A New Statesman Essential Non-Fiction Book of 2021
Being a Human sets out to understand what a human is, inhabiting the sensory worlds of three pivotal moments in our history.
In a Derbyshire wood, Charles Foster and his son enter the world of the Upper Palaeolithic, where they learn the old stories of connectivity, of intimate relationship with everything: the stories that work for a world where everything is conscious. From there, he traces the fate of those stories.
What happened to them in the Neolithic, when we carved up the natural world, and tamed and fenced ourselves? What happened in the Enlightenment, when the universe was drained of meaning? And can we find our way back to the deepest stories of who and what we are?
Charles Foster wanted to know what it was like to be a beast: a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, a swift. What it was really like. And through knowing what it was like he wanted to get down and grapple with the beast in us all. So he tried it out; he lived life as a badger for six weeks, sleeping in a dirt hole and eating earthworms, he came face to face with shrimps as he lived like an otter and he spent hours curled up in a back garden in East London and rooting in bins like an urban fox. A passionate naturalist, Foster realises that every creature creates a different world in its brain and lives in that world. As humans, we share sensory outputs, lights, smells and sound, but trying to explore what it is actually like to live in another of these worlds, belonging to another species, is a fascinating and unique neuro-scientific challenge. For Foster it is also a literary challenge. Looking at what science can tell us about what happens in a fox's or badger's brain when it picks up a scent, he then uses this to imagine their world for us, to write it through their eyes or rather through the eyes of Charles the beast.
