What do we mean when we say someone is a human—is it their DNA? their god-given soul? their capacity for moral autonomy? or is it just being recognized by other humans?—and do such definitions shape how we actually treat (and mistreat) those others we call human? These are the key questions motivating John Evans’s What Is a Human? and the book is to be lauded for its pathbreaking attempt to provide an empirical answer to such questions. Evans thinks that his answer should trouble secular Americans, since what he finds is a surprising lack of support for human rights among those educated in the nontheistic forms of humanism found in the sciences and humanities.
Evans is interested in what Americans actually say they believe constitutes “being human,” and how those beliefs are connected with the value they place upon human life (and what kinds of human rights abuses they might countenance). He looks not at what people think about “contested” humans—for example, whether a fetus counts as a human life or not—but rather at what treatment his subjects might mete out to “uncontested humans”—those whom they have no doubt actually count as people. To explore this connection, the author conducted survey research and in-depth interviews with Ph.D. students in the sciences and humanities, as well as the general public, providing both quantitative and qualitative approaches to answer his question. He sees four basic “anthropologies” in play with the American public: 1) the theological, which sees humans are being created in the image of god; 2) the philosophical, which defines humans as those in possession of particular traits like rationality and autonomy; 3) the biological, where being human is simply a matter of one’s genetic makeup; and 4) the socially conferred, which locates humanity in the process of mutually relating to others as humans (“a human is a person who exists in social relations with other people”; p. 11).
What Evans finds is that those who adhere to the philosophical and biological conceptions of the human are significantly more likely to support human rights abuses than those with a theological orientation (the case of the socially conferred is more ambiguous). Why is this so? He sees a basic devaluation of what it is to be a human once we move away from a conception that links the sacredness of human life to its resemblance to the divine. The biological anthropology is too materialist and too closely linked with Darwinian natural selection to give such dignity to humans, and the philosophical anthropology tends toward inegalitarianism in that its trait-based definition of the human grants some humans preeminence based on the degree to which they possess the relevant traits. In fairness to Evans, he notes that while these two anthropologies tend to coarsen our view of humans, they do not on the whole actually (yet) affect the way that most Americans think about human beings, because the background culture is so thoroughly imbued with egalitarian ideals that the inegalitarian implications of these doctrines have not percolated through (and he notes that their proponents do not intend that they should).
While I have my qualms about Evans’s findings (coming shortly), this purported linkage certainly gave me pause. I do not have to search my memory banks too far to recall undergraduates in my classes making the basic causal leap that is the centerpiece of Evans’s book, to wit: “anyone who would vote for X candidate is obviously too stupid to vote” (and so ought to be denied such a right), and so at a certain level his worries about the dangers of materialist and rationalist approaches strike a chord. That said, I think that Evans may be overstepping his causal warrant when he advises Richard Dawkins (his avatar for the biological anthropology) to make plainer his rejection of social Darwinism, since the study has a number of crucial lacunae that militate against wholly accepting his conclusions.
Although certainly Evans is methodologically sensitive, I am not satisfied that he has actually shown real effects stemming from the various anthropologies. In the general survey, he asked five key questions of his subjects to indicate their specific support for human rights abuses (he then compared these responses with the anthropology with which they most identified), but only two of the five are obvious cases (e.g., “taking a blood sample against the will of a death-row prisoner”; p. 213), while the other three seem more like violations of human rights from the specific perspective of theological anthropology (but not necessarily the others). The second question, for instance, “buying a kidney from a poor person” (p. 213), is a defensible ethical practice from a libertarian perspective, while the third, “someone with expensive medical bills and an incurable disease committing suicide in order to save his or her family money” (p. 213) describes a situation from a nontheological perspective that might be viewed as tragic or even evil, given the lack of health care in the United States, but might nevertheless be found a justifiable (or even noble) act.
The worry here, in sum, is that by selecting this particular way of operationalizing his dependent variable, Evans has not shown us the possibly dangerous moral effects of biological anthropology, but has instead merely shown us that people who believe in a biological anthropology share a different view of human rights than those with a theological anthropology. And while it is certainly true that Evans finds a noticeable difference in support for torture between the adherents of the theological and biological anthropologies, we also know that a substantial number of Americans actually engaged in such practices after 9/11, and I suspect that they and their most eloquent defenders (e.g., John Yoo) are far closer to the theological anthropology than any of the other contenders.
