Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence

FOREWORD

FOREWORD Max Oelschlaeger Reader beware! Manyreasons might bring one to these pages, suchas a love of animals, environmental concern, or an interest in humanpsychology , but few are prepared for either the radical inquiry or the remarkable range of evidence and subjects brought together here. Published originally in 1978, this book foreshadows Paul Shepards The Others: How Animals Made UsHuman, published in 1996, and is a necessary prelude to the later work.Yeton my reading, ThinkingAnimals is intellectually more radical and stimulating.Consider its central thesis : that animals profoundly shaped humanintelligence, and byincreasingly isolating ourselves from them—as we blithely proceed down the path of ceaseless industrial development and relentless population growth, all legitimated in the name of progress—we jeopardize the processes of cognitive and psychological development that are essential to humanflourishing. In the context of contemporary thought, Shepard s thesis is not one that is either well received or embraced with open arms. Intellectual fashion is largely set in either a deconstructive postmodern mode (a prevalent trend in the academy),where it is claimed that "the real" is ultimately nothing more than texts or interpretations of texts, or in a modernistic mode (especially popular in Washington, D.C., and other centers ofpower), where it is claimed that "economic man" is the measure of all things, and that the good society (and thus human flourishing ) depends simply on the continued advance of industrial culture. Accordingly, since Shepard asserts that there is a human nature that is not infinitely plastic and therefore open to any interpretation whatsoever , and since he further claims that the modern ideology of "Homo economicus" and, indeed, industrial culture itself are radically discordant with human nature, intellectual fashion necessarily dismisseshis arguments as out of style. Make no mistake, Thinking Animals commits intellectualapostasy. xi xii Foreword Of course, mainstream intellectual culture is one thing. Radical thinkers—what Berger and Luckmannfelicitously call "the intellectuals nobodywants'*—are something else (1966). As editor of The Company of Others: Essays in Honor of Paul Shepard, I discovered that Thinking Animalsand Shepard sother workshave influencedthe ideas and careers of architects and anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists , wilderness advocates,and even veterinarians. The noted theologian John Cobb Jr. acknowledges that Shepard challenged him to question "modern notions ofprogress" and reconsider the biblical notion of mankind's fall as one involving human nature. The ecopsychologist Chellis Glendinning observes that Shepard forced her to reconsider the "psychosocial dynamic of the contemporary world" as grounded in the dissociation of consciousness—and the unconscious —from wild nature in all its prolixityand chaos. MichaelMartin McCarthy, architect and former dean of architecture at TexasA&M, reveals the catalytic effect of Shepard s ideas on his conception of his profession. Constitutingnearly 10percent of the modern economy, the professions and trades that "design, construct, and develop" the environment are uninformed, McCarthyargues,byevolutionarily grounded concepts of human nature and the implication of such ideas for architectural practice. Shepard is also recognized by the internationally known ecophilosopher J. Baird Callicott as one of the very first thinkers to consider seriouslythe human implicationsof ecology—indeed, as one of the first human ecologists (Oelschlaeger 1995). The Paul Shepard I knewwascomfortablewith his outsider status, comfortable in the sense that he knew first hand (as an academichimself ) that intellectual culture is insular, isolated from the biophysical context of life. The books and articles typically generated by the intellectual class have nothing to sayabout the interrelations between the human and the more-than-human, the rest of nature. Leaving aside litterateurs, historians, and the like, who study humanityin its splendid isolation, even intellectuals who ostensibly study nature itself isolate themselves from it. There are ecologists whose work consists of quantifying energyflowsthrough theoretical entities knownas"ecosystems ," geneticists for whom creatures are nothing more than computer models. Allof this workis necessary and legitimate. Yetsuch workloses something. In contrast, Shepard deals withnature in the concrete rather than the abstract, and he attempts to engage the human and the rest of nature simultaneouslyand comprehensively. Foreword xiii What might conceivably make nature more real, more immediate, more vividthan an inquiry focusedon the animalsthemselves? Shepard conducts this inquiry without any sense of breathless amazement or sentimentality or caricature but rather with apervasive multidisciplinary sense of realism, an inclusive realism that does not privilege any one viewpoint (saythe zoological) at the expense of another (saythe psychological ). Yet Thinking Animals is not just about animals but about animals in their engagement with and influence on the human species...