Skywritings

Humanities and Public Life Conference, Thinking About Identity, Dawson College, Montreal 22 September 2016

The Merchant of Venice is not one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. It is a comedy, making sport of the kind of blood libel that has been used to excuse the sadistic cruelty and oppression with which jews have been wantonly scourged for millennia by non-jews.

Portia’s “he is little better than a beast” — said in jest about one of her suitors — inadvertently displays the other blood-libel, the greatest of them all: we project our worst vices onto our bloodied victims. We wrest even their name to baptize, disavow and excuse our own depravity toward them.

The play is a comedy, from beginning to end, juxtaposing Portia’s father’s strictures on her choice of mate with Shylock’s strictures on Antonio’s loan and Portia’s strictures on the ring she gives Lorenzo.

Like all comedies in the hands of a genius, this one has its deeper moments, notably Shylock’s “do we not bleed?” speech, but even that, in its vengeful pagan “eye for an eye” punchline, again projecting onto jews the failure of christians to practice what they preach (as forthcoming in Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech) is getting out of a stereotype exactly what you put into it. And of course the jew had to be cruel to his daughter and his servants in order to hone our hatred for when the latest variant of the blood libel is launched against the “beast.”

I usually deplore the obtrusion of a director’s minor talent onto a masterwork, but in this case the most moving moment of the play did not come from Shakespeare but from Jonathan Mumby’s closing, superimposing the wailing in Hebrew of Shylock’s christened daughter Jessica, over the triumphant latin liturgy as Shylock is led to his own forced desecration.

Yet even here, the shoe is on the wrong foot, for it is not the imposition of an unwanted creed that is the real tragedy of the jews but the sadistic cruelty and oppression with which they have been wantonly scourged for millennia by non-jews for clinging to their own.

The real villain of the piece (though not the one impugned by Shakespeare) is of course creed itself. The rest is just about human nature, and what the majority creed (or kind) is disposed to do with the minority creed (or kind).

Not strictly a monologue — though all acted and spoken by a single, very gifted actress, Sylvie Drapeau — this is the narrative, mostly in dialogue form, of portions of the life of a daughter and her dying mother: her absentee father (dissipated, alcoholic and abusive to the mother, yet loved by his daughter), her stepfather (likewise abusive to both mother and daughter but a better provider than the biological father), and her beloved half-brother (sired by her stepfather).

The drama is about the dying mother’s wish to see her son (alienated from her by the reliable stepfather who eventually abandoned both the mother and his stepdaughter(s), taking his son, age 8, with him, never to see his mother again). The themes are men’s violence and apathy toward their spouses and female kin. Most of the dialogue is the daughter trying, by telling him about their past, to persuade her half-brother by telephone to fulfill his dying mother’s wish. (We are left to imagine why he does not already know the story, why he has not been told before, how she can be on good terms with her half-brother despite the rupture and alienation, and what the real character of the mother was, aside from being a victim. We sense that she would have preferred a better life, a better spouse, and that she did the best she could under the circumstances.)

The play has some ambivalent anti-clerical aspects too: The usual impulse to commune with a just deity and the repulsion at the injustices, unprevented, unpunished. A “wise” priest is another fleeting personage in the drama.

In the end, the half-brother is not persuaded to “reconcile” with his mother, so the daughter can only use her mother’s last fading consciousness to give her the verbal illusion that her son has come back to her, and is there.

All this is well-evoked, both by Jennifer Tremblay’s text and by Sylvie Drapeau’s moving performance. In the open discussion with the cast after the play it was repeatedly affirmed that the play evokes familiar familal themes in Quebec. Are male abusiveness and female victimhood really that universal a part of the fabric of Quebec society?

“In 2004 the Court of Appeal referred to animal suffering as being determined by “scientific…value judgements” and to scientific literature which categorised the assessment of stress as “problematic and unresolved”. Given your background in cognitive science, and with a view to the Court’s nomenclature, how would you describe the current degree of scientific understanding of animal suffering or well-being?”

