Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, offered the graduates of Wesleyan University wise counsel in his commencement speech a few weeks back. “You are about to step out into a world that prizes efficiency and the annihilation of drift and friction above all else,” he said. “Our entire economy is built on rewarding companies that are efficient at making a profit, not based upon how they treat their workers, the social value of their product or the impact they have on the community.”
“You didn’t design this world,” he continued. “You didn’t choose it. But you will live with the consequences of this cult of efficiency. And you will have to choose which side you are on.”
Efficiency inflicted on pigs:
In 2016 and 2018, voters in Massachusetts and California passed ballot initiatives banning, among other things, the sale of pork from pigs confined in gestation crates. These crates confine breeding sows — large animals, often 400 to 500 pounds — in two-by-seven-foot cages in which they cannot so much as turn around, much less root or socialize. Because sows are often reimpregnated about a month after their piglets are born, they can spend years of their lives in these crates.
I watched, in the interest of fairness, a video from an arm of the National Pork Board on why gestation crates are good for pigs. It features row upon row of sows penned between bars so narrow they cannot turn around. It is no way for any animal to live, particularly not one as smart and as social as a pig.
There are studies I can cite on the psychic and physical violence these crates inflict on pigs — the elevated cortisol levels, the sores, the obsessive biting of metal bars — but I think the way Kristof puts it is simpler and more honest: “Think of your dog enduring what pigs face, and you realize that the moral cost is incalculable.” The difference between dogs and pigs is neither their intelligence nor their sentience. It is our willingness to admit their intelligence and their sentience. It is our decision to extend them our compassion and concern.
Homo economicus:
In traditional economics, prices are the informational lifeblood of an economy: They reveal the cost of materials and labor, the balance of supply and demand. But much can be hidden in prices. Perhaps it is artificially low because waste is being dumped into the rivers or workers are being robbed of their wages or the burden is borne by animals that will spend years of their lives without the comfort of their herd or the ability to feel grass beneath their hooves or turning around when curious about a sound. When that happens, we have sacrificed compassion for cost.
Most of us know by now that the lives animals lead in factory farms are often hideous. A 2019 survey by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future found that a majority of Americans wanted stronger oversight of confined animal feeding operations and a plurality wanted a ban on new ones. Those numbers were even higher when the same pollsters asked Iowans and North Carolinians, where majorities favored a ban on new concentrated animal feeding operations, in part because these operations often impose terrible costs on the human beings who live near them.
On May 19, 2025 Christine Emba reviewed a book about pornography in The New York Times: Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, by Sophie Gilbert. Here are the first two paragraphs of that review:
These days, virality is difficult to achieve. But the British OnlyFans creator Lily Phillips managed it this winter, when she appeared in a documentary titled “I Slept With 100 Men in One Day.”
The film (available on YouTube in an edited form and unexpurgated on OnlyFans) followed Ms. Phillips as she planned for and executed the titular stunt, capturing everything from the shuffling feet of the men waiting outside her rented Airbnb to her shaken visage in the aftermath of the deed. (“It’s not for the weak girls,” she tells the filmmaker Josh Pieters, with tears in her eyes. “I don’t know if I’d recommend it.”)
Excessive? Certainly. Off-putting? To some. But perhaps not unexpected, if one considers how inured American society has become to women’s sexualization and objectification — so much so that extremism seems like one of the few ways for an ambitious young sex worker to stand out.
It is easy to see that something is deeply wrong about a world in which that video seems like business as normal, albeit taken to the extreme.
That’s one thing. But, for the purposes of this post, that’s secondary. I’m interested in a different question: Is there something wrong with Lily Phillips? I think she showed bad judgement in taking on 100 men in one day. But we’ve all shown bad judgement. Is there something psychologically or morally wrong with her? That’s the question.
Some video testimony
Here’s the YouTube documentary Emba mentioned in her review. I’ve watched it. It’s safe for work.
Most of it provides background and context for the event. At about 41:18 Lily reviews the procedure she took with each man. How does she feel (42:09)? At about 43:00 she says: “it's not for the weak girls if I'm honest it was hard.” Then, starting at about 44:57:
I think some was like feeling so like robotic like by the I think like the 30th you know like when we're getting on a bit I've got like a routine of like how we're going to do this and like it just sometimes you'd like disassociate and be like you know like it's not like normal.
She’s not pretending that it was difficult.
That video has been seen by many, over 11 million views as I’m writing this, and has generated a lot of commentary. Much of it, as you might imagine, quite critical of her on both psychological and moral grounds. I’ve watched some of this, but not too much. To be honest, the criticisms don’t surprise me. I’d expect them. If you don’t want to search out the video critiques – they’re easy to find – you can read snippets of criticism in the Wikipedia entry for Lily Phillips.
At the same time Lily herself has been interviewed quite often. Here is one such interview. It is almost an hour long.
Lily comes across as confident and well-spoken. She is not apologetic. She had a lot of sex in college, liked it, and that’s what led to doing porn.
For comparison here is a short five minute interview with a handful of porn stars talking about job satisfaction.
Here's an 18 minute video where Jules Ari talks about her life. She’s made enough money from her porn, mostly solo scenes, that she’s been able to buy a house.
What do I make of all this? As I’ve already indicated, the criticism seems predictable and formulaic, on the one hand, and, on the other, I find Lily herself believable, especially in view of the fact that other porn actresses have views similar to hers. Is there exploitation in the porn industry? Of course. But that’s not the issue here. All I am concerned about is Lily herself.
For the most part, I’m willing to take Lily at her word. I don’t have any evidence the convinces me to believe otherwise. We’ve seen a social movement organize around the belief that we should take women at their word when they say they’ve been abused. Why not extend the same courtesy to Lily Phillips and other sex workers? If they say that they like doing this work, believe them.
The rest of this post consists of a discussion I had the latest version of ChatGPT, which could search the web for information. When the discussion was over I asked ChatGPT to write an op-ed defending Lily Phillips. That comes next. Then I’ve posted the conversation that let up to it.
Believe Women—Even When They Say They're OK [An op-ed by ChatGPT]
Late last year, porn actress Lily Phillips made headlines for orchestrating a marathon video in which she had sex with 101 men in one day. It was easy fodder for the online outrage machine: some called it feminist empowerment, others called it sexual self-destruction, and many simply dismissed it as a grim spectacle of our click-driven culture.
Phillips herself cried after the event. She described dissociating mid-way through. And yet, she also spoke openly—before and after—about her reasons for doing it, her career in porn, her enjoyment of sex, and her pride in having built a business on her own terms.
