Curiouser and curiouser

Charles Pasternak sets off to search for a defining feature of mankind in Quest. Mary Midgley wouldn't have started from there
Quest by Charles Pasternak

Quest: The Essence of Humanity
by Charles Pasternak
414pp, John Wiley, £16.99

Bad questions don't get good answers. This book's question, though old and much respected, is rather a bad one: "What makes us human?"

Charles Pasternak says his project is "to pinpoint a defining feature of man". As he observes, many candidates have been proposed for this role - speech, tool-use, reasoning, humour, self- consciousness and the rest. But it is hard to choose between them, and moreover they have all turned out not to be quite exclusive to humans.

It might therefore seem reasonable to conclude that there is no such single answer. Pasternak, however, is determined to have one. He thinks these suggestions only fail because they are too simple, so he puts forward a richer and more inclusive candidate - quest or searching. He does not claim this is exclusive to humans - all organisms search in some way. But he thinks the intensity with which people search is their special mark. Much of the book consists of a brief history of humanity, designed to show the importance of this activity.

Not surprisingly, Pasternak uses the term quest widely. It covers many things - curiosity, enterprise, the love of novelty and the migratory tendency to wander widely - which might seem distinct. Yet he still has trouble in making it cover all the things he cites as examples.

For instance, he names as prime cases of the human "migratory instinct" the Gypsies, the South African Boers, the Mormons and the founders of the state of Israel. But of these the Gypsies are (as he says) nomads - they travel for a living, not for pleasure. The other three groups travelled because they were persecuted. And this persecution was due to something that does not suit Pasternak's thesis at all, namely their constancy. They gave offence by refusing to change, by adhering stoutly to their traditions. Their wandering simply interrupted the pursuit of their previous ideals. It was not an end in itself at all.

How does this awkward fact bear on Pasternak's thesis? Here we run into the confusions that have always infested his initial question. The search for a single "defining feature" has never been a disinterested one. The numerous people who have put forward some quality as the essential distinction of humanity have not just been meaning to contribute to zoology. Instead, they have been trying to exploit the notion for moral purposes, assuming that what distinguishes us must have special merit.

Starting from Aristotle's rather unhelpful idea that each species has its differentia (its characteristic excellence which is also the quality that distinguishes it from others), they have each tried to establish their own favourite trait as playing this role in human life. They have hoped, in this way, both to establish its supremacy within human affairs and also - usually - to justify domination over species lacking it.

But the fact that something is species-specific has no bearing at all on its excellence. These are quite separate questions. Is Pasternak still playing this strange game? He does not directly claim that his favoured bundle of tendencies, centring on curiosity, is supremely laudable and ought to rule human life. He thinks all questions of value are too subjective to handle. He claims to be merely describing the facts of evolution objectively.

Much of his book does indeed deal with factual matters such as genetics and palaeontology, which have no obvious bearing on his central topic. Yet he constantly harks back to that topic in terms of intense celebration: "What then has been the message of this book? Not just to individuals, but to institutions and communities, to the nations of the world? It is simple; keep searching."

Searching for what? Clearly Pasternak's central example is scientific research. He brings other favoured human activities under this heading by fiat; for instance, "to create a work of art is to search". (But again, for what? It makes a difference which direction you start in...) Religion he treats, quite sympathetically, as having originally been just an early form of the scientific search for causes. He is a little puzzled by its having survived when science makes it unnecessary. He conjectures that people seek it for "spiritual comfort". But comfort is not exactly what people get from being shamans, nor from meeting the more serious demands of the great religions. And there are other crucial areas of life - for instance in personal and social relations - to which this kind of diagnosis does not seem relevant at all.

The trouble surely is that our natures are complex. Human life throws up many distinct ideals because we really do have many needs. Curiosity and its relatives are only a small segment of these. It is the difficulty of fitting these needs together - of finding an effective priority system that will satisfy our nature as a whole - that forces us to think about morals in the first place. That difficulty is also what makes so many moralists try to simplify their work by exalting a single aspect of our nature to a despotic position over the rest. This is how the notion of a differentia has always been used. And increasingly, since the Enlightenment, it is our cognitive powers that have been chosen for that dominant role.

If this meant we should think particularly hard about our conflicts, there might be much to be said for it. But merely searching, as such, has no special value. And if - as Pasternak, echoing recent prophets such as Jacques Monod, evidently wants - it means chiefly that we should do more science, or perhaps should travel more widely, it seems most unlikely to help us much with our real problems.

· Mary Midgley's The Myths We Live By is published by Routledge

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