The Animal at Unease with Itself. Isaac M. Alderman
our relationship to animals. On the Origin of Species was immediately controversial. In the popular account of the public debate at the meeting of the British Association in Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce asked Thomas Huxley if Darwin knew whether the apes were on his grandmother’s or grandfather’s side.[6] As Darwin actually proposed, and as our understanding of genetics now puts beyond such quips, the other great apes are not our ancestors but our cousins, a fact that theological and religious discussions must now take into consideration. The matter of death and dying, which Darwin rightly recognized as the driving force behind natural selection, is clearly no exception. Like every other animal, each of us will die. While we may recognize that we are destined to “go the way of all the earth” (Josh 23: 14; 1 Kgs 2: 2), humans also tend to view themselves as somehow special, different from other animals.[7] This difference is felt so deeply that it seems to demand a permanence that, in a perfect world, should extend even to the physical body, but obviously does not.[8] This is, as the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker has termed it, the “impossible paradox” of human existence.[9] Becker and this paradox—perhaps plight is a better word—are central to the discussion of human mortality, for it is this paradox that we will see at the center of terror management theory and the role of death anxiety in the process of reading, writing, and storytelling.
Throughout this discussion, we will see many ways in which humans have tried to categorize or organize our species, not just in terms of difference, but in terms of exceptionalism. How is our one species different over and against every other species? How are humans different from animals? Perhaps the uniqueness that humans feel is simply one of superiority. We have become the apex predator, the most successful species ever to emerge from a complex evolutionary web. One might consider the breakthrough for our species to have occurred some 2.5 million years ago with the first tool-making primates, Homo habilis, whose fossils have been brought to light in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge.[10] It was there that our cognitive development allowed for the technological leap that enabled us to remake the face of the planet, inaugurating the era some geologists now refer to as the Anthropocene.[11] The very name we have given ourselves, Homo sapiens, acknowledges that we are more cognitively advanced than all other animals. This goes beyond our ability to fashion tools, however, and so some have suggested that it is the presence of a mind distinct from simple cognitive processing that separates us from animals. Descartes said that animals are automata with “no intelligence at all, and that it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs.”[12] Humans, on the other hand, act in unique ways, functioning on advanced levels of communication and reason, including the imaginative and pro-social behavior of storytelling. Heidegger acknowledges that humans have an animal nature, but also have a secondary nature, epitomized by language that permits “a single sharp line to be drawn between human beings and members of all nonhuman species.”[13] Literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall has taken this idea a step further, suggesting that our species be rebranded as Homo fictus.[14] He asserts that, “story—sacred and profane—is perhaps the main cohering force in human life.”[15] Pro-social behaviors have been key to the success of many species, and many play, or develop hierarchies or other complex social structures. Yet humans are able to communicate in a very particular way, telling and consuming stories almost constantly.[16] The first chapter of Genesis tells a very particular story of human uniqueness. As with other ancient accounts and religious traditions, it asserts that humans are distinct from other animals by virtue of a special relationship to a divine being. In this opening account, creation reaches its culmination with the deity pronouncing,
“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. (Gen 1:26–27)[17]
Whether we consider our position at the top of the evolutionary pile to be due to our technological advances of tools and weapons, or our advancement through stories and communication of cultural ideas, or as a result of a special relationship to a divine being, it is evident that our religious, philosophical, and scientific traditions clearly express our belief that we humans are distinct from the rest of the animal world.
In addition to sharing the same ultimate end as all animals, humans also experience terror in the face of death. A deer faced with a mountain lion freezes or flees, just as the mountain lion encountering a bear flees or fights. When the danger passes, so does the terror and the animal returns to life as before. Like the deer or mountain lion, our autonomic nervous system kicks into high gear when encountering danger. Unlike these animals, however, we make weapons in preparation for such encounters, devise religious rituals and stories to help avoid them in the first place, and can ruminate on the question, “What if?”[18] It is this ability to reflect and experience the terror of imminent death in anticipation that led the psychologists Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski to suggest that we refer to ourselves as Homo mortalis: [19]
On one hand, we share the intense desire for continued existence common to all living things; on the other, we are smart enough to recognize the ultimate futility of this fundamental quest. We pay a heavy price for being self-conscious. . . . And here’s the really tragic part of our condition: only we humans, due to our enlarged and sophisticated neocortex can experience this terror in the absence of looming danger.[20]
This conflicting experience is what they, taking their cue from Ernest Becker’s paradox, describe as the “worm at the core” of human existence.[21] Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski are the developers of terror management theory, the approach to understanding death anxiety that shapes the present project. Proponents of terror management theory are far from alone in noting the importance of our awareness of death. Whether we are talking about the Greek origins of Western philosophy or twentieth-century existentialists, ancient stories or contemporary graphic novels, the topic pervades literature and philosophy.[22] Just as the discussion of religious matters must account for Darwin’s insights, so we should also consider the fact that we anticipate, ruminate upon, prepare for, and deny our own death.
Although we know death is an absolute certainty, we rarely consider this fact in our daily lives.[23] “We act as if we are exceptions to the fact of mortality,” as if we are the one of whom the psalmist wrote: [24]
A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand;
but it will not come near you. (Ps 91: 7)
Death surrounds us, in our lives, news, and entertainment, but it is never me who is dying. It is always someone else’s death that we see so frequently.[25] In being aware of mortality, humans are in some ways responsible for “the invention of death.”[26] Though Wittgenstein might be correct when he contends that death is not an event in one’s own life, for it is not an event that one lives through, the death of others is a significant factor in our lives.[27] We mourn, care for corpses, pray, and map “geographies for the dead to travel to.”[28] Hand in hand with “the invention of death comes the invention of continuous life. We all go somewhere else. . . . We move on.”[29]
Literary and philosophical reflections on death and dying are helpful for understanding death anxiety, but they do not describe what is happening cognitively during the process of reading, writing, and telling stories that remind one of one’s own mortality. Recent interdisciplinary use of the insights from cognitive science can help shed light on this process because we now know that death anxiety can influence the cognitive processing of the story. For most people, thoughts of their own death are infrequent and do not seem to bring great anxiety. Even so, as studies cited in support of terror management theory have demonstrated, though we may not generally recognize a distinct feeling we can attribute to death anxiety, it is present. Moreover, mortality awareness increases stress, decreases