It is undeniable that a human being is not a complete rational creature and many of his acts come directly from his most basic instincts. We still hugging our partner to protecting him/her if we notice any danger, we scream when our favorite team wins, a group of people in panic behaves like buffalos in a stampede and we feel a “weird” desire of take care of a baby, even if he is not our son. However, by this I do not mean that we are animals, because we have something special that make us completely different from them and make us the predominant specie of this planet: the intelligence.
This intelligence allows us to control these instincts, we can still have passions, basic needs, but what make us different from animals is that we can have some power over them. As men we have the instinct of reproduce and we are “pushed” to try to do it with as many girls as we could. Conversely we are not raping every suitable woman that we see in the street and, as a matter of fact, we usually look for a stable partner (in this example plays an important role another issue that from my point of view make us different from the animals as well, and that I will explain in other occasion: love). We can feel the desire of beating or fighting with a person who has committed an offence against us, but normally we use other rational methods, we call the police or use our legal system. Furthermore we have created a whole social structure that “control”, or we would better say, channel, these passions and make us possible to live in a society formed by millions of people.
However, what make us totally different from the animals are not just the intelligence and the skill to control our primary instincts but our adaptability, our ability to reflect about ourselves and about our society, and make conscious and vital changes. We have created philosophy, religion, thousands of political views and social organizations, and we have changed many times (and we are still doing it) our lifestyle. Moreover this is not just that we change faster than animals, they evolve slowly as well; it is that we can do it on purpose, as a rational decision, and animals have not this possibility and there is little evidence to support this view. (Can you imagine a lion wondering about eating vegetables or a Zebra thinking of have just one child?).
All in all, despite the fact that humans are continue having passions and sometimes are moved by powerful instincts, it unjustifiable to say that we are just complex animals, with a stronger social structure, we are much more than that. What make us human is the possibility of decide how we want to be and in which society we want to life. Following this reasoning the reader will be at the moment asking himself about the question: Why have we created the capitalism then? And this is a question that we will try to answer in another essay.
El Sinverguenza
1 comentarios:
Dear Sinverguenza,
I have read with interest your opinions about human to be considered animals or not.
I must say that most of your words and thoughts make perfectly sense to me but I have a number of objections that I would like to bring to your attention.
You mention our dependency from basic instincts but then consider intelligence being the characteristic that distinguish us as different from other animals: I think you are missing an important point here.
English language defines Intelligence as “an umbrella term describing a property of the mind including related abilities, such as the capacities for abstract thought, understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, learning from the experience, planning, and problem solving”
All the above skills are well present in the animal word. Of course we cannot really talk of reasoning for an ant, but we can assume all the above can apply to mammals and major reptiles, fishes, birds, and where ever else the brain is complex enough to permit it. For those who may have concerns about planning and problem solving, please think of hunting schemes from predators and the rudimental technology used by big monkeys such as branches used to catch insects where the hands cannot reach.
The only one that does not apply so often is the abstract thought, although, animals can dream which is a way of picturing alternatives scenarios than those gathered from daily experience.
I am also not completely sure of the fact that our intelligence can control our instincts. Of course we do it most of the time, but so do animals. Dogs for example don’t attack very small children as they recognise them as puppies (there are exceptions, but we also have the crazy ones!), nor they kill everyone they are angry with. My dogs shows regret when hurting me if we fight for play and many species have disgust for incest, which shows they can understand and choose their partners as much as we do. Dolphins and monkeys, please notice, do sex for fun as much as we do.
We, and them, can control our instincts at different levels of course, but we both can.
We do look for a stable partner because our children need to depend from parents for very long (let’s say up to 5 years, in nature). So do most of other long pregnancy-growth animals such as deer, penguins and elephant which are monogamist for the most part.
One more consideration on instinct. We are all chemically controlled by hormones. Hunger, sleep, emotions, mood. And we cannot control this with intelligence. You cannot force yourself to feel tired or happy in anyway.
The reason why we will never see revolutionist or vegetarian lion is because he is lucky enough to be happy the way he is. They don’t have any need of changing their social structures as we did through the centuries, because the level of complexity of their groups has never required it. In order to defend us better and accomplish to difficult tasks we developed better communication skills untill the tribe structure was not able to support such a big number of elements. Plus of course our over developed ability of abstraction that created the need of religions and magic, which led to philosophy and arts.
I personally think we are more animal than we like to admit. Simply we have forgotten why do we hug, shout or form families, thinking of different reasons than a pure and simple natural pragmatism.
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