Spider Sense

 

Friend Xerxes has recently returned from a group tour of Southeast Asia. As one of the exotic experiences the tour company laid on for their charges, they got to see a woman hunt tarantulas, defang them, and let them crawl over their arms. Then she fried the spiders, and the tourists could opt to sample them.

Xerxes was upset that the tarantulas were killed. Aren’t we humans arrogant, he asks, to assume that only we are sentient? 

I wonder if he has ever been to a slaughterhouse.

“Sentient” is not the word he should have used here. Sentient means responsive to the physical senses. Everyone believes that spiders are sentient. 

So why are we any better than spiders? Are we indeed simply being arrogant, or “speciesist”?

Dating back at least to Aristotle, animal and human souls have indeed always been understood in to be fundamentally different. There are different words for them in Greek. Humans have psyche. Animals have anima.

What’s the difference? 

A common answer is “reason,” or “free will,” but that may not be right. Animals can figure out simple puzzles, and this has always been known. See Aesop’s fable of the crow and the pitcher. Dogs can be wilful, and understand when they have been a “bad dog.” 

On the other hand, I read somewhere that when the behaviourists and the linguists teach higher apes to talk using sign language, the one thing they cannot do is answer questions in the conditional. They cannot understand hypotheticals.

Animals, even those most closely related to us, cannot retain narratives in the mind of what is not present. This suggests the faculty that makes us human is the imagination. And this seems to have been understood throughout the ages:

“Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me! 
The present only toucheth thee: 
But Och! I backward cast my e’e, 
On prospects drear! 
An’ forward tho’ I canna see, 
I guess an’ fear!” – Burns, “To a Mouse”

Now consider the account of the creation of man in Genesis:

Genesis 1:

“So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.”

Genesis 2: 

“Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

God created man “in his own image”; and what does that mean? Not to look like God, for God is a spirit. What is a spiritual image? Literally, or rather, etymologically, “imagination.” God is the great architect of all, the creator: creation is his image. Creation is in his image.

He then created man as a potter forms a pot. That too reveals his image: the human potter, the artist, acts in the image of God. In creation, God breathes his spirit into us—literally, or etymologically, he “inspires” us. 

What is the point of man’s creation? To tend the garden. As with pottery, this is a matter of taking the material God has created for us, and forming it by art. The intended end result, according to the Book of Revelation, is a celestial city, the New Jerusalem, one great work of art, a collaboration between God and man.

“One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” 10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. 11 It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. 12 It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. 13 There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west. 14 The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

“15 The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls. 16 The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long. 17 The angel measured the wall using human measurement, and it was 144 cubits thick. 18 The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. 19 The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, 20 the fifth onyx, the sixth ruby, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth turquoise, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst. 21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass.”

For this reason, a human life, and a human soul, is of infinitely greater value than an animal life.

We commonly understand a further distinction between plants and animals. Animals are sentient; plants are not. Plants are not conscious. They do not have the five senses. An animal life is therefore of greater value, their death of greater meaning, than a plant life. So vegetarianism.

There is another traditional distinction. There is the Christian pescetarian tradition: during the Lenten and Friday fasts, you are to eat no meat, but are allowed fish and seafood. Buddhist monastic “vegetarianism” follows similar rules: one is allowed seafood. Why is this where the line is drawn, and not at vegetarianism?

Because cold-blooded creatures lack emotions. They do not feel anger or love or fear. 

How do we know this?

Because they do not nurse their young.  Any creature that does not care for its young apparently has no emotional life. This is no doubt why the Devil himself is represented as reptilian, as a snake or dragon. They operate on sheer self-interest, lacking love or empathy.

Of course, they are really amoral, not immoral; they have no moral sense. Spiders presumably operate like robots, following their programming, their instinct. But there is therefore no moral issue in killing them, any more than in turning off a light.

This is why cannibalism is not cool, but it is cool to swat a mosquito.

How Many Souls Fit under a Microscope?

 

I think psychiatry and psychology do enormous harm. “Psyche” is soul. You cannot have a materialist psychology, that does not even believe in the existence of the soul. 

That blanket statement includes Jordan Peterson. While I generally agree with his politics, all he has managed to do in his thinking on psychology, in his rules for life and related videos, is to struggle his own way through a corn maze of miseducation to the unlocked front door of the stable. He is perhaps ready to acknowledge the existence of God. That puts him in the position of a baby about to be baptized; not a leader.

More regrettably, psychology suffuses our culture. We treat it like a religion; except that people seem to cling to their preferred psychological theories more fiercely and with less logic or evidence than anyone ever clings to a religion. Marking it as an idolatry, or, in psychological language, a delusion.

A sample text in a current textbook—in English, not Psychology--is all about the problem of bullying. And it explains, as psychology does, that people become bullies because they have themselves been bullied; or because they have been neglected by their parents, and do it to get attention.

One vital thing is immediately missing in this analysis: free will. As we see here, psychology reduces everyone to NPCs—except the psychologist. You stick in this pin, and you get that response.

The tremendous advantage of this viewpoint is that it eliminates right and wrong. With no moral choices, there is no morality. This is a great boon to those who want to do wrong, of course. Accordingly, psychology promotes evil.

That is actually the perfect philosophy to create bullies. It exonerates them. And it makes it unnecessary, indeed impossible, for them to change their behaviour, to improve themselves—because, after all, they have no free will. At the same time, the psychologists see themselves as gods, having agency over their patients when their patients do not—attracting bullies to the profession. And of course being logically inconsistent, and denying the essential moral principle, that of human equality: do unto others.

All this would be utterly damning even if it were true that bullies are tempted (albeit not compelled) to bully because they have themselves been bullied. But this too is improbable. Being bullied is painful. Experiencing pain, does the average person really want to impose it on someone else? If, for example, you put your hand on a hot stove, and get burned, are you motivated to encourage others to put their hands on hot stoves?

For most people, the reverse. Being bullied would convict you not to bully another. You would develop empathy and a fierce sense of justice. 

And this is just what you find in those who have been abused. Elon Musk is one example. He apparently bought Twitter to end the bullying.

Why do psychologists believe the opposite? 

First, because they simply ask bullies why they bully, and accept the answer. No bully is going to voluntarily take the blame. The obvious dodge is to insist they are actually the victim. 

And, being bullies themselves, the psychologists embrace the explanation.

As for bullying coming from a lack of attention from parents, this is nonsensical, because as a child, in order to get away with bullying, you generally do not want adult witnesses. So it is not what you are going to do if you want attention from your parents. It is the opposite of what you would do.

THis too probably comes from bullies refusing to take responsibility for their actions. So they will shift the blame to their parents: "I wouldn't have been able to do it if they had kept a closer eye on me."

The best approach to psychology is to assume that everything it says will be the opposite of the truth.

I think we all secretly know this. It is more or less the basic principle Freud propounded, when he claimed that everything our subconscious says to us means its opposite. He was actually revealing that tendency in himself.