The narrative of human exceptionalism posits that there is something unique about being human that makes us more valuable. And we believe that what matters most are the things that seem to separate us from animals—like our ability to reason or the immortal human soul. But what if you can’t separate the animal part of us from our spirit? What if being human IS being animal?
Melanie Challenger is a writer of environmental history, podcast host of Enter the Psychosphere, and author of the new release, How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Melanie joins Ross to share her argument against substance dualism, explaining why we can’t separate the idea of being human from that of being animal.
Melanie offers insight on how we can ‘become animal’ without reverting to amoral, self-serving behaviors and why she sees the simple, clean messaging around environmental issues as being problematic. Listen in to understand Melanie’s take on the human battle with mortality and learn to accept that life is finite but not fear death.
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Resources
Enter the Psychosphere Podcast
How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human by Melanie Challenger
On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature by Melanie Challenger
Paul Kingsnorth on Reversing Climate Change S2EP53
Thomas Aquinas’ Philosophy of Angelology
The Biological Mind: How Brain, Body and Environment Collaborate to Make Us Who We Are by Alan Jasanoff
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori’s Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Melanie Challenger, writer of environmental history, podcaster at the new show, Enter the Psychosphere, and author of her latest book, How to Be Animal, a new history of what it means to be human. Welcome to the show, Melanie.
Melanie Challenger: Thank you for inviting me.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m happy to have you. I’m going to start with maybe the biggest question of all, which is what does it mean to be human in your opinion? And if this takes the entire hour, that’s okay.
Melanie Challenger: It probably takes a bit longer than an hour. In the book, what I’m answering there... is actually a critique of the idea that being human is something separate or even separable from being animal. So the reason it has that subtitle is really because Not in absolutely all societies, and obviously this just does change culturally, and it does change historically as well. That said, there’s remarkable commonality in certain ways in which humans have thought about what it is to be human. And one of those is that we have tended to live by a sort of substance dualism.
So we’ve Across all societies, whether hunter-gatherer societies or sort of large kind of monotheistic societies, we’ve had this idea that there’s this animal bit of us, this fleshy, mortal part of us. And then there’s this spiritual part of us. Now it could be the soul. It could be the kind of living essence that, let’s say, if you were a Navajo Indian, you might think was the living essence that all creatures have and that it’s connected together as the kind of vital source that is in all living things. Whatever your culture, we’ve tended to have this idea of this animal, mortal part of us and this spiritual part of us.
Modern civilizations, and particularly in monotheistic civilizations, we’ve taken that sort of dualist idea that there’s this sort of immortal spiritual part of us and this fleshy bit that dies. And we’ve started not only to place sort of value judgments on it. So we’ve said it’s this, actually, it’s this spiritual bit that makes us human. It’s this spiritual bit that matters, that has value. And increasingly, we said, well, we’re the only beings with it. So it’s become a sort of human exceptionalist narrative as well. And that takes us right the way through.
Now, originally, that was a theological idea and partly a natural history idea. It was partly a question of what is the substance of us? What are we made of? And what matters about us? But it was always knitted in with theology. So it was always the idea That this is how we’ve been created, that this is the human soul versus the animal part of life. Then you arrive at the enlightenment and you get a sort of twist on this, which is the idea that actually what really makes humans stick out within the biotic community is our kind of cognition, our ability to reason, to rationalize, to have free will.
And this is the mind as this kind of this soul-like part of us. And really that’s carried right through to the present day. So when I’m talking about what it is to be human, I’m really trying to push up against that a little bit and say, well, We have no evidence for that kind of substance dualism. And were it to be true, the older idea that it’s probably in all living things would certainly be more likely, parsimonious-wise, to be true. So the human exceptionalist narrative looks very problematic at this point in time in our learning and in history.
But I argue that this idea that we’ve had for a long time now that the animal bit of us doesn’t matter or it could be separated out and that there’s this human, either cognitive or spiritual part that’s somehow separated. Is unlikely to be true. Doesn’t serve us well. And that actually to answer your question, being human is being animal. So that’s my point. That would be my answer. That would be what I would say.
Ross Kenyon: That was surprisingly graceful given how enormous that question is. Well done. Okay. I’m catching definite echoes of the episode we did with Paul Kingsnorth. In fact, I found out about your book because Paul Kingsnorth blurbed it and then posted about it on social media. And we hardly exhausted this topic. He spent most of the time talking about mind-body dualism and what he sees as the problems that have led to us feeling disconnected and in some cases trying to transcend the body or physical reality entirely and becoming pure idea or spirit and being uploaded into machines, souls into the cloud, perhaps you could phrase it.
But one of the things I noticed that was interesting about your approach that was quite different is that, well, did you know that Paul converted to Eastern Orthodoxy? Have you followed that whole saga?
Melanie Challenger: Now, so Paul I’ve known for a long time. So I was born in Oxford and went to Oxford University and Paul went to Oxford and is in a small, we’re in a kind of, Paul’s older than me, but we’re in a kind of group of people who sort of loosely have floated around the Oxford area, George Monbiot, Casper Henderson, who write in these sorts of areas. And kind of all know one another and value one another, but have very different approaches. Paul and I have corresponded for a long time and we’ve sort of collaborated on one or two things.
