Having today's open societies in such high regard I think that the best way to keep them open and healthy is precisely by cultivating freedom and understanding, that is why we should break our bounds that blindly bind us to them. Slaves create a society based on fear and obedience, we should not obey blindly, by the contrary we should support our societies because we love them and because we understand how terrible things would be without them, because we have vision. Wise people create societies that harmonize different paths and promote the well being of all. Being wise is also being able to think "outside the box" is also being able to guide, to be able to improve, to avoid the pitfalls that might send us back to the hell of the more frequent societies that are based on fear and superstition. So in order to fully help to create a better society we must learn to be clear, to see further, to understand more. I is similar to loving a person. It is not enough just to praise her, or being obedient to her, that might even be a bad thing most of the time. If we really want to help someone to be more fulfilled we must understand that person, her history, her goals, the ways in which she might get them, the ways that might turn to ruin, etc. Only by understanding this will we be able to help her fulfill her dreams.
So the first thing to understand about societies is that they all usually tell a story about themselves, how they came to be, what guides them, etc, that is rarely the whole truth. By far the largest lie, the most eerie and unearthly, is the story about ourselves, about the supernatural origin and role of humanity. In many cultures an intermediate notion, of the sub-human, was created to place those that not having the sacredness, the rights, beauty and value, of true humans, were nevertheless superior to animals. Sometimes these were the slaves, black people, at other times it was the Jews (and not only by the Nazis but throughout the inquisition), or the women, the children deprived of their ability to choose their own path (even when they understand the consequences). But this notion of sub-humans show just how much despise we feel for the rest of nature, or how superior we imagine ourselves to be regarding the other parts of the world. It is because we despise the rest of the world so much that we fail to understand how "God" could have created the Earth billions of years before man has appeared. What was He doing, looking at what gooses and spiders were doing? These lowly animals certainly do not deserve the attention of such a High Being, the Creator is certainly not interested in the affairs of fishes and anemone. They are there just for us to eat them, waiting for our hunger to start! So, a world without humans seem utterly absurd. That is why Darwin's theory of evolution and the huge temporal scales of time and space involved, are so frightening to certain groups. They refuse science in the name of religion, but in fact what is at stake is not the existence of a God, or of a meaning to life. What is at stake is the relation that man has to nature. If he is just another part of nature, another step in innumerable steps that will lead to new species and adventures to be lived in the eons to come, then there is nothing strange in the universe having existed for billions of years before our arrival. Every event that has occurred, in all that immense period of time, was important, sacred, immensely beautiful. Small fragments of rocks expelled by dying stars are getting their place in the scheme of things. Will they became new stars or planets? Will they be at the hot core of a planet, be a small asteroid, or be part of the mutable crust, sea and atmosphere? The stories of rocks encompass billions of years. They pass unnoticed to our eyes, but they go on anyway, irrespective of our ignoring them. Other animals and plants have very interesting stories too. All that we deem important, like love, danger, surpassing obstacles, the value of the family, hate and fear, cowardice and courage, abnegation and egoism, friendship and jealousy, all these things have been going on with billions of living beings millions of years before man was even a distant dream. Certainly they were as valuable to the animals that lived them as they are for us at this very moment. Life was as beautiful, dangerous and full of adventure and occasions for courage and love as it is today. There is no reason for us to think that, just because we humans now inhabit the world, there is more love or wonderment or value.
We, as humans, have definitely brought more intelligence, more ability to use instruments, to manipulate nature around us. We are like ants armed with the ability to manipulate the world around us in complex and profound ways. Our key to success was the development of a new kind of language, a language able not only to share immediate states of mind (like fear, hunger, attraction, etc) but able to indicate objects in any spatial-temporal reference and relation (of cause and effect for instance) with each other. For that we had to create names for mountains and valleys, calendars with months and years, names for each individual object. But, once this was created we can put any object we can name in any place and time to which we have words for.
