During the first meeting of a religion class I took in college, the professor asked, “What is the point of a liberal arts education?” None of us students in the room seemed to trust enough in our 18 years of hard earned wisdom to answer the question. We sat in several minutes of awkward silence. We fidgeted and wished we were not in a religion class. Finally, the professor flashed a smile and, to our deep relief, revealed the secret: “The point of a liberal arts education is to be interesting at a cocktail party.” Ha! He was toying with us.
Fast forward ten years to my early days as an assistant professor at Dartmouth College. One of my colleagues from the Philosophy Department was giving an informal lunch time talk on his work in metaphysics. He asked rhetorically, “What is the difference between humans and chimpanzees?” His answer: “Cocktail parties”. Laughs all around. Ha! He was being clever with us.
Both of them, of course, were making the same profound point about human uniqueness (and, fittingly, in a way that only a human could). We live in an era where the connections between the species have captured scholarly imagination. Yet, while the sequence of the human genome and the chimpanzee genome show a suggestive 96% similarity, there are certain behaviors that call into question whether 96% genomic overlap means as much as the numbers suggest it does.
To press the point, a cocktail party necessarily involves fermented grain/fruit drinks and alternatives for those who do not wish to imbibe because liquor is not part of the latest nutritional fad; lots of chit-chat about local goings-on, national politics, social networks, reflections on history and the future, and the latest trends in technology; manufactured clothing that sends all sorts of signals about status and identity; etc. etc. All this to say, the cocktail party is a unique event in the animal kingdom, and for a whole lot of reasons. It requires technologies, socially complex constructs, temporal displacements, moral judgements and triviality that don’t have obvious homologues among other species. Perhaps there are some analogues, but you have to be seriously creative to believe there is anything close to the cocktail party in the rest of the cosmos. Especially, if the cocktail party is in Hollywood.
Perhaps the time has come to once again, with all due species humility, spend time focusing on what is unique to our humanness. If we are one species among millions, one that is special only by the vagaries of biological complexity or neuronal connections, then, if we are honest, we have no actual obligation to life on the planet, though we may have a self-interested desire to sustain those things that sustain us.
But the “cocktail party” view of things demands more. As many have noted, it definitely would involve an acceptance that humans have a massively disproportionate responsibility to think about the health of the planet, whatever that might mean. This is due to our unique resilience (hence, our ability to disconnect from any particular ecological niche) and our technological prowess (hence, our ability to overcome any particular environmental challenge). But it is more than this. The “cocktail party” crowd cannot help but think in moral terms that go beyond physical survival. The thought goes to “right” and “wrong”, to “who are we?”, to “what are my obligations to the other?”