I’m really fond of Paul. We don’t necessarily agree on everything, But, you know, that doesn’t matter to, you know, you shouldn’t have to intellectually. But I don’t, I haven’t followed this part of things. He’s probably wary of telling me about this. But he did tell me that he was really, when he went to Ireland, because I obviously knew him when he was in Cumbria as well, and he shifted over to Ireland with his young family. And in his correspondences, he’s been engaging more and more initially with a sort of Ancient vestiges of Christianity that we’re in and this particular chapel I think that he’d found.
And there’ve been these little tidbits that he’s been dropping in to messages to me, but no. And I haven’t teased it out, possibly out of fear. I don’t know. Roy might tell me where he’s got up to. So you tell me what’s in Paul’s head now. What’s he converted to?
Ross Kenyon: No, no. And that’s fine. I don’t mean to make this episode about Paul either. If you’re listening, Paul, sorry. We’re talking about Melanie today.
Melanie Challenger: We love you, Paul, anyway. It’s all good.
Ross Kenyon: I thought this divergence was really interesting because he’s open now. He talked about it on the show, Becoming Orthodox. And he’s been writing and thinking about this lately in public. So I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone who follows his work. But he’s really seized upon... This idea in the Apostles Creed of the resurrection of the body and sort of Catholicism and orthodoxy of being a way that Christianity doesn’t have to have this mind-body dualism that involves a disembodied soul floating up to heaven. It could actually be. I know it’s weird, isn’t it?
Melanie Challenger: Do I think, do I think it’s possible or what are you asking me? I mean, I look, it’s really difficult when we cherry pick from history and this is because I do big history stuff. That’s something I’m acutely aware of because I also work. You know, within philosophy and within philosophy, there’s a great resistance to those kind of big panoramic sort of history views and that you have to be careful. And indeed, historians are always, you know, because they specialize in a particular area always. And within Christian thought broadly, it’s so unbelievably diverse.
And once you start going into the detail of different ways in which, so the theological arguments, if we were to look even in Aquinas’ time, That were happening about what might be possible, how to interpret texts, how to interpret theologically, either what they’re finding in scripture or kind of ideas, theological ideas that are going to matter to Christians. It’s so complicated that there’s lots and lots of diversity of ideas. I would say if I was going to be generalizing about it, you could pick out a couple of things from that sort of time period.
First is the angelologist thing. So this is the idea that, you know, that was debated a lot, you know, how if the angels aren’t sort of beings in a physical sense, how are they even recognizing that? Say, Mary, to be able to come and deliver a message. So these are the sorts of conundrums that theological thinkers were having to think about. What substance can also recognize a living person? Know that is different to another. Biologically, that’s a really reasonable question to ask, isn’t it? Recognizing who’s kin, who’s not kin, who’s prey, who’s predator is crucial to all biological systems.
But it led on to ideas that about whether we really even needed bodies to recognize things, whether you could have a kind of cognition that was ethereal in that sort of way. And those echoes from those early debates and possible solutions to these debates weave their way into philosophy and into intellectual history and You know, we see them returning. Another one in terms of resurrection that is interesting was the idea that you could take the troubling idea that, you know, saints who might have been cut up into different parts or, you know, someone might have a saint’s artifact in one church and might be another one.
How were these parts of the body going to re-cohere at the resurrection? And this was a real concern. But that led on When we look at the early scientific endeavors to understand the workings of movement and body and anatomy and so forth, to the experiments only kind of 150 years ago to work out if a soul could extend into another room. And so they would sort of cut off a frog’s head. And, you know, apply some, you know, some form of stimulation and see if it still moved and see if it if you took the head into a whole other room, would it still move and how far could you keep going?
How far would the soul extend? You see this weird interplay of theological and scientific and philosophical ideas that kind of bubble along through the centuries. We have a very incomplete, to answer your question, a very incomplete idea about what we are. But I’m very cautious when looking at intellectual history about extrapolating from theological dilemmas into scientific ideas or assumptions. They can really mislead us, I think, sometimes. It’s not an area that I tend to go down, I must admit.
Ross Kenyon: Fair enough.
Melanie Challenger: Does that answer your question at all, Ross? Sorry.
Ross Kenyon: Yes, it does. And we’re going to follow it up. And I think what I want to do is close the door to some of the way that Paul sees it, because you approach it from a different angle. I just want to address those. And then we’ll close it off. And then we’ll take it forgiven that Christianity is biologetic. By necessity, a dualistic philosophy that has separated mind and body or soul and body, because he locates it within Gnosticism and that heresy, or it’s a heresy depending on who you are really, but of everything matters.
Everything’s spirit is good. The material world was created by a demon, essentially, and God is his pure spirit. And this was an early trend in Christian thought that was sort of stamped out and then revived with people like Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code. So let’s ignore fights like that and just say that Christianity and most religions have an idea of a soul and a body and they’re distinct. And your work blends philosophical insights, but also science. Science has Yeah.
Melanie Challenger: You know, it’s really, so there’s a great neuroscientist called Alan Yasinov, who’s at Harvard, and he’s done a huge amount to try and myth bust on this sort of really, for him, neuroessentialism, which is the idea that we only need to look to the brain, if you like, to answer questions of mind and consciousness. He says, well, no, it’s very wet. It’s very messy. You know, consciousness, yes, it’s brain based. It draws on the whole of the body and you can’t ignore the body when we think about mind and consciousness.
