27.11.03

testing again ...

Darn you, blogrolling.com.
Stentor Danielson, 12:45,

testing ...

Stentor Danielson, 12:37,

Human, Animal, Machine

My previous post dealing with the line between animals and humans reminded me of a discussion we had in Political Ecology about the relationship of humans to animals on the one hand, and to machines on the other. Prof. Rocheleau pointed out that we (at least within Western culture) distinguish ourselves from animals on the basis of our capacity for rational thought, disparaging the emotional and un-articulatable portions of our being as "bestial." But we then turn around and distinguish ourselves from machines -- the paragons of explicit rationality -- by our organicness, disparaging machines as "cold and calculating" and unable to feel.

My response was to note that, in addition to seeing ourselves as the best of both worlds between animals and machines, the uniqueness of humans vis-a-vis both animals and machines is dependent on an idea of free will. Basically, we have it and they don't. Machines, we think, are ruled by deterministic logic (I've been told that even a computer's random number generator is deterministic, but in a way that satisfies the statistical profile of randomness). The same thing predictably happens when you push the same button. Animals, meanwhile, are said to be ruled by instinct. They don't think consciously the way we do; they just respond automatically to stimuli. Descartes, the great bogeyman of "critical" theory, went so far as to say that animals are basically the same as machines for this reason.

Free will seems to be closely tied to being a morally relevant entity. Only those beings capable of ethical action (which, to most philosophical systems, requires free will) have interests worthy of moral consideration. The link, I think, is consciousness -- free will requires consciousness to operate, and consciousness makes apprehension of benefits (in a consequentialist system) or rights (in a deontological one) possible. Of course, there are some conceptual delinkages that operate -- for example, humans as a class are considered to possess consciousness and therefore rights, so rights are conferred on any human, even one who individually happens to lack consciousness.

These sharp contrasts between animals, machines, and humans are easiest to make in the abstract, theorietical mode. Close interaction (at least of a certain type) with an animal or a machine tends to blur the line. We're all familiar with people who treat their pets as family members. We typically laugh at the situation because it's conceptually absurd (animals are not, according to prevailing philosophy, actually conscious and thus equivalent to humans), yet we know that in practice it has at least the appearance of reality. We successfully deal with our pets as if they were conscious moral entities. The blurring acquires a pragmatic, if not a "real," truth. A similar process can happen with a machine. I'm certain I'm not the only person to have named their computer (mine is "Abraham," incidentally). The name allows me to talk about him as an entity posessing a personality and a consciousness (and a gender). I've been annoyed recently because I don't have a name for my car, and thus can't easily treat it the same way.

The inclination to think of a machine as having consciousness is most apparent when it is giving you problems, behaving in an apparently irrational fashion inconsistent with the idea of the deterministic machine (and one purportedly identical with all others of that make) but consistent with the idea of an uncooperative person. This is a situation when the cyborg nature of the computer user -- in which the machine functions as an extension of the user -- breaks down. The machine then confronts the person as not just a thing or object (as Heidegger argued) but as another person. Individual personality becomes apparent as soon as the smooth functioning of the system breaks down. This works in social systems, too -- a cashier is just a cashier, functionally no more a person than the register or scanner, until they act "out of character" by, say, dropping your eggs or offering to grab some change for you from the "take a penny, leave a penny" cup.
Stentor Danielson, 11:56,

26.11.03

Vegetarian Hyperbole

A quick post before I head off to Thanksgiving:

Meet Bernard Goetz, New York City's Veggie Vigilante PETA: [Vegetarianism would solve] A quarter of the world’s problems? Goetz: A general move to vegetarianism would change the soul of mankind. There would be less fear, cruelty, craziness, grief, and struggle in the world if most people were vegetarians. There would be more gentleness, love, and health. That seems like a good trade. I just don’t see violence abating generally until we move, as a society and a world, toward vegetarianism. It’s a crucial step if our species is going to become truly civilized. PETA: This may seem odd, in light of what you’ve just said, but can you share a bit more about why you, personally, feel called to advocate vegetarianism? Goetz: I’d like to see the world a kinder and more rational place. If we’re going to do that, we have to start from the ground up. A vegetarian menu in public schools is the key to change. Of course, everyone supports kindness for animals, and everyone is opposed to gratuitous violence, even as most of them eat animals. I’m just trying to show people that their belief in kindness for animals and their opposition to violence, both of which are very noble, must ultimately entail a switch to a vegetarian diet. A vegetarian society will be a better society, with better values in general. -- via The Volokh Conspiracy

Let me begin by stating that I have nothing against vegetarianism. Indeed, I quite admire people who make that choice. I'm essentially vegetarian in my cooking for myself, though I don't go out of my way to avoid meat when I'm at someone else's house or a restaurant.

