Beyond Rivalry

I remembered to photo the cappuccino star cookies (I also made them in Christmas tree shapes) and the four loaves of orange-poppyseed bread I made yesterday.

 

Below is the grey squirrel who's been hanging out in this tree for months, taken a few moments ago in our light falling snow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We spent most of Saturday driving around a part of the state a couple of hours away from us, where we used to spend a lot of time. Our main destination was an herb farm's pre-holiday sale, and we stumbled into a Christmas craft fair in a small-town B&B. The rain, which began on Thursday, was alternately a light mist, scattered and steady showers, and occasionally a torrential downpour, and it gave a blurry, atmospheric feeling to our journey of revisitation.

 

Below, a magpie duck, sheep happily eating, JB the llama, and an herb shed and garden sale area ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Then, last week, I went to see an acupuncturist as a last resort for back pain I’ve had for over a year. The woman asked me how old I was. When I told her I was 42, she said, “You look so old! I thought you were much older.” I would have been offended, but I felt like she was saying what I felt and that the back pain was making this true. My face evidently was showing tough times too. She promised to fix me—that remains to be seen—and, as I was leaving, she said, You need to change your life today. Go outside. Not so much sitting anymore. You need to be happy, find a way. I walked out thinking I’d gone to a therapist or a fortune-teller. I felt sick for a few hours after that, possibly more from what she’d said than from the needles, and when I woke from a nap, I went directly to the animal shelter." -- Hard Times Dog by Colette LaBouff Atkinson

 

 

Yesterday, both animal-protection ballot questions brought to U.S. voters passed, in California and Massachusetts:

 

 

California's Prop 2 won big yesterday, with an estimated 63% of the vote. When it goes into effect in 2015 -- giving factory farms time to change  their practices -- it will "halt the inhumane confinement of animals on factory farms," ending "the practice of confining certain animals raised for food in crates and cages so small the animals can barely move. Prop 2 requires that factory farms provide enough space for animals to stand up, turn around and extend their limbs. It applies to breeding pigs, egg laying hens and veal calves." (You can read it all here)  Similar though narrower measures passed in 2002 in Florida, when voters acted to phase out two-foot by seven-foot metal gestation crates that confine breeding pigs; and in 2006 in Arizona, when voters banned both gestation crates and crates used to confine veal calves. More at HSUS.

 

 

About 56% of Massachussetts voters approved Question 3 yesterday, which will "phase out the inhumane practice of greyhound racing by 2010." The Humane Society of the U.S. reports that "since 2002, there have been 841 reported injuries at the two Massachusetts tracks, and 80 percent of those injuries were broken legs." They also note that "in recent years, the total amount gambled at the only two greyhound race tracks in Massachusetts declined by 65 percent and 37 percent." More here.

 

 

Otto the octopus wreaks havoc:

 

"A octopus has caused havoc in his aquarium by performing juggling tricks using his fellow occupants, smashing rocks against the glass and turning off the power by shortcircuiting a lamp....

 

"'We knew that he was bored as the aquarium is closed for winter, and at two feet, seven inches Otto had discovered he was big enough to swing onto the edge of his tank and shoot out a the 2000 Watt spot light above him with a carefully directed jet of water.' ...

 

"'Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it. And from time to time he completely re-arranges his tank to make it suit his own taste better - much to the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants.'"

 

This is the sort of little news story that is most poignant for me, most "pricking" or "stinging," that makes me gasp, tear up, simultaneously hate this cruel, careless world and send my heart out to those involved, animal and human alike:

 

WOODFIN, North Carolina (AP) -- Police in North Carolina had to halt traffic on a highway to help a mother bear get to her cub after it was struck and killed by a vehicle.

Police said the cub was struck Tuesday afternoon and the driver didn't stop.

Officers in the western North Carolina town of Woodfin halted cars for about 20 minutes after the mother bear had failed twice at trying to get her 80-pound cub off the busy highway.

Sgt. Dawn Roberts says officers stood with rifles while others pulled the cub to the side of the road near the mother. She says the mother bear grabbed the cub by the scruff of the neck and ran off into the woods to tend to it.

(Previous posts on this topic: here and here.)

