. . . . Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

. . . myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame”

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One of my children loves to watch those gorgeously filmed nature series that air on channels like Nat Geo and Animal Planet. Despite the exotic beauty into which they instantly immerse the viewer, my viewing pleasure is diluted somewhat by the suspicion that they are essentially stunningly shot animal snuff films (to adapt a memorable phrase from the television series Friends about Old Yeller). The baby elephant is almost sure to die of thirst as the trek between water holes gets longer and longer (climate change). The polar bear looks around for the thick snows of Arctic Canada in which his kind are designed to thrive and instead discovers more and more early thaws (climate change). Mountains of discarded plastic in oceanic garbage dumps threaten sea life deep in the dark ocean depths (pollution).

Still, I find myself captivated by the wild strangeness of these inhabitants of jungles, oceans, deserts, and arctic regions, so deeply alien to anything I have experienced. Despite the sometimes-anthropomorphizing narration, the brutality (they are, after all “brutes”) of these animal lives is on full display. This is the way each species, in its own way, is: “Crying What I do is me: for that I came.”

Across the board, these documentaries show a striking willingness to acknowledge and dwell on the nature of each profiled species—its physical attributes, hunting and mating rituals, adaptations to environmental challenges, pursuit of solitary or communal life. The viewer learns how each constructs a home, communicates with its kind, attracts a mate, fights off natural predators or feeds on largely defenseless prey, engages in seasonal migration or hibernation. Members of the animal world lead lives largely—almost entirely—scripted by their natures, and those researching and producing these documentaries seem fine with that. If one of the penguin young falls prey to a natural enemy like the orca or the sea lion, well, that’s natural. What else can the orca do? It is made that way.

When it comes to human beings encroaching on animal habitats, however, the reaction is different, and I am not sure the scriptwriters understand how much they are conceding to human exceptionalism by this difference. Setting aside for the moment our superior intellectual abilities, human beings are perhaps even more distinguished by free will and by the self-awareness through which we exercise it: that is, our ability to consider and identify the often competing demands of our thoughts, desires, motivations, and limitations. The biblical explanation is that, alone among all the creatures sharing the earth with us, we are made “in the image and likeness of God.”

Our species has a nature, as every species does, but (perhaps confusingly for strict materialists) our free will makes it possible for us to go against the design of that human nature. Unlike the penguins and jaguars and polar bears, orcas and seagulls and giant mambas—unlike all other species—we humans can choose not to abide by the in-built imperatives of our nature, though not without negative results.

Shouldn’t it provoke thought that we differ so profoundly from all our animal neighbors in what we today like to refer to as our “agency”? How do we come to be capable of causing so much upheaval on the planet that all of us inhabit, but that only one species among us can even conceptualize as a planet or consider leaving behind for another planetary home?

The first chapter of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter takes place the summer before that record-breaking winter, when Laura’s father notices the muskrats have been building homes with unusually thick mud walls. He concludes that severe weather will be coming. Laura is mystified:

“Pa, how can the muskrats know?” she asked.

“I don’t know how they know,” Pa said. “But they do. God tells them, somehow, I suppose.”

“Then why doesn’t God tell us?” Laura wanted to know.

“Because,” said Pa, “we’re not animals. We’re humans and, like it says in the Declaration of Independence, God created us free. That means we got to take care of ourselves.”

Laura said faintly, “I thought God takes care of us.”

“He does,” Pa said, “so far as we do what’s right. And He gives us a conscience and brains to know what’s right. But He leaves it to us to do as we please. That’s the difference between us and everything else in creation.”

“Can’t muskrats do what they please?” Laura asked, amazed.

“No,” said Pa. “I don’t know why they can’t but you can see they can’t. Look at that muskrat house. Muskrats have to build that kind of house. They always have, and they always will. It’s plain they can’t build any other kind. But folks build all kinds of houses. A man can build any kind of house he can think of. So if his house don’t keep out the weather, that’s his look-out; he’s free and independent.”

