First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Beauty is the Beast

Whilst working on an essay for Prospect on bullfighting, I heard a Natural History programme on BBC Radio 4 devoted to the issue of whaling which has recently returned to the news as Japan has increased both the numbers of whales it is hunting and the number of species, including the ultra-charismatic humpback. One of the many that struck me whilst writing the bullfighting piece was how so many of our views of, and dealings with, animals (and this goes for both sides of the arguments in this area) are based on an almost incoherent mix of raw emotion, flawed logical steps, ignorance of the facts and a lack of direct experience. However, what struck me even more during the programme’s discussion (by an impressive array of international scientists, conservationists, diplomats and politicians) was that whilst it is easy to point out some of the logical inconsistencies, become aware of some of the facts, there is an impossibility - a metaphysical one I think - in removing emotion and the need for direct experience of the animals in question in order to formulate a better position in this ethical debate. I thought I’d say a few words here, since I had no space in the main essay.

By way of preamble: in 1982 the International Whaling Commission decided to reduce the whaling quotas of the signatory nations to zero - they could neither agree to an outright ban nor even the use of the term “moratorium” - to allow the populations to return to a sustainable level and to review the whaling industry in general to improve its methods so that it would not again put this small but important area of biodiversity in jeopardy. However, the motivating force in this policy shift was the post-1960s rise in profile of both animal welfare and conservation.

Public attention was focused on whales by welfare and conservation groups by pointing out that whales were not fish but “mammals like us” (of course, fish are ‘animals like us’, but let’s leave the emotive, but biologically vacuous nature of this phrasing to one side). It was also pointed out, with better justification, that the intelligence and sociability of these animals was being ignored in our attribution of ‘prey-status’ to them. This was particularly brought home, quite deliberately, with the use of the beautiful and haunting sounds of the humpback whale by the biologists who had first classified them as ’songs’, Roger Payne and Scott McVay. As Roger Payne says in the programmes, this provided a suitable “audio-reinforcement” to the images of Greenpeace’s small, semi-dirigible boats blocking the path of the comparatively vast whaling vessels (Jonah and the Whale in reverse).

The most important question which is almost never head on in this debate is by what criteria do we, and by we I mean the non-vegetarian/vegan majority, decide that a fellow member of the animal kingdom is fit to be treated in the way we do. In general, the unspoken consensus used to be, and remains for the vast majority of the developing world, that if it is isn’t human, we can do what we want with an animal. Undoubtedly in the Christian tradition this thinking had a neat theological echo in the division of those beings with souls - i.e. us - and those beings without, although that position has since been mediated. I can’t claim any great expertise on Muslim theology, but in my travels in Morocco where the treatment of, for example, donkeys is so visibly cruel, I was often confronted with the opinion that not only did Allah give us the right to treat animals as we wish, but that the “Western” habits of keeping animals as pets, allowing them to sleep in our beds (something often brought up) and other attributions of what one might calls traits of ‘personhood’ to animals was a form of idolatory - a rational enough stance, given their views on animals, if you consider how we might view a people who made a bed for their vacuum cleaners, took them for walks, stroked them etc. However, with the withering of religion in’the West, especially in the sphere of policy, our ethics have latched onto other criteria of moral importance, such as sentience and consciousness.

Of course, it was not science that told us that some animals are sentient, e.g. can feel pain. Anyone who has had dealings with dogs or cats, which is most people, is well aware that they are capable of feeling pain. The anatomical discovery that dogs have a central nervous system not wildly different to our own may have helped confirm this in a scientific sense but only in the same pedantic way that knowledge of atomic structure confirms that diamond is hard. However, our knowledge of animals was genuinely increased when the more troublesome question of consciousness, more specifically self-consciousness, was approached by Gordon G. Gallup, Jr., et al (1970), who designed various ‘mirror tests’. The simplest of these involved anaesthetising a subject, placing a dot of coloured, odourless dye somewhere invisible to the animal, e.g. its forehead, and then using this marker as a way to gauge whether the subject could recognise itself in the mirror. Dogs and cats cannot; they are at first disturbed by mirrors, suspecting another animal’s presence, but soon learn to ignore them. Great apes such as the chimpanzee immediately use the mirror to perceive where the dot is on their bodies and then use their hands to try to remove it. Of course, anyone who has spent any time with chimpanzees, as I did at the Language Research Centre of Georgia State University in 2001 (which I have written about for the Financial Times which can be found here), knows that you just have to give a chimp lipstick and a mirror to prove with less rigorous but more humorous results.

