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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31727 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Martha Nussbaum writes about wild animal suffering in the New York Review of Books.

Sort of. That exact wording is not used, and the utilitarian discourse on the subject not referenced, but it clearly is the same general thought. And it is very cathedralised. We have:

The "everything is political":

In the US, “wild horses” and other “wild” creatures live under the jurisdiction of our nation and its states. To the extent that they have limited rights of nonintervention, free movement, and even a type of property rights, that is because human law has seen fit to give them these rights. Humans are in control everywhere. Humans decide what habitats to protect for animals, and leave the animals only what they decide not to use.

One might grant that the current status quo is that humans dominate everywhere, while still recommending that humans simply back off and leave all the “wild” animals in all of these spaces to do the best they can for themselves. Even that proposal would require active human intervention to stop human practices that interfere with animal lives: poaching, hunting, whaling. And it would be, it seems, a gross abnegation of responsibility: we have caused all these problems, and we turn our backs on them, saying, “Well, you are wild animals, so live with it as best you can.” It is not clear what would be accomplished by this pretense of a hands-off policy.

The critical theorising:

There are also some very bad reasons for not moving against predation. Part of the Romantic idea of “the wild” is a yearning for violence. Blake’s Tyger and Shelley’s West Wind are emblems of what some humans feel they have lost by becoming hypercivilized. A longing for (putatively) lost aggression lies behind a lot of people’s fascination with large predatory animals and indeed with the spectacle of predation itself.

(And much more in this direction. That is most of the article.)

And just enough mention of the exterminationist angle to stay deniable:

Moreover, the animal reservation is geared as a whole to this exercise: the wild dogs are highly endangered, and much effort is made to preserve them. I am agnostic about the desirability of preserving that species, but I think here the central concern prompting preservation is a bad one: money from sado-tourism.

I find this interesting in light of an ongoing debate about cthulhu theory: Whether new leftist causes are relatively obvious consequences of general principles that have already been driving the movement for a long time, or have more short-term cynical explanations. I lean towards the former and think this example supports that:

I think that today, its easy to see the Singer&Co rationale in an article like this. But if the Motte-equivalent of 2100 is arguing about that, and everyone has heard stuff like the link in public school, and then someone tries explain how this was anticipated by the obscure philosoper Singer, I can imagine that going quite a lot worse.

Humans are in control everywhere.

We exaggerate our control, especially our ability to act with predictable effects. I mean, if there's one thing that I hope people take away from covid, it's that nature can still bite us hard. Even if you think that covid was a big deal as a medical problem, it could have been a lot worse, and a fortiori it could have been much much worse if you think that it wasn't such a big deal. See also climate change, where (a) there is a lot of natural variation and (b) even the part that is due to human action is barely modifiable by human design due to political reasons and lagged effects.

We impact ecosystems. Our control of them is limited, unreliable, and extremely unrobust.

Does covid show that? Whether one takes issue with vaccine side effects, mandates and lockdowns, not locking down or masking enough, or the FDA being too slow - these are all social or institutional failures, not nature giving us something we can't take. Success by any of those measures is within the historical norm. And if sars-cov-2 had the same transmissibility but the death rate of sars-1, the response would've been quicker and harsher - plausibly with more mistakes along the way, but it'd be effective. To say we 'exaggerate our control' understates the power large-scale technology has, and if nature bites us hard, it probably looks more like complex, avoidable errors in use of that power than just climate or disease.

Whether one takes issue with vaccine side effects, mandates and lockdowns, not locking down or masking enough, or the FDA being too slow - these are all social or institutional failures, not nature giving us something we can't take.

These are the same thing.

Success by any of those measures is within the historical norm.

Indeed, which is to say "none at all".

And if sars-cov-2 had the same transmissibility but the death rate of sars-1, the response would've been quicker and harsher - plausibly with more mistakes along the way, but it'd be effective.

This is completely unproven.

Social failures don't need an external stimulus from 'nature' to manifest - they can be entirely internal, see america's crime problem. And the incorrect intentions, lack of competence, or whatever that leads to internal mistakes is the same kind of thing that causes poor responses to nature's incursions. So I don't think they are the same thing - a poorly coordinated pandemic response due to democracy, media, and government is very different from a 1 in 500 year flood wiping out your citystate. The latter seems a lot more like 'we can't control nature', than the former. I think the technical or social complexity of disease eradication, which has happened, is comparable to that of a successful disease-stopping lockdown, the latter of which is admittedly unproven.

If social or institutional failures mean you can't take control what nature dishes out, you have failed to control what nature dishes out. That social failures can manifest without an external stimulus does not change that.

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