We can only imagine what makes us different (Human nature, part III)

So what distinguishes human beings from all the other species of animal on the planet?  Genetics provides no obvious answer.  There is no firm genetic boundary between one species and its nearest neighbors—think of dogs, wolves and coyotes, which are able to interbreed with one another (and increasingly do).  Most of the distinctions that separate us from other species are matters of degree rather than specific behaviors and abilities unique to our species.

We might boast about our unusual brain size (relative to body mass), though this may be a consequence than a cause of the other things that make us different.  Our brains are proportionately larger than other recent species of hominin (with the exception of Neanderthals, who had measurably larger brains).  Perhaps more significant than brain size is brain structure and specialization.  Human brains are hardly superior in every way to the brains of other species.  The acuteness of our smell and the speed and accuracy of our reflexes are measurably inferior to those of other species—just watch your dog or cat provoked to sudden defensive or predatory action.  Our visual acuity cannot compare to that of hawks, or our auditory powers to those of bats.  Our navigational abilities cannot even compete with a butterfly’s.  But none of those other species can construct a meaningful sentence.

Perhaps more significant is our bipedalism (perhaps a consequence of the destruction of forest environments several million years ago and the spread of savannahs), which, together with our enhanced capacity for heat regulation by means of perspiration, allows us to track game in a coordinated manner over long distances.  But one of the biproducts of this upright stance is the freeing of our hands for specialized tasks.  Much of our expanded brain capacity is devoted to fine motor control and manual dexterity.  This is why so many essential economic activities, such as garment manufacturing or fruit picking, cannot be easily automated.  Bipedalism opens up all sorts of possibility for our hands and for the brain structures that operate them.

What about our technical skills—specifically, our ability to manufacture and use tools?  Tool-use predates our species.  Hominins have been modifying and shaping stones and sticks to perform specialized tasks for several million years.  Dolphins and crows have been observed operating simple tools.  Perhaps our species’ most significant technical innovation is cooking, which helps us to extract nutritional value from the edible resources of our local environment more quickly and efficiently, freeing up considerable time for other activities.  Cooking is also a group activity, encouraging our ancestors to spend more time together, thereby promoting cooperation and learning, and giving additional survival value to socializing.

Language clearly separates human beings from other species of animal.  But is this a real difference or merely a matter of detail?  Certainly we are able to manufacture an infinite number of specific sentences (and thus of subtle meanings).  Our capacity for speech clearly goes far beyond the communicative abilities of other species.  And our capacity for speech well exceeds our survival requirements.  We talk much more than is necessary for finding adequate food, shelter and warmth.  We communicate a lot of information every day, most of it for social purposes, which may indeed distinguish us from all other terrestrial species.

These are important differences, but we have not yet mentioned the most important.

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More than any other power or quality, it is our capacity to imagine that separates us from other species and makes us distinctively human.  Our imaginative abilities allow us to conceive of things other than as they presently appear—to dream, to hope, to anticipate, to inspire, to lie, to mislead, to cheat.  It allows us to want things that we do not yet have but which we might conceivably have in slightly different circumstances.  Imagination permits us to aspire—to be vengeful, greedy, disappointed, disillusioned, resentful, but also creative, transformative, revolutionary and heroic.  It makes possible our striving for material improvement, for identity, for justice.  All of our noble aspirations are varieties of human imagination at work.

Imagination makes possible progress and improvement—not just the accidental discovery of better tools or useful technologies such as cooking, medicine, agriculture, and mechanics (moving large stones with simple levers), but the deliberate investigation of novel techniques and unproven technologies for the purpose of bettering human life.  Imagination makes possible the strategic reorganization and deployment of resources, which in turn makes possible our modern consumer prosperity.  (Capitalism is one or several varieties of this.)  Imagination allows us safely to explore moral ambiguities and contested behaviors through fiction—poetry, novels, staged and filmed dramas.  And these allow us to understand otherwise inaccessible points-of-view or experiment with alternative styles of living and thinking.  But the same imaginative power also encourages fear of things unseen, even of non-existent threats, and so is the foundation of dangerous conspiracy thinking—the confusion between what might be true (however unlikely) and what has been demonstrated to be true by means of evidence.

