11.4: Seeing Ourselves in Life’s Larger Context

We need to back up a bit now in order to place ourselves within the larger context of life on Earth, so as not to make the mistake of imagining that human beings are uniquely distinguished from other animals by their exclusive possession of ‘mind.’ We humans are a kind of animal, a large-bodied primate to be precise, very closely related to chimpanzees and bonobos—our line having branched with theirs five to six million years ago—and also closely related, although somewhat less so, with the other great apes, the gorillas and orangutans. The mammalian order of living primates is divided into the prosimians, consisting of the lemurs, lorises and tarsiers, and the anthropoid primates, including the new world monkeys, old world monkeys, and the members of the superfamily Hominoidea, which itself is divided into the Hylobatidae, the family of the smaller or lesser apes, the gibbons and siamangs, and the Hominidae family of the great apes, made up of three subfamilies, the orangutans, the gorillas, and one (depending on the method of grouping) which includes chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans. The primates are thought to have evolved from a group of insectivorous early mammals living late in the Cretaceous, emerging as squirrel-like mammals in the Paleocene that began to develop the classic primate features of grasping hands and feet, stereoscopic vision and relatively large brains in the Eocene. First, the prosimians evolved and radiated across several major continents, flourishing until they were displaced by the later-evolving monkeys and apes, except in Madagascar, where they can still be found—if hanging on precariously—today. Monkeys evolved over the Oligocene and apes in the Miocene, with the early ancestors of humans probably making their appearance early in the Pliocene. By the late Pleistocene, Homo sapiens had appeared and was already beginning to make an impact on its environment.

If we’re going to think about our species’ relationship with nature, however, we need to consider the kind of ecological role that is played by the closest relatives of ours, the apes and the primates in general. Except for the insectivorous tarsiers, our primate relatives are far and away predominantly vegetarians, and our human digestive tracts are much more like those of the other great apes than like the mammalian carnivores. Most of the apes and monkeys are classified as either folivores (animals primarily subsisting on leaves), or frugivores (animals for whom fruit makes up a considerable portion of the diet). Folivores have the advantage of greater abundance and accessibility of food, but frugivores obtain a higher concentration of calories by eating ripe fruit, and it is thought that the greater energy provided, in combination with the cognitive demands of obtaining a high-quality but patchily distributed and sometimes only seasonally available food, have led to a larger brain size in otherwise similar species (Milton, 2006). Among the great apes, gorillas are primarily folivores, while orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos are primarily frugivores, although all have been observed to opportunistically consume invertebrates and the occasional small vertebrate. Chimpanzees will sometimes engage in cooperative hunting of medium-sized mammals– often monkeys– with social sharing of the meat. In places where they coexist with colobus monkeys, they can sometimes have a significant effect on monkey populations (Lambert, 2012). However, great apes and other primates do not seem to play a role in the ‘top down’ control of other animals. Meat actually makes up no more than about five to six percent of the chimpanzee diet, most of that being in the form of insects (Goodall, 1986, p. 232; Milton, 1987, p. 105) while the amount of animal flesh consumed by the other great apes is usually quite a bit less. According to Katharine Milton, although early humans began adding meat to their diets as the climate got colder in the Pliocene, “this behavior does not mean that people today are biologically suited to the virtually fiber-free diet many of us now consume,” since “in its general form, our digestive tract does not seem to be greatly modified from that of the common ancestor of apes and humans, which was undoubtedly a strongly herbivorous animal” (Milton, 2006, n.p.). Primates in nature thus do not have the ecological role of apex predator; the key role they play in ecosystem function is that of seed dispersers, moving the seeds of their favored fruit trees considerable distances and thereby helping to maintain tropical forests; they have also been considered vegetative ecosystem engineers through herbivory, shaping forest structure as they dine selectively on flowers, leaves and bark of certain trees (Beaune, 2015; Chapman et al., 2013).