And we’ve He says, no, it’s more messily biological than we’ve liked to admit. But I think that if you ask most scientists, even deeply religious scientists who deal in cognition, they would Say that they’re not drawing on any idea of the soul or that they’re not dualists, that they’re very much looking for material explanations for consciousness and mind and so forth. But if you were to talk to them about how they feel about, let’s say, doing consciousness experiments on macaques, Why that might be doing a distressing experiment, even with the best care in the world, it is a distressing situation that an animal might be in.
It’s permissible, but it’s not permissible with humans. They would say, well, because we have a kind of cognition that they don’t have and it morally matters more. You know, if you were to talk to them about what matters about us, they would probably talk in sort of human cognitive exceptionalist terms because that’s kind of how our world is structured now. So the funny thing is, is that you can accidentally have quite sort of dualist ideas that are So, and I think, Some of that is really just bias on our part and a completely understandable bias.
We have a cognitive niche as a species. There’s no question about that. And consequently, we put a huge premium on it and it deeply, deeply matters to us. But the kind of neat sort of ideas about being human and what our mental experience is that often sort of Admit a certain dualism, you know, allow it through the door, go unexamined. So I think that’s where we can still see it in the present day.
Ross Kenyon: For instance, it’s coded into English, right? I have a body versus I am a body. If you said I am a body, someone would be like, cool, you’re like a new age freak, huh?
Melanie Challenger: Yeah, it’s so true. It’s so true. Yeah. I’ve always found it incredible that the reality is the way in which our subjective consciousness works is that it does. I mean, it genuinely does feel people like Sam Harris have really tried to take this on and show people that it’s It’s a sort of illusion, this idea that we are some sort of floating thing kind of trapped inside, you know, in Christian terms, our earthen vessel, you know, that we are somehow being carried around by our body. It does kind of feel like that.
And also, if you ask people to think about what a life would feel like, you know, the affective states of experience without subjectivity, it’s really difficult for people. It’s much easier to imagine, as John Locke did, to have a thought experiment in which you can imagine thinking in a different body. Then you can imagine being feeling in a body without subjectivity. And so that’s so strong. That’s such a strong sensation for human beings, even if it’s, you know, to a certain extent illusory, not to say that subjectivity is an illusion, but just that idea that there is this kind of duality is an illusion rather than a reality of our condition.
And of how it’s actually biologically, you know, and hormonally and chemically emerging in us. You know, I think that, you know, you can understand why for millennia we have tended to think in that kind of way, because that is what our experience feels like. That’s what our experience presents as, you know, and it’s really, really difficult to think differently about it, I think.
Ross Kenyon: You keep using this term human exceptionalism or things akin to that. What does that mean?
Melanie Challenger: Yeah, do you know, it’s funny, isn’t it? These little kind of phrases that we have. I guess probably the... The phrase that people would be more familiar with nowadays is anthroposentrism, which is akin to human exceptionalism. But put simply, it’s the idea that there are unique parts of human beings that have unique value and from which our value derives. So it is a philosophical idea, if you like, because it is a value assumption about Often biological traits, but it hasn’t historically always had to be biological traits. So the soul, you know, the idea of the unique immortal human soul would be an example of human exceptionalist thinking.
But equally well, the idea that human beings, the modern day idea that only human cognition can have full moral status legally or philosophically is also a human exceptionalist idea, but obviously of a very different character. It’s related to anthropocentrism because I suppose anthropocentrism, so the idea that human beings not just are at the center of the world, but are ultimately what matters and where meaning resides, and therefore we’re justified in doing what we want or taking priority in certain dilemmas or situations. We’re that what matters, you know, it follows from a human exceptionalist idea.
So I guess, you know, that’s the relationship between the two.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, that makes sense. I’m going to pose an objection that you both address in the book slash I’m sure it’s the most common thing that someone says to you. Which is that appealing to our natural rather than exceptional qualities is a risk. Reading your book actually reminded me of, did you ever read Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth? Have you read that book?
Melanie Challenger: No, I haven’t done it yet. It’s on the list to read. I haven’t read it. So you’ll have to fill me in.
Ross Kenyon: I thought it was really fascinating, but he describes Hitler as a zoological anarchist and in the basic sense that it’s the strong should rule, the weak should submit. I almost imagine it as kind of like old school, the pejorative version of how we view pre-Christian or pagan society as being dominated by harem culture, alpha males. That rising above this sort of, I don’t know, our base level nature, which doesn’t always seem so good. It seems almost amoral and self-interested. How do we become an animal without reverting to some of those behaviors that we think are actually really bad and we should rise above?
Melanie Challenger: So this is so key. And to be honest, I mean, this is the stuff that I think very, very deeply about. And, you know, obviously I write writing for a mainstream audience and it frustrates me that, you know, you’re not allowed to really go deeply. I mean, this is not just the lifetime of one person’s thought, but this is this is the sort of thing that holds. Societies of thinkers mull for thousands of years. You know, these are really, really deep, really, really complicated and gnarly questions about the meaning of life and how good emerges in a seemingly amoral biological system.
That’s so untrivial. So anything I’m about to say is going to be a ridiculously beggared version of this. And my thinking is incomplete on this. It keeps me up. I think about it all the time. But to answer where I’m at now with that. So one of the things in the book that is not my idea philosophically, it’s an old idea, is that this is the kind of naturalistic fallacy. So the idea that what we ought to do Morally speaking, so this is moral philosophy, cannot follow from how we find things in nature.
