THE ARROGANT APE: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters, by Christine Webb
Riding my bike recently through Baltimore’s swampy summer heat, I pulled up sharply to avoid running over a yard-and-a-half-long eastern rat snake slowly making her way across the hot asphalt. I picked her up and placed her at the root of the nearest tree, which she quickly scaled until she reached a branch at more or less the height of my head. Perched there, with her body draped around the tree trunk, she cocked her head forward in a classic snaky pose, and stared at me with what I took to be a look of astonished relief.
I tell this story not to try to show that I’m brave. I like snakes and can recognize the few venomous species in the region. My point is, rather, to raise a question that Christine Webb explores in her excellent new book, “The Arrogant Ape.” When I had my moment with that rat snake: Was it all in my mind? Or was there something actually going on in her mind, too?
Webb, a primatologist, has no doubt about the answer. She belongs to a growing subfield of ecologists, naturalists and evolutionary biologists who argue that animals do indeed have minds, and all that goes with them, including feelings, intentions, agency and consciousness. (She urges us to avoid the term “nonhuman animal,” as it implicitly reiterates human exceptionalism, and also to use personal as opposed to impersonal pronouns when writing about animals — both suggestions I am now following, although I may be guilty of misgendering a snake as a result.)
To those of us who have animals at home — two-thirds of U.S. households, for a total of some 400 million pets, according to Webb — the fact that our cats and dogs have thoughts and feelings won’t come as a surprise. But then, why do we continue to permit the torture and slaughter of similarly intelligent and feeling animals on an industrial scale, along with the confinement and experimentation that takes place on university campuses and in the labs of pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies?
Webb argues that the culprit is a pervasive belief in human exceptionalism — specifically, the belief that humans are exceptionally intelligent. This belief, however, is wrong. As she shows, data supporting the supposed chasm between human and animal intelligence has been systematically rigged in our favor.
In experiment after experiment, researchers compare the highly privileged humans who volunteer themselves or their children for academic studies to animals who have been deprived of habitat, social connections and everything else that would allow them to thrive. It’s no wonder, she writes, that we’ve come to see humans as feeling and thinking beings while denying animals the same attributes. For when we remove “animals from their meaningful physical and social environments, we effectively transform them into reactive machines, and then study them as such.”
Webb effectively shows that children begin by assuming agency, feeling and intellect on the part of animals, and that these assumptions have to be trained out of us, targeted as anthropomorphic. Metastudies reviewing classic findings in the fields of psychology and evolutionary biology largely support her claim. But Webb is at her best when she undergirds these studies with detailed accounts from her own personal and professional experience, such as the story of an encounter at the primate cognition lab of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Harlem with a captive macaque named Macduff. I teared up at Webb’s description of how she responded to Macduff’s evident need for affection and contact by grooming him through the wire of his cage.
Webb steps onto shakier ground, though, when it comes to defending the larger claim that the cause of not only our failure to treat animals humanely (my choice of words) but also the environmental crisis as a whole can be found in the ideology of human exceptionalism.
Yes, there are some easy targets in Western intellectual history, from Aristotle’s ladder of nature, to theologians’ chain of being — an explicit hierarchy of creation leading up to humans — to Descartes’s dismissal of animals as mere automatons incapable of feelings or thoughts.
But she fails, in this reader’s opinion, to prove causality, and at times performs a kind of bait and switch, proffering one ostensible culprit and then replacing it with another. She ends her second chapter, for instance, by claiming that the attitude she has been calling human exceptionalism, far from a cultural universal, “has been a part of our society only in the mere blink of evolutionary time called modern civilization,” but then begins the next chapter with the charge that “from Aristotle to the Bible, from the Enlightenment to Marx, the idea of the human as a superior animal, or a being that is different from an animal altogether, permeates Western thought.”
Yet, while she thus indicts Western society as a whole, she also cites research that among “urban Boston children, rural majority-culture Wisconsin children and rural Native American (Menominee) children,” only the urban children “showed evidence for early anthropocentrism.” In other words, it seems likely that alienating attitudes toward animals as well as the environmental crisis humans have created stem more from the modern, industrial world’s effects on humans than from an ideology that dates back to the Greeks.
Why is this criticism of any importance, given how convincing I find Webb’s larger denouncement of our treatment of the animal world? To my mind, the greater ideological danger is not the belief that humans are unique, but rather our tendency to overlook the limits of possible knowledge and impose our ways of being on others.
To better cultivate the intellectual humility Webb calls for and mitigate the attitudes and errors she denounces, I would argue that we must come to better understand human experience and how it sets us apart from the natural world.
THE ARROGANT APE: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters | By Christine Webb | Avery | 326 pp. | $32
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