Christine Webb: The arrogant ape: A new way to see humanity

Christine Webb’s book The arrogant ape is a clear homage to Frans de Waal, from the dedication to the final word of the volume. Reading it is a compelling and irresistible “neural exercise” (rather like play behaviour is said to be), consisting of the continual revisiting — or rather overturning — of assumptions, knowledge and beliefs that place us humans on a pedestal above everything else, according to an anthropocentric worldview. Through an original, balanced mixture of personal narrative and argumentative essay, the author starts from elements of her own experience to reflect, through an interdisciplinary lens, on how we humans perceive the world (both living and non-living), often thinking of it as being at our service (we even speak of “ecosystem services”, where ecosystems are construed as serving us) and assuming, erroneously, that we can control it. This worldview reverberates from the individual microcosm to the macrocosm of theories that have emerged across a wide array of disciplines, including religion, philosophy, biology, and psychology, to name only a few. The intriguing “exercise” lies in dismantling and reassembling these frameworks, as we have internalised them since childhood through the educational and formative pathways to which we are exposed from our earliest years.