 

I'm into chapter 5 now (page 173) and have read chapter 3 twice. A lot of it still eludes me (the last time I read The Origin of Species was in high school), but here's what I've noticed:

 

Chapter 3, The Symbolic Species

 

This chapter, more than the others, is directly related to Darwin's theory of evolution, and concerns how the mimetic theory of culture parallels Darwin's theory of genetics as it also explores the evolution of mimetic theory and culture itself, the order in which things have occurred.

 

** "The theory of evolution seems to me quite powerfully sacrificial. ... Darwin ... stresses the importance of death just as much as the importance of survival. In some sense it is representing nature as a super-sacrificial machine...."

 

Girard agrees with sociobiologist E.O. Wilson that religion is adaptable: "I claim that religion protects men and societies from mimetic escalation. Religion has an adaptive value. But this is not enough: it is also the source of hominization, of the differentiation between animals and human beings, because ... through sacrifice it creates culture and institutions."

 

"One can argue that many groups and societies perished and were destroyed by lethal infighting, by the explosion of mimetic rivalry being unable to find any form of resolution. The scapegoat mechanism provided a fundamental contribution to the fitness of the group. This is the reason why such a practice is found throughout the world. This is the result of a form of systematic selection, which lasted thousands of years. It was the scapegoat mechanism, and subsequently religion, which provided that fundamental instrument of protection against natural instraspecific violence that any group of hominids [primates] is bound to trigger at some point for purely ethological [behavioural] reasons."

 

In other words, I think he's saying, the groups that didn't make it were those that didn't successfully scapegoat. Those that made it, did. Therefore, scapegoating persists as a behaviour, because it rendered groups that used it successfully fit enough to survive. 

 

The authors talk at some length about Konrad Lorenz's animal studies, which I do remember from college studies. The most interesting one to me here concerns geese behaviour:

 

"When two geese approach each other, showing signs of hostility, most of the time the common aggression is redirected and discharged against a third object. This redirection of aggressiveness has been 'crystallized' by evolution in an instinctual pattern which can create a bond ... through a kind of incipient scapegoating mechanism, even if it isn't proper to call it scapegoating since the third element often is an inanimate object. One can see here the first sketch of future scapegoating, very much in the sense of redirecting violence onto a third party. This observation, if correct, could account for the emergence of a bond among individuals who together scapegoat a third party, a victim. The redirection of the inner aggression of a specific group against an external element (or an internal element perceived as external which is expelled) creates a strong cohesion within the group itself." 

 

Soon afterwards, Girard reinforces this idea: "To have a common symbolic or real scapegoat is the most efficient mechanism to reinforce friendship."

 

There is much back and forth about whether animals truly scapegoat, whether they exhibit the complete mimetic mechanism. In general, Girard says no -- though I'm not sure if it's because animals' brains aren't large enough, or they don't operate with symbols, or they didn't experience the crisis (the "centre of signification") necessary to trigger it all (all three ideas are given some play, it seems) --  though Girard admits that "there are forms of collective violence present in these groups [of chimpanzees]. There are also forms of hunting with ritual aspects. Therefore, there are clearly signs of the emergence of the scapegoat mechanism. This is another stage of the long evolutionary process that led to the scapegoat mechanism."

 

There is some discussion on the movement from the violent, crisis event to the symbolicity (their word) of it in ritual -- went over my head for the most part.

 

** Then discussion of language and whether language precedes myth or myth language.

 

Girard's feeling is that "[L]anguage and the symbolic sphere could only be generated by a systemic 'catastrophe' .... One cannot explain taboos, prohibition and the complexity of symbolic exchange systems simply via biological explanations of the emergence of unselfish behaviour. There must be that upheaval there, which forced the change in behaviour. ... The same reasoning can be applied to language. The only thing that can produce such a relational structure is fear, fear of death. If people are threatened, they withdraw from specific acts .... Prohibition is the first condition for social ties and the first cultural sign as well. Fear is essentially fear of mimetic violence; prohibition is protection from mimetic escalation. All these incredibly complex phenomena were triggered by the founding murder, by the scapegoat mechanism."

 

Much of the rest of this chapter and the next  is Girard's defence of the founding murder as the only possible trigger.

