By Joseph Woodard

An extremely liberal, atheist, British comedian came out in support of Britain’s new free speech movement. As a result, he’s found himself under woke attack in public speeches and internet fora, and now allied with — for him — very unusual allies: religious conservatives. In the process, apparently, his new friends have tried politely to anchor his commitment to free speech in something more solid than his secular pragmatism, some deeper notion of human dignity. Yet the avant-garde comedian admits he simply cannot understand what they’re saying.

“They say, human beings are higher than animals, but I just don’t get it,” he marvels innocently. “Their words make no sense to me. Whatever could it mean to say that anything is higher or lower than anything else? What could that mean?”

Our cultural confusions, especially among the educated, reveal a language desperately in need of repair and a reality in need of rediscovery. If our British friend rushed into a burning house and faced the choice of rescuing either a single, obnoxious human or a half-dozen extremely cute kittens, he would rescue the obnoxious person. He simply can’t explain why. Admittedly, common synonyms like ‘noble and ignoble’ or ‘fine and base’ might express mere sentiments, approval and disapproval.

So, are higher and lower real, objective distinctions in ranks of being?

Ironically, Plato predicted that we’d have this problem in his Republic, 2,400 years ago. In democracies, Socrates tells his young interlocutors, “Beasts are freer than in any other city…horses and asses get into the habit of making their way, quite freely and solemnly, bumping into whomever they meet on the roads…” But today, this democratic tendency toward indiscriminate egalitarianism has been pushed into cultural psychosis by ideological scientism.

Now, Christians and Jews in particular may wonder why we should bother with this issue. Given our faith that we are created in imago Dei, in the image of God, the gulf between the human and the animal seems obvious to us. However, it’s not obvious to our larger culture.

The belief that human beings are ‘just clever animals’ gives a license for everyone to act like animals — and for our rulers to herd us like animals.  This has played a large part in the spread of every moral degeneracy, from sexual promiscuity to addictive snack foods to ‘putting down’ our sick or aged as if they were crippled sheep. For the sake of our friends and families, we must learn to defend our almost-divine human dignity in ways everyone can understand.

The Definition

To begin, the simple formula for the reality of rank: A is higher than B, if A is or does everything B is or does, but B is not or has not everything A is or has. (Philosopher Heidegger) An A lacks none of the substance and functions of a B, and has more. A is everything B is, and then some. So, a student once asked, what’s the yardstick to measure differences in rank? There can be no common yardstick between ranks. It would be absurd, for example, to try to measure the intelligence of a carrot or the agility of a rock. Some simple science will make this clear.

What we typically call matter — a grain of sand or rock — has mass and extension. Two tricks: drop it, and it falls; push against it, and it pushes back. For the most part, it’s just stuff, different sorts of stuff, but nothing in particular. We speak about more or less sand, versus many or fewer trees — the volume versus the count. Until people got romantic about gemstones and mountains, they were not generally recognized as anything having identity or thing-hood.

So, at the bottom rank, there’s different sorts of matter, stuff, but just stuff. Plants however are different. They are made out of matter, so they have everything matter has—mass and extension — but more. They grow, the nutritive function, and they generate their kind, the reproductive function. Plants take in different sorts of matter — carbon dioxide, water, minerals — and with the heat and light of the sun, they incorporate it into themselves. Non-plant becomes plant and as they mature, they realize their kind or idea, then reproducing other plants.

Why is this more and not simply different? Lifeless matter is subject to entropy: cooling and disorder. It decays. Life fights decay. Scientifically, life is now called negative entropy, the orderly concentration of energy. And it’s ironic that materialist science describes life as negative decay. The living thing doing this is truly particular, an active embodiment of information, a form, species or idea. For a rock, just existing is a minimal activity, but a plant is purposive, orderly activity. When it stops ‘doing plant,’ it decays back into its constituent stuff.

So, at the second rank, higher than matter, we have the lowest rank of life. The vegetable has mass and extension (like a rock), but also nutrition and reproduction. Yet animals are more. They have all the active functions of plants, but even more: sensation and locomotion. They gather information at a distance, and they move in response to that information. Cat sees squirrel; cat chases squirrel. It is providential that sensation and locomotion are united in animals, because an immobile cat would be highly frustrated, and a sightless cat would simply walk off cliffs.

Why is this animal with mass, extension, nutritive, vegetative, reproductive, plus sensitive and locomotive functions essentially higher than a vegetable? It flourishes only as a unified organism, so it has what we now call a central nervous system. A plant has tropisms, active genetic responses built into its individual cells, so each cell reacts to whatever touches it.

