The Intelligence of Anthro-Apology
Anthro-Apology: The recurrent tendency of a species to generate increasingly sophisticated explanations for why it is exactly the sort of species it had already decided it wished to be.
Anthro-apology examines the mechanisms by which Homo sapiens repeatedly explains its own behaviour in ways that preserve self-esteem while avoiding substantive revision. Intelligence occupies a central place within this apologetic tradition, functioning less as an observed property than as a moral distinction conferred retrospectively upon behaviours the culture already admires.
Consider the egg. M.F.K. Fisher, in her slim and impeccably argued Consider the Oyster, never actually considers the egg—an omission that the food anthropologist Dana Cordell once described as “the single most revealing gap in twentieth-century culinary literature.” Yet the egg has served, across cultures and millennia, as the primary metaphor for latent potential, for the thing that has not yet become what it obviously will. Intelligence, within the anthro-apologetic tradition, operates in exactly the same way: it names the potential we already credit ourselves with before any evidence of its expression arrives. We do not detect intelligence and then celebrate it; we celebrate the celebratable and then diagnose it as intelligence after the fact. The shell comes first. What’s inside it we decide later.
The Roman Empire understood this mechanism with extraordinary clarity, which is why the historian Mary Beard, in SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, notes that Roman civic identity depended far less on what Romans actually did than on an elaborate and self-reinforcing mythology of what Romans were inherently capable of doing. The Romans did not merely conquer; they conquered intelligently, which is to say, in the manner that their historians judged superior once the conquest was complete. The retroactive certification of intelligence as the cause of success rather than success as merely one possible outcome of many causes—this is anthro-apology operating at civilisational scale. The Empire was never simply an Empire. It was always already proof of something the Romans believed about themselves before they built a single aqueduct.
What makes this tendency so durable is that it feels, from the inside, like honest reckoning. The anthropologist who identifies a behaviour as uniquely intelligent genuinely believes she has observed something. She has not merely projected, she has measured. But the archaeo-mythologist Solvei Brandtberg has argued, with characteristic bluntness, that “every instrument we use to measure the intelligence of our species was designed by members of that species who had already concluded the measurement would flatter them.” The circular architecture of this project is not a flaw that practitioners work to correct; it is the project’s load-bearing wall.
Lewis Carroll understood the problem intuitively, which is perhaps why Alice, tumbling through Wonderland, encounters a world in which the rules of meaning-making are established not by logic but by authority and convention. When Humpty Dumpty informs her that a word means whatever he chooses it to mean, neither more nor less, she objects—but weakly, because she recognises that his version of the rule is not categorically different from the version operating in the world she fell from. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is not, as its children’s packaging suggests, a book about the absurdity of nonsense. It is a book about the absurdity of sense—specifically, about the way that the powerful name things and then use the names as evidence that the things exist as named. Intelligence, as a category, descends from exactly this tradition. The word names a quality; the quality is then located most abundantly in those who named it; their abundance of it confirms the value of the name.
This circularity is not an accidental feature of how cultures talk about intelligence; it is the mechanism by which the category reproduces itself. Brandtberg again, from her controversial lecture series at Uppsala: “The species that defines intelligence will always find intelligence wherever it finds itself, and will always find itself wherever intelligence, properly understood, resides.” Her critics called this unfalsifiable. Her defenders called it a description of how unfalsifiability works in practice. Both groups were probably correct, which is itself a demonstration of the phenomenon she was describing.
The anthro-apologetic tradition reaches perhaps its most refined expression in the modern study of cognition, where researchers have spent considerable effort establishing that humans possess capabilities that other animals lack, and then discovering, successively, that those same capabilities exist in other animals, and then refining the definition of the capability until it is established once more that humans possess the refined version uniquely. Language, tool use, theory of mind, emotional complexity, cultural transmission—each has followed this arc. The discovery that crows use tools prompted not a revision of tool use as a marker of superior cognition but a study of whether crow tool use was really the right kind of tool use, and whether crows understood their tools conceptually in the way humans did, and whether conceptual understanding was itself the correct threshold. The threshold shifts to wherever the human stands.
None of this represents dishonesty in any individual scientist. The researchers who designed those studies brought genuine rigour and genuine curiosity to their work. The anthro-apologetic tendency does not operate through individual bad faith; it operates through the collective inheritance of frameworks that feel, to those working within them, like neutral instruments. The fish cannot see the water, not because the fish lacks intelligence—you will notice the irony—but because the fish has never been outside it. Anthropology began as the scientific study of human cultures and immediately encountered the problem that the scientists were themselves members of a human culture, measuring human cultures with instruments their own human culture had produced. The discipline has spent roughly a century and a half developing increasingly sophisticated methods for accounting for this problem, and has done so in ways that consistently confirm the sophistication and self-awareness of the discipline. Which is to say, the anthro-apologetic tendency colonised the discipline designed to expose it, and then ran it from the inside.
What would a genuinely non-apologetic account of human intelligence look like? The question is more interesting than any available answer, because the moment one begins constructing the account, one must deploy the very cognitive tools whose neutrality is in question. One must decide what counts as intelligence, and one must make that decision using judgement, and judgement is exactly the faculty whose objectivity is disputed. The knot tightens the harder one pulls at it. This is not a counsel of despair—it is a description of a real epistemic situation—but it does suggest that the honest position is one of sustained irresolution rather than methodological confidence.
The species that writes its own story will write a flattering one. This is not unique to humans; it is probably true of any sufficiently self-reflective system. But humans have developed, over the course of several thousand years of recorded self-reflection, an unusually elaborate set of techniques for making flattery look like rigour. Philosophy, science, theology, art criticism, literary theory, and cognitive neuroscience have each, at various moments, provided the legitimising framework within which the flattery proceeds with a straight face. Intelligence is the name of the flattery’s conclusion. Anthro-apology is the name of the method.
What the species owes itself, and perhaps what is most genuinely intelligent about it when it achieves this, is the occasional willingness to sit with that description without immediately explaining why, on reflection, the description is itself a sign of the species’ unusual capacity for self-awareness, and therefore, once again, evidence of precisely the intelligence that was ever so briefly under scrutiny.
(1) Readers with an interest in the neurological substrates of nursery rhyme cognition may wish to consult the ongoing series of working papers emerging from the Peripheral Cognition Laboratory at the University of East Mercia, provisionally titled The Humpty Dumpty Cascade: Implications of Indiscriminate Intelligence Frameworks for Cognitive Cartography, following the identification by cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Piers Calloway-Fitch of a discrete cortical region—informally designated the “ovoid recognition node”—that exhibits heightened activation in subjects upon hearing the name Humpty Dumpty spoken aloud. The papers raise the uncomfortable possibility that if this region is accepted as the anatomical seat of a particular form of pattern recognition, and if pattern recognition is accepted as a proxy for intelligence, then intelligence as a measurable phenomenon becomes definitionally anchored to a response originally evolved for identifying large, unstable, egg-shaped objects on narrow surfaces. The third paper in the series, When the Wall Is the Measure: Towards a Non-Humpty Intelligence Framework, has not yet been published, reportedly because the review committee could not agree on whether their disagreement was itself evidence of the problem.
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