13 A Culture of Hands

I now return to soberer territory, at least in matters of style. The advent of the bipedal gait was the critical moment in human evolution, because it liberated the hands from locomotion duties. If we were not walking on our hands, we could use them for other things. (I remind the reader of my capacious use of “we” to refer to our species and to our ancestors, going back to our arboreal ancestors. At no point was H. sapiens a tree-dweller, though our ancestors were. Of course, speciation takes place gradually, so that species boundaries are not really as sharp historically as they may appear today.) In our new terrestrial existence the hands were also no longer used for clinging and climbing, or much less so if we combined habitats. This led to a redeployment in the direction of tools. Tools impelled us to new psychological and physical formations, with the hand and brain evolving together. Language eventually took root, centered initially on the hands. In due course language migrated to the voice, leaving the hands free for other tasks, of which there are now a great many. As human animals refined and consolidated their advances, a further development eventually took place: the growth of culture. Thus culture was made possible by the bipedal gait, because free hands were the engine of the entire cultural process. We would accordingly expect that the origins of culture would be manifest in the aspects of current human life that we call culture. If the hands explain the Transition, they should have left their fingerprints on what they produced. Our culture should be a culture of hands.

It is noteworthy that there is no quadrupedal culture: no quadrupedal species has developed culture, despite their evolutionary success as measured along other dimensions. Not even the semiquadrupeds among our nearest primate relatives have evolved anything that compares to human culture. Their hands are too busy acting as feet, among other things. Perhaps the ideal arrangement for us would have been quadrupedal locomotion combined with a pair of free hands; then we would have had the advantages of four legs, as well as enjoying hand freedom. As it is, we must accept the drawbacks of the upright two-legged posture as the price we pay for our intelligent hands. Given the principle of ancestral constraint, the ideal six-limbed anatomy was just not an accessible trait for us: so we are stuck firmly in the line of the tetrapods. Thus we have evolved as an awkward and unsteady species, but one endowed with a rich self-created culture—instead of being a firm-footed graceful species without culture. The human creature is a tottering savant, a vertically challenged sophisticate. His brain is large, but it can easily come crashing down. In evolution everything is a trade-off.

In this chapter I shall survey the contribution of the hand to human culture. This will mainly take the form of a listing of facts. There is little that is controversial here; we just need to remind ourselves of what we already know and take the measure of that knowledge. The role of the hand in culture is plain for all to see.

Let me begin with a famous work of art, because it expresses our theme perfectly: Michelangelo’s depiction of God and Adam at the Creation in the Sistine Chapel. As you will recall, this painting represents God and Adam as almost touching forefingers, with their hands at the focus of the scene, as determined by the gaze of the two central figures. The hands as elaborate pointing and gripping organs are made manifest to the viewer. Originative power is credited to God’s hand, which is firmer and more potent than Adam’s relatively limp hand (matched by his flaccid penis, it may be noticed). It is easy to read the picture as recording and celebrating the creative and definitive role of the hand in human existence. We come from God’s originative hand and we are most ourselves in our own hands—they are the fulcrum and source of our existence as human. Spirit is infused into Adam by means of God’s mighty supernatural hand, going straight into the receptive hand of the first man. Thus biblical early man is represented as a being whose being consists in his handedness. Here myth and science coincide for once. It is not a bit surprising that Michelangelo would take this view, seeing that as an artist his own being and spirit reside in the power of his hands. The creative power of the hand—it can depict even divine creation itself—would have been obvious to the artist every day of his working life. The godlike power of the artist flows through his hands, as God’s power flows through his hands (I shall later comment on the role of the hands in religion generally). It is therefore very natural that Michelangelo should here depict the Creation as an affair of hands. From my point of view, this work of art is an affirmation of the originative power of the hands in forging human culture—the human spirit as it has come to exist. I think also that the artist is hinting at a minor irony about this: despite the massive and formidable muscularity of the figures of God and Adam, it is the physically much less imposing hand that carries the weight of human achievement and uniqueness. Great power can come in small packages, it seems to be saying. We take the smallness of our hands for granted, as we employ them for a thousand tasks, but they loom very large in our success as a species—they are, so to speak, our compact secret weapons. This is another irony to add to the general irony of our species success (to which I return in the final chapter). Like a seed, the hand is small compared to what it can produce.¹

