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Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Thinking about thinking

I had a fun Satan Day yesterday, and I hope you did too.  After spending a few hours writing about nationalism and things, I kicked back with Her Satanic Majesty’s Request and watched some old New Jersey Devils games on DVD.  Funny thing is, if you watch the Devils in super slo-mo, you can see their power play using the demonic “pentangle offense” devised by Lucifer “Lou” Lamoriello.

But when the fun was over and I awoke this morning with all these curious triangles of “scare quotes” carved into my body, I realized with some regret that I’d been kind of harsh this week on the question of left-liberal coalitions (and on the commenters who’d broached the subject, to whom I apologize).  All I’d meant to say is that sometimes, in such coalitions, the liberals muck things up, and sometimes the left mucks things up.  And when things get mucked up, the leftists tend to think of the liberals as spineless, unprincipled wusses who vote to confirm John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, and the liberals tend to think of the leftists as intransigent, ideological purists who cannot bring themselves to vote for Russ Feingold.  Sometimes these characterizations are well-deserved, sometimes they aren’t.  But only very rarely, after a muck-up, do you see anyone actually re-evaluating his or her beliefs, as opposed to his or her tactics.

Thankfully, I am beyond all that now.  Back in the day, I used to get regularly buffeted by both sides.  One time I picked up an academic journal and came across an essay in which I learned to my surprise that I had sneakily (or sheepishly!) disguised my real beliefs in order to break into the pages of the Village Voice (the actual charge was “Bérubé must, given the ideological limits of the mass media, disguise his position as centrist”), where, in 1992, I had noted that both Terry Eagleton (on the left) and Hilton Kramer (on the right) despise postmodernism.  This, I was told, was a version of the “left-right equivalent thesis” that “bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the centrist equations in mass media political discourse, as in Georgie Anne Geyer’s identification of the two poles of American extremism as ‘the militias on the far right who hate and want to destroy government’ and ‘academic leftists in American universities who are using their pseudo-Marxism to “deconstruct” America.’” And this “left-right equivalent thesis,” I was reminded, had been “fundamental in mystifying and legitimating U.S. state terror in support of, for example, the ‘governments’ of El Salvador and Guatemala.”

Yep, you read that right: I pretended to be a centrist in order to appear in “mass media.” The evidence for this was that I noted, in the centrist Village Voice, that both Eagleton and Kramer were critical of postmodernism.  Never mind the fact that this happens to be true: Eagleton and Kramer were critical of postmodernism. That’s not important.  What’s important is that saying so links me to U.S. state terror in Central America.

And a journal actually published this.

Then a few years later, a particularly clueless liberal called me “one of the most enthusiastic epigones of critspeak as revolutionary praxis,” which was especially odd considering that (a) I don’t speak critspeak, (b) I don’t have any revolutionary praxis, and (c) “epigones” is used, like, really incorrectly here.  You can be an epigone of William Faulkner, say, or of Margaret Mead.  But you can’t be an epigone of critspeak.  And a journal actually published that, too, and then followed it up with said liberal’s insistence that in a passage where I’d critiqued the idea of the avant-garde, I was actually endorsing the idea of the avant-garde.  That was kind of baffling.  And finally, a couple of years ago I was kindly schooled by old Ed Herman, who let me know, in the course of doing a Horowitzian cut-and-paste of a few of my essays, that my opposition to war in Iraq was actually a form of support for war in Iraq, because I wouldn’t put Saddam’s state sovereignty over every other consideration.

At that point I decided I’d had enough of liberals and leftists alike.  I couldn’t count on any of these people!  (And my replies to each of them were just foolish beyond belief, each in a different way.  But I didn’t have a blog back then.) However, it was not until December 2004 that I finally announced the Coalition of Me and formed the Red Party, consisting of me.  Chris Clarke, flexing the wit that has made him famous throughout the Internets, promptly wrote its anthem, “The Ballad of the Hemp Beret,” and I sing it to this day to open my party congresses, which take place every six months in my study.

