Exceptionalism

 

Michael - Alternate Thursdays

Throughout recorded history – and almost certainly from way before that – exceptionalism has been a mantra of different groups and espoused by members of that group, arguing that their group is the best in the world and the best ever. It has been at a world level, a species level, a race level, a gender level, a language level, a country level. Almost invariably time, evidence, and impartial research has shown that any particular exceptionalism is wrong

World Logic Day?

At a species level we were told that mankind was created differently and placed in dominion over the other creatures. Painstaking and careful work by paleontologists has shown that is not the case. We evolved as they did and from them. To argue against that requires either a laughable conspiracy theory or the belief that the devil (?) has been doing the rounds secreting fake evolutionary evidence around the world in unlikely places. Why is anyone’s guess. (Yesterday was apparently World Logic Day according to UNESCO. Our local newspaper commented that not everyone celebrates this particular day.)

Hawaiian Crow using a tool

Anyway, we are, of course, exceptional in comparison with other animals. For example, we are the only creatures on the planet with consciousness. Are we? Not so fast. Firstly, we don’t even quite agree on what consciousness actually is. It may be a construct the brain uses as a protocol for governing itself and the body. If so, it’s likely to be widespread. Secondly, there is now a widespread belief among scientists that certain animals do have it including some birds, invertebrates such as octopuses, and – recently – even a type of spider may qualify.

But they don’t have souls. Well, that one’s hard to argue since we don’t know if we have them either.

Leaving aside the other animals, our species is clearly superior to the homo species that preceded us. Are we? We are different from them (that’s what being a different species means), but the implication of exceptionalism is that modern humans are better. How much better are we?

Arrowheads

Go back 50,000 years. A discovery from South Africa published this year establishes that San people from 60,000 years ago already knew how to use poisons to kill, or at least slow down, prey animals. Small arrowheads excavated from a cave in Kwa-Zulu Natal at a level dated to that period, contained micro quantities of the poison from the plant colloquially known as “Bushman’s poison bulb,” the same poison source used by the San people of the area in modern times. So how different were these people from us? They thought, they planned, they gathered and transmitted knowledge.

Go back 100,000 years. Last year saw the discovery that homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis not only interbred (we all share their gene pool), but that they probably kissed our species and conversely. This was established by genetically identifying species-specific oral microbe genes in fossil remains. In fact, some scientists believe that Neanderthals and humans were, in fact, just subspecies.

Path to the Dinaledi Chamber
In the dark...

If that’s still too close to us in terms of time, head back a quarter of a million years to Homo Naledi, who buried their dead at the Naledi cave in South Africa (something we previously believed only modern humans do). It wasn’t easy. They had to descend in the pitch dark through inaccessible caves to reach the funeral cave. Was it out of respect? That they didn’t want scavengers eating their dead? Or did they even have a belief in some sort of spirit or afterlife? Either way, it sounds very conscious, very human.

Coming back to a few hundred years ago, the belief was that the sun and the stars moved around the Earth – that the Earth, being the best, had to be the center of the universe.. Complex models were invented to show how that could work. None of them fit the data once astronomical measurements became less crude. Galileo, of course, deduced a much simpler model where the Earth moved around the sun, and that did work. But it spoilt the exceptionalism. It wasn’t popular, and neither was he.

Now we wonder – we no longer accept it as impossible – if there is life on other planets. We may never know. The exceptionalist argument is that for the universe Earth is the Goldilocks planet where everything is exactly right. However, there are a lot of stars out there, and we now know that a lot of them have planets. Maybe some of them have the right conditions for some form of life in those physical conditions. We may not even recognize it as life. I wouldn’t bet against it. And we may never know.

So, then, could we entertain the possibility that our species, race, culture, group, language, country, gender, whatever, is not exceptional in the sense of being the best? That there may be no good-better-best ordering at all. Maybe it’s enough that it’s wonderfully exceptional in the sense of being different.