Culpability
Other blessings: Obama is the nominee, a strong woman won the votes of eighteen million Americans, my newly planted green things must be purring, school is out, and I get to hang with Dubber tonight.
A follow up on cANTaclysm, because I chewed on Andria’s comment for a day. She wrote:
May I be so bold to point out that the brainless ant has no conscience- no method of determining a disaster from a triumph. We mortal beings have to live with choice and outcome. We have to FEEL. Sometimes i wish it was as easy as having [your] entire life uprooted, dumped to the side and happily falling back into line to do what you are equipped to do- just keep on living- without missing a beat.
I agree with the latter part of her point, that we’d be better off sometimes if we quit howling about everything and just did what we needed to do ‘without missing a beat.’
To the conscience thing, though, I think we humans are arrogant to assume we know what ants or any other beings do or do not feel based on their anatomy or anything else we think we see. I’ve marveled since I was a child that scientists could presume to tell us that other animals don’t communicate or don’t choose, don’t know or don’t feel. Such explanations have always felt like an excuse to me for mistreating other creatures, for refusing culpabiity. Ants don’t know, they just focus on surviving, but we alone have a moral sense, we tell ourselves, puffing up. We shouldn’t feel guilty; we’re not to blame. If so, why are we so entirely destructive of each other, other creatures, and the earth itslf, while other living beings will not naturally destroy their own environment or even enemy species unless something has fallen way out of whack? Why isn’t it possible that many animals–dolphins, whales, ants, horses, and who knows what else–have a more sophisticated system of communication than we could ever imagine and we’re the idiots? It may not be conscience exactly (they don’t have to make up Adam and Eve in Eden stories to instill it) but it’s an elaborate system of collective care for survival. They know that what happens to one could happen to another; that caring for the whole, not just the individual, matters. It’s the whole elephants cry thing. They (elephants) also apparently have greeting ceremonies, grieve, laugh, remember and live in intensely social communities. And even scientists know this now.
I’m also pretty sure by its behavior that the morning dove that got stuck in my basement yesterday felt intense distress about it (yes, it was about survival, but feeling is a link to survival) and that Rico, for his part, felt that I had made the wrong choice by freeing the bird.
Maybe the only reason we have a moral sense, if we do, (and I still reject the premise that we alone do) is that as a species we’re so utterly stupid, so tragically removed from the instinctual values of our animal nature, so entirely prone to self-absorption, fear, and devouring urges, that compassion is the only quality that gives us half a chance not to ruin everything for every being on the planet. So, even if in the wake of their holocaust the ants turn uncomplainingly back to the business of surviving and I have something to learn from that, I should think twice about what I’ve done, about what my actions caused to an unsuspecting society that did nothing to hurt me. My little act of unintended distruction, like my potential to willfully annihilate (as with nasty flies), links me to all the other sorts of devastation my fellow human beings are wreaking in the world right this very moment. If I fancy myself separate from it (oh, those Africans are killing each other but we educated urban hipsters are all about peace, man) then I don’t see my responsibility. If I only shrug about the ants, something in me is shut off. If I don’t see culpability, I won’t take it. If I don’t recognize it in me, I’ll put the burden on the other to deal. But if I were hungry, desperate, diseased, living in social chaos, or even just penetrated with fear I’m pretty sure that I, too, would be capable of ditching morality for viscious survival.
Something like that. Perhaps this is what Caryn meant with “Pema Pema Pema,” though we’re not all living in your curly head, girl, and therefore can’t automatically interpret your mantra.
Anyway, how’s that for only semi-coherent philosophical ramblings first thing in the morning?
