NONFICTION      

This morning in Bernal Hill, a park in my neighborhood,     -  -  -
                                 Photo by Weebly.com                          

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In Praise of the Anthropomorph
​by  Ed Brownson

This morning on Bernal Hill, a park in my San Francisco neighborhood, I came across a raven perched on a decaying tree stump picking at it for bugs. Judging by her pecking and munching, she was having a feast.
 
On the other side of the road two younger ravens, like most adolescents smaller and sleeker than their elders, clung to rock exposed by the steep vertical cut in the hill, trying to catch bugs there and not finding many. They were unhappy about it, and also like most adolescents, loudly made their complaints known.
 
The older raven on the stump, after giving me and my dog a wary eye and judging us no threat, looked up at the youngsters across the street, emitted two loud caw! caws! directly at them, then continued fishing bugs out of the stump.
 
One of the two adolescents—the smarter one?—flew across the street, landed next to the older raven and happily joined in the insect feast.
 
I immediately jumped to the conclusion that this was an example of parental teaching, something along the lines of, “Hey, dumbass! You get more bugs out of a rotting stump than a rock! (Sigh. Kids, these days!)”
 
I immediately scolded myself.
 
You’re anthropomorphizing. You are attributing ‘human behavior’—as if the behavior of humans is somehow singular and constant—to a bunch of birds. Very intelligent birds, true, but definitely not Homo sapiens. Stop!
 
Ok. I anthropomorphized. I apologize. My bad.
 
But wait. . .. is anthropomorphizing so bad? Really?
 
Seeing that adult raven look up at the complaining youngsters, call to them, watching one fly over, land on the stump, stand shoulder to shoulder with the adult, emulate her pecking and gleefully eating . . . did I or did I not witness an adult teaching a child the way to do something better? Does that lesson really change because the adult is a raven and the child, a fledgling? Am I not right in seeing a commonality between our two kinds?

The OED definition of anthropomorphism:
a. The attribution of human form, character, or attributes to God or a god.
b. The attribution of human personality or characteristics to something non-human, as an animal, object, etc.

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​A parent teaching a child is one of the most relatable actions we can witness among other critters in our shared world. Young life must be nourished, taught how to survive in whatever situation they find themselves in. Human or raven, dog or goose, it makes no difference. Young’uns need teaching and looking after.
 
We can—and do—tick off our differences from our planet-mates with hardly a thought. But our similarities? Those, we self-absorbed humans have to think about. After all, we’re so special, aren’t we? Yet when we take the time to consider our commonalities, we see, plain as day, the connections between us that were always there. We understand each other—and ourselves—better.
 
Humans have a genius—a compulsion really—to cast stories over everything we encounter or imagine. All too often we declare those stories true, all too often they become gospel. So scientists set up strict rules to keep those stories out of the picture while they study the world. They try to anyway; they don’t always succeed. Still, the rules help them get closer to the truth.
 
One of those rules is, don’t anthropomorphize. Don’t run around willy-nilly attributing human behaviors or characteristics to non-humans.
 
Unfortunately, this particular rule feeds directly into one of our worst traits: separating ourselves from everything else in the living world, pushing life into two categories: ‘us’ and ‘everything not us’.
 
This ‘us, not-us’ thinking has roots in one of the more horrific stories we tell ourselves, that awful planet-grab first proffered in Genesis 1:26-29, where humankind conveniently grants itself ‘dominion’ over, well, basically everything, rationalizing this theft by claiming our species was ‘chosen’ by some deity-another made-up story—and therefore, because we declare this story to be true, then by definition, all the rest of life is thereby ‘inferior’ and therefore ‘ours.’ 

Percent of DNA Homo sapiens share with our planet mates

 - chimps, 98%
 - cats, 90%
 - mice, 88%
 - dogs, 84%
 - cows, 80%
 - birds, 65%
 - bananas, 60%
 - yeast (yeast!), 25%  

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​Here’s another origin story. One more or less based on facts we know now, much more earthbound than the nonsense in Genesis.
 
Earth, our planet, is covered in a thin layer of organic soup. This soup is composed of endless snippets of DNA and RNA, biomolecules, organic compounds, proteins, minerals, acids and every other chemical that goes into assembling life.
 
