On Animals x Humans

Fox hunting and anti-vivisection: Why animals matter more than people

By Dean Burnett on 14/05/15, The Gardian

Extracts:

Outrage at fox hunting and anti-vivisection campaigns are just two examples of people putting animals first. But why do we favour other species over our own?

“(…) As many have pointed out, there seems to be far more outrage about some foxes than the welfare cuts that could devastate thousands. Even the “save the NHS” petitions didn’t get this level of interest. Yes, people are easily outraged, but this is excessive.

Similarly, and more worryingly, a million strong petition has compelled the European parliament to consider a ban on all animal research. This would have devastating consequences for thousands, even millions of sick people, given how integral animal experimentation is to successful medical research.

Whatever your opinions on these issues, the above examples show clear examples of animals being prioritised over humans. This is actually nothing new, especially in the UK. The RSPCA was established SIXTY YEARS before the NSPCC. The first recognition of child cruelty as a crime was actually due to the RSPCA, where a child was defined as “a small animal” because no child protection laws existed. The UK also has some of the most comprehensive and rigorous animal testing laws you’re likely to find anywhere. It doesn’t forbid it outright though, which makes it still unacceptable for many.

But where does this prioritising of animals over our own species come from? It’s a uniquely human feature. You don’t get hippos taking on lions to defend the zebras, or seagulls dive-bombing cats to protect their ratty comrades.

Empathy is clearly a factor. The ability/capacity to appreciate and understand what another person is experiencing, “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes”, is undoubtedly crucial in grasping and reacting to the suffering of others. (…)

However, studies have shown that it’s much harder to empathise correctly when your own state is very different to someone else’s (…). Two people experiencing something unpleasant will be very good at empathising correctly, but if one is experiencing pleasure while the other is suffering, then the pleasure experiencing person will seriously underestimate this suffering. So the more privileged and comfortable someone’s life is, the harder it is for them to appreciate the needs and issues of the worse off. But as long as we don’t put the most pampered sorts in charge of running the country or anything, we should be OK.

Animals seem to short-circuit this system somewhat. People have a strong tendency to empathise with animals, some of it is undoubtedly cultural but there’s an established tendency to favour or respond positively and emotionally to anything “cute”, hence the focus on foxes, or images of puppies or kittens being used by animal rights protestors, rather than fruit flies. This may be an evolved tendency, and some suggest we favour anything that has the qualities of human children (small, cute, vulnerable, playful, big eyes etc.) Although, with the earlier RSPCA/NSPCC revelation, this suggests we prefer child-like things to actual children.

There’s also the “Just World” hypothesis, a persistent bias people have to believe the world is intrinsically fair, despite it being largely random. This belief can be quite integral to a person’s worldview, and they’ll work hard to preserve it. As a result, we get victim blaming. Someone is suffering? Well it’s a fair world, and that wouldn’t happen in a fair world unless they did something to deserve it.

There’s also evidence of subconscious defence mechanisms, especially if someone encounters a victim a lot like them. Seeing a victim you can relate to means whatever happened to them could happen to you, which is a scary thought. The brain gets round this by concluding that the victim must have screwed up at some point, not that bad things can happen to anyone (you). And thus, we diminish the suffering of others to preserve our own piece of mind.

This doesn’t apply to animals, though. People can hate and condemn fox hunting all they want because, even in a worst case scenario, it’s incredibly unlikely that they’ll be mistaken for a fox.

Whenever you see a person in need, it’s impossible to say for certain what lead up to that point. But an animal, no matter what the circumstance, is always “innocent”, as they simply lack the ability to do anything to deserve suffering at the hands of man. Even the most vicious dog attacking a human is doing it because it feels it has to, not because it enjoys violence or cruelty. And thus, the suffering of animals violates our moral boundaries more easily than that of humans.

It comes down to how we are predisposed to often assume guilt or compliance in our fellow humans, but animals are always innocent.”

On Dying II

On Persuasion

The Science of Persuasion

On Denialism

The Varieties of Denialism 
By Massimo Pigliucci on Scientia Salon, 285/10/2014

“What the large variety of denialisms have in common is a very strong, overwhelming, ideological commitment that helps define the denialist identity in a core manner. (…) That’s why facts and reason can only do so much (or little) to turn the denialist.”

