Yesterday on Twitter, Jordan Peterson had something of a “we hunted the mammoth to feed you” moment, demanding a little “gratitude” on behalf of the men who do the hard and sometimes dangerous construction jobs that we effete Twitter-readers allegedly refuse to do.
A little gratitude, eh? For whom? For the actual people who do the hard but necessary work to keep our society going — a group that clearly includes women along with men. (Do, say, nurses somehow not count as civilization-maintainers?)
Or are we supposed to give our gratitude to, well, all men, just because they share a gender with so many of those constructing high-rises?
Either way, the “protected and privileged” Peterson, who has turned an assortment of grievances into a surprisingly lucrative career as a social critic and advice author who doesn’t follow any of his own advice, is an odd candidate for working-class hero. As some of those responding to his little tweetstorm pointed out.
Some took on his blinkered misogyny:
Others mocked Peterson’s patronizing solemnity:
Still others asked Peterson the pointed question: What exactly have you done for people working these dangerous but necessary jobs?
Matumos has got a point, big man. What are you going to do about it?
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@Alan
Bentham’s body on display, aka “the most vivid memory I have of my Ethics class.” Though our professor was careful to point out that that’s not Bentham’s head, but a wax copy. Our prof had a rather puckish sense of humor combined with a preference for precision.
@ Vicky P
Yeah, his real one was getting a bit not fit for purpose.
They still have it though…
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/2015/09/06/jeremy-benthams-mummified-head/
I’ve a friend who works at UCL and thus frequently sees Blossom and Bentham in person.
(Blossom and Bentham would be a good band name.)
@ Alan
I don’t really know if it’s the same sort of respect for both Bentham and Blossom, when Bentham clearly stated he wanted to be displayed after death, but presumably there’s no way to know what Blossom would have wanted. Then again, what with the botched head and the display thingy being just bones and a bunch of straw or something, I don’t know if Bentham got what he wanted either, so maybe it evens out.
@ masse mysteria
There has been some controversy with that. He used to be in a cabinet so he could attend lectures. So some people have objected to him being moved to that glass cabinet in the hallway.
https://inews.co.uk/news/jeremy-bentham-ucl-corpse-new-case-will-student-centre-401218
Indeed. But I guess we do so much to animals without caring about their lack of consent. This seems ok in the sense that it’s meant to be an honour. And we often celebrate human animals in ways they might not even known about let alone agreed to. So I’m ok in the sense at least it’s equal treatment. And it’s better than ending up as a sofa I suppose.
Must confess, I wouldn’t have any objections if I ended up as one of those door coverings. Although perhaps a more appropriate building than a church. I’d like to suggest a library or courthouse or something; but if we’re doing buildings that had a significance for me in life, then it’ll probably be a pub.
I rather like the Shakespeare fan who willed his skull to the RSC to be used in future Hamlet productions.
I’m going to have my body go to a body farm in my part of the state – I’ll be contributing to forensic science after I’m gone, which rather pleases me.
@ Vicky P
As seen here!
@ Alan
Much obliged. My knowledge of Bentham (and particularly his head) comes solely form Ask A mortician, and the video does tell the story in a pretty straightforward way (not to mention that Bentham’s head was a long-running joke in later videos).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FvYfuwZvyY
I didn’t mean that the idea wasn’t to honour Blossom, I was just under the impression that Bentham had masterminded his own corpse’s fate, so they felt like very different things.
@ masse mysteria
You raise a very interesting wider point. That whole thing of who speaks for people without capacity.
In animal rights we use “Voice for the voiceless”; but there is that issue of how do you know it’s what the animals would want?
Of course they can communicate. They make it pretty clear they don’t like to suffer and they have a sense of self preservation. So I suspect they’re on board with the not killing and eating them thing. But then you get into conundra like the Blossom case. There’s similar debates about service animals, vet treatment, all sorts of things
I am a big believer in the idea of animal personhood. See my limited contribution here.
But even there the issue arises that ultimately even a free animal will need human intercessors. But of course the idea of agents acting for people without capacity is hardly uncommon. Parents make decisions for their kids; families make decisions about unconscious patients; there’s the Court of Protection where the state can step in. And of course companies have directors.
I have a lot of business friends on LinkedIn who really struggle with the idea that animals have personhood, yet no issue over companies being legal persons.
@Alan
Thanks for the link! Nonhuman personhood is very interesting. I thought about this some when I pretty recently read Truth of the Divine by Lindsay Ellis, which included stuff about extraterrestrial beings and their personhood was being debated.
