I am an animal

To be a specimen of homo sapiens sapiens is to be an animal. Charles Darwin put this challenge in the way of thinkers, not just a milestone but a great boulder in the pathway of knowledge, which till then had been directed towards the supremacy of God, whether as the great designer, or the goal of human striving. Yes, we are animals and that is why ideas don’t change us much in a mere 150 years. If we were spirit trapped in flesh, as is so often claimed, then we’d have made more progress over the last three thousand years in proving that theory true.

I had decided to write on this topic this morning, and walked across a ploughed field on Gore Hill, the better to brood and ponder. I stopped to pee against a secluded hawthorn hedge, but a rustling disturbed me and I saw on the ground a young wren, unable to fly. I saw its breast throbbing as its heart beat fast in fear for its life. Poor thing! There is nothing to do in such situations but to move out of the other creature’s way, from respect. Our species can approach and feel compassion, where we cannot help one another. If I’d been a mesolithic hunter-gatherer, I’d have felt the same, for it was too small to catch and eat. Later I saw the remains of a fox, just its skeleton and a bit of russet fur, then a dead field-mouse bedraggled in the recent rain, its front paws clenched upwards; not to mention close encounters with several fleeing rabbits. I paused a long time in front of a beautifully striped snail. When its eye-stalks and feelers were fully extended, and the sun lit up its miniature scene, I asked it to “smile please” and clicked, but at this moment, my camera’s batteries went flat. Otherwise I could have shown you a photo of our very distant cousin.

It is from this hill that you can see Amersham Old Town laid out in the folds of its valley like Camelot, whilst you breathe purer air and feel connected to something beyond your own tribe. I wandered “lonely as a cloud” over the ploughed field, the stubble-field and the beanfield, whose plants are withered and the remaining pods blackened. I looked inside: they are exactly the same as what they sell in tins as Heinz baked beans. There is an elevation of the soul up on this hill, and as you look down on the Old Town – it’s a village in today’s terms – you know a tiny bit of how Moses felt when he went up the mountain and came down later with the Ten Commandments.

How can I explain concisely what it means to say “I am an animal”? It’s revolutionary! Take sex, take religion. All right, sex first. Doesn’t it prove the point that we are animals? Yes, but we ceaselessly try to deny it, to the point where we can technologically sever the link between sex and propagation. “Why are the young so heedless as not to use contraception?”, we ask, forgetting the wise purposes of Nature, which for 150,000 years had the wit, circumventing all our fanciful ideas, to beget, nurture, feed and guide the survival of our subspecies*. These days, governments think we cannot do any of these things without their advice.

Shamans and prophets arose as we made the dramatic change from hunter-gatherers to settled farmers, with chiefs and communal projects and hierarchies and wars against other tribes. These priests were the first to tell us the do’s and don’ts of sex, child-rearing, diet, education and so forth. I am reading the excellent Tribes of Britain: who are we? And where do we come from? by David Miles. I see that in many ways we have not gone beyond this neolithic stage of development which started a mere ten thousand years ago.

Religion as a social-spiritual force was a major part of the “package” which swept across the world updating the stone-age peoples to the heights of sophistication. It still is. Take war. We need God to be on our side. We pray for our men and women fighters. We have religious services for our dead. Our enemies are ungodly. Our war is just and needs to be proclaimed as such for the salving of our consciences. Jihad: holy war.

My words take me to places I had not expected to go. I wanted to stand on the hill, apart from the tribe. But I cannot survive on its rarefied heights. I belong with my people in the valley.

*Homo sapiens sapiens is a subspecies of the somewhat less wise main species homo sapiens, who has been around for 300,000 to 500,000 years, starting with Homo Erectus and including Neanderthals.