Another important issue to understand is that denialists exploit the inherently tentative nature of scientific or historical findings to seek refuge for their doctrines. (…)

Indeed, Denialism Studies (I’m rather happy to use that term!) is a highly interdisciplinary field, arguably one of the most interdisciplinary I can think of, including history, political science, law, natural science (from physics to biology), psychology, sociology, philosophy (in various forms, from political philosophy to ethics to epistemology), to mention just some of the principal contributors. And for once, this is an academic discipline that first and foremost deals directly with urgent issues that concern us all.

Which brings me to a number of suggestions about what to do in practice. To begin with, we need to understand that the fight is a long term one, which will be characterized by advances and setbacks, as it has always been whenever we want to move society to a better place against inertia, contrarianism, and entrenched interests. And yet, we also have a number of clear victories, or at the least indubitable advances, to point to and keep in mind, so there is a rational basis for hope.
The first thing to realize is that the push back against denialism, in all its varied incarnations, is likely to be more successful if we shift the focus from persuading individual members of the public to making political and media elites accountable. This is a major result coming out of Brendan’s research. He showed data set after data set demonstrating two fundamental things: first, large sections of the general public do not respond to the presentation of even highly compelling facts, indeed — as mentioned above— are actually more likely to entrench further into their positions. (…)

Yet another thing we can do: seek allies. In the case of evolution denial — for which I have the most first-hand experience — it has been increasingly obvious to me that it is utterly counterproductive for a strident atheist like Dawkins (or even a relatively good humored one like yours truly) to engage creationists directly. It is far more effective when we have clergy (Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State [6] comes to mind) and religious scientists (e.g., Ken Miller [7]) getting into the fray. That’s not to suggest that Dawkins or I don’t have contributions to make to public discourse, of course we do. But it matters very much who our audience is, and especially how we address it. (Yes, I’m talking about “tone,” among other things. We are educators, so we ought to know that nobody ever responds positively to being told that they are idiots or ignoramuses.) 

(…) On the other hand, however, individuals, organizations, academics and academic presses ought to be held accountable for their actions, particularly when what they do or say violates the duty toward integrity that should be the flip side of the right to speech. There was much discussion at the conference, for instance, about a systematic denial of the Armenian genocide fostered by a particular editor at the University of Utah Press. How are we to deal with such instances of willful public mischaracterization of facts? Again, successful precedents lead the way. A few years ago a similar controversy engulfed Princeton University [9], and it was dealt with by an onslaught of public, well argued and well researched, reviews and commentaries that effectively shamed Princeton into action. Outside of academe, of course, we have the infamous case of the CEOs of tobacco companies denying the obvious (under oath) in front of Congress. Besides the possible legal action that can be taken in the latter type of case, the most effective response at the time was the ridicule that was heaped on those gentlemen (I use the word with a significant amount of irony) by late night comedians, a ridicule that made abundantly clear to the general public that those individuals had gone way beyond plausible deniability.

Make no mistake about it: denialism in its various forms is a pernicious social phenomenon, with potentially catastrophic consequences for our society. It requires a rallying call for all serious public intellectuals, academic or not, who have the expertise and the stamina to join the fray to make this an even marginally better world for us all. It’s most definitely worth the fight.”

On Being Clever

The surprising downsides of being clever

By David Robson, on BBC Future, 14/05/2015

Extracts:

“At best, a great intellect makes no differences to your life satisfaction; at worst, it can actually mean you are less fulfilled. That’s not to say that everyone with a high IQ is a tortured genius, as popular culture might suggest – but it is nevertheless puzzling. Why don’t the benefits of sharper intelligence pay off in the long term?

