Politics is the Art of Advocacy, Negotiation, & Compromise

I'm a little awed by this, Mark. Beautifully written and reasoned.

I especially like what you say about our community:

We're lucky to have this community, and I feel privileged to have met a few of you for an actual meal.

This also:

I've never been impressed with the idea that Man ((in the gender neutral, all-inclusive sense, of course!) is purely (or even, primarily) motivated by self interest. Dawkin's reducing altruism and community to a manifestation of self interest (The Selfish Gene) has never felt convincing to me. What about awe and gratitude? How are those selfish? There's something more to us than survival instinct when we love someone deeply, or feel empathy, compassion and act on those to benefit strangers.

I loved 'The Fall' very much by Camus, but it ruined me for a few years after I read it, being so young, impressionable and awed by Camus. I remember asking my teen-aged brother not to read it. I was worried it would flaw him with cynicism! (Hmm, that was a tangent.)

Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Mirka. This thread has already provoked some very warm private messages, as well, quite beyond anything I could have imagined or expected.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. It's wondrful that people are sending you appreciative messages, but I would love if some would post their thoughts here.

I see it inspiring a number of different discussions since it touches on so many different aspects of  politics.

The last line is truly poetic.

It's a human voice, even more subtle sometimes than my own, musical without Wagnerian Romantic excess, flutelike and yet reasonable, pleasing and more euphonious than my own coarse growl, and not heard in these corridors nearly often enough.

Oh, and people I have spoken with Mark many times, and his growl is certainly that, but hardly coarse. I'd say it's faintly dappled with a bit of a drawl. It's a real treat to make this man bust out a laugh too.

I formally request Vigorous Puppy and Mirka's participation on our interview round robin thing!

http://chuckpalahniuk.net/forum/1000026/cultists-interviewing-cultists-2...

Vig, you have a gift for combining your passions with calculated, reasoned, and (dare I say) poetic rhetoric. I'm the type that flies off the handle much too easily (ugh, I just did it in my last post) and when I read one of your posts I tend to become very conscious of this. You are a model for civility. Though you don't post often I've probably learned more from you than anyone else in the cult, and there are definitely some intellectual heavyweights around here, especially in the workshop.

As always, it was a joy.

This is something I've been dwelling on a lot lately. Imperialism. Capitalism. Population. Politics. I think I'm sick of arguing. I think that people don't speak about these things anymore, they argue. I've noticed that everyone is so eager to jump down your throat with their own opinion that what's the point? I got so bored with arguing that I took a step away from discussions on anything of the matter. I became neutral and un-opinionated. But that didn't help the situation at all. I found out that my closest friends where completely on the opposite spectrum of me and my beliefs. I wondered, what they hell do they see in me that's worth friendship? I'd so angry at it that I would just unleash. I would yell, "I’m sick of hearing people talk about how America is NOT socialist country. 'Obama is butt-fucking the country.' America is capitalist. I say, cockshit. What is America? Where in the Constitution does it say any of this? America isn’t supposed to be anything but open to interpretation. You want capitalists to run the country? Big business investing in your quiet neighborhood? The same people that run the country will be the same assholes building Hummers and Escalades and selling you discount priced tube socks in your frozen foods aisle. Corporations who overproduce corn and beef by the millions of tons. Agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, Blackwater, pick your yardstick to measure democracy. Fuck that. Go toss Sean Hannity’s salad."

The cult really is great. It's a great community. But I think I've come to a belief that no matter what, wherever there is a large (ambiguous, I know) number of people there are problems. There always will be. No one cares about a greater good, or working in unison and sacrificing their own small opinion to create something great. I pretty negative on the subject, I know. But man, what the fuck? Sometimes, I wish we'd take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Look at it in an animalistic way (I know it sounds corny). The pack. The flock. The tribe. Whatever. Is this keeping to the integrity of the tribe? I'm sure some smart ass is going to give me shit for this post. It always happens. Always, behind the comfort of a keyboard and computer screen.

