Chapter 1: Becoming human

Until recently, the belief that the human species is qualitatively different from non-human life-forms has been one of the most abiding notions of nearly all sophisticated civilizations.

The nature of this difference, to be sure, was defined in a great variety of ways. Human beings generally assigned to themselves the possession of souls, moral sensibilities, immense technical powers, and remarkable mental faculties. These traits were often melded into various combinations and ascribed to some social strata by others to distinguish various strata from one another and from the proverbial beasts in the field. Even tribal peoples, who professed to see similarities between themselves and the animals around them, indirectly gave a commanding identity to their own kind by attributing human speech, motives, and interests to animals in the anthropomorphized universe of their mythology.

Western civilization in particular singled out reason as the faculty that, more than any other, gave humanity a unique status among all other forms of life. The West saw reason as the generative source not only of logic, discourse, and reflection but also of moral awareness and empathy. The ancient Greeks gave to thought an eminence so great that it acquired almost heroic proportions, both in the classical era of Athenian philosophy and as a major legacy in the ages that followed. Socrates, designated by the Delphic oracle as the ‘wisest man in Greece’, became the prototypical symbol of human genius, and Western civilization saw the jurors who sent him to his death for his intellectual independence as the collective embodiment of intolerance and ignorance, men who defiled the noblest traditions of Hellenic civilization.

Even theology, Eastern as well as Western, despite its emphasis on the validity of faith over reason, commonly used reason to justify faith to its followers. Augustine’s The City of God, Christianity’s ideological bridge from the ancient to the medieval world, remains to this day a closely reasoned masterpiece of dialectic, its authority partly supplanted centuries later by the scrupulously analytical Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. The notion that the Middle Ages was entirely an age of faith that elbowed reason and philosophy to the sidelines of culture is a myth, invented chiefly by later rationalists to free themselves from clerical authority. The biblical crossroads between man and the gods intersects precisely at the point where Adam eats of the tree of moral knowledge, to be expelled with Eve into ‘the east of Eden’ by an anxious Yahweh who warns his fellow deities (or angels) that man ‘has become like one of Us’ — in fact, that he will become a deity — if he eats from the tree of life and becomes immortal (Genesis 4:22—24).

By the eighteenth century, reason had not only been elevated to the Status of a defining human trait; it was seen as the arbiter par excellence for critically evaluating human social progress and moral development. Indeed, by virtue of its speculative capacities, reason had the all-important power to critically search beyond the past and present, to transcend the given state of affairs, and to stake out the contours of a progressive future literally defined as a rational society. Turgot, Diderot, and Holbach, among the great Enlighteners of the eighteenth century, conjoined reason with freedom in an intellectual partnership that prepared the ideological climate for the French Revolution and the emergence of modern socialism. Reason would illuminate the path to liberty, they believed, by destroying the fetters of superstition and domination. Diderot, for Iris part, gave to reason a suppleness and a nuanced sensibility equaled only by the greatest dialogues of Plato. A generation after Diderot, Hegel equipped reason with a system of logic that emphasized the creative dynamics of development over the arid statics of formal Aristotelian analytics.

The Enlightenment, as the rational and humanistic movement in eighteenth-century Western Europe came to be called, was appropriately named for its all-embracing rationalism. To the thinkers of the time, the world itself was inherently rational. Newton had shown that its physical aspects were marked by order and intelligibility; Montesquieu broadened this outlook to society and its history; Voltaire challenged the authenticity of supernatural agents; and German idealists from Kant to Hegel incarnated man from an Edenic malefactor into a creative subject who had the power to know himself and his own destiny. This sweeping vision of‘man the knower’, as Homo sapiens (a name that dates from 1802), helped to reinforce the emerging natural sciences in their struggle against theological restrictions, fostered a belief in social progress, and nourished the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution, whose limits, if it had any, have since bounded beyond the reach of prediction.

Classical humanism, as the humanism of the Renaissance was called, was bom in the fifteenth century. Embodied in men like Erasmus and Leonardo da Vinci, it tried to orient European sensibilities toward the intellectual achievements of the ancient world, particulady Greek culture, and its naturalistic esthetics, in sharp opposition to the dogmatism and artistic rigidities of medievalism. But its outlook was basically retrospective. By contrast, Enlightenment humanism was bom in the intellectual and scientific ferment of the eighteenth century. It was oriented not toward a pagan past but toward a rational future. It was to be embodied not only in the Encyclopedists but in the theorists of various nineteenth-century socialisms, with their shared principles of futurity and hope.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, both forms of humanism — the Renaissance and the Enlightenment — melded into what I shall call an ‘enlightened humanism’ that united Renaissance estheticism with Enlightenment rationalism, an outlook that pervaded the thinking of most socialists. The formidable prestige of enlightened humanism remained triumphant for a century, despite the assaults that were directed against it by mystics, romantics, and nationalists, all of whose ideas converged in the proto-fascistic völkisch movement of the fin de siècle. In the postwar era it is due in no small part to Martin Heidegger’s anti-Enlightenment and anti-rational tract, ‘A Letter on Humanism’ (1947), that the word ‘humanism’ has acquired its present-day pejorative meaning as an amoral, narrowly anthropocentric and ugly technocratic outlook.

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My expanded interpretation of humanism is not free of paradoxes — indeed, of paradoxes within paradoxes. Rousseau, to cite a striking example, who was no less a rationalist than the mathematician D’Alembert, nonetheless placed an emphasis on sensibilité so maudlin that he may be broadly called the ‘father’ of much of the anti-rationalistic romanticism of the nineteenth century. Voltaire was no less a progressivist than Turgot, yet the pessimism of his novella Candide fed into the misanthropic attitudes of later generations. Adam Smith, still another case, absorbed the altruistic moral philosophies of Shaftesbury and Hutchinson as a young man, yet he became the voice of ‘enlightened self-interest’ and the amoralism of the emerging industrial bourgeoisie.. All of these paradoxes came to a head in the French Revolution, whose universalistic declarations heralded the unity and fraternity of humanity, only to plummet into a strident nationalism and Napoleonic imperialism.

Within these major paradoxes lurked seemingly minor ones that emerged full-blown in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: technological advances were rational, yet they brought terrible misery to the working classes of the Industrial Revolution. The national rights of peoples were regarded as rational, yet asserting them brought a host of parochial cultural and ethnic hatreds. The growth of cities, commerce, manufacturing, and self-interest was rational, yet they despoiled the land, wrought havoc on the natural landscape, and destroyed the very aboriginal cultures that the enlighteners in their own writings had celebrated for their ‘natural virtues’.

Even as these paradoxes increased in number and intensity, fostering a xcntimental and moral counterweight to the overriding ideal of value-free scientific objectivity, the arguments between the rational enlightened humanists and their anti-rational romantic critics (who may be loosely called the antihumanists of their day) were eminently ideological in the strictest meaning of the word. Ideas were pitted against ideas, however passionate the poetry of the romantics and cold the prose of the rationalists. Even as reason was denounced by romantics as ‘meddlesome’ or hypostatized by rationalists as ‘sovereign’, it was in fact reason that informed both parties to the debate. Apart from sheer rhetoric, few were prepared to challenge the validity of rationality on its own terms or to deny its powers of clarification and conviction.

