CThe coronavirus has stopped us in our tracks and forced us to rethink our position as rulers of the world. You could say he’s done us a favor. An invisible enemy has challenged our treatment of the non-human world and the planet we share.
For roughly 2,000 years, most humans have imagined themselves to be Earth’s “apex predators”: smarter, faster, and deadlier than any other creature we share the planet with. An article in a 2018 special issue of Scientific American praised our species for “the richness of our subjective experience” and “better cognitive abilities and larger brains,” even though elephants have larger brains and no one has figured out how to measure the ” subjective experience. ” of non-human animals.
Our species has not always been so conceited. If we go back 200,000 years, we would find that early Homo sapiens acted more like rabbits than lions: they shivered at the rustle of tall grass and snuggled up at the sight of a pack of hyenas. We don’t know how much of our existence as a species is spent fighting and dodging more dangerous animals, but the men (usually) who conquered the marauding beasts were often remembered in myth.
Humans didn’t rise from their besieged state to something like global dominance in one leap. For many centuries, “civilized” or urban states embraced religions in which humans and non-human animals appeared to be more or less equal. In myth at least, they could talk and understand each other, mate and fight each other and, most clearly in the case of the Roman and Greek gods, behave like the main stars on a reality show. Only with the arrival of monotheism, approximately between 1200 a. C. and 700 d. C., the unique gods of each state acquired names and something like personalities: Jaweh, Jesus and Allah.
As these monotheistic supergods grew and incorporated the attributes that were once widespread among the many gods of polytheistic religions, they became more abstract and removed from the material world, to the point where that material world began to seem inferior and even disgusting. , as illustrated by a bishop who educated his congregation by plucking each feather, one by one, from a sparrow to punish it for being a “devil”, that is, a non-human, a bird. Hinduism was much more tolerant and made no spiritual distinction between human beings and other forms of life.
The Covid pandemic presents us with a particularly sharp difference between two of the species that populate the Earth: on the one hand, the complexity of the human species, with its oversized brain and mobile limbs; and on the other hand, the simplicity of a microbe or submicrobial particle like a virus, which has evolved to hunt creatures larger than itself.
In the late 19th century, humans, who had battled megafauna as predators and prey and continued to fight each other, first faced the unseen enemies that frequently attacked them and their children. Leading European scientists, notably Louis Pasteur, demonstrated that diseases could be transmitted from one vessel to another, while the Dutch microbiologist Martinus Beijerinck identified infectious agents which he called viruses.
Over the millennia, a pyramid of antagonistic creatures had arisen on our planet, ranging in size from viruses to bacteria to cells that make up entire living bodies. We humans have learned to make use of some of these tiny beings, for example in food production and medicine, but now we find ourselves in a less powerful position. We must belatedly reach an agreement. This will involve rethinking the idea of our supremacy.
There is hope for a more equitable arrangement among Earth’s species. In 2012, an international conference in Cambridge, Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals, issued a “official recognition that many non-human animals, including mammals, birds, and cephalopods, also possess ‘the neurological substrates that generate consciousness’”. This was, in its own way, a thunderous change in human consciousness, which until now had given no quarter to the idea that non-human animals are capable of imagination, curiosity, and other human-like traits. It raised a multitude of questions about humanity’s position in the world. What did conference attendees mean by “conscience”?
And why were scientists discovering animal consciousness only now, after generations of putting animals to work in their laboratories as sources of tissues and cells? What is the ethics of animal use and who should decide?
Perhaps philosophical questions are the easiest to answer, and they are not easy at all. The practical issues are more difficult. Can we share the Earth with our fellow earthlings? What happens to non-human animals imprisoned in feedlots and slaughterhouses? How will humans survive if large portions of the planet are “rebuilt” for optimal animal life? We may be about to make peace with our fellow planets, we can finally see the moral and practical reasons for doing so, but can we figure out how?
The burden of initiating “peace talks” between humans and non-humans certainly falls on us. It is our kind that emptied the once-crowded rivers and plains, silenced the chattering of the forests and plowed the fields of grass. We have much to learn from each other, assuming, of course, that the non-humans among us are still willing to make contact with creatures as bloodthirsty as we have proven to be. And the first thing we humans will have to learn, the basis of everything else, is humility.
www.theguardian.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism