We are the only animal that can deny our animal nature

In some regards we humans have capabilities beyond those of other species with whom we share our planet. But in this regard we are inferior to those creatures: we are the only animal that can deny our animal nature.

Not everybody does this, of course. I'm proudly animal, as is Maxim Loskutoff, who wrote "The Beast in Me" in The New York Times collection of philosophical essays published in the newspaper, Question Everything.

As you can read below, Loskutoff vividly recognized his animalness when a grizzly bear stalked him and his partner during their hike in Glacier National Park.

But it's strange that so many people are reluctant to admit that they are as much an animal as their dog or cat. Or the chicken they ate for dinner. What else could we be? We're made of flesh, blood, and bone, just like every other animal.

Sure, our brains have evolved to have the capacity to think thoughts like, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." (So said Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.)

This doesn't make such other-worldly thoughts true, though.

It simply shows that we are able to deny the reality of our human animality, covering that inescapable fact with layers of religious and metaphysical fantasy about how our true nature is ethereal soul, or some other supernatural notion with no foundation in fact.

The world would be a much better place if every person recognized that they are an animal.

This wouldn't turn everybody into vegetarians, but it would go a long way toward diminishing the sense most people have that humans are special, separate and distinct from all those animals we use, and abuse, for our pleasure.

Here's excerpts from the essay.

Obviously Loskutoff and his partner survived their grizzly bear stalking. They (literally) ran into a park ranger armed with a big gun who told them that the female bear was being tracked because she was almost twelve and having difficulty finding enough food at that age, manifesting increasingly aggressive behavior. 

Missoula, Mont. -- In the summer of 2012, the same year that scientists fully decoded the genome of the bonobo, the last great ape, my partner and I were stalked by a female grizzly bear.

...Several things happened in my mind at once. I realized the bear was following us. I realized she wanted to eat us, and I realized that I was an animal.

It was a strange epiphany. To be human today is to deny our animal nature, though it's always there, as the earth remains round beneath our feet even when it feels flat. 

I had always been an animal, and would always be one, but it wasn't until I was prey, my own fur standing on end and certain base-level decisions being made in milliseconds (in a part of my mind that often takes ten minutes to choose toothpaste in the grocery store), that the meat-and-bone reality settled over me.

I was smaller and slower than the bear. My claws were no match for hers. And almost every part of me was edible.

...I had one concern: to get us away without being eaten.

Civilization itself is an attempt to protect us from this feeling. From its earliest iterations in fire-starting and cave-dwelling to its current zenith in the construction of megalopolises, as well as the careful documentation of every birth and the methodical laying bare of each strand in every helix, civilization is a way of setting ourselves apart from the prey we once were.

Building walls, both physical and informational, to keep out the bears.

Yet even atop the highest tower in the most prestigious university we remain animals, directed by the same base-level needs and emotions that motivate living creatures from bonobos to rats.

...Of course there are aspects of our communal society -- caring for the old, the domestication of livestock, the cultivation of crops -- that link us to only a few other species, and other aspects, such as the written word, that link us to none as yet discovered, but in no place but our own minds have we truly transcended our animal brethren.

...As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously said, "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."

Most days I remain fully entangled in this web, cursing at my smartphone while rolling across the earth in four thousand pounds of steel. Yet there is something of the experience with the bear that remains inside me, a gift from my moment of pure terror.

It's the knowledge of my animal self. That instinctive, frightened, clear-eyed creature beneath my clothes. And it brought with it the reassuring sense of being part of the natural world, rather than separated from it, as we so often feel ourselves to be.

My humanity, one cell in the great, breathing locomotion spreading from sunlight to leaves to root stems to bugs to birds to bears.

All of us fragile, all of us fleeting, all of us prey.

Comments

[808]

Animals are pretty amazing. Dogs are used at hospices to alert when a patient is close to death. Cats can see things that we can’t. Ask any cat owner—they look in amazement and follow invisible objects around the rooms with their eyes.