But rather, if serious questions are posed: What are our obligations to one another? In what case, if ever, do I owe my neighbor something more than to simply leave him the hell alone? What can I expect in my society as a right and what should be regarded as a revocable privilege?

I get a very strong sense that you have the temperament to lose yourself in such thoughts, to take these things more seriously than you take yourself. If only for an hour or a day, you might forget hunger and thirst as you think of these questions. And that's a fine thing. A noble disposition will be tested in a thousand ways and will often fail you. Don't dwell on moments of shame.

I know from the inside out what a panic attack is, what the total absence of courage feels like, and what it is to obsess on petty feelings, like jealousy or envy. I know what it is to react in a way that you regret later because under stress or exhaustion, the pounding limitations of physiology, the lack of psychic energy, nature and circumstance have completely obliterated any chance that you can be your best in the moment.

Philosophy has classically treated Reason as an absolute and the mind as a realm of its own, pure and inviolable. As if, by virtue of being a person of virtue, you can and will merely choose to operate under your best lights at all times. I'm here to say, with the existentialists and humanists, that Reason is a Lighthouse atop a rocky mountain of madness with crashing waves all around. The power generator that facilitates the light is a burning lump of fat that will expire and the on-site technician is an ape that stops and stares perplexed when he occasionally encounters a mirror within the keeper's dwelling.

And we are all of this: the Light, the Ape, the burning lump of fat, the crashing waves, the rocks. Sometimes we hear the Siren Song that calls the sailors to die and it sounds so beautiful that we turn out the light of Reason just when it is needed the most. This too, is human. It's terrible and wonderful in equal measure.

To riff on Nietzsche's Zarathustra in my own peculiar way, the finer acts of the mind are a tightrope walker's act conducted over an abyss. As surely as you do it well, some lout will challenge you to do the same thing while drunk, and another lout will yell that a real man does his work in boots and not in slippers.

I've had the disease of considering these things for longer than some of our members have been alive. Admire me and you admire a man who has found no cure for his own disease, nor that of any other, while among my high school graduating class are physicians and dentists who are licensed, at the very least, in the use of legitimate anesthetics.

People who long for a final solution to all problems long for annihilation. A stronger person accepts problems as a given in life and strives toward greater finesse in handling them, one problem at a time. Nothing is final until we give up.

And there isn't just one, monolithic and singular, Something Greater, that every reasonable person should strive for. When you bring it back from big and somewhat empty abstractions, like Love, Peace, and Harmony, those obvious platitudes of pop songs... when instead, you strive for something more tangible, something in the way of Action, instead of merely Sentiment, you find that many projects are worth pursuing but almost none are compulsory.

Each of us has the singular project of being the best person we can be, and becoming the best we can become, but we also have the task of defining for ourselves just what that means, and the inflections are different for each of us. Being is a Verb. The universe welcomes our plurality.

What if life (or the universe, using it synonymously) is like an endless buffet line. Go ahead, stuff yourself. Save room for this or that. Pick and choose. But at the end, when you're entirely full, will you honestly care that you didn't choose the foie gras? or the hazelnut spread? I think not.

I agree, I don't think there is a singular or monolithic "Something Greater" for all people. But I can't help but think, at what point do our personal endeavors actually harm us? What you said about Action is right of course. There's beauty in movement. In action, in doing there is definition, even if it isn't seen at first. And there is definitely harmony/balance/spirituality in repetition of that movement.

VP, thanks for your words. I'm keeping them with me for a long time.