Whether Pa is correct in believing that the muskrats somehow sense the severity of the coming winter and adjust the thickness of their walls accordingly I do not know. But his emphasis on the animals’ lack of freedom to depart from the instinctual demands of their own nature—to build an entirely different dwelling, or to switch diets on a whim, or to become the predator of an animal that normally preys upon it—is as significant as he says it is. Deer, for instance, never “decide” to turn predator, abandon their vegetarian diet for a carnivorous one, and set off to prey upon wolf packs. Lions do not convert to grass-eating pacifism. Mountain goats do not move to the Sahara, nor camels migrate to the Arctic. Not only does each species require certain circumstances to thrive, but they “know” that: They do not attempt to rebel against their ingrained instincts.

With us it is different. We can choose, as Laura’s father points out, to build any kind of house we want. (He is thinking, we learn shortly after, of the very rudimentary homestead shanty that they currently live in and resolving to move the family to more secure shelter.) Every day we interact with fellow members of our species who have adopted vegan or vegetarian or carnivore diets. Others, again by choice, subsist almost entirely on junk food. Some of these choices are healthier than others; some are positively unhealthy. But all inhabit the spectrum of human choice, because we are not constrained by our instincts or even by common sense. We can do what we like—and in some instances, what we like may be the death of us.

For better or worse, human beings are different from the lower animals— and we were designed to be different, which means we are meant to be different. In The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis contrasts “the beast’s perpetual slavery to nutrition, self-protection and procreation” with “the responsibilities, shames, scruples, and melancholy of Man.” As the reference to “shames, scruples, and melancholy” indicates, we are distinguished even in being capable of wrongdoing—and, correspondingly, of astounding acts of virtue and empathetic identification with the suffering of others.

Scholars tell us that the Greek word hamartia, used for the hero’s tragic flaw in ancient tragedies and for sin in the New Testament, more generally referred to “missing the mark,” like an archer failing to hit the bullseye. If we view our moral shortcomings as failures to hit the target of what human beings are intended to be, then that means we are in fact meant to live our lives in a certain way. There is a standard by which we are measured, and we have plenty of experience in measuring ourselves and others by that standard. All human beings inherit a common human nature, and we understand that living in accord with that nature requires certain kinds of behaviors. Sometimes we perform successfully and sometimes—quite a lot of times—we do not. At those times we miss the mark of living a fully human life. But our freedom to choose among good, bad, and indifferent choices is not really a license to choose with impunity. Using our nature for our own aberrant purposes produces messy results, for ourselves and others.

In all sorts of areas of temptation, this is blatantly apparent, most objectively in the areas that have been codified by law in all cultures for which we have historical records. Take theft, for instance, which encompasses bank robberies and mugging old ladies on the street, but also stealing a candy bar from a corner store or a ten dollar bill from a family member’s wallet, claiming benefits we are not entitled to, or shaving a little of Uncle Sam’s share from a tax return. We can plausibly make the argument that all such thefts have antisocial implications—defrauding individuals or groups of money they need, exploiting the poor, eroding the social trust that we require for healthy societies, fomenting suspicion, disharmony, disunity. But though this is true, even apart from such implications, we know theft is wrong. We know it is wrong even when we participate in it in minor ways, such as by stealing time from an employer. It goes against the human grain, as the fox’s theft of the chicken from the henhouse never goes against that animal’s grain. Although we are the species that can choose to act against our nature, that doesn’t permit us to fully shake off that nature, which stubbornly persists in making itself felt.

The same is true of intentional physical harm to the innocent. From coldblooded murder to hot-blooded acts of violence, such actions strike most non-psychopathic people in almost all times and places as wrong. The worst of them have been forbidden by law since laws were devised.

There have been historical and regional exceptions, however, often justified by restrictive definitions of who is fully human. For example, Tom Holland’s Dominion describes the leeway an ancient Roman master had in treating his slave as brutally as he chose. Likely the master would concede that the slave was human, but his reduced status made him human in a reduced sense to the pagan Romans. A similar devaluation was applied to deformed, sickly, or even just inconveniently timed newborns, all of whom the Roman paterfamilias could choose to have exposed rather than welcoming into the family’s protective embrace. In such pre-Judeo-Christian societies (including all tribal societies where those outside the tribe could be enslaved or mistreated or killed), human beings were judged worthy of life or of humane treatment according to a hierarchy of value.