Near as our scientists can tell, this organic soup first formed about 4.5 billion years ago—that’s billion with a ‘b.’ It took 2.5 billion years of simmering before the first multi-cell life congealed in the soup. It took 1.5 billion more before the soup was cooked enough to assemble those lumps into something recognizable as a plant or an animal. From there it took hundreds of millions of years more to create dinosaurs and the tiny rodent-like critters scurrying about their feet, critters we call mammals, our own ancestors.
 
It was only seven million years ago, give or take, that our first hominid ancestors and those of the apes went their separate ways. And us? Homo sapiens? We popped up a scant 300,000 years ago.
 
And every step of the way, all this life, our every antecedent, emerged from, lived in, fed off, reproduced, and was absorbed back into that singular, planet-encompassing, organic soup.
 
We are the opposite of separate from other life. We are one with it. Right down to the simplest bacteria, the smallest strand of RNA, we evolved from the same soup, live in it, survive thanks to it to this day. When we travel into space, we must take containers of that soup with us. We call those soup cans ‘life support’ for a good reason.
 
There is no ‘us and not-us.’ There is only ‘we.’ We, forever and always intertwined.

Our refusal to acknowledge and accept our connections, our clinging to our original sins of ‘otherness’ and ‘dominion,’ has everything to do with why the Earth is dying around us. When you cast yourself in the role of ‘us,’ cast everything else as ‘not-us,’ you make it easy to ignore the damage you cause, the miseries of the others around you. Their problems are not yours, you tell yourself. You have no responsibility to them. They are ‘not-you’ so you need not care. 

According to the latest estimations, the ratio of cells in you that are yours, ie, part of your human body, to those that are not part of you, ie, bacteria, is somewhere around 1 to 1. If you could somehow rid yourself of your fellow travelers, you wouldn’t be cleaner. You’d be dead.
We are the soup.

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​We are now witnessing, with our fires and floods, freezing winters and scorching summers, dying seas, and mass extinctions, exactly how far down the hole into hell our conceits have taken us. At the bottom of that hole is yet one more extinction. Ours.
 
If anthropomorphizing our fellow planet-mates brings us more awareness of our interconnectedness and interdependence, of how fragile we are, of how necessary other life, all of it, is to us, then let’s hear it for anthropomorphizing.
 
Go, seek out the similarities in every bit of life you encounter. Next time you see a raven teaching her young how to catch bugs, or watch a dog teach a puppy how to navigate stairs, see a spider stock her web with bugs for her hatchlings, or a cow affectionately nuzzle her calf, go ahead, relate it to your life. Cast a story over it, one you can relate to. Tell the story to your own kid. Compare it to your world. Make it part of your world. See the joyful commonality between you and them, the connection, the wonder of life evolving in so, so many different ways yet always with a common, relatable theme.
 
Yes, some of the stories you cast might stick a little too well and make it a bit harder for the scientists trying to figure out the way the world works. But greater awareness for our similarities may, right now, be the higher value. Greater awareness will encourage more respect for the work the scientists do and crucially, more respect for the life they are studying. And you—and those scientists—will renew connections to our world and the connection of others and help release us all from our sad burdens of ‘dominion’ and ‘otherness.’
 
And maybe then we can get busy undoing the damage we have done to our world and its exquisitely rare, life-giving soup.
 
Maybe then we can finally anthropomorphize ourselves.

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​Ed Brownson’s plays have been performed in California, New York and Italy, with many developmental and staged readings along the way. His latest, Tap, Tap Tap, about a woman confronting a horrible past, was selected for production as part of the Playwright Center of San Francisco’s Fall 2021 ‘Best of…’ series. He has studied playwriting at American Conservatory Theatre, Central Works Theater Company, Theater Artists’ Conspiracy and many informal venues. Recently, he has been working on essays and long and short fiction, ‘attending’ numerous pandemic-inspired Zoom classes and groups to help him along the way.

Other works in this issue:
Fiction:  
Ms Noir and the Night Caller
Nonfiction:  
​Is That All There Is?  
Ghost City

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