A grizzly bear weighs more than 1,000 pounds, can run faster than a racehorse, and possesses claws and teeth that make human beings look laughably ill-equipped for survival. Yet in The Edge, it is not the bear that ultimately demonstrates superiority. It is the human mind.
This movie, made decades ago, is something that I keep coming back to. I am drawn to this movie because of its theme — the edge that humans have over other species. The edge that enables us to thrive in a natural world that is often hostile. That edge is not an opposable thumb but our specific consciousness which houses the faculty of reason. It is reason that allows humans to shape the world in a manner that is conducive to human survival, beating back lions, tigers, wolves, floods, hurricanes, and — critically — infectious diseases. It is also the case that the knowledge discovered by one human mind can be acquired by another, creating a web of information flow that serves to promote human life beyond the temporal and spatial bounds it was discovered in.
The Edge is fundamentally about thinking and using one’s mind to solve problems related to survival. In the film, a group of men are stranded in the wilderness. However, it is not the physically strongest human that flourishes but the one most committed to the use of reason. As they square off against the elements and the superior physical prowess of bears, it is the mind that triumphs. This is not surprising. As the philosopher Ayn Rand identified, and the film dramatizes, reason is man’s means of survival.
Darwin understood that humanity’s distinctive adaptation was not speed, strength, claws, or teeth. It was intelligence. Reason, he wrote, stands “at the summit” of mankind’s mental faculties. Humans survive not by adapting themselves to every environment, but by adapting the environment to themselves.
As such, it is the human capacity to reason that stands as the ultimate resource to call upon for survival issues.
These survival issues most definitely extend beyond bears. The bear in The Edge is simply a stand-in for nature’s threats. For most of human history, those threats included yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, plague, tuberculosis, and influenza and only in recent generations have some humans secured freedom from the disruption, death, and despair that characterizes infectious disease outbreaks.
The story of infectious disease is the story of reason applied to nature. Smallpox did not disappear because nature became kinder. Cholera was not defeated because rivers became cleaner. Yellow fever did not retreat because mosquitoes became less dangerous.
Human beings identified causes, discovered mechanisms, tested hypotheses, and transformed knowledge into action. Every vaccine, antibiotic, sanitation system, intensive care unit, and genomic surveillance network is reason made tangible.
Left to her own devices, Mother Nature would kill us. Survival rdepends on the ability to think. It is not automatic; it is an achievement. The edge that separates humanity from the bear, the mosquito, and the microbe is ultimately the same edge dramatized in the film: the reasoning mind.