The gradual adoption of Christianity in the West and elsewhere did not eliminate the often-convenient categorization of human beings into ranked classes that could be treated to varying degrees of violence or exploitation. However, it did work to mitigate certain practices, and at the very least to cause many who were guilty of them to develop a bad conscience and the awareness of moral opprobrium. Over the centuries, the initial understanding that murder and mistreatment of the innocent were wrong was expanded, with the categories of human status and innocence—and the degrees of protection afforded them—likewise extended. On differing timelines, there were movements to mitigate the inhumane treatment of prisoners, the insane and the handicapped, and to free the enslaved. Christianity, with its belief in a Creator God who also loved all human beings enough to become incarnate and suffer torture and death on their behalf, revolutionized the understanding of human rights beyond tribalism and social status. In a perverse way, we can see the effect of Christianity by observing the rise of various tribalisms and the endangerment of human rights as religious influence has receded in the West. Still, Christianity laid its extended understanding of human rights on the foundation of human nature—“grace building on nature,” as St. Thomas Aquinas put it (“grace does not destroy nature, but fulfills its potential. . . ,” Summa Theologiae).

From the first generations of Christianity, pagans remarked on Christians’ abhorrence of abortion and euthanasia, their care for orphans, and their willingness to risk their lives to care for plague victims. This was how Christians had been enjoined to treat fellow members of the human species. However, that did not make it easy for them to do so. Like more universally held moral imperatives such as laws against stealing, Christians could not obey them instinctively, as an animal “obeys” the impulses of its nature. Although certain actions under certain circumstances seem right and wrong to us, they are not actions we are driven by nature to do, like breathing. They are things we could choose not to do. We might do that wrong thing even though we know we should not, or we might try to convince ourselves that the peculiar circumstances made it an acceptable choice, or that our free will was impaired in some way, by force or overwhelming influence or survival instincts.

And sometimes there are mitigating factors; sometimes we are under great pressure, given false counsel by someone we trust, not fully in possession of our reason due to alcohol or drugs, and on and on. These factors do not make the wrong thing right (they do not, for instance, make the choice to abort a child right because money is tight or loved ones are exerting pressure), but they can reduce the level of our guilt.

But whether we are acting in accordance with our human nature or against it, whether we are deliberating, debating, extrapolating, and weighing arguments or obstinately ignoring all that to scratch an itch, we are always engaged in something quite alien to what the school of fish, the pack of wolves, the mountain goats leaping from crag to crag, or the black widow spider are doing when they act.

Everyone knows this on some level, even the producers of nature documentaries, or they would not be hectoring us to clean up the environment, stop eradicating rainforests and using chemicals that poison food and water sources. After all, it would be pointless to ask a hippopotamus to relocate because another species needs to use its watering hole—not because we don’t speak hippopotamus, but because they are not persuadable in that way. They may move because they see us as a threat or because some other instinct moves them to do so, but they won’t debate the pros and cons or be persuaded that moving is the right thing to do.

However, there is another and opposite way to reason wrongly about the difference between human beings and other species: We can begin to doubt whether there is even such a thing as human nature, concluding that our freedom to choose derives from the absence of any natural human template we are directed to conform to. In the area of human sexuality, for example, we can accept serial monogamy, polygamy, open marriage, a lifelong series of hookups, an addiction to porn, or a romantic relationship with ChatGPT as equally normative. We can view past norms as mere utilitarian moral codes adopted for the flourishing of the species in particular times and places that have nothing to say to us now. Where once human flourishing required stable families to bear and successfully bring to adulthood the many children needed to fill society’s ranks at a time when so many died young, today we need many fewer—and some of us have been persuaded to believe that Earth would be better off if we did not reproduce at all.

If children are no longer a clear economic boon to society—and also drain money, time, and energy from their parents—then the mutual love and support aspect of the traditional marriage of man and woman until death carries the whole burden of justification for the institution. That means that whenever at least one member of the couple concludes that life would be improved with no partner or a different partner, only the fragility of a perhaps imperfectly intended promise to love and cherish until death can prevent the union from snapping in two.