It is certain that cognitive psychobiologists whose research is devoted to understanding how animals think (cognition) and feel (sentience) have extensive knowledge and evidence about what is required for animal well-being. Neither the law nor the courts have come anywhere near giving this evidence the weight it deserves, in the way it has done for the medical and psychiatric evidence on human well-being.

Notice that I am using ordinary-language terms such as thinking, feeling and well-being rather than abstract technical terms that formalize and desensitize what is really at issue. Another such ordinary-language term that everyone understands is suffering. I think that many current laws ignore or allow enormous amounts of suffering to be inflicted on animals — suffering that is evident to anyone who looks and feels, and that does not need “scientific” analyses to “prove” the victims are indeed suffering.

Trying to protect animals from suffering operates under an enormous logical handicap, well-known to philosophers: the “other-minds problem.” It is logically impossible to know for sure (“prove”), even for scientists, whether and what any entity other than oneself is feeling. Even language is not a guarantor: If someone says “that hurts,” they could be pretending, or they could even be a robot — a zombie, that does not feel at all. Logically speaking.

But it is obvious to all who are trying to be honest and benign about the problem of human-inflicted animal suffering that it is disingenuous to invoke the other-minds problem in order to create doubt about suffering in animals where we would not invoke it in the case of humans. We know that just about all mammals and birds suffer if they are confined, deprived of access to their kin and kind, or forcibly manipulated. We all recognize the mammalian and avian signs of stress, pain, fear and depression; and where we lack personal experience (such as with reptiles, fish or invertebrates), there are not only scientists but lay people — with abundant experience observing and caring for animals — who are highly capable and more than willing to inform and guide us.

It would be a shameful pretence to act solemnly as if there were any uncertainty at all about the vast, obvious amounts of gratuitous and indefensible agony that humans are inflicting on animals in the bred-animal product industries (as well as in the wild, without even entering into the special problem of potentially life-saving medical research).

“Stress” is a formal, sanitized term for harm — both physical and mental, both felt and unfelt — that is incurred by an organism’s body. There do exist some subtle cases of stimulation, manipulation, and background conditions where it is not yet known scientifically whether they are stressful. Those are the “unresolved scientific problems.” But the elephant in the room — the countless instances and practices that not only virtually all cognitive psychobiologists but all decent laymen would immediately recognize as suffering — are still so immeasurably widespread, legally permissible, and un-policed today that we are very far from reaching the cases where there is any genuine uncertainty that calls for scientific expertise.

“In the same judgement it was stated that emergent “evidence…[for] an identifiable deficit in net well-being” caused by restricted feed could give credence to a legal challenge against the practice. Does this type of statement imply courts’ trailing behind scientific consensus in their reasoning?”

It is very hard, even for a cognitive scientist, to force oneself into the sanitized, almost psychopathic jargon of “restricted feed” and “identifiable deficit in net well-being” when the question really being asked is whether starving chickens causes suffering.

“Broilers” have been selectively bred to grow from chicks into adult-sized (indeed pathologically oversized and deformed) invalids in an extremely short time. Not only does this put tremendous strain on their bodies and legs (crippling them and sometimes making their legs snap off) but it makes them so ill that they cannot survive till breeding age unless the ones that are to be used as breeders are systematically starved throughout their short, agonized lives so as to slow the rate of their devastating growth enough to allow their pathological genotype to keep being reproduced.

It is shameful to frame any of this as innocent, unanswered questions, awaiting the results of future research. The whole phenomenon of broiler breeding is monstrous.

Of course it causes suffering to be kept constantly on the threshold of starvation. There is hardly the need for the learned opinion of “poultry scientists” to attest to this — unless one is trying to make mischievous or malevolent use of the “other-minds problem” to protect economic interests.

“You are the chief editor of the journal Animal Sentience. Is there scope for greater cooperation between lawyers and scientists regarding animal welfare, and if so how could this be achieved from your perspective?”

Yes, there is enormous scope. And enormous good will as well, especially among the younger generation of lawyers. And “cognitive psychobiologists” are also people — people who know that nonhuman animals, like human ones, are feeling creatures that can be, and are being, made to suffer gratuitously by economics-driven industry, perverted, industry-driven “animal science,” and uninformed as well as misinformed consumer demand. If asked, the impartial experts are well-equipped and eager to inform the public and protect and help promote sentient animals’ well-being. That is the convergence and collaboration that the journal (Animal Sentience) is devoted to fostering.

