innocence and animals

I greatly enjoyed engaging with Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience again because I briefly interacted with the poems my senior year of high school. In our discussions about the two collections of poems, I recall us agreeing that the Songs of Innocence had a common theme of innocent aspects of life whereas the Songs of Experience had themes of death and the difficult lessons that life teaches us. However, the poems in the course anthology were poems that I had never read before. The imagery in “Night” reflects many of the themes that I had learned previously, as it describes “green fields and happy groves” and birds “covered warm” (73). “The Little Girl Lost” has equally dark imagery, as it describes “beasts of prey” that come from “cavern deep” (75). The images that I have included below are also the covers of these respective anthologies, which also is a visual representation of the aforementioned themes.

songs of innocence

songs of experience

“The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” had many interesting allegories to the story of Buddha. In the story of Gautama Buddha, he gives up wealth and fame in order to search for Enlightenment. Just as the previous story from the Jungle Book was an allegory to Genesis, Purun Bhagat is in a position where he can “endow scholarships” in his spare time (84). He also possesses lots of wealth, he even “resigned position, palace, and power” to search for Enlightenment. Ultimately this allegorical methodology makes the story more engaging and enhances the meaning of text. I also felt like there were many thought-provoking parts of the excerpt from Life of Pi. The narrator complains that he has “heard nearly as much nonsense about zoos as I have about God and religion” (97). It seems a major problem with the author’s relationship to animals is not a lack of empathy but instead a lack of knowledge to properly inform that empathy. He notes that “well-meaning but misinformed people think animals in the wild are “happy” because they are “free”” (97). This brings me back to much of the discussion that we had about Earthlings last semester when Bump argued (to my surprise) that vegetarianism is not necessarily the solution to the problems that Earthlings outlines. Instead, a consciousness change is necessary. Just as Ishmael concludes that the only solution is to teach a hundred other people, it seems that Martel is implicitly arguing that the first step to altering the treatment of animals is through changing knowledge (instead of a purely political/behavioral approach).

buddha

genesis and its contemporaries

I was surprised to find both in my reading of Genesis and in subsequent scholarly research how inconclusive the text is regarding why Cain’s offering is rejected. This seems to be an integral aspect of the story, because one of the great lessons to be learned is how to please God and the lack of an explicit discussion regarding what God seeks in the offerings. One common theory about why God rejected Cain’s offering is because of its bloodless nature. However, it seems unlikely that God give a preference for live offerings over bloodless offerings for a few reasons. First, God seems to show great reverence for the land when he assigns Adam to “till the ground from whence he was taken” (Genesis 3:23). Instead, it seems likely that the greater use of adjectives referring to Abel’s offering distinguishes it implicitly from Cain’s. Abel “brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof” (Genesis 4:4). However, “Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering” (Genesis 4:3). Some scholars argue that “by offering the firstborn Abel signified that he recognized God as the Author and Owner of Life,” and the accompanying descriptor of Cain’s offering as being of the ‘firstfruits’ is intentionally missing (Waltke 368). While this explanation is certainly not definitive, it makes greater contextual sense to me instead of the ‘bloodless’ theory that many assume. It seems likely that if the ‘bloodless’ hypothesis were true, the author would have emphasized the blood in its description of Abel’s offering. There were also striking parallels between Cain and Abel and the excerpt from the Jungle Book. In the final story with the Tiger, the Tiger “killed the buck, and thou hast let Death loose in the Jungle” (57). The Tiger is singled out for committing the first murder of the animal kingdom, much like Cain. There is even a ‘scar’ imposed on the animal kingdoms, with the “black stripes upon his flank and his side” resembling the marks left because of Cain’s murder (58).

tiger

Paradise Lost offers some interesting commentary about the Tree of Knowledge. Eve provides two reasons why she should not eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Later in her conversation with Satan, she claims that “God so commanded” for her to not eat from the tree (652). However, earlier in the conversation, the speaker reveals his voice and refers to the tree as the “root of all our woe” (645). This analysis of why the tree should not be eaten utilizes a consequentialist justification. While this provides an interesting interpretation for why the tree should not be eaten from, some implicit anthropocentric analysis is also given regarding the tree. In the face of the tree, many animals saw the tree as they “longing and envying stood, but could not reach” (593). I am not claiming that this is anthropocentric because it underestimates the physical capabilities of the animals. Rather, this analysis seems to imply that animals do not have the choice to fall outside of God’s approval because they were never within the purview of God’s watch in the first place.

adam and even posing with the tree of knowledge

Bruce Waltke. “Cain and His Offering”. Westminster Theological Journal 48 (1986). Page 368.

