Ishmael, Book Review II

I will offer only a few observations on the book. First, a point of clarification: Ishmael paints a powerful and accessible picture, but, we ought not confuse this picture with others. Though Western, white, patriarchy provides a clear example of the taker mode of operation, takers are not identical with the West, with whites, with men, or any combination of those. Beijing, Robert Mugabe, and Margaret Thatcher do not offer an alternative to the taker mythology. Takers have made nearly the entire planet into a prison, and we humans are its occupants … all of us. Getting out of the prison is more important than redistributing privileges within the prison. The ecological revolution trumps all others.

Second, a call for elaboration: Quinn’s meditations on the first chapters of Genesis are provocative, and they could be usefully read alongside Hugh Brody’s considerations in The Other Side of Eden. Likewise, his alternative account of the history of the world contrasts nicely with the account in Hegel, Marx, Fukuyama, and Sayyid Qutb. It could be filled out by reading it alongside the works of Paul Shepherd. (I am planning to review some of Paul Shepherd’s books next.)

Third, a few critical comments: The “either / or” dichotomy (either takers or leavers) that forms the basis of the book supports its thesis as well as a bicycle at full stop supports its rider. Still, I can concede its usefulness for making the book accessible. However, our rider definitely falls over when Quinn provides only one of the two wheels; that is, he gives us the “either” without the “or.” Quinn develops the taker mythology but never gives as much attention to the leaver mythology. His leaver mythology doesn’t speak much about the gods and doesn’t really take the form of a story. This is a damning criticism in the terms the book set for itself. Instead, he frames leaver mythology in terms of biological and evolutionary laws. It is highly doubtful that this is the way leavers of various stripes would formulate their mythology.

Further, Quinn’s leaver mythology embraces the values of romanticism and democracy; species and forms of life are valued for their own sake, possess their own rights, and no group imposes its form of life on the others. This stands in tension with his evolutionary-based claim that the universe is moving toward intelligence and self-awareness, that such qualities are more complex and are presumably better or a genuine “advance.” Humans were the first to make this break-through, that other forms of life will follow and they will hail us for helping keep their futures open. Leaver mythology begins to look like a mishmash of ideas from the political left of the sixties, not from as yet unassimilated tribes in Brazil. Surely an intelligent, self-aware gorilla could offer a more significant paradigm shift than this.

Ishmael, Book Review I

Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. A Bantam / Turner Book, 1992. ISBN: 0553375407

Ishmael shares a genre with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; both alternate between 1) a symbolic narrative and 2) a series of straight-forward but allegedly mind-blowing lectures. I don’t know if this genre has a name.

The narrative: In Ishmael a teacher is looking for a student who wants to save the world. The narrator, Alan Lomax, is the student; the teacher, Ishmael, is a gorilla who communicates telepathically. (Yes, you read that right.) Ishmael lives in an office building, where he also conducts his classes with Mr. Lomax. Four-fifths of the way through the book he is evicted from the office building and sold to a carnival.

The lectures: Ishmael helps his student unearth the mythology / worldview / ideology of the civilized world, those he designates “takers,” and of those civilizations that “history left behind,” whom he calls “leavers.” For the takers, the gods made the world for man to rule, but man first must conquer it. When he finally conquers and rules, the world will be paradise. However, man has a tragic flaw that keeps him from fulfilling this mission. For the leavers, on the other hand, man belongs to the world. The world tends toward complexity, self-awareness, and intelligence. Man is first to achieve self-awareness, and his job is to keep the future open for other species to also advance in complexity, intelligence, and self-awareness. (Remember, this is a gorilla talking.) All can now see that human culture will crash within a few generations. From the leaver view, this is not the result of a tragic human flaw; it follows from acting out the taker mythology. Takers have not really transcended nature, but they have acted as though nature’s laws no longer apply to them. The result is a reduction in complexity and diversity of species, but also of actual and potential intelligence and self-awareness. Natural law will bring the taker experiment to a close, not, however, before the takers themselves have nearly destroyed the planet.

Ishmael, the gorilla, having taught the human all he has to teach, offering to be now his friend rather than his teacher, dies due to lack of good care in the carnival.

Cartmill, Review IV

Cartmill’s final account of the immorality of hunting fails to convince. First, his claim to have found “consensus” among “the industrialized West” is as persuasive as asserting “we the people…” It leaves out not only non-Westerners, but also the non-industrialized in the West, particularly the rural poor, including those living on reservations. I suspect that the asserted consensus, even within the industrialized West, is a lie. Our way of life could not exist without considerable suffering from many animals. We need them to test medicines and medical procedures, and to provide foods of choice to people living in large cities. We are vaguely aware of their suffering, and most of us do not object.

Second, Cartmill himself notes that many contest the claim that a utilitarian ethic can and should be the fundamental principle by which we judge our treatment of animals. The objection is that utilitarians consider only pleasure and pain, and pleasure and pain can be felt only by individuals, not by species. By treating everything as an individual, the utilitarian cannot make important ethical distinctions; that is, utilitarian principle is blind to certain realities. For example, if an invasive species threatens to throw an entire ecosystem out of whack, and if biologists set out to eradicate the invasive species, utilitarians will protest on behalf of the individuals that will suffer under the eradication program. The utilitarian fails to recognize that individuals can exist only in certain ecosystems, alongside other specific species, and this is because an individual is not only an individual, but a member of a species. Cartmill notes that hunters share this view with environmentalists and biologists, but he makes no reply (236). (I will save other objections to utilitarian ethics for another day.)