Good to see you doing some writing again, Mark, you should post more often. Your voice is one of the reasons I’ve stuck around this long and the first time in a long time I’ve been inspired to add my voice to the cacophony that is The Cult.
Of course, that being said, let me take you to task over some of your comments.
You mentioned voting and people who don’t vote. I’ve heard this opinion before and it always upsets me. I have two main problems with this (well, maybe three, possibly more).
The 2000 presidential election proved conclusively for anyone who is capable of thinking for themselves and not being browbeaten by monotonous media oversaturation of the mind (if the old Soviet empire were doing it, we’d call it brainwashing) that the American electoral process is fundamentally flawed. George Bush did not get elected. He was appointed. By the Supreme Court. A Supreme Court that has been highly politicized since the Reagan years and is currently stacked with Republican foot-soldiers. Don’t believe me? Just look a couple of their current rulings. Killing a pristine Alpine lake in Montana by dumping it full of highly toxic mining tailings somehow doesn’t violate the Clean Water Act (No? What exactly is the definition of clean water, then?). And how about no spending limits on corporate lobbying? More money = free speech. Am I the only one who sees the Orwellian nature of this? The more money you have, the greater the access to government.
Before I leave the 2000 election alone for now (it was Joseph Goebbels who said “never forget the power of the people to forget”), let’s NOT forget the outright criminality that undermined the voting process in the state of Florida, Jeb Bush’s Florida. Hanging chads aside, blacks were turned away from the voting booths in record numbers by hook or by crook (Hello, Jim Crow) and the whole process was shanghaied by Republican strategists who somehow managed to convince the American people that counting ALL the votes was somehow undemocratic (Another favorite Nazi saying: “the same lie, repeated over and over again, no matter how outrageous, will eventually become the truth”). It seems to me that at one point in our democracy (and it is democracy first, a business second, if at all, lest anyone forget), an official had to be elected by a CLEAR majority. Should have done the whole damn thing over again. Guaranteed the outcome would have been different.
Problem number two: the Electoral College ensures that lightly populated and majority white mid-western states get the same amount of votes more or less than population-heavy, ethnically-diverse coastal states. What does that mean in real terms? That my vote in New York counts less than someone’s in Idaho, for instance, and a President can lose the popular election and still win because of the Electoral College.
Problem number three: two much emphasis on the President, as demonstrated by the Republican senate win in Massachusetts. The President is largely a figurehead anyways, sitting atop a large political machine that is actually the one determining public policy, while the President’s job is mainly just to sell it to the American people. And what about state and local elections? Here in New York, I’ve seen the power of the local community boards when they are saturated by real estate developers and you find yourself suddenly priced out of your own neighborhood after being denied loan after loan.
And lastly, the problem I have with voting (or at least the majority perception of it) is that it lulls people into the false sense that democracy only happens once every four years. One of the reasons that these big, faceless corporations you call out ARE so successful is because they spend the time and energy (and sh*tloads of money, of course) lobbying Capitol Hill. Or fund puppet citizens lobbies like these Tea Party nuts to make Democratic officials look bad (not that they need the help). Does the average American spend anytime lobbying their elected officials? I think not. And certainly not in an effective way. Would it help? Certainly couldn’t hurt. As someone who has lobbied on the Hill and locally and has deeply immersed himself in the democratic process, I just love it when these same nuts start screaming “communist!” (Actually, I think the refrain is now “socialist!”)
Also, I was a little bothered about what you said about dogs not having politics. This is another common misperception fueled by humanist ego-centrism. Dogs, and all animals for that matter, have the same wants and needs for space and resources as we do (your words, more or less), only we don’t think too much about it because we are so preoccupied by our own wants and needs (Americans and other first world nations are more preoccupied by the wants more than the needs, methinks). As someone who has spent time with wolf biologists in Yellowstone studying canine behavior (I even had the chance to meet David Mech, the country’s foremost wolf researcher. He didn’t like me too much either, I get that a lot), I can tell you that their system of communication is just as complex as ours, only that theirs is more focused on their needs rather than their wants. And since a large part of that need revolves around hunting, much of their communication is non-verbal. But they set up hierarchies same as we do and formal tribal units same as we do (only we call ours community). They are pack animals same as us and a lot could be learned about human nature if we were to take the time to study canine behavior. I’ll give you just one example. Put a bunch of unneutered male dogs in the same space as a bitch in heat and see what happens. Do the same thing with a bunch of dudes (I use that word in the most pejorative of senses), step way back and tell me if you can see much of a difference. And if you think we are superior just because we have a more advanced system of speech, let me tell you that human speech is comprised by about 26 or 28 phonetic sounds. Ravens have 44.
Finally, I’ll touch upon your comments about terrorists. We call them terrorists, their people call them freedom fighters. Again, it’s a matter of perception. When I see a young boy facing down a tank armed with nothing more than a Molotov cocktail and if the media wasn’t telling me who was who and what to think (and, just as importantly, what NOT to think), I know who my heart would naturally go out to. The underdog, of course. I love it when people run around saying they hate us because they hate freedom. These self-same people are not prone to over-analytical introspection and, unfortunately, make up the majority of the voting public in America. Yes, what Saddam did the Kurds was horrific, but let’s never forget it was we who put him in power and supported him when the Ayatollah came to power in Iran. Nor should we forget it was we who orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister in 1953. At that time, Iran was modernizing, extending voting rights to women, and recognizing Israel. Why did we do all this? Same reason we helped create the Nation of Israel in the first place (forget for a moment all the right-wing conspiracy theories about the Jewish lobby): and that reason is oil. We’ve been screwing up Middle Eastern politics for over half a century because of oil. Why? Because we need it? No, because we want it. Because a group of very rich white men have decided that America has to run on oil (that 1953 coup d’état happened to coincide with Eisenhower’s decision to build an interstate highway system, put everyone in their own car and turn America into a nation of suburban homeowners). We have built a whole infrastructure around oil and refuse to give it up, even if better alternatives exist. Even if we have create endless wars in the Middle East to protect that flow. Bear in mind, the Iraq war didn’t begin in 2002, it started in 1991 and never really stopped, despite the perception the media creates. Likewise in Afghanistan. Before the Taliban, it was the Mujahideen, and we were fighting the Russians for control of it back in the Eighties. Why? Because we need to annex a bunch of goat herders living in the caves of Tora Bora? No, because of Afghanistan’s strategic access to oil reserves (it’s next to Iran for anyone who would care to look on a map, and Israel is next to Iraq). Nor should we forget none of the September 11th hijackers were Afghani, most were Saudi Arabian, our supposed ally. Draw your own conclusions.
So when you ask yourself why they hate us so much, put yourself in their shoes. Wouldn’t you? We’re the ones who have been bombing them for years, destabilizing their governments, and denying them access to food and medicine (anyone remember Clinton’s embargo?). To them, WE are the evil empire. If you want this endless war to end, don’t put your faith in the Army or the Marines. They are a business just like any other. Focus on other forms of clean energy. This is the twentieth century after all and we’re supposed to have flying cars by now. We shouldn’t have to live in an international police state because we’re beholden to someone else’s bottom line. This is one case where a TRUE free market economy, one free of corporate favoritism and unfair subsidies (i.e. corporate socialism), would most assuredly do some good.
There. You asked for a left wing voice and you got it.
Careful what you wish for.

