Anthropomorphism - Genius or stupid?

One recalls, in the Indian education system, memories of having to endure English as taught in the British schooling system for 12 years before properly learning it from subtitles to American films and TV. In course of the education, many concepts imprisoned on paper by Messrs Wren and Martin subconsciously entered our brains. Let’s analyse one such concept: anthropomorphism, i.e. the tendency of writers to assign human traits to non-human characters or things.

To be brutally honest, it comes across as absolutely ridiculous. If anything, the world as we know it is going in the opposite direction. We expect our cricketers to be run machines, our politicians to be truth machines and our domestic help to be, well, machines. In fact, we are actively working towards the mechanization of the human species by becoming expectation machines ourselves and making our children robots. In other words, with our increasing interaction with technology, we can safely be accused of becoming increasingly inconsiderate towards fellow humans over the years.

The inconsiderateness index of humans shot up massively when a suit at Disney decided that toys needed to have feelings for him to make money. That has led to a domino effect where we are being told that everything from video game characters and emojis to feelings themselves are conscious. We used to live in a period where children used toys as nothing but projectiles and the ‘unbreakable’ label on them as a challenge. The days are not far when you would be burdened by the moral implications of crashing a Hot Wheels car into a pile of other cars, sending them flying. As a former connoisseur of Hot Wheels crashes, the author can attest to the fact that watching shiny bits of metal and plastic be thrown around the room would be remarkably less fun if one had to debate later on whether one’s car felt like it was a gladiator enslaved to do one’s bidding, and possibly perish in the process.

It’s not just limited to toys as well. The first non-humans to get voices and traits were animals. Having studied the Warner Brothers, imagine my surprise when the guy at the zoo I first went to told me that ducks and rabbits do not, in fact, spend their whole days scheming against each other. Over time, I am convinced that anthropomorphism is just a plot device created by artists who cannot, or will not, animate human characters for the enjoyment of the audiences.

This is not to say that this cruel concept is limited only to toys. The largest victims of tacked-on human traits are pets. If the internet is to be believed (indeed a topic of great debate in itself in the present day), millennials would rather care for a pet than a human child. This is not only against conventional logic in that a human child has a better chance of developing human traits than dogs or cats, it has also led to the invasion of the internet by puppies and kittens being subjected to events in human  lives. It isn’t funny when you put tiny spectacles on a cat and post it to social media, and the cat isn’t thinking “Oh I hate this so much I’m going to knock over something as revenge for this humiliation” when you do it. It’s a cat. The extent of its thought is probably where its next meal is coming from. My point is, a human as an animal is the most advanced and all that but there is no need to mock those with less intellect than (some of) our species. It is time, then, to call a spade a spade and just leave it at that.

I am willing to concede that it is okay to form an emotional connect with some objects. It is okay, for example, to have a lucky pen. It is okay to have a food item of preference in stressful situations. It is okay to apologize to your motorcycle after hitting pothole after pothole on your way back from work. It’s a motorcycle, all it will say after you hit a pothole is ‘pssh’ from its shock absorbers and continue to ferry your body around. It might think of you as a pillock for a minute for subjecting it to torture, but nothing a good service won’t fix. Motorcycles are reliable buddies, and I make it a point to check on mine as often as I can. Like us, they have needs of food and clothing as well. In fact, I call mine Chetak after the Maharana’s legendary horse, and I just got him new shoes in time for the upcoming monsoons.

Anthropomorphism? On second thought, it’s alright, I guess.