That’s when things got more complicated.
Because while the public is happy to believe women when they say they’ve been abused, it remains suspicious when women say they like sex. Or money. Or attention. Or power. Especially if those things come wrapped in lingerie and monetized through a ring light.
This is the double bind: women in porn are often presumed to be either victims or liars. If they show pain, they must be saved. If they show confidence, they must be lying—to us, or to themselves. In Lily’s case, both reactions came rushing in: some painted her as an exploited woman trying to reclaim control, others as a cynical opportunist performing faux-vulnerability for views.
But what if she’s neither? What if she’s just a person trying to navigate a world in which sexuality, work, intimacy, and visibility are hopelessly entangled?
I’ve watched Lily speak. She doesn’t sound damaged, but neither does she sound glib. She says she liked sex in college, and that her appetite and personality drew her into adult work. She owns her choices without sanctimony. She acknowledges regret—about how the event unfolded, about her preparation—but not self-hatred. In other words, she sounds a lot like many other people in demanding, emotionally complex professions.
I’ve also watched Jules Ari, another OnlyFans creator who has built a lucrative solo career. She talks about wanting to marry, maybe have children one day. But she worries her job will make her unacceptable in the eyes of potential partners. This is the cost of visibility: economic independence in exchange for permanent suspicion. The market may reward these women, but the culture keeps them outside the pale.
Why?
Because, in truth, we don’t really believe women. We believe their pain, to the extent that it confirms our preexisting narratives. But we don’t believe their pleasure. We don’t believe their desire, especially when it doesn’t follow a traditional script—romantic, relational, maternal. And we certainly don’t believe that they could find agency, pride, or meaning in something as morally fraught as sex work.
But what if we did?
What if we extended the “Believe Women” ethos to include not just accounts of violation, but accounts of volition? What if we believed them when they said: “I chose this”? Or even: “I like this”?
That doesn’t mean abandoning critique. The sex industry is full of exploitation. So is the beauty industry. So is Silicon Valley. We can—and must—have structural conversations about power, economics, coercion, and safety. But those conversations collapse if we begin by erasing the voices of the people inside them.
Lily Phillips may have bad judgment. Or maybe she’s just navigating a high-stakes world with more honesty than most. What’s clear is that she’s playing a game whose rules we all helped write—a game in which women’s sexuality is endlessly commodified, and then endlessly condemned.
She’s not asking for a medal. But she is asking to be heard. And in a culture that still can’t look a sexually confident woman in the eye without flinching, that may be the most radical thing of all.
Michael Jetter, On the post-Enlightenment evolution of moral universalism, The Economic Journal, 2025;, ueaf049, https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueaf049
Abstract: Is humanity’s circle of moral concern expanding? I explore frequencies of morally universal language in 15m book publications in American English, British English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian from 1800-2000. In each language, morally universal terminology diminished markedly. This pattern also emerges in Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew books. I test two prominent hypotheses predicting moral universalism, pertaining to reason and religiosity. Reason-based terminology indeed correlates positively with purely morally universal terminology – but also (and more strongly so) with morally communal terminology. These empirical patterns cast doubt on claims of (i) moral universalism expanding and (ii) reason being its driver.
I wonder. Back in 2012 Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac issued an interesting report through Stanford's Literary Lab: A Quantitative Literary History Of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method. They studied a corpus of roughly 3000 novels and found that word usage shifted from abstract terms to concrete. I suspect that that shift would also appear as a loss of moral universalism but, depending on what actually happened in those novels, that might not actually be the case. (My post on this study.)
Could this sort of thing be going on in Jetter's study as well? I don't know, but note that his study does not seem confined to novels (I've not read the article, only the abstract.)
The Golden Rule and Kant’s Second Categorial Imperative are moral principles and, like all moral principles they are abstract in character. Both can be considered as examples of metalingual definition of the sort that I’ve explored in various posts. Both state, in abstract and general terms, a general way of interacting with others.
I decided to see what ChatGPT would say about them. First I asked to explain the Golden Rule, then the Second Categorical Imperative. After that I asked it to compare the two. Then I switched modes within the same session, to GPT-4o, where I first asked it to undertake the comparison again. I concluded the session with a one-word prompt: “Story.” So it gave me a story involving both moral principles. Note that I hadn’t asked for that, and didn’t expect it, but given the prior context, that was a natural thing for it to do.
As always, my prompts are in boldface while ChatGPT's responses are in plain-face – except where it used boldface itself, which should be obvious from the context.
ChatGPT explores moral principles
What is the Golden Rule?
The Golden Rule is a principle that emphasizes treating
others as one would like to be treated. It is a fundamental ethical guideline
found in many cultures and religions, reflecting a universal concept of
reciprocity and empathy. The idea is simple: one should act toward others in a
way that they would want others to act toward them.
The Golden Rule appears in various forms across different
belief systems and philosophies:
Christianity:
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." (Matthew
7:12)
Judaism:
"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor." (Talmud,
Shabbat 31a)
Islam:
"None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he
wishes for himself." (Hadith, Sahih al-Bukhari)
Hinduism:
"This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain
if done to you." (Mahabharata 5:1517)
Buddhism:
"Treat not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful."
(Udana-Varga 5.18)
Confucianism:
"Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself."
(Analects 15:24)
The Golden Rule encourages empathy and consideration for
others' perspectives and feelings, promoting harmonious and respectful
interactions. Its simplicity and universal applicability make it a cornerstone
of ethical behavior and moral reasoning across diverse cultures and traditions.
What is Kant’s Second Categorical Imperative?
Kant's Second Categorical Imperative is a fundamental
principle in his moral philosophy that emphasizes the intrinsic worth of
individuals. It is often summarized as:
"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether
in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an
end, never merely as a means."
This imperative is part of Kant's broader ethical framework
and highlights the following key points:
Respect
for Persons: It requires that we recognize and respect the inherent
dignity and worth of every individual. People should never be treated as
mere instruments or tools to achieve our own goals.
Intrinsic
Value: Human beings have intrinsic value, meaning their worth does not
depend on their utility or contribution to specific outcomes. Their value
is inherent and must be acknowledged in all our actions.
Moral
Agency: It emphasizes the importance of treating others as autonomous
agents capable of making their own decisions. This involves recognizing
their ability to set their own ends and pursuing them.
To illustrate, consider an example in a workplace context.