And if society concludes that only “reasonable” numbers of children are necessary and that large swaths of the population would likely be better off forgoing them, then the definition of marriage and the social understanding of that institution need not include anything about generating children. (Which potentially, at least, opens up that definition to just about any person or persons in any combination for any purpose.) And if children are not all that important and if lots of people would rather not have any, or would rather not have them anytime soon, but would still like to engage in sex, then legalized abortion will be needed to accommodate those desires.

All of these are human choices in the sense that humans are capable of making them, but that does not make them choices that contribute to a fully human life, any more than our choices to betray promises, neglect or maltreat the weak, or exploit those under our authority do. Certainly we are thereby exercising our free will, but so was John Wilkes Booth when he shot Lincoln in the head at Ford’s Theater. So was Judas Iscariot when he betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. And so was Hitler when he set in motion the plan to exterminate the Jews. Though all of us exercise the human capacity to make free choices, surely that does not make all choices right. Surely when we make certain choices we are diverging from the design and purposes of our human nature. If so, isn’t it crucially important to distinguish between right and wrong uses of free will, and to encourage the former and discourage the latter?

Instead of which, in recent decades, we have chosen to extend our indiscriminate approval of choice beyond the standard moral questions to the great ontological question: What is a human being? But we introduce to this ancient question a modern twist: While philosophers like Aristotle describe us as rational animals, and while the book of Genesis reveals us to be creatures made in the image and likeness of God, the claim of today’s transgender proponents is that human beings are whatever they define themselves to be. But if each of us has the power to define himself or herself (and the power to use any desired pronouns to do so), then each person becomes something like a species of one. That is, if we are not created with free will and consciousness, but inhabit a seemingly parentless universe that just randomly happened to come to be, a universe in which we inexplicably can choose radically different courses of action, then we are not constrained by gender assigned-at-birth biological characteristics, and perhaps not any other kinds of characteristics either. We can each create our “self” as whatever we please. This makes much less sense than even the flattened naturalistic view of the human species as no more than a smart animal with exalted pretensions. And yet variants of it are entertained by extremely intelligent people, including some of the tech wizards that populate Silicon Valley. For years some of these have been proposing various mind-machine melds or predicting that we can achieve what they bizarrely conceive to be a kind of immortality by uploading the contents of the human mind onto a computer. Certainly the tech wizards betray their boyhood science fiction interests in the sci-fi tropes they keep plotting to bring to, well, life. Escaping from a doomed planet Earth to colonize the moon or Mars or a series of ever more distant planets is another classic example.

What strikes me most about every version of the tech wizards’ plans to relaunch, relocate, or revivify humanity is how fundamentally unserious such plans are. Not that their formulators lack seriousness. But their seriousness has the flavor of the five-year-old explaining to Mommy how he plans to solve world hunger or end war. Mommy smiles a bit sadly, understanding that someday he will know better. But apparently a financially successful subset of that five-year-old cohort never did learn better, and now they in their own way (and the academy and the globalists and the media in theirs) are all set on transferring similar kinds of stick figure dreams into something they would call reality.

If we could imagine the multitudinous species of the world being granted the gifts of self-awareness and human speech for five minutes, they might chorus to us something like this:

We cannot make or unmake our natures. Even you humans, the cunning apex of the Creator’s creation, cannot alter the nature of what you are, and attempting to do so invites disaster. There is much you can do that we, instinct-bound, can only gape at. But for you, excellence must be chosen. And to choose the path to excellence, you must first know what you are, who you are, and what you are made for. Any hammer that deludes itself into believing it is a saw will not succeed in behaving like either. Any man who thinks he is a woman, or any woman who thinks she is a man, will likewise be frustrated. And anyone who signs up to colonize Mars should think long and hard about what characteristics a human society on Mars needs to accord with human nature. Moving to Mars does not turn you into a Martian.

Instead, humanly speaking, the most rewarding project that life can offer any of us—young or old—is to become ever more fully what we are, so that each of us (in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ words) “acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is.”

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Original Bio:

Ellen Wilson Fielding, a longtime senior editor of the Human Life Review, is the author of An Even Dozen (Human Life Press). The mother of four children, she lives in Maryland.