What Is a Human?

Language, Mind, and Culture

By: James Paul Gee

Narrated by: Michael Puttonen

In a sweeping synthesis of new research in a number of different disciplines, this book argues that we humans are not who we think we are. As he explores the interconnections between cutting-edge work in bioanthropology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, human language and learning, and beyond, James Paul Gee advances, also, a personal philosophy of language, learning, and culture, informed by his decades of work across linguistics and the social sciences. Gee argues that our schools, institutions, legal systems, and societies are designed for creatures that do not exist, thus resulting in multiple, interacting crises, such as climate change, failing institutions, and the rise of nationalist nationalism.

As Gee constructs an understanding of the human that takes into account our social, collective, and historical nature, as established by recent research, he inspires listeners to reflect for themselves on the very question of who we are—a key consideration for anyone interested in society, government, schools, health, activism, culture and diversity, or even just survival.

©2020 John Paul Gee (P)2022 Post Hypnotic Press Inc.

Everything is a connected part of a larger system

An interesting listen that blends several fields (biology, chemistry, ecology, philosophy, and more) together into an informative read sure to catch even a layperson’s interest.
Personal anecdotes and recent research blend well in this entertaining title that would enrich any personal library.

Philosophy, Linguistics, Common Sense

I like listening to popular science audiobooks while doing my daily exercises or boring routine work. With a little Bluetooth earphone in one ear and a smartphone in your pocket, you have both your hands free, can still hear what is going on around you and you are mobile as well.

I have just finished listening to James Paul Gee’s What Is a Human? Language, Mind, and Culture, which was an enjoyable listen. I liked Michael Puttonen's narration and I had to keep reminding myself that he is not the person who wrote the book. Somehow his voice fit the book exceedingly well. I would recommend getting the eBook as well in order to be able to reread passages. Sometimes I found it a bit difficult not to let my mind wander elsewhere.

Terms like Terman the termite, Human-Made Monsters, Transacting Swarms and quite a few others will certainly stay with me. The comparison of his cat Bene’s behavior after a misfortune with his own imagined thoughts if something similar had happened to himself made me laugh out loud. And reminded me very much of myself. I wish I were more like Bene!

I like the fact that Mr. Gee doesn’t tell other people what to do, how to behave or what to think – but that he reserves the right to not “feel safe” with certain people around him. I can’t quite agree on his spiritual take on things or something like a spiritome. That is not me. But I don’t feel that I am pressured to go this way, either.

I do wonder, though, how Mr. Gee finds the time and energy to take care of his farm with numerous animals, while still writing papers and profound books like this as well as enjoying all kinds of computer games. :)

Thanks very much to NetGalley.com, Post Hypnotic Press Audiobooks and Amazon's ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange) demo for an ALC of this audiobook!

Humanity as a Man-Made Phenomenon

Like “freedom” or “democracy,” most people think we have a working definition of “humanity” in our heads, and it works adequately most of the time. But this loosey-goosey approach to human essentialism has caused negative outcomes throughout history. War and slavery have let powerful people strip the social designations of humanity from strangers, while belief in human exceptionalism currently threatens humanity’s very existence through anthropogenic climate change.

In his youth, James Paul Gee initially trained for the priesthood, but after losing his faith, he earned a Ph.D. in linguistics. This duality probably influenced the interdisciplinary nature of his subsequent activities, such as the tacitly public nature of literacy, or the social interpretation of video games. This book, written as Gee retired from active academia shortly before the pandemic, is the culmination of his life’s work.

Gee identifies human nature through a balance of extremes. Each human is utterly unique, he writes, but unique human attributes manifest themselves mainly through social context. Therefore we are separate, circumscribed by the limits of our senses in the world, but we’re never truly separate, as we rely utterly on relationships with other humans and the natural world. We lack “free will,” a sludgy and imprecise term, but that lack doesn’t justify determinism.

Past attempts to define humanity have fallen down on the lack of nuance inherent in brevity. Recall Plato defining a human as a “featherless biped,” and Diogenes responding by brandishing a plucked chicken. Gee makes no such mistake here. His definition of humanity sprawls over 200 pages, sometimes narrowly focused on precise scientific outcomes, other times expanding to encompass philosophic maunderings and autobiographical anecdotes. Brevity isn’t Gee’s weakness.