And that’s primarily as a highfalutin way of pointing out the obvious, which Darwin was very acutely aware of. He understood that biological continuity was not just a threat to the idea of a created, intelligent, designed universe. That he grew up in, but it was a threat to our moral ideas that if we have real gradual continuity with everything around us, then our moral systems must have emerged from the same world in which lots of very horrible things happen like parasites, like predators, like aggressive attacks, you know, to get your own way of one individual over another.
Rape, all of these sorts of things that take place in nature that are the business of how individual organisms try to attain energy and survive. It looks pretty, you know, it’s nature red in tooth and claw. And you can understand that why we wanted to separate out our idea of how our lives matter and our moral systems from that chaos. And the fear is that if you start to tread back into our, to associate or align ourselves too much with the amoral system, Nature of the world from which we came is that it threatens or undermines, I suppose, what we might call not just society, not just the ties that hold us together, but the whole moral project of human life.
My response to that is you have to... Well, I suppose my inclination as an individual and as a thinker is that you cannot build on a false foundation. So it’s no good ultimately will come of, you know, drawing a line in a sand where no line exists. You have to look at the abyss. You have to face the reality. And then if you want good to emerge from that, you have to understand the conditions in which good emerges. So For me, there’s an example from the Holocaust that, and I’ve done a lot of work historically with conflict in my earlier life and worked a lot with people actually who were survivors of, and indeed soldiers in various different conflicts around the world and through time.
And so I’m kind of across that sort of literature and also just, you know, the experiences. And there’s an anecdote of a woman who is in one of the camps and is starving. And there is a... Man beside her who is dying and is hours from death. And she could take his food at this stage, but she chooses not to. And she chooses not to because she understands that it’s the choice that makes, going back to your first question, that makes her human. Even though I think in anybody’s book, we wouldn’t morally judge her, but she’s been so dehumanized by her situation and by what’s been done to her.
She’s had all power taken away from her, but she still has the power of that kind of impulse control and that choice. And also to make that choice according to her beliefs about who she’s going to be. So in terms of building her sense of self and who she is. And that to me... is a reminder of several things. It’s a reminder that it wasn’t her spirituality that pushed her into that conclusion. It was her recognition that fundamentally what is remarkable about human beings is the behavioral choice that we have that derives from our moral sensibility.
Now, I think that we have to understand that as having emerged Naturally, that is not just some abstract. It’s actually about behavior. She acts in a different way than she might have acted just purely to survive. She acts because of how she wants to remember herself, because of how she wants to build her identity and who she wants to be. That is a very... Now, we don’t know because we have no other surviving humans or members of the Homo lineage. It’s possible that Neanderthals and other human species might have shown this if they were still around, but we’re an outlier.
But that will have emerged naturally. That’s a natural part. So we can... If we understand morality naturally, if we allow it to be something that is embodied and natural and animal, but specific to us, that’s part of our adaptive niche. It’s how we come to be better people with one another. And a lot of that is very cognitive. If we accept that, then it allows us to, for me, it allows us to align ourselves with our Animal reality. We don’t need to abstract it. We don’t need to separate it out.
We don’t need to tell ourselves exceptionalist stories, even though it is exceptional. We don’t have to put the value on it in that kind of way. We just recognize that is how we flourish. Our moral capacity and how we remember and understand ourselves as good beings is our niche. It’s our behavioral niche. It’s how we flourish. And so that allows, it’s never going to be a neat fit because biology is not going to allow that, but it’s a pretty good fit. It’s a pretty, if you pay attention to it, I think it allows you to be a good animal, if you like, and for us to somehow marry those two things together.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a comprehensive answer to a difficult question. And the very way in which I asked it, I think, smuggled in some concepts that needed unpacking too. It’s funny that upon reflection, I had smuggled in the idea that the natural biological state of human life is one of endless war against all. Melville has a line in Moby Dick about the universal cannibalism of the sea. And that’s the world that I had imagined. But actually there’s examples from nature of mutuality and commensualism that you’ve singled out in your book. But there’s also just countless idea that I smuggled in Is a liberal anthropology or an anthropology of liberalism of a rational, independent individual, but in a more natural or air quoted primitive state, there really wasn’t an individual.
That’s a sort of modern creation of the last couple hundred years. Before that, we saw ourselves primarily as members of packs of groups of people that were working together in a sort of mutual and mutualism being the operative maybe philosophy here that was happening. Is that an appropriate reaction? Yeah.
Melanie Challenger: I don’t know. Again, I’ve mulled this one. We can’t be sure of what the mental experience of people hundreds or tens of thousands of years ago was like. My suspicion is that Once you have the kind of cognition that we have that will have emerged, which is not to say we all have the same cognition. I mean, I get a bit weary of that. I assume I bake variation into all of my thinking. So I’m assuming that when you’re talking about we or that we have this or we have that, that there is obviously variation within that assumed.
But nonetheless, human beings, our species certainly has, and likely other members of other hominids have had a particular kind of cognitive capacities and behavioral capacities that are very general, very adaptable and involve subjectivity. My suspicion is that as soon as you have that, Regardless of what cultural, you know, whether you’ve got a collectivist culture at work or whether you’ve got a more individualistic culture at work, you’re still always going to have individual thought, recognition and rebellion at work. You are still going to have moments when we’re not a superorganism. And to me, we really don’t look like a super organism, not cognitively.
