The evolving debate over the difference between us and the animals proceeds apace. Animals are now regarded as having true communication ability including language, generationally transmitted culture, even a wide range of what we had previously imagined to be solely human emotions.
My personal favorite has always been the putative distinctions having to do with tools, and what they suggest about foresight and intelligence. We have long known that many animals both use and make tools. Recently, we even learned that some birds, presented with challenges regarding how to obtain food, have solved them by conceiving tools, fashioning them, and using them successfully.
These experiments were conducted under conditions not found in nature, so the behavior could not come from natural, instinctive, or inherited characteristics; it was an innovation developed as a calculated response to a new situation. Mind you, these are birds.
Man the Tool-Maker, indeed.
But now a new distinction has been advanced. The suggestion has been made that we use symbols in ways that animals don’t. We all know that some animals do use symbols to represent simple concepts so that they can communicate with researcherrs and trainers.
But we use them to represent our emotions, as well. The import of this is that we thus abstract our emotions from raw influences over our behavior and interactions into ethereally neutral concepts. We are able to manipulate these intellectually rather than emotionally, deliberate over them rather than react impulsively to them, and discuss them with each other in ways enabling us to solve problems in a peaceful rather than a combative manner.
Animals can’t do that. So, there is the grand distinction: Man, the Symbol-Maker, the Emotion-Abstractor.
But does that sound right to you? Do symbols inevitably dampen emotion, liberating us from life as thoughtlessly and instantly reactive brutes, and transforming us into calmly contemplative theorists?
Or, possibly, rather than diminishing, do they intensify our feelings and both magnify our responses and quicken our recourse to them? Do they plunge us into newly heated contests over timelessly visceral emotions, leaving us as sure, or as confused, as ever about where lies honor and dishonor, virtue and vice, glory and depravity?
I have my ideas. How about you? This is a good weekend for observing some powerful symbols, noting the effect they have on or how they are used by people, and drawing conclusions about how, if at all, that differentiates us from the beasts.
See you on Monday!
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