The Agony and the Ivory

From the current issue of Vanity Fair, a must-read article on elephant poaching:

Another carcass has been found. On the Kuku Group Ranch, one of the sectors allotted to the once nomadic Maasai that surround Amboseli National Park, in southern Kenya. Amboseli is home to some 1,200 elephants who regularly wander into the group ranches, these being part of their original, natural habitat. More than 7,000 Maasai live in scattered fenced-in compounds called bomas with their extended families and their cattle on Kuku’s 280,000 acres. Traditionally, the Maasai coexisted with their wildlife. They rarely killed elephants, because they revered them and regarded them as almost human, as having souls like us. Neighboring tribespeople believe that elephants were once people who were turned into animals because of their vanity and given beautiful, flashy white tusks, which condemned them, in the strangely truthful logic of myth, to be forever hunted and killed in the name of human vanity. And Maasai believe when a young woman is getting married and her groom comes to get her from her village she musn’t look back or she will become an elephant. “But in the last few years, everything has changed,” a member of the tribe told me. “The need for money has changed the hearts of the Maasai.”

In praise of tacit knowledge: lessons in listening part 2

For someone who lives by words, I have a surprising proclamation to make: we rely too much on language. Hear me out, because I know what it is to rely on language. Years of philosophical training encourage such reliance but ultimately reveal its limitations.

There are multiple ways of knowing, thinking, and communicating—sensation, emotion, movement, sound, shapes—and it is impossible to reduce all that is worth knowing to factual statements. In fact, most of what gets communicated even in speeches is conveyed at the level of gesture, posture, vocal tone, and so on. (Which is why email is notorious for sparking misunderstanding; it is too easy to misread...or, perhaps, too easy for the actual meaning to poke through the veil of words.) I was discussing this sort of thing recently with a very interesting woman from Wyoming whom I met at a cafe last week. 

I had been reading the New York Times and was annoyed by yet another article touting some quality that purportedly makes humans superior to other animals. I wondered aloud why we expend so much effort delineating difference rather than recognizing our kinship.* My accidental lunch companion, who works with horses for a living, responded by telling me about Buck, a Sundance Festival award-wining film about a cowboy named Buck Brannaman who “helps horses with people problems.” He learned natural horsemanship from Tom and Bill Dorrance and Ray Hunt, who inspired a new way of engaging with the animals. There's a brief trailer clip for the film at the link above that gives you an idea what all this is about, but at bottom it's about respecting the horse's tacit knowledge of the world.


As my Wyoming companion waxed poetic about these horsemen, it became clear that as much as she enjoyed visiting Manhattan—she had, in fact, grown up here and was back to help care for her 91-year old mother—she also felt alienated by an implicit dismissiveness toward the beauties of rural life and subtly demeaned by a contempt toward nature her urban counterparts didn't realize they had. That, perhaps, is the most difficult thing about contempt: it's a moral prejudice rather than a language statement we consciously believe.

It was only after we parted company that I re-discovered Verlyn Klinkenborg's New York Times column about the rural life. In honor of my lunch companion, then, as well as a more humble and open way of living, I’m going to quote an obituary Klinkenborg wrote in 1999:

There is no such thing as a horse whisperer. There never has been and never will be. The idea is an affront to the horse. You can talk and listen to horses all you want, and what you will learn, if you pay close attention, is that they live on open ground way beyond language and that language, no matter how you characterize it, is a poor trope for what horses understand about themselves and about humans. You need to practice only three things, patience, observation and humility, all of which were summed up in the life of an old man who died Tuesday in California, a man named Bill Dorrance.

Dorrance was 93, and until only a few months before his death he still rode and he still roped. He was one of a handful of men, including his brother Tom, who in separate ways have helped redefine relations between the horse and the human. Bill Dorrance saw that subtlety was nearly always a more effective tool than force, but he realized that subtlety was a hard tool to exercise if you believe, as most people do, that you are superior to the horse. There was no dominance in the way Dorrance rode, or in what he taught, only partnership. To the exalted horsemanship of the vaquero —the Spanish cowboy of 18th-century California—he brought an exalted humanity, whose highest expression is faith in the willingness of the horse.

....what you could learn from Dorrance was a manner of learning whose subject was nominally the horse but that extended itself in surprising directions to include dogs, cattle and people. If you learned it, you would know it was nothing to boast about.

