Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times by Stephen Batchelor; Yale University Press, 352 pp., $28
God himself, David tells us in the Psalms of the Old Testament, made humans “a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honor and put everything under their feet.” Today, after nearly 2,000 years of science, many thinkers still insist that our species reigns supreme. “Although we are animals,” writes philosopher Roger Scruton, “we are not just animals.” We are better than other creatures, he stated in a 2017 New York Times op-ed. His assertion that humans, alone, “inhabit a life-world that is not reducible to the world of nature,” echoes millennia of received wisdom. The idea that humans are uniquely intelligent, powerful, and important is such a cultural given in Western philosophy, religion, and science that few of us bother to question it.
From Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, to zoologist, biophysicist, and animal behaviorist Donald Griffin’s Animal Thinking (1984) to primatologist Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016), my home bookshelves groan with titles nimbly illustrating the complexity of other animals’ emotions and smarts: Not only chimpanzees and crows, but even fish and insects make and use tools. Octopuses search out and join together coconut halves to build secure shelters. Goldfish remember a maze learned five months before. Fruit flies turn to drink when deprived of mates. Dolphins identify themselves and one another with signature whistles, comparable to names. Moray eels and fish, coyotes and badgers, wolves and ravens cooperate to hunt. And new findings seem to pour in almost daily.
Harvard primatologist Christine E. Webb is well aware of these discoveries, and in her work with baboons and other primates, she has made a few of her own. In her exciting new book, The Arrogant Ape, she takes her research-based conclusions a bold step further, contending that the very idea of human supremacy is “an assumption, one frequently masquerading as an obvious truth.” Though taught in our schools and universities, normalized in our research institutions, and permeating our everyday speech, that assumption arises from sloppy science, lame reasoning, and flaccid imaginations. And it’s a deception as dangerous as it is ubiquitous.
Much of what we “know” about comparisons between animal and human minds comes from the equivalent of comparing apples and meteorites. Webb points out that most laboratories studying animal cognition use intellectually handicapped subjects. From beagles to monkeys to rats, lab animals are typically raised in boring, stressful, sterile environments—conditions proven to cause physical damage to any brain. Often these poor animals aren’t fed properly. Webb worked in a primate lab, where animals are often kept at 85 percent of their normal body weight—supposedly to motivate them to perform for a food reward. “Imagine depriving a child of food or water before subjecting them to a series of math tests,” Webb writes.
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