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After Zizians and the efilist bombing I have tried to pay more attention to the cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.
A Substack titled "Don't Eat Honey" was published. Inside, the argument is made that to buy or consume honey is an unethical act for insect suffering-at-scale reasons. According to the essay, bees, like livestock, suffer quite a lot at the hands of beekeepers. That's a lot of bees. Thus the title: don't eat honey.
This particular post is high on assumption and light on rigor. It received outrage. Another post on Bentham's blog on insect suffering I recall as higher quality material for understanding. Did you know that composting is an unethical abomination? I'd never considered it!
'Suffering' presents an incommensurable problem. Suffering is a social construct. Suffering is the number and intensity of firing pain receptors over time. Suffering is how many days in a row I experienced boredom as a teenager. Still, science attempts to define and quantify suffering. An equation works out the math: how conscious a cricket is in relation to man, a cricket's assumed capacity to feel pain, the length of time it spends feeling pain, and so on. My prediction is we will figure out the consciousness part of the equation with stable meaning before we ever do so for suffering.
We will manage to rethink, remeasure, and find additional ways of suffering. People always have. Today, plants do not feel "pain", but tomorrow, pain may not a prerequisite for suffering. Maybe starvation becomes a moral imperative. If the slope sounds too slippery, please consider people have already built a (relatively unpopular) scaffolding to accept and impose costs at the expense of human comfort, life, and survival. Admittedly, that suffering may present an incommensurable problem doesn't negate any imperative to reduce it. Find more suffering? Reduce that, too. It does give me reason to question the limitations and guard rails of the social technology.
According to Wikipedia, negative utilitarians (NU) are sometimes categorized as strong NUs and weak NUs. This differentiates what I'd call fundamentalists --- who follow suffering minimizer logic to whatever ends -- to the milder "weak" utilitarians. The fundamentalist may advocate for suffering reduction at a cost that includes death, your neighbor's dog, or the continued existence of Slovenia-- the honey bee capitol of the world. Our anti-honey, anti-suffering advocate has previously demonstrated he values some positive utility when it comes to natalism, but much of his commenting audience appears more in the fundamentalist category.
One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future. That our great-grandchildren will look backwards and wonder how we ever stooped so low as to tolerate farming practice A or B. I don't doubt we'll find cost effective, technological solutions that will be accepted as moral improvements in the future. I am not opposed to those changes on principle. Increase shrimp welfare if you want, fine.
My vague concern is that this social technology doesn't appear limited to spawning technological or charitable solutions. With things like lab meat showing up more frequently in the culture war I'd expect the social technology to spread. So far, however, vegans remain a stable population in the US. Nerdy utilitarian bloggers are yet to impose their will on me. They just don't think I should eat honey.
This view of suffering, as some sort of negative imposed on life, is bizarre to me. I mean it makes sense coming from a person suffering clinical depression or otherwise deeply disordered. But suffering, by and large, is our biology's way of pointing the way to go. Only children think the world would be better off without suffering. Anyone who has ever seen a news segment or documentary about people literally born without the ability to feel pain understands what a nightmarish body horror that is. I'll never forget the one I saw. Turns out without pain, it's hard to keep an infant from clawing their own eyes out, chewing off their own tongue, fingers and toes, and other acts of senseless self mutilation. They won't cry when they need something, so the new parent, ignorant to the condition, first discovers something is amiss after the child, instead of crying to be fed in the middle of the night, lets their parents sleep peacefully while they remove their own eye with their curious searching fingers.
Suffering may seem pointless to the disordered mind, but every now and again we get a Twilight Zone like glimpse at a world without suffering, and it's a horror almost beyond belief. Like a hell out of Event Horizon or Hellraiser.
It almost seems gnostic: we've been trapped by a terrible demiurge into a prison world of suffering. If only we can deprive ourselves of enough material items (now including honey) in this prison world, we'll finally be able to reach the perfect spiritual realm.
So much of modern leftism has Gnostic parallels, it's unsettling once you know what to look for.
I've never thought about it that way. Do you have other examples that come to mind?
A lot of Marxist false consciousness and its derivatives seems very reminiscent of certain ideas about the demiurge.