It should be noted that the same has been shown for dolphins, although in a less dramatic, and perhaps consequently more disputed manner (see, e.g. the psychologist Clive Wynne’s essay in Nature in 2004). Lacking the necessary limbs, the significant behavioural change is how long they spend in front of a mirror showing the marked portion of their bodies rather than other mirrors in the same array which do not. I think that a very important point can be taken out from this. Scientific results can be so dry as to have little effect on our views and most especially what philosophers would call our moral intuitions. Seeing an animal hover motionless in the water in front of one mirror rather than another does little to effect my views of it, whereas seeing one putting on makeup, and being as visibly amused by the results as the observers, is an entirely different matter. For science, although it can be used to confirm our rougher, readier but essentially fuller and more human interactions with animals, cannot override nor replace them. One area in particular that this strikes me is in how animals treat their dead. There is something that happened within me with regards to my view of lions when I observed a lion eating another lion that I had seen it lick in greeting a few days before. Just as there was something in the opposite direction when I read the following passage in In the Kingdom of Gorillas (2001), by the social scientist Bill Weber and the biologist Amy Vedder: 

“The day of Quince’s death . . . [the group] made a 180-degree turn and headed rapidly in a direct line toward where they had last seen Quince . . . [we were then] rewarded with an exceptional sight. First Icarus, then Puck, went straight to her nest and placed their faces on the exact spot where Quince had breathed her last. Each then sat back and stared off into space. The two sat side by side as others passed near the nest site. Then the entire family moved off silently into the surrounding forest.”

There can be no denying that the choice of language is unscientific, emotive even, and yet evocative of the sorts of truths which fuel the engine of our ethical judgements which simply will not turn over on cold scientific truths unless they are suitably dramatic. It is the description, as fact-based and unclouded, as is possible, of an emotional being living an experience with these animals - things which are utterly intrinsic to how we judge how we will treat an animal, and it is only in the acceptance of that that any sort of clarity can be brought to the argument of whether or not we should be hunting whales.

Although I have not set out to write a piece on whaling, rather a piece going over some of the sources of our moral stance with regards to it, it would be remiss of me not to briefly state my own views.I have spent far too little time with cetacean species to claim sufficient amounts of the sort of direct contact I regard as so necessary - with the one exception of endless, joyful (for me) hours spent as a child entertaining a very bored captive bottlenose dolphin during a week’s stay on an island off the Great Barrier Reef. However, I have picked up more from that surrogate for direct contact: the well-made and honest nature documentary, which is not as easy to find as one might think (I have written on this in a lighter vein in Freize magazine, which can be found here). In theory, these could provide the population at large with the sort of experience in the fuller sense which I regard as a sine qua non for moral judgement - an absolute necessity - especially when this is backed up by the (apparently) morally-neutral, but scrupulously honest scientific data (I highly recommend Cetacean Societies, edited by Janet Mann et al [1999] - although it is a little out of date now missing such recent research as the 2005 discovery of the transmission of tool-use across generations in dolphins from mother to child [see Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]).In the light of this, it would seem to me that the intrinsic cruelty of the practice of commercial whaling - the means of death for an animal of that size killed in the high seas whilst leaving a commercially viable carcass is necessarily prolonged and agonising - and the clear intelligence, sociability, and sensitivity of the animals in question simply outweighs whatever miniscule benefit to humanity in terms of whale-meat or other products there may be in the modern world, although this may not always have been the case.

Two caveats: I am aware that many of the examples of intelligence above actually refer specifically to bottlenose dolphins, and that these decisions should be made on a species-by-species basis. Also, arguments from the point of view of sustainable populations and that great engine of conservation, aesthetics (phrases like “majestic” and “largest mammal ever to have lived” spring to mind) are entirely independent of this.

P.S. Joshua Plotnik’s team at Emory showed elephants pass the mirror test late last year (in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), whilst the year before Karen McComb’s team observed (in Biology Letters) that elephants not only pay strange and touching attention to their dead but even to the clean skeletons of dead elephants - although the elephants’ graveyard is undeniably a myth. It is worth adding that an excellent description of what these facts translate as in our actual dealings with actual animals is, paradoxically, to be found Ernest Hemingway’s Big Game hunting short fiction, ‘An African Story.’
 
Alexander Fiske-Harrison’s latest researches into the world of bullfighting can be found at The Last Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight.

This is First Drafts signing off for 2007. Prospect has now left the building.

In the meantime, don’t forget about the two parlour games we’ve started off below. We want to know what you think were the most overrated and underrated
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cultural events of 2007, and we’d like to hear your suggestions for self-reviewing books. Particularly imaginative contributions will be honoured with publication in the next issue of the magazine, and there may—may—even be a prize or two on offer.

Very best wishes to all our readers, old and new, for the festive season, and we’ll see you all in the new year.

As of about an hour ago, Prospect is officially on holiday for the next ten days or so, but we have an excellent selection of web exclusives for you to enjoy over the festive season.