Perhaps they have extra senses that we humans have reasoned away for the most part.

Animals are far more in tune with nature (naturally) and seem quite graceful in their acceptance of death (if/when they “feel” they’re ready to go).

We humans aren’t exactly geniuses.

[um]

We are only animals.

That is identifying A as B.

Identification as something others
Identification based on a part
Identification based on attribution of value and meaning => race, class, caste etc. etc

Identification horizontal
Identification vertical => upwards and downwards

Things are what they are
seldom what they look like
let alone how they are seen and presented

Presenting human beings as animals ....is making them seen as something they are not.

It is the same as telling some Indians that they are lower class dalits instead of, being indian, instead of being human.

BUT .. that capacity by itself is part of the natural human, even if it is artificial. All living creatures discriminate as they are allowed" = restricted only to take certain things for maintenance of the body as food

In the garden of eden, the time there was no culture and only nature prevailed, discrimination was natural. When they were thrown out of eden they had to attribute meaning and value themselves, artificial, abstract, not related to nature. In the long run the sophisticated it into the culture we have today. Culture is an abstract replica of nature with its rain woods, deserts and creatures in it, Creatures that are identifiable as , poisonous and ferocious ... we call them dalits

[Ron E.]

Humans are of course animals - we are not vegetables or minerals. The arrogance of we humans is incredible in thinking we are above or better than other species and believing that we have dom-inance over them (biblical teaching). That we share 98.9 per cent of our genes with other primates shows our evolutionary connections to them.

Ever since there has been biological life on earth (3.7 billion years), there has always been dominant species. Evolution (at the moment) has favoured humans due to the fact that our brains have developed the survival ability to form concepts, with the capability to think abstractly and to plan. These abilities have served us well but there is a distinct danger that the way we use the resources of the planet we will pay the price and some other species will take over the top role.

We egoistically think we are better than other species – in many ways we are though all other species have qualities that could put us to shame. Religion panders to our own sense of specialness aided by an ego (self-structure – some call it a soul) that separates itself from what is natural about its own body and also separate from the environment it inhabits.

It is feasible that the human race will continue inflicting suffering on itself and the rest of nature unless we recognise our interconnectedness with everything. Acknowledging the grandeur of all that we perceive and experience helps to elicit a certain humility and gratefulness in our lives. A working antidote to an overly ego-based existence.

[um]

Do not hate yourself for being human.

It was and is not in your hands, that you have the power to recreate your original habitat, so that you can adapt to whatever changes appear before you.

There is no difference between the behavior of humans with other living creatures.

Humans cannot but act as they do... it has nothing to do with arrogance or ill will.

Like all other species they spend their lives in survival mode. ... and ... they are GIVEN the opportunity etc to make free choices with regard to what they individual and as a group THINK is the best way to survive.

That said ... some have developed "harmfull" ideas.

Even Putin ... is acting out his vision on survival
In THAT sense there is no difference between him and Zelensky., having another vision on the SAME inner drive, instinct.

There is just unique variation of SAMENESS.

[Appreciative Reader]

Haha, pardon my compulsive nitpicking, but are we actually "the only animals that can deny our animal nature"? Really? What about ants, to take one example amongst many, many others? One might well imagine an ant, born and raised in an ant-hill, toiling away single-mindedly at its appointed task all of its life, happening to walk over a leaf of a tree in a queue with other ants, when a sudden gust of wind blows away the leaf (that had happened to have withered away at the stem, maybe with the onset of autumn, or maybe the work of some fungus, as happens all the time); so that the ant, for the first time in its life, finds itself all alone in the wilderness. There, as it espies a large fierce-looking bug stomping around, it might conceivably have exactly the same kinds of thoughts as the experience with the bear recounted here --- assuming, of course, that ants have any kinds of thoughts at all.