The way we are doing it is through “open peer commentary.” Every “target article” published in the journal — no matter what species, what behavior or what conditions it is studying and reporting — is circulated around the world, across all specialities — to zoologists, ethologists, ecologists, evolutionists, psychologists, legal scholars, bioethicists, nutritionists, veterinarians, social scientists and animal activists — inviting them to provide commentary that elaborates, integrates, critiques, supplements or applies the content of the target article. The commentaries are published as formal mini-articles following the target article; the author responds to them, individually or jointly.

The journal is online and open access so that the target articles as well as the commentaries can be published as soon as they are reviewed and accepted. The target article by the biologist Brian Key on whether fish fail pain has already drawn over 50 commentaries. Among the target articles currently undergoing commentary are ones by: a philosopher (Colin Klein) and a biologist (Andrew Barron) on insect sentience; an economist (Yew-Kwang Ng) on welfare biology; a law professor (Martine Lachance) on veterinary reporting of abuse; a philosopher (Mark Rowlands) on animal personhood; a cognitive psychologist (Arthur Reber) on the origins of mind, and a psychologist (Thomas Zentall) on cognitive dissonance in animals and humans (forthcoming).

Among the signs of progress are the growing number of countries and states where animals are being formally accorded the legal status of sentient beings with biological needs (instead of just property).

Just here in Montreal, the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund of McGill University convened an important and influential symposium on animal law in 2012. (It was this symposium that made me into a vegan!) In the same year, the International Research Group on Animal law of the Université du Québec à Montrèal (UQAM) convened an international animal law conference in Paris on Animal Suffering: From Science to Law. Since then both France and Quebec have granted animals sentient-being status. A new course on animal law offered by Professor Alain Roy (specialist in child protection law) at the Université de Montréal was filled with one hundred law students on the very day it was announced.

And I will be directing the 7th Summer School in 2018 of the Cognitive Sciences Institute at UQAM, whose theme will be The Other-Minds Problem: Animal Sentience and Cognition.

“Lastly, you are passionate about pushing for CCTV in abattoirs. Speaking to an audience of law students, what would you like to happen”

Not just in slaughterhouses. In all locales where animals are commercially bred, confined, or used in any way by humans.

The strategy is in two phases — Phase I and Phase II — and it is essential that Phase I come first:

Phase I (Public Sensitization)

1. Adopt a law that recognizes animals as sentient beings with biological and psychological needs.

2. Require, by law, 24-hour, 360-degree audio/video surveillance and recording at all locales where animals are commercially bred, confined, or used in any way by humans in order to monitor and ensure that the animals biological and psychological needs are being met according to existing regulations (which of course are far from adequate).

3. As the enormous volume of surveillance recordings cannot possibly all be inspected by government inspectors, all the recordings must be coded, web-streamed and made permanently open-access online, so that their inspection can be crowd-sourced for public inspection: A clear description of the pertinent existing regulations (with which the producers need to comply) has to be made available online for the general public, and relative to those existing regulations, any citizen can then report any observed violation, noting the code of the video on which it occurs and the timing of the violation.

4. Not only will this help immeasurably to ensure that existing (inadequate) regulations are complied with, and thus ensure that what goes on is only that which is allowed by existing law, but it will have the even more important effect of allowing the public to witness all the horrors that go on that are still allowed by the existing laws (especially in industrial breederies, transport and slaughterhouses).

5. It is these “authorized” horrors that Ag-Gag laws and lobbying are aggressively trying to prevent the public from witnessing.

6. The hope is that once the public has open access to the full scale of the horrors (especially in industrial breederies, transport and slaughterhouses) the majority of thus-sensitized citizens will exert pressure on their elected lawmakers not only to make existing regulations increasingly rigorous, in the protection of animals’ biological and psychological needs, but also for introducing legislation for a reduction in what is permissible and a transition to alternatives to animal production and consumption:

Phase II (Graduated Taxation on Animal Production and Consumption)

1. Require, by law, a surcharge on the production, vending and consumption of animal products, available as a rebate to incentivize the production, vending and consumption of non-animal alternatives.

