A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • Ah the world, oh the whale

    I finished Philip Hoare’s The Whale this weekend, and I highly recommend it. It’s part memoir, part natural history, part literary criticism, part social and cultural analysis, and part mystical meditation.

    Hoare traces our history with the whale, focusing on the high-tide of the American whaling industry in the 19th century, followed by the more industrial approach developed by Japan, Russia, and certain European nations in the 20th.

    Along the way, we’re treated to fascinating facts about whales such as the elaborate sounding equipment of the sperm whale and the incredibly long life-spans (200+ years!) of the bowhead. We also get character sketches of whaling magnates, amateur scientists, and others whose lives became intertwined with these legendary creatures.

    One of the key touchstones of the book, though, is Herman Melville and his epic Moby-Dick. Melville’s obsession with writing his magnum opus, which mirrors Ahab’s obsession with catching the white whale, is in turn mirrored by Hoare’s own growing fascination with the whale.

    The climax is a heart-stopping first-person description of Hoare’s close encounter with a sperm whale off the Azores Islands. Which is a fitting capstone, since it’s a book as much about human understanding–and misunderstanding–of whales as it is about the animals themselves.

    And, inescapably, it’s a story of tragedy. The ruthless hunting of the whales that was accelerated by the advent of 20th-century industrial technology has only recently been slowed and extinction averted.

    However, other man-made dangers, such as noise that scrambles the whales’ ability to find their way, ships crossing the oceans, or the changing food supplies caused by global warming, may yet doom the whale.

    While he avoids preaching, Hoare’s book is essentially a meditation on the “otherness” of the whale, a form of life that may be just as intelligent and sensitive as humanity, yet all-but-incomprehensible to us because it exists in such a radically different environment. The question before us is whether we will recognize these “other nations” or continue to treat them as resources for our consumption or expendable collateral damage in our war against nature.

  • Friday links

    – Jim Henley on the high road and the low road

    – The July issue of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics focuses on poverty and development

    – How easy would it be to fix Social Security?

    – The Twilight series: not just bad, but morally toxic

    – Who you callin’ a pescatarian?

    – Marvin writes about teaching Anselm’s ontological argument

    – The AV Club on alt-country pioneer Robbie Fulks

    – The New York Times‘s Nicholas Kristof reports from the West Bank

    – A recently published dystopian novel about animal rights; here’s the author’s blog

  • Other nations

    We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals … We patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the Earth.

    — Writer and naturalist Henry Beston, 1926, quoted in Philip Hoare’s The Whale

  • Huxley on distractions

    I’ve been spending what free time I have this summer dipping into the works of Aldous Huxley, both his fiction (Island, Eyeless In Gaza) and non-fiction (Brave New World Revisited). I’m currently working my way through a collection of essays called Huxley and God, which, as the title suggests, deals broadly with religion.

    Huxley is best known of course for his dystopian novel Brave New World, but he also had a lifelong interest in religion and mysticism. He popularized the idea of a “perennial philosophy”–a basic metaphysical, psychological, and ethical structure common to the great religions of the world. Huxley was a friend and mentor to Huston Smith, who further explored the perennial philosophy (or “primordial tradition” as Smith prefers to call it) in his study of the world’s religions.

    One of the points Huxley returns to in several of these essays is the danger distractions pose to the spiritual life. We’re more commonly aware of the dangers of our passions–our deep-seated desires, our self-will. But, Huxley says, the “imbecile mind”–with its constant, meaningless chatter–can be even more insidious:

    It is of [distactions’] essence to be irrelevant and pointless. To find out just how pointless and irrelevant they can be, one has only to sit down and try to recollect oneself. Preoccupations connected with the passions will most probably come to the surface of consciousness; but along with them will rise a bobbling scum of miscellaneous memories, notions, and imaginings–childhood recollections of one’s grandmother’s Yorkshire terrier, the French name for henbane, a White-Knightish scheme for catching incendiary bombs in midair–in a word, every kind of nonsense and silliness. … [W]e are … creatures possessed of a complicated psychophysiological machine that is incessantly grinding away and that, in the course of its grinding, throws up into consciousness selections from that indefinite number of mental permutations and combinations which its random functioning makes possible. Most of these permutations and combinations have nothing to do with our passions or our rational occupations; they are just imbecilities–mere casual waste products of psychophysiological activity. (Huxley and God, pp. 153-4)

