Larry Barnett lives in Sonoma where he was elected to three terms on the City Council and served twice as Mayor. A thirty-three-year resident, he currently serves as Chair of Sonoma's Planning Commission. He has been married for 48 years, has two daughters and three grandchildren.
Alive and conscious of it
Animals are alive; it’s so obvious as to be a tautology. Not all animals, however, are aware of being alive. As far as we can tell, human beings are the only ones.
Opinion about awareness, and even more precisely reason, has varied. The designation of animal behavior as the use of reason actually poses some interesting implications.
We humans think of ourselves as rational animals, ones that use reason to make inferences. When we examine non-human animal behavior, however, a reasonable case can be made that human beings are the most irrational animals.
The definition of reason is critical here; take squirrels, for example. In carrying out their daily behavioral routine, squirrels never make a mistake. The outcome of the decisions a squirrel makes, even what we would consider reasonable decisions, have their positive and negative effects. Crossing a busy road to find a nut and being struck dead instead by a passing car is not something, as best as we can tell, any squirrel intends to do. But, it happens, and to people, too.
For the squirrel killed in this way, it was a pure accident. It was not a rational decision and behavior as we think of it, but nonetheless, the squirrel was doing what squirrels do to find a nut across the road. In that respect, the squirrel made no mistake. We might even call this an example of perfect reason, which is to say an action well synchronized with the world known to the squirrel. People know more, but their actions are poorly synchronized.
The imagination and freedom of thought we humans enjoy means that many of the so-called rational decisions we make are bad ones. We invent stories, histories, justifications, and develop ways of re-classifying reality to make us emotionally comfortable with the irrational decisions we’ve made. Non-clinically speaking, human beings think and act crazy.
This, in case you were wondering, provides a way to understand our world, the world we human beings have created. The product of “rational” thought, the world we have constructed is as crazy as we are. For it to be otherwise would require humanity to step outside of both itself and the world to gain an unmistaken absolute truth about reality; because we can’t, not every choice we make leads to a positive outcome; some are fatal.
Based upon the choices we make, the best possible outcome for the human species is survival. So much of the world we’ve created – our understanding of science, medicine, physics, chemistry, and the rest of the sciences – has been in furtherance of human survival. Human survival is simultaneously the lowest and the highest bar we can surmount.
Squirrels don’t worry about the S&P 500, tomorrow’s weather, or how good their furry tails look today. It’s true; squirrels never built, nor could they build the Golden Gate Bridge. So, are human beings the sum of human culture, which is to say we are all the systems and things that we’ve created? Are we, for example, just living symbols of money?
It’s no wonder we’re crazy, and sympathy is called for. Like all other animals we are just trying to be, to survive in the best way we are able. Our stories often get in the way of making good decisions and making them rationally. Squirrels, although they may suffer their own forms of trauma, certainly don’t worry about having enough money.
