Thursday, January 26th, 2012, 12:00 am
Humans Are Technically Animals, But Some People Treat Them as Such
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UMAN BEINGS are a special kind of animal because we, humans, are the only ones capable of writing about animals. The inclination to distinguish between human and animal is an artificial one, a bit like saying “pork” and not “pig” and “beef” instead of “cow” (not personifying something we eat). But as humans we do have special responsibilities for those of our kind — it’s an implicit contract we share because no-one wants to be seen as potential prey of one like oneself.
To drive humans into abuse of other humans (or even cannibalism) it takes great disturbance and a bad mind. Like most animals, as part of our survival instincts we choose to bond with our kind — sometimes bonding against other species (tribalism is the causes of many wars). But the general commonality is, people take some sort of bad fuse to happily mistreat fellow people. Steven Weinberg once said that “[r]eligion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”
Likewise, people typically choose to treat fellow humans well, but for someone to talk about peers as though they are animals it takes extreme capitalism and devaluation of life it can lead to. When will we start talking about the ills of this kind of globalisation?