This article got me thinking about the intersection of two common vegetarian arguments. Goetz's assertion that vegetarianism would solve a quarter of the world's problems seems to be based in the notion that cruelty to animals leads to cruelty to people. I frequently hear that children who torture animals go on to be cruel toward people in their adult life. I wonder, however whether these factors don't really share a common cause (a cruel disposition), rather than the one causing the other.

Further, there's the question of what kind of line exists between humans and animals, and between wanton and necessary cruelty. For a person concerned with animal rights, these two lines are extremely fuzzy. People like Goetz have trouble seeing animals as morally distinct from humans, and trouble seeing any cruelty as necessary or justifiable. This may or may not be the correct view. Nevertheless, many people do make such distinctions. Drawing a line that allows you to think of animals and people as totally different sorts of things can seriously restrict the bleeding-through of practices used with regard to one group into the other. Given how much effort animal rights proponents have to expend in arguing against making this distinction, I find it hard to believe that the distinction is psychologically meaningless to the person making it. The line between wanton and necessary cruelty works similarly. The thing to note about the kids who torture cats is that they do it for the purpose of being cruel. This is different from the hunter who works to minimize the cruelty of his shot, or the butcher who has to kill the cow to get the steaks. Whether this cruelty is necessary or not, the key is that it's conceptualized as such by the perpetrators, and that conceptualization creates a barrier between categories.

At best, we could reframe the "cruelty to animals leads to cruelty to humans" argument this way: the ability to draw a distinction between animals and humans, and between necessary and wanton cruelty, gives a person the conceptual resources to draw a distinction between "people you can be cruel to" and "people you can't be cruel to," and to define some cruelty to humans as necessary.

Goetz seems to argue, in the second response I quoted, that our desire for nonviolence is already sufficiently strong. Here he's arguing that nonviolence should lead to vegetarianism, rather than the other way around. The link that's missing, he says, is recognizing that meat production is violent. This echoes another common vegetarian argument: "You wouldn't eat it if you had to kill it yourself."

This argument is based on the idea that we're separated from the production process of our food. We know in the abstract that meat comes from dead animals, but steaks could grow on trees for all the difference it makes to someone picking one up at the grocery store. The fact that people don't think about the cruelty involved in making their dinner means that that cruelty has no effect on them. Eating meat is not an acceptance or endorsement of cruelty, at least on the psychological level that would translate that into cruelty toward non-livestock, if one is as distant from the production process as the average American omnivore.

Further, humans are in general quite able to come to terms with the cruelty involved in getting meat. A slaughterhouse may be quite shocking at first to people who have always thought meat came from a plastic package and interacted with animals only as pets. Nevertheless, for thousands of years people were able to deal with killing animals for food. You (as an individual and as a society) get used to it -- a process that often involves setting up the kind of psychological distinctions I described above.
Stentor Danielson, 12:08,

25.11.03

Vacation

Posting will be light for the next few days as I do the Thanksgiving thing.
Stentor Danielson, 22:35,

Sense Of Place

Doug Merrill has a post over at A Fistful of Euros asking about whether Americans have less sense of place than Europeans. It's an question that plays off the idea that America is a land of immigrants, with a shallow history (like the old joke "What's the difference between a European and an American? The European thinks 100 miles is a long way, and the American thinks 100 years is a long time.").

This is a familiar idea, but we white residents of postcolonial nations more often hear ourselves contrasted in this way with our own indigenous populations than with Europe. White Americans* are said to lack the deep roots in the land that Natives have evolved over thousands of years of living with a patch of country.

One response to this is to valorize a lack of connection to place. Place-connected people can even be portrayed as parochial stuck-in-the-muds. This is popular, and I think there's something to be said for mobility as a lifestyle choice for some people.

Another response is to question the empirical basis of the contrast between white and Native (or American and European). On the one hand, there has been work done that shows that Native Americans were not quite so eternally and holistically connected to their land as the extreme binary would claim. This argument can be politically dangerous, as it threatens a discourse that many Native and pro-Native people have a lot invested in. These people are right to fear that such debunking can be misused to support the claim that Natives' status vis a vis the land is no different from that of other populations (and hence it's no big deal that it was stolen from them). Middle grounds can be tough to hold.

The other side of this response is to hold that, despite the relatively short time that white culture and society have been in America, whites are still able to develop a strong sense of place. Social relations of relatively recent origin are so easily naturalized and made to seem as if they came from time immemmorial that it's very concievable for a reasonable sense of place to have developed in a recent-immigrant culture. The official stance of the Oneida Nation toward non-Oneidas living in the area of their land claim is interesting in this regard. The Nation reassures residents that they will not be kicked out if the land claim succeeds, because the Oneidas know how awful it is to lose one's home. This recognizes that, though the land may have become available for white settlement illegitimately, that doesn't change the fact that the whites who have lived there have developed a connection to that land, made it their home.