There is no mysticism, no magic, in this, only the recognition of kinship with horses. Plenty of people have come across Bill Dorrance and borrowed an insight or two, and some have made a lot of money by popularizing what they seemed to think he knew. But what he knew will never be popular, nor did he ever make much money from it. You cannot sell modesty or undying curiosity. It is hard to put a price on accepting that everything you think you know about horses may change with the very next horse.

“You cannot sell modesty or undying curiosity.” You can’t buy them, either, and that’s actually good news. It means they are within the reach of every single one of us, if we are willing to practice.

It seems to me that our culture actively encourages us to mistrust others, to adopt a "moral prejudice" that is inimical to curiosity, let alone honesty, respect, compassion, love, and understanding. The pervasiveness of manipulation by the advertising industry, politicians, media moguls, and corporations demands we become more discerning, not less; the manipulation is blatant, so ubiquitous that it has become invisible. (The Union of Concerned Scientists says that the average American is exposed to three thousand ads each day.) Is this why we simply shut down, shut away, shut off? How do we protect ourselves from harm and yet remain open to one another? For starters, we need to be curious, and we need to listen.

Considering a recent kerfluffle on a New York Times comment thread, it seems to me that we get into trouble precisely because 1) we assume we already know what we need to know about a situation, and 2) we are quick to assume that others, in general, are ignorant. In the first instance we foreclose our own curiosity; in the second, our humility. We would do far better to assume that we have limited knowledge and others might have something to teach us, even in areas in which we have expertise. But the very same belligerent, self-satisfied incuriosity that dominates our public discourse —c.f. the comments beneath virtually any YouTube video clip— reinforces the notion that other people are uninformed or worse. I would argue that ideological intransigence is much more dangerous to democracy than simple lack of knowledge.  As long as our arrogance-cum-ignorance keeps us from questioning ourselves or others, all it will take is a comely face or the mere appearance of confidence to disguise intellectual and moral rot. 

________________

* Subject for another post. Here I'll simply note that the leading candidates (language, the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror, etc.) all fail the task, and that looking to define humanity by selecting one quality that appears to be unique seems to me to be a pretty muddle-headed way to prove superiority, which itself is a muddle-headed project.


Culling geese

The New York Times reported recently on the generosity shown toward turtles nesting at JFK. Apparently there is a bitter dispute going on in the NYC community about how officials treat geese, however, and a comment had led me to look further into the issue. The comment thread revealed some of this bitterness, and I had wanted to give a fuller response than I could fit into the comment box, so I post it here:

Brian (#47): I appreciate your responding to clarify your position. You seem firm that the geese must be culled. This was not clear from your earlier comment, which didn't even mention culling—in fact, I didn't know about the culling until Ellie's comment prompted me to wonder what she meant by saying that "geese are a whole different story." (So at least one person here did not know what she was talking about.) It seems the debate is, at root, a conflict between moral perspectives on how we interact with the rest of our ecosystem.

As for your implicit accusation that people who object to the culls are mawkish sentimentalists, and that "the real problem" lies with them, I'd like to point out that the New York Magazine article quotes the president of the Humane Society as agreeing that there is a problem (and even helping with the egg-addling) but also criticizing the USDA for being historically inclined to kill animals. He then notes a successful relocation program that took place with gulls near JFK in the 90’s.

Here are some facts from the same article, which I'll assume for argument's sake are correct: in 2010, the geese numbered ~257,000 in NY state. 15,000-20,000 Canada geese currently live year-round in the metro region. Over the past three decades, there have been “as many as” 315 bird-plane collisions each year.  The USDA decided, by methods not described, that a mere 5000 birds is an “acceptable” number.  If they mean to leave 5000 in NY state, that’s quite a massacre they propose; if they mean only in the metro area, that’s still a significant cull. The article doesn’t mention the number of planes that fly over the city, but 300 collisions actually isn’t much—and even if you kill birds that are nesting near the airport, this doesn't do anything to reduce the risk of migrating (non-NY-resident) geese getting sucked into plane engines. In fact, the famous Sullenberger landing in the Hudson River was forced by just such migrating geese.  