Finally, Cartmill’s argument is that if we erase the distinction between humans and animals as morally irrelevant, then we can see that hunting is wrong. This conclusion follows only if we put on the utilitarian blinders. Attention to American Indians, such as the Lakota Sioux, would have shown the hidden assumptions. According to the Lakota, the bison is their brother. That is why they hunt the bison. To understand this view requires more than learning how to employ a single abstract principle (pain is bad) in a detailed, ledger-book calculation. It requires understanding an entire history of a people and a way of life carved out for centuries in symbiotic relationship with the bison.

Cartmill, Review III

To his credit, Cartmill does not limit his book to cultural histories of the morality of hunting and of the hunting hypothesis. In the final chapter, he weighs in on morality: “We need to ask whether hunting is wrong” (240). Cartmill lays out the variety of worldviews and motives the give sense to the actions of both anti-hunters and hunters. But finally, he too cuts to the chase and settles on utilitarian ethics, Peter Singer style. “There is a consensus today, at any rate in the industrialized West, that the suffering of sentient animals is something that is intrinsically undesirable….” (240). We can spot the conclusion from a single premise: hunting is wrong.

But it is not a single premise. The entire book has lead to this conclusion. The hunting hypothesis and the immorality hypothesis are themselves framed by the more general claim that hunting and morality conflict. By showing the associations of hunting with war and by arguing for hunting’s associations with rape, Cartmill underlines his point with a big, thick, red marker. Within this framework, the hunter can position himself only by brushing aside morality in the style of Nietzsche. Cartmill, however, tries to smoke him out of this amoral stance. If the hunter flees from morality, he cannot position himself in “nature” via the hunting hypothesis because science does not and cannot prove that hunting is “natural.”

What conclusion follows from this? Hunting is as human as morality; morality is as natural as hunting. The conflict between hunting and morality is not a conflict between the human and nature but between different ways of living life. What principles could we extract from the life lived best? Cartmill offers one: pain is undesirable. Since there is no qualitative difference between the pain of a non-human animal and a human animal, and since hunting causes “excruciating” pain, we cannot justify a way of life that includes hunting.

Cartmill, Book Review II

The immorality hypothesis, that esteem for hunting and morality are inversely related, also receives extended treatment, showing that Europeans, in fits and starts, have viewed hunting with increasing moral suspicion throughout Western history. The importance and meaning of hunting does not depend on the amount of food it makes available. Rather, [it] is intelligible only as symbolic behavior, like a game or a religious ceremony, and the emotions that the hunt arouses can be understood only in symbolic terms” (29). The framework most crucial to the meaning of hunting has been the distinction, sometimes separation, of humans from nature. As he points out in his well-known essay, “The Bambi Syndrome,” both hunters and anti-hunters share this symbolic framework. They disagree only on how to value the different sides of the line. For many hunters, hunting is natural and morality is merely human sentimentality; for many anti-hunters, morality is natural and hunting is a human perversion.

Cartmill’s work moves quickly, as any survey must, over the cultural images of hunting throughout Europe and western history. He provides both the panoramic vision and focused snap-shots of particular episodes. It might seem unfair, then, to complain that he has not included enough, that his view is Eurocentric. But, on behalf of the hunter, I must raise this objection. The bow hunter from Wisconsin does not locate himself in a tradition that began with Apollo or Artemis. He thinks rather of Fred Bear, and Howard Hill, of Pope and Young. And Ishi. In the tradition of hunting, prior to Pope and Young there are only the native peoples who hunted this same land. This alternative genealogy raises a hornets’ nest of other issues, but these do not find a place in Cartmill’s account even though the Wisconsin bowhunter needs precisely this alternative genealogy.

Cartmill, Book Review I

Cartmill, Matt. A View to A Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Cartmill challenges the use of “the hunting hypothesis” to support the claim that humans are naturally hunters.

The hunting hypothesis, an anthropological thesis, claims that humans differentiated themselves from the ape, and so from nature itself, through hunting. Our distinctive tools, weapons, physiology, and social structure all developed because we hunted and in order to hunt. Associated with this hypothesis is the additional claim that humans have a natural bloodlust and so are not naturally moral; we are “lunatic apes.” Let’s call this second claim “the immorality hypothesis.”

Cartmill debunks the hunting hypothesis on two grounds. First, he offers a fascinating history of the development and adaptation of the hypothesis itself which shows that it was adopted for cultural reasons.

Second, he demonstrates that the hypothesis cannot be scientific. Science explains by subsuming instances under general laws; entirely unique events cannot have a scientific explanation; the differentiation of humanity from nature has no parallel cases; ergo.... The hunting hypothesis is a myth. This does not mean that it is false or useless, but the hypothesis is not a candidate for the status of scientific explanation. So far, so good.

Science of Pleasure IV

Epicureans offer a corrective to the utilitarian account of pleasure in a second aspect also. The epicurean recognizes the ways in which our beliefs affect our happiness. For example, they encourage us to develop a disposition toward gratitude. If we give thanks for the good things in our lives, if we don’t believe we deserve them as our right but can welcome them as a gift, we will be happier. (Epicureans also claim that belief an judgmental gods and belief in an afterlife in which one suffers under the judgment of those gods leads to unhappiness. In the pursuit of happiness, we should jettison such beliefs.)