We might behave like that because we are capable of... Extraordinary acts of collaboration and cooperation into the millions of us, which is amazing and does almost look superorganismic, but I don’t think so. I think at a cognitive level, we’re often individually rebelling all the time against, and it’s slightly stressful to be in social groups. It’s slightly stressful to have to suppress emotions and feelings and needs and desires and impulses. It’s It’s not some happy clappy togetherness, no matter what group you’re in. And so, yeah, people in small hunter-gatherer communities have affairs.
There are sexual tensions and flare-ups and all sorts of stuff that goes on. And I suspect that will have been there always from the moment that you have any kind of really strong subjectivity at work. So, yeah, I don’t know about that. I think it’s a little bit messier through history and now would be my instinct.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, I respect that answer so much because it’s certainly way easier to sell a book if you probably just have a straightforward opinion on. Yes, the lapsarian moment was mind-body dualism and a liberal anthropology of the self-actualized independent individual. You’re saying, I don’t know, actually, the old ways of doing things were not really that simple either and there were tensions.
Melanie Challenger: Yeah. Do you know what? In some ways, I’m only talking to my mom about this today because I make my work through writing. And obviously, there’s a pressure on you to produce content that will sell in large numbers. And Simplified messages, of course, sell more easily as do, you know, subjects that allow people to sort of either get feel that they’ve got kind of handle on something very quickly or that are kind of just, you know, appealing to large numbers. And I wish I could, you know, financially, I guess I wish probably in terms of status and reputation, I wish I could be that kind of person.
But I’m afraid I am an absolutely old fashioned hunter of The truth, seeker, treasure seeker of what is actually going on. I mean, and I write to engage with other people, other thinking people of any kind, of any, you know, just any inquiring mind. And because I write also because it’s where I think. I remember the poet Ted Hughes talked about his... And I see them as, you know, then connecting so that we could become a kind of super brain with readers and we’re all thinking through these things together. You haven’t thought hard enough if you are offering your great story that’s absolutely straightforward.
And it’s seen as a failing. It’s such a sorrow to me that we think that someone not Not providing all the answers or not providing the one theory or whatever is seen as a failing. For me, that’s the beginnings of thought. You know, you should be asking questions and then you should be working out how you can ask better questions and leave behind the questions, you know, were too simple or were too kind of, you know, but sadly it’s not the way commercial publishing works, but, you know, it is the beginnings of thought, I think.
Ross Kenyon: You can’t see me right now, but I’m grinning like a fool. I love that. And that’s what we try to do on the podcast too. I don’t know that I have a set of finite answers that I could discreetly present to someone to solve all of the world’s problems. Your book absolutely reads like this too. One of the blurbs on it described it as lyrical. And I absolutely think that’s the case. It has this beautiful flowing kind of expansive question presenting and engagement, but it doesn’t strike me as strictly linear in its presentation either.
It almost feels like there is a strong poetic kind of quality to it. And it did make me think, am I reading too much into that? Or is that how you see your work as well?
Melanie Challenger: Well, I’m not, I’m never doing anything... By design in that kind of way, in the end, so my first book that I wrote called On Extinction, which was really a exploration of, it was a young person, I was young when I wrote it and it was a young person’s sort of squaring up to really how we’d arrived at this point where we have such a, and when I say we, I just mean, you know, broadly human civilization, you know, is endangering. The earth systems is how we’ve ended up with climate change, biodiversity crisis.
What were the stages that took us there? And I looked very much from a biocultural and industrial extinction. So I used extinction very poetically. This wasn’t some sort of category error. I was actually just using, trying to use that idea, that concept of extinction very broadly to look at the cultural, industrial and intellectuals. Intellectual and historical forces that had sort of, that were in the background to this point that we’d arrived at. And really, in many ways, it’s a story of the Industrial Revolution, what led up to that and the consequences that flowed from it in some ways.
But it’s also that the kind of dominant industrial societies came to think about this. What it is to be human and what was right and wrong and what was justified and what we should be pursuing and investing in our societies, which obviously still resonates now. But I did it in this way where that was actually more poetic than in this. I trained in literature and language, English literature and language. And I originally thought that I would just work in the creative arts. I actually still work in the creative arts now, more in classical music as a librettist and I started, you know, publishing poetry when I was young and I still have a big part of me that works with artists and in the creative arts and I totally get that world.
But right from the get go, I was always asking, I guess, historical and natural history and philosophical questions that I couldn’t simply answer artistically, that I actually needed to shift into nonfiction And research to be able to answer satisfactorily for me. Maybe that’s my weakness as an artist, but that was where I needed to go. So I’ve had those two things running in tandem. But because they touched more closely at the time when I wrote that book, there’s a lot of Deliberate, if people pay attention, there’s a lot of recurring imagery, which is very metaphorical and kind of echoing things that I tried to create, really is a way, in the way that a poem does, to try to provide stopping points for people to think.
Because I want my books to provide... They’re like little churches, if you like, little chapels that I want people to come into, not to be told, but to think and to question the world around them. And so I was trying to do that quite deliberately in that first book, but I don’t know how successful that was, truth be told. In the second book, in How to Be Animal... I probably just have that kind of automatically in me to a certain extent that my use of language comes from that. So it does have probably automatically have a little bit of a poetical and kind of aphoristic aspect to it that is just my style now that I probably just do without thinking.