Yet an animal has instincts, activating its whole being with more developed, single purposes. You can chop a twig from a tree, stick it in soil, and its cells all respond independently. The cells in the wet dirt multiply root cells, while the cells sticking up in the air, bathed sunshine, respond by multiplying leaf cells. Don’t try this with a cat. You cannot chop off its leg, stick it in a saucer of cream, and expect it to grow another cat. It lives or dies as a dramatically more unified whole. Legless or sightless, the cat likely dies, because it lives a life more fully alive than a carrot.

So, at the third rank, higher than plants, we have animals, with mass, extension, nutrition, reproduction, sensation and locomotion. Yet human beings are even more. Human beings have minds and free wills, functions enabled by reasoned speech. How can this be?

We must take a step back, and consider something too easily ignored by reductionist materialism: nature’s laws themselves are mysterious, and the fact that we can understand the tiniest bit of them, even more mysterious.  As Einstein said, “…the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”

The first ‘scientific’ atheists (like Francis Bacon) erred in assuming that whatever is smaller is simpler. They thought everything could be explained in terms of atoms, like drifting grains of sand. They were wrong. Since then, particle physicists have discovered that the smallest atomic particles are an infinitesimally precise, spectacularly improbable balancing of four forces: gravity, EMF, strong nuclear, weak nuclear. Cellular biologists now know that plant and animal cells are amazingly complex molecule factories, manufacturing protein building blocks for each of our 30 trillion utterly specialized cells.

Geneticists have found that each of us sprout from a fertilized seed, containing a single, absolutely unique word (genome) composed of 23 syllables (chromosomes), with each syllable on average 100 million letters long (nucleotide pairs). Our names in English may have a dozen letters, but our unique names in carbon chemistry must be much longer, since they communicate all the structural information and active blueprint needed to grow each of us into life.

Hindu mythology marveled poetically that the Earth sits on the back of a turtle, on the back of a turtle, on the back of a turtle…implying, ‘It’s turtles, all the way down.’ Equally mythically, reductionist materialists imagined, ‘It’s tiny sand grains, all the way down.’ Now, real science is discovering — however far down ‘it’ goes — ‘It’s Intelligence, all the way down.’  So indeed, “the Heavens proclaim the Glory of the Lord.”

Human Souls

Back to the fourth rank, much higher than animals are humans with reasoned speech. Speaking on a purely natural level, like any animal, humans are composed of matter (some more than others), living our nutritive and reproductive functions (sometimes healthily), and ranging our world with sense and motion. Like animals, we act intelligently to satisfy the necessities of life.

However, speechless animals embody no more than their own idea or species, the purpose or active intelligence of their particular type, and they live only instinctually. With reasoned speech, humans are so much more.

The Heavens proclaim the Glory of the Lord, but under the Heavens, we humans can understand that.

Again, speaking on a purely natural level — accessible to our maybe secular family and friends — animals have sensation and locomotion, united in their neural instincts. Rational human beings have analogous faculties, elevated to an immeasurably higher rank: intellect and will, united in our minds.

Just as animal life is enabled by molecular forces and laws of motion, the solid geometry of genetics and laws of organic nutrition—similarly, but infinitely more nobly, our minds are enabled by the so-called Transcendentals: Being, Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

We naturally embody the laws of:

• logic;
• mathematics;
• linguistics;
• taxonomy
• natural ethics (we hope);
• music;
• poetry;
• agriculture;
• carpentry.

We also embody all the mental tools and development of the arts, enabled by human diversity; communities of speech; and cooperative divisions of labor.

As animals occupy their ranges, analogously, but infinitely more nobly, we humans occupy families, societies and civilizations, within, yet open to the Cosmos — becoming personal, social and civilizational microcosms of the Cosmos, reproducing at least enough of the universal order, in our own little splinters, to survive our own ignorance and stupidity. Being such a microcosm of the Cosmos may be most immediately experienced in contemplating a sunset.

Even skeptical British comedians can acknowledge that we somehow experience Oneness with the Whole, when we pause to contemplate a sunset, the uniqueness, harmony and splendor of an unrepeatable moment in time and space, the transcendental imperative of Beauty at work. Do cats contemplate sunsets? We can be compared to a cat in terms of our growth, fertility, agility and vision (where we’re hopeless), but it’s unfair to the cat to compare it to us. In terms of its social organization, artistic innovation or scientific exploration, the cat is supremely indifferent.