Furthermore, it is valid to ask whether culling birds on Riker’s Island and Prospect Park is going to do much to reduce an already-low risk: a report covering 1912-2002 estimated that bird strikes cause 1 human death per 1 billion flying hours. Air travelers face greater danger from a plethora of other possible events. Needless to say, the birds come out much worse.

I have several objections to the culling described in the article, some moral, some practical, and some a mixture of both. The most salient here is the tremendous waste of it all: as the article notes, there are “...alternatives which are probably much cheaper and more environmentally friendly than sending hundreds of adult geese to suffocation chambers, double-bagging their carcasses, and dumping them in a landfill.”  (You know something is morally objectionable when "suffocation chamber" becomes an acceptable euphemism for "gas chamber.") Apparently I’m not the only one troubled by this waste: a June 15 cityroom article in the NY Times informs us that this year, the culled geese are at least going to be sent to slaughterhouses in PA and distributed to food banks. 

One last point. We define “pest” rather arbitrarily as anything that competes with us. Yet humans are responsible for soil degradation and contamination, massive deforestation, the eradication of 50% of ocean-dwelling species in just the past half century, the slow suffocation of trees* and a host of other environmental catastrophes. We have also shown remarkably poor prognostic ability when manipulating species to try to control some small part of nature in one region, which invariably has profound and unpredicted consequences elsewhere.  I’m not sure we can afford to be killing off massive numbers of animals when we have no idea what the effect on the ecosystem will be. In any case, if we wait long enough, the geese will die off on their own through some combination of effects of toxins in the environment and climate change. Then again, so will we. So maybe we should be focusing on bigger problems.

*The entire earth has effectively become a gas chamber for trees: go to Wit's End, click on links for research about dying trees, and get very, very depressed. 

Proof you don't need religion (or moral philosophy) to be good

And I say this as someone who thinks a lot about both.  Here is a brief news clip on a remarkable rescue of a dog—by another dog:

The Iliad, bin Laden, and a Mother's Day Proclamation

I've been quiet about the assassination/murder/execution of bin Laden, in part because the blogosphere has been full of opinions, but mostly because of feeling there are many other Important Matters to ponder. But I have finally decided that there is one important thing to articulate about the headlines of this week besides the question of whether anyone really believes the death of this one individual is going to diminish terrorist activities around the globe. (Which, after all, was the ostensible motive for killing him.)

It is this: that conservative estimates of the number of people killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since the U.S. coalition attacks began is nearly 1 million. That's more than 300 times the number of people killed on September 11, 2001. According to U.S. State Department data, that's also 130 times more people than were killed in all terrorist attacks around the world from 1993-2004. (Numbers after 2004 remain classified, since they suggested that the U.S. wars were actually fomenting terrorist attacks, rather than striking terror into the terrorists' hearts.) The cost of these wars has plunged us into an economic whirlpool of debt, with ever-widening currents sucking jobs and public services into the deep. Talk about Pyrrhic victories.

The most recent issue of Harper's Magazine contains a lengthy essay by Nicholson Baker, "Why I'm a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War." He examines the circumstances surrounding the US entry into World War II and the result, concluding, along with a number of historians, that this act actually fueled Hitler's rush to exterminate the Jews. I am not a WWII historian, but it's a provocative argument.

I've also been reminded of Simone Weil's beautiful, exceptionally moving essay, "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force," published initially in 1940 after the fall of France. It opens thus:

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.

To define force—it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us....

The rest of the essay's 24 pages are equally potent; I recommend reading it as a perspective-altering, almost transcendental experience. And it is very much relevant to us today, when our society is riven by internecine strife between people who cannot communicate because they have forgotten the extent to which circumstance and necessity impinge upon the human soul. Again, Weil's words:

... nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image. [...]

Both the Romans and the Hebrews believed themselves to be exempt from the misery that is the common human lot. The Romans saw their country as the nation chosen by destiny to be mistress of the world; with the Hebrews, it was their God who exalted them and they retained their superior position just as long as they obeyed Him. Strangers, enemies, conquered peoples, subjects, slaves, were objects of contempt to the Romans; and the Romans had no epics, no tragedies. In Rome gladiatorial fights took the place of tragedy. With the Hebrews, misfortune was a sure indication of sin and hence a legitimate object of contempt; to them a vanquished enemy was abhorrent to God himself and condemned to expiate all sorts of crimes—this is a view that makes cruelty permissible and indeed indispensable....Throughout twenty centuries of Christianity, the Romans and the Hebrews have been admired, read, imitated, both in deed and word; their masterpieces have yielded an appropriate quotation every time anybody had a crime he wanted to justify.