2. The percentage surcharge can be increased with time.

3. The surcharge should be imposed on all three involved parties: the producer, the vendor and the consumer.

4. The rebate should likewise be available to all three parties: the producer, the vendor and the consumer. (The implementation of the rebate will be complicated initially, but that should not be accepted as an excuse for not imposing the surcharge. With thought, testing and planning, a fair, efficient rebate system can be developed by the time the graduated surcharge reaches significant levels.)

5. For producers, especially, the rebates will provide strong incentives to produce non-animal alternatives.

6. All surplus in the tax revenues should be used to provide sanctuary for the former production-animals that are liberated by the change in production and consumption patterns. And any left-over from that should be used to invest in the development of non-animal alternatives.

Stevan Harnad: “Descartes’ Error and Animal Identity”

4pm, Thursday 22 September, Dawson College, Montreal

(part of Humanities & Public Life Conference: Thinking About Identity 19-23 September)

Descartes’ Cogito — “I think therefore I am” — was supposed to guarantee that humans exist: “I must exist because I am thinking.”

But how do I know I’m thinking? Because it feels like something to think. And I know I’m feeling something when I’m feeling something.

So it’s feeling, not thinking, that matters. In fact, it’s the only thing that matters. There is no right or wrong in a feelingless world. Things just happen. No joy, no sorrow, no mind/body problem, no self or other, no identity, or identity crises.

Descartes also thought that (nonhuman) animals don’t think: that they are just feelingless robots. They have no identity.

I will try to show how very wrong he was about that, and how very much Descartes’ error matters — for the animal victims… as well as for every decent human being.

[texte français suit dessous]

I. CCTV to Inform, Mobilize and Sensitize the Public. Recruit the public to monitor and enforce existing animal husbandry regulations through public crowd-sourcing as well as to sensitize the public to the reality of what is currently permissible in animal husbandry.

Mandatory 24/7 CCTV surveillance and recording in all venues where animals are bred, raised, housed, transported, used in any way, or killed.

All the CCTV data are live-streamed and permanently archived as openly accessible on the web, coded for time and location, so that the public can witness, monitor and report any observed abuses within the existing welfare rules as well as to recommend what rules need to be strengthened.

(Note, that II — legislation — is not possible without I — sensitization — first. Only public demand and support can lead to the adoption of II.)

II. Legislate Graduated Tax to Incentivize Transition to Non-Animal Alternatives. Implement, facilitate and accelerate a transition to non-animal alternatives.

Graded tax, increasing with time, on all consumer purchases of meat, fish, dairy or eggs in supermarkets or restaurants, or any other animal products (such as fur, leather, wool, down). All tax revenue is used as discount on the purchase of non-animal alternatives.

Graded tax on all production and vending of meat, fish, dairy or eggs, or any other animal products (such as fur, leather, wool, down). All tax revenue can be claimed by producers and vendors as rebate for the production and sale of non-animal alternatives.

All unclaimed surplus from the tax revenue is used to provide sanctuaries for animals that survive from the food and fur industries.

Harnad, S (2013) Luxe, nécessité, souffrance: Pourquoi je ne suis pas carnivore. Québec humaniste 8(1): 10-13 http://j.mp/15JnWHw

Harnad, S (2014) Taste and Torment: Why I Am Not a Carnivore. Québec Humaniste http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/377684/

Harnad, S (2014) Animal pain and human pleasure: ethical dilemmas outside the classroom. LSE Impact Blog 6/13 June 13 2014 http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/06/13/ethical-dilemmas-animal/

Bekoff, M & Harnad, S (2015) Doing the Right Thing: An Interview With Stevan Harnad. Psychology Today Blog. January 2015. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/373876/

Harnad, S (2015) Pour fermer les abattoirs, il faut les ouvrir. Le Huffington Post Québec 25/6/2015 http://quebec.huffingtonpost.ca/stevan-harnad/droits-animaux-cruaute-animale-lois-abattage-abattoirs_b_7659206.html