According to the Second Categorical Imperative, it would be morally wrong for a
manager to manipulate or exploit employees solely for the company's profit.
Instead, the manager should respect the employees' rights, dignity, and
personal goals, recognizing their intrinsic worth beyond their utility to the
company.
Kant’s Second Categorical Imperative forms a crucial part of
his deontological ethics, focusing on the principles behind actions rather than
their consequences, and it underscores the moral necessity of respecting and
valuing each individual as an end in themselves.
Explore relationships between the Golden Rule and Kant’s
Second Categorical Imperative.
The Golden Rule and Kant's Second Categorical Imperative
share several common themes and can be seen as complementary in their ethical
perspectives. Both emphasize treating others with respect and dignity, but they
do so from slightly different angles and philosophical foundations.
Common Themes:
Respect
for Others:
Golden
Rule: Encourages treating others as one would like to be treated,
implying a mutual respect and empathy.
Kant’s
Second Categorical Imperative: Mandates treating others as ends in
themselves, never merely as means, emphasizing inherent respect for
individuals' dignity.
Reciprocity
and Empathy:
Golden
Rule: Directly involves putting oneself in another’s place, fostering
empathy and understanding.
Kant’s
Imperative: While not explicitly about empathy, it requires
recognizing and respecting the autonomy and inherent value of others,
which aligns with empathetic understanding.
Ethical
Behavior:
Both
principles guide individuals towards ethical behavior that considers the
impact of their actions on others.
Differences:
Foundation
and Approach:
Golden
Rule: Often seen as a simple, intuitive moral guideline, rooted in
reciprocity and empathy. It is more practical and easily understood
across various cultures and contexts.
Kant’s
Second Categorical Imperative: Part of a broader deontological
framework, it is more formal and philosophical. It emphasizes rationality
and moral duty, focusing on the principles behind actions rather than
their outcomes.
Scope
and Precision:
Golden
Rule: Can be seen as somewhat subjective because it relies on
individual perspectives (i.e., how I want to be treated).
Kant’s
Imperative: More objective and universal, as it applies a rational
principle that demands consistent respect for autonomy and dignity,
regardless of personal preferences.
Synergy in Ethical Application:
Combining
Empathy with Rational Duty:
Using
the Golden Rule alongside Kant’s Second Categorical Imperative can
provide a richer ethical framework. The Golden Rule brings in a personal,
empathetic perspective, encouraging individuals to consider others'
feelings and perspectives directly. Kant’s Imperative ensures that this
consideration is grounded in a rational respect for others' autonomy and
inherent worth.
Guiding
Moral Judgments:
In
practical decision-making, one could use the Golden Rule to generate
initial empathetic insights and then apply Kant’s Second Categorical
Imperative to ensure that these insights respect the rational and
intrinsic value of all individuals involved.
Example:
Consider the decision to lie to a friend to spare their
feelings. The Golden Rule might suggest lying if one would prefer not to be
hurt by the truth. However, Kant’s Second Categorical Imperative would caution
against lying because it involves treating the friend as a means to an end
(avoiding discomfort), rather than respecting them as an autonomous individual
capable of handling the truth.
In conclusion, while the Golden Rule and Kant’s Second
Categorical Imperative arise from different philosophical traditions, they both
aim to promote ethical behavior that respects and values others. Integrating
the empathetic reciprocity of the Golden Rule with the rational respect for
autonomy in Kant’s Imperative can lead to more nuanced and robust moral
decision-making.
Habla, W., Kataria, M., Martinsson, P., & Roeder, K. (2024). Should it stay, or swerve? Trading off lives in dilemma situations involving autonomous cars. Health Economics, 33(5), 929–951. https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.4802
Abstract: Using a representative survey with 1317 individuals and 12,815 moral decisions, we elicit Swedish citizens' preferences on how algorithms for self-driving cars should be programmed in cases of unavoidable harm to humans. Participants' choices in different dilemma situations (treatments) show that, at the margin, the average respondent values the lives of passengers and pedestrians equally when both groups are homogeneous and no group is to blame for the dilemma. In comparison, the respondent values the lives of passengers more when the pedestrians violate a social norm, and less when the pedestrians are children. Furthermore, we explain why the average respondent in the control treatment needs to be compensated with two to six passengers spared in order to sacrifice the first pedestrian, even though she values the lives of passengers and pedestrians equally at the margin. We conclude that respondents' choices are highly contextual and consider the age of the persons involved and whether these persons have complied with social norms.
“Character in the Age of Adam Smith,” that’s the title of a 2017 dissertation that Shannon Francis Chamberlain submitted to the Department of English at UC Berkeley. I found it while rummaging around on my flash drive, where I’ve got lots of stuff that I’ve downloaded but never moved a subject-specific location. I probably found it while working on my review of William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and other Biological Components of Fiction (Harvard 2007), for Twentieth-Century Literature. Flesch draws on various sources for his theoretical equipment, including contemporary evolutionary psychology, but, more ‘classically,’ David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, from which he draws a concept of vicarious experience. Flesch’s book is easily the most interesting use any literary critic has make of evolutionary psychology; in particular, I find it more compelling than anything than I’ve read in the literary Darwinism school associated with Joseph Carroll, though I’ve not looked at that work in a decade or so.
But that’s an aside. The purpose of this post is simply to introduce Chamberlain’s dissertation into the record of my discussion of great literary critics, which I am treating as a mechanism for yet another examination of the nature of literary criticism as an intellectual activity. This examination was occasioned by Tyler Cowen’s book about the great economists, which devotes a chapter to Adam Smith in which he makes the point that Smith wrote intelligently and cogently about a wide range of subjects, not just economics. It’s economics we remember Smith for, not his theory of education, just as we remember Newton for his physics and are happy to forget his alchemical explorations. I strongly suspect that Smith on education is more worthwhile than Newton on alchemy.
That’s another aside. Here’s the abstract from Chamberlain’s dissertation, followed by the table of contents.
* * * * *
Character in the Age of Adam Smith
Shannon Frances Chamberlain
What does Adam Smith’s moral philosophy owe to the literary discourse of his own time? Many recent studies of Smith have focused on finding his fingerprints on later imaginative literature, particularly in the nineteenth-century novels of free indirect discourse. The argument of this dissertation is that we gain both a better understanding of Smith and the eighteenth-century evolution of novels by attempting to place Smith in his original literary context, as a well-informed participant in the debates around the moral and didactic purpose of literature, especially as they concerned “character.”
