The Plan of the Book
A SJHS story
I’ve gotten some writing done this week, primarily in the wee hours of the morning. I’ve found myself waking up early, thinking about this book and have decided to get up and put in a couple hours before my day job begins. The topic has been Seeing.
I’m claiming that the spiritual journey of Homo sapiens can be traced through a number of evolving capacities of our species. For each of these, I show how it is connected to the capacities of other species, but then how it became something more in the human context. And to be provocative and controversial, I claim that these capacities led to something remarkably different about human beings.
For this first part on Seeing, I claim that human beings are the only creatures that create art. Yes, I know about the elephants that have been trained to hold a paintbrush with their trunks and put paint onto a canvas. Perhaps more relevantly, bowerbirds create elaborate displays out of leaves, berries, and whatever else they can find as part of their mating rituals. But I try to make the case that our visual arts have become something very different.
Now, on the one hand, every species has distinctive things about them. That’s why they are a different species. So I’m claiming something more than just “humans are different than other species.” At the other extreme, I’m not interested in taking this idea to human exceptionalism, where some people claim humans are the only thing that matters, or that humans have the right to use up whatever resources we want to. In fact, I’m going to claim that our uniqueness gives us a special responsibility to care for the rest of creation. No other creatures have moral responsibility like that.
Obviously I’m not giving a full defense of all this here. But I’ll tease a little more of where things are going (at least I think so… the actual writing tends to pull me in directions I hadn’t anticipated).
After the first part on Seeing, I move to Walking. I touched on this a bit in The Sacred Chain, but will develop further how we became bipeds and what change that had on our way of being and our capacity for spirituality. After that is Thinking, in which I’ll talk about increasing brain size, and how that was primarily in order to engender culture transmission for us. Then Talking. Lots of things communicate, but we tell stories and write poetry. Next is Feeling (do any other creatures cry?), then Choosing, and finally Loving. Again, for each of these: where did they come from and how are we similar to other creatures that do them? But then how they have been transformed into something very different in Homo sapiens?
These are the seven Parts of The Spiritual Journey of Homo Sapiens. They roll off the tongue pretty well. Go ahead and say them aloud and commit the sequence to memory:
Seeing
Walking
Thinking
Talking
Feeling
Choosing
Loving