    In Huxley’s view, the modern world has made it particularly difficult to free oneself from distractions because it has elevated the pursuit of constant distraction to a positive good (one is reminded of Pascal’s line about men’s miseries deriving from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone):

    The Old Adam’s restless curiosity must be checked and his foolishness, his dissipation of sprit turned to wisdom and one-pointedness. That is why the would-be mystic is always told to refrain from busying himself with matters which do not refer to his ultimate goal, or in relation to which he cannot effectively do immediate and concrete good. This self-denying ordinance covers most of the things with which, outside business hours, the ordinary person is mainly concerned–news, the day’s installment of the various radio epics, this year’s car models and gadgets, the latest fashions. But it is upon fashion, cars, and gadgets, upon news and the advertising for which news exists, that our present industrial and economic system depends for its proper functioning. For, as ex-President Hoover pointed out not long ago, this system cannot work unless the demand for non-necessaries is not merely kept up, but continually expanded; and of course it cannot be kept up and expanded except by incessant appeals to greed, competitiveness, and love of aimless stimulation. Men have always been prey to distractions, which are the original sin of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevancies, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system. Recollectedness, or the overcoming of distractions, has never been more necessary than now; it has also, we may guess, never been more difficult. (pp. 156-7)

    One can well imagine what Huxley would’ve had to say about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, um, blogs, and the various gadgets that keep us constantly in touch with these sources of distraction. O brave new world, indeed.

  • Balance!

    Today’s WaPo offers a review of a spate of new political books under the headline “Flame-throwing political books from the Right and the Left.” In judicious Post fashion, it finds the Left and the Right about equally guilty of partisan extremism. “If you believe the liberals,” we’re told “we have Republicans going insane after their White House defeat.” Shrill!

    Of course, the conservative books under review pretty much to a one are about how Barack Obama hates America and wants to destroy our constitutional system of government. And they didn’t even mention Andy McCarthy’s new book.

  • Coming up for air

    Thanks to everyone for their kind congratulations on the birth of our daughter. If you have kids, you don’t need me to tell you that it’s an exhilarating and exhausting experience. And if you don’t, my paltry words won’t be able to do it justice. I can’t go so far as to say we’re in any kind of routine yet, but we’re getting the hang of things, thanks in large part to some much-appreciated help from my mother-in-law.

    I took a month-long leave from work, so I’ve been getting well practiced at the mechanics of infant care (diapers, bottles, swaddling, etc.), running interference between my wife and daughter and the outside world, spending money hand over fist on baby supplies, and receiving visits from wonderful friends, who have usually come bearing delicious food. All that plus trying to get to know this mysterious little creature who now shares our lives.

    There has been some down time (newborns sleep a lot), and I’ve spent most of it reading baby books, usually of the how-to variety. But I also picked up, on Marilyn‘s recommendation, The Scientist in the Crib by Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl. It summarizes, in a very lay-reader friendly fashion, some of the recent research on how babies’ minds develop. Specifically, it looks at how infants’ minds are hardwired to solve certain conundrums that have bedeviled philosophers for centuries like the existence of other minds and the external world. I’m not sure David Hume would be satisfied, but it makes for fascinating reading, especially for a new parent.

    I also managed to read Michael Pollan’s Food Rules. The bite-sized nuggets of text were perfect for those first few bleary days after coming home from the hospital, when my brain could only process about 150 words at a sitting (at most). It was a good reminder not to let the stresses of new parenthood turn into an excuse for eating crap. Though, contra Pollan, convenience food can be a blessing in some circumstances.

    Hopefully as the learning curve becomes a little less steep I’ll find more time to post here. I will try to avoid becoming a “daddy blogger” though. 🙂

  • Gary Steiner on the moral status of animals and the “intellectualist” bias

    Marilyn tipped me off to this very interesting-looking book by philosopher Gary Steiner: Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship. Looks like the book came out in 2008, but I wasn’t previously aware of it. Steiner provides a summary of the book’s argument here .

    Interestingly, Steiner takes a tack that is opposed to that of at least some animal advocates. These advocates have argued that, contrary to what we’ve previously thought, animals really do have capacities for complex thought, reasoning, self-awareness, etc., and that we should attribute moral status to them accordingly. Steiner maintains, however, that these capacities are morally irrelevant and it’s enough that animals have “rich inner lives”–lives of their own that are entitled to respect regardless of how closely they approximate human lives.

