We are not like animals – unfortunately!

Being Primal means that we acknowledge our shared ancestry with life on this planet – many thanks to Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. But being Primal means then that we acknowledge our shared characteristics with other life on this planet:

“Primates matter. I don’t need to give you justifications describing their economic value or role in ecosystem services (although let’s not underestimate their importance as seed dispersers in tropical forests). Primates share so many of our characteristics – we see ourselves reflected in their gestures their facial expressions, their social interactions and the way they nurture their young. Primates hold a mirror up to the human race and that alone should be enough to justify our working to avoid their extinction.”

                Dr Abigail Entwhistle in “Relative Importance”, Fauna&Flora, 15, June 2012, p.4.

Primates are our closest relatives – and we are killing them off. We are killing not just the occasional bad or unlucky individual but we are killing them all. Imagine an individual from one particular species - Homo sapiens – killing all his or her relatives. That would be front-page news indeed and cries of shame would echo around the world. But as we kill off our closest relatives in nature, there is little outrage, few headlines, very few voices calling for justice to be done, no powerful police teams tackling this odious crime…. Why not?

“Primates are facing a crisis. This has been the case for the last 50 years at least, and the threats have not abated.”

                Ibid,. p. 5.

It is of course mankind who is killing its own closest relatives, the primates.

Mankind’s sense of justice and injustice is at times so self-absorbed, so self-reflecting and so human-self-privileging that it is classifiable as a kind of mental illness. Teenagers can sometimes be self-absorbed like this. In their struggle to find themselves in an adult world, teenagers can be too aware of their own pressing insights, limitations and predicaments and the demands of their own immediate situations that they often cannot see or relate to the plights of others – notably their parents. Of course not all teenagers are like this and there are many examples of “mature” teenagers who respect and work with their relations to the world outside of their own small selves.

Parents, schools and colleges are very skilled in helping young people discover their relations with the wider world that has created and nurtured them and which holds the key to their sustainable future. In a very real, everyday-living-sense, these wider relations include those that embed us and enable us to flourish – or wither - in the wider natural world.

If we linger a while with the idea of teenagers finding their way out of personal limitations and self-absorption, we can build a better understanding of one cause of mankind’s impact upon nature. Imagine if on a higher, more complex level, mankind is like a teenager – locked in an understanding that is far too self-absorbed and self-reflecting. Indeed if we look at one of – if not THE – controlling influences on mankind’s development, neo-classical economics and free-market ideology, then this teenage self-referencing and self-absorption is all too apparent.

The whole sophisticated, magnificent, influential and exceedingly powerful edifice that has created global corporations, financial institutions and free-markets that handle billions of dollars daily – is built upon rational choice theory – it is a system conceived by man, for man, in the service of man!!

The grown-up, mature, responsible world occupied by too many business leaders, financiers and politicians world-wide is at heart something akin to the same kind of self-absorbed, self-reflecting and self-privileging that it is at best a teenager trait; at worst a kind of mental illness. How else do you explain the fact that multi-millionaires who have far more money than they could possibly spend in several lifetimes dedicate themselves to making even more money – and not enjoying life with all their relations, human and non-human?

Baby orang-outang at Sepilok Orang-outang Rehabilitation Centre, Borneo, Malaysia

In 1967, Desmond Morris’s book The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal (Hardback: ISBN 0-07-043174-4; Reprint: ISBN 0-385-33430-3) caused a sensation. It was sensational stuff to compare mankind with apes and to argue that we are so intimately related.

Unfortunately this sensational news still has still not had the impact it should in some very major business, economic, financial and political circles. Too many leaders, first movers, developers and their followers still behave like teenagers – locked within the boundaries of their far-too-small-worlds of their own making (more accurately locked within logical belief systems – see the ISD book).

This is why we are killing nature on an industrial scale – this is why we are not unfortunately like those animals who have learned over aeons to live alongside each other.