We believe we humans are somehow wholly different than other animals, true. But might this itself not be yet another symptom of that same malaise, this imagining that somehow it is just us humans that "denies our animal nature"? What does that even mean? A regimented ant in its ant-hill, is it also not denying its animal nature then? A bee? A wolf mindlessly following its pack? A fish or a bird migrating away within the (metaphorical) cocoon of its own school or flock? And if we argue that these creatures are merely following the specific peculiarities of their own animal nature in so doing, then who is to say that we humans also aren't following the specific peculiarities of our own animal nature in living as we do, apparently divorced from nature, and apparently beating ourselves up over denying our animal nature? Might all of that not tantamount to what our animal nature is?

-----

I just quickly looked up this guy, Maxim Loskutoff. He's not phyiscist, or any kind of scientist, only a general writer, so I suppose we can excuse him this imprecision in thought and expression. For that matter, many bona fide scientists also sometimes tend to ramble on and gas away when venturing into philosophizing and pontificating outside of their core specializations. And in any case, Loskutoff's broader message is sound, and it would be foolish to miss the forest for the trees, as it were, and miss his larger message by getting mired in the small imprecisions in how he expresses himself, absolutely.

Still, the nit kind of caught my eye, and --- compulsively, perhaps --- I could not help picking at it, a bit.

[808]

@AR

Re:
“But might this itself not be yet another symptom of that same malaise, this imagining that somehow it is just us humans that "denies our animal nature"?”

I couldn’t help but laugh when you wrote, “What does that even mean?” 😂

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CoxJpY8pS9V/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

[Ron E.]

I have just been (re)reading Fieldman Barrett’s book ‘Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain’. She paints an interesting picture of the origins of biological life and reveals that brains did not evolve for thinking but to manage the body simply to survive – she calls it ‘body budgeting’ (allostasis). I found this interesting in view of this particular blog, as Barrett’s description of our bio-logical origins emphasises the amazing journey of our biotic heritage and the unique link we have with the genes of other animals – and plants (animals and plants all share a common ancestor!)

Why we appear to deny our animal heritage is purely down to how we think. It is only our manner of conceptual thinking that constructs various mental interpretations of who/what we are, and imagining ourselves to be superior and special is one of the prominent cognitive constructs that our brains create. It is all down to our sense of self – our ego, our self-esteem.
And as necessary as it is to have self-esteem, I would add, that it is also necessary to understand this particular self-creating phenomenon if only to avoid living in a world that is mostly subjective – a mental construction.

Okay, so the brain is in the business of creating our reality, but we have to live in this world as it presents itself to us (brain filters and all). So we have a possible choice; do we live in a world that consists of thoughts and concepts, or do we live in a world where we can (perhaps only occasion-ally) drop the mind’s continual chatter and experience the world (and ourselves) as revealed through our senses.

The mind’s contents – all the cognitive content – is as natural as our body and brain, so in this sense everything about us is natural. But there is definitely a case for describing the difference of walking around being in our heads (so to speak) and being present in the world as it presents itself in the moment. I realise this takes us into the realms of awareness and meditation, but perhaps this is what we need to ‘get back to nature’; to acknowledge our animal connections as perceived through our body/brain senses.

[SantMat64]

"This wouldn't turn everybody into vegetarians, but it would go a long way toward diminishing the sense most people have that humans are special, separate and distinct from all those animals we use, and abuse, for our pleasure."

But humans are in many ways separate and distinct from other animals. We have a higher ontological value than any other animal. The proof of that is seen in, say, a tiger attacking a human being. No one any human culture (except perhaps a few West coast progressives) would defend the tiger's "equal rights" to feed on humans. No, the tiger is killed. By the same token, though killing tigers for nothing but sport is reprehensible, no human culture (except the aforementioned) would advocate the killing of the tiger hunter.

As for meat eating being done only for "pleasure," this is a common veg trope, and a false one. Humans have always depended on animal food for survival. Human biology 101.

[um]

>> As for meat eating being done only for "pleasure," this is a common veg trope, and a false one. Humans have always depended on animal food for survival. Human biology 101.<<

BEFORE humans INVENTED, hunting and tools, they had to feed themselves too.