The great apes notably have a very slow rate of reproduction; chimpanzee mothers suppress ovulation by suckling their young for four to six years, creating a long interbirth interval between what are usually single offspring, resulting in no more than four to fi ve young over a lifetime (Tutin, 1994). Their average density on the lands they occupy is also quite sparse, depending on habitat type and social organization, but is usually on the order of less than one to two to fi ve individuals per square kilometre, with home ranges that can (if not limited by human encroachment) extend to over 500 square kilometers for chimpanzee communities of 20 to 100 individuals (Nishida & Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, 1987). It has been suggested that it is the cognitive capacity of different species that places an upper limit on group size, since an individual can only maintain awareness of a certain number of relationships at the same time (Dunbar, 1992). The difference between the average densities of chimpanzee societies and our own when concentrated in urban centers is really quite striking, and bears consideration in light of Robin Dunbar’s pronouncement that 150 is around the limit on the number of individuals any of us is capable of knowing well (Hill & Dunbar, 2003).

Most of the primates are highly social, often with more or less well-defined hierarchies keeping individuals ‘in their place’ as a function of social standing, but a wide range of types of social organization is found within the primate order. Among the great apes, orangutans tend to live a fairly solitary existence within tropical forests, while gorillas usually live in troops of several females with offspring dominated by an older, male silverback. The two chimpanzee species typically live in multimale, multifemale groups, the common chimp groupings usually dominated by one or several alpha males. In contrast, the bonobos seemingly accord females the upper hand—and, it should be noted, we humans are equally related to both. In chimpanzee societies, intergroup male-male competition, with several powerful males, vying for the position of alpha-male, is often the most noticeable preoccupation. ^[9] On the other hand, some primates also seem to have, if not a desire for ‘equality,’ at least an innate sense of ‘justice’—or at least an acute sense of how their rewards compare with those of competing conspecifics—that is thought to contribute to cooperation on the basis of equal sharing within the group. de Waal and his student, Sarah Brosnan, taught captive capuchin monkeys to exchange plastic tokens for food, but when a monkey discovers that her reward is only a bit of cucumber while her neighbor is getting grapes, she shows her displeasure and throws the cucumber out of the cage (Brosnan & de Waal, 2003). The primate order encompasses animals with a wide range of behavioral repertoires, and primates, generally, are perhaps the most behaviorally flexible among the mammals, with humans the most flexible of all, biologically speaking. We humans, thus, innately possess a great many degrees of freedom, allowing for a great many alternative behaviors, many different ways of asserting our moral agency, possible within the realm of human choice.

Seeing Mind in Human Life

But, if we are in fact so similar to other organisms as a result of evolutionary continuity, what about our much-vaunted human uniqueness? Presumably it has to do with our superior intelligence, but if our cerebral cortex is seen as a little less special in light of what we’re learning about brain structure and organization in other animals, we were also taken down a peg or two as neural network research began to investigate intelligence in the workings of both biological and artificial systems. It seems that, when the artificial intelligence (AI) folks first started trying to engineer computerized robots that could actually move around and deal with physical objects, they were embarrassingly unsuccessful—because they had been assuming that real intelligence was based on the kind of rule-governed manipulation of abstract symbols, the kind of linear, if-A-and-B-then-C-must-follow logic of which philosophers are generally so proud. It turns out that things don’t work that way for animals trying to get around in the real world, however: they appear to identify objects through a process of pattern recognition involving some complex neural circuitry, and their interactions are guided by yet more neuronal connections organized into networks that become activated when particular skill sets are required—and, as we are discovering, the same is true of us (Preston, 1991; Davion, 2002). Even much of what we consider our ‘highest’ mental activity—our moral reasoning, for example—seems to be carried out by neural networks that we share in basic organization with many other animals. Much of the research disclosing this information is quite recent, utilizing functional neuroimaging (fMRI) in human beings responding to morally relevant scenarios. What was discovered, according to one team of researchers, is that ”the psychological processes underlying moral choices recruit socio-emotional and cognitive processes that are domain-general” (FeldmanHall et al., 2014, p. 297), meaning that there is no set of ‘moral’ circuitry peculiar to humans that enables us to think and behave in a moral sphere uniquely our own. Rather, moral reasoning activates patterns of circuitry involving emotional and social cognition such as empathy and theory of mind, the ability to understand another’s point of view—circuitry enabling similar sorts of cognition in at least the brainier types of nonhuman animals as well. In humans, the brain regions involved in what we consider moral reasoning include the ventromedial prefrontal cortex—attuned to emotional response—and the right temporoparietal junction– involved in ‘theory of mind’ processing in nonmoral contexts as well as moral ones. As another pair of researchers conclude, “so far, the uniquely moral brain has appeared nowhere—perhaps because it does not exist” (Young & Dungan, 2012, p. 7). This conclusion is becoming increasingly clear as further research is carried out. All in all, morality is supported not by a single brain circuitry or structure, but by a multiplicity of circuits that overlap with other general complex processes, according to Pascual et al. (2013, p. 5) “The ‘moral brain’ does not exist per se: rather, moral processes require the engagement of specific structures of both the ‘emotional’ and the ‘cognitive’ brains” (Pascual et al., 2013, p. 6)