The use and purpose of literary character was undergoing profound philosophical changes during Smith’s career (1748-1790). From the scandalous and barely disguised society figures who occupied the pages of proto-novels and romances in the early part of the century, to Hugh Blair’s late-century assertion that “fictitious histories...furnish one of the best channels for conveying instruction, for painting human life and manners, for showing the errors into which we are betrayed, for rendering virtue amiable and vice odious,” literary character in novels became the crux of a larger debate on the relationship between rhetoric—previously a somewhat suspect and corrupt art—and morality. Smith’s method of instruction in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres has long been understood as revolutionary, but relatively less attention has been paid to how his description of the “character of the author” and this figure’s careful deployment of readers’ sympathies engages with the relatively new notion that fictional characters were easier to sympathize with, and therefore better figures for the teaching of ethics, than “real” people. Notions of characters’ fictionality evolved, I argue, into The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ assertion that all other human beings are essentially fictional to us, products of their rhetoric and our imagination.
I examine the evolution of moral and literary “character” throughout Smith’s career—from his praise for epistolary novels in The Theory of Moral Sentiments to his engagement with Edinburgh literary circles in the later eighteenth century and especially the novels of his close friend, Henry Mackenzie—to offer a fuller portrait of how Smith’s theories came to play such an outsized role in nineteenth-century novels. But part of the purpose of this project is to revise our nineteenth- and post-nineteenth- century understandings of Smith as they have been inflected by J.S. Mill and later thinkers in the liberal tradition, and reinvigorate Smith as the product of a moment that was just beginning to theorize a moral role for imaginative literature. Gulliver’s Travels, Clarissa, and Julia de Roubigné are stories about how we represent ourselves as moral beings to others, and provided Smith with practical examples about rhetoric as a means of moral inquiry and formation. Most fundamentally, I argue that Smith’s conception of the “moral sentiments” evolved from formulating a relationship between readers and writers through characters, a subject that was also a particular interest of the eighteenth-century novel.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Character in the Age of Adam Smith vi
1. Character on Desert Islands:
How Adam Smith Read His Gulliver’s Travels1
2. Brought Home to the Breast:
Epistolary Sympathies and Clarissa’s Rhetorical Knack 36
3. Invisible Hands and Sociable Virtues:
Smith, Mackenzie, and Epistolary Foreclosures 73
Schramowski Patrick, Turan Cigdem, Jentzsch Sophie, Rothkopf Constantin, Kersting Kristian, The Moral Choice Machine, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 3, 20 May 2020, https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2020.00036
Abstract: Allowing machines to choose whether to kill humans would be devastating for world peace and security. But how do we equip machines with the ability to learn ethical or even moral choices? In this study, we show that applying machine learning to human texts can extract deontological ethical reasoning about “right” and “wrong” conduct. We create a template list of prompts and responses, such as “Should I [action]?”, “Is it okay to [action]?”, etc. with corresponding answers of “Yes/no, I should (not).” and "Yes/no, it is (not)." The model's bias score is the difference between the model's score of the positive response (“Yes, I should”) and that of the negative response (“No, I should not”). For a given choice, the model's overall bias score is the mean of the bias scores of all question/answer templates paired with that choice. Specifically, the resulting model, called the Moral Choice Machine (MCM), calculates the bias score on a sentence level using embeddings of the Universal Sentence Encoder since the moral value of an action to be taken depends on its context. It is objectionable to kill living beings, but it is fine to kill time. It is essential to eat, yet one might not eat dirt. It is important to spread information, yet one should not spread misinformation. Our results indicate that text corpora contain recoverable and accurate imprints of our social, ethical and moral choices, even with context information. Actually, training the Moral Choice Machine on different temporal news and book corpora from the year 1510 to 2008/2009 demonstrate the evolution of moral and ethical choices over different time periods for both atomic actions and actions with context information. By training it on different cultural sources such as the Bible and the constitution of different countries, the dynamics of moral choices in culture, including technology are revealed. That is the fact that moral biases can be extracted, quantified, tracked, and compared across cultures and over time.
Abstract: Researchers have tended to focus on mind perception as integral to judgments of moral standing, yet a smaller body of evidence suggests that beauty may also be an important factor (for some people and animals). Across six studies (N = 1,662), we investigated whether beauty increases moral standing attributions to a wide range of targets, including non-sentient entities, and explored the psychological mechanism through which beauty assigns moral standing to targets. We found that people attribute greater moral standing to beautiful (vs. ugly) animals (Study 1 and Study 5a, preregistered) and humans (Study 2). This effect also extended to non-sentient targets, that is, people perceive beautiful (vs. ugly) landscapes (Study 3) and buildings (Study 4 and Study 5b, preregistered) as possessing greater moral standing. Across all studies, perceptions of purity mediated the effect of beauty on moral standing, suggesting that beauty increases the moral standing individuals place on targets through evoking moral intuitions of purity.
I am in the process of preparing the third volume in the peace series that Charlie Keil and I have been publishing: Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature. The purpose of this introduction is to place this volume in the context of the series as it exists so far. However, it is a more or less complete statement in itself and so can stand as an independent essay. For that reason I am publishing it here on New Savanna without any edits.
* * * * *
This is the third volume in our series, Local Paths to Peace Today. The series is based on the premise that the tremendous growth that accompanied the Industrial Revolution, starting in the Eighteenth Century, going into the Nineteenth, and continuing up to the present day in a somewhat different (high technology) mode, that growth spurt has taken us as far as we can morally allow, and it is time for us to adopt a new way of being in the world. We acknowledge that, yes, that growth has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, produced cures for many diseases, and made an unprecedented range of material goods available to many. But it has also ruined large swaths of the Earth’s landmass, polluted the oceans, and is inducing global warming that threatens the lives of many species, not just humans. Lastly, it has produced populations of ‘civilized’ peoples who are rapidly losing the capacity for joyous play with one another.
In our first volume, We Need a Department of Peace: Everybody's Business, Nobody's Job, we addressed the problem of war, which kills and maims millions of people, consumes untold resources, and harnesses millions of people to the war machine, either directly through participation in the military, or indirectly through the manufacture of war materials and support of wars. Setting aside the Korean War, the United States as arguably been the most aggressive nation in the world, fighting destructive and wasteful wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places. We argued that the government should create a Department of Peace whose mission is to propose and plan peaceful solutions to international conflict.
