-----Original Message-----
From: Dreamer <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Friday, May 07, 1999 11:46 PM
Subject: Re: "True beauty"


Dreamer wrote:

>
> Bissell responds to the below: Your are correct, however my point was that
> just using the same words does not constitute the same meaning. Luke the
> psycopath was *not* experiencing "true beauty," he was just saying the
> words. The point of the post was that Jim Tantillo's (I think) use of
> aesthetics to describe hunting had parallels to Luke's torture of animals.
> It is *not* analogous, parallel, similiar, or in any way related merely
> because the same words are used. Same reason I objected to Chris Lees'
> constant use of child molestation as analgous to hunting.
>
> My wife, and I love her dearly, is one of those people who use wild
> exaggerations to describe stuff. We were just in Mexico on a hike through
> some Mayan ruins in the Jungle. She said, "It's so hot I'm going to kill
> myself just to cool down."  She often uses words like "hate," "love," etc.
> to describe fairly mundane things, like food or whatever. She doesn't
really
> mean that in any true sense of the word, she's just saying it. For her to
> say she "loves" crab legs, which she did say, and for me to say "I love my
> wife," are *not* parallel, analogous, similar statements. It's just using
> the same words. In one case the words are appropriate to the situation, in
> the other they are not appropriate. Using pathological behaviors as
examples
> of non-pathologal ethical situations is a sophomoric debating technique.
> That's all I meant to show.

Dreamer responds:  I agree with your philosophy of language, Steve, but I'm
not
sure how we can tell the the words aren't being used in the same sense
in the cases at hand.  Maybe Luke had a keen sense of the ironies and
pathos in the situation he created.  Maybe he reached an ecstatic peak
with artistic elements.  I'm reminded of the brutality conducted to the
background of Beethoven in Clockwork Orange.

Bissell: Exactly! If you recall, the *point* of Clockwork Orange was to
*make* Beethoven associated with pathological behavior, *not* to suggest
that appreciation of Beethoven and rape were the same experience!


Dreamer continues: I'm not sure Chris was using pathological behaviors as
examples of non-pathological situations.  His point was that both sets of
behaviors
might/should be considered pathological.  According to the principles
he's articulated, recreational hunting SHOULD be considered
pathological.  Just because it happens all the time does not make it
objectively healthy.  Ceremonial human sacrifice, accompanied by
ecstatic ritual, happened all the time in many historical cultures.  But
observing that behavior from our vantage point, we might reasonably make
a case for labeling that behavior pathological.  (Or, again, perfectly
normal and acceptable.  Witness the macabre celebrations which continue
to accompany many executions under modern capital punishment policies).

Bissell here: Again, I agree with the observation, but not the conclusion.
Paul Shepard in _Nature and Madness_, as well as Fromm and others, feels
that entire societies can be "insane" and behave pathologically. According
to Shepard however, the trend to consider hunting "un-natural" is a symptom
of that pathology, and the association of hunting. . .a human activity for
at least 2,000,000 years. . .with pathological behaviors is a symptom of
society's inability to recognize our ecological/evolutionary role. I ofen
"sign" myself with this quote from Shepard

"A journey to our primal world may bring answers
to our ecological dilemmas. Such a journey will lead,
not to an impulsive or thoughtless way of life,
but to a reciprocity with origins declared by history
to be out of reach."

Shepard felt that the view that "post modern" humans could not return to a
hunter/gatherer past were a misreading of actual conditions. It is not the
hunting per se that distinguishes a hunter/gatherer life style, but a wide
compliment of behaviors and social settings.

My objections continue to be the same: the equation of hunting with
pathological behavior is simply a debating technique which misses the entire
point of hunting in a social/cultural sense. Child molestation, rape, human
sacrifice, bull fighting, boxing, torture, school massacres, on and on, are
not part of our evolutionary/ecological past however much they are part of
our history. Better explain that; all those terrible things have been around
for a long time in human history (say 10,000 pb to now) but none of them
have had any selective pressure on our evolution. Hunting/gathering however
has been around 2,000,000+ years and has shaped our genotype/phenotype.

I'm reading Jared Diamond's _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, which IMO is very
good, and he makes the point that war and such are *only* possible in
agricultural societies, hunter/gatherers do not develop divisions of labor
necessary to support a warrior class.

I get frustrated on this point very easily. As I have mentioned several
times on this list, I am a hunter even though I haven't even shot at an
animal in over 15 years. I don't "enjoy" killing animals any more than a
lion "enjoys" killing; it's what humans do as members of functioning
ecosystems. Lions don't "need" to kill, we can put them all in zoos and feed
them vegetable protein and they'll do fine, and we can go on Sundays and
laugh at them and take their pictures and buy cotton candy for the kids and
feel very smug that we've "saved" the species. What crap!

Why is my killing an animal pathological and a lion killing an animal
"natural?" I believe Dreamer (again, if I'm misremembering forgive me, I
grow old) suggested that "traditional native Americans" should/could hunt
ethically. But as a white male living in the 'burbs I can't? How on Earth
does that work?

Ecological roles and places in food webs are not matters of choice, they are
questions of ecological/evolutionary forces. It is clearly a matter of human
perspective versus evolutionary perspective. My father was a geologist and
he use to say things like, "It was a very short time, only a couple of
million years." Was he wrong? Is two million years a "very long time?" Taken
from the traditional view of ethics, I think it is; however, environmental
ethics, or at least one branch thereof, would have us think in these larger
terms. That is the correct, IMO, reading of Leopold, Rolston, Shepard, and
some others. The reading that only recent history and environmental
degradation due to human activity is the *central* issue in environmental
ethics is, again IMO, incorrect.

Well, I've prattled along for too long. Thanks, Dreamer, for getting my
engine going this morning. I was feeling a bit groggy until I did this.

Steven Bissell



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