 

** Next, they tackle the origins of animal domestication, which Girard, apparently in contrast to everyone else, says came about through sacrifice and not the other way around (people didn't first domesticate animals and then think to sacrifice them): "I believe that one starts treating animals like human beings in order to sacrifice them. [Doesn't bode well for my dog.] ... [T]here is no incentive directly related to domestication and its advantages since no one knows about them at the start, and they will only become evident as time goes by." Worse, to begin with, animal domestication is anti-economical. Girard concludes that "[d]omestication could not have been foreseen, nor even planned!" In parts of the world where there were no animals that could be domesticated (apparently some culture tried polar bears ...), "there were also massive ritual killings of human beings, because the process of animal substitution in ritual sacrifices never occurred." 

 

The animal makes a good ritual substitute for the human because the best sacrificial victims are both insiders and outsiders. Domesticated animals are not quite humans but are enough insiders to work.

 

** On to the origins of agriculture. "What" says Girard "could have given to the human being the idea of putting seeds into the ground? They buried them hoping they would resurrect like the community as a result of sacrifice -- and they weren't wrong." Apparently agricultural societies had a lower quality of life than hunter-gatherers, working harder for the same amount of food, less healthy, prone to famine, etc., so "why was this behaviour reinforced (and hence selected for) if it was not offering adaptive rewards surpassing those accruing to hunter-gathering or foraging communities?" 

 

Girard thinks it "became reinforced because ... it has a sacrificial origin. The hunter-gatherers started to settle permanently because of the increasing importance of ritual sites and the complexity of the rituals of which they were part, and which in turn produced, as I said, the domestication of animals and the discovery of agriculture." While climate change and soil conditions, etc., were also important, discovery around the place of sacrifice was most important.

 

I'm not entirely persuaded. Couldn't a group have another reason for either remaining in one place for a while or for wanting to do so, and couldn't they chance upon the planting of a seed (tossing a seed that plants itself is not an uncommon thing to do), noticed it, and used that knowledge? Maybe it wasn't economical at first, but if the group wanted or needed to remain in this area, for some reason (a bunch of the group sick, someone important disabled, weather or natural barrier creating an obstacle to moving, and so on) they could have developed the practice. I'm more persuaded of the animal domestication hypothesis, which I realise rests on the same foundations, and yet sacrifice seems more directly tied to animals than to plants.

 

** And on to the origin of language. Eric Gans, a former student of Girard's, proposes a theory of human origins in which language -- or the giving of a sign, a given and received communication of designation, to another -- resolves the mimetic crisis rather than sacrifice and scapegoating. Basically Gans posits that at some point, at a moment when all hands reach for the same thing, the sight of the others reaching deters each from grasping it. Thus the desired object becomes a "repellent, sacred force" that "converts the gesture of appropriation into a gesture of designation, that is, into an ostensive sign ... that comes to designate the object rather than attempting to capture it."

 

It sounds plausible until you read Girard's rebuttal, which is simple and experientially verified, at least for me: " In order to believe it, you must believe that there has been violence before.The previous violence has produced fruits of awareness of its consequences," hence everyone hangs back.

 

Girard sees this as another "rhetorical manoeuvre to negate the primacy of religion in human culture."

 

I feel like I'm typing the whole chapter onto this screen but really, there is much more I don't understand or don't have strong interest in, and even the stuff that I'm noting here I'm doing so only cursorily. 

 

Chapter 4 next.

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Birnbaum lost his yellow lab, Rosie, this week. He writes about it in The Dalai Labrador. (More on Birnbaum here. Another photo of Rosie here.)

Reunion with Christian, the Lion

 

 

(No, it's not fake) (More story.)

 

A mish-mash of my recent online reading, pondering, etc.

 

>> Alpine murder mystery: Are sheepdogs being poisoned to save the grey wolf? (Independent, 18 July 2008): 

 

So far this year, 17 sheepdogs (including Great Pyrenees) have been poisoned -- with slug poison placed inside pork meatballs -- in the high Maurienne mountains, just inside the French border with Italy. The killings seem to stem from an ongoing dispute between sheep-lovers (and shepherds) and wolf-lovers. "'The pork meat balls were left, some time during the night, most likely just before dawn, in a place where the dogs would be sure to find them. This is the work of a maniac – a madman. What if the meat had been found by a small child? There are tourists everywhere at this time of year, including many British tourists.'"