But it’s much more straightforward in a lot of ways. And the reason it’s not linear is ultimately because I’m trying to float above these very big topics and very big time spans to give people a sense of how All of these things are coming together to affect us. So it’s a bit bird’s eye, I guess, in that way. And that’s how you get in these spans of time and topic in any given chapter. But I think the style is probably maybe slightly more... You know, I guess authorial in some ways than my first book was.
And certainly there’s much less sort of personal essay and narrative in it, partly because I feel that the ideas are a bit, you know, I’m genuinely concerned. So I felt like I had to be pretty straight with people as much as possible.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s a necessary approach for writing a big history in the capitalized, like Will Durant kind of way, where if you are going to write something about thousands of years or more of humanity, There’s a real risk that you just find the one angle, the one axe you want to grind throughout. I just read a history of food like that. You actually have a number of moments where you say, you’ll present a case that someone has made and say, you don’t have to buy that. Or you don’t have to...
You may or may not accept that or something like that.
Melanie Challenger: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: That is not... I love it. So I don’t mean to harp on it too much, but I wish more people could think and write like that because I connect with that strongly because it’s what I try to do here. Not to pat myself on the back too much, but...
Melanie Challenger: No, but it’s really important for, it is something that greatly concerns me about the messaging around sustainability, around climate change, around all environmental issues. You know, I’m obviously quite immersed because I do work in ethics as well. So I do have a practical end to my career. I’m very engaged in deliberative democracy, in bioethics, you know, and I’m active in those areas and increasingly at the moment active in representation of non-human animals, for instance, procedural justice, those sorts of things. So there is a practical element to my life as well, beyond just writing.
So I hear, you know, consequently, I’m kind of really embedded in the environmentalist movement. And I have lots of colleagues who are engaged in all of this and always my worry. And it’s the same with working in bioethics. So for any listeners who don’t necessarily know what bioethics is, bioethics is basically, it’s basically working out the ethics that have emerged from the life sciences. So it’s Yeah. Even in that sort of field, you’re very rarely allowed to go back to first principles and to work your arguments out again or to have hesitation because it directly relates to policy.
So policy makers or decision makers want a simple, clean answer. They want to be told what to do and why, and then they’ll decide. You know, churn it through their political kind of, you know, all their stakeholders or whatever, you know, their real world scenario. And it will come out in some slightly mangled version. But ultimately, that’s what’s going on in the decision making process. But my inclination, of course, is to stop and to think if we are trying to save a gorilla, we need to understand why a gorilla matters.
We need to understand how. We need to understand what they might be communicating to us. We need to think about our history of ideas. We need to think about first principles of reasoning again. These are slow processes of thought and deliberation that are often very messy and often very difficult to reason out. And people are kind of allergic to that. But for me, you know, when it comes to climate change, let’s say, you need to understand how Why things matter in any given situation. And then you need to understand how to think critically about it.
That sort of, which is very much within the humanities broadly, that sort of thinking has been pushed to the sidelines. And I don’t think it can stay in the sidelines for much longer because ultimately we can’t just rely on the science. The science tells us The best version available at the time with the best data you have available at the time of what is happening now and what might happen in the future. But to understand what we should do and how we should evaluate that data, that is the work of philosophy.
And we can’t continue to think it’s just the whims of opinion or it’s just the political kind of or cultural point of view of any moment in time or any particular situation. You know, party that happens to be in power. These are, you know, difficult areas of reasoning that require time and deliberation. And I feel we absolutely need to do those. And that requires accepting uncertainty and admitting doubt. And that’s what, you know, a lot of people just do not want to do. But, you know, yeah, I’m all about that.
I think that’s the important work we need to do. But, you know, it’s difficult.
Ross Kenyon: I have a question for you, Melanie, and it’s a strange one to ask without it sounding like an implied threat.
Melanie Challenger: Right. Oh, God.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Amazing preface. I know. Do you want to die? How do I say it in a tone that doesn’t communicate it like a threat? Do you wish to die?
Melanie Challenger: That’s an interesting question. Nobody’s asked me that. Well done for asking that. Yeah. I mean, we were just talking about climate change and, you know, Why does it matter to us? Why does extinction matter to us? Why do we not want to be animals? All of these things that we’ve been talking about, you know, death is in the background to all of them. And the value of life, what a good life is, how long a life should be, how, you know, how valuable an individual or, you know, a set of lives are, all of these sorts of things.
Again, these are things people push from view and don’t want to talk about and think about. I had to really square up to mortality a lot in this book. One of the reasons for that is because, of course, the appeal of the idea that we’re not really animals or that we are somehow have this exceptional sort of separate part of us, it buffers us from our fear of death. One of the reasons we don’t like to look at death very much in all sorts of ways that human beings hide death.
That we create through predation because we continue, we’ve always been predators and we continue to be predators. We just do that in organized ways now in farms and factory farms and so forth. But that’s, you know, we’re still obviously, that’s what it is in essence, biologically. Yeah. Not absolutely conceptually, but that is what it is. We hide all of that away from ourselves and we hide our own deaths away from ourselves. We’ve really got to a stage. That’s different across different cultures, of course, but all human beings do battle with the idea that we’re mortal.
