I'm a dumb hairless ape.
I first had this realization on an airplane when landing in Boston. As a landlubber from Indiana, the ocean represents some surreal and powerful force foreign to my daily existence. I was staring out the window of the airplane at the sublime ocean like a young boy. I was awestruck by its power, beauty, and terrifying indifference. Then a completely different thought captured my attention. The "all-powerful ocean" and all things before the Big Bang existed in a human-relatable volume of space — a volume you can see that is much smaller than the ocean itself. This idea was even more sublime than the ocean, yet abstract.
But I couldn't "see" this sublime idea. I could accept it. I could imagine what it must be like by placing myself in some imaginary space relative to it. I could, if I diligently applied myself and after years of hard work, write down equations that supported this theory. And, more importantly, what did I even mean by "see"?
After some reflection, the concept of "seeing it" transformed into what is constrained by my mental hardware and contingencies — those of a dumb hairless ape. I put it this way because it seems like some of the other dumb hairless apes understand this phrase very well, or maybe they just find it amusing.
That being said, I don't really think we're all that dumb. We're just dumb in relationship to very complex things. We navigate a huge class of problems such as space, social relationships, etc. with masterful skill. However, there is a different class of problems, such as the fundamental nature of reality or ethics, that are far too complex for us to see in our mind's eye. These are concepts that don't neatly fit into our innate constraints of Euclidean space or human language.
Mentioning ethics was probably a bit of a leap for you because it's a substantial jump in categories from physics to ethics. But why are ethics complex?
Socrates spent his life wandering the streets of ancient Athens pondering this question. Ethics captured the mind of a very brilliant man. He would question his interlocutors on the nature of wisdom and the good. None of these conversations ever felt definitive or final, nor have any felt definitive since his time. The underlying principles have eluded many brilliant minds since 399 BC. It seems as if we should be able to easily state our ethical principles as self-evident; that is, these are the principles I want to live by.
Admittedly, my values have changed over my lifetime. I valued play as a child, relationships as a teenager, and career as an adult. There is likely some underlying essential principle of good or wisdom in these values, but as a dumb hairless ape I'm not able to reduce this into unambiguous words.
Many people seem to merely opt out of this ambiguity by simply substituting ideology or religion for it. I suspect even more people aren't even aware of this at all — they were born into a religion, culture, and time like a fish is born into water. Lastly, I suspect others (myself included) were born into a privileged Liberal ideology where we're even permitted to question the sacred precepts of our culture (but maybe not this precept).
For those of us who are willing to contemplate and question our ethical principles, I don't think we can do so in a vacuum. More specifically, we should not separate our ethical principles from the question "What kind of animal am I?" If we ignore what kind of animals we are, then ethics becomes theology: a narrative about salvation.
First, the Greeks had an idiom: "Know thyself." But this phrase seems to imply some kind of psychological introspection elevating humanity to a status that I'm not entirely comfortable with — specifically, that there's a definite self to know. Rather, the words "animal" or "ape" seem to be right because there's something finite yet changing, mammalian, and evolutionary about our essential nature. There's a genealogy of competing proteins resulting in the psychological mess that is me. This is my own personal inversion of Stuart Smalley's Daily Affirmations: "Doggonit, I'm a psychological mess."
Second, rather than just studying evolution or intense psychological introspection, there are valuable lessons to be learned from history because humans have not changed very much compared to our self-created environments. The lessons to be learned from history are ugly. The ugly, cynical take is that hierarchies and power have always been deployed to benefit a select few to the detriment of many. Further, the illusion that our technological or cultural improvements have ushered in an inevitable era of enlightenment is largely that — an illusion. I'd say better to err on the side of cynicism informed by a bleak historical perspective rather than gleeful optimism induced by technology and culture, although I'll admit there has been something like progress through history.
Last, I very much adore the phrase "truth is stranger than fiction." However, I'd also amend the phrase: "but fiction can be truth." An artist can say things about the nature of reality in fiction or art that I'm not convinced can be expressed otherwise. Vermeer could "say something" about experiencing light that could never be written. J. D. Salinger could capture the narrative of a teenager's search for authenticity that could never be knowable by reading the DSM. Art, fiction, music, etc. are kinds of human experience — specifically creative ones — and can reveal a deeper understanding of the nature of humanity.
I've meandered from a halfwit daydream on an airplane to a grandiose stroll through the world of ideas. You're probably asking, what's the point? Simply this: to know what kind of animal we are is not only a scientific discovery but also an act of self-expression.
