An Ode to Adhesives

Apes are known to use tools. Gorillas have been seen to use sticks to gauge depths of water, and chimpanzees use stones to crack open nuts. But using a simple object to help achieve an end is a far cry from combining two different objects and creating a completely original tool. As soon as early humans started experimenting with tools, they must've realized one thing beforehand—that the function of an object may override its original intent. A to B makes C, B to C makes something entirely different. With that historically significant moment came the idea of adhesives.

Adhesives, a term used for a chemical substance that attaches one thing to another, hold our society together. They are the binding point behind humanity, they represent our very intelligence and ability to interact with nature in a truly original way. About 280,000 years ago humans were making complex spears with stone blades attached. Of course, the attaching must have been the hardest part. This process of attaching objects stems from the power that humans have of uniting. We seem to understand, more than any other creature that we know of, that two things can make one.

It is amazing that this concept is hardly ever talked about. Doing a quick search on the internet will get you nowhere. Yet, it surrounds us. If you look at any complex man-made object, you will see that it was made of multiple things. There are two ways to do this; the chemical and the mechanical (for example glue and nails). We have come to a point where our daily lives never expose us to the reality of the situation: without adhesives, our society would fall apart.

Adhesives go further than chemical substances. A certain human essence is important in determining what makes our mind different from others. For example, throughout history, some of societies' rules were held in place using the “institution of marriage.” It is not by chance that we call marriage a “bond.” It literally unites two people (or more), for the benefit of cultural stability. One look at simple examples of unity, relationships, and attachment in culture (fraternity, filial love, love for the country and love for material objects, to name a few) will lead philosophers and psychologists to value their theoretical and scientific importance.

Another great example of this abstract thought that humans use to imagine the non-real is the Internet. The concept itself is just so amazing, when you get right down to it. It is basically, with some rules and exceptions, a non-real mathematical projection of our thoughts, shared by close to a billion people. Non-real things are traded, bought, and sold. People are making money off of abstract thoughts that have little to do with real life. All these projections are connected in an intricate system, the Web, a concept that points to our obsession with linking thoughts and images. The internet is a projection of our adhesive-oriented mind.

These abstract thoughts can be regarded as a general trend in human behaviour and thinking. Even those of us of the lowest intelligence can “imagine” things happening, and extend our mind into the future. This, to psychologists, marks the importance of our frontal lobe: it gives us the ability to plan ahead. But our mind does, most certainly, go deeper than that. Adhesives, the topic of this essay, can be used as a metaphor for this concept: the concept of our ability to draw connections between non-real identities.

Humankind has to be given credit, not for making these amazing structures, but for making that leap from instinct to abstract thought, to creativity. Our thoughts were like little objects floating around in a whirlpool of the “phenomena”, and creativity linked those thoughts together. A great example is the ape's discovery of the added function of the bone in the beginning of Kubrick's Space Odyssey. Imagine this first epic moment: the moment when early man gained the ability to connect two entirely different thoughts, and make them into something entirely new.

And that is precisely why our society is built upon these connections. Not only is the table that supports your computer made of multiple materials glued together, but every single thought that you have had since you could process information has been due to this exact same principle of connecting the abstract. Man did not start progress (as some psychologists claim) as soon as he could project his thoughts on his future, but instead the divine moment of evolution came when the ape projected in the first place. This projection was just that: an imagination that defied apparent reality outside the mind. It was a simple thought, probably very simple, but all it did was link two very different things, and put them together. In the same way that chimps use sticks to dig out termites, that first “man” used his mind to imagine something. This is the basic underlying notion of mathematics, society, and our “conscious” mind.

You can comment on this article on the Discussion Page