Author: Stevan Harnad

[Re: Katha Pollitt’s The Mind-Body Problem]

My own involutional sentiments are evolving in a rather different direction (perhaps only because I am still blessed with undeserved good health): It’s not all about my body and its ‘druthers (whether indulged or denied) but about the needs of the countless bodies of others with more pressing things to agonize about than mascara or whether to come home at 4am. — And, come right down to it, it’s about their minds rather than my body…

Liv & Ingmar: Painfully Connected is a moving documentary about the relationship between Liv Ullman and Ingmar Bergman. But although it takes the form of a spontaneous interview-like monologue spoken by Ullman, interspersed with very short excerpts from her Bergman films and a little prior documentary footage with Bergman, it is actually a scripted theatrical performance, and a remarkable one, because it is reality, dramatized, with the actress playing herself.

And the metaphor is apt, and doubly self-referental, because so many of the unforgettable roles Ullman had played for Bergman in their films were in fact reflections of their intense but troubled relationship and their respective demons.

The more troubled one was clearly Ingmar. But he remains the revered eminence in the wings. Only Ullman has her say, which is affectionate, loyal and admiring throughout.

Yet one has the occasional feeling during Ullman’s extremely insightful and moving performance, that some of it may be art rather than actuality: high art, creative, going beyond merely being “my Stradivarius,” the instrumental role her ‘Pingmar’ accorded her, as she relates with apparent pride and gratitude.

But perhaps they both understood their symbiosis best. Maybe Ullman’s roles and scripts — she refused many that did not fit — inspired her performances the way Schiller’s poems inspired Schubert’s songs.

Yet surely she was both the player and the instrument, even if Bergman composed the score. What he might have meant was something closer to the way knowing he has such a “Stradivarius” to play on inspires the playwright too.

The playwright/film-maker is left mostly to our imagination in this film, apart from letting us know that he was a tormented genius, driven to seclusiveness, jealousy, and even psychological and physical violence. But we cannot discern what made him that way. Unlike Ullman, Bergman was far too private ever to make such a “documentary” about himself. What he had to say, he said in his own films, much of it through his “Stradivarius.”

Her art was cathartic for her, but perhaps his was less so, for him. Yes, they were painfully connected; but one has a feeling that despite her unquestionable loyalty and lifelong devotion, most of the pain was his (though probably little or no fault of hers).

There really does seem to be something unique in the blend of carping, complacency and collusion in the Carpathian Basin. If it’s not in the genes (as hyperbolically hypothesized by the Kossuth-prize winning novelist Akos Kertesz — for which he then had to seek asylum in Canada at age 80), maybe it’s in the drinking water?

[Excerpt from an exchange with “Anonymous,” who had suggested that if I wanted to help animals I should join him in distributing vegan burritos to homeless people. I replied that I did not think that that was the best way to help animals — and I added that I was very much against homeless people forcing animals to live in the urban streets with them. In prior exchanges, Anonymous had also suggested that PETA does more harm than good and that signing petitions for animals is useless.]

Anonymous: “[T]he large majority of people… view ‘animal rights activists’ as ‘obsessive radicals’.., and… most animal rights activists are indeed ‘obsessive radicals’”

Well then I guess that settles that, doesn’t it?

Anonymous: “I felt… your almost contempt for homeless people.”

No, you mistook my more-than-contempt for anyone who forces an animal to live in the urban streets for a contempt for the homeless.

(Of course the rescue of a homeless animal by a homeless person may sometimes be a better fate for a homeless animal than being on its own in the streets, but I don’t know how often it turns out that way — and I wasn’t talking about the homeless rescuing the homeless. James Bowen himself writes that his case, and his cat, were special, and urges the homeless not to acquire pets.)

Anonymous: “the animals of the homeless [that] are suffering [are] the exception… when compared to the pampering that ‘family pets’ typically receive…”

Having read this, I came very close to cutting off this correspondence. I find it too insensitive to even begin answering. Is this another thing that “the large majority of people” are right about?

Anonymous: “[T]hey are animals. They are made to adapt to the outdoors… evolved from the wild, where the conditions are far more taxing than they are as a pet of a homeless person.”

I can only answer this as a biologist, because this remark was far too far from reality to answer ethically:

1. No, domestic animals are not “made”: they are selectively bred and designed, by humans, to suit their purposes. That’s why so many have disfigured, dysfunctional bodies and are susceptible to so many inbred diseases.

2. Wild animals did not evolve naturally to survive in the urban streets — with the possible (partial, and miserable) exception of pigeons, sparrows and rats.

3. The outdoors to which wild animals are adapted — and inbred domestic animals are not — is in no case the urban streets.