On the other hand, a recent development that supporting continuity between us and some other animals with respect to how morality ‘works’—how social animals maintain harmony and cooperation within the group—has been the discovery of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are cells within the brains of certain animals that become active both when an animal performs certain motor movements and when that animal sees or hears another animal perform the action. They were first discovered by accident, the legend goes, when a rhesus monkey, with electrodes implanted in the brain for other purposes, showed a pattern of activity corresponding to arm, hand and mouth movements—which the monkey was not carrying out—while watching one of the researchers eat his lunch. In the human brain, mirror neurons are concentrated in the posterior part of the inferior frontal gyrus and in the rostral part of the posterior parietal cortex; working together, they seem to transmit information about the goal or intention of another’s movements.

These mirror neurons are believed to be connected with the insula and the limbic system to form a large-scale network supporting our ability to feel empathy (Iacoboni, 2009). If perceiving the way others feel through sensory cues sets these ‘mirror’ neurons to resonating with those of the other being, we, in essence, are able to “feel each other’s feelings.” It is “something we accomplish . . . naturally, effortlessly, and quickly” that seems well explained by the incorporation into this neural network of “a prereflective, automatic mechanism of mirroring what is going on in the brain of other people,” according to Marco Iacoboni (2009, p. 666). Recognizing their existence has been said to ‘dissolve’ what has been called ‘the problem of other minds’, the question of how we can come to know that others have minds and, roughly, what they are thinking. Moreover, since “a proximate mechanism that evolved to serve the ultimate goal of cooperation . . . will yield benefits for all contributors” (de Waal, 2008, p. 281), it has been claimed that “the evolutionary process made us wired for empathy” (Iacoboni, 2009, p. 666). Such mirroring neurons have also been found in some of the ‘brainier’ social animals, including other primates, dolphins and birds, he notes, evidence of the kind of ‘interiority’ that we humans also possess. Giacomo Rizzolatti, the original discoverer of mirror neurons, suggests that the mirror neuron system allows understanding of the actions of others ‘from the inside’, providing “a profound natural link between individuals that is crucial for establishing inter-individual interactions” (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2010, p. 273). However, caution has been raised against ‘an overly enthusiastic tendency’ to overinterpret possible connections between the mirror neuron system and empathy, since there are likely to be a number of different neural pathways involved in this complex phenomenon, and the empirical evidence for a direct connection with mirror neurons is limited (Lamm & Majdandzic, 2015).

These neurons may also be implicated in processes that have the opposite effect in human beings, in a way that is intimately connected with our major claim to ‘uniqueness,’ our remarkable facility with language and symbols (Corballis, 2010). The inferior frontal area in the macaque brain where mirror neurons were first discovered, area F5, roughly corresponds with Broca’s area in the human brain, one of our important language areas, and in subsequent studies of human ‘mirroring,’ neurons in the language areas of the left hemisphere have been found to be activated (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998). Whereas in the monkey’s brain the mirroring area is considered to be primarily involved in hand movements, this striking correspondence has led these and other researchers to propose that human speech, and later language more generally, may have originated with hand gestures, socially shared, which came to be adapted for intentional communication. However it came about, for the majority of us humans at least, our primary language areas are situated within the left hemisphere of our brains, and the left hemisphere’s contribution to our human uniqueness may possibly be a key as to why we have increasingly been waging a war against nature, as well as wars against each other from time to time.