    Steiner isn’t the first to make this sort of argument. In his contribution to the anthology The Great Ape Project, which promotes extending basic rights to the great apes, philosopher Steven Sapontzis contends that the bias toward the intellectually sophisticated is just one aspect of our species bias:

    Rejecting our species bias–overcoming speciesism–requires that we also reject our bias in favor of the intellectual (at least as a criterion of the value of life or of personhood in the evaluative sense). Overcoming speciesism requires going beyond the modest extension of our moral horizons to include intellectually sophisticated, nonhuman animals, such as chimpanzees and whales. It requires recognizing not only that the origin of value does not lie in anything that is peculiarly human; it also requires recognizing that the origin of value does not lie in anything that is human-like or that humans may be assured they have the most of (because they are the most intellectually sophisticated beings around). (“Aping Persons – Pro and Con,” The Great Ape Project, p. 271)

    Using intellectual sophistication as a criterion of moral worth can have uncomfortable consequences even apart from the question of animal rights. For one, wouldn’t it introduce a hierarchical ranking among human beings such that the more intellectually sophisticated, reflective, etc. people were worth more, morally speaking, than others? And wouldn’t it also imply that an extraterrestrial species far exceeding us in intellectual sophistication would be morally more valuable than us, and perhaps even justified in using us the way we use nonhuman animals?

    Steiner’s book also tries to reconcile liberal rights and individualism with the apparently heavy demands that the recognition of animals’ moral status would make on us. He offers what he calls an “Ideal of Cosmic Holism” in which human beings are understood as “a special form of life—a form of life that is capable of reflecting on its own nature, and hence of taking on moral responsibilities, but whose capacities for critical reflection do not render it morally superior to non-human nature.”

    Human beings are in the unique position of being able to recognize and act on moral obligations toward animals (and perhaps toward non-sentient nature as well), even though non-human beings lack the capacity for reflection and hence lack the ability to take on reciprocal obligations toward humanity. Our moral relationship to animals is one of stewardship: we have obligations to protect animals and to refrain from interfering with their efforts to flourish according to their natures, even though animals have no corresponding obligations toward us. The fact that for millennia we have exploited animals with little if any self-restraint is a sign not that we have any right to do so but simply that we have failed to acknowledge our place within a cosmic whole of which we are merely a part.

    I don’t know what religious affiliation, if any, Steiner has, but this is remarkably consonant with the Christian view of humanity’s place in the cosmos (or at least the Christian view, properly understood), so I’m very interested in seeing the details of how he works this out. Unfortunately, the book is a bit on the pricey side, so unless CUP wants to send me a review copy, you may have to wait a while for my take on his argument, dear reader. 😉

  • Edwards on animal redemption

    If the entire creation–not just human beings–is to be taken up into the divine life (deified, to use the term Edwards prefers), then it makes sense to ask whether individual, sentient, non-human creatures (i.e., animals) will participate in the new creation. Edwards thinks that, based on the character of the God revealed in Jesus, we can hope that animals will share in the resurrection life.

    He points out that the Bible affirms God’s love for each thing that he has made. Further, the God revealed in Jesus is one of boundless compassion. At the very least, Edwards says, we must affirm that God remembers, holds in the divine mind, the travails and triumphs, sufferings and joys of each one of his creatures. But, he goes on to argue, the biblical concept of God’s memory is much more robust and metaphysically significant than our ordinary human concept. For God to remember us is for God to hold us in the divine mind, to keep the divine attention on us. Metaphysically, God’s holding us in the divine mind is what keeps us and the entire world from lapsing into non-existence. Moreover, the incarnation is God’s assumption of flesh, not just humanity. In some way, it reconciles “all things” to God, not just wayward human beings. So is there something more we can hope for in terms of animal participation in the life of the world to come?

    I have been proposing that each animal is known and loved by God, is the dwelling place of the Creator Spirit, participates in redemption in Christ, and abides forever in the living memory of God. Can more be said? I think it can. It can be said that animals will reach their redemptive fulfillment in Christ. They will not only be remembered and treasured, but be remembered in such a way as to be called into new life. (How God Acts, p. 165)

    Edwards admits that we can’t really form an imaginative picture of what this would be like, but, then, the same is true of the resurrection of human beings. Our inability to adequately imagine something doesn’t show that it isn’t real. As he says, the “basis for our hope is not our imagination but the God revealed in Jesus. … As Elizabeth Johnson has said, our hope is not based upon information about the future but on ‘the character of God’ revealed in the Christ-event” (p. 165). Animal fulfillment, Edwards says, must be based on their proper nature, and we don’t need to think of it as strictly parallel to human fulfillment. “The God of resurrection life is a God who brings individual creatures in their own distinctiveness in some way into the eternal dynamic life of the divine communion” (p. 165).