This invention of language allowed two great innovations in the animal world. First of all it was now possible to communicate states of affairs (the deer is 300 meters on the right, by the river), and to think together about them (what is the best way to catch her?). But, much more importantly, it was now possible to share and record for future generations all that a generation had learned. So, methods of hunting, house building, fishing, cloth making, cattle raising, instrument making and usage, all this was able to be recorded and transmitted from one generation to the next. Slowly, over thousands of years, the "knowledge" (ways of dealing with the world that work) augmented so much that man become, not so much what his powers of cognition would normally allow over the course of a lifetime, but a product of a lineage, a whole set of generations, which one after the other, created a body of knowledge that was now passed to this individual, that was now able to be the sum of learning of all that was recorded before him. Man was no longer an "animal", that is, he was not just the sum of his physical and psychological powers applied to a natural environment. Now he was the product of a "culture", a set of cognitive achievements that would have taken an individual thousands or millions of lives to gather, but that, with this "culture" thing, could now be gathered in just a few weeks.
In this sense, it becomes clear what the phrase "man is not an animal" means. It means that you and I are not really the main result of our bodies and of our innate psychological abilities. If we had simply been born in this world and no culture would have been added to us, then we would be like wolves and other mammals, completely at lost. That is why we are not "animals": instead we are the mixed reincarnation of thousands of people that lived before us, and who have left their imprint on us through our culture, which was poured into us until it filled us so much that we become a "person". We absorbed ideals, ways of seeing the world, desires, notions of good and bad, abilities to deal with our surroundings. Nothing of this is a part of our genetic heritage, it is not a part of our body, it is not an innate ability of our brain. It is like an imprint. An animal is imprinted with his current environment, but a human is imprinted with the experiences of thousands of generations that have passed before him. He is not really one person but a multitude of voices that, as if resurrected from the dead, talk and act and decide through him. This is the true meaning of "man is not an animal", he is the (re)presentation of the minds that come before he was born in a new synthesis, he is relieving the lives of his ancestors, not only of his biological ancestors but of the part of mankind that influenced his education.
So, if an uncle or a grandfather lived his life as if maintaining "honor" was the most important thing, then many will receive this inheritance. If one accepts that this is indeed the right way to live he will in part recreate the kind of experiences of his dead grandfather or uncle. He might feel the conflict between desire and duty, the rewards of being virtuous, the pain of failing in his duty, the reactions of others to his attempts, success and failure, etc. This also happens with technical skills like lighting a stove, cleaning up the house, etc. We are collections of what other people lived and achieved. The more humanity evolves the more the recent humans synthesize, through cultural, the human lives and experiences that happened before them. Sometimes failed ideal or impossible systems of ethics are relived over and over again until some solution or new system is found.
Man is not an animal, he is a reenactment of past lives and experiences and ways of seeing and acting upon the world. This resurrection of the past, this ability to recover lost minds and attitudes is what gave the human species it's immense reproductive advantage over other animals. As long as we live in large societies and keep our records straight, we are able to fit in each single man the successful learning experiences of thousands of his ancestors. This of course provides our inner mental life a richness, a breadth, a variety of experiences and states of mind that blows away that of our fellow animals. They can only conceive of the experiences that their live has provided them directly, so far. They will only know that sea, that kind of grass, that climate. But our minds are much vaster, incomparably wider. The vast majority of the things we know of, that guide our life, are things we have never experiences directly. We know of the dangers of going to jail without ever having been in jail, we know how wrong it is to kill another human being, the feelings of guilt, the moral weight, without have ever experienced it. We know that we need food without have ever been starving, we know how our body works without ever having seen a single cell, we know that there is a place called China, we know that there are volcanoes, deep seas, distant planets, all this and much, much more. We even know of stories and legends that only exist in our imagination. Our inner world is gigantic when compared with the minds of other animals. It is like comparing the a vast forest with a small hole in the ground.
What does this all mean? Well first of all it means we are in continuity with nature. We are not more important, we are just different. We were the first species of our planet to have developed a strategy of survival based on the "transmigration of minds" ^_^ or more precisely, the transmission of what works well. In a few generations this can't make much difference but in thousands of generations it was bound to put us on the top of the ladder. We have control over all the continents, we could live under water or in the skies if we wanted, we can do thinks that are unimaginable to other animals, our power is surprising even to ourselves and it seems to grow more everyday. But our difference from the rest of the animals is just a difference in degree. Most of them have minds and hearts just as we do, they feel and experience, they just have to learn everything from the beginning as if they had to experience everything for the first time, as if they were the first member of the species ever to have lived on this world. Their minds are born almost empty and only direct experience can fill them. They have to go through the experience to learn it. We don't. We live the successful strategies that the dead have learned, lived and passed on to us. We have a different strategy but the hardware is basically the same.
