A Feeling of History

Or, a defense of humanity from the encroachment of ant metaphors

The Tower of Babel by Bruegel the Elder

If a super-intelligent alien came to Earth from a backwater of the solar system (a remote moon of Jupiter he refuses to specify), what would he see? He would recognize that life here takes two forms: some creatures seem lonely and others do not.

Some creatures have others with whom they make teeming structures, like a school or murmuration, while some build stable facades from matter more lasting than their bodies. The solitary ones wander endlessly, hunting and sheltering by themselves, mating with the rare-found companion in their travels, for a time forgetting loneliness with their offspring…then, finally, they are once again alone. 

There’s an unthinking quality to animals with social lives, the alien observes, a busyness that overwhelms whatever delicate capacity for free thought which would bloom without companions. The solitary ones, in contrast, seem trapped with their thoughts—on their own schedules, but with the anxiety this freedom entails. Our alien guest from “a place near Jupiter” (he seems to be sensitive about his origins) insists on lumping humans with ants, who have communities as we do, rationally unaware of the nuances of being a social creature.  

His rigorous analysis continues: if you look at human life from far enough away, doesn’t a city look like an anthill? Displacing other creatures from their niche kind of resembles war. Mutualism with another species where protection from predators is exchanged for nutrition looks suspiciously like farming.

Noticing his primate interlocutor is agitated by the ant comparison, the hypothetical near-Jovian holds still in what looks like rapt attention, his quick generalization not having landed as well as he hoped. He enjoys turning over the friend-concept in his mind, and what he’s seen about Earth so far has indicated to him that humans seem to appreciate diversity, some even calling it their “strength”. He’s tired of his peripatetic lifestyle. So he lets the primate speak:

What do we have in common with an ant? Could an ant ever be lonely, smothered by the pheromone-laden fog that fills its home? Each compound wafting through those dark, warm tunnels is a message: queen looks splendid today; new clutch of larvae needs tending; follow forager #38756, he seems excited! Their communication is specific yet wonderfully general, a one-to-many correspondence both intimate and public. For an ant who never leaves the safety of the familiar channels in which it labors, we can picture a life free from worry, full of constant contact and camaraderie. But what about a solitary ant alone in the wilderness, sent out from company to find food? 

I pull up my blanket to shudder off the sudden feeling of exposure; an ant is a million times smaller than a human and so lives in a world a million times larger than ours. It forages in random directions with no certainty of what it’ll find. Consider the sheer number of ants waylaid on the trail confused by unfamiliar smells, unable to escape their dogged imperative to find something useful and return home.

The desert ant Cataglyphis bombycina knows with astonishing precision how far away she is from home. If you were to carefully glue small stilts to each of a forager’s limbs before her return to the colony, she’ll overshoot it in proportion to the length of the add-on. Shorten her legs and she will undershoot, confusedly looking for an entrance still further ahead. This internal pedometer, along with the quickly dissipating scent of herself and her brethren trailing behind her, must surely stave off loneliness by keeping home always in focus. If an experimenter doesn’t nab her before she returns, she’ll make an “ant”-line straight for her colony, despite any turns made along the way. That she was primed to shoot home instantly at the moment of discovery seems to me evidence that she was raring to go back all along, and the finding was simply the trigger. 

The longer I consider my question of what we have in common with ants, the more I think about how societies, generally, solve this problem of loneliness. (The alien definitely picked up on something.) Societies keep organisms from being isolated agents in the world, exposed to harsh elements and enemies. They provide a sense of fitting into a larger scheme to which your personal fate is inextricably tied, the danger of existing cushioned by the thousands you live alongside. And there are more benefits than simply protection. Groups of like animals, all with the freedom to differ and specialize, can gather greater amounts and types of resources from their environment, pushing away decay with the combined shove of a myriad individuals. 

But though the ant behavior that parallels ours appears dramatic to us, especially considering the atrocious tolls exacted by and on ants during their 100-million-year earthly presence, all the drama takes place entirely in our heads. Inside their heads, things seem conspicuously silent. 

(Our alien guest’s eye-stalks begin shaking rapidly—knowledge of our planet seems to enter his mind with a degree of pleasure, somewhat like our own.)