    In some ways, the problem of animal suffering is more acute for theology than that of human suffering. This isn’t because animal suffering matters more (whatever that might mean), but because, as C. S. Lewis memorably put it, animals can neither deserve nor be improved by pain (as humans arguably can). Plus, there’s no free-will defense available for animal suffering, at least not directly. If God has the character that Christians believe he does, and if the distinctively Christian answer to the problem of evil is that God has acted and is acting to redeem his creation, then it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that God will include his beloved animals in the resurrection life.

  • Denis Edwards on new creation: radical transformation and real continuity

    One problem for any Christian eschatology–an underappreciated one, it seems to me–is reconciling it with the rather bleak view of the universe’s future provided to us by modern science. We’re told that our universe will, after billions of years of expansion, either collapse back in on itself in a “big crunch” expand endlessly into an ultimately lifeless, dissipated “heat death.” Neither scenario aligns particularly well with the hope of a “new creation” offered by Christianity.

    In How God Acts Denis Edwards tries to provide an account of that hope that is intelligible in terms of modern science. He says that it is first important to be clear about the limits of theological concepts and language; imagination is indispensable in religion, but we shouldn’t mistake our images of the ultimate destiny of creation for the thing itself. Nevertheless, he ventures that the Christian hope should be seen in terms of a “deification” of the created, material universe. Taking the death and resurrection of Christ as both an analogue and the definitive sign of God’s promise, the destiny of the material universe will be one of both radical change and continuity. Somehow, the material world will be taken up into the life of God. We hope for this because, echoing N.T. Wright, we hope that God will do for the whole universe what he did for Jesus at Easter.

    Edwards emphasizes that we are to see this transformation as entailing real continuity. We shouldn’t think of the new creation as God scrapping the old one and starting over. But what does continuity mean here? We can, perhaps vaguely, understand what it might mean in the case of a human being–we at least think we can understand how a person’s individual self could be preserved even through a radical transformation. But what about the physical cosmos? Edwards suggests that we should think of matter as inherently “transformable” into a new state; it has a potential, as part of its nature, to become something more–and radically different–than what it is. He points out that our tendency is to think of “spirit” as somehow mysterious and “matter” as basically straightforward. But science has revealed, particularly over the last hundred years or so, that the nature of matter is far more mysterious than we thought. Who knows what it might be capable of becoming?

    This sense of continuity, Edwards contends, gives weight to our actions here and now. While the final consummation of all things is definitely God’s action, everything will in some way be preserved in the new creation:

    Our own efforts, our ecological commitments, our struggles for justice, our work for peace, our acts of love, our failures, our own moments of quiet prayer, and our sufferings all have final meaning. Human history and our own personal story matter to God. The Word of God has entered into history for our salvation. History is embraced by God in the Christ-event. In the resurrection, part of our history–the created humanity of Jesus–is already taken into God. We are assured that all of our history has eternal meaning in God. This means that our stories have final significance, as taken up into God and transformed in Christ. (How God Acts, p. 159)

    It seems that both radical transformation and continuity are necessary to make sense of the struggles and suffering that take place in our world. Transformation is required to right the wrongs and wipe away every tear, but without continuity the whole history of the world would look like a pointless waste. Paul’s metaphor of creation “groaning” like a woman in childbirth is apt.

  • Book notes

    Currently reading:

    Denis Edwards, How God Acts. See my posts on this here, here, and here. The second half of the book, which I may or may not blog about in more detail, is less concerned directly with the question of divine action, but offers Edwards’ take on redemption, the atonement, and the salvation of animals, among other things. Edwards discussed some of these ideas in a previous essay that I blogged about here. I think his “participatory/incarnational” model of redemption has a lot of promise for thinking about the work of Christ as it applies to the wider, non-human creation.

    Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals. I was worried this book on factory farming by novelist Foer would be too precious, or postmodern, or that it would simply cover already well-trodden ground. But it’s actually really good! Full of interesting (and alarming) facts, but written with a novelist’s verve. There’s also a recurring theme about the importance of this in light of his being a new father, which resonates with me for obvious reasons.

    Heidi Murkoff, et al., What to Expect the First Year. So, apparently these baby things require a lot of care! Who knew?