In fact, the paradoxical fact that rationality was an approach shared by enlightened rationalists and romantic anti-rationalists alike became all the more marked in the late nineteenth century.[3] Both fervently parochial racists like the Comte de Gobineau and universalistic social visionaries like Karl Marx cast their views in scientific or at least rational terms, as did heated romantic nationalists like Garibaldi and sober revolutionary internationalists like Eugene Varlin. The great Western tradition of reason, indeed, of an expansive humanism that included the natural iciences, not only served as the arbiter of truth but constituted the formative core of human self-definition. Enlightened humanism retained its influence even when it was under assault by its opponents. For upon whatever grounds anti-rationalists and rationalists differed in specifics, they usually shared an implicit common concern for humanity.

In any case, the influence which the romantic anti-rationalists exercised was largely confined to an intellectual and esthetic elite. On society as a whole, it had a very limited influence. Conventional nationalism and religion had a much stronger impact on the social attitudes and emotions of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europeans, albeit generally as viscerally existential phenomena with no discursive appeal to ‘man the knower’. Creditably, the most significant and intellectually demanding popular movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was formed around ideas attributed to Karl Marx, which appealed not only to the proletariat’s material interests but, with varying degrees of success, to its mind and its presumed internationalism. Apart from the intellectuals who debated, often in esthetic realms, the virtues and filings of reason, the heritage of enlightened humanism acquired a mass outreach in Marxian socialism and, to a considerable degree, in classical anarchism.

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The ideological situation we face, today, is significandy different. The current crop of antihumanists are coarser, intellectually shoddier, and, alas, far more influential than the romantic anti-Enlightenment writers and poets of a century ago.

Worse, contemporary antfiiumanism tends to be more blurred than its predecessor in its approach to the grave concerns that face humanity and those that lie on the social horizon. If most of our ills — ecological as well as social — arise from increasingly dangerous dislocations in the existing society, the problem of how we deal with each other and with the powerful technological means that society has at its disposal for reshaping the planet is a matter of paramount importance. To slight these eminendy social problems, to play down the importance of reason in resolving them, indeed, to ignore the need to achieve what socialism in all its forms called a rational society, is in my view suicidal. Owing to the immensity of our social and ecological problems, the turn to an irrational antihumanism serves to paralyze our capacity to act with purpose and sanity.

Indeed, at a time when the world seems to be descending into cultural and ecological chaos, to deprecate the very means for creating a rational society — notably, an enlightened humanism — should be cause for great alarm..This is especially so when antihumanism is on the point of becoming the conventional wisdom of our time. It surfaces today in ordinary table conversation as a chic state of mind from the households of American suburbia to the regal domiciles of England. Not much of this ‘conversation, to use the language of postmodernism, is entirely intelligible; nor is it notable for its consistency. It is rare these days to come upon any single work drat is reasonably coherent and free of juvenile exhortations and unthinking waywardness, or that tries to follow out with relative completeness the logic of its premises.

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In this ideological quagmire, several antihumanist works can be singled out that typify those which fill libraries and bookstores today. Perhaps the most characteristic work that lends itself to coherent analysis — which is not to say that it is free of contradictions — is David Ehrenfeld’s The Arrogance of Humanism[4] Written by an academic at Rutgers University who holds numerous degrees in history and science, Ehrenfeld s book is possessed of a literacy and pithiness that are unusual in current antihumanistic literature, much of which is drenched in New Age metaphors and heady exhortations. ‘When one chooses a guiding philosophy of life’, Ehrenfeld sternly warns his readers, ‘and the modern world has chosen humanism — one becomes responsible for all the consequences that flow from that choice’.[5] This demand that we follow the logic of a choice to its end is entirely laudable.

What, then, is the humanism of which Ehrenfeld is so suspicious? His definition is unerring in its certitude and disturbing in its implications. Humanism, we are told, is

a supreme faith in human reason — its ability to confront and solve the many problems that humans face, its ability to rearrange both the world of Nature and the affairs of men and women so that human life will prosper. Accordingly, as humanism is committed to an unquestioning faith in the power of reason, so it rejects other assertiom of power, including the power of God, the power of supernatural forces, and even the undirected power of Nature in league with blind chance.

In the humanist outlook, notes Ehrenfeld reprovingly, neither the ‘power of God’ nor the ‘power of supernatural forces’ exist, while the ‘undirected power of Nature’ can ‘widi effort be mastered. Because human intelligence is the key to human success, the main tasks of humanists is to assert its power and to protect its prerogatives’.[6]

Ehrenfeld’s definition of humanism may be less than satisfactory, particularly when he casts adherence to humanism in theistic terms, like ‘uupreme faith’ and ‘unquestioning faith’. But inverting Ehrenfeld’s definition of humanism supplies us with a pithy definition of humanism: notably, a faith in the powers of God, of supernatural forces, and of ‘Nature’. Precisely what these cryptic powers and their sources are remains disturbingly unclear. Even more disturbing are the archaisms contained in both these definitions. Ehrenfeld seems to believe in the very powers of God and powers of the supernatural diat it took enlightened minds centuries, if not millennia, to exorcize, together with necromancy, superstition, and religious fanaticism, a struggle literally waged in tile torture chambers of the Church and State.

By no means is Ehrenfeld alone in criticizing enlightened humanism for its ‘degoddedness’ or Entgöttering in viewing reality. We also have it from E. F. Schumacher in his Guide for the Perplexed that

faith in modern man’s omnipotence is wearing thin, Even if all the ( new 3 problems were solved by technological fixes, the state of futility, disorder, and corruption would remain.... More and more people are beginning to realize that ‘the modern experiment’ has failed. ... Man closed the gates of Heaven against himself and tried, with immense energy and ingenuity, to confine himself to the Earth. He is now discovering that the Earth is but a transitory state, so that a refusal to reach for Heaven means an involuntary descent into Hell.[7]

Clearly, ‘faith in modern man’s omnipotence’ is a pejorative interpretation of the humanistic commitment to rationality. Perhaps even more explicitiy than Ehrenfeld, Schumacher, the guru of ‘small is beautiful’ (the tide of his most influential book), tilts toward the transcendental, if not the ecclesiastical. Still other antihumanist authors, such as William Irwin Thompson, Thomas Berry, and Matthew Fox, would likely have few disagreements with Ehrenfeld’s and Schumacher’s antihumanism.

These seemingly reflective judgments by presumably sophisticated antihumanists are often the stuff from which the crassest of vulgarities are written for consumption by the New Agers of California and, in recent years, neady all other points of the compass. Neither Stonehenge nor the romantic cliffs of the Rhine can be excluded as a center for those ‘Higher Levels’, as Schumacher calls them, ‘that alone can maintain [man’s] humanity’.[8] Cruder forms of this extremely loose verbiage can be found snugly ensconced not only in esoteric periodicals that proclaim ‘Nature’ as ‘the gates of Heaven’ but in the Anglo-American mass media.

