Well are we ?
Let’s see. What are the great unique achievements of mankind ? Technology. Crime. Murder. Sex for pleasure. Rape. War. Advanced language.
That does seem to be about it. So lets look at them.
* Technology: Well some other creatures are tool users, but indeed no other species have taken tool use to anything like the levels we have.
* Crime: This is almost really unique, in other social animals rulebreaking is very rare – it’s usually too dangerous. When it is risked it is usually a sign of a coming usurption attempt. Humans just break the rules because we can, for a milion reasons, the rarest of which is probably that we believe the particular law to be wrong and want to replace/become the government.
* Murder: Again, not unique, other creatures of this planet do kill and they do kill their own kind. In fact every species does, it’s debatable however if any of them do it as often as we do… oh wait, spiders and mantisses kill their mates – that’s gotta up the numbers. Mother scorpions look so protective with their babies on their backs – false image actually, she isn’t carrying them – they are hiding. If one falls off, he is mommy’s lunch. What we can say is that we, without a doubt, have the highest rate of killing both of ourselves and of other species of any known vertebrate.
* Sex for pleasure: Everybody knows that animals just do it when their fertile without giving it much thought and purely to procreate right ? Sorry, another fairy tale. Chimps and Dolphins also have sex purely for pleasure, outside of eustrace periods. Well not all chimps, only the Bonobo’s actually, our closest genetic relatives. And they got the whole shebang, masturbation, foreplay, mutliple position (in trees too !) and yes orgies – a film of bonobo’s in their natural habitat could be mistaken for a porn film for people with a hair fetish. Their entire society is built upon sex. It reminds me of my all-time favorite line from star trek. “They make love at the drop of a hat”, “Any hat”. In fact, their life of serial sexual encounters pretty much whenever their not eating (their world is to them a paradise with little to fear and no starvation) is probably exactly how we used to be. Until we decided to walk on two legs and go live in grass with lions anyway. By the way, bonobo’s with their free practise of a society built on sex, well they don’t seem to care much about genders, both females and males frequently give sexual pleasure to their own genders. Our closest family on this planet are a race of bisexual perverts who average over 100 sexual encounters with different partners of inconsequential gender every single day.
* Rape, rape is the counterpoint to sex for pleasure. With the practise comes the need for consent. It’s absense is one of the worst crimes one human can do against another. Whatever the rapists and victims gender, rape is guaranteed to cause trauma, it’s the ultimate betrayal of trust. Bononbo’s don’t have rape, they get around the need for it by never saying no. Unlike humans they really are always in the mood and always consent. Yet they do have initial approaches to test for willingness. Even though they reaction has never been known to have been a no, they nevertheless ask consent, quite moral of them eh. However just as we think that there is something unique to us, uhoh. Remember there is a third species here that has sex for pleasure. They are not as closely related to us genetically as bonobo’s but they have bigger brains and their social structure bears more resemblance to ours actually. They are also one of the only species of wild animal that seeks out human contact willingly and frequently. They are of course dolphins. And dolphins do rape. They gang-rape. Gangs of young male dolphins are known to corner of a young female and serially rape her.
* War, ah yes war. War is almost unknown among vertebrates, territorial struggles exist but are rarely if ever fatal for any members of the packs fighting. War is not just murder, it is murder squared. Murder justified for some reason and done on massive scales. Only a few other species practise it, ants being a notable example. What all the war-mongering species have in common is that they are not thinking species, they are species that blindly obey orders – orders themselves created from a blind following of instinct. Perhaps there is a lesson there. The only other species with soldiers, are worse than sheep, killing without thinking about it. Following orders without caring. They show a remarkable and sad resemblence to the state human beings enter whenever war happens to us.
* Advanced language. Well other species have languages. Chimps, elephants, dolphins, wales pretty much every intelligent species can communicate with others. But nobody does it like we do. We took language to a whole new level, a level where it occupies more than 30% of our physical brainspace. It is the tool we use to study the world (mathematics is just a language) so in fact we have technology like we do purely because we have language like we do. We have poetry, stories, conversations, fights, and yes even blog posts.
So are we special ? Not as special as we like to think, but we do have one thing that nothing else has. We can truly communicate with each other, we can convey meaning better than anything else alive. So most of the things we usually think of as uniquely human are horrible and we end up feeling grateful that they aren’t uniquely human. It turns out there is only one thing that we have and no other species has. This is of course love. I don’t care what scientists say about this – I’ve heard the arguments and it’s bullshit they can’t find the explanantion (because their looking in the wrong place) so they discount it’s existence. You can measure a lot of brain activity of of someone in love and conclude that they are merely horny and jealous but like I said – you’re looking in the wrong place. You’re like Terry Practchet’s ‘auditors’ breaking paintings and sculptures down to look for beauty. Love is real, it’s the only thing (in it’s many incarnations) that is truly unique to us. We don’t have sex just for pleasure, well we do but sometimes we do it to show love. Love is our most powerful invention. I think we made love. We made it out of a combination of advanced language and sex for pleasure. Advanced language allowed us to share and bond with another human in ways no other species can match. Sex for pleasure allowed us to show the intensity of the resulting emotions through an act of ultimate caring and kindess. Put them together and you have the little starting blocks love was built out of, but synergetically it has become so much more than it’s constituent parts.
Then when we had love, love started guiding things other than our bonding with one other person. It became our prime motivator, the happiest people do their dayjobs because they love what they do. As a member of the Brazilian ministry of culture pointed out once: the root word for amatuer is amor – love. The greatest professionals are the amatuers, the ones who do it for love.
And we also mixed love with tool use. We started using tools to create new ways to convey love, a new language form where all the words mean love. This new language is art. And yes I do believe every artwork ultimately means love. A warpainting, why would it move us if we didn’t care for the people it showed, or the ideals they stood for ? Why would we bother to paint it? We paint warpaintings out of love for someone or something. That too me is the beauty of art. I didn’t list it on top because art is not something uniquely human, it is unique to ius, but is isn’t something. The reason ever art student spends two years debating the definition of art and never finding a good answer is because art isn’t something, art is a language, and the language is made up entirely of an infinity of synonyms for the word love and since you can never convince me that we can ever have enough ways to say I love you you can never convince me that we don’t need art – we need it more than we need everything else together.