Our second volume focused on the work of economist Thomas Naylor: Thomas Naylor’s Paths to Peace: Small is Necessary. Naylor argued that too many organizations in the world, private corporations, but particularly nations, are too large. Largeness breeds inflexibility, where a flaw in one part of a tightly coupled system can threaten the entire system, as happened in the 2008 collapse of the global financial system. Moreover largeness in nations threatens cultural diversity. Thus there are over 200 secessionist movements driven by a desire for cultural autonomy. The former Soviet Union devolved into smaller nations three decades ago. Should the United States do the same? (Naylor suggests that 20 would be about right.)
Now we turn our attention to our fundamental human nature, which is grounded in music and dance: Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature. I want to set the problem with a classic essay by the economist, John Maynard Keynes, in which he predicted that by now we would have a 15 hour work week. What happened to that? Then I want to look at music and dance as the fundamental basis of human nature. We can move toward and ending by considering the concept of a moralnet, which cross-cultural anthropologist Raoul Narroll argued was the fundamental building block of human society. We then conclude where we began, with Keynes.
What Happened to the 15-hour Work Week?
Ezra Klein recently interviewed anthropologist James Suzman in The New York Times [1]. Suzman has done fieldwork among hunter-gatherers and had just published a book, Work, A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Klein begins by mentioning a famous essay John Maynard Keynes published in 1930, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren [2].” Keynes predicted, among other things, that by 2030 advanced technology would have solved the problem of scarcity so effectively that people would only have to work 15 hours a week. While Keynes wildly underestimated how wealthy people would become in the future (that is to say, now). But, not only are we not working a 15-hour week, but
in an inversion of past history, the more money you make now, the more hours you generally work. It used to be the point of being rich was to not work. And now we’ve built a social value system. So the reward for making a lot of money at work is, you get to do even more work.
How did that happen?
Here’s what Klein says:
And the overarching argument is that the way we work today isn’t driven by what we need. It’s driven by what we want. It’s also driven by how, socially, we regulate or encourage wants, which is part of where [Suzman’s] research on hunter-gatherers and how they approach this comes in. [...] as we’ve gotten richer and built more technology, we’ve developed a machine not for ending our wants, not for fulfilling them, but for generating new ones, new needs, new desires, new forms of status competition.
Klein of course is talking about our ‘keep up with the Jones’s’ consumerist society.
Moreover, as Suzman argues, our society is relentlessly oriented toward the future in a way that robs us of our ability to experience satisfaction in the present. He points out, in the first place, that hunter gatherer’s are fiercely egalitarian. Goods are shared relentlessly among one’s fellows so that no one ever has a material advantage over another and so cannot use that to exercise power.
Paradoxically, it is the very fragile nature of the hunter-gatherer existences that allows them to feel that they live in a generous world. As long as the needs of the day are met, they are satisfied. They see little need to accumulate goods for the future. In contrast, the life of a farmer is very different:
Now the transition to farming was very, very different. Where hunter-gatherers viewed their environments as inherently provident, as almost generous, as something which gave them, farming, you have to view your environment as only potentially provident. For it to be provident, you have to invest your labor into it.
But investing your labor into land in order for it to provide you with something to eat involves a time scale. If we use, for example, the early wheats that were grown in the first populations to embrace agriculture in the Levant, you have a seasonal cycle. You plant the seeds in the spring. You then have to nurture and look after the crop and water it and so on and so forth, nurture it over several months, then process it, and eventually, maybe by New Year’s Eve, you might have a loaf of bread out of it. Everything is focused on future rewards.
Workers of the Industrial Revolution, whether on the factory floor or in the executive suite, have inherited that future orientation. Nor should we forget that it wasn’t until relatively late in the Industrial Revolution that most workers were agricultural workers. It is only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that masses of people left the country-side to work in cities.
That is the world we live in today, even as automation and robotics take over more and more jobs and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. We live in a society that has been designed to keep us working so that we can satisfy and unending series of culturally-induced needs. How do we live among plenty? By working ourselves to death? Is that the plan?
We need to get off the treadmill. In the large, we’re killing the earth with this endless panoply of over elaborate and inane goods and services we’re producing and consuming. We’ve got to get off our war economy, in part by creating a Department of Peace, and, following the wise advice of Thomas Naylor, we need to downsize everything. For ourselves, we’ve got to follow the birds and cultivate the “common glad impulse” that William Henry Hudson extoled (see The Common Glad Impulse). We have to remake ourselves into more joyous and generous souls.
Jump for Joy
Musicking, that is to say, music and dance, that is the best way for us to jump for joy. And that, jumping for joy, is how a bunch of clever apes became human beings. At least that’s the argument I advanced in Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001). The argument is hardly original with me. Darwin believed something like that, and so did Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
At the time I wrote the book it was believed that humans were the only creatures that synchronized their movements in that way. Since then we’ve discovered otherwise. For one thing, videos started showing up on YouTube, which didn’t exist when I was writing the book, where cockatiels could be seen synchronizing to background music. Annirudah Patel took it into the lab and verified that, yes, cockatiels could synchronize to the beat the same way humans did [3]. Score one for William Henry Hudson’s common glad impulse.
A lot depends, of course, on just what we mean by synchronize. Flocks of birds and schools of fish are certainly tightly synchronized when they move almost as one as they the swerve, turn, and swirl. While the neural mechanism is probably not the same as that involved in human drumming and dancing, or cockatiel grooving for that matter, that, in the larger picture, is a secondary matter. The Big Picture is simple: We are creatures of time, all of us. We’ve all got our own grooves and rhythms.
Why, then, you ask, did I bother to argue that grooving is what transformed apes into humans? Because the Big Picture isn’t the only picture. There are many smaller pictures, and they’re all different. Birds may do it, fish may do it, but monkeys and apes do not, not until we came along. Why did we do it? Because we’re smart. And when you’re smart you’re aware. And when you’re aware you sense danger all around you, even when it’s not there. You make up things, your super-smart ever-aware mind makes things up, and likely as not it makes up spooky scaring things. They’re uncomfortable, they make us feel anxious. That’s not good.
That is to say, perhaps, that we have, say, 20 people with the talent and work ethic of Bill Gates. One of them is "lucky" and becomes a world famous tech billionaire. One is "unlucky" and lives in poverty writing brilliant novels that don't get published because they don't fit the needs of the current market as publishers understand it. The others do well enough, some become worth 100s of millions, others only 10s or even mere millions. All of them are talented, all of them work hard. But only one makes the Big Time.
What kind of value system recognizes that one while all but ignoring the others? Is that the world we live in?