A functional differentiation between the two cerebral hemispheres extends far back in vertebrate evolution; birds, for example, have been shown to be more effective in pecking at grains of food using their right eyes, controlled by their left hemispheres (since major nerve tracts cross over inside the brain), while scanning for predators overhead with the left eyes, controlled by their right hemispheres (Vallortigara, 2000; Rogers, 2012). Many subtle and not-so-subtle differences in function between the two hemispheres are still being discovered in humans, but in the view of Iain McGilchrist, a British psychiatrist and philosopher who has devoted many years to studying the neuropsychological specializations of the hemispheres, “the most fundamental difference” between them—and something that would seem to pertain to hemispherically-lateralized animals across the board–is that there is a basic difference in the type of attention they direct toward the world (McGilchrist, 2009, p. 4).

The right hemisphere tends to apprehend ‘what’s out there’ broadly, holistically and in context, recognizing other beings as already embedded in social relationships with the self. The left hemisphere, in contrast, directs a narrow, focused attention toward parts and pieces of things, tends to favor thinking in abstract terms and following a linear sequence of ‘logical’ reasoning, and generally comes at things with a use-orientation, categorizing them in terms of how the individual animal, in competition with others, might benefit from exploiting them. The role of the right temporoparietal junction in theory-of-mind processing, important in social cognition and moral reasoning, should be kept in mind. Ideally, the two hemispheres work reciprocally and in coordination with one another. The proper sequence of neural processing of incoming information, McGilchrist maintains, is that the right hemisphere initially takes in the immediate, real-time presencing of what’s in the organism’s total environmental surround; then, passing across the corpus callosum to the left hemisphere, the most salient aspects of it are abstracted, categorized and evaluated for use or threat; and finally this information is re-presented to the right hemisphere for reintegration into a more thorough and once again holistic understanding of the overall situation—a sequence that can be represented RH > LH > RH—presumably enabling the organism to take appropriate action within its lived context (McGilchrist, 2009, pp. 189-208).

Our left hemispheres have enabled us to examine the world around us in great detail, and, through the use of linear logic, to formulate and test scientific hypotheses. Without these specialized skills, we would not have been able to discover all the intricacies of living organisms of which we have recently become aware. But its propensity for abstraction in combination with its general use-orientation, when not counterbalanced by the right hemisphere’s ability to connect with others and put things in larger perspective, has most likely contributed to the way our society dismisses nonhuman others and nature in general as merely ‘resources’ for us to use, and it may also be a significant factor in perpetuating the continuing intergroup conflicts within our human realm.

Left hemisphere dominance may also be responsible for a certain linearity of thought—unfortunately emphasized throughout our educational systems today—that may serve to block our ability to engage in systems thinking, something desperately needed in order to understand the impacts of all the processes our ‘war against nature’ is unleashing now. This preference for linearity may underlie some of the ‘short-termism’ with which we have approached just about everything, from human population growth to the social spread of unsustainable habits to the accumulation of plastic trash on our beaches. Populations and positive-feedback processes without external controls don’t grow linearly over time but rather exponentially. However, just as a tangent drawn between two points on a curved surface can provide a reasonable approximation of the path from A to B if they’re close enough together, growth in components of these systems may seem linear if the time interval of evaluation is short enough. Therefore, projections of consequences may lead to overestimation of the time until thresholds are crossed, as well as serious underestimation of all the repercussions as trend lines intersect over time. Should the manufacturers of disposable plastics have been looking ahead to the dissemination of their products worldwide and their eventual fragmentation into indigestible particles contaminating worldwide food webs? It is a serious question to ask: Why not?

It is the degree to which many of us modern humans seem to be ‘stuck’ in the left hemisphere mode, failing to reintegrate its insights into the holistic picture supplied by the right, that McGilchrist believes may lie at the heart of many of today’s pressing problems, as will be discussed a little later on.

