Several months ago, while they were waiting in line for something or other, a woman's baby began to squirm and cry quietly. Naturally, the woman responded by patting the infant on the back while making cooing noises and jostling it gently in her arms. I can't say that I'd never witnessed such a display before; working in a department store, it's as commonplace as many other personal moments in people's lives. This one affected me, however, and not just with the “D'aaw” emotions you'd expect. That child reminded me, more than anything else, of a monkey; the scene, something out of Animal Planet.
It wasn't the first time I'd compared babies to animals. Speculating on ideas of humanity and the self, I've often wondered at the apparently gradual humanizing of babies, whose behavior suggests less intelligence than that of puppies, into creatures with minds capable of interpersonal connection. For a long time I'd tried to figure a definite line in early childhood development when the ego sprang into being; indeed, I'd almost given up hope of figuring this out before I have my own child to experiment on. The scene at work, however, changed the problem for me, made me look at it from a different angle. Rather than drawing a line at where the humanity began, I thought to find the point when people stopped being apes.
The mother, first: waiting in line for food, comforting her distressed child, likely en route to a home with a family unit, possibly including other children and/or a mate. Hmm, nothing there. No great authority on what “people do,” I decided then to think over my own activities and extrapolate from there; I'm not so different from others, so it stood to reason that my desires and methods for obtaining them should be similar to those of people in general. That day I'd: woken up, eaten, showered, played on Facebook for a bit, then taken the bus to work. Well...Facebook was certainly beyond the realm of mere animals, but then I hadn't invented the thing, merely used it; arduous indeed if you've never used a computer or keyboard before, but I was raised with such trappings of the communication revolution. Likewise, the internal combustion engine I utilized to get to work was a technological marvel, but not my own; just another achievement of humanity that I knew how to use.
Technology, then, was something definitively human, something mere animals couldn't make. So creating technology could be called an act of real live humans. Great, except that my spiffy new definition applied to only the tiniest fraction of homo sapiens that have ever lived. Try as I might, I couldn't bring myself around to anything else people did that other social animals didn't, so I decided instead to expand my definition of technology. There's science that precedes the actual inventions, which means experimentation, a process always initiated by hypothesis; hypothesis, then, could be expanded to include the whole of abstract thought(yes I get this bored at work).
From this angle, technology is relegated to the incidental; imagination, the ability to create ideas, is the dividing line I was looking for. Babies become people, then, when they learn enough about the world they live in to start speculating about what else is in it. What still bothers me, though, is that I had to do such philosophical cartwheels to get to this; why I couldn't just look at people, with all their creativity and original ideas, and trace back the continuity of this state from their early childhoods.
Ah, well. Working in a department store, you don't always see people at their best.
No comments:
Post a Comment