And, this is where I stopped reading. Whatever  you wished to add to this thread, and it looked like a great deal, I took exception to you addressing Mark that way.  I have no idea who you are,  but  that  remark came off as incredibly rude and pompous.

While I agree with much of what you say Kendrick, there are a few points I take issue with. First, the 2000 election. I was just as disappointed when that happened but my biggest problem wasn't the conservative Supreme Court or even the corruptness of Jeb Bush (even though he did promise Florida to his brother, which just reeks of corruption). The problem is that we're not a democracy at all, we're a republic. The founding fathers didn't trust the public to elect a president by a pure popular vote. In some ways this made sense, especially considering that most people were illiterate when this country was founded. This actually worked out well for them considering it kept that psychopath Aaron Burr out of office. But the only time a president has been elected without a majority vote is when it was very close. There's no way presidents who received large majority votes - Reagan, Obama - could have been defeated. As for the "my vote counts for less b/c I live in a highly populated area," well, that's not completely true. New York has a ton of electoral votes. If you were to go strictly off population then the areas with low populations would have no voice. They would be enslaved to the majority opinion of those who don't understand the political issues of their region and frankly don't care. This is what started this Civil War. When Lincoln was elected president, was it really fair for him to govern over a geographic majority of the country which all voted against him because a population majority located in a comparatively small region voted him in? I don't think so. We seceded from England for this very reason. As a midwesterner, even a liberal midwesterner, I would feel my region wasn't fully represented if the high-population costal areas had a political monopoly. Our political issues are not always the same as yours, and if New York and California dictated every presidency we would have no reason to take part in the system.

