We are the species that believes in change. We are the beings that can take nature personally and do something about it. We have personal objections to the limited and precarious character of our biological existence: nature is cruelly indifferent to my personal existence; nature does not care about me as a person; nature is out to replace me. We are the animals who care about me, who think in terms of personal identity, who can orient ourselves around the insight that each member of the species is unique and irreplaceable.
Each of us is an animal who refuses to be wholly reduced to merely a part of a species or a part of some impersonal natural process. When we try to dispense with participation, we are engaged in a mission impossible that might well make us miserable more than anything else. Our personal identity depends upon being relational beings, and even consciousness is knowing with (con = together, sci = knowing). Of course, nature does provide indispensable guidance for knowing who each of us is. But still it is quite wonderful what we can do for ourselves.
Impersonal natural evolution continues gradually to be displaced by conscious and volitional evolution — evolution caused by members of our species with ourselves in mind. All of nature has been altered by our personal willfulness, and it is almost impossible to find anything that is purely nature or merely impersonal on our planet any more. We have engineered whole species, dogs and pigs and cows and chickens, into existence for our personal convenience and even with our personal vanity in mind. Although the human race has not been changed by nature in any fundamental way since it showed up, it has changed the rest of nature with itself in mind. And now we are on the edge of a biotechnological revolution that promises to allow us to fundamentally change our own natures.
Scientists tell us that we are pretty much like dolphins — cute and smart, dependent, rational, social mammals. And we are like dolphins in some ways, of course. But now the very being of the dolphins depends on us, rather than the other way around, for we think they are cute enough and smart enough and entertaining enough to protect, while the tuna are ugly enough and dumb enough (not to mention tasty and nutritious enough!) to die. But we could easily switch things around and take the dolphin out — perhaps as a threat to our species’ self-esteem — and gain a strange Rousseauian or Buddhist appreciation for the noble simplicity of the tuna. The dolphins do not have what it takes to be out to get us, because they do not have what it takes to be in technological rebellion against their natural existence. Our being will never be dependent on them. One reason is that they cannot think personally enough to raise the question of being. Another is that they are not equipped to act freely enough to consciously and willfully change their own nature, or ours. And not only is there no dolphin technology, but there are no dolphin physicists, no dolphin priests or preachers, no dolphin princes or presidents, no dolphin poets or philosophers, and even dolphin parents are not like our parents.
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