An article, “Watching Whales Watching Us,” the cover story in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, illustrated how profoundly anthropomorphic writers about the natural world are becoming. This is the quote that caught my eye:
Somehow the more we learn about whales, the more we’re coming to appreciate the sublimely discomfiting reality that a kind of parallel “us” has long been out there roaming the oceans’ depths, succumbing to our assaults. Indeed, when that baby gray calf bobbed up out of the sea and held there that first morning, staring at me with his huge, slow-blinking eye, it felt to me as if he were taking one impossibly long and quizzical look in the mirror.
When a writer rockets that far over the top, it ruins his credibility.
The “animals are people too” meme is ubiquitous and, I think, destructive. More over at Secondhand Smoke.
July 13th, 2009 | 3:50 pm
This reminds me of a passage from the jolly prophet of mirth in Orthodoxy:
Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if anyone had called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did . . . He popularized the contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.
July 13th, 2009 | 4:43 pm
I once heard it said that such a thing is the fault of Walt Disney, especially in how he instilled in youngsters this idea that animals act, think, and feel just like humans.
July 14th, 2009 | 6:38 am
Where is the argument is made for why whales are not like us (I don’t think the author being criticized here said ‘just’)? Is it just supposed to be obvious? Indeed, many animals are far more intelligent and worthy of ethical treatment than most of us consider. We need more consideration of animal dignity, not less. Especially, as Mary Eberstadt tells us, if we are pro-life:
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php?year=2009&month=05&title_link=pro-animal-pro-life-1243228870
July 14th, 2009 | 10:58 am
Pro life, as I understand it, is about protecting innocent human life. It is a dangerous thing, it seems to me, to conflate the value of animals with that of people. People certainly have a duty to treat animals humanely which arises out of our status as moral beings. But that isn’t the same thing.
Some Christians think that the faith requires vegetarianism. But Christ’s Last Supper was surely lamb, it being the Passover Feast. St. Paul discusses vegetarianism as the weaker choice. Jesus did not rail against animal sacrifice at the Temple, but at cheating money changers. Etc. Etc.
But that wasn’t the point of the post or the core of my concern. The point is that nature writers are almost desperate in their desire to transform fauna into people. If society buys into that meme, it is very dangeorus.
Thanks for your thoughts Charlie.
July 14th, 2009 | 7:08 pm
Thanks for engaging me, Wesley.
Jesus is never described as eating meat. Kindness to animals is described as a mark of holiness. God originally intended us to eat vegetables and not animals. God originally creates animals ‘because it is not good that man should be alone.’ Paradise is continuously described as non-violent even when it comes to human-animal and animal-animal relations.
Surely it is more serious thing to torture and kill a person than to torture and kill a non-person. But part of being pro-life, I should think, involves a respect for the morally relevant interests of all life. Couldn’t one accept this claim without ‘conflating’ the value of persons with the value of non-persons?
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