From a bestiary to perspectivism: Sunday morning thoughts

I'm always half- or three-quarters-way through six or seven books at once. One of the books that I'm swimming around in is TH White's translation of a medieval bestiary, The Book of Beasts. At the end of the book, White discusses the history and role of bestiaries in the medieval imaginary. One of the points that he touches on is the way in which, for the medieval—and for many of those before and after, for what it's worth—the universe held to a rational pattern and the macrocosm could be reflected in the microcosm. In the older worldview, one could see the structure of the universe in the slug that crawled across the path in front of you (I have a thing for slugs) and one could draw moral lessons from the behavior of the lowliest animal or plant.

The modern mind is much less likely to find moral allegories in the behavior of bees or ants or other parts of the natural world. At least in part this may be because the modern world for all its (correct) embracing of the lessons of natural selection sees us as more separated from the (rest of the) natural world than the medieval mind would have fathomed.

For all that, the modern mind still sees a rationality in the universe. Of course, we no longer think it is rational because it has been planned by some Being. Our common-sense understanding of science as limning the structures of the universe and cutting nature at its joints requires not only that the world be rational or understandable but also understandable by beings like us. It might well be the case that not all scientists understand themselves as doing this, but I take it many do; moreover, most of us laypeople think that's what's going on.

We should see there is something odd about this, or at least odd about it from a certain perspective. From a certain kind of religious perspective, especially one that accepts that we are created in the image of the Creator and posits a great chain of being, it makes perfect sense to think that the universe is rational and that it should be understandable by us. But, absent a Creator, why think the universe should be rational? Maybe you still have justification for thinking that the universe will have to make some sort of objective sense, though I'm not sure what that really means. Even on that assumption, why assume it should make sense to beings like us? Why think that any natural process should create a being able to comprehend the processes that led to that being?

Maybe I'm in a Nietzschean or mysterian or even—Heavens forfend—Kantian mood today, but there's a kind of faith here. I'm not sure that this

faith can bootstrap itself merely by talking of the usefulness of our theories into anything more than a kind of pragmatism.

Extinction

I think Twitter took me there, but in my office hour—during which, as per normal, a student failed to show up for an appointment—I ended up reading a little bit about the work of Guy McPherson, late of the University of Arizona, who has predicted for more than a decade that humans will be extinct by 2030, all of civilization having ended years before. The last few days have been unseasonably hot. Of course, the last few months and years have been, as well. So, the idea of abrupt climate change leading to massive changes doesn't seem all that implausible to me. 

I'm not that interested, though, in figuring out the science of his predictions. Instead, it got me thinking, as we always should be—and, as I take McPherson to think, since he believes we are well past the point of solving our problems—about whether this life is one that can be thought of as worth it. Of course, if I knew that all of humanity had no more than 14 more years at best, I would radically change my life; but, in that case it would be because I'd not be sure that there was much point in anything at all. Maybe there would be a point, but that point would have to be entirely present-oriented. Even assuming that humanity will make it, am I living a life that is worth it, or a life that, were I to die in 14 years, I could look back on and think, "That was a pretty good one?" If not, why not?

One more thing about Mateo

For the past several weeks—and especially on the weekends, probably because we were around him all the time and he couldn’t show us just his energetic side—our Vizsla, Mateo, had been acting like he was suffering from a little bit of arthritis. He was stiff and achey and sometimes he wouldn’t really want to walk. We were upset, but not that surprised. He was closing in on his tenth birthday and was definitely becoming a senior. I said, again and again, that this was what things were going to be like now and that we just had to enjoy his good moments and make him as happy as possible. We bought him some joint support treats. We let him spend more of his time in the evening on the sofa between us. We, of course, let him spend the entire night and most of his day in our bed; his bed had become more a formality, to be moved from room to room as if he were actually going to use it, though we knew that ours was the bed he preferred.

This last weekend, he had a good weekend. He played on Saturday and Sunday. He went on a great walk with me in the sun and heat of Sunday. Monday, Fernando took him on another walk he really enjoyed. When I got home from the university on Monday, they were still out on their walk. I heard him crying from blocks away because he had sensed that I was home. When they got back, he searched the house for me—I was in the bathroom—and he was so excited to see me.

Monday evening, he was stiff again. He was having trouble getting comfortable. We called him onto the sofa after dinner and he finally relaxed between us. When we went to bed, he got into bed with us. But he woke up at midnight, as if he were thirsty or needed to go out. Fernando got up and opened the door for him, but he collapsed. He couldn't stand on his back legs. Fernando got him back in and he got back on the bed. When I got up with him at five, the same thing happened. He collapsed. Then he got himself up and tried to drink water, but he couldn't lean down to do it. He got up again and walked into a corner of the patio and lay down. 