Americans, too, lack a tradition of tragedy—treacle doesn't count—and American exceptionalism is everywhere in evidence, from political speeches to economic debates to the unwillingness of many to face our environmental crisis. Is it any wonder that we spawned Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? Are they our gladiatorial rings?

In honor of Mother's Day, let me also share a portion of Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation, written in 1870 in reaction to the carnage of the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War:

We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

Their vision, of an international council of women, was simplistic, but the sentiment, I think, was right.

What two dogs in the aftermath of the tsunami can teach us about ethics

The video I mentioned last week, showing the touching loyalty of one dog for her companion injured by the Japanese tsunami, apparently went viral. It's not surprising that people all over the world were moved to watch: the tender interaction between the two dogs is so utterly uncomplicated by any form of ego. They are emotionally in tune; there is no need for verbal language. They depict an ideal we humans have to work hard to achieve in our relationships.

I was reminded of other videos I've seen recently about animal relationships, especially inter-species friendships. Tara the elephant and Bella the dog; the joyful, affectionate reunion between Christian the lion and the men who rescued him years after they'd released him back to the wild; the zoo-caged gorilla who tenderly rescued the human child who'd fallen into the cage and brought him to the zookeepers. There are actually a plethora of such stories, which nevertheless are always reported as if they are singular, even miraculous, events. Perhaps we are only projecting the unlikelihood of our own involvement if we find a fellow creature in need, particularly if they are of another class, race, or species.

Considering these inter-species encounters, I'm struck by how uncomplicated they are by human-style egoism. Rather, they are emotionally "real": powerful, direct, profound, immanent. These animals do not waste time calculating which species is more intelligent.  They do not waffle over whether other species are sentient, lord their species-specific abilities over others, or shrug their shoulders when disaster strikes someone not of their tribe. They do not wonder, in self-justification, whether others feels pain. They do not set out to utterly destroy other species.

Only human animals are so disconnected from their place in the world that they regularly make the mistake of thinking they are above it. It is a holdover from the Judeo-Christian notion that man has dominion over nature, which has provided twisted justification for marking all non-human species as Other, as Object, paving the way to excluding them from the Kantian imperative to treat others as ends in themselves. 

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that ethical behavior is rooted in our animal natures, not our capacity to reason. Aristotle wrote of the similarities between humans and dolphins over two and half thousand years ago: both take pleasure in exercising their skills, both display curiosity, bravery, and purposefulness. Nietzsche picked up this idea a century ago:

The beginnings of justice, as of prudence, moderation, bravery—in short, of all that we designate as the Socratic virtues—are animal...

To empathize, to share joy or sorrow, to connect... these do not require verbal language—they require sensitivity, presence, memory of one's own experiences, the inclination to pay attention and to risk trusting.  Considering the range of inhumane responses and behaviors on display every day, it would seem we should look to nonhumans to learn how to live.

Kantianism, canine style

In the midst of all this serious talk about disasters and national character, a dear friend of mine forwarded me a very touching video from Japan via an Italian news network (please excuse the brief ad at the beginning).  In the rubble of what used to be the city of Mito, in the Ibaraki Prefecture, a rescue party found this dog, who led the humans immediately to her gravely injured companion.  Muddied and undoubtedly hungry, the first dog refused to leave her wounded friend until more help arrived and the critically injured animal was treated.

It is a very moving video clip, worth the short moments it takes to view.

Preliminary thoughts about character, national and individual

It is natural that the recent disaster in Japan should turn our thoughts toward the possibility that our own homes might be vulnerable to similar upheavals. We vainly attempt to calculate the most likely disaster scenario, imagine for a few seconds what heroic actions we might take, what route we might use to escape, what neighbor we might rescue along the way (or not). And in a few days, most of us will have successfully buried these anxious-omnipotent fantasies, reassuring ourselves that we're exceptional or that technology will save us or that there's nothing we can do anyway.  Denial, grandiosity, fatalism.