Group-Living Social Primates: Cooperation and Conflict in Bioregional Context

To zoom back out of our examination of brain organization and cognition for now and focus more closely on ‘who we are’ and how we got to be that way, evolutionary biology paints a picture of our early primate ancestors living in relatively small social groupings that had to cooperate in order to survive, just as our closest relatives, the great apes, do today. Our progenitors fanned out from the tropical forests into other habitats, coordinating hunting practices to supplement their mostly vegetarian diets and later domesticating plants and animals to ensure a more consistent food supply. People worked together, sharing tasks within the group and often competing with other groups of humans for needed resources, sometimes engaging in violent intergroup conflict along the lines of what primatologists call lethal raiding, observed among chimpanzees in the wild today (Wrangham, 1996). We should remind ourselves, however, that humans are equally close genetically to the other chimpanzee species, the bonobos, whose social organization is somewhat different and who have been seen to engage in peaceful intergroup interaction, which thus must also be seen as an available option within our larger ‘genetic toolkit.’ As discussed earlier, the need for cooperation within the group, to maintain its integrity and to defend against threats coming from outside the group, is what many think gave rise to the development of our ethical sensibilities, with the help of our neural wiring that enables us to feel empathy (de Waal, 2009). Too much individual selfishness and too little altruism toward other group members would produce uncooperative bands with a survival disadvantage when pitted against more cohesive tribes of people that worked well together. Human security, then, emerged from small, face-to-face communities that worked together to make their living from the local bioregion and successfully fend off predators and competing human tribes. Individual lives might be more or less difficult, depending on the vagaries of the total environment, and wars might be fought with other bands of humans, but nature itself was the provider, if not always a benign one, during this long period of our evolution. Humans were an integral part of the natural world as we, like all other species, did what came naturally in order to survive, and our early belief systems generally included a core of respect, if not reverence, for Nature, in recognition of its fundamental role in sustaining life.

We Humans Have Specialized in Utilizing Symbols

Coevolution of Symbolic Culture, Language and Intergroup Conflict

One definition of culture is ‘shared symbolic meaning,’ which primatologist Carel van Schaik traces back to the socially learned labeling of edible foods or dangerous predators, seen in a variety of animal species, developing into the emergence of special skills and/or special communicative signals unique to particular populations of nonhuman primates, and finally to the conveyance of meaning by arbitrary signs (symbols), an ability that seems to be possessed rudimentarily by certain groupings of both chimpanzees and orangutans living in the wild (van Schaik, 2004, pp. 156-157). In the primate lineage that includes both chimps and humans, where social groupings came to be dominated by male coalitions engaging in lethal raiding and later in more sophisticated forms of warfare, it seems a crucial threshold was crossed once group membership could be signified by means of behavioral or linguistic conventions. In a move that seems to directly counter Iacoboni’s feel-good role for mirror neurons, Van Schaik theorizes that “between-group hostility, by favoring symbolic cultures, helped to lay the foundation for human language” (van Schaik, 2004, p. 158). Our ancestors’ ability to cooperate was greatly enhanced by the ability to communicate using sound, sign and gesture, but this applied primarily to those within the social group. Once a simple manifestation of our biology as social primates, held together by bonds of kinship and reciprocity, now the group could mark and conceptualize itself, draw a line between the collective self and other human groups sharing and displaying different symbols, pulling disparate members together into tight cohesion. Once we became able to represent a qualitative difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ by the arbitrary symbol, we learned somehow to ‘cut’ the empathic connection that might otherwise, should we relate face-to-face, set mirror neurons in the emotional circuitry of our brains to resonating empathically; it seems that words and images can get in the way of empathy, as can numbers.