I lifted him—this was a dog who would never let you pick him up—and carried him back into the bedroom and onto the bed. His breathing was labored but he started to calm down. He wouldn’t, though, turn his head when we called him by name; he was concentrating on not hurting, it seems. We talked about what to do. Should we see if he felt better? Should we go to the vet immediately? Should we wait until our vet opened?

He fell asleep again and so we let him sleep between us: the dog who was always with us, around whom we defined ourselves and our lives. We got up at seven. He tried to drink water. He couldn’t. He vomited it. He collapsed again. And, so we called our vet, who couldn't see him until the late afternoon. Off to the emergency vet. It took us far longer to get there than it should have. Modern technology doesn’t always help you get where you need to go.

We took him in. The vet came to talk to us quickly. Our boy had bloody fluid in his abdomen and evidence of at least one mass. The prognosis wasn't good. Even if it was benign, the chances that he would make it through the surgery were low; among other problems, the old boy had a heart murmur we knew about. And, the chances were that it wasn't benign. If it was cancerous, we were told, he would have another month or maybe four. And, that was only if he made it through the surgery.

We made the decision we had to make: to have him put down. We went back to see him and though he couldn't kiss us as he used to do always and given every opportunity, as almost every picture of him shows, but he gave the tok-tok-tok-tok of his tail that always meant that he had seen his guys.

They wheeled him into the room where we had been earlier and we spent time with him before and during and after the procedure. We bawled and have been bawling for the twenty-four hours since. 

We left a piece of ourselves, individually and as a couple, on that table. We scheduled our days around him. We bought the house we now live in because it would be good for him. We bought cars based on whether they could carry him. We planned vacations and trips based on who could take care of him—he was too idiosyncratic to be boarded successfully. Half our conversations were about his bowel movements or what funny thing he had done or what he had eaten. He kept us both sane. He has kept my depressive swings from going too low, because there was always him to take care of and to comfort me and us. You didn't have to explain things to him. 

He was a dog, but he wasn’t just a dog. He was a friend. He was a lifeline. He was an object and giver of love. He was supposed to live longer. We were supposed to get to watch him get older and take care of him and see his face turn white and hold him and feel him against us in the night.

I hurt—we hurt—in ways I haven’t in a long time. All I see in the house and all I heard in the night was his absence. We look for him and he’s not there. We look at each other and start crying again. I want him to comfort me and he won’t ever again. 

I’m really, really sad. It’s because of something—someone—really amazing who is gone. I miss you. 

Some pretty random and disorganized thoughts about wanting what we lack

We consistently fetishize and idealize those things that we lack, that we can't quite achieve. It's as if we recognize our incompleteness—whether we think of this as our fall from grace, our looking for our other half, our alienation, the absurdity of our lives, or any number of other ways it's been conceptualized through the years—and think that if we could just get that one thing everything would be complete. And, since it's a thing we aren't ever going to get, we can be guaranteed never to be complete.

So, many gay men fetishize a particular picture of masculinity. I'm not saying that gay men can't be masculine. Hell, I'm so mascmusc it's painful. But, so many in the gay community long for the "straight-acting" man. Why would you want this unless you think that's not what you are? Unless you think there is something missing in your own masculinity or femininity or wherever you fall?

But this isn't a post about gay men. You see the same thing in political discourse with its strange nostalgia for a time that never was, quite often a fantasy of the 1950s or early 1960s (though only if you are both White and straight) or sometimes a Rousseau-tinged fantasy of the rural life (only ever indulged in by people who do not remember that life), a time that could not possibly be regained—there is no way back there from here. If only we could regain that, if only we could live in that way again, everything would be fine. The world would be perfect; utopia would be achieved.

You see it in religious believers who long for a golden past—the Tridentine Mass, primitive Christianity—or the millennium whatever that is supposed to look like. 

You see it in revolutionaries who long for the utopia to come when everything will be made whole.

You see it in our consumerism, when just one more possession, a new car, a nicer house, that jacket, those kicks, will be the thing that makes everything right, that will finally make me happy.

I see it in myself, in a need to think of people who are merely acquaintances as friends, in a need to feel I belong even to groups that I know I could never belong to. I idealize community and friendship in a way that points to my own inability to feel or find either one very often. That is, I idealize it in the way that one of nature's outsiders is bound to. If only I would belong, if only they would think of me as a friend, then I would be happy. But they won't, so my unhappiness is external.

And, that's the thing about all of these: happiness is conceived of as something I will gain if only I could achieve the unachievable. But this is a kind of nihilism—in the way Camus conceives it in The Rebel—in the way it removes value and happiness to some future state. It also leads us to do things that are wrong (for us) in order to achieve that unachievable or constantly progressing goal. 

