A Grain of Person

On whales, sand and selfhood

Not long ago I listened to an episode of the podcast Radiolab that really stuck in my mind. It described a form of subjectivity that differed so vastly from the human way of experiencing the world that it was very difficult to imagine what it might feel like, even though I could appreciate that it sounded… well, better. The episode was called ‘The World’s Smartest Animal’ and it was a live show in which two science writers and two comedians competed to convince a panel of judges that their chosen animal was the smartest.

The Stanford science historian Laurel Braitman argued the case of the sperm whale. She told the panel that whales use echolocation to communicate, which functions a bit like boat sonar: a sound goes out, bounces off an object and comes back, thereby communicating information about that object’s identity and whereabouts. Unlike boats, however, ‘animal sonar also comes back as a physical feeling’. To the best of our understanding it isn’t just a sensory experience, but an emotional one too.

We can’t name those emotions, not having this ability ourselves, so sperm whale subjectivity has dimensions that we can’t even imagine, and it’s possible that they have a completely different sense of self to our own. Braitman explained that in the mid 1980s,

a neuropsychologist named Harry Jerison proposed that echolocative communications that are emotional in nature — so, like, grief or joy — might be experienced by whales and dolphins as more than shared information: they actually might come in as shared feelings. … Jerison thought this might give rise to … [a] communal self, meaning that whales and dolphins might not say “I” — they might always be a “we”. We are sad, we are sick.

There is some evidence for this in cases of whales who collectively beach themselves and die, even though later analysis shows that only one or two out of dozens of them were actually unwell. (A noise of sorrow came from the audience at this point.) Imagine the inherent compassion of a species who have no need of empathy because they experience others’ feelings as their own.

A few weeks later, quite by chance, I listened to another episode of Radiolab that happened to explore this very idea — collective selfhood — through a completely different lens. It was called ‘Small Potatoes’ and it was a celebration of ordinary, unsung objects. It borrowed one of its sections from another podcast, Everything Is Alive, in which actors assume the identities of an array of ‘inanimate’ objects — a balloon, a towel, a pregnancy test — and sit down to be interviewed, with gravity and seriousness, about their lives. The clip in question opened with a male voice saying: ‘My name is Chioke, and I am a grain of sand.’

Chioke talked for a while about his experience of being a sand-grain, and then he said something very profound about sand-selfhood:

Chioke: If there’s one difference between them and, uh, I… Sorry, I’m having trouble with the pronouns. You know, we’re doing this interview, and I’m a grain of sand.

Interviewer: Yep.

C: But that’s not really the way I would think of myself. Normally, I would just say “we are sand”.

I: Okay.

C: So you see that there’s the kind of mass noun thing happening. And it’s weird to talk to you because … you don’t seem to have a mass noun arrangement. So you say of yourself that you’re a person, right?

I: Yeah, I would say “I am a person”.

C: So, like, why aren’t you a grain of person?

I: Why do I not consider myself as a fraction of all of humanity?

C: Yeah. Like, that makes more sense. It just seems to me that if you recognised the degree to which you owed your existence to other people, you might also be nicer to other people.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since. We are just ‘grains of person’. Why don’t we understand ourselves that way?

It’s interesting that the actor chose to give Chioke a name, because it strikes me that a name would be null and void if you experienced the world as part of a collective self. The purpose of a name is to individuate: to mark someone out as distinct and self-contained. This collection of atoms = David. That collection of atoms = Harry. A defining part of being ‘Kate’ is the fact of not being ‘Ellen’ or ‘Nikki’ or ‘Abby’ or ‘Florence’ (though I know and love people called Ellen and Nikki and Abby and Florence).

But what if we’d never been given names, never been taught to think of ourselves as individuals? How would we understand our selves then?

The tendency to identify with the label allotted to us is scaled up across human cultures. We have family names to distinguish us from other families, country names to distinguish us from other countries. So often we amplify what separates us from those who identify with other names and not what makes us the same.

An extreme and terrible example of this is playing out in Gaza right now. Genocide is made possible by the belief in an irreconcilable difference between self and other, by the conviction that there is no common humanity between the bearers of one name and the bearers of another, that the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ can never come together to form a ‘we’.¹ It couldn’t happen if we understood ourselves not as separate things colliding, but as the interconnected outposts of one much larger thing. Like the children’s author Katherine Rundell wrote on Instagram after the bombing of the Rafah refugee camp on May 26th: ‘Our children are burning. There is no such thing, and never has been and never will be, as other people’s children.’

It’s in our nature, perhaps, for us to understand ourselves in multiple dimensions and other people in singular ones, the number of dimensions we see diminishing steadily as we move outwards from ourselves and our children via loved ones, friends, colleagues, neighbours, acquaintances, people on the internet and strangers on the street. Eventually we get to the people who make up the majority of our species. We know they must exist out there somewhere — there are over eight billion humans on the planet, after all — but most of them we’ve never seen or heard of, and it is easy to persuade ourselves that they don’t have any dimensions at all.

What would it be like, I wonder, if the realness and solidity of all those anonymous people increased at the same time as our own diminished, so that we no longer saw ourselves as standing out in relief against a flat backdrop of unknowable otherness, but rather as tiny pieces in a vast network of interconnections?

I don’t know if we can ever truly learn to think of ourselves as ‘grains of person’, but I do feel, increasingly, that we have a moral obligation to try.

1. I know genocide is still a contested term in this conflict, but I’m following the example of Aryeh Neier, the co-founder of Human Rights Watch.