What makes us human?

What makes us human? Coming up with definitions of what makes us human. Clearly, if you haven’t come up with, or happily accepted, some dividing line between the human and the non-human — with yourself safely on the human side of the line — you aren’t human. 

There are two kinds of living things in the world — those that define themselves as human, and those that don’t. It’s rather parochial, isn’t it? It betrays a sense of anxiety over identity. What are the consequences of misdefining the human? 

Defining terms can be useful. But we fall into a trap of our own making when we think it’s all about the word. Settle on the right word, perfectly designed and defined, and you have the thing, you’ve got its number (so to speak). The namer has power over the named. How much power?

In a recent book about that other human species, the Neanderthal, the authors remind us of the changing definition of what it means to be human (while readily buying into the idea that pinning down that definition is vitally important):

The ability to make tools was once considered definitive of what separates humans from other animals. Now that we know that other primates and even birds use tools, this notion has changed, and it is now commonly thought that humans are defined by the ability to make tools that are designed to produce other tools.

Once we discovered that “man” wasn’t the only tool user or even tool maker, we had to find another definition of … man, was it? Humans? For now at least we can soothe the anxiety about the encroachment of other intelligences upon our safe separation from them by making the definition of the human just a tad bit more elaborate. Breathe easily, my friends, for once more we are behind the definitional wall, a wall far more impregnable than before, no doubt. 

The authors, by the way, were including Neanderthals among the humans, Neanderthal stone tools having been found that were used to make other stone tools. I suppose we can allow Neanderthals to be human at this late date. We can be generous. Where’s the harm in it?

source:

The Neanderthals Rediscovered: how modern science is rewriting their story

by Dimitra Papagianni & Michael A. Morse

2013. Thames & Hudson, New York, NY