4. Wild animals, left unhindered, in their own natural habitats, are not at issue: purpose-inbred, industrially produced, chronically disease-prone human fabrications are.

5. Most people are not fit to have a “pet,” and far too many pets, far from being “pampered,” are overfed, underfed, ill-fed, confined, medically neglected, generally neglected, abused or abandoned (to the streets, or to shelters that kill them).

6. Yes, wild animals often do suffer miserable fates in the wild (and more often because of human encroachment than because of the original habitat to which they are adapted); but the domestic animals’ miserable fates are imposed on them by those who “made” them — whether it’s in homes, farms, circuses, breederies or slaughterhouses.

7. To compound their vulnerability by condemning them to share the fates of street people is to pile atrocity upon atrocity (and occasional exceptions don’t alter the overwhelming rule).

Anonymous: “I believe that one either possesses a genuine compassion, or one does not…. One cannot pick and choose what type of suffering is ‘worthy’ of one’s compassion, and which is not. If you care, you care about all legitimate suffering.”

All suffering of feeling creatures is “legitimate.”

But I don’t know what word would better describe what it is that one is lacking if one thinks that pets are pampered and better adapted to live in city streets.

And I can’t share your apparent satisfaction with generic, unfocussed compassion (“panpathy”?) either. I think that alone may be more likely to lead to complacency — a symmetric, benevolent embrace of both the victims and the victimizers, rather in the spirit of Christian “charity,” as if there were nothing wrong with the world that radiating love won’t fix (if not in this life, then the next).

I actually think that now that we have outlawed (if not completely eliminated) genocide, homicide, slavery, child abuse, rape, torture and violence, it’s time to face the biggest remaining moral abomination of our species, which is the way we treat other feeling species.

This doesn’t mean lack of compassion for humans, or less of it. But there’s already incomparably more selective compassion for humans than for nonhumans, and always has been: It’s animals who need human compassion most now. And the more there are of us, the more they need it (because we keep on breeding and abusing more and more of them).

I don’t think that those who have an acute sense of the urgency and enormity and disparity of this are “obsessive radicals” — or at least no moreso than the opponents of genocide, homicide, slavery, child abuse, rape, torture and violence were.

The homeless are a worthy cause and are in undeniable, urgent need. So are those who suffer from muscular dystrophy. Both always have been. Almost everyone agrees that homelessness and muscular dystrophy are bad, and should be remedied (even if most people are not actively doing anything about either). But none of them are actually doing — or condoning — anything that actually causes homelessness or muscular dystrophy either.

Not so with the monstrous things we are doing and condoning every minute to animals, as food, as entertainment, as decoration, as sport and, yes, as pets.

So, yes, if there is something substantial that I can do personally to reduce suffering, I think it is neither in the area of campaigning for (or doing research on) muscular dystrophy, nor in distributing vegan burritos to the homeless. I may be wrong, but I suspect that there may be far more real burritos, suffering real agony, every moment, than there are homeless people on the planet, and next to no one cares about them, even in principle. And they are but the tip of the iceberg of human inhumanity that will never be melted if human compassion continues to be reserved for its anthropocentric targets — or treated as if it were some sort of subjective, undifferentiated spiritual exercise rather than an objective, focused, urgent imperative.

Anonymous: “I feel [PETA] are, overall, doing more harm to animals than good… I’d have thought that you’d see PETA in a very similar context that I do.”

I used to; but the more I see of their campaigns (and so little else, coming from elsewhere) the more I think that that may just have been a superficial stereotype I had. I may be wrong, but I am less sure about things than you, in your undifferentiated compassion, seem to be: toward “obsessive radicals,” PETA activists, petition-signers, and pampered pets.

Anonymous: “I feel that if one possesses a compassion for animal suffering, it would logically follow that the same person would possess a compassion for the suffering of human beings – as in homeless persons.”

But you see, it is you who have made the assumption that I lack compassion for homeless persons; in fact, you have made a lot of assumptions.

Anonymous: “I feel that if one cares, one cares – without being selective, and without prejudice. Vegan burritos seems a natural for compassionate people – it is showing a compassion for the animals in not using anything from them, and feeding the suffering homeless in this way. It also, naturally, shows people that one can be efficiently fed and nourished… without any animal products – something that most people (including many homeless people) do not believe is possible. This may result in them eating less meat and choosing more often the non-meat items (when they’re in shelters, at ‘soup kitchens’, etc.).”

