Being a Human

Starred review from August 9, 2021
Barrister and philosopher Foster (Being a Beast) travels back in time, over hills, and inside sea caves for this wondrous and moving examination of “what the self is.” On “a desperate search to know what I am, how I should live and what shape consciousness adopts when it is folded into a human body,” Foster traces three phases of evolution. He begins 40,000 years ago, when upper-Paleolithic hunter-gatherers became “behaviorally modern.” Next, he describes Neolithic settlements around 12,000 years ago, when humans domesticated crops and animals and “we started to get boring and miserable.” Then comes an examination of the Enlightenment—which he argues continues to this day. Despite so much knowledge and advancement, he writes, people are “ontologically queasy” and “laughably maladapted to our current lives,” which has led to widespread alienation, insomnia, and depression. To get back in touch with the “constant ecstatic contact with earth, heaven, trees and gods” he argues humans need, Foster witnesses shimmering visions, eats roadkill, contemplates birdsong and language, and hypothesizes that consciousness exists beyond humans, who for a while contain it. Foster is a wonderful prose stylist, and knows how to build a case and support it with plentiful detail. This powerful account is a remarkable achievement.

Starred review from August 1, 2021
An expansion of mind and soul, wonderment for the natural world, and intense self-examination all flash in this unusual exploration of three crucial periods of human history, the early Upper Paleolithic, the Neolithic, and the Enlightenment. Foster, a British veterinarian and nature writer, follows his unusual immersion in animal life, Being a Beast (2016), with this equally deep dive into the physical, mental, and spiritual realms of our distant ancestors. He imagines their environs, sensory feelings, and ideas. Most of his attention is directed to the lifestyle and beliefs of nomadic hunter-gatherers during the Paleolithic epoch. Emulating them, Foster does some extreme and extended camping in the forest. On his menu are berries, wild salad, and cooked roadkill. At one point, he intentionally fasts for more than a week. In summertime, he walks 20 miles a day. Moving forward in human endeavors, he considers farmers and then scientist-philosophers. His upmost interest is the development of human consciousness and behavior. Abstraction, the value of creating stories, respect for all life, and intuition are emphasized. Foster laments, ""We are laughably maladapted to our current lives,"" yet he offers reassurance that ""our real nature is glorious."" A thought-provoking fusion of anthropology, archaeology, environmentalism, and much more, Foster's heady narrative swerves between dizzying and dazzling.

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Starred review from July 15, 2021
British scholar and writer Foster delivers a spirited romp through human history and finds our time wanting in many ways. Building on Being a Beast (2016), in which he looked at the world through the viewpoints of badgers, a fox, and other critters, Foster imagines a humdrum deep past in which not much happened until around the Stone Age, when some mysterious spark fired our imaginations. As he writes, "God is good and favours the Upper Palaeolithic," and its inhabitants responded to that goodness by painting glorious works of art in hard-to-get-to places, placing their dead in carefully constructed graves, and building cultures. That age of metaphor and creation, of "self-creation and self-knowing," came crashing down in the Neolithic, which brought us agriculture and urbanization. "In the Neolithic," Foster laments, "we started to get boring and miserable," controlled in all sorts of ways. Instead of moving through the land, knowing what to hunt and what to gather and paying close attention to our surroundings, we became machines of labor. The author offers a provocative, pleasing meditation on the different ways in which the two stages of human evolution made use of fire--one to create, one to destroy--and he cleverly links the Neolithic world of overcrowding, forced labor, taxation, epidemic disease, and other woes to our time: "Continue synergistically for 12,000 years or so, and you have us." This is a magpie book full of intriguing anthropological sketches. On one page, Foster notes that a circular house "is an intrinsically democratic space," and on another, that the Romans were more interested in nature than were the Greeks. Throughout, the author makes connections between minds past and present with the "more-than-human world." It's a book that fits neatly into the growing library of modern British natural history writing, alongside the best of Nan Shepherd, Robert Macfarlane, and Roger Deakin. A splendid assessment of the many ways there are to be a person, for good and ill.

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