Ishmael Three

In the closing chapters of Ishmael, Daniel Quinn explicitly reveals his view of the causality of the exploitation that he critiques throughout the novel. In doing so, Quinn explicitly distinguishes his view from many other theories prominent in the social sciences. Ishmael explains to the narrator that “the world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison” (251). In a way, Quinn is arguing that humanity enslaved to its desires. The narrator eventually reaches the conclusion that the goal of this prison industry is “consuming the world” (252). As a result, Ishmael places the shifting of consciousnesses and grassroots education at the forefront of its strategies for resistance. This runs in the face of the strategies of many prominent Leftists, who give preference to social justice amongst humans. Ishmael argues, “What is crucial to your survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself” (252-3). In the view of anti-capitalists, “avoiding giving central importance to the emancipation of labor - tends to vitiate the anarchist reading of things, and loses concreteness” (Kovel 197-8). By denying the importance of internal hierarchies within humanity, Daniel Quinn is distinguishing his solution from the frequently accepted social critique from Marxist schools of thought. For Quinn, only a confrontation with desire and our own complicity in the system through the education of other individuals can bring systemic change.

prisoners

Some interesting analysis is also presented regarding racial diversity. When drawing the distinction between rearranging hierarchies within the prison and overthrowing the prison overall, Ishmael concedes that “white males—have called the shots inside the prison for thousands of years, perhaps even from the beginning” (252). By making this concession, Ishmael acknowledges that racial hierarchies are a systemic problem in the social order. Ishmael views the broader movement that he is attempting to initiate as being a solution to these racial striations. The complete rejection of consumer culture is “a common cause to which all humanity can subscribe” (253). It appears that Daniel Quinn views this social cause as one that the entirety of humanity can rally around, providing an opportunity for an inclusive and racially diverse society to emerge from the ashes of the waste and greed that characterize the status quo.

racial diversity

Joel Kovel. The Enemy of Nature. Zed Books: New York (2007). Pg. 197-198.

Ishmael II

I found Ishmael’s reading of Genesis to be extremely provocative. I think a crucial element to keep in mind when attempting to approach his reading of Genesis is to analyze it with the right methodology. Daniel Quinn does not advance his argument with the intention of uprooting decades of anthropological and historical analysis of Biblical texts. Rather, Quinn’s project should be analyzed in terms of how useful it is for establishing a counter-history of society. Ishmael acknowledges himself that “many of these people had their own tales to tell of this revolution, their own ways of explaining how these people from the Fertile Crescent came to be the way they were” (175). This seems to acknowledge the entirely subjective and arbitrary nature of the Old Testament texts, with their origins in the spoken word tradition of history. As a result, it would be foolish to assume that Ishmael strives for historical accuracy. Despite this different lens that I used to examine Ishmael’s re-reading of Genesis, I still have my apprehensions. It seems pretty self-evident that the elements of society that propagate the environmental exploitation that Ishmael is concerned with (Statist bureaucracies and profit-driven corporations) are largely secularized. Their rationality is hardly contingent on myths espoused millennia ago. They are informed by normalized discourses, many of which are the product of Western Enlightenment’s renunciation of any thought separate from Reason.