My apologies, therefore, to all of my readers who weren’t aware that I had actually solved the problem of left-liberal coalitions eighteen months ago.

Now to switch gears. Today is the day that Janet leaves for a month, to teach in various secret undisclosed locations in Ireland.  She did this three years ago, too (and went with Nick that time), but of course I didn’t have a blog then and couldn’t regale thousands of readers with tales of the Jamie and Michael Show (theme song sung to the tune of “The Itchy and Scratchy Show") as we took road trips every weekend.  The waterpark story is definitely worth telling one of these days.  Alas, there will be no weekend road trips this time, although Jamie and I do have a cross-country gig at Twin Peaks Lodge, where there’s a conference I have to attend later this month.  Jamie will come along for the fun, fun, fun and for a side trip to the Vancouver Zoo.

So it’s time for a Jamie story.  I have a couple of ‘em saved up from the past few months, and here’s one.  It was mid-April, and we were visiting Janet’s family for the weekend.  I was thinking ahead to my graduate seminar on disability studies the next Wednesday, and reading over Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals (about which I blogged briefly here, in the midst of a weird April illness).  But since everyone was getting ready for an Easter dinner and no one would talk to me about MacIntyre, I decided to ask Jamie about it.  Yes, I know, 14-year-olds with Down syndrome don’t often file reviews of the work of neo-Aristotelian philosophers, but Jamie knows he has a disability, he knows I taught a course about disabilities this spring, and he’s extraordinarily disability-aware in general.  (More about all this in future installments.) Occasionally, I tell him what I’ve been reading about Deaf culture or people with Down syndrome or people who use wheelchairs.  But this time, I wanted to talk to him about animals.  So I said, “hey, Jamie, can I ask you a question?” while he played with his grandmother’s bingo pieces, which he can do for hours while watching Animal Planet in the background.

“What is it, Michael?”

“Well, I’ve been reading this book for my course on disabilities. . . .”

At first this was met with “try other stuff” and “bo-ring” and other such teenager-demurrals, but when I explained that this guy was also writing about animals, I got his attention. 

“So here’s the question, Jamie.  Can animals think?  Some people say yes and some people say no.  What do you say?”

For Jamie, this was (so to speak) a no-brainer, because his Lucy happens to be the among the very smartest dogs on the planet, capable not only of determining when a family member is ill but also of knowing when she is in Connecticut by using elementary canine-calculus to determine her position in the hemisphere.

So we talked for a bit about how Lucy can be happy or excited or worried (about the thunder, because she does not understand about weather) or sad (when she sees a suitcase), and about how some animals have brains that are very complicated but others have brains that are very simple.  “Sharks,” Jamie did not fail to say, “are one of the best predators.”

“True enough,” I said.  “Animals can be very clever about finding food.  And they can have feelings, like sadness or happiness.  And complicated animals like dogs and horses can even understand humans, too.”

“Or chimpanzees,” Jamie added.  “Or gorillas, like Koko. Or dolphins.” Here Jamie did his dead-on imitation of dolphin clicking.  And being the disability-aware kid he is, he is fascinated that Koko learned sign language.

“But, of course, animals do not speak human language,” I added.

Quick as a flash, Jamie replied, “Parrots.”

“Right, parrots.  Good one.  And of course dolphins and whales can talk to each other in dolphin and whale language.  So we know that animals can understand things, and can figure out how to find food even when it is very difficult. But do they have thoughts about these things? Do you think Lucy can sit down and say, ‘hey, maybe I shouldn’t be so worried about the thunder’?  You remember when you were sad, and you thought about it, and we talked about what it is like to be sad.  Do you think a dog can do that?”

Jamie mulled this over for a few seconds.

“Well . . . you can train,” he said.

