Being a Human review – a weird and whacky journey through human history
This book cannot be approached without attempting to understand its author. Charles Foster is a seething, polymathic cauldron of conflicting talents. He is a barrister. He is a vet. He is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, teaching medical law and ethics. He is an inveterate traveller.
Not the easyJet sort. More of the sort to venture to the North Pole, the Deserts in Saudi Arabia, the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia, and the Quirimbas Archipelago in Mozambique. He seems to be perpetually pitching up at airports far from centres of the human population. So, more a Ryanair guy, perpetually pitching up at airports far from centres of human population.
He is a prolific author of more than sixteen books, including Being a Beast – a sibling of Being a Human – Wired for God, and The Selfless Gene. It turns out that The Selfless Gene is a powerful rebuttal of the ghastly Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. I’m warming to Foster. Any author who has spent time successfully debagging the insufferably smug and intolerant Dawkins gets my tick of approval.
Charles Foster’s frankness with the reader takes an unusual turn early in the book. He claims regular out of body experiences. He senses spirits in foxes and hears whistling in the darkness – “La li-li-li, li-li.” This musical theme suffuses the narrative and is used to end the book in the four-paragraph Epilogue, this time whistled by his eight-year-old son Tom. What on earth is the reader meant to conclude? Presumably, that Tom has absorbed his father’s weirdness through osmosis.
Reflecting on the author’s conversion to Christianity provides some insight into the thought processes driving Being a Human. As explained at length in Wired for God, we are reminded that Foster came to Christianity through revelation.
He, like St Paul, was struck by Jesus lightning and experienced his very own epiphany. Not on the road to Damascus, but in a squelchy field in Derbyshire. St Paul heard the voice of an angel. Charles Foster listened to the trees. He believes God permeates the DNA of all living things. Ear pressed to the ground; he listens to beetles, the sound of berries communicating with each other, spies a hare sensually bare its genitals to a full moon, smelling coal tar fumes from Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic rotting vegetation.
Pretty weird? It gets even better. All the while, Foster is in communication with an imaginary friend he calls X, a Sympatico spirit from the far horizon of history, who appears to him during these forays into nature – but only when his mind is “linking”. On one occasion, X turns out to be a gatepost. Sometimes X’s son turns up.
Are X and his son out-of-body Fosters, Charles and his son Tom? The long-suffering Tom is hauled from homework on trips which would typically attract the immediate intervention of social services on the grounds of child abuse.
Charles Foster is unusual. Anyone who keeps a desiccated fingertip – amputated after frostbite on that North Pole ski trip – in a box and rattles it at students to prove their “oneness” with the natural world around them is hardly conventional. It’s just a finger in a wooden box. What’s your point?
The point is, Foster uses shock as a cattle prod to stimulate interest, hold attention and spur a sense of inquiry in students and readers alike. Believe me, Being a Human is shock-a-bloc.
The book is written in three eras, Upper Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Enlightenment. There is an Epilogue and an Acknowledgment section, running to three pages. Stuffed with people Foster has surprised, offended, relied upon, or just generally pissed off. It is a telephone directory that tells its own story.
I recommend reading the Enlightenment section first. It is a tightly argued thirty-page exposition of the author’s central premise; that our easy assumption about the supremacy of humans in the natural order, dating back to the triumph of empirical science at the dawn of the era we most congratulate ourselves upon, the Enlightenment, is misplaced. We ignore the lessons to be dug up from prehistory at our peril. It’s a Gaia thing.
That thirty-page endpiece is written in a completely different style to the preceding chapters. Read it before embarking on the meat of the book, Parts I and II for it is lucid, tightly argued and persuasive. The preceding 300 pages are anything but. This book resembles one of Foster’s beloved gas-emitting swamps.
Wade in unprepared, and footing is soon lost. The reader flounders hopelessly. The narrative style is elliptical, discursive and opaque. Only occasionally is there a rock on which to rest a thought. This book is not so much about Being a Human as it is about being Charles Foster. The author jangles his out of body experiences at readers as much as he rattles that fingertip at his students. What’s he smoking? Time to dive into the swamp!
“Today I am watching the deep purposefulness of crows. They have an intention far more complete than my own fractured intention. That crow there, flapping heavily from one field corner to the other is far more of an agent than I’ve ever been. And agents know their own: the non-human world – of which Upper Palaeolithic humans were a part – has an integrated solidarity. Agency means meaning and significance. The field as a whole means something. It has a reason and a direction.”
Swampy Foster immediately self-denigrates this passage as “mystical claptrap”, then claims, “there are moments when I can align myself with the intentions of crows”. I am not sure I am encouraged to reforge my worldview based on this startling apercu. Gibberish is a kind descriptor.
Then, there are the frequently asserted statements of the bleeding obvious.
The main visible difference between modern humans and Upper Palaeolithic humans is not clothes or hairiness. It is their cosmopolitanism and motion compared with our parochialism and sedentariness. We stay put. They wandered about a bit. Terrific. But no real evidence is offered for the significance of sweeping assertions like this – of which there are plenty. OK. Upper-Palaeos were not in favour of Brexit.
Much of the book is challenging to understand and speculative. The author’s writing style is haphazard, assertive, digressive and sometimes misleading. He makes a habit of narrating scenes of animal evisceration he and Tom have performed on The Dales’ hapless wildlife, only to deflate the reader by announcing, “Of course, none of that is true.”
I found Being a Human pretty much the most difficult book I have ever read. Since, that is, a German edition of Noddy goes to Toytown, I was given by a kindly but maladroit relative at the age of 5. At least, Noddy geht ins Spielzugland had great pictures.
Parts I and II are divided into seasonal chapters – Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. Each brings a different perspective and challenges to the author’s attempt to survive unsupported, in the woods, or on a Welsh seashore. The noise of passing traffic somewhat undermines the intended effect of primitivism, planes headed to nearby airports and the hearths of friends – always on hand to provide sustenance in the form of refreshing homemade cider.
The experiences of innocent hikers happening across the hirsute, fur-clad, unshaven, un-showered, flint-blade-wielding Foster roasting pigeon breasts on a hot stone with his son are, sadly, not recorded.
Where did this repetitive, rigmarole research into sustainability get the author? Not far. Frankly, not much effort is made to distinguish the Upper Palaeolithic from the Neolithic. Pigeon breasts have probably been fried in much the same way over 40,000 years.
Condense the first 300 pages of the book over an ancient charcoal fire pit, and it comes to this. We have lost a large percentage of our ancient humanity as we digressed from nature, cultivated animals instead of following them and forgot that they – and trees and ragwort – all have souls. That’s it. We are less human than we were.
Should you read this book? Unless it is your covert desire to squat in a midden, whistling through lark bones and identifying rabbit femurs, the M25 droning in the background awhile, give this one a miss. And wonder at the forbearance required to be Mrs Foster, the unsung hero of this curious volume.