They are not equipped in their natural state to catch an prey bare handed and running and if they might have found a carcass they did not have the tools to consume raw ,meat let alone separate it from the bones.

The only animal protein available are some insects to be found in wood.

The first humans or humanoids live in a climate zone where they could survive without any adaptation to nature .. like all the other creatures.

Meat eating is and adaptive invention to survive in climates where they otherwise not could survive. That was a very slow process ...the summit of what process is to be found in the Inuit and astronauts ... hahaha

Bur if you can not do without meat just eat it ... there is no god that is interested in what you eat.... no need to justify it ... hahaha

[Ron E.]

Um. Just for clarity. Hominoid species (Habilis) well before homo sapiens had tools. Sapiens regularly cornered and chased large animals over cliffs - and had tools to carve them up. So they existed on a meat and veg diet - hunter gatherers.

[um]

BEFORE

BEFORE TOOLS

People had to feed themselves

TOOLS are inventions
Tools are inventions like FIRE and the wheel

BEFORE ... BEFORE BEFORE they hat to eat with their BARE hands,
EAT what was ready available, the whole year around and tasty and could be handled with BARE hands

DO not take the CAPITALS personal, please.

[um]

>> Sapiens regularly cornered and chased large animals over cliffs - and had tools to carve them up. So they existed on a meat and veg diet - hunter gatherers.<<

BEFORE they KNEW that and BEFORE they had these tools invented ... they had to eat also.

No invention in the kingdom is ever made if not related to a forceful adaptation yo changing circumstances.

[808]

“Nine human species walked the Earth 300,000 years ago. Now there is just one. The Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis, were stocky hunters adapted to Europe's cold steppes. The related Denisovans inhabited Asia, while the more primitive Homo erectus lived in Indonesia, and Homo rhodesiensis in central Africa.”

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/there-used-to-be-nine-species-of-human-what-happened-to-them/wcm/6d257455-8c06-4387-8b11-4f49131994eb/amp/

We’re all animals.

[808]

I look “white” but my trace ancestry is North African, Nigerian, Somalian, and Gambian. I have a good deal of Neanderthal DNA too—much more than the average person.

This all came as a bit of surprise thanks to a recent DNA test.

Survival of the fittest—that’s our animal nature. Sadly, this world has a strong scarcity mindset. That’s why we often focus more on getting and taking than on giving and sharing.

But I have seen animals exhibit generous behavior to the point of self-sacrifice.

You don’t need a written language to understand and experience love.

We incarnate into various life forms and then one sunny day we’re born human?

Does the butterfly flit around all self-consciously and arrogantly believing it is separate from God? No.

But we believe that we must incarnate through multiple life forms until we enter this human form in order to understand that we are separate from our Source. And then we’re supposed to spend our human existence trying to become more like the butterfly—without an ego.

Humans are by far the most arrogant of all species. We destroy each other and the planet. No species is capable of the narcissistic, egocentrism that humans have perfected.

On a brighter note—now that we recognize our egocentric nature, let’s try and learn a little something from the butterfly. Thankfully, it is possible to unlearn all of our destructive egocentric programming.

[Roger]

There is human animal progression..................

Evidenced facts are the building blocks of human progress.

But even a scientific fact is subject to change within a causal universe.

This is because no thing (physical, emotional, psychological, or any combination thereof) can be established evidentially to be a truth in or of itself, and can only be honestly presented as the most current plausible functional understanding, based on current, evidence based facts.

The biggest hindrance to human progress is the building of houses, based in unevidenced beliefs, where the occupant has to rush around trying to keep it standing, against the winds of change that threatens to flatten it.

All of the current evidence points to the fact that, change is the only constant, in the known universe.

[Ron E.]

Sorry Um - but humans have always used tools and ate meat. If there was ever a time before tools and meat eating - then they weren't humans.

[SantMat64]

"Humans are by far the most arrogant of all species. We destroy each other and the planet. No species is capable of the narcissistic, egocentrism that humans have perfected."