The Matrix is obviously a big Gnostic metaphor (the machines have pulled the wool over our eyes and trapped us inside a false reality, we must see the truth and escape into the real world; machines = Demiurge). The Wachowskis later claimed that they'd always intended the film as a metaphor for coming out as trans, which inspired a lot of eyerolls and accusations of revisionism. But I don't think that's the case at all, I really do think that's what they intended at the time of writing:
Everything about trans activism, really, has Gnostic undertones: the very concept of a "gender identity" which is wholly distinct from one's sex is obviously sneaking dualism in by the backdoor, but the way so many trans people talk about being trapped inside these nauseating flesh prisons and their transhumanistic desire to mould, slice and sculpt their bodies to better achieve their embodiment goals carries a big whiff of it too. This is part of a broader trend since the emergence of the internet towards Gibson's "relaxed contempt for the flesh": the tendency to see your body not as "you" but as a tool or vehicle you are controlling. Sometimes this can end up in weird science-denial places: fat acceptance activists who deny that the laws of physics apply to human beings just as much as anything else, that the only thing that can cause disease is mean words and fat shaming. It almost seems to come off like a denial of the existence of an objective external world: instead, we are all just souls trapped inside flesh prisons, and the only way one soul can be harmed is if another soul inflicts harm upon it.
At the extremes, you get into whatever the Zizians were doing, with their outré decision theory ideas about doing whatever it would be optimal for every one of your paraselves to do elsewhere in the multiverse - but they're a noncentral idea of the trend I'm describing.
I'm often startled at how culturally significant the Matrix has been. The sequels weren't all that good, the plot of the original was strange and confusing, and the concept of "the world is revealed to be an illusion" has been done better -- but the concept of the colored pills, bullet time, and Laurence Fishburne's performance as Morpheus just made the movie hard to forget. The strange aesthetic made it both confusing and memorable. (Sometimes I think the flaws of Star Wars did the same -- both the OT and the prequels have diehard fans precisely because they were tacky and disjointed. The sequels are so polished, but they're polished like a turd.)
The Matrix definitely sticks out in my memory, but personally I'd rather everyone take the Christpill from Catholic Morpheus.
Reminds me of Umberto Eco's Cult of the Imperfect. He applies the idea even to acknowledged masterpieces - one of the reasons why Hamlet, for instance, has been so compelling is because it is in some ways badly written. Lakes of ink have been spilled on trying to interpret Hamlet's motives because they are not clear in the play - because they are actually rather arbitrary and inconsistent, in a way that would probably strike us as bad writing, if Shakespeare did not have the reputation that he does. And while you could just conclude it's because Shakespeare was rushed or made some bad calls, it's so much more interesting to treat the text as whole, the arbitrariness as intentional, and dive into psychoanalysing the hero.
Star Wars is also in that golden zone of imperfection, I think. Even in the OT, the films are frequently disjointed, and characterisation changes wildly without explanation. It's pretty obvious that ANH is written for a universe in which Luke's father and Darth Vader were different people, and Luke and Leia are not related, for instance. In ESB, Luke hates and fears Vader and wants to kill him, and Vader disloyally seeks an ally to stage a coup against the Emperor; in RotJ, without any explanation, Luke now regards Vader with this self-sacrificial love, and Vader is so broken upon the Emperor's will as to consider revolt impossible. It's not inconceivable that something happened in between the films to cause both of them to change their minds (maybe Luke struggled long and hard with the revelation that Vader was his father and eventually came to the painful conclusion that he must love him the same way he thought he loved Anakin; maybe the Emperor discovered Vader's plot and tortured him into submission), but there is no hint of either of these processes in RotJ. The characters are just... different.
And yet I can't make himself dislike Star Wars because of this, or view the OT as lesser. I even like the PT. I still love those films, all six of them. (There are only six Star Wars films.) In many ways I love Star Wars because of its flaws, not only because of its strengths.
The Shadows of the Empire book does a lot of the heavy lifting, at least in the old Legends continuity, explaining not just Luke (Jedi training and seeing the cost of seeking revenge above all) and Vader's (finding the Dark Side increasingly unable to repair or alleviate his damaged flesh, and that Palpatine is grooming people to kill Vader's whole family... and thinks Vader's so weak that a crime lord that's not even force-sensitive might take him down) change in perspective, along with a lot of other goofy bits like Leia's Booush outfit or where Luke's new lightsaber crystal came from. Kinda with mixed results: it's definitely not a Zahn-level book, and a few parts were pretty cringy even by 90s-standards, but neither was it awful.
Of course, it did so twelve years after Return of the Jedi made it to theatres.
Eco's theory is certainly believable. For other examples, Harry Potter and Redwall fandom regularly points to the many bizarre early storytelling decisions as why they joined as heavily as they did. I will caveat that it's definitely not sufficient, though. Jupiter Ascending is a glorious trainwreck that leaves unanswered questions everywhere, but despite a small fandom of exactly the demographics you'd most expect to be into fanfic, it's largely abandoned.
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