• Stephen Chan, who has been following the ANC congress in Polokwane, South Africa, on Jacob Zuma’s victory but Thabo Mbeki’s last triumph. PLUS Former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein has updated his print magazine piece to reflect the latest developments.

• Andrew Jack, the FT’s former man in Moscow, on the prospect of a grand power-sharing deal between Vladmir Putin and his heir presumptive “Dima” Medvedev next year.

• Daria Vaisman, a Tbilisi-based journalist, tries to get to the bottom of Georgian President Saakashvili’s surprise crackdown on the demonstrations in November.

• Sean Swan, replying to Dean Godson, on why internment failed in Northern Ireland

Editors are privy to all manner of excuses from writers, but one thing that really gets them flooding in is any request to take part in a survey or poll. I suppose it’s the fact that writers are being asked to put pens to paper (however minimally) without being paid for it that makes them so uncompliant. But rather than simply admit this, they tend to resort to variants of the time-worn formula: “I’d truly love to do this but…” Our poll in the current issue of the most overrated and underrated cultural events of the year garnered a particularly inventive array of excuses. Here is a selection:

–(From a famous novelist): “Thanks for the invitation, but I’m afraid I just don’t partake in enough cultural events to answer your questions. Besides, living in Dublin, for all its vaunted trendiness, is like living on the Outer Hebrides—nothing much happens here except seals.”

–(From an eminent philosopher): “I’m sorry, but I’m going to fail you on this one. I can’t think of anything desperately worthy that has been ignored or trashed, and, equally, I can’t think of anyone I particularly want to be rude about (at least, not in the world of culture). No doubt some brilliant idea will occur to me, long after your extended deadline; but I have tried hard to think of one so far, without success.”

–(From a well-known historian, sent via email): “I am sorry not to have answered—was away and don’t have internet in the flat here (Ankara). I would love to do something for you but feel a bit out of touch culturally: please forgive.”

–(From a novelist): “Sorry, I have no ideas for this: everything seems overrated to me, except for [here the writer inserted the name of his own recently published novel], the publication of which was rather like a feather dropping down the Grand Canyon into oblivion—but I think it’s probably bad form and a bit undignified for an author to whine about this sort of thing.”

–(From a historian, sent at least a week before the deadline): “I’m afraid I’m struggling with flu at present so alas I must say no!”

–(From a well-known popular scientist): “If you don’t mind, I would rather miss it this year, because of keeping myself out of the press for the time being.”

–(From a columnist): “Just a word to say I won’t be able to do this this year—I’m on a deadline for a book and every minute counts!”

But first prize for hypocrisy must go to the agent of a famous novelist who, having been approached to ask the novelist on our behalf, sent back an email saying: “xxxxx enormously appreciates you thinking of her, but I’m afraid she’s deep in her own work and doesn’t really want to be distracted.” However, this was rather undermined by her email’s subject line, which was obviously how the agent had framed our request when she’d forwarded it to the novelist (and which she had forgotten to delete): “Prospect wanting something for nothing—see below.”

We have invited readers to send in their own nominations for the poll (see here). There’s really no excuse not to….

In cuisine, the saying goes, the first bite is with the eye: appearances may be deceiving, but even the wariest diner begins their judgement with looks. Popular idiom cuts the other way with literature, advising good readers to ignore anything it comes wrapped in. At least in the Prospect office, however, the sport of pre-judging books is alive and well, faced as we are every day by a mesmerisingly long list of titles vying for review. And we don’t even need to look at the covers: just an author and title will do.

It’s in this spirit that we’ve begun seeking out the best embodiments of one particular principle: books whose titles (with a little applied ingenuity) provide their own reviews. An honourable precedent was set by the science writer, Matt Ridley, in our 2006 poll of Books of the year, who answered Steve Lowe and Alan MacArthur’s Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? with “Yes, it is just you.” And, more recently, Pierre Bayard’s How to talk about books you haven’t read yet moved us to observe that, although we don’t have the time actually to read his book, M. Bayard has undoubtedly produced a seminal tract for our times.

Among many other favourites, there’s Theodore Dalrymple’s In Praise of Prejudice (which I knew was going to be rubbish before it even came into the office); Martin Amis’s collected essays, The War Against Cliché (a rip-roaring page-turning rollercoaster ride and a sure-fire hit from the master himself); Patrick Ness’s Topics About Which I Know Nothing (upon which we all felt far too ill-informed and under-qualified to comment); and the immortal This Book Will Change Your Life by Ben Carey and Henrik Delehag (which I was planning to review, except that immediately after finishing it I founded an internet company, made millions on the stock market, married a former Miss World and emigrated to California). And, for a more in-depth take on our philosophy, see the Prologue to Edward Leamer’s review of Thomas Friedman’s paean to outsourcing, The World is Flat.