But it is worthwhile considering the hard truth that there is no place on earth that can guarantee our safety from some form of disaster—earthquake or flood, drought or famine, hurricane or tropical storm—and it's only going to get worse. Not just because we're now subject to socio-economic catastrophes with global reach (financial meltdowns, endless wars, dwindling resources) or the ravages of human greed on a grand scale (corporate pollution, misinformation promulgated for political or commercial gain). As Bill McKibben argues in Eaarth, we have created a planet that is increasingly inhospitable to life, a planet profoundly changed from the one many of us were born on. Sometimes human society itself seems inhospitable to life: abuses of power, abuses of privilege, abuses of one another....all of which are usually intimately related to the afore-mentioned financial meltdowns, wars, dwindling resources. And, while I’m delineating kinds of suffering, I might as well mention illness, which afflicts us as individuals yet can have profound consequences for people around us (and which also can result from natural disasters as well as acts of evil).

Seneca summed it up: "What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears." 

But if denial and grandiosity aren't viable options, neither is fatalism.

I’ve argued in this blog recently that we have to address problems at the level of scale at which they occur: our global environmental crisis, for example, requires coordinated responses among countries and corporations and not just individuals using less plastic. But there are, of course, appropriate responses that can take place only at the individual level. If you find yourself injured, for example: 1) you could deny it (a frequent response—at a public hospital we frequently see patients who’ve let a tumor get so large it becomes much harder to deal with, though that’s usually for lack of money rather than pushing the problem away from consciousness); 2) you could "push through the pain" (and likely injure yourself further); 3) you could collapse into a helpless heap and make everyone else around you cater to your needs; or 4) you could learn what you can about the injury and the circumstances leading to it and tend to the injured part until it heals, being particularly careful in the future to not make the same mistake.

I’m thinking response #4 reflects the healthiest approach, the one most likely to prevent further problems. But it requires knowing how to recognize an injury, having had a prior experience of being cared for and healing (thus knowing what it is to take care of the body), having a certain amout of hope and creativity in utilizing available resources, and a lot of patience, determination, and capacity for self-reflection. In a word: character.

One of the striking things about reports coming from Japan is that they regularly mention how calm and cooperative the displaced have been. The New York Times today reported:

Many Japanese have endured the privations with a similar mood of quiet stoicism, and the strong sense of community that still prevails in these northern rural areas. Even the hardest-hit areas have remained orderly and friendly, and crimes like looting are largely unheard of.

Without making too many generalizations about different cultures, I think many could agree that such communitarianism is comparatively weak in the U.S.  We live with a surfeit of information but a lack of integrity; all we seem to talk about is how to make more information available to more people (internet for everyone!), while few explore ways to enable individuals to make good use of that information. Analytic skills and understanding how to participate in a civil conversation can be shockingly absent even among professional groups.

We are, I believe, suffering the consequences of two powerful ideas combined into a distinctive political ethos: the central tenet of liberalism, which prioritizes process over substance (see Stanley Fish's provocative essay in the Times about this), and a central tenet of capitalism, which values competition.

We now habitually confuse means and ends, and our conceptions of goodness have grown dangerously thin. All that matters is winning the game, whatever the game happens to be at the moment. Is the game SAT scores? Let's teach to the test. Is the game about getting a degree? Let's plagiarize and cheat our way through school. Is the game winning an election? Let's lie about our opponent and stir up fear. Is the game about being popular? Let's talk about bipartisanship and hope no one has the audacity to remind us of the actual problems that aren't even up for discussion. Better yet, let's talk about "winning the future" and “out-educating the world” and hope no one asks what that even means.

I submit that a host of our ills reflect bad character, and that our contemporary process-oriented, competitive ethos has eroded certain conditions essential to human flourishing.  Over the course of future posts, I want to explore the notion that ethical behavior begins with attaining mastery of a practice, trade, or art—playing the piano, laying bricks, cutting hair, tending bar, raising chickens, designing gardens. I believe that through these ordinary social practices, which put us repeatedly and directly in touch with the effects of our actions, we develop a range of virtues that are necessary for our own happiness, the success of our relationships, and the health of the earth: humility, attentiveness,  self-discipline, circumspection, perseverance, sensitivity, taste, patience, perspective, connectedness... virtues that cannot arise either from the top-down application of abstract moral principles or from the practice of white-collar jobs whose express purpose is to manipulate people or money.

To be continued...