Salmon Sentience, the Bert Test, Deep Ecology
Yesterday’s post explored the conundrum posed by the wild/farmed salmon distinction, essentially dismissing it for the rarely mentioned third option of not eating salmon at all and getting your precious omega 6/3 ratio sorted out by eating flaxseed. While making a reference to the question of salmon sentience, the post generally argued its case from a conventional environmental perspective. Today’s post is a follow up to yesterday’s. It’s intended to flesh out, as it were, the logic manifested in my analysis. Consider it my mental outtakes. Like most outtakes, they’re a bit rough. But, I hope, revealing nonetheless.
My decision to put the salmon sentience question on the back burner, while foregrounding the conventional environmental question, reflected my hunch that actively attributing sentience to fish—that is, presenting them as individuals with a sense of self capable of making basic choices—could fail the Bert test. The Bert test?
Bert is person I know who who grew up on a ranch, is open-minded but not whimsical, highly intelligent, and, with proper tact and factual support, could be swayed to agree that cows, pigs, and even chickens have moral relevance. But fish? That’d be a tough sell for Bert. That would cross a line of plausibility in the Bert universe (which, by the way, is a common universe). That’s the Bert test. Hardly scientistic, I admit, but it’s a litmus test of how far I might go in a carnistic culture before my activist cant backfires, as I’ve seen it do, into claims that I’m something of an eccentric, if not an outright lunatic. The Bert test is me engaging as an activist in the world as it is, not as I want it to be.
My other decision to promote (and thus tactically accept) a conventional environmental perspective also bears scrutiny. Although not always the case, a conventional environmental perspective generally focuses on how human consumption negatively effects the natural world. It’s an entirely artificial and superficial way to think about the environment. It’s sort of bean-counting approach manifested in our obsession with measuring carbon footprint, species decline, nitrogen runoff, and fracking wells. The lower the numbers, the better environmentalist we are. It’s a polar vision in which humans do stuff to the environment, measure the impact, have fights about it, and make (mostly rhetorical) adjustments.
A more authentic view of the environment is one, of course, in which all species are included. This understanding demands that we think more holistically about the integration of human species into the entity of the earth’s flora and fauna, and our role therein as humans and individuals. Put differently, it demands that we understand the world within us as equally critical to “the environment” as the world we see out the car window. Or, even better, that we erase that boundary altogether. In this more expansive and authentic vision, we cannot talk about salmon without talking about the entire global ecosystem, much less the teetering architecture of values within us that condones the atomistic fragmentation of life while dismissing its essential interdependence.
Perhaps the greatest reason for including these previously omitted perspectives is that they seamlessly complement each other. A deep ecology vision has no need for the farmed/wild debate. In acknowledging the functional and even spiritual interdependence of all species, as well as the behavior of all species, not to mention an environmentalism of the mind, it simply assumes that salmon makes choices, have sentience, and swim upstream for (mystical) reasons that are ultimately both beyond our comprehension and entirely familiar. In that assumption there is liberation.
Whether or not it would pass the Bert test is another question.
tomorrow: a brief report on the experiential velocity of a human being propelling himself through 26.2 miles of space
I’d recommend “Fish Cognition and Behavior” to any Bert I meet. http://media.johnwiley.com.au/product_data/excerpt/1X/14443322/144433221X-47.pdf
The growing body of literature on fish intelligence and sentience is painting a picture 180 degrees away from what we expected.
But then, in science, that’s to be expected.
Victoria Braithwaite of PSU is perhaps the preeminant place to start this discussion after the evil DesCartes. although I appreciate the cite/link from the paradoxically named humane hominid above. To me it is better not to enter the arena on the cognition and pain thing at all as it is basically used to support a rigts view and the class of scientists who seriously believe animals including fish can not feel pain are limited to a lunatic fringe of crackpots akin to climate change skeptics who manufacture objections based upon either stupidity or politically channeled grant money. The danger in allowing scientists to make ethical decisions is inherent. Remember the Third Reich started out as a social movement embodying the principal that science and technology should guide society and the other way around. In the Amercian Emppire and the Chnese Empire add “ownership of” before science and technology.
If anyone is really interested in pain and cognition, I give you sunny Glasgow in March where the entire matter will be discussed to an unmerciful death: http://www.davidbain.org/pain/pain-and-animals
The Bert thing is a heueristic, like “Kelly” of the Daily News or the “Man on the Omnibus” from Edwardian times. It is essential to realize that Bert is not the reasonable consumer with access to all relevant informtion which free market theory presumes and has limited agency, which occurrs mostly by default and not acts f will or ethical choice. Neither is Bert such a consumer in the marketplace of ideas. Maybe this is useful for getting a read on an audience but I suggest Bert should not appear as a regular in this blog.
Remember the Third Reich started out as a social movement embodying the principal that science and technology should guide society
No, it didn’t.
I do not want to bicker but science and technology was a big part of the Third Reich’s crazy pastiche of ideology and of modernism as well. That was why Heidegger was so fascinated with the Nazis at the outset. It is a huge danger to be told by boffins that the world can and should be controlled through science
The Nazi movement began as an expression of romantic German nationalism, rejecting liberalism, Marxist socialism, and the whole notion of historical progress. Alfred Rosenberg, a leading Nazi “philosopher”, described the German world-view as a mystic and cosmic vitalism; Hitler deplored modern society’s attempted revolt against nature. But once in power, the Nazis paradoxically harnessed science and industry in their revolt against the modern world. What I find fascinating is the “green” element in German fascism, and the lesson it holds about the dangers of extreme versions of holistic environmentalism. Deep ecology has been accused (e.g., by social ecologist Murray Bookchin, and rather unfairly, I think) of having ecofascist tendencies. Tom Regan accused Aldo Leopold’s land ethic of being ecofascist.
As Taylor has pointed out, Nazism was primarily a mystical, anti-modernist, racial supremacist movement. It never sought to “embody the principle that science and technology should guide society.” If anything, quite the reverse was true: science and technology should serve the needs of the state, and whenever there was a conflict between scientific fact and state policy, the former was suppressed in furtherance of the latter. Of course, the Nazis used the tools of science to further their goals, but this is true of any state, and is not an indictment of science itself.
And anyway, who the heck said, or even implied, that the world should be controlled through science? My only point was that as science continues to uncover the facts of nature, those facts can and should inform our ethics, as well as be part of the arsenal of animal rights advocacy.
The Nazi mystical nonsense aside, their enabling myth sought to use science and technology to pursue their political goals and, in turn, was to be used to perpetuate their mythology and attempt to actualize it. I don;t want to get too off message with the Nazis and science detour as my comment is directed more at the use of science as part of the modernist religion.
Interesting point about Tom Regan. A very nice man for sure, but one with whom I disagree on almost everything. Under a deontological worldview almost everything can be labeled as fascist if it advocates for collective rights or the rights of non humans and imposes duties and responsibilities. I actually believe the rights argument is fascist because the granting of rights necessarily excludes others from having rights and disallows the those others to posses enumerated rights. Boria Saxe had some interesting things to say about Nazi ecofascism.
their enabling myth sought to use science and technology to pursue their political goals and, in turn, was to be used to perpetuate their mythology and attempt to actualize it.
Well, so what? Again, that’s not a problem with science, or even one caused by science.
whoa typo: “NOT the other way around” in para 1 2nd to last line. The type in the box format is not one I prefer