Homeless people are also hungry people, eating whatever they can manage to get. It is not with them that I would start preaching the renunciation of meat as unnecessary for survival or health; inspiring the homeless to do it can wait till after we’ve inspired the well-fed and well-to-do — who have a choice — to become vegan. And made sure the homeless have homes, and enough to eat,

Anonymous: “people smoke…[and] do other things which are harmful to themselves… and this is why people consume meat and dairy even after they’ve been told of the abuses and suffering of the animals.”

You seem to be missing something here: People are not (as with smoking) consuming animals despite the fact that it harms themselves: they consume it despite the fact that it harms animals.

(In other words, there’s a missing bridge here, something of the order of “it is harmful to ourselves to harm others” — or, “it’s harmful not to be compassionate”? Well if the hope of inspiring everyone to become vegan is a faint one, I would say the hope of inspiring everyone to become “panpathic” is even fainter — though becoming a vegan would be a good start.)

Anonymous: “It’s as if people of all ages in these situations revert to being very young children… imagining that they are definitely one of the 5% of people whose health is not negatively affected by smoking; that the animals killed for their meals were not abused and did not suffer, etc…”

You are right that people delude themselves that the animals they consume don’t suffer, were better off than in the wild, were necessary for survival and health, etc.

But your reasoning here nevertheless reminds me a little of the circular reasoning in your first paragraph. You are conflating self-interest with altruism: Yes, people keep smoking even though it is likely to harm them; but that is not quite the same sort of thing as to keep eating animals even though it harms animals.

Anonymous: “I saw on the news that Temple Grandin is in town for an autism related event… maybe [you want] to find her and speak with her?”

I may be wrong, but from what I’ve seen in the media and on youtube, I’m afraid I might find that I can’t like TG too much; nor do I think I’m likely to learn much from her. (I thought she cared about animals; but she seems to care more about killing them efficiently — and stressing them too much just happens to be inefficient… If someone arranged a meeting, I would not turn it down; but I would not seek one of my own accord. I’d much rather meet with people like Melanie Joy & James McWilliams — or even Ingrid Newkirk…)

Letter of Miklos Horthy to Count Pal Teleki, 1940, 14 October [note especially the italics added]:

“As to the jewish Question, I have been an anti-semite all my life, I never had anything to do with jews. I find it intolerable that here in Hungary every last factory, bank, fortune, store, theatre, newspaper, business, etc. is in jewish hands, and that the image of Hungary abroad is that of the jew. However, since one of government’s most important tasks is to raise living standards, and for this we have to increase our wealth, it’s impossible within a year or two to phase out the jews, in whose hands everything resides, and replace them with loud-mouthed incompetents, otherwise we’ll be ruined. To do this requires at least a lifetime. I was perhaps the first to proclaim my anti-semitism loudly, yet I cannot calmly countenance inhumane, sadistic, pointless humiliation — not while we still need them.”

If the Hungarian populace is fatuous enough to let Fidesz get away with it, what can one say other than that they deserve to reap what they sow? One feels enormous pity and compassion for the decent minority in Hungary that is outraged by the foulness of Fidesz. But they are only a minority, as the polls show. The Hungarian majority’s willing fall into the fell thrall of Orban’s peacock-strutting kleptocracy is going to leave (yet another) indelible blight on the historic reputation of this Balkan backwater so full of petty jingoes with delusions of grandeur.

The cheap sensationalist dimension of PETA — as in some of its perverse pubic ads about fur — is obviously pathological.

The trouble is that mass movements and causes of any kind — good and bad — also tend to attract the lunatic tail of the Bell Curve. And some in PETA seem to think that any kind of attention is good attention.

And of course, as in all charities, there is a split between good works and fund-raising.

It’s so hard to say whether on balance PETA does more harm or good.

I appreciate the way they monitor and call attention to abuse (sometimes terribly graphically — but I’m beginning to think that that might be necessary, with most of the planet unaware of the horrors, or in denial).

I don’t know if the petitions and campaigns end up reducing suffering. I sign. I’m informed about the appalling scope and scale of the abominations. I hope. And I’m trying to find a non-token way I can help.

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The distribution of vegan burritos to the homeless in Montreal is good: It helps people. It also proves that vegans don’t care only about nonhuman animals.

But just about everyone is in favor of helping people (whether or not they actually do it). And most people are not contributing to harming people, or in favor of it.

Not so for animals. Most people are contributing to harming them, and most are not opposed to — or even aware of — the unimaginable scale of that harm.

So I think animals need help even more than homeless people do. And of course there are incomparably more of them, purpose bred, industrial-scale, for exploitation.