I guess the thing with Blossom “feeling different” has (for me) something to do with the fact that animal pelts have been used as currency and displayed as hunting trophies and such.
I remember reading about a chimpanzee who was a test pilot for space flight (I assume I’m remembering Ham?) who after his death was buried with the same sort of ceremonies as his human fellows, only the text also mentioned that his skeleton was taken for further study and was not buried. There was no mention of this being the practice with humans, so it left a weird aftertaste. (Also notable that the humans or their next of kin could have consented to donating their skeletons, possibly to help further flights for humans, whereas it seems unlikely that Ham [if it was him] would have been studied to make sure chimpanzees would be safe in space.)
@ masse mysteria
The idea of aliens and personhood is a fascinating topic. By what criteria would we deem them as people. I also like to look at it from the flip-side. How would aliens regard us? We allow the tiniest difference in DNA to be the line between who’s a person and who’s a commodity. What if they use the same test?
War of the Worlds, as well as being an allegory on colonialism, was also a commentary on this. Wells was what we’d now call a vegan; hence the Martians using us for food.
I follow the cases on AI personhood. That’s cropped up in the art world. Whether AI can be regarded as creators.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise
But I can adopt some of the arguments and principles for animal rights. There’s already a bit of crossover.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/24/us/monkey-selfie-peta-appeal/index.html
And yes, poor Ham.
As it happens there is a cadaver on the ISS. But presumably there was consent from someone for that.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1296
@Alan
Didn’t the Martians treat us as food because we looked like a species they used for food on Mars? Makes one wonder how we’d react to extraterrestrials who looked like chickens.
Personhood could be equally interesting in a fantasy setting, but I haven’t read fantasy widely enough to know if that tends to pop up. A lot of the Discworld books do comment on equality between species, but I can’t remember talks of questions about personhood per se, but again, I haven’t read all of the books.
@Alan
Reminds me of a know-nothing know-it-all who insisted that if Lex Luthor succeeded in killing Superman, he could not be charged with murder, because those laws only apply to humans. In the real world. The guy refused to accept that the laws might be different in a world with multiple alien superheroes and a US Ambassador to Gorilla City.
@ masse mysteria
I don’t think the Martian’s motivations are covered too much in the book; other than the bit in the intro about them running out of resources. But in-story we only have the narrator’s speculation to go on.
Wells though did give a lecture where he speculated about evolution and, using martians as an example, came up with the idea of a creature whose body was devoted almost purely to intelligent thought and thus had only a vestigial digestive system. Hence just ingesting the blood of other creatures.
@ allandrel
I like considering the legal aspects in works of speculative fiction.
Notwithstanding the excellent point you make, Lex might still be in bother. The common law definition of murder says that it’s the killing of any ‘reasonable being’ (sometimes ‘reasonable creature’).
Presumably reasonable there means capable of thought, rather than not pointlessly antagonistic. Otherwise there’d be a lot of acquittals.
So whilst it would certainly be a defence I’d raise, I can see a judge saying Superman qualifies.
But more here on what that phrase entails here.
As you can imagine a lot of the points crop up in personhood discussion (cf Deodands, and ‘Did Dave Bowman murder HAL?’)
@Alan: That entire discussion is why I ended up siding more with Bookchin and the social ecologists than the deep ecologists. Nature doesn’t just not have a voice; even if we try to give it one, it’s a discordant choir, not a single voice. We have to accept that we are going to do some anthropomorphism in the process because we literally cognitively can’t avoid it, and figure out what actually matches the evidence and the competing stakeholder needs the best.
@ fred b-c
Heh, I think you know a lot more about this subject than me.
But yeah, there’s as many genuine conflicts of interest in nature as there are in human society. So similarly all one can do is seek the best, or least worst, outcome on some general grounds. Whether that be utilitarianism, precautionary principle, or just plain old ‘so far as practicable and possible’.
You familiar with Asimov’s “Zeroth Law”? That was a proposed solution to a similar problem.
I fall back on something similar. Maybe it’s just an intellectual crutch, but I’m very persuaded by Gaia Hypothesis, and I’m moving rapidly to accepting Gaia Theory. So that’s one way of comparing possible outcomes against a model goal.
In practical terms that means supporting anything that leads to as diverse and ‘natural’ eco system as possible; Daisyworld ++. As that seems to be what works best for the planet as a whole.
And it’s easier than trying to get a lion to eat tofu.