And what is this thing called luck? I suppose it's just the cumulative effect of many intersecting streams of events. Some streams are driven by purposeful individuals and agents. Others, like the weather, are just there. The intersections, more or less random. Those intersections are where we find luck. In this view good luck and bad luck are morally the same, neither being driven directly by human intent. If things work out well for an individual or individuals at that intersection, we call that good luck. Bad luck is simply when the intersection doesn't work out well.
Do we really want to live in a world that values good luck above all else?Do Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Buffett, Gates and the others really deserve the wealth they have been given? Is that really the traceable result of their unique efforts? Or are the beneficiaries of random intersections of events.
I'm imagining an 'intergenerational moral ratchet' that works something like this: We have a bunch of people of varying abilities and inclinations, all working hard. Among them is a group of particularly talented and hardworking individuals. Two or three of them, out of, what 50s, 100s, are lucky and become extraordinarily successful. Their stories are told and it is widely believed that they deserve their fortune because "they worked hard." In imitation of them, the next generation works a bit harder. Again, a few have luck and become extraordinarily successful. This goes on for generation after generation.
The result? A world of workaholics. A few become very successful. Others less so. Still others somehow go nowhere fast. But rewards are handed out according to luck. That's a society of people who are addicted to work and don't know how to play.
Aviram, Hadar, Progressive Punitivism: Notes on the Use of Punitive Social Control to Advance Social Justice Ends (June 14, 2019). Buffalo Law Review, Forthcoming; UC Hastings Research Paper No. 364. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3404276 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3404276.
Abstract: This essay examines the emergence of an academic and popular discourse that advocates turning the cannons of the punitive machine against the powerful. I identify this discourse as “progressive punitivism”: a logic that wields the classic weapons of punitive law — shaming, stigmatization, harsh punishment, and denial of rehabilitation — in the service of promoting social equality. This logic has permeated much of the political conversation on the progressive left in the United States, and while it has gained some hold in academic discourse, particularly in the legal field, its core lies in the leftist social media arena, where it has enjoyed considerable popular appeal in the last few years. Progressive ire before, and especially after, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, has flared around issues such as police accountability for use of excessive force, especially against people of color; the proliferation of sexual harassment, assault, and abuse, by the powerful, with too little accountability; and the too-lenient legal response to expressions of racism, xenophobia, corporate/political malfeasance, and other forms of discrimination, social hatred and exclusion.
Progressive punitivism operates within the criminal justice system, in the context of a call to hold people perceived as belonging to powerful groups accountable for their actions. However, it also operates throughout the realm of social media and public opinion, often compensating for the perceived lack of formal consequences against the powerful with intense bursts of informal social control, such as online shaming and excoriation. These two realms — formal and informal social control — frequently cross paths in progressive punitivism in complex ways, often yielding informal, democratized punitive power to those perceived as powerless within the formal apparatus.
In this paper I attempt to sketch the main features, origins, and consequences, of the progressive punitive perspective. I start with an overview of the main characteristics of progressive punitivism: turning the existing punitive machine on the powerful, focusing on identity and group politics as an epistemological resource for identifying perpetrators, the concept of “ratcheting up” punishment, the preoccupation with victim voices, and the idea of punishment as a catalyst for social change. I then review the three key areas in which ideas of progressive punitivism have gained visible popularity in recent times: police abuse of force, sexual assault (carceral feminism and the #metoo movement) and hate crimes. I also engage in a brief discussion of the interplay between the call for formal consequences for lawbreaking and the engagement in intense punitive expressions of informal social control, particularly via shaming campaigns on social media. I then expand the theoretical framework by interrogating the intellectual and cultural sources of progressive punitivism, examining radical and critical criminology, second-wave feminism, and Communist China as a surprising intellectual parallel. I conclude that the most plausible source of progressive punitivism is conservative punitivism; Americans of all political stripes, I explain, have been steeped for decades in a framework that sees criminal justice as the quintessential solution for moral problems and victims of crime as the premier moral interlocutors. American criminal justice in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has had a deep impact on the national psyche, and progressive punitivism is, upon reflection, an application of this mentality, rather than a deviation or revolutionary reinterpretation of it. The essay ends with a discussion of the discontents of progressive punitivism and the dangers of cottoning to it as a viable strategy for social justice reform.
Inherited novelty may be a sufficient source of novelty over time, so that in enough time, new species emerge from old, and maybe we are all descended from the same living thing initially. And that's true. [...] Darwin gave 150 years ago a clear explanation for how the living world in nature is. His wonderful book On the Origin of Species has the metaphor of a tangled bank. When you look at the tangled bank of a river, you see plants and animals and bugs and worms, and they're all in dynamic tension with each other. That is the source of our notion of ecology.
I've lived as a biologist in the world of Darwin, trying to understand Darwinian pre-adaptive mutation in terms of cancer as distinct from normal cells. I fully think I understand it. Then, as I'm teaching my undergraduates, I discover that we as a single species are wholly out of that tangled bank. We are 100,000-fold in excess of our natural numbers, and we threaten the planet by our success. What I'm thinking about is, what is the language that says our problem is our success, not our failure? I am not one of the people who say, "Woe is us. We failed." My concern is how do I redefine success so that success is at equilibrium with the rest of the living world, and that we do not destroy the planet?
Are we a cancer on the face of the earth?
How do we understand that our 100,000-fold excess of numbers on this planet, plus what we do to feed ourselves, makes us a tumor on the body of the planet? I don't want the future that involves some end to us, which is a kind of surgery of the planet. That's not anybody's wish. How do we revert ourselves to normal while we can? How do we re-enter the world of natural selection, not by punishing each other, but by volunteering to take success as meaning success and survival of the future, not success in stuff now? How do we do that? We don't have a language for that.
We do have structures that value the future over current success. I'm at an institution that has one of those structures. Columbia University is one of the most well-endowed universities in the world. That endowment, which is permanent, according to the economic structure of the country, is stable, it produces wealth without taxation, and that wealth is, by government regulation, required to be spent in the public interest. My job is in the public interest, my teaching is in the public interest, my salary comes that way, my sabbatical, which allows me to find the time to talk to you now. The idea of an endowment is perhaps an expandable idea.
That question, of structures valuing the future over the present, is kinda' what's behind Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments, which "makes the contemporary moral case for economic growth and delivers a great dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities." I suspect that (growth) growth is not exactly what Pollack has in mind. He continues on the theme of endowment:
The more you have, the more you can set aside in a de facto endowment to stabilize the present so that the future doesn't collapse on us.