Actually, humans are just like other animals (even butterflies) in that they use the environment for survival. The survival of any species depends on that species quite unsentimentally looking out for itself. The era of so-called selfish exploitation of the earth was extremely brief in the West. Though, it's still happening today in countries like China, India, and most of Africa. But again, we in the West are long past that. True, we did burn a lot of coal to the detriment of the air, but that was a better and cleaner option than burning wood. It's not "arrogance" for humans to use the environment to survive; we're not butterflies, neither are we deer or rabbits that can live off of wild plants.

[808]

“Actually, humans are just like other animals (even butterflies) in that they use the environment for survival.”

Aliens disagree (quite unanimously).

The humans of today rape the land and devastate their environment. We aren’t so gentle as to simple “use the environment for survival.”

We’ve gone way, way past using what we need to survive. We are collectively swimming in green which will eventually turn our oceans swampy green.

We’re at another tipping point.

[808]

*swimming in greed
—————
The root of the problem is identifying too strongly with our biological nature.

A classic—
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-1960s-led-grim-predictions-humans-180954423/

[SantMat64]

"We’ve gone way, way past using what we need to survive. We are collectively swimming in green which will eventually turn our oceans swampy green."

So they keep telling us, but the people who say these things still live in houses, use electricity from fossil fuels, drive cars, and rely on all manner of technology, such as their phones, which are all make possible by using the earth's resources.

This idea of the earth dying is false and probably the most dreadful platitude that has come along in ages. In any case if there are culprits of ecological devastation it's not really helpful or accurate to say "we." IT sure as heck ain't "we." We know every well which countries are heedless of gross pollution and which are not. Ever been to New Delhi? We know which countries are polluting the ocean as well. And we know which president blows up gas pipelines in the North Atlantic.

But whatever, our efforts to save the earth are just more of our sentimentality. The electric cars and solar panels don't really amount to anything of real value. For example, the California wildfires of 2020 created enough carbon emissions to offset 16 years of reductions through the state’s green policies — twice over — according to a UCLA study published by Environmental Pollution.

In the meantime, both the left and right in the US are cheering for a war with Russia, packed as it is with the most nuclear weapons. And we stoke the current war in Ukraine, urging on the poor Ukranians to fight to the last man, rejecting peace talks from the beginning.

"We" are all sentimental madmen, spending 2 years shutting down society because of a virus hardly worse than the flu (I told you all so), institutionalizing anti white racism and gender fluidity so that guys can finally win the freedom to share the locker room, naked, with our daughters.

[Dungeness]

@ Ron E [ humans have always used tools and ate meat. If there was ever a time before tools and meat eating - then they weren't humans. ]

So, if a two-leg "vegan" foraged for nuts and roots only, he had to be non-human period?
He might well have picked up on the gorilla's use of a stick to get some ant protein at later
points, I suppose, but to assert that no humans ever evolved into vegan-hood first ignores
the dictum "when hungry, you eat what's easily at hand". So maybe solely because roots
and nuts were the only plentiful food source... there were vegans in the 'hood first, no?

[808]

@SantMat64,

A lot to unpack there… not sure I have time to address every point right now, but I’ll touch on a few things.

1. The Ukraine war is tragic on all fronts. Russia’s conditions for peace from the very beginning were anything but reasonable. That said, it’s a heartbreaking tragedy. There are no victors in war. The psychological damage alone that this war has had on the citizens of both Ukraine and Russia will take generations to heal.

2. I’m a moderate and believe the extremes of the left and the right are fueled by fear instead of rational thought. Extreme ideologies are rarely, if ever, a good thing.

3. You lost me when you said “because of a virus hardly worse than the flu”. It might be “hardly worse than the flu” today—in areas where the majority of the population has survived previous exposure to the novel coronavirus. But we lost 7 million people worldwide even with extreme measures in place. We probably saved at least a *billion lives by shutting down for a few years. No regrets about that.

*this is where I should insert a citation or something… Think Spanish Flu.