My surmise, in fact, is that the causal connection in these real-world cases would largely exonerate the biological worldview, but here is where survey- and interview-based research requires some additional methodological tools (say, those looking at how “implicit bias” or “motivated reasoning” leads to actions that do not accord with stated beliefs). There is certainly value to Evans’s efforts to link anthropologies of the “uncontested” human to human rights practices, and the rich detail of the in-depth interviews is fascinating and will reward deeper study (in some ways akin to Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton's Habits of the Heart, 1985). But the case against biological conceptions of the human remains far more ambigous than Evans acknowledges, and to see why in more detail, we can turn to Samantha Frost’s Biocultural Creatures.
Perhaps the first thing to note about Frost’s book is that it is almost unique in my experience, as a work of political theory, since it reads more often than not as a text of popular science like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988) or Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe (1999). This might sound like a backhanded criticism but it is not; this is a novel and refreshing work in which Frost offers us a new picture of “the human” from the ground up (from the molecules up, as it were), based on “a what-if, as in, what if I were to start with quantum physics” (p. 25) in order to develop a theory of politics.
Frost is most directly motivated by the multiple environmental catastrophes—human and nonhuman—brought about by humans in the Anthropocene (the era when humans have become the defining feature of the climate), though she, too, like Evans, is concerned with how imaginaries of human self-mastery lead to the abuse of those excluded from the political community. But Frost comes at the question from the opposite vantage, since for her, theological anthropologies are themselves implicated in the expansion of human domination over the environment. She looks, rather, to posthumanist criticisms of anthropocentrism in order to build “a counter concept of the human [as] an embodied and thoughtful animal as well as a technological aficionado, a creature embedded in and composed by the social and material contexts of its existence, an agent whose actions are dependent on and conditioned by manifold networks of ecological, institutional, social, and symbolic relations” (p. 13). Frost’s biocultural human is a complicated enfolding of multiple dynamic processes where humans are still conceptually distinct from other entities, but without the hierarchical assumptions built into prior models (e.g., Evans’s theological and philosophical anthropologies) that fundamentally separated human culture from our animal and biochemical nature.
Frost’s chapter titles can give a flavor to her itinerary, as she takes readers through (in order) “Carbon,” “Membranes,” “Proteins,” “Oxygen,” and “Time.” The chapter on “Membranes,” for instance, offers the reader a lesson in how “the distinction of an organism vis-à-vis its habitat is a function of activity rather than substance” (p. 53), which reveals the myriad ways that creatures normally taken to be discrete individuals, separated from their environments, are in fact biochemically entwined with their surroundings via their “porous bodies.” This leads to some passages where a reader may wonder about the connection to practical politics or specific debates in democratic theory, and Frost’s acknowledgment that she is merely “gesturing” to human politics at the conclusion of the text might leave some readers looking for more direction.
Let me say here clearly, however, that this is an extraordinarily valuable undertaking for political theory, and we should be grateful that Frost is engaging the conversation at this level. As Evans shows us (if, perhaps, less dramatically than he thinks), there is a lack of imagination in most popular biological accounts of the human, and this lack is present in the Ph.D. students no less than the general public. Simplistic reductionism haunts both Richard Dawkins and his theological critics, and we have a dramatic need, in the Anthropocene, for a textured conception of the human (or posthuman) that can locate us as creatures in complex interdependence with our habitats, without dissolving particular human responsibilities (say, for global warming) into the ether.
Frost’s text is a salutary beginning in this effort to “find our ethical and political bearings” (p. 159) by reconceiving how our matter—seen more as processes that comprise us, rather than substance—“matters.” It offers us no easy prescriptions, though I think an additional chapter that directly addressed “language” in furtherance of this reorientation could have been useful. Since so much of our biocultural habitus turns on how our fantasies of mastery play out through the linguistic separation of the higher human self from its abject “animal” other, I worry that even a nuanced account like Frost’s can still leave space for the genie of anthropocentrism to find purchase. To put is somewhat differently: we need a biocultural account of the functionality of resistance to acknowledge that we are biocultural.
That said, Biocultural Creatures will be an important touchstone for works in posthumanist ethics and politics that succeed it—for while our biochemistry issues no clear programmatic instructions, our political institutions and ideals ought, at the least, to reflect engagment with our best efforts to understand our place in the universe—even (or especially) if that humbles rather than elevates us.