(And I deplore the way urban homeless people acquire animals to share their fate (or sometimes just their life-style choice) and soften people for a handout. I’ve even seen them sitting on St. Denis in the cold holding on to shivering kittens or cats they’ve co-opted for that purpose, very much the way the Romany use their own babies for begging; similar practices in India. We protest to the use of the babies; no such chorus for the animals. — No, the ones that need help the most, and most urgently, are animals. While we continue to countenance the treatment of animals as property we will never treat people properly either.)

(And if we used the arable part of the planet to grow food to feed people instead of to feed it to animals that we purpose breed, brutalize and butcher to feed ourselves, there would be more food to feed more people. And a far more humane attitude toward both human and nonhuman animals.)

Two remarkable women have collaborated in the creation of this profoundly unsettling and unforgettable glimpse of the immeasurable suffering being imposed at every instant, all over the planet, on its most helpless and undefended inhabitants. All that agony is being imposed by us, needlessly, and, for most of us, unknowingly. The Ghosts in Our Machine is Liz Marshall’s and Jo-Anne McArthur’s historic attempt to loosen the scales on our own eyes by allowing us to gaze into eyes of our victims.

They do not try to overwhelm as with graphic images of horrors. Apart from one fleeting, grainy moment toward the end of the film, we witness only the miserable conditions in which the victims are caged and restrained throughout their short, hopeless lives, awaiting their ultimate fates — which are left to the far more merciless medium of our own imaginations and consciences, rather than the camera. The camera is reserved for eye contact with the (countless) Damned and the few Saved — whisked away in the last moment to a Sanctuary.

Everything is profoundly and passionately thought through in the composition of this powerful and beautiful documentary: The Ghosts are the then-doomed (and now-destroyed) feeling creatures who look us in the eye throughout the movie. The Machine is the industrial complex that breeds, brutalizes and butchers them for the market’s palates, fashions and entertainment. And the market is Us.

Apart from Liz and Jo-Anne’s formidable artistic skills, we also sense and share their agony at being unable to rescue their subjects, and their yearning to mobilize us to power down and phase out this monstrous machine.

One would have to be a psychopath to witness this film and leave saying and feeling: well, it’s too bad, but that’s the way it’s going to have to be: my palate, fashion and entertainment are worth those animals’ continuing agony.

Why on earth should the democratic opposition seek electoral victory?

Viktor Orban has robbed the country blind.

Even if the opposition wins the next election, Orban’s long-term appointees, oligarchs, croneys and infrastructure will be there to make sure the opposition fails and Orban gets quickly and triumphantly re-elected the next time round.

Meanwhile, the poop is set to hit the propellor in the next few years, big time, as Orban’s Ponzo Kleptocracy implodes.

And the Hungarian populace is fully media-primed to pin the blame for the catastrophe on the opposition yet again, if they are in government at the time.

So it seems to me like lose/lose for the opposition to aim for electoral victory.

The opposition should instead pull out all stops on telling it how it is, whether or not the populace is yet ready to believe it — and this seems to be exactly what Ferenc Gyurcsany’s Democratic Coalition is doing.

Let the public hear the truth, loud and clear, vote for Fidesz just the same, and then face the consequences.

Just deprive Orban of his supermajority, which allows him to paper over every piece of piracy with a new law.

The economic catastrophe of the next four years is now inescapable: Let it fall on Orban’s head, deprived of the superlegislative power to protect him from the consequences.

And let the free and foreign media trumpet the Democratic Coalition’s message loud and clear throughout.

Hungary is beyond any quick fix now; but allowing effects to coincide with their causes is the only hope of awakening the gormless Hungarian electorate to who and what is the real cause of their misfortunes.

Both Pinker’s dreary scientism and Wieseltier’s spirited critique are stunningly superficial, and the reason is simple:

“Science” is just systematic common sense: thinking that is constrained by reason and by fidelity to tested and testable facts. These are not the monopoly of disciplines that call themselves “sciences.” (They are not even always faithfully practiced by them!)

The English word “science” is an empty scientistic label that attempts to confer a crisp authority where boundaries are fuzzy: “science has found“; “scientists say.” Other languages partition knowledge as consisting of the physical sciences and the human sciences rather than the sciences and the humanities — and by the “human sciences” they don’t just mean “evolutionary psychology” or “cognitive neuroscience.”

There is, however, a much simpler distinction that does capture a difference worth noting (though on this both Pinker and Wieseltier are in agreement in their distaste for “postmodernism”): the difference between conclusions based on evidence and reason and conclusions based on interpretation and opinion.

Roughly speaking this is the difference between empiricism and hermeneutics. But there is a component of the latter in just about all knowledge, except possibly mathematics. So that’s no basis for mapping out two distinct territories either; it’s just a difference in degree.