Broadening the subject from literature to all the arts brings further pleasures, including what the Guinness Book of Records informs me is the shortest published theatrical review in history, of the late-Victorian show A Good Time (”no”)—a trick repeated by the film critic Leonard Maltin in his review of the 1948 musical Isn’t it Romantic? What we’d like most of all, however, is to hear from you with any suggestions you may have to augment our list over the holiday period. The best ones may even make it into the front half of the next issue…

Best-of-the-year lists are a staple feature of magazines and newspapers come December, but can make pretty grim reading—with backs predictably slapped all round, and the odd gem crowded out by big names. So this year, following on from the success of our 2006 “books of the year” feature, we invited over 50 Prospect writers to contribute their nominations for the most overrated and underrated cultural events of 2007 (interpreting “events” as loosely as they liked). A selection of responses are published in the print edition, but you can now read the complete results online here.

We’d love to know what you think about our poll. And, by way of a festive entertainment for all of our online readers over the Christmas period, we’d also love to receive your nominations for your own overrated and underrated cultural events of 2007. Simply unleash your sentiments in the comments below—and we hope to publish a selection of the best responses in our first issue of the new year.

The causes of the Irish economic miracle have been much analysed; less so its effects. John Murray Brown’s cover story in the new issue of Prospect looks at the new breed of Irish rich: the men—and they do seem to be almost exclusively male—who have profited from Ireland’s long economic boom and particularly its leap in property prices. These men represent the first big, indigenous moneyed class in Ireland, and they are having a profound effect on the way the Irish see themselves.

Interestingly, despite the fact that the extraordinary enrichment of Ireland has started to have an effect on the British economy—as Murray Brown says, in London, few big property deals get done these days without some form of Irish involvement—British media and politicians have largely ignored it. But as Ireland gets richer and more confident—its GDP per capita is now comfortably ahead of Britain’s—it is starting to care less about what its larger neighbour thinks.

Let us know what you think of the piece below.

At a time when poetry has seemingly been banished to the outer fringes of our culture, it’s astonishing to read that only 40 years ago, the election campaign for a new professor of poetry at Oxford could draw in national and international newspaper correspondents, television crews and the attention of such literary luminaries as Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin and Arthur Miller. In the new issue of Prospect, Bernard Wasserstein tells the tale of how his insurgent campaign to get the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko elected to the chair in 1968 almost succeeded—and managed to suck in all the various cultural currents of the time.

Our big think-piece for Christmas is a portrait of the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, by the doctor, writer and general polymath Raymond Tallis. Tallis believes that Parmenides’s model of a static, homogenous, undifferentiated universe—as described in a 150-line fragment of his 5th-century BC poem On Nature, which constitutes the entirety of his surviving works—went on to suffuse western thought and underlies much of modern philosophy and science. Parmenides’s achievement, writes Tallis, was extraordinary: “thought and knowledge encounter themselves head on for the first time… such a huge advance is self-consciousness that it is no exaggeration to call it an ‘awakening.’”

Yet, argues Tallis, with much of contemporary science running into dead ends—the search for a grand unified theory of everything, the attempt to understand the mysteries of human consciousness—it may be time to revisit the “Parmenidian moment,” to see if there might be an alternative “cognitive journey” from the one the pre-Socratic philosopher set us on 2,500 years ago.

Was Gordon foolish not to sign the EU treaty along with the other heads of state, as almost everyone seems to think? I’m not so sure. When British people are pressed to think through what they want out of Europe, a sensible majority grudgingly accept the benefits of the single market and the need to pool sovereignty on some things - but what the British have always been allergic to is the supranational aspects of EU symbolism, precisely those things on display in Lisbon today. So for Gordon to distance himself from the pomp and ceremony while still signing up to what is valuable about the EU may be populist, but it is not completely unreasonable.

In any case, it turns out that the whole premise of the treaty was false. The EU is not suffering from gridlock as a result of enlargement, as many predicted; indeed, if anything, it is working better now with 27 members than it did when it had 15. This is not what either Eurosceptics or Europhiles want to hear; the former never accept the EU might be working well, and the latter are wedded to the logic of “gridlock” as a justification for the latest round of institutional reform. That is why a remarkable report by Helen Wallace, the noted pro-EU academic at the LSE, got so little publicity earlier this week. Wallace points out that of the EU decisions that are subject to complex co-decision rules, the number that went through on the first go actually rose from 34 per cent in 2003 to 64 per cent in 2005 (easing to 59 per cent in 2006), after the first wave of enlargement. Moreover, about 90 per cent of EU decisions continue to be made by consensus and the number of pending cases at the European court of justice is falling. Even the arrival of Romania and Bulgaria is failing to screw things up.