@Alan: Asimov is my favorite writer, and R. Daneel one of my favorite characters. When I write AI, I try to avoid the Data trap where the AI is presumed to want to converge to human-like sapience. What’s so wonderful about Asimov’s most advanced robots is how wonderfully deep, empathetic, and kind they can be without having to emulate humanity.
However, in the non-Asimov Foundation novels written later, someone did have the Zeroth and First Laws used as an explanation for why Asimov’s galaxy has no aliens. The robots exterminated them. Their laws didn’t say “A robot shall not” about sapient beings but about humans. Killing non-human sapients was obligatory. I…. did not like this much.
Still, it is a reminder that we need to think not just in terms of humans specifically but in terms of sapience and sentience per se.
@ fred b-c
As Susan Calvin would put it, you can’t tell the difference between a robot and a decent human.
And of course the Solarians programmed their robots to only recognise Solarians as human; to much the same effect.
Lumipuna linked to a really good video a while ago. It was by a woman whose name crops up a bit round here; but my addled memory can’t recall. (I’m at the stage where if I learn a new name I forget where the car keys are.)
But anyway she linked to some studies that suggested the less speciesist you are the more tolerant you are generally. So I’d programme my robots with a ‘Minus one-th law’.
“A robot must not harm life or allow life to come to harm…”
Thinking about it, Asimov did sort of go that way with Gaia.
And now of course I’ve just made the connection.
@alan: I’ll be curious to check out that study, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The more radical arguments that try to link meat-eating or animal abuse directly to patriarchy, statism, etc. have never convinced me because I think all modes of oppression have their own internal logic (I recommend checking out Liberating Theory, which was a big collaboration between Michael Albert and a lot of other leftists on theory – I use it as a framework on top of intersectionality), but I do definitely see that the really blatant disregard for life tends to lead to a really blatant disregard for human life. You can see it in the parts of the NRA that act as a death cult.
(And in line with what Squack was complaining about, it also is indicative that some of the people who when it’s useful for their religion will be loudest about the sanctity of life will then go on to have ideological defenses that are about how little life matters when it suits them there).
@ fred b-c
I do that a lot.
I do genuinely believe that how we treat animals is how we train children from a young age to accept that certain things that we regard as negatives are inevitable, natural, and perfectly fine. I also find it’s a useful tool for creating cognitive dissonance in progressives.
It’s probably a more ethical way than my other plan of creating a Lone Star Tick mass breeding and release programme. (I’m checking the legality)
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alpha-gal-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20428608
But to get back on point, there is a recent study that does help with the argument that intolerance is a learned trait and it starts with animals.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/19485506221086182
@alan: The problem is that even if one can show some kind of average connection between meat-eating and other oppressions, that average connection has too many potential confounders that I doubt can be separated out. Are we including the religious confounder, where lots of strong beliefs about meat eating are being connected to the belief that humans are superior to animals because of religion? A general acceptance of animal rights? Etc.? If you take a person who generally broadly accepts animal rights, thinks that there should be regulations to protect animals even for slaughter or eggs/milk, etc., are they going to generally still be more accepting of oppression? I don’t know. I do know that there are vegan neo-Nazis. It’s an average connection.
In contrast, it’s reasonable to point to how, say, capitalism and patriarchy have a connection, even though capitalism is anti-human and will eliminate differences between people as irrelevant to the market, because a nuclear family with domestic differentiation is convenient as a locus of control. There’s some major structural connections there.
The study is interesting, but notice how it finds that adolescents acquire some moral reasoning where they can think in species terms. Not that they necessarily will, but that they get that acculturation and ability. I don’t think that’s terribly convincing.
@Fred B-C
That’s the premise of Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker universe, except thr someone else had done that, keying the robots to kill everyone who wasn’t the creating species. Which species no longer exists, so the Berserkers are out to kill absolutely everyone and nobody can make them stop.
@Alan
No, he was clearly acting in self defence.
@Dali: I wonder if Brin et al. (I forgot which of the non-Asimov Foundation books have the revelation about the robot genocide) were making a cheeky reference to Berserker.
It’s also important to note that Asimov could tell a good Frankenstein yarn. My favorite (and one that’s super relevant with the discussions around self-driving cars) is the robot story (which is clearly not in the main timeline) where they try to figure out how to make a robot prioritize what human life matters so it won’t pick two old grandmas over one virtuoso violinist. The robots realize that, well, they’re the superior humans, because they have better bodies and brains, so if we’re differentiating by some hierarchy of value, why keep any meatsacks alive?