The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [156]
“I’m losing my hair!” I shouted. She could see that it was true. Great empty swaths of my flesh lay raw and exposed in rangy mottles all over my body where my fur had thinned to nothing. I was hideous. I looked sickly. Tal touched my fur. My wet hairs just slid off of me and stuck to her fingers. I was so embarrassed about my condition, that day I wore a long-sleeved shirt and a stocking cap to work, which I kept on all day long, refusing to unlid myself. (Thank God I did not have to submit myself to an EEG test that day.) It did occur to me that I might be losing my hair because I was becoming human. I was becoming one of you, the naked apes, the apes of vanity.
So then, a word on vanity, my vanity. Vanity: what sin is more uniquely human? This is why we are so impressed when an animal recognizes itself in a mirror. It’s vanity that makes us human. A bird or a fish will interpret its own horizontally backward image as a threat—not even realizing it is flat, not even remarking on the curiosity that this dangerous other moves only when the animal’s I moves. Hence the animal attacks the mirror. Hence the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass. Hence the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in the glass. Great apes, though, do see themselves in mirrors, as do dolphins and elephants. But let’s make a comparison to, say, tool use. The important thing is not so much the use of tools as the modification of tools. That is, we used to think that human beings were alone among the animal kingdom in their use of tools. Then somebody observed chimpanzees fishing for termites with twigs, and concluded that we must now unhook the velvet rope and allow chimps into the exclusive tool users club. Ah, but!—said the anthropo-chauvinists, we’re still the only species to modify tools, aren’t we, ha, ha! Then a woman—always a woman, a patient and compassionate woman—actually bothered to sit quietly and watch for long enough to figure out that we were in fact snapping live twigs off of trees and stripping the leaves before rooting around in the termite hole, because the termites stick better that way, for life clings to life. Since then, by the way, chimpanzees in “the wild” have also been observed smashing nuts open with rocks and hunting with makeshift spears. So check and mate then, we Pan troglodytes both use and modify, and the list of things that make human beings so fucking special continues to shrink.
But my point is, what goes for technology goes for vanity. To recognize oneself in a mirror is one thing, to modify oneself in a mirror is another. Body modification is more human than merely humanlike. I see human, I look in the mirror, I see ape. This was a great psychological vexation in my formative years. Monkey see, monkey want to be.
For what differentiates a human being from a chimpanzee? Merely in physical terms, I mean. If space aliens were to beam down to Earth tomorrow and look at all the creatures that slither, crawl, hop, run, prance, swim, waddle, and walk it, and initially have some trouble telling chimpanzees apart from humans, what subtle physiognomic distinctions would we tell them to take note of so they might better parse us out from one another? Notice the length of the legs and the forearms, we would tell them, the shape of the skull, the curvature of the spine, the distance between forefinger and thumb, that humans have two opposable thumbs and chimps have four. And chimps have thick hair all over their bodies. So there are two principal things hominid animals did when they branched off from