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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.

The general atrociousness and wordsaladness of the piece aside - the complete strawmanning of Romanticism is infuriating -it's unclear to me what the position being put forward even is. The author says that basically humans have a responsibility to reduce the suffering of wild animals, but then she also says that humans basicially have no right to violate the autonomy of said animals? The solution (?) seems to be that the entirety of nature (which doesn't exist anyway according to the author) should basically be turned into a giant zoo, where humans are meant to be an invisible guiding hand for all animals. It has some pretty hilarious implications, like presumably we'd have to give all rabbits birth control drugs or something (in a way that doesn't violate their supposed autonomy?) so they don't... well... breed like rabbits. But honestly the whole exercise reads to me just as an excuse to berate humanity because the author hates humanity.

It's articles like this that really make me embrace Idealism and express outright pro-anthroprocentrism. That humanity is distinct and apart from nature, and that humans are more than mere animals, but are capable of Reason which is what seperates and makes us superior to animals. Animals are stupid and much less important than humans. I don't care how much people make appeals to animals' supposed sentience. They are not sapient and not capable of Reason. It's not clear if they have any conciousness (and they probably don't, save for maybe our closest primate cousins). Animals do not deserve the same rights as humans, they are stupid beasts. I don't think anyone has ever said that to the author. We humans have decided that we want to preverse nature because we believe it has value - economic, aesthetic, moral etc value. But that value is ultimately derived from our human Reason something those animals are completely incapable of doing.

It's been said it's much harder to refute a really stupid argument than a smart argument because the really stupid argument has such stupid prepositions and poor logic that it's hard to know even where to begin or how to formulate a counter argument, the whole thing is just rubbish. This article seems to be one of those really stupid arguments. There's some hilariously stupid lines in this article such as:

when what we ought to do is respect animals’ choice of a way of life

As if animals have the capacity to make such choices!

It's articles like this that really make me embrace Idealism and express outright pro-anthroprocentrism.

Why jump from one extreme to another? Intelligence is a gradient as pretty much everything else in biology. Humans are most probably smarter (= more capable of abstract reasoning, choosing between courses of action, anticipating experiences, working with complex systems, etc.) than elephants, crows, and dolphins, which are probably smarter than non-human apes, which are smarter than monkeys and octopodes, which are smarter than dogs, which are smarter than lizards, which are smarter than fish, which are smarter than earthworms, which are smarter than plants, which are smarter than bacteria. You can then assign rights and responsibilities accordingly with whatever criteria you prefer.

Talking about "animals" as a block in general is not very useful. Chimpanzees are more like humans than like, say, jellyfish under the vast majority of aspects.