Consider the characteristic opening of a recent cover article in Time, the American mass-circulation weekly. ‘How Man Began’, professing to tell its readers about ‘sensational’ developments in human evolutionary anthropology, declares: ‘No single, essential difference separates human beings from other animals — but that hasn’t stopped the phrasemakers from trying to find one’.[9] Whereupon the article proceeds, presumably under a tyranny of archaeological facts, to tell us, quite inadvertendy, diat the differences between humans and other animals are not only essential but really quite staggering. Filtered down to ever lower layers of literacy, the article’s sensationalistic opening — the facts notwithstanding — produces a vision of the human condition that is ultimately opaque, mysterious, and necromantic to millions of ordinary readers.

In contrast to nineteenth-century debates between romantic antihumanists and the enlightened humanists, rationality rarely, if ever, enters into current antihumanist affirmations. Statements that are not simply declarative are filled with theistic metaphors that seem bent on making the skeptical reader feel like a heretic who violates God-given (or Goddess-given) injunctions. Intonations replace insights, dull repetitious mantras replace the evocative poetic recitations of the old-time romantics, and reason gives way not only to intuition but to vague allusions to cryptic ‘powers’ that allow for no explication, much less analysis.

No less irritating is the fact that this stuff not only blurs the boundaries between the human and non-human; it obliterates the very identity of human beings in the great drama of biological evolution and their self-consciousness in the equally important drama of social evolution. Whatever the ‘gates of Heaven’ may be, we have no way of knowing where they are located, still less how to open them. The spiritual geography of these freely drawn and inspirationally guided maps, so currendy popular in Anglo-American bookshops, constitute a cartography guided by the viscera rather than by the brain, and by visions that are more hallucinogenic tiian insightful. Antihumanism provides no compass for this world, yet it has no other world to offer, short of an imaginative one that differs in considerable detail with each guru, periodical, or book consulted.

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In the light of the public confusion about the human condition, particularly with respect to humanity’s identity, it behooves us to ask ourselves who we really are as a species and what would constitute a society that fulfills our potentiality as rational and creative agents in the world. Let me stress the word potentiality, a word I use to emphasize what we could be if we brought reason into our affairs rather than what we are today in a mad and meaningless world.

Our being as a species is closely related to our being as social creatures. To discuss them requires asking what constitutes our place in what is broadly called ‘Nature’ and what constitutes a rational society. Certainly, if we stumble blindly into the future with no sense of the characteristics that make us uniquely human, antihumanists would have a prima facie case for designating people a ‘cancer’ in natural evolution, with little promise of doing more than destroying the biosphere and most of themselves.

In trying to define our humanity as organic beings, we will not get very far unless we define words that are usually used very loosely in reference to our status in the biosphere. I refer especially to the word Nature, one of those very complex words that is used glibly and whose meaning becomes more elusive the more we examine it.

No one doubts that ‘Nature’ is, minimally, a wilderness area that one can see from a mountain top, a scenic view of valleys, fields, forests, and streams, indeed, of all that lies so magnificently and invitingly within our purview. Nature, to many people, is simply a vista free of human beings and hence ‘authentically’ natural. Such vistas adorn picture postcards, particularly in the Far West of the USA, and the canvases of ‘nature painters’.

On the surface, this definition is partly true — and also partly false. That Nature is a vista. bereft of human presence is a convention deeply ingrained in the modern mind, especially in North America, where Nature and wilderness are widely regarded as synonymous. More important, the notion that Nature has eternal attributes as wilderness is so commonplace that it has become a frozen image in innumerable artistic, literary, and documentary works and a staple in a pseudo-philosophical New Age literature that extols the need to ‘dwell in’ and ‘abide with’ an unchanging, eternal ‘balance of Nature’.

Yet this frozen image of Nature is extremely deceptive. The fixity of a breathtaking vista simply does not exist. Nature is not only dynamic at every moment of the day but, above all, is highly developmental. Plants and animals are generally not only active in maintaining themselves hut are interactive in creating new eco-communities.[10] Life-forms are continually being bom, maturing, and dying, entering into elaborate food webs or networks that make possible the vistas we admire.

Most important for the purposes of our discussion, what we call Nature is continually evolving: plants and animals vary within the same species and mutate into new life-forms. They are continually transforming themselves, at times so gradually that their evolution is completely unnoticeable; at still other times with great rapidity, in what some biologists call ‘punctuated equilibria’.

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What makes our notion of Nature as a mere vista particularly misleading is that it ignores humanity’s place in the natural world. That is to say, it obscures the fact that human beings are not aliens in a dichotomy of Man pitted against Nature. Rather, human beings are a result of the long evolutionary history of the natural world.

In fact, they are a very special result of that history. They are possessed of abilities no other life-form has equaled in kind. Indeed, if Nature is a cumulative evolutionary process — in the case of organic evolution, from the earliest prokaryotic cells through eukaryotic cells and their elaboration into the aquatic, terrestrial, reptilian, mammalian, and primate groups — the word Nature becomes more than a metaphor for mere ‘Being’, an abstract existence.

The challenge of thinking about Nature as a cumulative evolution arises from the duality of the evolutionary process itself. On the one hand, human beings have qualities that can be found in nascent form in other animals as a result of their shared evolution. But by virtue of a twist In the evolutionary process, they have also developed well beyond their animal ancestors. They have created a new realm of evolution based on their extraordinary intelligence, anatomical flexibility, unprecedented communicative abilities, distinctly mutable and highly malleable institutions (that we can properly call society), and extraordinary capacity for innovation.

I cannot emphasize the institutional, mutable, malleable, and innovative nature of society too strongly. Society, properly speaking, is a strictly human phenomenon, one that stands in significant contrast to the genetically imprinted collectivities of so-called ‘social insects’and the relatively loose, developmentally static animal aggregations of herds, troops, and similar groups. Although such animal aggregations change in population numbers and are found in a wide range of different species, animal communities undergo very little variation; nor do they possess an institutional framework formed by conscious design. Human beings, by contrast, form bands, tribes, tribal federations, monarchies, democracies, and republics, among others, each of winch has richly articulated structures, intersubjective relationships, and cultures, and which can be changed by popular action, coups, and upheavals of one kind or another.

The majority of animals, moreover, merely dwell in their environment. If they alter that environment, they do so primarily inadvertently, merely by their presence in it, or by nascent choices from among naturally available possibilities. With a few and very limited exceptions, they do not consciously remake the conditions they find but rather try to live within them. By sharp contrast, human beings consciously act upon their environment, and with new material techniques, they intentionally try to shape it to meet their own needs. Put simply: animals generally adapt, while human beings generally innovate*. This distinction is a difference not merely in degree but in kind.