The idea that human societies will eventually die, the idea that the human journey will eventually end in extinction is one of the main Reasons that we are trying to avoid the climate disruption. We’re trying to stay alive for as long as possible. But it’s also one of the reasons that we find it very frightening to accept that human civilizations will at some point in time eventually end, that life on Earth will at some point in time eventually end, which it will. We find that really an absolute assault to what it is to mean something.
That to me is... Something that we must all as individuals at some point in time, if we can, come to terms with. I think morally we need to have better conversations about it. I personally don’t find the fact that human civilization will end threatening to the moral business of life in the here and now. I’ve said this in other discussions that I’ve had since this book came out. So morality, I don’t think morality... Morality happens at the individual scale. That’s where we should pay our attention. And I don’t think that the meaning of our lives has to be threatened by the fact that eventually the human species will likely die out.
So I think we still have to do the business, you know, even if we understand that about where we’re going at some point in time in the future, that’s not a get out of jail free card. You know, it doesn’t mean you can just tumble into nihilism and ignore the moral, you know, Realities of the here and now in your lives. And so that’s one aspect of death that I respond to. And so if you ask me that question, do I mind that I will die and that our species will die out?
No, no, I don’t. I understand that life is finite and at every scale, that the universe is finite, that the likely, you know, we don’t quite know, of course, but likely finite. Certainly the earth is. We do know that. Certainly the sun is finite. And our lives are finite. And I think it’s really frightening. It’s really deeply frightening. I have small children. When the idea of death drops into their minds, as a parent, you want to protect them from it. I’ve felt a kind of kick of anxiety when I can see it dawning on them.
And I know they’re going to ask me, And I know they’re going to ask me if I’m going to die and if nanny’s going to die and if grandma’s going to die and if they are going to die. And you can see the fear. They are growing up in a household where we don’t have a religion. So they don’t have that buffering them at all either. My kids are deeply immersed in natural history. My husband’s an ecologist and biologist and I work on natural history, so they’re totally in nature all the time.
Ross Kenyon: They see the stoat grabbing the baby rabbit.
Melanie Challenger: They know what’s going to happen. They understand all of this and it is frightening. And so I have really had to square up to that myself and accept that my life is finite and to do my very, very best in the time that I’m here. And I’ve tried to encourage my children not to be frightened of death, not to seek it, but not to be frightened of it. I was very frightened of death as a child, but no, I’m not frightened of death in the way that I was. It’s simply because I accept that it is how it has to be, that is the nature of the way life emerges and that I don’t think it’s the right path to fight that.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe you think this is a difference of degree and maybe you think it’s a difference of kind, but if we were able to live... Old Testament patriarch style, live hundreds of years or maybe just be functionally immoral.
Melanie Challenger: Begatting lots of children.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Once you start begatting, how do you stop? Should we not be pursuing something like that? What’s the difference between eliminating polio or something like that and then having life extension? I think there’s a difference between that and uploading your consciousness into a machine. I’m not really sure where it is.
Melanie Challenger: Yeah, it’s very difficult. And this is another example of the fact that lazy, easy thinking about moral dilemmas, we should be wary of them because that’s a really good example of the fact that where is the line? Is there a line anywhere where we move from the moral imperative that many people would see to eliminate the diseases that cause suffering, to cure cancer, to extend life It’s very, very recent that we’ve arrived at the point where we think our life expectancy, we even imagine, I mean, just think about the words, life expectancy.
We now come into the world and we expect a certain amount of time. You know, isn’t that extraordinary? It’s very, very recent. I mean, it’s just... It’s very much this moment because, you know, most people came into the world and death was really everywhere. And there was a huge amount. And that’s not like they just thought that was fine. You know, there was a huge amount of suffering. Darwin is an example of that, who really suffered when his child, now was Annie, died, you know, that he sort of admitted was his favourite.
And really... Struggled with that. So even people born in generations where there was a lot of death, mothers died in childbirth and all sorts of things. We didn’t have any near the kind of sophistication we have now. People never accepted death or just sort of didn’t care when they buried their babies. Of course they didn’t. And there is a moral imperative, if you can, as a scientist, Eliminate some awful genetic disease. We have CRISPR now, and that’s the big kind of hope is that these sorts of new genetic technologies might really get at some of these very difficult to cure or treat rare sort of genetic disorders, for instance.
Why would you not be trying to do that? And obviously people, we’re looking for universal flu vaccines. We’re looking for, we’re constant, and there’s a strong moral imperative to do that because we don’t want to suffer and because we want to maximize our opportunity to flourish. And it feels morally bankrupt to not want to continue doing that. But at what point in time does that become unsustainable? Who has to pay the price for that? Because the realities of the chaotic nature of how life emerges, including human life, is that you can’t just have Lots and lots of organisms living forever without there being a cost.
So that cost could be other species, that cost could be resources, that cost could then start to be future generations who haven’t been born yet, but who are not going to, that bit of extra, 10 years of extra life for Few generations back is going to then be paid for in the flourishing of some generations. It’s very messy. It’s very difficult to be sure. So I think the easy response to that really is to think about the kind of the clearer situations where we should be cautious. So for instance, if you’re developing a drug that might extend life, let’s say, well, how does that drug Have to get developed.
You know, does it mean that we have to do huge amounts of animal testing, for instance, is that justified? Does it mean that we have to mine, you know, a certain kind of chemical or something? Is that justified? Does it mean that we, you know, so to look at the discrete ethical level can sometimes just help in it. But I think also, are you doing it because you want us to live forever? And is that a reasonable end goal? Again, you can apply some scrutiny there so you can stop and think, well, is that end goal a good goal to have?
