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.)