Even so, our unique human capacities do not constitute a complete breach with the natural world — even as we innovate, we simultaneously incorporate our animal heritage into our lives. Indeed, one of the great problems in social development is our animalistic inertia — our conservatism — in retaining obsolete social traditions that act as a brake on much-needed social changes and innovations. Although as human beings we are vertebrates, mammals, primates, and. retain certain instincts and vaguely understood impulses that are rooted in our inescapable animality, we are also capable of transcending our adaptive animal attributes and in the process becoming less animalistic than our remote hominid forebears.

If we are to advance beyond metaphorical concepts of Nature and see the organic world as an evolutionary process, we have to view Nature in a less simplistic and more graded way than the romantic image of a mere vista. To understand the emergence of humans and their creation of culture requires that the conventional image of Nature as the striedy organic be differentiated in such a way as to distinguish the social world from the merely biological. While acknowledging that all humans are necessarily mammals, we must also recognize that all mammals are not necessarily humans — indeed, between them is not only an evolutionary continuity but also an immense divide. Insofar as Nature includes the biological realm of animality that precedes the emergence of society, we are obliged, following the Roman orator-philosopher Cicero, to speak of biological evolution as ‘first nature’ and social evolution as ‘second nature’. And while we wish to recognize humanity’s filiations with its organic evolution or first nature, second nature evolves from and also includes first nature. By the same token, we do not dissolve the very real qualitative distinctions between human and non-human life-forms in a reductionist quagmire. First and second nature — the biological and the social — form a richly differentiated continuum in which second nature emerges from first. While each interacts with the other, second nature marks a transcendence of first nature, a sublation of an adaptive animality to an innovative humanity.

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Given the distinctions as well as the continuities between first and second nature, antihumanists who view human beings merely as another animal are making fools of themselves — and have a narrowly reductionist image of the natural world as well.

If humans were merely animals that just happen to be acutely intelligent — and if intelligence were an attribute no different in kind or value from, say, the ability of birds to navigate or caribou to migrate — their strictly animalistic behavior in exercising that faculty should be cause for little concern.[11] If people are no different from other animals, why shouldn’t they limitlessly populate the planet, as all animals would if they could? Rabbits, after all, might very well have overpopulated the Australian continent to the detriment of its flora and other fauna if human beings had not taken radical measures to control their reproduction rates. Or why shouldn’t people devour the earth’s resources, or even tear down the entire biosphere merely to gratify their immediate needs and impulses? If ratio nahty is comparable to the navigation of birds or the migration of caribou, humans are under no obligation to behave differ-’ ently from any other animal. Indeed, the fact that all non-human animal species are occupied exclusively with their own well-being and their need to reproduce should countervail the antihumanist view that ill-mannered human beings constitute an ecological cancer on the planet.

My point is that antihumanists unthinkingly presuppose the very exceptional rational faculties human beings alone possess, even as they denounce these faculties as the source of human ‘hubris’ and ‘arrogance’. Indeed, even as they belitde ‘faith in the power of reason and human capabilities’, to cite another of Ehrenfeld’s formulations,[12] they implicidy rely on reason to criticize that seemingly sinister ‘faith’. That antihumanists can even communicate with other human beings on morally and religiously charged issues — that would be utterly meaningless to animals, indeed completely beyond their understanding — reveals the unstated presuppositions of their denunciations of humanism. Moreover, if they denounce reason as a ‘power’ supported by a misplaced ‘faith’, their alternative cognitive faculties — intuition? — would also require the ‘power of reason’ to explain why an intuitive ‘faith’ has any validity at all. That is to say, they must turn to reason to wriggle their way toward a belief system or any eminendy human form of knowledge, with all its evident or concealed ways of thinking — be it a faith, belief, or insight.

Whether one chooses to anchor human knowledge in faith based on intuition or on reasoned elucidation, there is not a shred of evidence to support a belief that animals have faith in anything. Nor do we expect them to have faith, let alone act rationally, with respect to anything aside from their survival. Belief systems are beyond the competence of any known animal species apart from human beings. Ironically, we tend to judge the competence of animals in the survival game more on their ‘intelligence’ than on any belief sys tems we may impute to them — that is, on an attribute denigrated in human beings.

Finally, human beings are distinctive and different from animals because they are consciously innovative, not merely adaptive. They do not merely dwell in given habitats; they create new environments. Their innovativeness, like their power of reason, was not given to them by heavenly beings, mythic figures, or ‘alien’ visitors from another galaxy; rather, they are products in great part of biological evolution itself — of first as well as second nature.

It is to this evolutionary process — biological development and the emergence of society — to which we must turn for an understanding of what it means to be human.

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Anatomically, human beings are not an abrupt branching away from a long flow of evolutionary development. Quite on the contrary, they are the outcome of trends in natural evolution that are not only explicable but are in a sense quite logical, to an extent that paleoanthropologists, even nominalistic ones, are still learning.

If biological evolution is entirely a hit-or-miss matter of chance, it is inexplicable and meaningless; unique human qualities would seem to have emerged ab novo with no basis in a long process of organic differentiation. If, conversely, biological evolution is predestined in unwaveringly teleological terms, so that the appearance of humanity was already inexorably prefigured from the very beginnings of life, the emergence of humanity — or any life-form — acquires a mystical dimension that presupposes the existence of the very phenomena we are attempting to explain.

Between a strictly nominalistic conception of evolution and a strictly teleological one, there is a middle and more plausible ground that is worth examining. If we think of how certain, specific evolutionary attributes developed, our image of their development becomes both less nominalistic and less teleological. Consider how the nervous system evolved, for example. Organisms with complex nerve networks can be traced back to the distant Devonian epoch, more than a hundred million years ago, when fishlike animals began to leave the ancient seas for terrestrial shores and the open air. These Chordata, with their spinal cords and simple brains, adapted themselves to so many different ecological niches that their ultimate occupancy of trees was quite as comprehensible as their occupancy of swamps, arid lands, caves, and the like.

In the tight of the eminently attractive ecological forest niches that were open to them, the evolution of primates and their differentiation into monkeys, apes, hominoids, and hominids seems far less chancy a development than strictly empirical paleoanthropologists often lead us to suppose. Recent discoveries suggest that it was in densely forested areas — not necessarily in arid open savannahs — that bipedal primates began to evolve. Indeed, the discovery in 1994 of an ancestral fossil, Australopithecus ramidus, has left paleoanthropologists speculating that a bipedal link between apes and humans walked on forest floors nearly four and a half million years ago, about a million years before Australopithecus afarensis of ‘Lucy’ fame appeared, and long before savannahs emerged in areas of Ethiopia that are rich with hominid fossils today.

Is this mere accident? Possibly — in a very narrow view of natural selection. Or is it the fulfillment of a potentiality? Certainly, because such bipedal hominids did appear after all, they did not emerge from smoke. Their development toward bipedatism built on earlier anatomical changes that had taken place long before primates descended from tree branches to the ground. What we call human 7 patently evolved from within an immensely important tendency — in biological evolution: the enormous specialization of an organ system whose development makes for greater behavioral flexibility — the nervous system — in contrast to highly specialized anatomic attributes such as scaled, armored hides, fanged jaws, and immense claws. Leaving aside ironclad teleology, human evolution occurred within a number of specific tendencies in animal development that are thoroughly consistent with Darwin’s Origin of Species, and reveals the potentiality for social evolution.