Harnad, S (2015) To Close Slaughterhouses We Must Open People’s Hearts. HuffPost Impact Canada http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/stevan-harnad/vegan-animal-welfare_b_7702020.html

Harnad, S (2016) Animal sentience: The other-minds problem Animal Sentience. 2016.001 http://animalstudiesrepository.org/animsent/vol1/iss1/1

Harnad, Stevan (2016) CCTV, web-streaming and crowd-sourcing to sensitize public to animal suffering. Animal Justice UK, 2, Winter Issue http://alaw.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/Animal-Justice-UK-Issue-2.pdf

Proposition stratégique pour une transition globale vers les alternatives non-animales

I. La CCTV pour informer, mobiliser et sensibiliser le public. Recruter le public pour surveiller et appliquer les réglementations existantes en matière d’élevage par le biais du web-streaming et croud-sourcing, ainsi que pour sensibiliser le public à la réalité de ce qui est actuellement permis en élevage.

Surveillance CCTV 24/7 obligatoire et enregistrement dans tous les lieux où les animaux sont engendrés, élevés, hébergés, transportés, utilisés de quelque manière que ce soit, ou tués.

Toutes les données de vidéosurveillance sont diffusées en direct et archivées en permanence en accès ouvert sur le Web, codées selon le temps et l’emplacement, afin que le public puisse témoigner, surveiller et signaler tout abus observé contre les règles de bien-être existantes ainsi que pour pouvoir recommander que les règles soient renforcées.

(Noter que II – législation – n’est pas possible sans I – sensibilisation – d’abord. Seuls la demande et le soutien du public peuvent conduire à l’adoption de II.)

II. Légiférer une taxe graduée pour inciter à la transition vers des solutions alternatives non-animales. Mettre en œuvre, faciliter et accélérer la transition vers des alternatives non-animales.

La taxe graduée, augmentée avec le temps, sur tous les achats de viande, de poisson, de produits laitiers ou d’oeufs dans les supermarchés ou les restaurants, ou tout autre produit animal (comme la fourrure, le cuir, la laine, le bas). Tous les revenus fiscaux sont utilisés comme rabais sur l’achat d’alternatives non-animales.

Taux de taxe sur toute production et vente de viande, poisson, produits laitiers ou oeufs, ou tout autre produit animal (comme la fourrure, le cuir, la laine, le bas). Tous les revenus fiscaux peuvent être réclamés par les producteurs et les vendeurs comme remise pour la production et la vente d’alternatives non-animales.

Tous les excédents non réclamés provenant des recettes fiscales sont utilisés pour fournir des sanctuaires aux animaux qui survivent de l’industrie alimentaire et de la fourrure.

A very fair and accurate picture provided by Christopher Adam. Yes, Budapest is still in many ways a wonderful city, worth visiting. But this is despite Orban’s corrupt and autocratic regime, not because of it.

And, yes, the Orban regime is hypocritically using the memory of the Hungarian refugees of 1956 as part of a cynical and demagogic foreign campaign to capitalize on former worldwide good will toward Hungary to camouflage the regime’s current shameful hate campaign against refugees, soon to culminate in a “Referendum.”

Orban’s domestic hate campaign (now being masked by his charm campaign in Montreal and elsewhere) is not even being conducted primarily because of visceral hatred on the part of the Orban regime. There is real hatred there too, of course, but Orban cultivates it in the Hungarian populace mainly out of self-serving opportunism: Orban systematically foments fear, anger and loathing to distract the Hungarians from his depredations on both their civil liberties and their public funds (along with his enormous cut from all EU subsdidy funds) and their liberties, which he steals to enrich hmself and his accomplices and to keep increasing his personal autocratic powers.

Hungary’s cultural charm is real. The Orban regime’s cynical charm campaign is repugnant, reprehensible, and should be unmasked by all decent, thinking people, Hungarian or otherwise.