Separation of the Symbolic Realm from the Realm of Nature

Language not only facilitated our immediate, group-maintaining actions, however, it gave people the ability to tell stories, maintain collective memories of past events and imagine possibilities that might or might not ever come to pass, inserting some distance between a human cultural realm and the temporal flux. Moreover, since the ability to communicate meaning through the use of specifically constructed words and signs did make humans stand out from all the other animals not showing such a talent, the move into the realm of symbol can be seen as cutting the first cleavage demarcating the human world from the world of the purely natural. Our growing use of symbols—vocal, gestural, or graphic—pried us away from the concreteness of the world of nature, with all its chaotic diversity, toward the relative stability and uniformity of the general concept. To transmit shared meaning, symbols that could cover minor differences by making things ‘the same’ were required. ^[10] In developing our ability to communicate by means of this process of abstraction, the ability to quantify assemblages of relatively similar things began to take precedence over recognition of fine qualitative differences among particulars. Unruly nature could be ‘ordered,’ named and made to seem more uniform, and increasingly brought under the control of human beings, both physically and conceptually.

It’s been known for more than a century that most of our neural wiring for language is located within the left hemisphere, and Iain McGilchrist suggests “the metaphor of grasp” (2009, p. 112) as a way to link together language, the possible role of ‘mirrored’ hand gestures, and the left hemisphere’s use-orientation. It ‘is not an accident that we talk about ‘grasping’ what someone is saying,’ he maintains; rather:

The idea of ‘grasping’ implies seizing a thing for ourselves, for use, wresting it away from its context, holding it fast . . . it is the expression of our will, and it is the means to power. It is what enables us to ‘manipulate’—literally to take a handful of whatever we need –and thereby to dominate the world around us. (McGilchrist, 2009, pp. 112-113)

‘Grasping’ certain parts and pieces of nature, naming and ‘ordering’ them and putting them to use, certainly gave our ancestors an edge over their many evolutionary cohorts; on the other hand, when only certain aspects of reality are plucked out of a very complex total field and made into ‘re-presentations,’ they become abstract concepts that can be quite misleading, particularly so if we fail to complete the circuit and place them back within the larger context from whence they came. Thus, “what is moving and seamless, a process, becomes static and separate—things” (McGilchrist, 2009, p. 137)—a transformation in our perception of the world around us of which Nietzsche, for one, complains at length. Moreover, as McGilchrist continues, “manipulation and use require clarity and fixity, and clarity and fixity require separation and division”—so, he maintains, if he had to pick “one governing principle” to characterize the left hemisphere, “it would be that of division.” In other words, McGilchrist (2009, p. 137) tells us, “it is the hemisphere of either/or”–the generator of what is referred to as dualistic thinking.

Dualistic Thinking, Enmity and War

Psychologists and philosophers who study the processes underlying our current propensity for waging war among our human groupings often point to an extreme form of dividing up the world, called dualistic thinking, as providing its necessary conceptual framework. In Faces of the Enemy, psychologist Sam Keen (1986, p. 18) explains:

Around the basic antagonism between insiders and strangers the tribal mind forms an entire myth of conflict. The mythic mind, which still governs modern politics, is obsessively dualistic. It splits everything into polar opposites. The basic distinction between insiders and outsiders is parlayed into a paranoid ethic and metaphysic in which reality is seen as a morality play, a conflict between

The tribes versus The enemy

Good versus Evil

The sacred versus The profane

Such dualistic thinking is socially reinforced, producing a consensual paranoiawhereby, according to Keen, the group creates a ‘good’ self, with which it consciously identifies, by splitting off ‘the unacceptable parts of the self—its greed, cruelty, sadism, hostility, and what Jung called ‘the shadow’ (Keen, 1986, p. 19)–and unconsciously projecting these traits onto ‘the enemy’- whoever or whatever lies on the other side of that barrier its members’ abstracting and dichotomizing minds have constructed for themselves. As Keen vividly illustrates with examples of propaganda posters created by the different sides of various military conflicts, ‘the enemy’ is often depicted in nonhuman form, as a fearsome animal or some kind of disgusting vermin, all the better to put some distance between us and them and make the killing of them that much easier to do. This polarizing tendency of thought, taken to an extreme, can also impose a projected ‘deadness’ on the living other, providing a convenient justification not only for killing individual beings but for abstracting all vital qualities out of them, conceptually transforming human as well as nonhuman nature into uniform bits of lifeless matter and eventually into completely abstract monetary units–often then to be put to use, via our economic institutions, in escalating the ongoing war of us against them, in a self-reinforcing, feed-forward process.