Human beings are primates, a group of animals with highly flexible physical attributes. The primate body has free forearms that allow it to adapt easily to a great variety of environmental conditions. It has stereoscopic vision, which makes it possible to judge distances ranging from the most minute to the far horizon. Primates can see colors, a capability not given to mammals generally, remarkably enhancing primates’ knowledge of the similarities and differences between the things that make up its environment.

Human hands, distincdy primate in origin, are puny by comparison with a lion’s claws, and human arms are weak by comparison with a bear’s forelegs. The relatively hairless human skin is more vulnerable than the hides of most mammals to changes in weather, insect bites, thorns, and abrasions. These anatomical failings would have made humanity s survival impossible without a brain that was ultimately capable of generalizing and memorizing to an unprecedented extent. These brains, which evolved together with a vocal apparatus, bipedalism diat freed the arms for a greater variety of tasks, stereoscopic and color vision, and highly manipulative fingers, conferred on human beings an unprecedented capacity not only to survive but to radically refashion the natural environment to suit their needs.

Not all of these attributes emerged at once. Indeed, it would render biological evolution miraculous to maintain that they emerged simultaneously in a single creature. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of only half a century ago, which regarded brain development the earliest step toward human development, evidence today shows that bipedalism preceded humanity’s advance beyond the mental equipment of a modern chimpanzee.

Whether bipedalism conferred rudimentary social advantages upon the earliest hominids by freeing the arms to carry food back to a family unit or a group, or to fashion simple implements, or both, is a question we may never be able to answer definitively. Greater brain power came later, as the evidence suggests, as did elaborate tool-making. Each may have had social consequences: bipedalism leading to closer association; free arms to a growing sense of responsibility to one’s kin group rather than to a single or several offspring; tool-making enhancing mental astuteness.

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The emergence of humanity was part of a strong overall biological trend, spanning hundreds of millions of years, that gave rise within first nature itself to a species that transcended its mere animality and produced a second, distinctively social nature, just as the development of the inorganic world had previously given rise to the organic. Having developed t vithin first nature and as part of its very evolution as an animal, humanity evolved further to produce a second or social nature.

No ‘faith in a higher authority’ , be it the ‘power of God’ or the ‘power of the supernatural’ (Ehrenfeld) or any power to ‘open the gates of Heaven’ (Schumacher), need be invoked to explain how — or why — human beings, over the course of their evolution, achieved their eminently natural capacity to consciously alter their environment and make them more amenable to human well-being.

Nor did any of this ability evolve because primates, hominids, and humans perversely ‘willed 7 it into existence. Throughout, natural selection shaped the human ancestral line, no less than it was shaping the ancestral lines of contemporary wolves, bears, whales, tigers, and all the furry little creatures we find so endearing and of which we feel so protective.

Natural selection worked on features that already existed, ‘selecting’ certain possibilities or potentialities that arose from previously advantageous developments, be they simple nerve ganglia that could become brains, legs that could become arms, a rudimentary upraised stature that could become fully bipedal, bones that could become fingers, and so forth — ranging across the anatomical and organ systems of the earlier, more generalized mammals.

Thus humanity is not some sort of freak in organic evolution. In fact, increasing subjectivity, intelligence, and physical flexibility would confer enormous advantages on any animal species. Early human beings initially did no more than what any versatile animal would do: they used their remarkable and developing brains to meet their own needs. If their highly generalized anatomy required still more brain power to compensate for their very limited muscle power, they fortunately continued to evolve more brain power.

The natural component of becoming human, then, consists in the fact that biological evolution enhanced rationality — the very ability that so many antihumanists regard as one of humanity’s troubling attributes. To be a human animal, in effect, is to be a reasoning animal that can consciously act upon its environment, alter it, and advance beyond the passive realm of unthinking adaptation into the active realm of conscious innovation. A mystical faith in the ‘supernatural’, ‘God’, and ‘the gates of heaven’, as an alternative to reason, not only catapults humanity, out of natural evolution; it creates out of pure smoke a mythic transcendental realm that severs the ties of our species to the natural world. Not only do antihumanists denigrate the naturally endowed power of human beings to reason; they open a vast chasm between the human and their revered Nature that no wispy metaphors, alluring rituals, lofty pretensions of naturalness, or mystical rubbish can fill. However much they may claim to deny that they see any opposition between human beings and the natural world, they are implicitly among its principal ideological architects today.

Finally, the supernatural, God, and the gates of heaven are crassly anthropomorphic illusions, like Disney cartoons that present talking bears, soulful deer, commanding lions, malicious wolves, and gloved mice, recreating the a nim al world in the most pedestrian human forms. In movies, talVing lions are imparted with missions acceptable to a highly moronized public, then sent forth to carry the burdens of lionhood onto the African savannahs. Conversely, in real life, full-grown men and women try to establish an identity with wolves hy childishly howling around campfires — which would probably panic any nearby wolf and cause it to rush back to its lair. Others speak as the ‘representatives’ of stones, rivers, and — with excessive hubris of entire mountain ranges in a juv enil e ‘Council of All Beings’, as though the animal world — prey and predator alike — ever created so natural an institution as parliamentary government.

Naive as these antics may seem, their impact on the human condition can easily become sinister when they ax used to create atavistic movements, socially reactionary impulses, and dangerous fantasies that obstruct attempts to change an irrational society into a rational one. Such movements bear disturbing parallels to earlier movements that offered biologistic explanations for the world’s troubles — movements that melded a romantic ecologism with nationalism and racialism, to make the twentieth century one of the bloodiest in history.

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Having defined Nature as a cumulative evolutionary process and suggested humanity’s place in it, we are in a better position to deal with human beings as social creatures.

Our highly complex brains, our capacity to make tools and to vocalize syllabically, our dexterous fingers, bipedal gait, and stereoscopic vision, all taken together would not provide us with startling advantages over instinctively programmed, heavily muscled, roaring, and swift beasts of prey if each of us lived isolated in forests and on savannahs. Indeed, many human attributes — such as our relatively feeble muscles and slow gait — would be outright fiabilities, especially if our highly imaginative minds panicked us with fantastic as well as real fears. The distant Pleistocene world of our ancestors was anything but safe, carefree, and liberating. It does not take an abundance of knowledge to recognize how appallingly dangerous an African night is to any creature, even to animals that five in herds.

