A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Of wolf and man

Thanks to Jeremy for tipping me off to this review by John Gray of philosopher Mark Rowland’s new book The Philosopher and the Wolf.

Rowlands lived with a wolf he adopted for many years and learned lessons from him about what it meant to be happy and to be human. He also makes the provocative claim, with which Gray concurs, that, with humanity, a new possibility for evil enters the world, and that when humans are compared to wolves it’s the wolves who are getting the short end of the stick:

In evolutionary terms humans belong in the ape family, and if apes are intellectually superior to other animals it is because of their highly developed social intelligence. Some of the most valuable features of human life – science and the arts, for example – are only possible because of this intelligence. But it is also this type of intelligence that enables apes – some kinds of ape, at any rate – to engage in forms of behaviour that, when more fully developed, embody types of malignancy that are pre-eminently human. As Rowlands puts it: ‘When we talk about the superior intelligence of apes, we should bear in mind the terms of this comparison: apes are more intelligent than wolves because, ultimately, they are better schemers and deceivers than wolves.’ The ability to scheme and deceive requires a capacity to enter the minds of others, which other animals seem not to possess in anything like the same degree. But the human capacity for empathy brings something new into the world – a kind of malice aforethought, a delight in the pain of others that aims to reduce them to the condition of powerless victims.

Gray, that inveterate critic of optimistic rationalist humanism, likes to point out that, once you leave behind the metaphysics of Christianity, you really have very little solid ground to stand on in asserting the innate superiority of human beings to other animals. C.S. Lewis made a similar point in his writings on vivisection: if might makes right in justifying cutting up animals for our own benefit, why wouldn’t it also justify cutting up “defective” humans or class enemies or other races? In Lewis’s view, it was the Christian worldview that undergirds both justice for humans and mercy toward other animals.

(Incidentally, Rowlands’ Animals Like Us is one of the best introductions to animal rights issues I’ve read. It’s rigorous, but clear and straightforward.)

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3 responses to “Of wolf and man”

  1. Rick Ritchie

    I have to wonder whether this is accurate, regarding both social relationships and theory of mind. In Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin talks about how we may have learned to have a broader set of familial relationships from canines, as we are the only hominids who do so, as the canines do. And on a recent National Geographic special, I saw tests with both apes and dogs as to whether they could understand human pointing as a clue as to where food was hidden. This had started as a test for apes. They got dismal results time after time. Someone who watched some trials exclaimed, “My dog could do this easily.” They tried and found this was true.

    They also tried another test on the dog. This was to see whether a dog who avoided taking food when someone was watching would take the food when the person closed her eyes. The dogs consistently made the distinction. They understand that humans need to be watching with their eyes to see something.

    It has been suggested that when dogs were domesticated, it changed both humans and dogs pretty radically. They became our noses, and our ability to sense the world through smell declined. We became their judgment, and their ability to judge declined.

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  2. Lee

    Very interesting! Merits further investigation, I’d say.

    I watched a documentary a few months back about the origin of the dog that was fascinating, but I can’t remember if it addressed these issues.

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  3. Rick Ritchie

    I catch most of the TV on this subject on the National Geographic Channel. But Temple Grandin’s book offered some good citations, too.

    Thinking this through further, I wouldn’t want to say that dogs had more theory of mind than apes, but that whatever they had of it extends to humans in a way that the ape version does not. Dogs are known to recognize human faces, whereas most animals, even if they can recognize individual humans, do so by recognizing their gait or some other feature of overall body type.

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