The Correcting Animal: The Case for Humanity - Paperback

There is a case against humanity, and most of the educated world has quietly accepted it.

We are the one creature that has put the whole living world at risk. We built the death camp and the strip mine. Some who follow the thought to its end conclude that the decent thing would be for us to stop.

The Correcting Animal is the case for the other side, and it does not begin by denying the charges.

The charges are largely true. Its quarrel with the prosecution is stranger and more basic: contempt for humanity is available only at a distance. It requires the population figure, the carbon total, the species-level rap sheet. Almost no one comes to despise humanity while looking at a human being.

So the method is to look.

Across twenty chapters, Chip Joyce describes the creature entire, beginning with a fact that sounds like an indictment and turns out to be the key to everything: a human infant arrives more helpless than any newborn on Earth, turned out too soon and unfinished, without the fixed answers every other animal is issued at birth.

That helplessness looks at first like the deepest of our curses. It is the opening through which everything else came pouring in-the guessing, the correcting, the reaching, and at the far end of it, the love.

The argument runs through the crow that bends a wire into a hook, the doctors who would not wash their hands, the two billion sparrows killed on one man's order, the botanist who died in a cell for telling the truth about grain, and the mathematician who waded into the pond at Auschwitz.

It draws one line through all of them.

Goodness is the willingness to be corrected. Evil is the refusal to look.

What separates them is never intelligence. It is whether the wall around the mistake is allowed to stand.

Written in the register of Bronowski and Sagan, grounded in Popper, Deutsch, Hayek, and Rand, this is a defense built from evidence rather than sentiment. It ends where it must, on a single human face.

For readers of The Beginning of Infinity, Enlightenment Now, and The Ascent of Man.

The philosophical companion to How to Think: Conversations from a Father to a Son.