of big words here - of "how far back in the evolutionary past to distinguish humans from others"; the question from biology of whether there really are species with essential traits or just "categories into which we group creatures for convenience"; the possibility that artificial intelligence could achieve the condition of consciousness; and finally, the evidence from genetic research of how scant is the difference between us and other creatures - "Being human has never felt so beastly".
In the 20th century, he notes, we had a handy and inclusive definition of humanness, which was that of inter-breeding - any group was human if other humans could successfully breed with it - yet in that same century racism and acts of genocide seemed to deny the definition its validity. And with the approach of the millennium the concept of humankind acquired two new and problematic dimensions. Firstly, the free availability of abortion in the leading democratic countries required that the unborn be classified into a new, sub-human category, so that "a new quality called 'personhood' has now been invoked to justify the reclassification", and secondly, work in artificial intelligence and genetic engineering "has made the human future as problematic as the human past". Do we in consequence face the "post-human" future forecast by the "end-of-history" school led by Francis Fukuyama, or is our notion of what constitutes humanness so indeterminate that we can continue simply to "yank at its elasticity and prolong the debate"?
These are large issues, and only a historian of Fernández-Armesto's daring and scholarship would attempt to tackle them in such a short space. He has not always been so economical: his Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years is a mighty tome which nevertheless became a worldwide bestseller. He has written, his publisher tells us, on the history of religion, maritime warfare, cartography, urban history, early colonial history, and food ("Move over, Ainsley," the Independent on Sunday excitedly exclaimed of his Food: A History. "Here comes an Oxford scholar to tell us how to eat"). He is a professor in the departments of history and geography at London University and a member of the modern history faculty at Oxford, and is a prolific journalist and broadcaster.
He opens So You Think You're Human? by addressing the question of when we began to consider ourselves human, and consequently to relegate other creatures to a different and usually lower scale of being (Darwin wrote in the margin of one of his notebooks the wonderful restriction "Never say higher or lower").
"It is tempting," he writes, "to suppose that what differentiates our species from others is our obsessive urge to classify ourselves apart from the rest of creation."
Some would claim that the very fact that we could devise the concept "Nature" must mean that we are outside it, in other words that humankind is unique and discontinuous with all other creatures. What a piece of work is a man, says Hamlet, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god. However, it may be that Nietzsche is closer to the mark when he characterises man "as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal", the creature which other animals regard as one of their own "which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason".
Fernández-Armesto is grimly insistent that history since its beginnings shows that everything by which humans differentiate between themselves and other, non-human creatures "turns out to be mistaken or misleading". Examining such topics as humankind's language skills and ability to make tools, he provides examples of how animals in their own way are just as gifted and well-adapted as we are - he notes wryly that "chimps have proved better, on the whole, at learning human language than human researchers have proved in mastering ape communication". Unless the capacity to communicate through speech is "a special power of the mind, beyond explanation", he writes, it must be accessible to more than the human species, and the form of it that we have developed must be more a matter of chance than any form of reasoning.
Primatologists have ingeniously imagined how our hominid ancestors might have diverged from our primate cousins and acquired language on the way: speech arose as an alternative to grooming. The growth of the group determined the need for ways of networking that were elastic, inclusive, and time-saving. A look at ape networking today suggests what might have happened.
It is a nice thought: Hamlet as a higher form of nit-picking.
The quality which we believe sets us head as well as head-and-shoulders above the herd is consciousness, the precious gift of knowing who and what we are, where we have been and where we might go, and that, in the end, we shall die. It is consciousness that gives us art, philosophy and science, as well as arrogance, greed and readiness for war. It brings the tragic into our lives, even while it glorifies us. It is blessing and curse, and barely tolerable burden. In Thomas Hardy's great short poem 'Before Life and After', which is bleaker than anything in Beckett, the poet mourns a time "Before the birth of consciousness/ When all went well" and yearningly wonders "Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed/ How long, how long?". If not to be born is best, then being born we wonder if not knowing might be second best.
Fernández-Armesto is one with the likes of Peter Singer, originator of the notion of animal liberation, and John Gray, author of Straw Dogs, in his indictment of human arrogance in the face of nature. He points out that genetic research "shows how feeble and arbitrary the distinction between humans and other animals is. We share nearly 95 per cent of our genome with chimpanzees - not much less than we share with each other. The difference which makes us human is a barely significant difference". Or as he nicely puts it, "umans are unique, but not with any unique sort of uniqueness".
Yet he is alive to the dizzying consequences of an all-embracing, holistic approach to the world which would set man at the level of other creatures and no higher. There is the problem of how far down to go. Human rights, if they are to be rights and not privileges, must apply to all humans, the unborn, the comatose or the vegetative as well as "us". And if we apply them to all humans, what about the apes, to whom we are genetically so closely related? And after the apes? As Bertrand Russell pointed out, the end of this process is votes for oysters.
In the final chapter, 'Post-Human Futures? Humankind in the Age of Genetics and Robotics', Fernández- Armesto stoutly defends the idea of the soul, or "spirit" at least, an idea which so much of modern science seems bent on destroying. Human intelligence, he writes, is probably at bottom unmechanical - "there is a ghost in the human 'machine', whereas computers only 'quasi-think' within formal, closed systems". The discovery that life is a system animated by spirit was, he believes, one of our primitive ancestors' most profound insights, and it remains as true in our day as it was in theirs. This is a brave, some would say foolhardy, position to occupy in this cyber-age, when the hungry gene is eating through everything. Yet he is surely right when he says that the impact of "the infotech revolution" on how we think of ourselves has hardly registered yet, and that its full effect is incalculable:
There are two ways of escape from the bleakness of supposing that we have to forfeit our delusions of freedom and accept that we are what we once thought other animals were: automata or soulless brutes. The first is to realize that the dilemma is false: we may be products of evolution and prisoners of our genes; but that does not make us unfree. We still re-shape ourselves through experiences we endow with meaning. The second route lies through our self-re-classification as part of nature: but a nature which is full of enchantment, and in which no life is merely brutish.
John Banville's most recent book is Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City
So You Think You're Human?: A Brief History of Humankind By Felipe Fernández-Armesto OUP, 179pp. £14.99