I'm not saying that part of happiness isn't finding things outside ourselves. I have to admit that much or most of the happiness in my life relies on the presence of my partner/husband/friend. But, I am saying something that has been noted by thinkers as diverse as Aristotle and RuPaul: love and happiness have to start with a love and happiness in oneself. I have to start by loving my life and my situation as it is in its imperfections. This might well include a realization that it could become better, but it has to have some value as it is. Nothing else can complete me unless I am already complete.

If we can't love the here and now and the person we are, we will never love any there and then or person we can become. 

On thinking about natural law in the shower

I first learned to think and do philosophy as part of a tradition, a fairly conservative Catholic tradition that took both Aristotle and Aquinas seriously. My graduate training was very different, but the effects of that initial training are still in me. I might be a very bad and marginal member of that tradition, but I am still in it in some ways. One way that I remain is in a general respect for virtue theory and—oddly enough for an avowed homosexual—natural law approaches to ethics. I still take Aristotle and Aquinas seriously and I think their approaches to the good life, to flourishing, to what is good for us still speak to us.

If there is something odd about this it is because natural law moralists, in particular, have been at the forefront of objections to the decriminalization of homosexuality and to recognition of same-sex marriages. I'm not interested in debating whether modern advocates of natural law are in the right here. But I do want to note one important thing. Both virtue theory and natural law theory are meant to be empirically grounded theories. They make pronouncements about what is good for beings like us and what would amount to a good life for beings like us based on facts about our biology and psychology.

It is a basic assumption of both sorts of accounts that humans have some immutable nature. I think this is probably right, at least in the medium term; what might happen to that nature over evolutionary time is a different issue. But, many modern proponents of each of these theories seem to assume that our knowledge of this nature is also immutable. What I mean is this: Contemporary natural law theorists operate under the assumption that Aristotle and Aquinas had a complete and completely correct account of human nature, in its biological and psychological aspects. Thus, they believe not only that human nature is immutable, but that we have known all there is to know about it for at least almost a millennium. 

What we have learned about human biology and human psychology and the nature of human interactions since the middle ages is or seems to be of almost no interest to many practitioners of both virtue theory and natural law ethics. You see them quoting Aquinas as authoritative on all such matters.

Now, I think that Aquinas understood quite a bit about human psychology, but I don't think he got it all. And, his biology was pretty bad. Similarly, I think Aristotle understood human motivation and psychological development and society pretty well, but he was missing out on some pretty important pieces, pieces which have partially been supplied by further exploration in the ensuing years. 

Mostly, I think that Aquinas and Aristotle and others in this tradition were right to base an ethic on what we are like and what will lead to happy and fulfilling and flourishing lives for creatures like us. They were also right to think that is largely an empirical question. But this empirical question is an empirical one, not an a priori one or one that was settled in the high middle ages. If we discover new things about ourselves—say about sexuality or human interaction or the family—then our theory has to respond to that.

If virtue theory or natural law is just a constant rehashing of what people thought 900 or 2300 years ago, it isn't philosophy, it isn't even virtue theory or natural law, it's just a dead orthodoxy. And, that's exactly how it should be treated: as dead and irrelevant. 

(I should mention one exception to the immutability of the theory here: Almost all such theorists have discovered that lending at interest is morally acceptable; that we learned something about economics that Aquinas wouldn't have known, since he roundly condemned this practice as usury and a violation of the natural law. This exception may be self-serving or might be a realization that the theory needs to evolve.)

Aut ridenda omnia aut flenda sunt: some thoughts on anger

We live in an age that at least appears to be bathed in outrage. Maybe we are angrier than we used to be. Maybe we are made angrier by the way social media allows us the intimacy of knowing the thoughts of our non-intimates while accelerating the formation of virtual though effective mobs. Maybe nothing has changed but the way we think about these things.

It's not just that we appear to be angrier. To some degree we are expected to be angry. If you enter a discussion about abortion or racism or campus sexual harassment or ISIS or Trump's latest tirade or whatever the issue of the moment is, it isn't sufficient to have the correct opinion. Of course, it won't be accepted if you have a different opinion even if you can mount a reasonable defense of your heresy. But, even when you are on the right side, you have to be sufficiently passionate about it. If you aren't outraged and ready to march, it's suspicious that you even care. 

But this may just give anger too much credit. This week, I've been reviewing Seneca's De Ira. Among the demonstrations of his erudition and theoretical virtue, he speaks to the way we live now. Particularly striking is his questioning of the effectiveness of anger. I think it's common now to think that anger helps to motivate action. Seneca denies this more than he should; in his Stoicism, he believes we should motivated and act wholly on reason. I'm suspicious of this for both Aristotelian and Humean reasons—reason alone will always leave us cold—but I think he's right in the way that anger can at least tend to motivate us in the wrong ways. 