My own feeling is it’s not a realistic goal to have and therefore it’s dangerous to pursue it. And we would be better applying our technology and intelligence to More realistic and positive goals in the here and now. But there’s a lot of people hell-bent on getting rid of death, that’s for sure, if they can.
Ross Kenyon: I think those are all fine nuances to explore. One perhaps more elliptical response I’ve heard came from an Alan Watts lecture I’ve heard. I think it’s something called like On Becoming Nothing. I don’t know. He has so many things like that. So it’s something within that genre of his. But about how important youth and birth is to curiosity and how we sort of lose the natural sense of wonder. It’s hard for me to even say this without kind of choking up a little bit. And that’s just listening to Alan Watts in general.
He pushes my buttons in this kind of way, maybe for you too. But I think if we lost that, would we not just have thousand-year-old people who have been like, I’ve seen everything, I’ve done everything, I’m still going because I’m scared of dying and I’ve not made peace with my having a body.
Melanie Challenger: I guess that’s what I mean by an unrealistic goal. It derives from a fundamental misunderstanding about where we’re actually deriving pleasure and meaning from, and it’s deriving from fear. Fear is really not a good motivator for human beings. As a general rule, it tends to lead us astray. I know we focus on greed. We focus on all of these sorts of things. It would be better if we paid more attention to how fear drives us and trying to sort of ameliorate that at the point of the fear. There’s so much in the immortalization kind of obsession that is, it derives fear.
From misunderstanding. So one of them would be how do human beings become well-rounded? Well, mostly a really crucial phase is nought to three years. So the environment in the womb, the nurturing of the mother. And then after, and that’s not too, I’m very aware of not being bioconservative in a way that is, you know, Deny is people who can’t have children in the conventional way. I understand all of that, but this is how most children are born. Biologically, we have to focus on what is maximum sort of flourishing for us that comes to what we are adapted for, which is not to say that the natural path is best in any kind of simplistic way, but it means you can’t ignore it.
Most people will come to life in their mother’s womb and therefore that environment is really important. And we know this now. We have so much evidence and data for this now. We know it’s really crucial that we try to make sure that mothers are well supported, that environment is healthy right from the get go. We then have to try and say stress levels aren’t too bad, all of that sort of thing. Health is good, food is good, et cetera, et cetera. They’re being looked after. And then that the nought to three years, the amount of touch children receive, the amount of closeness and proximity to primary caregivers.
Most often mothers again, but, you know, just making sure that whole environment and that whole network of caregivers is supported and that the child is touched and valued right from the get go. We know this has an effect on us. Our whole bodies, you know, respond to this. And therefore, our building of identity and our resilience, our ability to cope with stress, our ability to cope with fear, our responses to aggression are very affected by these years. There’s a lot of plasticity. Of course, you can undo some damage if it’s done in those times.
And it’s not all absolutely biologically deterministic because biology doesn’t work like that. It’s not neat and deterministic, but it’s still, again, it matters and getting that right matters. We have to remember that a lot of the people who are trying to push this sort of live for everything are often men. They’re often men of a certain status. And they totally ignore what it would mean for how we bring children into the world, for the fact that how even learning mathematics is affected by our body movements, by gesture. It’s not just a matter of staring at numbers on a page.
It actually matters what we do. With our bodies, it matters who’s talking to us and how they’re showing us. You know, we live deeply embodied lives. Our bodies matter to us profoundly. But to try and simply live forever, you would really have to industrialize all of that process right from the beginning, right from conception. And that I do not think is there in madness lies, I do think.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s a fine place where we can start wrapping it up, Melanie. I think we covered all of human history, the fear of death. I think we’ve exhausted all these topics now. There’s a lot more to cover. And if you like this conversation- Fixed it all, haven’t we, Ross?
Melanie Challenger: It’s all sorted.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I don’t know if I can take credit. I think of much of it’s deriving from the simulation of your book. But I imagine if someone’s listening and they dug this, how to be animal, a new history of what it means to be human, they would clearly enjoy that as well, right?
Melanie Challenger: I hope so, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: You hope so. That’s the intent. But you can buy wherever you buy books. Is there anything else you want to tell people about, Melanie, now that you have them here?
Melanie Challenger: No, not really. Just, I suppose, I do like hearing from people. So I have my podcast that I just recently started, which is all about diverse intelligence, actually, which is my sort of next project. So how did agency and intelligence emerge? How does it all interact, all of the different diverse intelligences on the planet? We kind of cover everything from meerkat intelligence, which I was actually doing earlier today, which was completely fascinating teaching in meerkats, through to Neanderthal minds, through to philosophy of mind, AI, everything. I guess if people are interested in that sort of thing, then hop on to enter the psychosphere and listen in on that.
But I do like getting people reaching out and engaging. For me, readers often see things that I didn’t see or have their own knowledge to bring to bear. And I really love that aspect of the writing life. So I guess that’s what I would say.
Ross Kenyon: Well, great. Links to all of those things are in the show notes. And thanks so much for being here, Melanie.
Melanie Challenger: It’s been my pleasure.
Ross Kenyon: It’s been mine too. And if it has been yours as well, listener, please rate and review us on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Give us a great rating and review. It helps us get content like this out to more people. And thank you so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review.
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