What Makes Humans Different?

A Deeply Serious Inquiry into the Name of This Publication

Unlike many cultural anthropologists, I have been one of few still fascinated with the ongoing debate over how to distinguish humans from other highly intelligent mammals. We can’t settle the issue.

Lay people usually think this is pretty easy to nail. Online articles are everywhere.

We have big brains. Come on. Look at our heads. 

Yes, but whales have larger brains than we do (~8,000 cubic centimeters vs. 1,300). So, your point is…?

We’re bipedal! 

OK, but so are kangaroos, ostriches, and emus. That’s more of an intra-primate distinction to anthropologists.

OK, but we can make tools! 

We have now discovered that capuchin monkeys use stone tools (though not direct ancestors of ours) in the wild.

OK, now I’ve got you. Take this - Humans have millions of sweat glands per person and can sweat through almost their entire surface area. NO other animal can do this. It allows us to walk for hours and hours and stalk prey until they collapse. Boom!

Fascinating. The last part is true, but horses also sweat profusely, allowing them to run and run and run…. as we can. Maybe that’s we get along so well?

Yes, but humans are the only animals that have harnessed fire! We’re pyromaniacs.

Interesting, but also not true. Biologists have seen other primates harness fire. We now believe that humans began using fire by gathering wildfire embers. Learning how to start it from nothing but raw materials was the real innovation.

Argh, smartass! Look, we’re social animals. 

Well, also interesting and insightful, but most mammal species have a social component to their lives. Hell, ants are socially complex. And animal sociality can get quite complex even outside the primate world, especially in elephants and dolphins and ANTS! But I’ll come back to this topic in a bit.

So far, we’ve looked at physical and cognitive differences and come up short on any one feature that makes us unique. Hey, maybe nature doesn’t work this way? Or innovation of any kind?

We’re wasting our time looking for one single attribute to distinguish us from all other animals. It’s our unique package of rare attributes (big brain+ profuse sweating +bipedalism + tool-making + social complexity). I’m pretty sure you won’t find another single animal species with all four of those.

HOMO CAN’T BE SAPIENS WITHOUT IMAGINATION

As of now, anthropologists designate modern humans as homo sapiens sapiens. If ‘sapiens’ means ‘wise,’ they must be talking about some other animal. Because we are certainly NOT worthy of being called wise once, let alone twice!

Seriously, though, if we are so ‘wise’ an animal, it is because we know that our prodigious imaginative powers are amoral. They require some moral anchor. That moral anchor can not be - buying more on Amazon to help our economy grow. This is precisely what every committed banker seems to believe- consumption fuels growth, and growth is good.

As I’ll be writing about in my next book - human communities sustain themselves NOT by never-ending growth but rather by committing to two collective practices that are almost non-existent in the animal world.

Rituals and story-telling.

And both of these lean heavily on the dangerous power of big-brained imagination.

Without our enormous capacity for imagination, we wouldn’t even be able to imagine the societies we live in or how to improve them.

Imagination is the myelin of shared cultural value systems. And it requires some anchor, like Ritual’s transformative endpoint or Story’s themes.

The name of this publication - Homo Imaginari - is simply another Latin play on words. I chose the name, because I think imagination may be the secret ‘tool’ we need to improve as we handle rapid social changes in the 21st century.

I believe humans really are a uniquely imaginative species (based on our limited access to the inner worlds of elephants, apes, and dolphins), not because we have dreams or know the sun will rise again tomorrow.

Because we can imagine alternative social worlds and attempt to make them happen. I’m pretty sure my dogs don’t imagine such fanciful things. Or, if they did, they would imagine worlds where I spend all day rubbing their belly and feeding them kibble.

Computers can’t imagine. All they can do is compute and forecast. So, imagining alternate futures is left to us.

Historically, humans consciously adapt at the societal level in the wake of significant crises and wars. This is a form of tragically rushed, mass adaptation to new leaders, governments, economies, etc. Violence almost always precedes these ‘adaptations.’

The challenge we face in the 21st century is that social change is unfolding more rapidly than a human lifetime but less slowly than war or invasion.

I do believe this pace of change is dangerously imperceptible to us. Easy to ignore. Easy to punt the responsibilities to cope with it to another generation.

And, so we struggle to adapt collectively. We bumble along. We fight without realizing the axes of conflict.

A sign of our failure to proactively imagine an adaptive future more quickly is the recent explosion of otherwise educated people falling prey either to a) conspiracy theories or b) fantastic imaginings of a glorious past to which we must return. The former is a desperate, panicked imagining. The latter is the blind refusal to imagine a world that adapts to new realities. We could call it fundamentalism too.

We are doing an abysmal job of imagining a collective future that includes and tolerates individual diversity yet demands responsibility to the local, state, and federal communities.

Homo Imaginari. A species known for its imaginative powers.

It’s possible that the Internet’s massive data-gathering power will help us imagine a better future. We’ll be able to focus on the imagining part more and less on analyzing the problems to address.