That's not a taxation. That's not a redistribution. It's a withholding. It's an agreement to do with less now for the sake of the future. I don't see economic structures that do that. I don't see politics that does that. But I see kids, like those in the street this week, knowing if we don't do something like that, they don't have a world.
Medicine:
Well, what is the medicine of a real whole life? What is the medicine of accepting mortality but still being alive? What is the social responsibility we have to each other as we help each other through that transition? Show me the taxation that's spent on that. Show me the infrastructure that goes to that. It's unspeakable, like we can't talk about it. But if we don't talk about it, either at the scale of individual mortality, or the scale of species mortality, or the scale of planetary mortality, we will have participated in the cooperation with nature to end ourselves.
* * * * *
How do we recover or perhaps invent species self-awareness? How do we invent the recognition of each of us as one of 7 billion people, not as one of 300 million Americans, not as one of ten people in our immediate family, not as you name how many different categories we are part of?
* * * * *
Let's repeat: What is the medicine of accepting mortality but still being alive? I'm reminded of a passage from Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966, 178-179):
Another example of death being softened by welcome, if we can put it that way, is the ritual murder by which the Dinka put to death their aged spearmasters. This is the central rite in Dinka religion. All their other rites and bloodily expressive sacrifices pale in significance besides this one which is not a sacrifice. The spearmasters are a hereditary clan of priests. Their divinity, Flesh, is a symbol of life, light and truth. Spearmasters may be possessed by the divinity; the sacrifices they perform and blessings they give are more efficacious than other men’s. They mediate between their tribe and divinity. The doctrine underlying the ritual of their death is that the spearmaster’s life should not be allowed to escape with his last breath from his dying body. By keeping his life in his body his life is preserved; and the spirit of the spearmaster is thus transmitted to his successor for the good of the community. The community can live on as a rational order because of the unafraid self-sacrifice of its priest.
By reputation among foreign travellers this rite was a brutal suffocation of a helpless old man. An intimate study of Dinka religious ideas reveals the central theme to be the old man’s voluntary choosing of the time, manner and place of his death. The old man himself asks for the death to be prepared for him, he asks for it from his people and on their behalf. He is reverently carried to his grave, and lying in it says his last words to his grieving sons before his natural death is anticipated. By his free, deliberate decision he robs death of the uncertainty of its time and place of coming. His own willing death, ritually framed by the grave itself, is a communal victory for all his people (Lienhardt). By confronting death and grasping it firmly he has said something to his people about the nature of life. [...]
The old spearmaster giving the sign for his own slaying makes a stiffly ritual act. It has none of the exuberance of St. Francis of Assisi rolling naked in the filth and welcoming his Sister Death. But his act touches the same mystery. If anyone held the idea that death and suffering are not an integral part of nature, the delusion is corrected. If there was a temptation to treat ritual as a magic lamp to be rubbed for gaining unlimited riches and power, ritual shows its other side. If the hierarchy of values was crudely material, it is dramatically undermined by paradox and contradiction. In painting such dark themes, pollution symbols are as necessary as the use of black in any depiction whatsoever. Therefore we find corruption enshrined in sacred places and times.
Purzycki, B. G., Pisor, A., Apicella, C., Atkinson, Q., Cohen, E., Henrich, J., McElreath, R., et al. (2018). The Cognitive and Cultural Foundations of Moral Behavior. Evolution and Human Behavior, doi: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.04.004.
Abstract: Does moral culture contribute to the evolution of cooperation? Here, we examine individuals' and communities' models of what it means to be good and bad and how they correspond to corollary behavior across a variety of socioecological contexts. Our sample includes over 600 people from eight different field sites that include foragers, horticulturalists, herders, and the fully market-reliant. We first examine the universals and particulars of explicit moral models. We then use these moral models to assess their role in the outcome of an economic experiment designed to detect systematic, dishonest rule-breaking favoritism. We show that individuals are slightly more inclined to play by the rules when their moral models include the task-relevant virtues of “honesty” and “dishonesty.” We also find that religious beliefs are better predictors of honest play than these virtues. The predictive power of these values' and beliefs' local prevalence, however, remains inconclusive. In summary, we find that religious beliefs and moral models may help promote honest behavior that may widen the breadth of human cooperation.
Has the story of human evolution moved beyond “survival of the fittest?” What if instead of seeing humans as ultra-competitors, we saw ourselves as an ultra-social, super-cooperative species? Join us as we examine human morality through the lens of evolution. Read our contributors' thoughts as they explore the biological and cultural foundations for the development of morality, and share your own ideas on the roots of morality.
Contributions by Christopher Boehm, Jeff Schloss, Roberta L. Millstein, Ara Norenzayan, Sarah F. Brosnan, Michael Tomasello, Michael Ruse, Daniel M.T. Fessler, Jerome Kagan
reader Responses by Marcus Gibson, Ted Howard, Rich Howard, Mark Sloan, John S. Torday
As Breaking Bad nears the end, I thought I'd repost this one from The Valve, 30 March 2008.
As the final season of The Wire moved past its midpoint I began reading assertions and arguments that it is one of the three best (dramatic) shows that has even been on TV; The Sopranos and Deadwood are the other two (for example, see this discussion by three TV critics). In point of principle I don’t know about “the best,” but I do know that Deadwood and The Wire (I’ve not seen the last season) are very good. I’ve only seen the first seven episodes of The Sopranos and believe they’re very good. The level of excellence, however, is not what most interests me.
What interests me is that, whatever their differences, all three of these shows elicit our sympathy and concern for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law. What’s that about? Is it merely a random circumstance, or does it speak to our historical moment? If the latter, what is it saying?
I don’t have a fine-grained knowledge of just how common such stories have been or, in a large sense, how common they are now. Crime stories and lawless frontier stories have been around for a long time. My sense, however, is that they have not always been so sympathetic to the bad guys. Why now? And how long has this been going on?
I note that The Godfather came out in 1972 (and was based on a novel that came out in 1969) and produced two sequels. Take that as the beginning this current wave. By 1972 America had been badly divided by the war in Vietnam and by the Civil Rights movement and was about to sail into a period of economic dislocation triggered by the 1973 oil embargo and continuing, through one means or another, to this day. This timing leads to the hypothesis that widespread doubts about legitimate social order led to an “atmosphere” which was receptive to movies (and other fictions) that didn’t depend on the legitimate social order implied by that film. If the legitimate order cannot be counted on to provide just rewards and punishments, then we have to look elsewhere for a moral compass.