By bringing a camera with infrared fights onto the African Savannah, Donald Johanson and others have dramatically shown that all hell breaks loose when the sun goes down: Hyenas attack lone lions, while lion prides attack elephant calves and even pull down a burly, formidable buffalo of enormous strength and bulk.[13]

Humans are immensely vulnerable animals — more vulnerable than arboreal primates — and our ancestors, such as Lucy, in the remote Plio-Pleistocene, were even more vulnerable than we, who at least have nearly three times the brain size for our weight than she. Our rich cultural heritage enhances our versatility in the most challenging and unfamiliar conditions. It is doubtful that lone, bipedal hominids could have survived the furious predation that normally occurs in African forests and savannahs at night without some system of common defense. And it was in Africa, in a wilder and more dangerous world than the cold north-lands, that our ancestors originated.

Significandy, hominids honed to a fine degree precisely those traits that made for effective cooperation. Their traits for expression, communication, guardianship, care, and cooperation seem to have increased rather than diminished. They increasingly developed skills that depended upon cooperative activity rather than individual physical strength. If bipedalism had any value to our ancestors, it was to carry food and young juveniles — to acquire food for a group of some sort, not merely to feed oneself. Like many paleoanthropologists, I wish to emphasize that an integral part of our first nature — our biological evolution — is our ability to function cooperatively with others of our own kind. The extent to which we can call this ability social is difficult to say. It is striking that the physically strongest of the early hominids, Australopithecus robustus, with its massive jaws and frame, was extinct by the eady Pleistocene, while the more gracile Australopithecus afaremis, which may have been ancestral to all Australopithednes, gave rise to the early Homo genus from which we are all direcdy descended. Nor was Lucy, some three and a half million years ago, any less an object of prey than baboons, chimpanzees, and other primates. What is remarkable is that the diminutive hominids of the late Pliocene and early Pleistocene were not extinguished like so many other species in those remote periods, and it is this fact that requires explaining, not simply their anatomical and cranial evolution.

By no means, in fact, did social life or second nature suddenly emerge in our species from first nature and abruptly ‘disconnect’ us from the natural world. Inscribed on our physical anatomy are the incipient elements of social life that make it possible for us to be sharing, cooperative, and family-oriented animals. Human first nature is shaped not only by anatomical developments that make for greater intelligence in getting food and outwitting predators — developments we might expect to find in all animals; it is also shaped, especially in early hominids, by developments that yield complex forms of consociation and interaction. For an immensely long span of time, rudimentary forms of consociation provided an advantage to one hominid fine over another that was selective socially as well as naturally, much as mutual aid provided a marked advantage to one animal species over another.

To speak exclusively of natural selection without reference to the advantages conferred on hominids by social selection, then, would be simplistic. To the extent that early hominids formed social groupings without complex institutions, the two were tied together very closely. Thus traits favoring cooperation, intercourse, group protection, and scavenging-foraging (our ancestors were more likely scavengers than hunters) were ‘selected’ for the same survival reasons that fangs and claws were ‘selected’ for lions.

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The earliest institutions that distinguish a society from a herd were probably structured around eminently biological facts, such as extended infantile dependence, age difference, gender distinctions, and blood ties.

The newborn human child is a strikingly unfinished and vulnerable creature. U nlik e many newborn ungulates, which can rise to four legs within a matter of hours and run with the herd in a day or two, it is totally helpless at birth. It takes years for a human infant to gain the competence to care for itself. Depending upon individual differences, some thirteen years may pass before a child is sufficiently developed to function as a responsible person. During this protracted period of dependence, children retain a mental plasticity that makes it possible for them to learn a great deal of knowledge, much of which they will need to survive under very rudimentary material conditions of life.

By contrast, a newborn chimpanzee completes its infancy in half the time of a newborn baby, and it ends its juvenile phase in half the time required by a human child. Five years or so after a chimpanzee is bom, it can fend for itself within its habitat more effectively than can any human child of the same age, even in simple band or tribal communities. Once it has reached maturity, however, a chimpanzee’s learning capacity is very limited; a human being, on the other hand, can absorb knowledge throughout much of its life.

The protracted dependence of the human child leads to bonds of lifelong commi tm ent, even as the mother becomes occupied with the care of new and younger siblings. Sharing food, collective care taking for the young, an abiding sense of responsibility to the infirm and to the family group as a whole — all yield a clearly discernible human family structure, to an extent that is largely unknown in chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, among whom even the sharing of food is idiosyncratic at best (apart from the mother-offspring relationship), and the sick are actually shunned.

Given the human child’s ever-increasing mental faculties, its wide-ranging emotional repertoire, and its growing sense of self-awareness, it becomes the cement, as it were, of a distinct institution, the family, together with its mother and others by whom it may be raised The biological imperatives of childrearing for a long period of time constitute the point of departure for building an institutionalized society, rather than a loosely bound community.

The next major biological fact that seems to have played a constitutive role in forming early society is old age. In the demanding world of prehistory, the physical vulnerability of aging adults would tend to foster a commonality of interests among them that led to a simple, mild stratification in which they were mutually protective against neglect or abandonment by the community. In cultures that lacked writing, elders were the all important repositories of community knowledge, the heirs of the group’s wisdom, which would give them an enhanced position in band and tribal communities. It was they who taught the young the arts of survival and who brought their experience to the service of the community — and made themselves indispensable as teachers. Respect for elders, often in powerful gerontocracies, is almost universal among the remaining preliterate peoples, and It is not difficult to believe that they were highly respected in early organized societies and were ultimately given privileged positions.

Of immense importance as well were the institutionalized differences in gender that emerged in early social development Certainly, the sexes took on different material tasks. Women were responsible for child-bearing, food-gathering, and food preparation, while men engaged in scavenging, tool-making, hunting in varying degrees, and protecting the group from marauding men of other communities. Although both sexes did many things in common, the more the human tool-kit expanded and new ways of securing a livelihood emerged, the more likely it was for work to be divided functionally along gender lines so that a true division of labor occurred in most cases, even leading to a cultural division along sexual lines, in which females formed their own sororal groups and males their own fraternal groups.

Finally, the most obvious institutional forms of affinity were organized around kinship, the most universal form of relationships in contemporary preliterate communities. Just as childrearing, age differences, and gender groupings are based on biological facts, so too are relationships structured around blood ties (whether real or fictitious). Within a recognizable circle of blood brothers, sisters, parents, and other relatives, strong obligations existed that formed the sinews of social ties. One’s basic allegiances were owed first to one’s immediate kin, the members of one’s family. These were slowly extended outward to include allegiances to cousins and to offshoots of one’s group, clan, and tribe, until kinship ties became so remote that in their most extended forms, they implied no obligations at all.

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We can only guess when clearly definable institutions like the family appeared in human evolution. One of the earliest hominid ancestors, Australopithecus afarensis, about four feet tall but clearly bipedal, appeared on the semiforested African savannahs some four million years ago.[14] It had a brain that was no larger than that of a chimpanzee. Far from resembling the ‘killer ape’, as Australopithecines were called years ago, the predators of other animals, afarensis was more likely the fairly docile, omnivorous prey of leopards and hyenas. The fact that it was undoubtedly bipedal, which qualifies it as a direct ancestor of modern human beings, provides reason to suspect that mother-child relationships in these hominids were more structured than those of chimpanzees, among whom maternal bonds to the young are relatively loose and easily separated after a couple of years. In 1976 in Tanzania, the distinguished paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey found free-striding, distinctly bipedal footprints of what appears to have been two afarensis adults and a child, preserved by overlays of volcanic ash. Very much like our own, they suggest close bonding among our early ancestors — possibly even a permanent family unit that walked upon ashy soil some three and a half million years ago.

