Interestingly, Rowlands focuses on the simian obsession with sex for pleasure, and how wolves, and other animals, do not have such an addiction, for he had no clue as to ‘what he was missing.’ Yet, sex’s detachment from mere reproductive activity is not a path charted only by apes. Whales copulate as furiously as apes, as detailed in many a study, but, despite such an elision, Rowlands sums up his third chapter in this manner:
The more unpleasant the animal, the more vicious it is, and the more insensitive to the possibility of conciliation, the more it has need of a sense of justice. Standing on its own, alone in all of nature, we find the ape: the only animal unpleasant enough to become a moral animal.
What is best about us comes from what is worst. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it is something we might want to bear in mind.
As The Philosopher And The Wolf goes on, Rowlands explores testing on animals, and how much of it is little more (if at all) than torture or sadism. He discourses on differences he has with his friend, philosopher Colin McGinn, on the nature of evil, and why he feels McGinn’s linking of it to schadenfreude is wrong. On the other hand, I feel Rowlands too liberally uses a term like ‘morals’ when the secular word ‘ethics’ would do. This trope leads into one of my two biggest disagreements with Rowlands; the other being the foundation of his anti-carnivorism, even as he champions piscetarianism, the eating of fish, for himself and his pooches. I guess fish, like fungi or plants, simply cannot feel. Still, until we develop Star Trek-like machines that can assemble atoms into any substance we like, something will surely have to die so we can live. And trying to claim an ethical higher ground over which thing bites the bullet, to me, sounds hypocritical, at worst, and silly, at best.
The other disagreement I have is with his defense of Hannah Arendt’s monumentally dense (and wrong) proclamation about... you know it, the ‘banality of evil.’ Rowlands cites animal experimentation in the halls of Academia as an example of evil’s banality, yet, and perhaps it is because of too many years in Academia’s detached and rarified air, he does not seem to see how ‘exceptional’ such behavior is. After all, these are not people who run canidromes (places where illegal dog fights take place), but educated men who are generally left wing to a fault, who are utterly detached from the cruelty of their actions. It may be arguably banal to declare the owners of most pets banally evil (at least those who abuse their pets), or most abusive parents, but certainly not degreed sadists. In short, what often occurs in the endless examples of evil that Arendt’s supporters trot out is a conflation of the banality of an evil actor’s motives, demeanor, or reactions with the exceptional motives they ascribe to.
Article comments
1 - Sebastian
"smite the apostate down"
That's the language of the Taliban. It has no place in educated society... not even as a metaphor.
This article was a muddle-headed meander of pseudo-science, and superstitious moralising. The errors of logic and fact are so numerous the article is not worth correcting.
Incidentally, fish have a highly developed sense of touch (including an organ designed specifically for it which we do not share: try to guess what it is) and are perfectly capable of feeling pain. What little research there has been into their intelligence also demonstrates a capacity for learning and memory.
It is an error of Victorian proportions to assume that lack of personal knowledge is equivalent to knowledge of lack.