Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee is a slovenly piece of work: generally untidy and a conglomeration of aborted ideas and staged meanings.  Ultimately, it rests uncomfortably in the mind as failing to provide much to the reader.

Despite the continual urge to toss it aside, there are several notable high points that stand out, true ideas that wedged themselves into my mind and forced me to think.  While I am not reviewing the book at this time—honestly, the complaint above is about the only review worth writing lest I give the work more credence than it deserves—I did want to give at least some foundation for the text from which I will now quote one of the aforementioned high points.

[A chimpanzee named] Sultan is alone in his pen. He is hungry: the food that used to arrive regularly has unaccountably ceased coming.

The man who used to feed him and has now stopped feeding him stretches a wire over the pen three metres above ground level, and hangs a bunch of bananas from it. Into the pen he drags three wooden crates. Then he disappears, closing the gate behind him, though he is still somewhere in the vicinity, since one can smell him.

Sultan knows: Now one is supposed to think. That is what the bananas up there are about. The bananas are there to make one think, to spur one to the limits of one’s thinking. But what must one think? One thinks: Why is he starving me? One thinks: What have I done? Why has he stopped liking me? One thinks: Why does he not want these crates any more? But none of these is the right thought. Even a more complicated thought—for instance: What is wrong with him, what misconception does he have of me, that leads him to believe it is easier for me to reach a banana hanging from a wire than to pick up a banana from the floor?—is wrong. The right thought to think is: How does one use the crates to reach the bananas?

Sultan drags the crates under the bananas, piles them one on top of the other, climbs the tower he has built, and pulls down the bananas. He thinks: Now will he stop punishing me?

The answer is: No. The next day the man hangs a fresh bunch of bananas from the wire but also fills the crates with stones so that they are too heavy to be dragged. One is not supposed to think: Why has he filled the crates with stones? One is supposed to think: How does one use the crates to get the bananas despite the fact that they are filled with stones?

One is beginning to see how the man’s mind works…

At every turn Sultan is driven to think the less interesting thought. From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?) he is relentlessly propelled towards lower, practical, instrumental reason (How does one use this to get that?) and thus towards acceptance of himself as primarily an organism with an appetite that needs to be satisfied. Although his entire history, from the time his mother was shot and he was captured, through his voyage in a cage to imprisonment on this island camp and the sadistic games that are played around food here, leads him to ask questions about the justice of the universe and the place of this penal colony in it, a carefully plotted psychological regimen conducts him away from ethics and metaphysics towards the humbler reaches of practical reason. And somehow, as he inches through this labyrinth of constraint, manipulation and duplicity, he must realize that on no account dare he give up, for on his shoulders rests the responsibility of representing apedom. The fate of his brothers and sisters may be determined by how well he performs.

We humans assume animals are incapable of higher thought processes like our own, so we devise intelligence tests based solely on these assumptions.  We hinge these tests on basic needs (generally food), and that makes them a call to the more primitive aspect of thought: survival.  We use the results from these tests to show that animals are in fact not intelligent as we are, that they are incapable of higher reasoning.  Sure, we admit and demonstrate that they can learn tricks and general logic if we subject them to experiments focusing on that area.  It does not occur to us that our own tests limit their ability to demonstrate whatever thought or thoughts they might actually have.  I wonder how many “truths” based on this mentality could be overturned if we stopped thinking of ourselves as so above everything that we stack the deck against the creatures we are trying to understand.  What astonishing discoveries have we hidden from our own minds by way of the limits we place on those we wish to assess?

And the same anthropocentric attitude permeates all our considerations about intelligence and life itself.  In our ongoing search for extraterrestrial life, we assume many things: it will require water; it will require a planet in the “Goldilocks zone” of a star system, otherwise it will require some other means to produce liquid water and acceptable temperatures; and it will require that an alien intelligence make use of radio waves, and that they utilize those radio waves at a time in history that makes them available to us in the present (for consider this: radio waves in space move at the speed of light, so the number of lightyears away a star is counts as the number of years the radio waves have to travel in order to reach us, hence the further away the star is, the older the waves have to be in order to be discoverable in the present).  All of these are wrong assumptions, yet all of them are predictable: they all assume that life anywhere has to be like us and has to think like us.

Which brings us back to the quote above: We know dolphins have language and use tools, yet we don’t count them as truly intelligent since we can’t categorize, test, measure or see that intelligence in a way that we understand.  For every test of intelligence, for dolphins or chimpanzees or any other species, we make it impossible to see more than cleverness and rudimentary thought, not because the animals themselves are incapable of more, but rather because we are incapable of seeing more and because we design the tests to see if they have human intelligence.  And it goes without saying that nothing in the universe will ever have human intelligence except, well, humans.

Again, all I ask is that you think about it.