The first hominid to earn the generic name of Homo, specifically Homo habilis (that is, ‘handy man’) appeared about two million years ago, leaving not only distinctly humanlike fossil remains but recognizable stone tools. Litde more than a half-milfion years later, its descendant, Homo erectus, emerged, and with its appearance we can speak plausibly of some kind of lasting institutionalized form of social organization. Homo erectus clearly crafted tools and learned to use fire. Indeed, until this indisputably human species appeared, our ancestors were confined geographically to the African continent.

Erectus was not only technically versatile but, given its capacity to use fire, may have been a hunter, setting grasslands afire to trap and harvest animals, possibly stampeding herds over cliffs, and effectively defending itself against predators with torches. This constellation of developments — particularly the ‘taming’ of fire — must have been a turning point in human evolution. Probably, erectus‘s main source of animal proteins and fats came from scavenging, especially using stone hammers to break open the long bones of prey animals that even hyenas, with their powerful jaws, could not crack, and consuming the rich marrow that was left behind after the animal’s flesh was consumed. It is also possible that erectus did some hunting and fishing, built shelters, and lived an organized group existence. Finally, erectus was the first hominid to leave the African cradle of human evolution, migrating as far east as Java, which suggests that these humans may have known how to clothe themselves against inclement weather.

Erectus had a brain that was about two-thirds the size of its modern descendants. Within a span of about a million years, humans like Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (now classified as a form of Homo sapiens) appeared with brain sizes comparable to our own. They probably carried spears, hunted collectively, engaged in seemingly ceremonial.burials, and lived in small organized communities. In the absence of any art-like remains, it is hard to say with assurance that they held complex religious beliefs; nor is it clear that they could articulate words and sentences with any proficiency. But their burial sites suggest that they may have had some kind of belief system and form of family organization.

The physical features that distinguish authentic humans from their Neanderthal cousins is more marked than the more genteel current literature on Neanderthals would have us believe. Contrary to what some paleoanthropologists have contended, it is very unlikely that Neanderthals would be indistinguishable from modern men and women if they were dressed in modern clothing. Not only were they unable to use articulated language but they would be noticeably different in their very rounded facial profiles. We have no reason to believe that they had the artistic sense that modern humans possess, or the power to generalize in such a way that their cultures resembled even the mythopeic cultures of present-day aboriginal peoples. They were sluggishly adaptive rather than excitingly innovative, and more passive in response to the world around them than experimental and innovative. Indeed, although they were the most important human types for nearly a hundred thousand years, they left no significant evidence of artistic or ongoing technological development. Ironically, Neanderthals may well qualify as the prototypical ‘primitives’ revered by primitives and ecomystics today, that lived in ‘harmony’ with ‘Nature’ — but if diey did, it was in a harmony that they did not know existed, produced by their inability to change the environment in which they lived, not by any sensibility that could be called ecological.

Not until some ninety thousand years ago did our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens, become a clearly visible presence in the evolutionary process, essentially crossing the line between its animal ancestry and its human future. The famous Magdalenian peoples of southern France and northern Spain, who left behind the remarkable cave paintings and sculptures of some 15,000–20,000 years ago, as well as related groups in central Europe and Asia, created a definitely human-conditioned environment, one that they had significantly altered to meet their survival and mental needs. Theirs was no passive culture, despite obeisances made to it by modern primitivists extolling stone age ecological communities. Far from merely dwelling in a habitat, they innovated technologies unknown to any previous human community: bows and arrows, sophisticated spears and spear-throwers, weaving, elaborate decorative clothing, amulets, extraordinary depictions of themselves (males and females), and complex shelters, on the tundras of Eurasia.

As their burial sites indicate, they probably had increasingly elaborate status groups structured around elders, shamans, and outstanding hunters, and they were likely to have developed complex systems of sympathetic magic. Over time they seem to have developed rationalized techniques for making things to supply not only themselves but the growing trade networks of which they were part — even an ‘assembly-line’ system in one case, in which each participant made a portion of an implement that was ultimately exchanged in finished form across the European continent.

From the mammoth hunters of the Eurasian tundra to the Magdalenian foragers of southern and central Europe, Homo sapiens collectively produced a virtual explosion of creativity in technology and art, aggressively intervening in the surrounding world. Stone Age Man, as we like to conceive ‘him’ , is less likely to have been a somnambulant worshiper of Nature than a wandering, curious, and immensely inventive being who hunted with vigor and tried in every way to improve Ins everyday lot, even to the point of exterminating existing species to meet Ins needs (including the need for goods to trade), then migrating into areas that contained more plentiful sources of food and other resources. The theory should not be excluded that these migrations required them to displace other hunters — that is to say, through warfare.

Clearly, no mystical reverence for Nature that gives rise to an ecological sensibility inheres in human beings like a gene in a double helix. Only an ethical intention to behave with a sensitive concern for other life-forms and their needs — a uniquely human trait — could yield an ecological sensibility that goes beyond the gratification of material needs. Such an ecological sensibility is the result not of a ‘Pleistocene consciousness’ , to use the jargon of modern day primitivists, but of a rich civilization, of the nuanced sophistication of the human mind, and of sensitive advances in humanistic values.

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An institutionalized community, composed of structured family groups, constitutes the initial biological basis of second nature. Added to this minimal society, so to speak, are institutions formed around age groups that conferred authority on the old as the repositories of wisdom, around kinship ties as the sinews of social obligation, and around an emerging division of labor based on gender differences.

These institutional bases for social life were initially grounded in biological facts: childrearing, age, blood kinship, and sexual traits. Thus it is fair to say that second nature ‘eased’ in a graded way out of first nature. The separation between first and second nature may have been very gradual; in fact, the quasi-biological institutions that mediated this separation — family, kinship, age, and gender — are still a major presence in modern social life, however much their institutional forms have changed over time. For all the difficulties that besiege it, the family is still regarded as the cellular tissue of society, age is still viewed as a source of wisdom, and ‘blood’ (often in the form of raging ethnic solidarity and nationalism) is still ‘thicker than water’.

Even as these biological facts were increasingly acculturated, transporting humanity from first into second nature, their impact was as confining as it was liberating. Social structures based on blood ties, such as bands and tribes, could be very parochial. Generally they tended to deny to outsiders or strangers the customary protective rights that all the kindred members of their groups enjoyed. An outsider or stranger who visited a group or lived in its midst could be treated quite arbitrarily and might easily be killed because of a whim or a minor quarrel.