A weighty burden

One possibility is that knowledge of your talents becomes something of a ball and chain. Indeed, during the 1990s, the surviving Termites were asked to look back at the events in their 80-year lifespan. Rather than basking in their successes, many reported that they had been plagued by the sense that they had somehow failed to live up to their youthful expectations. (…)

Another common complaint (…) is that smarter people somehow have a clearer vision of the world’s failings. Whereas the rest of us are blinkered from existential angst, smarter people lay awake agonising over the human condition or other people’s folly. Constant worrying may, in fact, be a sign of intelligence – but not in the way these armchair philosophers had imagined. Interviewing students on campus about various topics of discussion, Alexander Penney at MacEwan University in Canada found that those with the higher IQ did indeed feel more anxiety throughout the day. Interestingly, most worries were mundane, day-to-day concerns, though; the high-IQ students were far more likely to be replaying an awkward conversation, than asking the “big questions”. “It’s not that their worries were more profound, but they are just worrying more often about more things,” says Penney. (…)

Mental blind spots

The harsh truth, however, is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions; in fact, in some cases it might make your choices a little more foolish. Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has spent the last decade building tests for rationality, and he has found that fair, unbiased decision-making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the “my-side bias” – our tendency to be highly selective in the information we collect so that it reinforces our previous attitudes. The more enlightened approach would be to leave your assumptions at the door as you build your argument – but Stanovich found that smarter people are almost no more likely to do so than people with distinctly average IQs.

That’s not all. People who ace standard cognitive tests are in fact slightly more likely to have a “bias blind spot”. That is, they are less able to see their own flaws, even when though they are quite capable of criticising the foibles of others. (…)

A tendency to rely on gut instincts rather than rational thought might also explain why a surprisingly high number of Mensa members believe in the paranormal; or why someone with an IQ of 140 is about twice as likely to max out their credit card.

Indeed, Stanovich sees these biases in every strata of society. “There is plenty of dysrationalia – people doing irrational things despite more than adequate intelligence – in our world today,” he says. “The people pushing the anti-vaccination meme on parents and spreading misinformation on websites are generally of more than average intelligence and education.” Clearly, clever people can be dangerously, and foolishly, misguided.

So if intelligence doesn’t lead to rational decisions and a better life, what does? Igor Grossmann, at the University of Waterloo in Canada, thinks we need to turn our minds to an age-old concept: “wisdom”. (…)

In one experiment, Grossmann presented his volunteers with different social dilemmas – ranging from what to do about the war in Crimea to heartfelt crises disclosed to Dear Abby, the Washington Post’s agony aunt. As the volunteers talked, a panel of psychologists judged their reasoning and weakness to bias:

i)                    whether it was a rounded argument,

ii)                   whether the candidates were ready to admit the limits of their knowledge – their “intellectual humility” – and

iii)                 whether they were ignoring important details that didn’t fit their theory.

High scores turned out to predict greater life satisfaction, relationship quality, and, crucially, reduced anxiety and rumination – all the qualities that seem to be absent in classically smart people. Wiser reasoning even seemed to ensure a longer life – those with the higher scores were less likely to die over intervening years. Crucially, Grossmann found that IQ was not related to any of these measures, and certainly didn’t predict greater wisdom. “People who are very sharp may generate, very quickly, arguments [for] why their claims are the correct ones – but may do it in a very biased fashion.”

Learnt wisdom

(…) Fortunately, wisdom is probably not set in stone – whatever your IQ score. “I’m a strong believer that wisdom can be trained,” says Grossmann. He points out that we often find it easier to leave our biases behind when we consider other people, rather than ourselves. Along these lines, he has found that simply talking through your problems in the third person (“he” or “she”, rather than “I”) helps create the necessary emotional distance, reducing your prejudices and leading to wiser arguments. Hopefully, more research will suggest many similar tricks.

The challenge will be getting people to admit their own foibles. If you’ve been able to rest on the laurels of your intelligence all your life, it could be very hard to accept that it has been blinding your judgement. As Socrates had it: the wisest person really may be the one who can admit he knows nothing."

On Dying I

My Own Life

By Oliver Sacks, 19/02/15

“A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. The radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye. But though ocular melanomas metastasize in perhaps 50 percent of cases, given the particulars of my own case, the likelihood was much smaller. I am among the unlucky ones.

I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

I have been lucky enough to live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and five have been equally rich in work and love. In that time, I have published five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages) to be published this spring; I have several other books nearly finished.

Hume continued, “I am ... a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.”

Here I depart from Hume. While I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities, I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild dispositions. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.

And yet, one line from Hume’s essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more detached from life than I am at present.”

Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

On Bullshit Jobs

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber, 17/08/13.

Extracts:

“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

(…) Rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. (…) These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens. (…)

The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

(…) There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. (…)

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment? Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way (…) to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems to be a general rule that the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.  Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled – unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.”

David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.