Humankind is clearly different from every other species of animal, however you wish to define the difference. The difference is commonly defined as self-awareness, sapience or sentience (which are commonly used as synonyms, although they mean slightly different things). However, I believe that possibly the biggest thing which separates us from the rest of animal life is that humans are aware of the fact that they are going to die.
We can often see other animals acting in ways which will clearly postpone their deaths, such as eating, drinking and fleeing predators, but I would argue that these actions are merely due to inherited instinct (for example, rabbits with a genetic predisposition to fleeing dangerous predators will survive, and be able to pass down this predisposition), rather than through any actual awareness that they might die. We on the other hand, find it possible to conceive that there will be a time when we will no longer exist, and the fear of that, I believe, drives almost all of the actions which separate us from other animals. One of the main features common to almost all humanity, but completely devoid in the rest of the animal kingdom, is religious worship. As far as I can see, this is fairly easily explained by the fear of death. As far as I know, religion first emerged in the tribal stage of humanity, with people worshipping animal and nature spirits, but more importantly, great importance was placed on respecting the spirits of their dead ancestors, whom they believed watched over them. Humans at this point, with their newly-found awareness of death, would have found comfort in the belief that they would live beyond their deaths to watch over their progeny. Although religion has come a long way since then, a constant in every modern religion (and correct me if I'm wrong), is that they all propose some form of life after death, whether through a heaven/hell concept, or some other means. It seems to me very plausible that all religion has evolved from the foundational concept of life after death, which could easily have originated by our ancestors trying to find a way not to mind too much about death. I should mention here that I don't have a problem with people believing in any religion, but I, myself, am not a believer. I respect your right to believe everything I say and believe is wrong, and it might very well be, although I, personally, am fairly sure it isn't. The example of religion is probably the biggest, but it is only one of the ways in which the awareness of death is inextricably tied into the human psyche.
I've heard that when a Roman general was victorious in a particularly major battle, he would have a slave come up to him and say: "Memento mori," roughly translated to "Remember you are going to die." The importance of the awareness of death in human culture had gotten to the point where it seemed appropriate to remind someone of it whenever they achieve something so great that they just might forget it. Egyptian Pharaohs would be buried along with all of their greatest possessions and their slaves so they would be as rich in life as they were in death, showing that they were so invested in their concept of life after death that would happily deny their families wealth and sentence their slaves to death for it's sake. The First Emperor of China even spent most of his life having a terracotta army built to guard him in his death. In this way, his fear of death was so acute that it consumed the majority of his life, not to mention the countless slaves who were forced to work themselves to death in the process. Think what could have been achieved with the same determination and manpower if it had been applied to something which could have improved peoples lives, rather than one persons death. On a much smaller scale, I think we all spend too much time and effort building terracotta armies of our own.
The waste of peoples lives in this way is far from the only consequence to humankind's obsession with death. If indeed we can attribute most, if not all, of humanity's differences to other animals with our knowledge of death, then all the ways in which humans are worse than other animals can be attributed to this as well, and there are plenty. Humans are the only animals not to live in balance with their environment; instead we devour resources at an unsustainable rate. Humans aren't adapted to any environment other than the world we've created for ourselves; we are biologically dependent on cooked food, clothes and shelter. Furthermore, humans are the only animals who do not all have fairly equal living conditions. Consider mice: although some might get eaten by a fox, or something else involving similar suffering, up until that point all the mice in the world have around the same level of living conditions. However, humans live in vastly different conditions; at the two extremes people can live in the lap of luxury, barely suffering their entire lives, or without ever having enough to eat, or clean water to drink. Eventually, I believe that the causes of all of these problems boil down to awareness of death, although it may be a complicated chain of causes. That's why, although we may never be able to lose our awareness of death, it is vitally important that we try to focus on other things, although it frightens us. We must do more important things with our lives than build terracotta armies to console our fears, and instead of remembering that we are going to die:
Rule Two: Memento Animare: Remember to live.
No comments:
Post a Comment