But the quest of progress is shadowed by a darker sibling, one of the most potent of the human imagination—the notion of perfection.  At first hearing, the word seems to embody our highest aspirations.  But it conceals a deadly sting.  The notion of perfection propels us toward impossible goals.  Occasionally we surpass our ambitions, though more often we find ourselves burdened with unachievable expectations.  Perfection tells us we are failing when we are mostly succeeding.  Think of the hard-working B+ student wallowing in misery for just missing an A.  It nestles at the root of depression, whispering to us that we are failures.  Sometimes it condemns us as hopeless sinners, turning joyful religious gatherings into guilt-trips.  It makes uncompromising demands that poison the realm of politics, encouraging us toward intolerant extremes.  It prevents us from trusting and negotiating with strangers, or other flawed human beings, to work out the compromises that make peaceful coexistence possible and improve the quality of all our lives, however incrementally.  In its name we sometimes become fatally distracted from achievable and measurable improvements.  It keeps us from appreciating the modest medical victories that may not be miracles but which extend lives and reduce suffering.  We despair that we have not found the promised cure for cancer though we have beaten back the scourge on almost every frontier.  We have not conquered death—and likely never will—though we have doubled average human lifespans in little more than a century.  The tragedy is that we too often allow ourselves to give up the better in devotion to the perfect.  Yet our capacity for critical thinking—for which imagination is an essential element—offers a remedy.  It reminds us that perfection exists nowhere in the natural world, only in the realm of imagination.  We can teach ourselves to live with less of it. 

Imagination makes possible our mortality salience—consciousness of our impending deaths.  Do individuals of other species anticipate their own mortality?  Can juveniles of our species really appreciate their impending self-extinction before some personal brush with mortality?  But our adult imaginations become highly attuned to the ever-looming possibility (ever closer to certainty), even when it is not immediately threatening.  The awareness of our non-imminent demise permits us to dream up mitigations—medical plans, life insurance schemes, last wills, bequeaths, foundations, monuments, cryonic chambers, even the hope of continued existence beyond death.  It allows us to anticipate and quantify the dangers of climate change, and redirect our present behaviors to compensate.  Many of these efforts require and encourage social cooperation.  The ancient Egyptians famously devoted many of their resources to the elaboration of a death culture—and probably did not consider any of these to be wasted (though perhaps only those who controlled the greater share of resources).

You might object that we will soon be done with death—that our advancing medical technology will lift us beyond the reach of natural illness, allowing us to achieve practical immortality.  It is not impossible to imagine.  Yet it remains a fantasy, a symptom of reckless hoping.  We have no reasonable evidence to support such a prospect, in the near future or beyond.  Until such evidence arrives, this hope survives exclusively in the imagination.  Otherwise, we remain as we have always been—fated to die and doomed to know it.

In the meantime, we have improvised a workaround called morality to help manage our behavior while we are still in this life.  It is an imaginative construct that serves our social needs.  (We’d have little use for it alone on an island.)  With it come other social kluges such as shame, status, authority.  Some aspects of our moral behavior reflect the practical requirements of daily cooperation with other members of our species—traffic laws, public health codes, social safety nets, queuing etiquette, table manners.  Writ slightly larger, these cooperative customs help us to establish notions of justice, which are among the most powerful and distinctive inventions of the human mind.  Most of these are really about getting along peacefully, practically and equitably in our daily interactions.  (Other varieties propel us to revenge and retribution.)  But our species is further able to imagine moral superstructures transcending our local existence.  Our imaginations allow us to make grandiose claims about natural justice—standards of right behavior that we suppose are written in the natural order of things—or even divine justice, the idea that human moral standards reflect (or ought to) the will of some wiser observing agent, whether inside or outside of the natural order.  And so, quite apart from the practical needs of daily life, we begin to imagine a super-human moral contest that we call good and evil.

All that can be called evil in the universe exists first in the human imagination.  Evil is undoubtedly a concept that exists in the human mind, which may just be human brains doing what brains do.  Whether justice exists anywhere outside of the mind is likely beyond our human powers to confirm.  Every human being suffers.  Every one dies.  But only in the imagination do we make distinctions concerning which versions of suffering and death are natural and blameless and which criminal and punishable.  Since we are both empowered and constrained by our native imaginative capacity, it is probably beyond our natural ability to determine whether evil exists objectively—that is, independently of the human minds that imagine it.  Perhaps for the best.  Our only practical human concern is negotiating with other human minds an understanding of evil that can be applied to our civil affairs.  We really need no one but ourselves to affirm that slavery and genocide are evils.  Likewise, all that we might call good, worthy or just is found in the same realm of imagination.  It may be that the universe itself is indifferent to good and evil, to striving and sinning, to the worthy life and the unworthy existence.  It may be that nature itself does not know or care if we suffer or find joy in our present lives.  To attribute such moral awareness to a non-human will or being would be a bold act of human imagination.