Stevan Harnad
Canadian-Hungarian Democratic Charter

Hard to say whether “dottoressa” is just a fatalist/pessimist or a closet Turul triumphalist. His/her/its/their admirer “e-2016” certainly sounds more like a TT (or should we add the T for Trump too, or our fourth T-word)?

Yes, malign self-interest has a long arm, but without donning Pinker’s rose-tinted specs, slavery is now mostly outlawed; the subjugation of women is on the decline; rape, violence, torture, homicide and genocide are widely condemned and even sometimes punished. The absolute number of human-inflicted horrors is still increasing, but their proportion is decreasing (at least if we count only human victims), so if civilization can master population control, maybe even absolute wrongs will one day begin to shrink.

The day is long, and human nature is raw and savage, but the evidence is at least as supportive for positive developments as negative ones, even in the area of human rights and governance.

In any case, fatalism is self-fulfilling. With Pascal, we have to wager that a good outcome is at least possible.

Perhaps in a completely information-controlled dictatorship (which is hardly possible in the online era, though maybe North Korea comes closest) the “politicians” are to blame if the populace makes the wrong electoral “choice.” But in most of the world, despite the polarized media, it is still possible to make informed choices, if the populace makes the effort.

Yet in the case of Clinton vs. Trump this is not even the problem. One just has to hear Trump (1-2 times) to see that he is a brainless, heartless, cheap, vulgar, self-aggrandizing, lying tycoon. That all non-psychopathic american voters don’t immediately and totally reject him with revulsion is not only an extremely sad — indeed tragic — fact about far too large a proportion of the US electorate, but it is open and shut evidence about who is to blame if he is elected: Trump certainly couldn’t have done it without them.

In Hungary today, with its own Turul Trump, the situation is somewhat different — because the press is highly controlled, the electoral ridings are gerrymandered and rampant conferral of extra-territorial citizenship has stacked the cards, the constitution has been gutted and guttered, checks and balances are nearly gone, mafia-style corruption pervades the regime and its supporters, and the pervasive, systemic corruption together with a partly perverted police and judicial system have intimidated the citizenry — the situation is not the same as in the USA. But the electorate is still to blame for the fact that they keep voting in Orban. The handwriting was already on the wall in 2008, well before the electoral gerrymandering, media control and constitution-busting, with the majority’s readiness to jump aboard Orban’s shameless and completely (completely) groundless FUD campaign of slander against Gyurcsany.

The Hungarians bought that, then, despite its transparent meanness and mendacity, just as Trump supporters are doing now. And they got what they deserved for their unthinking (and unadmirable) somnambulism.

Of course the populace (whether they choose to vote or not) is to blame for their electoral outcome: Who else?

Jane Mayer: Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells It All
The New Yorker July 25 2016.

What a shocking article! And yet we all knew it already. It has been there all along in every word Trump mouthed, every grotesque grimace, every vulgar gesture, and the limitless emissions of nasty, mendacious braggadocio and shameless hype. And the utter vacuity.

Schwartz, for all his purported pangs of conscience, is not worthy of sympathy for his part in this lurid lay of lies. He is most Trump-like when he effects remorse for having “made” Trump: No, he took some of Trump’s vile tricks and made them his own, using them to spin a tall tale that would enrich them both. He became a Trump(et). The ghost in the megalomane. It’s no wonder that his confessions are now being channelled by Jane Mayer rather than being told in his own voice. It is indeed his own credibility that he has done in with his self-serving strumpetry. (And yet it’s better that he’s decided to come clean, and now, before the election, rather than after. If (and only if) he is genuinely repenting, his own story has a tinge of tragedy, whereas Trump’s is all heinousness and hubris.)

But at least Schwartz is not running for president of the United States. Surely the most shocking part of all this — and the one that is the most to blame — is this charlatan’s open-eyed, cheering following. Has the US indeed become a Trump nation, ethically and aesthetically blind, oblivious to all this, or an accomplice in it?

Yet the homology with Hungary’s Viktor Orban is loud and clear too: the lies, the hype, the manipulation, the philistinism, the megalomania… the psychopathy. And a fair harbinger of what’s in store in the U.S. if Trump’s tranche of the electorate prevails.