Anger is, after all, an emotion, or a passion in his taxonomy. When we are passionate, we don't think clearly and we act in ways that are not means to the ends we desire. Anger, in particular, takes over. We strike out at people who aren't to blame for the injustices we are angry about; we don't dig deeper into what we are angry about, failing in some cases to see that there was nothing to be angry about in the first place; we harm ourselves and those we care about, metaphorically (and sometimes literally) punching walls and destroying those places and relationships in which we live. We commit injustices small and large to vent our rage. None of this gets us to our goals, at least not in the most direct way. If the machine is unjust, maybe raging against it isn't the best plan. Maybe planning, rationally and coolly, would be more effective.

More importantly, it is easy to lose the humanity of our opponents in our rage. Anger turns our opponents into demons. Demons don't have any goodness left in them, demons don't have reasons, and demons don't deserve our respect. And, if they are demons, we are angels or saints at the worst. Angels are fully good, they have all reason on their side, and deserve full respect. Angels aren't humans; even saints aren't like any humans we know. In anger, we lose the humanity of others and we lose our own. We can no longer see their goodness nor our own failings. And, every disagreement can become an existential fight between Good and Evil. In such fights, no compromise is possible. There is no cooperating with evil. Thus, injustice is likely never to be ameliorated if it can't be erased altogether.

Finally, as Seneca also notes, anger is hard to maintain. You can coldly hate someone for decades, even generations. But, it's hard to maintain the froth of anger for long, at least about the same thing. Online an outrage lasts for no more than a day or two and then another gains our attention. The mob swarms from one to the next. But when we move onto to the next outrage, what happens to the one we've left behind? It's left behind. And, the thing about real problems, real injustices, is that they take time and commitment and anger just won't keep us at that. It takes something else, maybe a passion after all, but not that one. 

Why shouldn't you sit in my front yard to eat your lunch?

In the middle of the summer a contractor for the city began replacing the sewer lines in our neighborhood. Having finished that, the same contractor is now digging up the streets they have just sort-of repaired to replace the water lines. This has meant a summer with the constant sound of heavy machinery and multiple backhoes and bulldozers racing through the street at breakneck pace and parked throughout the neighborhood overnight, through weekends, and during holidays. The work is scheduled to be completed by March 2017; so much for private contractors being more efficient than public workers. 

These are the sorts of first-world problems that people like me like to complain about. Living in San Diego, they combine with the third-world streets—only slightly better than those around my husband's family home in La Matanza in Argentina—to give us some small thing to temper the weather and sun and ocean and mountains and everything. But I'm not going to complain about that now. Instead, I'm going to complain about myself.

Since this is the last week before the academic year picks back up, I am still at home with the dog and my one remaining monarch caterpillar. I spend the day reading and avoiding work and dreading/longing for the beginning of classes. As I ate a piece of leftover pizza today, I noticed that one of the workers had walked from the work-zone, which surrounds us, but isn't within a block of our house in either direction, to sit on our retaining wall to eat his lunch. This irked me, but I figured that he was only sitting on the wall and, after all, he needs somewhere to eat his lunch. After a second piece of pizza, I looked out again and he had been joined by another worker. His companion wasn't sitting on the wall but lying on the stones on our front yard, between two plants. From being irked, I became angry.

When I walked the dog I noticed that they had their coolers and a radio and a whole spread in front of the house. As Mateo and I walked around the block, I thought about what I should do. Should I confront the workers and ask them not to lie on our yard? Should I call the company and complain about their behavior? Should I wait for Fernando to deal with it?

When we got back to the house, I said hello to them and went inside. By this time I had begun to ask myself a different question: What the hell is wrong with me? Here were two people eating their lunch in the middle of a hot day doing relatively unpleasant work. And, I was upset because they were sitting on a wall and lying on some rocks. Of course, that wall and those rocks are mine. But, they were doing no harm and getting a little bit of rest.

The answer to what is wrong with me (in this context) is a fully American, fully Lockean, common, and inhumane conception of property. The harm they were doing was a very minimal trespass, one that did no damage either to the property or its owners. The wall and yard are in the same shape as they were before their lunch. I wasn't going to be using it for something else during that time. But, as my reactions and actions show, I have deeply imbued the notion that property is sacrosanct, that is exists as a right and value in and of itself and before all others.

But that's not what property is like. Property, as Aquinas taught, exists for the good of the community. A right to property exists to help us avoid tragedies of the commons, because people take better care of what is theirs than what is all of ours, because collective farming and cooperatives and group work in classes tends not to be as productive. But property is not some primary value; it can be justified only insofar as it contributes to the commonweal. In a certain, very real way, each of us holds it in trust for the community. And, when the good of the community is threatened by property claims those claims must be reexamined. Sometimes the community will win and sometimes property will. But when it's between two men sitting down for fifteen minutes and my claims on the wall, it's probably the community that wins.