Secondly, it also says something of importance about our future. If man is just another step in the huge history of our planet then things will not stop here. We are not the last stop, we are just another example of the diversity of life. Things will go on and on, and, if the future will resemble the past, than, a couple of million years from now, many other intelligent beings, very different from today's man, will inhabit this planet. It might seem scary to think how small each of us is in the grand scale of things, but what is better: to have a big part in a small and petty story or to be a small part in an infinite story, both in its scale and beauty. I have to confess that I am enchanted with the incredible and infinite beauty of this Cosmos. I much rather prefer to have an infinitesimal part in this infinitely wonderful world than anything else I can imagine. And why would I want to have a bigger part. I am glad that dolphins, spiders, snakes and pandas and dinosaurs and all the billions of billions of living creatures that have inhabited this planet and that will inhabit it in the future might have their place here. I wouldn't like to take their place. I wouldn't like to live longer or to occupy more space or other resources. Even as it is I wonder how many square miles are needed to feed me all of these years, how much diversity was lost so that I could be. But I am glad that I am, I am full of joy of being a part of all this.
Current human societies are not able to accept this perspective that I've just described, for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that, unless we have seen and thought a lot about nature, we are simply not interested in gooses and albatrosses. It demands a more precise vision of nature than what we generally have to share the thrill of the salmon going up the river and to feel the thrill of the bear eating it; this thrill is not available nor is interesting to the most part of us - we cannot imagine being neither the salmon nor the bear nor experiencing death as a natural, non-traumatizing, part of life. As I said before we can only desire what we can understand, but it is much easier to understand the beauty of a kiss given in our face by someone we love than to understand the beauty of a family of bears or wolves getting reunited. Therefore we will tend to be more receptive to the pleasures that our fellow humans can give us, and we will feel much more in tune with them, much more preoccupied with the human world. Other animals and distant events in space and time will probably be out of view (out of interest) for many millennia for human society at large. As a result from this detachment from the rest of the natural world we have created a mythology that supports what we see as our "special place" in it. According to this mythology God is somehow more similar to humans than to marmots or sea lions or dolphins and crabs and flowers. God has the face of a man! ^_^ And God has put us here to "test" us, and to make us rulers over all land, sea and everything in it. Obviously this does not go along with the temporal and spatial scale of the universe, but, we just ignore it due to the many advantages that this picture brings. The main advantage is that it allows for a direct explanation of "why we are here". We are here to be "good", to give money to the church, to vote, to respect the law, etc. All the universe exists in order for me not to fornicate but control myself until my wedding night has been certified by a priest in white clothes talking in the name of God. God also watches to see if we are using condoms or been guided by too much passion when we delve deep inside each other. God is especially concerned to know if we are good boys and girls and do everything we are told. So, in this perspective, the all universe seems to be nothing more than an occasion for us to be well behaved. This is what I meant when I said that we care about what we are taught to care. Only by deconstructing this fantasy, by deprogramming our minds will we be able to find out what it is that we care about. I cannot say what any of us should care about. I don't even know very well what I care about, the most accurate answer I have for myself is "everything", although this is certainly false for I am only aware of an infinitesimal part of the Universe.
For all I know this vision of a God, made by man to fill the needs of man, will probably be dominant for many millennia. Only if and when the cognitive powers of man are substantially extended will we be able to absorb the enormous beauty that is all around us, and this will be able to feed us and seduce us to open even more to the whole. This can happen in many ways, for instance by much better education (schools as opportunities to explore the world in fun and interesting ways, in our own pace and direction), or through the use of eugenic technology that could make available the ability to reduce limitations in our cognitive powers (obviously I'm not speaking of reducing aggressiveness or any other personality traits - eugenics will be beneficial only if it increases freedom for individuals) or through the advancement of cybernetic systems. Intelligent beings with highly developed cognitive powers, in a free and open society, and with much longer live spans would presumably find easier to be open to the beauty of the non-human universe. Although having no longer the limitations or prejudices of typical human beings would make it counter intuitive to call them humans.