Happy Animality

I have been in the thick of writing my senior thesis--The End of Liberty--well, actually, in the thick of trying to find the time to write it...anyway, in the course of my research I came across this picture of a sculpture ("The Young Family") by Australian sculpter Patricia Piccinini, which, although meant to depict a transgenic creature representing the biological "animalness" in humans, is in my mind a representation as well of the "animalness" (or potential animalness) of our non-physical identities. Could it be that our thoughts, our thought-worlds, our social organizations, are in fact shot through with animality on some very basic biological level? The point is mundane if taken in its simplest sense that we are, afterall mere mammals. And if we are in a very basic psycho-social sense animal, then what can this potentially say, for example, about some of our most cherished and enlightened ideas? Such as liberty. Such as equality. Such as democracy. Such as tolerance. The point I am trying to make in my thesis is not actually this point--but the more I study the more I realize that, even if we are much more than highly developed mammals (which I believe), I think that the state of the world makes a strong argument for the fact that human beings, under the guise of enlightened development and 'progress', are in fact becoming more animal-like everyday. Most importantly, we are becoming animal in the sense that we are losing our seemingly instinctive and distinctively human drive to self-reflect and critically engage the world as it is. In the course of this regress, I fear, we are losing the very freedom, the freedom to self-determine by critically engaging the world as a uniquely valuable and autonomous individual, that makes us most special as human beings--whatever, in the final analysis we happent to actually be.