Being a Human
Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness
Charles Foster
Profile Books 2022
Pb, 400pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781788167185
Charles Foster’s first best-seller – Being a Beast (2016), widely praised as a “strange masterpiece” – had a premise that was hard to beat: he wanted “to know what it is like to be a wild thing”. He and his son Tom attempted to recreate an Upper Palæolithic lifestyle in a Derbyshire wood, getting down with the badgers, foxes, deer, swifts and otters. It was one thing to describe which areas of a badger’s brain light up on a functional MRI scanner as it sniffs a slug, they reasoned, and quite another to discover how the whole wood appears to the badger.
Their plan “involved inching dangerously down the evolutionary tree and into a hole in a Welsh hillside, and learning about weightlessness, the shape of the wind, boredom, and the shudder and crack of dying things … seeing the world from the height of a badger, shuffling or swooping through a landscape that is mainly olfactory or auditory rather than visual”.
This was not an exercise in hippy neo-shamanism but a (literally) down-to-earth experience of animal environments and diets and winding back all their modernised human senses. One memorable portion (among many) was their verdict on the taste of worms munched in different parts of the countryside and in various seasons.
The Fosters emerged from the woods with Good News for us all: there is indeed an alternative to regarding ourselves as merely “meat machines” (scientific materialism) or “economical units” (the socio-political view). Foster found these two paradigms “insulting”, adding that we humans are capable of being “so much more”.
The premise for turns upon puzzling out what sets us apart from the other lifeforms on this planet. To do this means following the
