S. Bissell wrote :
<snip>
> 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!
Chris :
You've lost me there,Steve. Your logic seems to be of the ' I breathe when I sleep,
therefore if I'm breathing I must be sleeping' variety.
> 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).
Chris:
Actually, as far as I am aware, I have never stated that 'hunters are victims
of some kind of pathology', i.e. ill, diseased.
What I said was that I don't think hunters can justify what they do, i.e. killing
a wild animal. Jim put forward various suggested justifications, one of which
was the 'aesthetic enjoyment / keen satisfaction' argument. My response was
to say that, a paedophile could use that same argument. And then we had the
Woodham example, where again, _hypothetically_ Woodham could argue that
he tortured and murdered because it was 'true beauty'.
The purpose of all these arguments, on my part, is not to prove that hunters
are psychotic, but to indicate that the arguments used to justify killing animals
are inadequate. If, and I mean _IF_, killing animals is _evil_, you don't change that
fact by insisting that you enjoy killing animals. You cannot change a bad action into
a good action, simply by declaring that it gave you some 'aesthetic enjoyment'.
Interestingly, there has just been a discussion on the radio, including a woman
who has built a reputation by getting personal intervies with serial murderers,
Nazi war criminals, and the like, and writing books about them, their motives,
and morals. She was asked for her definition of evil. Her reply was, that 'to gain
pleasure by harming another' is the essence of evil. She didn't say so, but I guess
she restricted 'another', to humans. But as I have argued already, 'other' can include
all that is not one's self, and to harm a river, for example, by pollution, by killing
all the organisms that make it 'river', is harming other people and future generations.
The pollution occurs because people want power and wealth and enjoy making money.
A great many pleasurable recreational activities do cause harm to the environment.
I would myself stop just short of calling hunters or tourists or businessmen who cause
negative effects upon the environment 'evil'. I think they are just thoughtless and
misguided on the whole. But once they have been made aware of the consequences of
their behaviour, if they persist, then maybe they do cross the line and become evil.
> 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.
Chris :
Well, hang on Steve. You're conclusion may be right or wrong, let's put that to
one side for a moment. But the argument and logic that you use to arrive at
your conclusion is very shaky indeed. Hominids and earlier humans may
have hunted for 2 or 3 million years. So what ? We are not australopithecines
or Neanderthalers or Australian aborigines or Zairean pygmies. Our genotype/
phenotype is not fixed. We've been domesticating ourselves for at least 10000
years. Just look at the difference between wolves and the many breeds of
domestic dog. There is not much of us that is ruled by genotype / phenotype.
We're ruled by our cultural conditioning. We are more intelligent than we were
a century ago, because of better diet and intense education. Even if we were,
on average, much as we were 50000 years ago, I don't think it follows that
we are obliged to limit ourselves to that average behaviour. We have the
example of Shakespeare, or Paul Shephard, who we look to, and we adjust
our conduct and ideas accordingly. If you look at the examples of humans
from all times and places, there is no 'right way', there is just astonishing
flexibility.There is absolutely nothing in your line of thought which commits
any of us, per se, to hunting animals. You may like to fantasise when you go
hunting, that you are filling the role of a lion, but that's all it is, a fantasy in
your head.
> 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.
Yeah, but it doesn't follow that they are 'nice'. Plenty of examples of hunter/
gatherers who go on killing sprees against others. They don't need a warrior
class to do that.
> 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!
And humans have the intelligence, supposedly, to be able to see that when
they have swarmed, and overpopulated the environment, and wrecked the
ecology, and live mostly in high density artificial cities, to go out killing
wild animals which are under such tremendous pressures already, maybe doesn't
make a whole lot of sense, regardless of what we might or might not have
done a million years ago.
> 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?
Because whether an action is right or wrong, good or bad, appropriate or not,
depends upon the context. I'm not at all happy, when people claim the right
to do something merely 'because it's traditional'.
> 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 return to reality, and take a close look at what is happening in the world.
We are in the middle of a grave emergency, the greatest loss of species for
sixty million years. We need an ethics that is appropriate for this crisis.
Chris.
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~chrislees/tao.index.html
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