Adam and Eve

I also felt like the passage about ‘the crash’ was an extremely important section of the assigned reading. Ishmael is correct in pointing out the flawed logic of optimists who claim that “we must have faith in our craft” because “it has brought us this far in safety” (109). While these ideologues of the status quo utilize flawed logic, this does not necessarily suggest that a Malthusian world view is safe or productive. This paragraph becomes almost scary when Ishmael invokes fear-mongering rhetoric: “Five billion of you pedaling away—or ten billion or twenty billion—can’t make it fly. It’s been in free fall from the beginning, and that fall is about to end” (109). Ishmael’s invocation of Malthusian discourses still reinstates “the spatial code of modernization theory which draws a line between developed and underdeveloped regions” (323). Although this line-drawing may appear neutral, it has insidious implications for Western development policies. As a result of neo-Malthusian discourses, the motivation for development policy “is not so much the quest for food of hungry millions that demands the dismantling of traditional agriculture in the name of political stability, but rather the pressure of these faceless masses on more or less pristine ecosystems in remote areas” (330). It is evident how such discourses justify “discriminatory land policies and “coercive conservation”” being imposed upon the Third World by Western countries (331). The ability for Ishmael (and thereby Daniel Quinn’s philosophies) to be coopted by other neo-Malthusians becomes apparent as many of them publicly “maintain that “nothing less than the kind of commitments so recently invested in the Cold War” is needed to halt current trends” (331). I agree that both Ishmael and Daniel Quinn would oppose such coercive policies being imposed by the West. However, the discourses deployed by Ishmael have empirically been used to justify such neo-colonialist phenomena. Perhaps framing the problem in a less catastrophic context would avoid such repercussions for policymaking. After all, what empirical evidence does Ishmael possess to warrant his claim that the crash is coming? Scientific evidence is inconclusive about many aspects of the resource scarcity debate, with the likes of Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich unable to entirely refute arguments from books by Julian Simon and Bjørn Lomborg. Until there is more evidence that a real catastrophe is at hand, dangerous discourses must be interrogated in order to prevent the needless suffering of human beings.

Malthus is no match for Bjorn Lomborg's beautiful eyes/hair/face/body

Michael Flitner and Volker Heins. “Modernity and Life Politics: Conceptualizing the Biodiversity Crisis”. Political Geography: 21 (2002).

Ishmael I: Takers and Reductionism

I found the opening passages of Ishmael difficult to read. While the content of the dialogue between Ishmael and the protagonist is full of thought-provoking ideas, problems with literary execution detracted from the overall presentation. The premise of the book relies on many clichés developed by Daniel Quinn. These problems start with the introduction of the narrator, who plays the role of the typical politically disillusioned victim of suburban America. The failure of counterculture movements of previous decades has left the narrator feeling politically empty-handed. This is understandable, considering counterculture politics “has been one of the primary forces during consumer capitalism for the past forty years” (Heath and Potter 2). However, this one-dimensional narrative seems to have been replayed in almost every American fiction since Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history. The narrative of suburban isolationism is too vague for me to develop a particularly intimate connection with the narrator’s intellectual explorations.

Counterculture depicted

Ishmael’s proposals hinge upon his critical analysis of the status quo. He arrives at the conclusion that the social order is organized around a Taker/Leaver distinction that borders on an overly deterministic account of the ‘Taker’ class. However, when Ishmael engages in his critique of the development of society, he presumes that civilization is an inherently negative force. Moreover, he presumes that the Takers are “captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live” (Quinn 25). This reductionist position ignorantly homogenizes all Takers into a nebulous oppressive class. Two problems arise from this methodology. First, it functions to limit the radical potentiality of Ishmael’s critique of consumerist society. George Pavlich argues that by grounding the consumerist critique upon the normative assumption that Takers are wholly negative, “normative yardsticks for critical judgement are deemed reasonable by virtue of the rational” which causes Ishmael’s criticism to become a “slave to the disciplinary ethos that its revolutions seek to transgress” (Pavlich 363-364). Ishmael’s critique of consumerism falls short of questioning the presumption that a single monolithic category of humans can even be isolated as the sole cause of consumerism. Ishmael risks becoming enslaved to the same normalized practices that propagate the ignorance that he is trying to combat. Second, Ishmael’s position on the Takers creates an indefensible demonization of the West. The narrator even notes that Ishmael’s characterization is an oversimplification. However, Ishmael justifies his position by claiming an equally hegemonic account of the social order is necessary to combat dominant practices. This logical fallacy greatly hinders Ishmael’s ability to provide a valid account of domination. The fact that his opponent adopts simplistic and homogenizing discursive tactics does not justify the blatant lie that every single member of Western culture is inevitably complicit in resource depletion and environmental destruction. Certain institutions and economic actors are more culpable than others, and the failure to make such distinctions only risks the failure of Ishmael’s own personal project.

George Pavlich knows the secret to critique

George Pavlich. “Nietzsche, Critique and the Promise of Not Being Thus…”. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. Volume 13. 2000. Pages 363-364.

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture. Page 2.