When orangutanghonan Jenny was taken to the London Zoo in 1837, it was the first time that the modern västerlänningen were eye-to-eye with its true origin. The young Charles Darwin visited the zoo in march 1838, and was ”speechless” before the sight of Jenny. He wrote in his notebook about her obvious intelligence and human-like emotional reactions, and noted: ”Man in his arrogance thinks himself to be an outstanding creation… more Humble and, I believe, more in line with the truth of the matter is to regard her as created from animals.”
the Climate crisis, and the threat to our civilization and the continued existence of that it represents, brings to the fore the very question of what kind of creatures we are, about what kind of artgemensam self-image we have. It is possible to consider our headless overexploitation of the earth’s resources, the industrial capitalism’s quest for ever-more growth and material consumption, as a result of a collective denial of our most basic biological vulnerability, our absolute dependence on the ecosystems of which we are a part of. We are as humanity at an existential crossroads. We need to decide what life is worth.
the imitation of christ, points out that we humans are not as unique as we like to convince us is the primatologist Frans de Waal. In the newly published ”Mama’s last hug” stresses de Waal our fundamental similarity with other mammals, and, in particular, are, in terms of our emotional reactions. This similarity is manifested every time we react emotionally, in accordance with the bodily emotionsprogram – for anger, fear, joy, curiosity, etc. – as hammered out by natural selection. At the same time, he is skeptical towards the view of evolution as a battlefield, where the selfish genes go winning out of the battle that determine the most effective biological överlevnadsmaskinerna – a perspective that he found prevailing when he took his first steps as a researcher in the 1970s. His own early research findings on the socially advanced försoningsbeteenden in the chimpanzees was met with impatient avfärdanden from the scientific community. Today, he says, is a different susceptibility to other animals than man, is demonstrating a rich and varied emotional life.
The Waals perspective invites, as well as Darwin’s, to humility in the face of our deep and close kinship with other creatures. Non the less we humans, while unique in some ways. Next to the confusion as our closest relatives the chimpanzees (if you just zoom out enough and consider kusinparet on the basis of evolutionary time), however, it is only we who make up the fire, writes the source code and sets up the plays.
have, in his research career, been on the hunt for it that distinguishes man from all other species. In the newly published in the ”Becoming human” he summarises three decades of innovative research that compares the son of man and schimpansungar, aimed at uncovering the unique human in our ways to understand and relate to our surroundings. And it is uniquely human, it turns out, is about perspektivtagande, the ability to – cognitively and emotionally – to raise their eyes and see oneself from the outside.
It was probably just a climate crisis as once, far down in the evolutionary tidsdjupen, forced into our foremothers and forefathers on the cooperation path. The dwindling supply of food made us mutually dependent on each other. Evolutionary pressures then arose which gradually opened the human psyche from its previous relative inneslutenhet.
the son of man and schimpansungar have a similar cognitive development when it comes to understanding the physical world – manipulerandet of objects, simple arithmetic, basic understanding of cause and effect, etc. But it is different with the social, relational ones.
From the age of nine months, is the son of man able to create a common uppmärksamhetsfokus together with the parent, and share feelings and experiences through mutual fade. Tomasello calls this artunika the ability of ”shared intentionality”. Between three and seven years of age be taken, then a further immensely cognitively and emotionally strides, in what is called ”collective intentionality” – the children will be now cultural, groupthink creatures, geared to understand and act on the basis of the own group’s norms.
the experience of a greater ”we”, as the self is included in, we get access to the group’s cultural knowledge. The ability to think together, in a common upplevelsefält (common ground), makes us also capable to instruktionsbaserad learning, with the result that we can derive from previous generations knowledge, without having to limit ourselves to learning only through imitation.
When our cultural abilities, perspektivtagande and instruktionsbaserad learning, matures in barndomsåren we get in this way the ability to connect us on the team (in the day the whole of humanity) common knowledge, and then develop it further. We create norms and institutions, the incorporation of the other’s and the group’s perspective within ourselves, and evaluate ourselves – as rational and moral beings – on the basis of this external perspective. We can, in other words, put parentheses around our own approach, and take the other’s respective group (the generalized other) perspectives on what we ourselves do and think. The power of human cognition lies precisely here, in the experiential ”we” that we incessantly and spontaneously create together in life in all situations. Relationaliteten permeates the human psyche.
I read these two books in tandem, and my thoughts go out to a thin volume, published in 1994, by the psychoanalyst Neville Symington, with the title ”Narcissism: A new theory”. If the human mind once emerged from a fundamental vulnerability, our deep interdependence on each other, so can narcissism be described as an active turning away from this is the human psychological grundfundament.
the psychoanalytic thinking that an early established defense against a perceived vulnerability of which threatens the self with desintegrering. Much is unknown when it comes to the narcissistic personlighetsstörningens causes, but clinically active theorists have emphasized the experiences of profound emotional abandonment (in combination with different levels of innate vulnerability), which resulted in an escape into the fantiserad invulnerability.
What does this flight into the verklighetsförnekande fantasies? On a level deep within us, is, says Symington, a mental entity or reality, which he calls the lifegiver, a kind of mental power that makes the world, other people and the own self alive and real for us. The lifegiver can be likened to a life energy that at the same time open the self to others impact and influence, and the essence of the narcissistic disorder consists in that the individual turns away from and displaces the lifegiver within himself.
Narcissism is borne up and driven just by a hatred of the relational, the deep level within us where other people are always present, and influence. As fragile creatures aware of our own mortality and loneliness, we are all susceptible, to a greater or lesser extent, for the narcissistic illusions, says Symington. Our psychological maturity is a high degree of liberation from these narcissistic fantasies.
punctured when the speaker intrudes on the self as a separate living reality – the Symington describes as ”the impingement on the self of the other’, the other’s intrusion in the self. It is precisely this ”intrusion”, this relational reciprocity, which narcissisten must deny and fight through to establish it as another psychoanalyst, Daniel Shaw, has called the ”hegemonic subjectivity” – a relational system in which only one perspective, narcissistens own, should be, and where the other becomes deprived of its subjectivity, reduced to merely an object with the task to confirm the narcissistens grandiose self-image.
the Climate crisis can be said to constitute just such an ”impingement on the self of the other” – it confronts us with the consequences of our actions, with the entire planetary ecology in the role of the exploited other.
There are, of course, in our civilisation’s attitude to nature, to mother earth, something that strongly resembles the narcissistic denial of vulnerability: a relationslöst, exploitative relationship, a turning away from the lifegiver. We have been exploiting nature, mother earth, the basis of what could be described as a artgemensam narcissism, heavily reinforced by our current economic paradigm, which has denied our absolute dependence on nature.
Against this collective denial, which is represented within each of us, there is now a battle over the whole world. We try as humanity together wake up to face the enormous existential threats we have created for ourselves in the form of a destabilized climate. Uppvaknandets and förnekelsens forces are struggling for the upper hand, and to his assistance in the denial of our psychological defence mechanisms steroidpumpat the assistance of fossilbränsleindustrins virtually unlimited financial resources.
the cultural animal, that fades until, in both the Waal and Tomasellos works, with their different but complementary approaches, can provide inspiration to our essential common awakening. We have the capacity to transcend our selfishness, not just as individuals but as a collective if we take the step to truly realize our absolute dependence of each other and of other life forms on this planet. It is now, in this historical phase, which, together, we will determine if we are going to use the capacity or not.
