I am recurrently grateful for what I consider to be the huge privilege of living this life as a human being. Not that it’s any better than to live as some other creature. All creatures may in their own way be delighted to be living the life that is theirs – and, if they could reflect upon it, perhaps even more so not to be suffering the atrocities of warfare and starvation and other forms of madness that we humans regularly inflict upon ourselves and one another. It may well be that humanity is a flawed species – a kind of cancer on this planet, or an evolutionary experiment gone terribly wrong. But for all that, when I consider the astonishing gifts and abilities that evolution has bestowed on us, I nonetheless feel hugely grateful to be human.
For one thing, I am grateful for the gift of wonder and insatiable curiosity to understand this most amazing universe in which we find ourselves. Because of our oversize brain with its infinitely extensible repertoire of symbols that we use to represent our world, we are hard-wired as meaning-seeking creatures – hell-bent on figuring out who and where we are in the larger scheme of things, unable to avoid a host of ultimately unanswerable questions, and destined always to wonder.
Einstein spoke of this in his 1932 address to the German League of Human Rights: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
We humans seem unique in this regard. Could dolphins or chimpanzees experience some limited version of wonderment? Maybe. But I’m willing to bet that your pet Retriever is not pondering life’s meaning. We humans have evolved to a quite different level of consciousness. Standing apart from the ongoing stream of fleeting sensations, we represent in our minds an organised and stable universe that we can objectively consider. It’s as though we have been granted a measure of detachment and are now set free to contemplate our life, to ponder our existence, and to wonder.
Equipped with this capacity to objectify our world, and driven by our wonder and curiosity, we have accumulated a vast amount of knowledge. Not content with the sensory receptors given us by nature, we have created tools to expand the range of our perception to explore everything from the depths of space to the micro-world of bacteria. Were it not so, we would still believe the sun revolves around the earth and that disease is caused by demons, witchcraft, or the displeasure of a god. But as our empirical knowledge has expanded, so has our sense of wonder. We know now that our sun is just one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy, which is one among 100 billion galaxies in our universe. That makes a total of 10 trillion stars (give or take a few) – the same as the number of cells in our body and more than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world (though just how anyone figured that out is beyond me). To which all I can say is “Wow! That is so amazing! No, more than amazing, it is unimaginable. My mind boggles.”
What a huge privilege to be human! – to have access to all this knowledge, to be part of the ongoing quest for more, and always to wonder! Truly, anyone who no longer pauses to wonder or stands rapt in awe is as good as dead.
And speaking of death, this surely is part of the burden of being human. So far as we know, no other creature contemplates, let alone worries about, its eventual demise. Some, from apes to elephants to magpies, seem to grieve the loss of a family member. And cattle and sheep, on their way up the slaughter-house ramp, seem to show some nervous anticipation of what is to come. But we alone, though still immersed in the ongoing stream of nature and history, are able to look behind us from whence we have come, as well as before us to what we imagine our future may be. And we know, with absolute certainty, that around some bend in the stream, death waits. Moreover, given our heightened awareness of self and the sense that there is some enduring “I” that indwells this changing body, it is very hard for us to imagine our own non-existence. Indeed, the prospect of it is so daunting that we will do almost anything to deny it – from building monumental pyramids, to investing in all manner of anti-aging potions, to creating elaborate systems of belief about our soul’s survival after death. Clearly such anxiety, which is with us from about age 4 until they lay us to rest, is part of the downside of being human.
One other consideration is worth mentioning. Our greatly expanded awareness system has both blessed and cursed us with a measure of freedom unknown to any other animal. Without getting into the centuries-old debate about determinism versus free-will, let’s acknowledge that, although it may be illusory, our experience of free-will is absolutely real. It certainly feels like we have some choice in the decisions we make. And this experience of freedom seems to have evolved along with bigger brains and heightened awareness.
Most animals do most of what they do instinctively. Their behaviour happens, without any conscious decisions being made, as determined by their nervous system in response to their changing environments. But as brains became more complex and their perceptual categories more extensive, behaviour became less and less driven by instincts and more and more shaped by what the animal had learned from its experience. By the time Homo sapiens emerged, very little was left to instinct. We still have basic needs that must be satisfied, but few inborn programs for doing the millions of things that we do. The vast majority of our behaviour is learned. And given our unique kind of consciousness – our reflective awareness of what we are doing, our memory of what we have done, our imagining of what may be possible, and our consequent ability to predict the likely effects of our behaviour – we have no option but to plan and choose what we will do.
That freedom comes at a huge price. Other species can do what they do, untroubled by whether it is right or wrong. And what they do is virtually guaranteed by evolution to be appropriate to the eco-niche to which they are adapted. We, on the other hand, are hung with minds that must decide what we will do, and our choices can be adaptive or catastrophic. We are the only creature that takes from our environment far more than we need, and does so not only by slaughtering vast numbers of our own kind but by endangering the very ecosystem on which we depend. Now as the dominant species, we can literally shape the future life of this planet for good or for ill. Whether we like it or not, we have become co-creators of its ongoing evolution.
What an enormous responsibility! It is the privilege and burden of being human.
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