Human Exceptionalism Is An Outmoded Religious Concept

It's not unusual these days to hear someone say in the same breath both that humans are distinct from the rest of the "animal kingdom," and that we must keep in mind that we are part of the continuum of life on Earth, two statements which directly contradict each other. The fact that it's not unusual, that even respected academics can still say such things without immediately being shouted down or risking their tenure, demonstrates that we are in a period of transition from religion to science. As recently as Charles Darwin's lifetime, the assertion that humans are no more or less than animals, although it was no longer particularly eyebrow-raising within biology departments, could still encounter great resistance in general in even the most progressive universities, because even then most of them were still dominated by religion. Very few universities founded more than two centuries ago were founded as other than religious institutions, and very many since have been founded as religious institutions, whose very purposes for being are based on holy texts which are thousands of years old, not on insights gained more recently which conflict with what those texts say. And, of course, universities which have been explicitly, declaredly secular cannot be expected to have been entirely immune from religious mindsets and agendas which permeate our very existence. And the notion that humans are distinct from the rest of nature is a religious notion, not shared by all religions by any means, but a central tenet of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which teach that God put man in charge of everything and that man has a soul which is lacking in other species.

This human exceptionalism is deeply ingrained in people's minds. But biology says something completely different. It has shown us that we are not different from other animals. We're all carbon-based and we all grow and function on the basis of DNA, and humans share the majority of their DNA coding with, for example, cats. We're the same.

It's also only religiously-based thinking which causes anyone to find such plain facts insulting and/or to reject them. The religious concept of humanity being "higher" than all other life forms causes a remarkably one-sided assessment of human accomplishments when making comparisons between species. Yes, there are a long list of wonderful things which are unique on Earth to our species, the information technology by means of which you and I are now communicating being just one example. But there are also a long list of horrible things which only we humans have accomplished. No other species has produced smog or acid rain. (Not yet, anyway. We mustn't forget that all species are continually evolving, not just us.) And besides thoroughly tangible things like computers and pollution, there are assumptions made about things we don't know, such as what other species are thinking. (It's iffy enough when we claim to know something about the internal lives of other members of our own species.) Even among biologists who are atheists the assumption than no non-human species think at all, based on nothing at all but the vestiges of religious human exceptionalism, is still amazingly widespread. How do we know that dogs don't think in ways very similar to us? How do we know, for example, that they have no religious beliefs? The only rational answer is that we don't know, that such assumptions rest on primitive human mental habits and upon no firm evidence. And that we should stop making such assumptions and approach such subjects with more open minds.

Habits of thinking develop not just in individuals but also in groups, and this habit of regarding humans to be exceptional and apart from the rest of life -- again, I must emphasize, NOT shared by all humans, although it has been dominant in Western and Islamic civilizations -- this mental habit has been engrained and reinforced for thousands of years, and so perhaps it's not at all to be expected that it will vanish quickly. But we can start by recognizing where it came from, and that it has not come from science.

I don't think that there should be anything at all insulting or otherwise disappointing in seeing ourselves as animals like other animals. If adapting this attitude is a negative thing for you, perhaps you don't know non-human species as well as you could and don't love them nearly as much as you could.

Someone Asked Whether Religion Was Bad For Animals

The answer is obviously yes: we're animals and religion is bad for us. It's also unfortunate that some religions teach that humans are fundamentally different from other life forms. I'm not an expert on Native American cultures, but I gather that some of them regard humans as just one part of life, no more important than other parts, an insight which Graeco-Roman Judaeo-Christian culture has resisted with much tenacity. And for all I know there many be many other human cultures in other parts of the world which lack these strange ideas about humans being unique, and about "nature" as something separate from humans. It amazes me to see how many biologists, although they've managed to shake the primitive belief in a deity or deities, still hang on to primitive ideas of human exceptionalism, insisting that humans are unique and separate from the rest of life, in the face of ever-mounting evidence that we are not. It's as if they haven't fully grasped the fact that all life forms are continuing to evolve, and that a paltry few million years ago our ancestors were creatures which human exceptionalists would not recognize as human, and that there's no reason to think that in a paltry few million years the descendants of dogs or cats won't be able to read or build computers or do other things which supposedly are "uniquely human." (What, you think dogs and cats aren't paying attention to us?) Not to mention assuming things such as that other species here and now have no human-like emotions, or that we actually comprehend their sophistication in other fundamental ways and are therefore qualified to compare them (disparagingly) with ourselves. Heraclitus and Nietzsche only got this one half right when they pointed out the similarity between apes and humans and said that people don't want to see the obvious similarities because apes are ugly and the similarity is insulting to us: some of the similarities between us and apes are insulting to the apes.

"Natural" and "Artificial"

I think it's good when practitioners of conventional medicine listen with an open mind about alternative theories and practices.

In a similar vein, I think it's bad when practitioners of alternative medicine are closed-minded about conventional practices, and when conventional medicine is prematurely condemned and demonized.

A while ago, the strangeness of the general usage of the words "natural" and "artificial" struck me. Calling man-made things "artificial" seems to suggest that they are somehow less real than other things. Bees take material from plants and elsewhere, manipulate them in a complex process, and make honey -- honey that we call "natural" because humans didn't make it. When we manipulate substances, or build structures, it's "artificial." It really strikes me as a strange, arbitrary, artificial distinction.

Now it's true, some artificial things are bad for us -- but to stick to the example of bees, a lot of natural things are bad for us, too. Like bee venom.

But why I'm posting right now is because I was suddenly struck by the connection between this distinction in the human mind between natural and artificial, with artificial being bad or at least not as good as natural, and the traditional Judaeo-Christian view of humankind as being essentially wicked and depraved. What comes from a wicked, depraved being must be inferior to that which comes from God.

Of course, a practitioner or consumer of natural cures is not necessarily Jewish or Christian, nor does he or she consciously accept the traditional Judaeo-Christian doctrine of the depravity of mankind. But the mental distinction between natural and artificial seems to me to be a clear example of what Nietzsche described, at the beginning of the third book of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, as the shadow of the belief in God, which will endure long after people no longer believe in Him.