Humans, to Gee, exist in community; he uses termite mounds as his metaphor (sometimes stretched to breaking). Obviously we rely upon others to divide labor, collaborate on labor, and amplify our thought processes. But we don’t just exist in community; we are ourselves communities, what Gee calls “transacting swarms,” made up of our microbiomes and our relationship with the earth. We live in termite mounds, and we are termite mounds.

But Gee distrusts the mechanistic materialism of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Just as humans have organic biomes, we have “spiritomes,” the complex nest of spiritual realities in which humans dwell, individually and collectively. Though Gee, a lapsed Catholic, flinches from capital-T Truth claims, he believes human spiritual subjectivity is real enough to matter in making life-altering decisions. We all have relationships with evidently noncorporeal realities.

To this point, Gee’s thesis draws heavily on research from other thinkers academically grounded in the physical sciences. Not surprisingly, as a linguist, Gee’s anthropology becomes most dense and detailed when discussing how language shapes the human mental structure. Gee admits coming from a Chomskian generative linguistic background—fascinating but often abstruse. But exactly how his linguistic background shapes humans may surprise you.

Gee admits never reading poetry until after achieving his doctorate. How he studied linguistics without at least a historical survey of poetic metaphor eludes me, but whatever. Gee waxes rhapsodic about what a revelation it was discovering poetry in adulthood, unclouded by state-school “skillz drillz.” The unsullied joy he describes bespeaks a wonder that we who still read poetry often struggle to recapture. I’m downright jealous.

Despite his sometimes scientistic mindset, the humanities offer Gee’s greatest insight into the relationship between our outside, communal world, and the strictly internal neural landscape of senses and higher reasoning. We perceive the world according to our senses, and also according to our ability to describe it to others. His lavish fondness for poetry, especially Emily Dickinson, bespeaks a worldview in which subjectivity isn’t a weakness, but a defining trait.

To his credit, Gee doesn’t pretend his definition is more binding or global than it actually is. He acknowledges that any definition of humanity is provisional and circumscribed by the author’s background and prior knowledge. His language is colored by nuance and the frequent need to walk a tightrope between seemingly contradictory positions. He invites informed readers to challenge and refine his definition of humanity; he doesn’t just stand pat.

Now past seventy, Gee clearly writes with one eye angled toward how posterity will remember him. He clearly intends this volume as a capstone of his academic career. He finished writing in the months leading up to the pandemic, and one wonders how this book might’ve looked just six months later. Yet as a prolegomenon to future humanistic studies, Gee offers an exciting, readable, and purely joyful philosophic consideration.

I reccommend this for detatched, objective minds

Michael Puttonen has a lovely narrative voice. I appreciate how he approached this book with his performance.

However, the work itself was not engaging enough to keep my attention. Often the writer will arrive at a point, define the point with a more accurate linguistic term than what is commonly used, build up a detailed metaphor to show the term in practice and then repeat the thesis in a myriad of ways to drive that definition home. However, conclusions felt like an afterthought when those arrived and the meandering nature of this expository approach left me -- I really hate to say this -- bored.

For example, communities are interesting when described as "transacting swarms" and how that could be illustrated when it comes to insects and how they work in community, but that does not really delve into what that means for humans when those transactions result in the oppression of those without social advantage (i.e. how does a transacting swarm thrive when subjected to classism, racism, or sexism to oppress portions of the swarm for the short term benefit of a smaller portion of the swarm). If the point was made, then I missed it over the repetitive use of "transacting swarm" throughout the chapter as the point was driven home over and over again of how this definition works to help explain a facet of human nature.

In the books, I got as far as the concept of "fetish" as an alternate, non-sexual way of describing the mechanics of belief systems. It reached a passage about the value "fetish" attributed to money, where the narrator had to repeat several common sayings about money (i.e. "Time is Money." "It takes Money to Make Money", "Money is power.", etc etc.)... and that's when I realized I was bored. I could not make it past chapter 7. Perhaps there are great insights toward the middle and end of the book -- things that could connect these ideas to the seemingly chaotic nature of humans -- but I was not engaged in the meandering path enough to do so.

If this is a subject of study that interests you, if you are familiar with the author and his theories, if you have an objective, logical mind and wish for a new view on terminology in how some human concepts can be described in more interesting ways -- this may be the book for you. The narrator is certainly worth it.

However, if you see the fascinating cover and check it out as a subjective mood reader like me, you may be bored. This is not the sort of non-fiction book you'd read as you would an interesting podcast on an obscure topic. Nor are the concepts too complex to wrap your head around. It's simply... rather detached and meandering. It might leave you wondering what the point is to consider human concepts with different terminology.