SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE

Civilized people, almost everywhere, believe that people are unlike dogs, cattle, sparrows and ants. People decorate and clothe themselves; they build houses, fences, roads and monuments; they tell elaborate stories about their personal and communal history, and sign their names to contracts. Most civilized people also assume that people matter more than ‘animals’, although they do not agree what treatment that importance warrants. Tales about tribes who treat human beings as property, or as meat, simply support our own conviction that we ourselves are civilized. Tribes who seem to regard monkeys, crocodiles or cows as their superiors, or at least as ‘sacred’, almost make us suspect that ‘savages’ like that are not really human (and so may be treated with the same contempt that they, we think, display).

Such humanism is itself a strand in all the Abrahamic faiths, as also in the sort of atheism which thrives in a post-Abrahamic culture. The first point to be made about the humanism of civilized humanity is simply that it was always compatible with the equally obvious truth that people are very like dogs, cattle, sparrows and ants. Obviously, we are born, eat, drink and die. We also jockey for position, make up to potential mates and allies, mark out our territories, defend our young, and (ants apart) play games. It has always been obvious that people are mammals (like dogs and cattle), vertebrates (like dogs, sparrows, crocodiles and trout), and animals (like dogs, ants, worms and jellyfish).