Human Distinctiveness in Different Cultures

I want to pass on a clip of text from Samuel Arbesman's recent Substack email, on the path dependence of fundamental ideas about ourselves. I suggest checking out the links to his related writing on human distinctiveness:

The “Orang-Outang”

Awhile back I wrote about AI and human distinctiveness: basically my argument was that we should be less concerned by whether or not AI can do we what we can and care more about what we want to be doing. In other words, focus on what is quintessentially human, rather than what is uniquely human.

But perhaps some of these concerns are simply Western preoccupations, rather than universal human concerns?

In the recent book Fluke (which is fantastic!), Brian Klaas noted the following provocative point about differences between Western and Eastern thinking—and their views on human distinctness—and how it might have been due to the ecological milieu that each one arose from:

In this vision of a world humans are distinct from the rest of the natural world. That felt true for the inhabitants of the Middle East and Europe around the time of the birth of Christianity. Camels, cows, goats, mice, and dogs composed much of the encountered animal kingdom, a living menagerie of the beings that are quite unlike us.

In many Eastern cultures, by contrast, ancient religions tended to emphasize our unity with the natural world. One theory suggests that was partly because people lived among monkeys and apes. We recognized ourselves in them. As the biologist Roland Ennos points out, the word orangutan even means “man of the forest.” Hinduism has Hanumen, a monkey god. In China, the Chu kingdom revered gibbons. In these familiar primates, the theory suggests, it became impossible to ignore that we were part of nature—and nature was part of us.

This is almost a Guns, Germs, and Steel-kind of approach, but for ideas. At the risk of creating too much determinism here¹, it’s intriguing to explore the path dependence of ideas and concepts that organize how we think about the world and ourselves.

This reminds me of other research that examined how small historical distinctions can still affect our modern world, even if they are no longer relevant. For example, there is research that looks at how certain locations betray their histories as portage sites—places where boats or cargo were transported over land, allowing travel between more traversable waterways—despite this being obsolete. And yet it still has a certain long-term effect, as per this paper “Portage and Path Dependence”:

And returning to ideas, there is a paper entitled “Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of ‘Rugged Individualism’ in the United States” that explores whether or not certain differences in location—areas considered the “frontier”—affect the geographical variation of ideas and beliefs in the United States. 

In the end, simply being more aware of the ideas and history that suffuse our thinking—rather than taking them for granted—is something important, whether or not we are trying to understand humanity’s place in the world, how technology should impact humanity, or why cities are located where they are.