Our race, as a whole, is very much in love with it's own sense of humanity and what it truly means to be human. The trouble is, everything breaks down and becomes more than a little unpleasant when we try to define what that actually means. The first things that usually come to mind are the noble “Hollywood†traits: notions such as love, honour, or conscious thought. But does not a dog care for her young? Don't bears defend their territory if another animal trespasses against it? Doesn't a snake evaluate the situation before it strikes? If were are going to define what makes us human, we have to find what traits we posses that other animals do not. One might say that our ability to change our environment for personal gain makes us unique, however beavers will decimate large forests with floods and dams.
So what sets us apart? What makes is human? The answer is hatred. There is no other creature in this world that could possibly wish the ill-fate of another for a futile attempt at some sort of emotional relief. A hippopotamus will kill to protect it's space. A wolf will kill for dominance. A lion will kill to eat for another day. However none of these animals will kill because it would “make them feel betterâ€.
Now the question I would like to leave you with is this: If a person was unable to hate, would that make him “inhuman� And is that necessarily a bad thing?
Chimpanzees hate. In fact they have exhibited gang behaviour, where they attacked another rival group of chimps, and killed one of them by ripping its balls and nails off. Seriously. I think it was an Attenborough documentary. Oh, and elephants in fact- they will kill out of hate. In India, there has been an unusual amount of killings caused by elephants to their owners. They even have the cunning to attack them in their sleep, and actually find where they sleep before killing them, as they obviously grow to hate them. They are made to stand in the hot sun all day at festivals listening to all sorts of what to them is strange noises, and can't get away. They become very stressed because of this, and it's all the worse if they happen to have gotten in while in musth. So yeah, nothing sets us apart from the animal kingdom. Humanity is a term derived for our civilization of rules and hierarchy, nothing more. If there is no humanity, we live as animals. It's just a term for living in a more sophisticated way than animals. In fact, our homes and buildings are essentially nothing more than the mud huts and caves we used to frequent hundreds of thousands of years ago. We simply made them more sturdy, found better materials etc. Everything is simply progression, simply because we have the brain power and the capability of recording things to remember and improve upon. If anything, that's our only superiority over animals- the intelligence/brain power to record what is in our mind on something, and of course our incredible memories and learning abilities. Now you might say our intelligence will obviously set us apart because if we're the only ones with the ability to express our memory, we are the only ones capable of acting upon hatred. But hatred is just an emotion- well it's not conscious anyway. If you take bad care of your dog, it will grow to dislike you, it will also learn what foods it does and does not like. So it is acting upon its dislikes, because it obviously won't eat a lot of a food it doesn't like.
The answer is simply our cognitive/thinking abilities over other animals and dexterity sets us apart. We can can all think on our feet and make decisions in the blink of an eye in any situation. Our minds are so incredibly fast and our bodies are so versatile that we can do so much more than any other animal.
As for racial hatred, primates and other intelligent life forms will reject what's different, but again we simply do it on a higher level. As for the creation of weapons, primates again are similar in the fact they use tools for various things, yet we simply have the wit to apply things to one another.
tl;dr we're more intelligent and fortunately have the physical abilites to go with it. End.