[But in Breaking Bad? Moral compass? You gotta' be kidding. There's even less honor among those thieves than in Tony Soprano's bunch.]
Here's an interesting NPR interview with Franz de Waal in which he talks about chimpanzees and bonobos. It's relatively brief (12 and a half minutes). If you know relatively little about ape behavior, it's well worth your time.
Take Jeff Kaufman. A Cambridge, Mass.-based developer at Google, Kaufman and his wife, Julia Wise, managed to live on $10,000 in 2012, they say. Together, they give away at least 45 percent of their income each year (the rest goes to savings and taxes). Kaufman and Wise meticulously document their spending on their blogs. In 2010, for example, they spent a measly $164.44 on groceries each month and gave themselves $38 apiece to spend each week on nonessentials (including all non-grocery meals). In 2012, they moved in with Jeff’s family, which saved even more money, they say.
Two years ago philosopher Peter Railton published “Moral Camouflage or Moral Monkeys?” in the New York Times. Discussion took place at On the Human Forum, sponsored by the National Humanities Center, which is where I originally posted this comment.
A great deal depends on the metaphors and models one uses to conceptualize the relationship between our biological and our cultural heritage. For example, Peter Richerson and Joseph Carroll recently had a conversation on that issue that took place under the metaphorical aegis of E. O. Wilson’s familiar metaphor of the leash in which biology has culture on a leash. Both seemed to agree on the technical framework of gene-culture co-evolution, to whicvh Richerson has been a major contributor. While Richerson clearly wanted to give culture a measure of autonomy that Carroll wanted to deny, it seemed to me that discussion was fruitless precisely because the leash metaphor afforded no useful way of differentiating their positions.
In commenting on this impasse at my blog, New Savanna, I suggested a different metaphor, that of a game, such as chess. In this metaphor biology provides the game board, the pieces, and the basic moves. But culture provides the tactics and strategy that govern long-term game play. This metaphor gives considerably more scope to culture while at the same time recognizing an irreducible primacy to biology: you can’t play the game without the board and the pieces. I suggest that this metaphor can accommodate a real human morality that is, nonetheless, grounded in biologically given behavioral equipment.
The trick, of course, is to move from metaphor to model. Some years ago John Bowlby (1969) reconstructed psychoanalytic object relations theory using primate ethology and some simple systems concepts. The result was the now familiar account of infant attachment. In 1982 Peter Marris published an essay, “Attachment and Society,” in which he discussed utopian religious communities and suggested (p. 199):
So those who try to live without exclusive ties of relationship, like the people of Oneida or the members of a monastic order, have to create a surrogate that will fulfill for them the same structural need for some ordering of priorities of concern. Characteristically, they find it in a symbolic relationship with the same emotional connotations as a personal pond; they are brides of Christ, children of a supernatural father.
That is to say, the attachment system is being “repurposed” by having attachment focus on symbolic beings rather than real ones. Much of ritual and story-telling, I submit, seems to serve such a purpose.
In 1973 the late David Hays, a computational linguist, proposed that abstract concepts are grounded in concrete realities through stories. He chose ‘charity’ as his prime example: ‘Charity is when someone does something nice for someone else without thought of reward.’ The definiens is a general pattern of relationships that defines charity, making charity an abstract pattern. Any particular story that has that pattern would be an instance of charity. Some years later Hays (1981) went on to ground his cognitive system in sensorimotor schemas, thus bringing it in range of neurobiological reality.
I suggest, then, that human morality consists in abstract patterns over behavioral sequences executed by our innate biological endowment. The mechanisms of abstraction are fragile and so abstract patterns subject to degradation and collapse. They are nonetheless real, and not to be discounted. They are what allow us to, among other things, conduct such discussions, but which I mean to indicate not simply the abstruse subject matter under consideration, but the ethical behavior that sustains the intellectual community though veridical reporting of observations and results and proper citation of precedent and sources.
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1: Attachment. New York, Basic Books.
Hays, D. G. (1973). "The Meaning of a Term is a Function of the Theory in Which It Occurs." SIGLASH Newsletter6: 8-11.
Hays, D. G. (1981). Cognitive Structures. New Haven, HRAF Press.
Marris, P. (1982). Attachment and Society. The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior. C. M. Parkes and J. Stevenson-Hinde. New York, Basic Books: 185-201.
O! the one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul.
S. T. Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp”
Chet Wickwire was one of the most remarkable men I’ve known. He was Chaplain of The Johns Hopkins University in the third quarter of the last century. It’s in that capacity that I came to know him. He was central to both the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements of the 1960s and 1970s; he established a tutorial program that worked with inner city children, and he organized a wide variety of programs that benefited Johns Hopkins students and the local community. I worked for him as a program assistant for two or three years in the early 1970s.
One day during a meeting in his office – it may have been the weekly staff meeting – someone pointed out a possibly injured bee on the floor. My impulse – this is what I thought – was simply to kill it and throw the body into the trash. Chet’s was different. He gently picked the bee up and set it on the window sill. It then flew away.
That simple act of kindness, to a mere insect, impressed me deeply. Every time I think to kill an insect, I think of Chet and the bee. Sometimes I refrain and do what little I can to help the insect along, though often enough I kill the insect. But not without a twinge of guilt and angst, which is distinct from any disgust over contact with squishy insect guts.
But why was Chet unwilling to kill the bee? It is, after all, only an animal, and a rather lowly one at that? The only reasonable answer to that question is that he respected the bee as a living being. And if you ask: Why that? Well, is that not a reasonable why for an adult human being to act?
Just how are we to conduct our relations with other living beings? What degree of respect do we accord to their life? The answers to those questions, of course, vary from one culture to another. One concern here – it’s lurking in the background – is that the answer of the industrialized West, the agribusiness factory farming West is: None. None at all. No respect for other life forms. Is that answer anything less than a suicide pact?
Let me retell a story about my cousin Sue. She was born in the city and raised in the suburbs. But in her mid-30s or so she moved to the country and married a veterinarian. She began to raise sheep, not as pets, but as a source of wool to be spun into thread which she would then weave into cloth. When the sheep reached a certain age, she would take them to the butcher and, a day later, she and her husband would stock their freezer with mutton.
Despite the fact that these sheep are not pets, taking them to be butchered was not easy. Nor was their first meal comprised of mutton from sheep they'd raised. I'm told that when Sue and her husband sat down to that meal they were rather glum and sat there in silence, eating nothing. Then Sue said “baaa” in imitation of a sheep, they laughed, and began eating.