First consider visual art. From primitive cave paintings to all subsequent visual art, the hand has been the implement of creation. Early man did not paint with his foot or nose or elbow. Only the hand has the motor delicacy necessary to apply paint to surface with the requisite finesse. Perhaps man first conceived of painting when he noticed the ability of his fingers to make well-formed shapes in the sand or in mud. This was the preadaptation for pigment painting on walls: from finger painting in mud to tool painting on walls with pigment. Training the hand would be essential, but this was already in full flow with toolmaking and use. Perhaps too the representational mimicry of the hand gave early man the idea of other forms of mimicry, in which the medium of mimicry is applied by the hand rather than simply being the hand. Sculpture arises naturally from painting and is equally indebted to the hand. Here again early man had been molding the world with his hands for a good while in toolmaking, so the basic sculptural skills would be in place already. Sculpting is only a few evolutionary increments away from making axes and spears. It is all craftsmanship and “handiwork.” Music required the manual production of instruments, and instruments are perforce played with the hands. Music is appreciated with the ears, as painting is appreciated with the eyes: but ears and eyes are impotent as creators of art—they must rely on the talents of other organs of the body. Aesthetic bliss, delivered by the senses, needs to get its hands dirty—it needs manual labor. The artist is an artisan: she works with her hands. She is also a tool-user, a descendant of early tool-users, fighting to survive. There is urgency in the artist’s actions; art is not just playing around. Art is manual tool use elevated to the level of the aesthetic. Art thus has its origins in biological necessity.

Technology follows much the same pattern. Every machine needs an operator interface. A machine needs to interact with the human body in such a way that the human will can influence its actions. Thus machines always have an input part and an output part: the part where the human operator acts and the part where the machine acts. A machine needs workable controls, as well as determinate practical effects. This is as true for a hammer as it is for a spaceship. There is the “business end” of the machine and there is the “user end.” The user end consists of assorted buttons, levers, wheels, pads, handles, pedals, keys, grips, and what not. Machines must be designed to do a job, but also to be accessible to the human anatomy. That is indeed the essence of a tool: an object that performs a function and can be humanly operated. Now it is true that not every machine is hand-operated, but the vast majority are; and that is because most of our machines require delicate, controlled motions and grips of which only the hands are capable. There would be no point in having the intelligence to make machines if you did not possess a bodily organ that could properly operate them. Without hands, machines would be de trop. Thus our technological culture is primarily a handheld culture. If we all developed some strange hand ailment that derailed our manual manipulations, our entire technological culture would grind to a sickening halt. Tools have advanced tremendously since the first primitive axes and scrapers, but in one respect they are still in the Stone Age—they still need the human hand, and that has not changed much in a long while. The design of a lever in a spaceship is not so different from the design of an axe handle. Tools and technology must be handled, and that requires a part that fits the human hand. What is amazing is how much technology has amplified the gap between what the hand can do by itself and what it can bring about by the use of hand-operated devices. But there has been hardly any advance in how tools are operated, simply because the hand has stayed pretty constant for thousands of years. If we ever develop a user interface that works directly with the brain, then tools will be differently designed; but as things are, the hand decides what designs are humanly workable. This is why the design of the hand is written all over the design of our machines, from cups to computers.

Writing obviously depends on the hand, as we humans are constituted. If language originally developed through the hands, as suggested earlier, then writing is a natural way to use language for humans. But, even with speech in command of most communication, we depend on the hand to write. The reason again is simply that no other organ of the body has the necessary dexterity and delicate gripping capability. Whales and dolphins can be credited with language but not with writing, because their fins and mouths are just not up to the task, even if other conditions were favorable for writing to develop. Writing has obviously played an enormous part in forming human culture, but it all depends on having a hand that is as agile and trainable as ours. Being intelligent enough to invent writing is not enough; you also need a bodily organ that can translate that intelligence into action, namely the hand. Fortunately the (forced) adoption of bipedalism led to such a hand. We would not be writing anything if we still lived as quadrupeds in trees. It was our dizzying descent to the ground that led ultimately to our literacy. Penmanship has replaced brachiation. If writing is the transmission of collective memory, then the hand is the agent of that transmission. It makes cumulative intergenerational knowledge possible.²