"The dogs have often died in great agony....  [The poison] causes instant and catastrophic diarrhoea and lung failure in small mammals like dogs. 'They finish up dying completely dehydrated but, before that, they drown in their own bronchial fluids.'"

 

There are about 100 wolves in France. There is a sheep-protection plan in place in the area, and there have been no wolf attacks on sheep in the Maurienne area for more than two years. 

 

>> If you haven't read it yet, I recommend "Cancer & Creativity: One Chef’s True Story" (Food & Wine, July 2008):

"While undergoing treatment for tongue cancer, Grant Achatz temporarily lost his ability to taste. Paradoxically, it taught him brilliant new ways to create flavor."

 

 

>> Impossible Experiments  (Psychology Today, 1 July 2008) is a small collection of research psychologists would like to do "if neither ethics nor practical reality stood in your way." What interests me is that almost all the comments (so far) are about one hypothesis, that how parents raise their kids doesn't influence them significantly. The experiment I would jump on is Tamler Sommers' "Another Man's Shoes."  (The YouTube video at the end makes clear that the whole thing is a joke ... or is it?)  Other never-done experiments.

 

 

>>  "Our Infantile Search for Heroic Leaders" by Johann Hari (26 June 2008, Independent). Hari's thesis is two-fold: That there are no perfectly good leaders and that we can't expect leaders to solve our problems because "every civilising advance in history ... was won because ordinary people banded together and agitated for it." Not much new there, but what interested me about this article was Hari's critique of Mandela, Gandhi, and Churchill as flawed leaders. I never knew that Churchill, for instance, was "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." His portrayal of Gandhi as a murderer (of his wife) seems overdone, not because I don't believe it's possible but because even as Hari presents it, it sounds more like a matter of adhering to principles in one case (his wife's illness) and not in another (his own illness), a rather ordinary though insidious trait.

 

 

>>  Reframing Questions by Dave Pollard at How To Save the World (16 July 2008) seeks to promote critical thinking, to help us think beyond our own "false myths and limiting generalizations." He gives some examples of some limiting myths and generalisations he encounters everyday in business, then reframes the questions, and then asks his readers: "What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?"  Some day I may give some energy to it and respond to that challenge here.

 

 

>>  "Why We Like New Stuff" (Mental Floss, 16 July 2008). Basically, "our brains are actually hard-wired to prefer novelty and adventure. ... In fact, research on the ventral striatum (the part of the brain associated with rewarding behavior) seems to indicate that sating our sense of adventure provides us the same sort of satisfaction we get from sex and food." Dopamine figures, too.  Full study (7 pages, PDF).

 

 

>>  "Italian Outrage Over Roma Drowning Photos" (21 July 2008, CNN) is confusing to me. "Italian newspapers, an archbishop and civil liberties campaigners expressed shock and revulsion on Monday after photographs were published of sunbathers apparently enjoying a day at the beach just meters from where the bodies of two drowned Roma girls were laid out on the sand."

 

I think I might be creeped out if dead people were lying on the beach -- I'm creeped out when a dead seal or horseshoe crab is lying on the beach -- but the sunbathers' critics aren't shocked that they're not repulsed enough, presumably; they're shocked that the sunbathers are indifferent to the bodies. Shocked that they can act as if they aren't there, that they can do what they would ordinarily do without creating a sacred space for the bodies, without making their deaths the focus. That doesn't seem so bad to me. In any important way, the girls are not there, so why regard the dead bodies as something sacred, something whose presence means we should act differently than we do ordinarily? I guess it's because death is seen as such a powerful force.

 

The Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crecenzio Seppe, said in his blog that "'To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur.'" I'd agree if the girls were injured or needed lifesaving efforts; then it would be cruel to be indifferent. But I don't see how the sunbathers' can really mind the dead girls' business now, or why they should. 

 

I've been in the presence of someone in the moments of her death, and in the presence of her body, as it lay in her house, for a couple of hours after that. The moment of dying, yes, that felt like something happened, something a little unusual and yet not, like breathing in and out. But for the hours afterwards? My experience was that life went on in its ordinary way. If I hadn't felt that all along that morning, I would have when the mortuary folks came with their plastic garbage-like bag and heaved her body into it. It was about as sacred-seeming as bodies under beach towels on a sunny day.

 

(In a twisted way, it kinda reminds me of this ...)