OK, I know I’m a biased observer, but I think that’s just brilliant.  Just.  Effing.  Brilliant.  What Jamie meant, I learned, was that animals must be capable of some form of thought if they can be trained.  Lucy, for example, must have some reflective relation to her bodily functions in order to learn not to urinate and defecate in the house.  (We talked for a bit about the rule, in Babe, that ducks and pigs are not allowed in the house.) But then, as my class argued later that week, even goldfish can figure out when it’s feeding time.  But then again, as MacIntrye points out, bottlenose dolphins learned enough of an artificial human-dolphin language to distinguish the sentence “take the surfboard to the frisbee” from “take the frisbee to the surfboard.” MacIntyre comes down squarely in favor of the proposition that animals can think, and he takes to task wankers like Heidegger, who, with their big fat thumbs on the scales, purchase the uniqueness of human language by distinguishing us from what MacIntyre cheekily calls “a welcome variety of bees, moths, freshwater crabs, lizards, sea-urchins, woodworms, and woodpeckers.” So in one way Jamie might be wrong: the fact that you can train an animal with operant conditioning isn’t necessarily evidence that the animal has become, how should we say, thoughtful.  I myself trained a white rat to respond to a fixed-ratio schedule in college.  (What the rat was doing in college I’ll never know!) But the more radical implication of Jamie’s remark—that you can train an animal to think—is really interesting.  And it reminded me of my favorite passage in Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, about which I also blogged briefly about two years ago.  From one of Ms. Costello’s (problematic) lectures on animal rights:

Sultan [a chimpanzee] is alone in his pen.  He is hungry: the food that used to arrive regularly has unaccountably ceased coming.

The man who used to feed him and has now stopped feeding him stretches a wire over the pen three metres above ground level, and hands a bunch of bananas from it.  Into the pen he drags three wooden crates.  Then he disappears, closing the gate behind him, though he is still somewhere in the vicinity, since one can smell him.

Sultan knows: Now one is supposed to think.  That is what the bananas up there are about.  The bananas are there to make one think, to spur one to the limits of one’s thinking.  But what must one think?  One thinks: Why is he starving me?  One thinks: What have I done?  Why has he stopped liking me?  One thinks: Why does he not want these crates any more?  But none of these is the right thought.  Even a more complicated thought—for instance: What is wrong with him, what misconception does he have of me, that leads him to believe it is easier for me to reach a banana hanging from a wire than to pick up a banana from the floor?—is wrong.  The right thought to think is: How does one use the crates to reach the bananas?

Sultan drages the crates under the bananas, piles them one on top of the other, climbs the tower he has built, and pulls down the bananas.  He thinks: Now will he stop punishing me?

The answer is: No.  The next day the man hangs a fresh bunch of bananas from the wire but also fills the crates with stones so that they are too heavy to be dragged.  One is not supposed to think:  Why has he filled the crates with stones?  One is supposed to think: How does one use the crates to get the bananas despite the fact that they are filled with stones?

One is beginning to see how the man’s mind works. . . .

At every turn Sultan is driven to think the less interesting thought.  From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?) he is relentlessly propelled towards lower, practical, instrumental reason (How does one use this to get that?) and thus towards acceptance of himself as primarily an organism with an appetite that needs to be satisfied.  Although his entire history, from the time his mother was shot and he was captured, through his voyage in a cage to imprisonment on this island camp and the sadistic games that are played around food here, leads him to ask questions about the justice of the universe and the place of this penal colony in it, a carefully plotted psychological regimen conducts him away from ethics and metaphysics towards the humbler reaches of practical reason.  And somehow, as he inches through this labyrinth of constraint, manipulation and duplicity, he must realize that on no account dare he give up, for on his shoulders rests the responsibility of representing apedom.  The fate of his brothers and sisters may be determined by how well he performs.

Food for thought, folks.  And with that, we conclude this week’s series of daily posts of two thousand words or more, and for the next four weeks, modulate into the Three Posts a Week we’ll be doing while we’re on the single-parent schedule.  See you Friday with a game that will be arbitary . . . but fun.  Really fun this time.  I promise.

Posted by Michael on 06/07 at 12:21 PM
Jamie • (97) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
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