[808]

And, yes, I have been to Delhi.

With India soon to be the world’s most populous country, it needs to focus on literacy and education. It’s going to be tough being a democratic nation aligned with BRICS situated between the world’s two largest superpowers. Perhaps India will leave a lasting mark on the world… if it can take the middle path.

[um]

@ Dingeness / Ron

IF humans started out as raw meat eaters, than they have over time lost that capacity.

The only tribe that is able to eat raw meat, are the Inuit.

BUT ...

In order to chew and digest raw meat one has to get the meat from the bones and being able to cut it in a certain way.

Every meat eater, even not professionals like chefs and butchers etc, can know that meat has to be cut in a certain way otherwise our teeth cannot handle it.
These tools had to be invented as well as the knowledge of cutting meat etc.
Before .. they were able to do so they had to feed themselves too.

We lack the strength in our hands and teeth that animal meat eaters have by nature.

Next just consider why we cook meats even now we have all the tools of the trade?

What is cooking all about?

It is changing the structure and often the consistency of otherwise unpalatable and poisonous material in such an way that it RESEMBLANCES fruit and nuts.

Even an steak Tartar is never eaten as raw meat, there are different aromatics mixed under it.

For long years i have been associate with the food branch and never saw people eating raw meat.

[Ron E.]

The original point here was that we need to embrace our animal nature’s and that in many ways we believe ourselves to be special – often backed by religious beliefs. Um made an earlier comment that “Presenting human beings as animals ....is making them seen as something they are not”.; but later agreed that “There is no difference between the behaviour of humans with other living creatures”.

And as for when humans began eating meat is totally unknown. Evidence shows that our nearest hominid ancestors ate a varied diet including meat. Evidence also shows that we (modern humans – Homo Sapiens) regularly ate meat but there is no evidence to say that we (modern humans) were once solely vegetable eaters. When modern humans appeared on the scene (200,000 years ago or so), according to paleontological discoveries, all finds of the ancestors of us modern humans show the remains to have been of meat eaters – and, they also show remains of the animals they ate.

It’s almost as if modern humans came into existence with meat-cutting tools in their hands! Nowhere (as far as my research shows) has there been discoveries of Homo Sapiens that had solely vegetable diet. Maybe some of the earliest hominids lived only on seeds and leaves etc. but there is no evidence that we (Homo Sapiens) did. If we were solely plant eaters, it was long before we evolved from Homo Heidelbergensis, the common ancestor we share with Neanderthals.

[808]

And this is the type of retaliatory behavior “we” humans take when other countries don’t agree with “us”. (India didn’t vote to condemn Russian invasion of Ukraine.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/indias-economy-looks-shaky-under-the-hood-11c28fd0

Speculation is make or break in the markets. I don’t agree with this sort of behavior, I’m simply pointing it out because the average person is spoon fed their “facts” by seemingly reputable reporting. The motives behind publishing certain things while not publishing other news is, more often than not, completely lost on the average reader.

The Ukraine war is tragic for everyone and yes, we should work harder at pushing for peace talks.

[Ug]

Of all the “humanimals” on the planet, Putin is currently the greatest obstacle to world peace.

[um]

@ Ron

That reasoning about the diet from our ancestors by Antropologist and archeologist is based upon ... findings.

The artifacts they found were all related to tools, firemaking etc.

But if you do not know how to make fire, as there was no need to have that knowledge and if there are no tools to be found as there were no tools needed for staying alive, that doesn't mean there were no people around.

It is to be compared with a statement that before writing and printing there was no knowledge as we as scientist could not find anything related to the distribution of knowledge ...nobody with common sense is going to accept such a tragic form of tunnel thinking

Things are in vented when needed .. now they are planning to go to the moon and now the will find means and tools to do so.

If you can survive from plucking fruits, nuts, and roots why for heavens sake would anybody want to run a hare out?

If the weather is such that the difference between day an night temperature is so low that you need no covering etc why would you be interested in fire or seeking shelter let alone building houses, iglo's etc .