Charles Foster's book "Being a Beast", is among the most bizarre I have ever read. The author, who is a lawyer, professor of law and a former vet, attempts life as a variety of animals. He often does this with his eight-year-old son Tom, who is a charming but highly dyslexic. Foster is seen eating worms, burrowing into earth as a badger and swimming naked in otter bins. Foster returns with a sequel, Being a Human. This book acknowledges the accusations of eccentricity, even madness, that were made in the previous book.
Foster's new work is a continuation of the previous project. However, this time Foster is not interested in understanding the brains or bodies of animals. His question is more close to home: What does it mean to be human. Foster begins his argument with a controversial point: the history of humanity is not one of progress. It is a tale of disenchantment, loss, and a world in which we live a limited, limited life. He says that few of us know what kind of creatures we are and sets out on a quest for answers.
The book's structure is a frenzied march through time. The longest section is the one that takes place in the Upper Palaeolithic period between 50,000 to 12,000 years ago. Foster says this is when humans were most authentic and essential. Foster and his loyal 13-year-old son Tom are now living in winter, and they are as intelligent and sensitive as ever. They live in Derbyshire woods as hunter/gatherers, eating roadkill and carrion.
Foster writes that the second section of the book takes place in the Neolithic. It was then that we began to feel bored and miserable.
Or, not eating at all. The book's central theme is that humans may have suffered the greatest loss in their quest for modernity, if they lost contact with the otherworldly, the unmentionable, and the mystical. Foster asserts that shamanic experiences are crucial to any inquiry into the origins of humankind. Regular meals, Foster claims, are dangerous. We were not meant to eat enough. Foster starts to go hungry, and Tom is allowed to eat. Foster sees shimmering lights as he fasts, believing that if he doesn't eat, it helps him to see the deeper parts of the world. He says that the last thing he ate was a hedgehog. Foster meets X, a man he calls X and his child. They are visionary mirrors of Foster, Tom and ghostly visitors from prehistoric times. He hears a song La Li-lii-li, which he believes to be the Upper Palaeolithic.
The second section of Foster's book is set in the Neolithic around 12,000 years ago, when Foster says we began to feel bored and miserable. Foster says that this was the time when humans began to become more dependent on the natural world and moved from hunters-gatherers to farmers and from wandering nomads into settlers. Tom is absent from the later sections. He is a child in the Upper Palaeolithic, and there is no place for him at the Neolithic's dark places: the Abattoir where Foster meets Steve the Peedo, the pesticide-soaked industrial farms, and the Fox Hunt (all of which Foster considers the logical conclusion of Neolithic processes).
The Enlightenment is the final section of the book. Here the pernicious Neolithic methods were codified and enshrined. Where the last elements and mysticism of mysticism are lost to the hyper-rationality and 18th-century scientists, philosophers and scientists, the Enlightenment is the final section. We were finally forced to live a modern life in prison, where we are subject to delusions of security, such as pension policies and cunning investments.
Foster is a charming writer and a companion through this sometimes frustrating book. Foster's argument that we have lost something as a species in our transition from wandering animism into settled civilisation is strong. It is supported by many learned quotations and dense footnotes. However, the reader can also find evidence to support the thesis in Foster's own life. The pages of Being a Human reveal a shadow-book in which Foster uses the freedom of the hunter/gatherer tribesman to vent against the constraints of his suburban Oxford life as a father to six children and husband of a prudent woman.
Foster must be an absolute nightmare to live with. He says that he prefers to travel alone abroad to avoid the vicariousness effect. I play the whistles, flutes, and a little Celtic Harp in folk sessions at pubs. I also play the trumpet in college jazz bands. I only call on my family when I need them to check my back for ticks or feed me lasagne. He hops onto a boat to Bilbao and wants to be seated in a bar with stevedores, pimps, and Basque speakers.
Foster's book, Being a Human, aims to define what it takes to thrive. It is clear that Foster wants to be free from the trappings and conventions modernity brings, as well as the obligations and obligations that come with adulthood. It's not a manifesto for living, and Foster doesn't seem happier for all his shamanic experimentation and gallivanting. It makes for a great, if somewhat bizarre, read as a book subject.