There’s a certain group of contemplative humans who emphasize an emptiness to mental life, arguing that it’s a necessary condition for effortless action. They say that our ego sets up stakes before the body acts, but that to act well, we must forget our ego and the stakes during the act itself. We can imagine a quietly blissful farmer hammering in a nail or the deadening silence within a soldier's mind as they shut out the din of a battlefield. Even though as humans we may not be born to this Silence, its achievement is often seen as a worthwhile goal. But alas, many creatures seem to be better at it than we ever will be. A little thing called self-consciousness often gets in the way.

One particularly eloquent human, in his book Galatea 2.2, writes about a kind of cessation experience, if you will, when meeting a woman he’s been distantly infatuated with:

I maintained myself on the way to the cafe….I at least avoided utter nitwittery. I felt disembodied. Detached. Steeped in emergency room calm. War coverage with the sound turned off.

I contend that ants take care of their young and wage war with the same sort of mindlessness, an ability honed through millions of years in samsara. There is no nurturing yet neither is there bloodlust. In the course of time ants have faced a billion Battles for the Bulge, making each new war charge with the same gung-go step as the first. But is this heroism? There’s an odd emotional absence, some absurd lack of inner conflict that makes ants’ actions difficult to comprehend from our mammalian perspective unless we resort to the phrase “they’re just little robots, aren’t they?” And in some sense, they are, or at least more so than our furry relatives, who show greater flexibility and warmth in their social interactions.

This is all to say, Mr. Alien Smarty-pants, that our surface similarities with ants shouldn’t cover the fact that we humans have loud pictures in our heads, vivid copies of experience that we cast and multiply into each other’s minds. We have a feeling of history, of memory writ large, vast arenas full of living offerings from every member of our species joined by a shared language—an immense abstract record, flexible and iconic. 

(The eye-stalk shaking stops, then accelerates.) 

The key difference between the loneliness shown by ants and Homo sapiens is that for us history addresses a unique depth to our loneliness—it addresses a society's isolation in time. We can’t have a conception of our own distant ancestors while lacking awareness of our status as such to our descendants. We build things to last in part as a message to them, to remind the not-yet-existing of their continuity with the community of have-existeds that occupy the past. In doing so we keep future generations from feeling unanchored, from being isolated in the face of time’s ability to erode memory and with it, our social connections.

Because they don’t remember their history, ant societies are lonelier than ours; for ants, and more broadly their colonies, the only script worth remembering their past in is the code that makes them up: their olfactory receptors, armor, and size. The lack of a flexible record has tragic consequences—it means that when an ant nest splits to expand its territory, the offshoots will inevitably forget each other when they can no longer communicate. Their proteinaceous signal-receivers have irreversibly mutated; they have no hope of translation or diplomacy, no way of remembering past allegiances and shared identities. 

In the same way our parents tell us about the early years we can’t remember, we have cultural narratives that tell us, with varying degrees of accuracy, about our collective origins. We identify ourselves with those that resemble us in some way, at first only with genetic kin but eventually, thankfully, with those whose mental patterns overlap with ours. As creatures that project their sense of self onto their society, we seek evidence about the forms our culture took in the past. We find strange societies acting out strange rituals which are deep down little different from the strange rituals of the present, and this eases our loneliness.

We feel more situated in the present through missives sent through time from exceptional humans who understand, psychologically, what it is to be human. As Mahler put it, “Tradition is not the cult of ashes, it is the transmission of fire.” What makes us essentially human, if we can’t articulate it when we’re asked, is the sheer amount of stuff we’ve been handed—the best and the worst of it. To answer the question, all we have to do is point. 

Our ancestors speak to us through the centuries in their own distinctive ways, not just leaving evidence of their presence like rocks stacked next to a river but also, perhaps mainly, leaving a characteristic trace. We were here and this is what we were like. Knowing their words must speak for themselves, they made sure to shout their deeds into time. They carved the stories of their actions into their children’s memories with such force that we can’t help but repeat them to our own. Our drive to expand our living spaces, we share with ants. Not, however, a feeling of history. 

(The alien, dumbfounded by the primate’s insistence on the error of his initial guess, had patiently sat his ass down and listened to it wax on and on about why ants were dumber than his own eusocial species. What a waste of time. Thinking Earth didn’t make very much sense, he slid back into his galactic RV grumbling to himself “Thank Ganymede all those ants can’t talk.” )