Over time, there seems to be a shift in explanation with regard to how Americans teach themselves the nation's history. The classic view of American history is of America as a sort of blank slate, a wilderness to be claimed and a fresh start free of the persecutions and entrenched political interests of ancient England. But more and more it seems that Americans of all races are seeking to adopt Native history (at least pre-1492) as their history. History books are more likely now than before to start with the Paleoindians in Beringia rather than Christopher Columbus in Genoa. This seems to indicate a desire to find deep roots in the land, to look for one's forebears through the lens of place rather than of culture or genes.

*And presumably other non-Native races as well, but when you're talking in binaries the racial picture tends to get simplified to just two groups.
Stentor Danielson, 22:29,

Members Out, Casino In

Quest For Federal Recognition Pits Nipmuc Against Nipmuc ... Identical letters [to the one telling Ginger Wood she was no longer a member of the Nipmuc tribe] went out during the summer to 1,073 others who, like Wood, say they are Nipmuc. In one stroke, the tribal government lopped off two-thirds of the tribe's family. The purged members, leaders say, could not prove they are who they say they are, genealogically speaking. ... The purge is rooted in the Nipmuc Nation's long quest for recognition by the federal government as a sovereign tribe. To secure that status, members must show the Bureau of Indian Affairs that all are descendents of the historical tribe, and that they continue to operate politically as a tribe. Federal recognition is the most important hurdle the Nipmuc must clear en route to their goal of opening a large casino in central Massachusetts or northeast Connecticut. Such a designation is required before the government will allow gaming on tribal lands.

My first reaction to this story was that it was an illustration of the dirty politics that surrounds casinos. It reminded me of accusations that the Oneidas cut members who opposed Turning Stone from their rolls. Then I caught on to two key elements: first, the tribe seemingly has nothing personal against the people who were rejected, it's just that they don't have adequate documentation of their ancestry. Second, the immediate concern is not the casino, but federal recognition. True, the push for federal recognition is driven by the desire for a casino. If the Nipmuc leadership didn't want a casino, it would likely have been content to remain recognized only by the state, and people like Wood would be able to remain in.

A portion of the blame must, however, go to the BIA and its rules for tribal recognition. It's those standards against which Wood failed to measure up, and which presented the tribe with the choice of cutting members or giving up on a casino. Yet federal recognition is more than just a stepping stone to a casino. It's a crucial marker of tribal status and sovereignty.

It's problematic to demand formal paperwork from marginalized segments of society. Even when they are not overtly shut out of the official system, their lives are often of necessity organized in ways that aren't documented or documentable in the terms accepted by the wider society. This seems especially difficult for eastern tribes. Because the east was colonized sooner and more thickly, there has been a longer period of cultural and social forces tearing at the integrity of tribes. Some, like the Haudenosaunee, got lucky -- their political power allowed them to gain recognition from the fledgling USA at a time when their status was closer to what Indians in the west had in the late 19th century. Others -- like the Nipmuc, whose land was the site of one of the first white population booms -- weren't so lucky. This makes it more difficult to reconstitute a tribal organization and get the paperwork together to get recognized.

On the other hand, relaxing the formal standards for membership in a tribe brings its own problems. Particularly as advantages to tribal membership grow, there will be people who unfairly want in, and those people are less easily deterred when standards are lax. Further, the tribe may have incentives to inflate its membership.

Simply handing the decision over to the tribe has a certain appeal. One big hangup for these sort of inter-cultural relations is that you generally find the more powerful side able to define the terms of the relationship. The tribe has to prove its validity by the Euro-American standards of the federal government. There have been great intra-tribal conflicts when the federal government insisted on working through a Euro-American style tribal government despite the existence of a traditional indigenous governance structure. It's tempting to say that it should be the tribe's own standards that apply, or some combination of the two that would prevent unscrupulous tribes or pseudo-tribes from scamming the government. This would help with the inter-cultural question, but it has the possibility of simply reproducing the power assymetry on an intra-tribal scale. Any organization, including a tribe, will have an elite holding power. The lack of structural incentives (such as the promise of a casino plus the stringent geneology requirements) may alter the shape and degree of abuse of that power. But it can't eliminate it. So long as there are advantages to be gained from official status, it is necessary to remain vigilant against those who decide on that status.

I wrote a paper for my Aboriginal Studies class a few years ago that had some slightly more developed thoughts on this general topic.
Stentor Danielson, 00:17,

23.11.03

Apology To Netscape

For a long time I've had a sidebar section labeled "Field Manual," which said "This site uses stylesheets. Therefore you shouldn't use Netscape." This was due to the fact that my stylesheets didn't render properly in Netscape. I assumed this was because Netscape wasn't fully standards-compliant. But I have discovered that the problem was on my end -- a little syntax error that IE overlooked but which Netscape, being a CSS perfectionist, got hung up on. That problem is now fixed, so Netscape users (at least users of the newest version, which is all I have on my computer to check it with) should now see the page as it's intended to be.
Stentor Danielson, 15:02,