Democratic extremists may object that considering these differences in rank means disrespecting rocks, carrots and cats. But in reality, it means respecting their nobility in their proper ranks. To ignore differences in rank is to reduce everything to the status of just stuff, as our current culture demonstrates.

This bears repeating: to ignore differences in rank is to reduce everything to the rank of mere matter, human material for the use of our rulers.

In reality, nurtured within a natural network of families and communities, human persons are truly free, but not independent; responsible, but not servile. A mature person, living for a family, within a wide array of productive friendships and societies, is more perfectly individual than the most solitary badger, and more perfectly social than the most docile sheep.

A Brief Lexicon

Since we’re diligently recovering the reality of Higher and Lower, we should take a quick look at their synonyms: the urgent (necessary) and important (meaningful), then the noble (fine) and ignoble (base). They describe first the differences between our purposes, and then between persons within the rank of the human, where there is a common yardstick. Here we can also think about the difference between good and bad, on the one hand, versus good and evil, on the other.

Urgent and Important

Our lower functions are most urgent. It is most necessary that I do not step off a high building, or I will imitate a falling rock. It is next most necessary that I stay well-watered, or I will imitate a wilting carrot. It is both necessary and important that I have healthy family relationships and productive friendships. Friends are necessary, because otherwise I will end up imitating an injured cat, hiding under a porch. And friends are important, because otherwise I eventually lose our shared awareness of Truth, Goodness and Beauty: our local microcosm or civilizations of music, art, literature, architecture, craft and cuisine.

We’re always tugged between urgent necessities and important joys. Living fully alive begins with the art of transforming the necessary into the important. We elevate merely eating for nutrition or stress-relief, into dining for celebrating our families and friendships. We thus transform isolated tasks into the contemplation of an excellent, meaningful life — happiness. Sadly, too many families these days simply eat, rather than dine with daily conversation.

Noble and Ignoble

Humans have all the functions of mass, so we’re subject to gravity; all the functions of vegetables and so require nutrition; all the qualities of animals and thus inhabit a range. And we are minds, so we live in a Cosmos of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. These are lower and higher functions. In healthy animals, these functions work in harmony. For free humans, not so much. This should surprise no-one.

A Socrates, living intentionally at the highest, contemplative level of his being, is fine and noble. Living as if one were a belly on legs, like a Henry VIII, is base and ignoble. Somewhere in the middle is living a simple, productive life, with family and friends, for which most of us can be perennially grateful. However, short of a lobotomy, we cannot sink below the human and live as some sort of innocent animal, like Rousseau’s cartoon “Noble Savage.” If we try, we end up like Rousseau, abandoning our bastard children in an orphanage — base and ignoble.

Within the limits of our circumstances and responsibilities, we should always try to live up the level of our highest capacity.

Lastly, a cat can be good or bad, growing into the idea of a cat well or badly, subject to the circumstances, its genetics, nurture and food supply. But we humans can be good or evil. We are evil when we freely choose to betray our local microcosms of Truth, Goodness and Beauty for the sake of selfish dominion. Then we see any personality vanishing into the vortex of irrational willfulness, the collapse of any personal vision of the good life, into the hollowed mannequin of a Hitler, Stalin or Mao—’no one home there’ — a malignant will to dominate, stripped of any meaning.

Tragically, it’s often the humans with the greatest talents or abilities that have succumbed to the temptation of evil, because they begin to look on their fellow men as some sort of lesser species rather than marveling at the community of minds that we all share.

For both honest pagans and devoted Christians, our natural capacity to replicate the order of the Cosmos and reproduce it in our own beautiful creations has almost universally been recognized as the Imago Dei, the Image of God in each soul. We may pray for an opportunity to defend (diplomatically) human dignity with all of our more secular family and friends. It would be nice someday to console our British comedian friend, that he’s really much more noble than he thinks, and likely happier than he can explain. He simply needs a reformed vocabulary.

Joseph K. Woodard earned a BA at University of Alberta (Pol Phil), MA’s at Dalhousie and St. John’s (Great Books), Greek and Latin diplomas at Berkeley, and a PhD at Claremont. He invested fifteen years as an academic (Bethany, Brock), fifteen as a journalist (Alberta Report, Calgary Herald), and eleven as a tribunal judge (Citizenship Canada). He has helped his wife, Kathy, raise ten children with homeschooling and parent-run school start-ups, and always taught adjunct at independent high schools and colleges. He writes for websites like The Imaginative Conservative and Public Discourse, serves as director of research for the Canadian Centre for Home Education, and moderates Great Books seminars online with Angelicum Academy.