Gender differences, which probably took the form of a complementary relationship between the sexes in early human communities, ultimately led to the domination of women by men. Indeed, in almost every ancient civilization, the truly patriarchal family, in which the eldest male exercised life-and-death powers over all members of a familial or clan group, placed domestic life under an absolute tyranny. Nor did the male’s authority, whether as father or husband, disappear until faidy recently, however much it was attenuated over the passage of time.

By the late Paleolithic, when Homo sapiens sapiens cleady replaced the Neanderthals, animistic and probably quasi-religious belief systems had become an integral part of hunting-gathering or foraging societies. Whatever meanings can be imputed to the paintings and sculptures in European caves, there is every reason to believe that they were partly if not entirely magical. By 18,000 years ago, as the last glacial period drew to an end, people were painting figures that are remarkably redolent of Siberian and American Indian shamans. Burial arrangements suggest a belief in an afterlife, and statuettes are intended to have unknown but apparendy potent magical or quasi-religious powers.

To the extent that modern aboriginal cultures are a creditable guide to the past, we may speculate that Homo sapiens sapiens was ideologically suffused by a belief in the portentous functions of dreams, the presence of ancestral ghosts, the power of magic to assure success in hunting, and the ubiquity of demons that caused illness and death.

But if our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a world so ‘enchanted’ , it was built overwhelmingly on illusions, as I cannot stress too strongly — given the specious primitivism and mysticism so much in vogue among today’s bored middle classes. Needless to say, people in Paleolithic cultures experienced tangible dangers, too, from marauding groups, warfare, and the sacrifice and torture of captives — and from very real material uncertainty, dangerous predators, and early death. Indeed, judging from their remains, few if any Pleistocene peoples survived beyond the age of fifty, and only half reached twenty. There should be no illusions that Nature closed around this human world any less harshly than it did around the animal world.

Moreover, the limits imposed by first nature or the ‘natural life’ were not only physical but mental. Lacking syllabic writing, our early ancestors had no means of clearly recording their thoughts and experiences. Pictographs may provide a concrete story to those who inscribe and read them, but only modern syllabic writing provides the means for sophisticated generalizations that can be elaborated from one to another. Hence much that preliterate human beings knew, aside from what they acquired from experience, was handed down by word of mouth — a technique for conveying knowledge that is patently limited.

Important as spoken language is — indeed, it is one of the most important distinctions between human and non-human beings — the fund of knowledge it can provide, even in the most practical matters, is markedly limited. A preliterate community’s history and experiences can reach back no further in time than to what is retained in the memory of an individual narrator. However keen the narrator’s memory may be, it is immensely limited by comparison with the knowledge contained in the books of even a modest library. Moreover, the very idea of a history has little meaning in a preliterate society. There, events of the past take on a fabulous form that slowly drops a veil between past experience and reality, or else their memory simply fades away as one generation replaces another.

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Is the prevalence of reason the sole criterion for defining our humanity? Should an ethics of complementarity, rectifying the unavoidable inequalities that exist between individuals within a community — even within the same individual at different times in the life-cycle — be ignored in the light of cold reason? Do esthetic sensibilities, intuitions, spiritual insights, and personal uniqueness have a place in a rational society? My response would be that reason and imagination, thought and passion, have be to combined.

In sum: to become human is to become rational and imaginative, thoughtful and visionary, in rectifying the ills of the present society. By extension, our capacity for compassion obliges us to intervene in the evolutionary process of first and second nature and to render them a rational and ethical development. To become human, in effect, is to become Nature-rendered self-conscious, to knowingly and feelingly participate as active agents in the natural and social worlds. As the potentially conscious products of first and second nature, we are the lone agent who can meld them in a higher transcendence I have called ‘free nature’ that eliminates needless pain, destruction, catastrophes, and regressions.

This free nature would be a ‘thinking nature’, a fulfillment of the evolutionary process in the natural world that tends toward ever-greater subjectivity and flexibility in dealing with environmental challenges. Social life, far from being divided from or placed in opposition to the natural world, would then be rationally integrated with first nature as a self-conscious dimension of a new, creative, richly differentiated, and meaningful whole. These goals, rooted in the still-unfinished Enlightenment, constitute a unified vision and passion that takes full note of humanity’s singularity and potential ability to ultimately create ecosocial institutions — institutions that will bring human beings into harmony with one another and humanity into harmony with the natural world.

Enlightened humanism is the hopeful message that society can be rendered not only rational but wise and not only ethical but passionately visionary. If this message remains no more than a hope today — and no movement for a rational and ecological society is possible unless it is permeated by hope — it would nonetheless validate my claim that humanity is the most ‘enchanted’ species on this planet. For only human beings can hope rather than merely exist, foresee rather than merely remember, five as active agents rather than merely dwell as passive beings, change the world for the better rather than merely accept it, innovate rather than merely adapt.

But humanity today fives in the tension between the utterly irrational society that has brought us two monstrous World Wars, the unforgivable horrors exemplified by Hitler’s extermination camps and Stalin’s gulags, seething nationalisms, and ethnic hatred on the one hand — and generous ideals of freedom, cooperation, sharing, empathy and an ecological sensibility on the other. However important sentiment, intuition, feeling, and spirituality are as part of our being, reason must always stand like a sentinel, a continual challenge and corrective, lest our animality conspire with our intelligence or cunning to yield unforeseeable terrors and unexpected horrors in our still-unfinished development as human beings.

Unfortunately, removing these tensions and failings in such a way that humanity can undertake its movement toward a rational society is more problematic today than it has ever been in the past. The very means that exist to achieve a rational society — technological proficiency, wide-ranging instruments of communication, enormous knowledge of the natural wodd, and great intellectual powers — can be dangerously deployed by the present irrational society against the attainment of a better wodd. Today, simplistic appeals to our ‘intuitions’ and ‘spirituality’, to the ‘power of the supernatural’, to our ‘inner child’, and to the wisdom of various gurus are leading not only to futile introspection and an irresponsible narcissism but to social inaction.

Attaining the realm of freedom requires replacing the demonic powers diat keep us in various degrees of servility — be it to the dominant political and economic powers or psychic charlatans — and presupposes the existence of freely acting rational as well as imaginative human agents. It is precisely this much-needed consciousness that is under formidable assault from the antihumanistic ambiance of our time. Seldom have we been invited so insistently to regress to modes of ‘Being’, to use Heideggerian language, that emphasize our animality. Whether this animality takes the form of our genetic makeup, our undifferentiated ‘Oneness’ with an indefinable Nature, our intuitions, or our ancestral primitivity, it involves a loss of our rationality, human distinctiveness, capacity for innovation, and active agency in changing the world for the better.

These antihumanistic trends, in their intangible but all-encompassing ambiance, have gained an influence that obstructs our fulfillment as a meaningful result of natural and social evolution. Until the current antihumanistic tendencies are subjected to serious criticism, we cannot even begin to address the more tangible problems of our time that antihumanism obscures and distorts. It is to tills critical task that we must turn if there is to be even the remotest prospect of achieving the social fu lfillm ent and ecological responsibilities that implicitly constitute our humanity.[15]