I don’t know about the rest of the class, but I can’t help but feel that our discussions on Animal Rights have become a stalemate. Part of this I believe is because we have hashed the topic so many times, but I also feel that both extremes of the debate have formulized unrealistic views of animals in general. On the one hand you have the basic philosophy that animals are automatons. Pure biological matter, whose only goal is to survive, and don’t really possess true emotions, but rather perform behavior that will best reward them in life. The other argument is that animals do in fact possess some sort of conscious thought. That they are pure, innocent beings who are dominated and taken advantage by the wicked human species. I can’t help but feel that both are not really accurate portrayals of the animals. It would rather seem that our class is using animals as sort of a manifestation for their own values and ideals about nature. And since animals have this fortunate inability to communicate with us directly, their silence can be the loyalty of our best friend or the total ambivalence of the world
.
People seem to view nature in Bambi vs. White Fang imagery
But whether it is animals or a higher power, humans are constantly trying to assign ethics and values to the world around them. Humans cannot believe that “nature is but a vast machine indifferent to the sufferings of living beings.” (Stevenson 654) I believe that our mind is not sophisticated enough to understand or believe this concept. The total belief that nature is this unemotional mistake is to imply that we truly are “insignificance, bounded by inefficient senses and ‘moving about in worlds not realized.’” (Stevenson 653) And with that in mind we are to accept that “whether a man be good or evil, he is similarly the prey to fate.” (Stevenson 654) The spread of this philosophy would surely lead to the failure of society. Without the incentive to be “good,” without direction and meaning to your life, people would descend into a state of chaos, filled with suicides, murders, theft. Human existence would vanish. “And Life, a Fury slinging flame.” (Tennyson L)
“So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.”
---Tennyson L
I think Tennyson does an amazing job of expressing this despair. Maybe we are nothing, maybe there is no purpose and we are the accidents of science. And so we cry out to the world, but not in a language the world understands, just this forlorn, hopeless cry. This is where, in my opinion the divine spirit comes in. ‘God,’ in whatever shape or form, silences and comforts our tears.
“I stretch lame hands of faith and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.”
---Tennyson LV
Humans have perhaps “evolved” in a way twhere meaning and value are important, and with that we need justification. Whether or not ‘god’ exists is not important, what is important is finding your own inner peace, that which satisfies your own personal sense of morality. So that whether “the hills are shadows, and they flow from form to form;”(Tennyson CXXIII) you can be satisfied with your life in your final days. I found the last stanza of Tennyson’s CXXIII quite meaningful, because in my opinion is sums up humanity’s need to believe in a higher purpose, and hints that perhaps our need to find morality is not a sign of Darwinian weakness, but rather one of the most beautiful aspects of science.
“But in my spirit will I dwell,
And dream my dream, and hold it true;
For tho’ my lips may breathe adieu,
I cannot think the thing farewell.”
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