Play and sport make up a large part of human culture in the broad sense. The hands are inherently playful, it seems. They want to play. So there are a great many games involving the hand—far too many to list. It is true that not all games or sports involve the hands directly—soccer being the obvious example (but even here the hands come into play at certain points: the throw-in, goalkeeping). But the hands play an indispensable role in a great many types of game, and skill with them is crucial (remember that we must include the whole support system of the hand in our conception of the hand—wrist, arm, and so on). There are almost as many types of grip are there are sports—compare tennis and discus, archery and shot put. Eliminate the hand from games and sports and you eliminate nearly all of these activities. People evidently derive great pleasure from the playful exercise of the hands, as well as meaningful challenge. So the hands centrally gratify the desire of the human being to play—no doubt one of our deepest urges. They thus contribute to human flourishing. The hands amplify the scope of human play well beyond the play of our ape ancestors. They make us into Homo ludens as well as Homo sapiens. I like to think that in the small communities of early man there existed the opportunity for the playful use of the hand, as well as the grit and grind of toolmaking. When, I wonder, did they discover the simple game of catch? That must have cheered them up considerably. It may even have compensated partially for the loss of the arboreal habitat, with all of its opportunities for playful activity (brachiating looks delightful). Leisure activities, as well as work, center on the hand.

I have already remarked on the hands in relation to social life, so there is not much new to add. Greeting, grooming, signaling, stroking, beckoning, pointing—these are all manual acts. So are fighting, stealing, and strangling. The hand gives us the good, the bad, and the ugly. For all its virtues, the hand is also a criminal organ—a way to commit bad acts. It is difficult to be an effective thief without thieving hands. Murder invariably involves hands. The hand can save life, but it can also take life. The hand must accordingly be punished for its wicked ways—by caning, handcuffing, even amputation. The Devil finds work for idle hands, as the saying goes—devilish work. The hands are so naturally active that they turn readily to bad or imprudent acts as well as good. We thus discipline children in the proper use of their hands: “no fidgeting,” “keep your hands clean,” “don’t pick your nose,” “don’t stuff your hands in your pockets,” “cross your arms,” “don’t hit your neighbor.” The hands need to be policed and sometimes punished. Nor must the hand stray where it does not belong. Some things may not be touched. Some people are declared “untouchable.” Thus the hand is woven into social relations at every turn. The social fabric is threaded with digits. The creation of society, as we know it today, traces back to the liberation of the hands that followed our arboreal descent. Other social species, such as ants, rely on other mechanisms to regulate society; but in human society it is the hands that largely structure our interactions. As a social being, one of the first things a human child must learn is how to use his or her hands in public—correct hand deportment. Hand etiquette is de rigueur.³

Finally, a few words on the hands and religion. Hands play an important role in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. He works with his hands as a carpenter; he performs miracles with his hands; his hands are pierced in the Crucifixion, thus immobilizing and torturing them. In religious iconography, Jesus’ hands are often depicted as slender and gentle. One does not think of his hands as sweaty or dirty or calloused. Healing (putative) typically involves “the laying on of hands.” In prayer the hands are pressed symmetrically together in supplication. Priests perform ritual hand gestures and touch parishioners in stylized ways. Religious ritual is hand centered. We speak of “God’s handiwork” and say that our fate “is in God’s hands.” Then there are stage magicians and “card sharps” with tricky hands, working their “magic.” Wizards tend to perform their magical feats with handheld wands. Magic seems to hover around the hands. They have a mystical aura in many traditions. Perhaps this traces back to those ancient evenings when humans first noticed the remarkable powers of their hands, and marveled. Maybe the member of the group with the most dexterous hands was the most revered, the most “holy.” Indeed, I would say that the naturally evolved human hand is the nearest thing to magic in the known universe—though it is a perfectly natural biological organ that evolved from the fin of a fish. It is not surprising if its powers have been expressed in supernatural terms. We tend to think the most virtuous among us have beautiful hands, and the hands of the Devil are regularly depicted as hooves or claws. The hand of the Wicked Witch is always a thing of horror—bony, sharp, misshapen, discolored, terrifying. Religious, aesthetic, and moral are here intertwined in the hand, as if it condenses much in our spiritual condition. In the hand we think we glimpse our own transcendence of nature—what sets us magnificently apart. But, of course, we are as much creatures of nature as any other species, hands included; we are just natural creatures of another type, and quite continuous with what came before. The human hand, as it now exists, is a modification of a preexisting natural form, going back through countless generations to the fin of the humble lobe fish (now long extinct). But the modifications have wrought tremendous changes in efficacy and centrality. In religious imagery the hand is celebrated and elevated, though through a prism of superstition. We can appreciate the kernel of truth in this antiquated mode of thinking, though we rightly discard the supernatural trappings. The hand can be impressive without being in any way supernatural. Indeed, what is remarkable about it is precisely that it is a natural product.⁴