Regardless, I do agree that we've allowed money and politics to become too involved in one another. I was glad Obama wagged his finger at the Supreme Court during the state of the union address.

Regarding animals as political beings. They most definitely are not. Baboons have hierarchies as well, so animal "politics" may be comparable to monarchies and dictators, but republics and democracies which incorporate debate transcend far beyond this animalistic pecking-orders. The raven may have more phonetic sounds, but it's what we do with these sounds, not how many, that distinguishes humans from animals. In a democratic system shriveled little wimps like Denis Kucinich can have just as much influence as the big and strong Jesse Ventura. With wolves and baboons the hierarchies are more comparable to gang activity - those who are physically strong dominate over those who are not. In politics an unpopular person doing unpopular things, such as Larry Flynt, can utilize reason and debate to change the system.

Lastly, I mostly agree with your assessment of terrorists but I don't think Israel was founded for oil. The British also had just as much or more influence in the creation of Israel. It really was just a cruel trick to relocate the Jews. The Europeans didn't have to worry about crazy anti-semites such as Hitler if they convinced the Jews to move to a desert thousands of miles away, damn whoever currently lived there. The creation of Israel was so racist--it was the west deciding that we owed the Jews something to make up for Hitler's genocide and so we gave them a region which wasn't ours. We decided that the Jews had a greater moral worth than the Muslims who inhabited the middle east so we took their land (it also had a lot to do with Christians preferring Jews to control the holy land rather than Muslims). Of course, oil became a major issue and still is, but I hate when the middle east conflict gets reduced to a mad rush for black goop. Bush wanted to invade Iraq just as much to line the pockets of his military-industrial-complex friends as his desire to steal their oil. Not to mention that I think Bush actually believed his crap about extending democracy to the middle east. He was an idealist in the worst kind of way and he was trying to establish a legacy.

btw, the Army and Marines don't scare me half as much as Blackwater. My opinion of Obama will greatly hinge on what he does with their contracts once the Iraq/Afghanistan wars end. Blackwater and other mercenaries are probably the most dangerous threat to our freedom. If we don't shut them down and ban Americans from participating in mercenary activity they will start taking foreign contracts. The U.N. needs to internationally ban mercenaries before African countries realize their potential.

I don't think he meant to come off this way. His poor word choice has led many in the workshop to have a similar impression, but I think he means well.

This was where I was going with my animalistic comment. Maybe politics is the problem with us. Again going back to population because we have such an uncontrollably high number, politics can be only so strong. What helps one group interferes with another group and so on. Maybe we can learn a lot more from the animal world then most people think. With regards to hierarchies-they work in the animal world and they have worked in the human world. No, I'm not talking about England. I'm referring to a "council of elders" type deal. Maybe the problem with politics in the human race is the greed/want. We think too human-like. We've grown so greedy and out of touch with the world/reality/universe/environment that we can't see this. Today, we aren't the physical creatures we were. We don't express strength and dominance trough physicality like the animal world, we express strength and dominance through economics, etc. Isn't Bernie Madoff the top dog? or Bush? or [insert global politician]? So, in that sense, I think the Wolf analogy still applies.

But then again, what do I know? Really, nothing, and I often have trouble expressing ideas to words.

Wow, such spirited responses. Much appreciated all, both yea and nay, antagonists and defenders.

My perception is that whatever lucidity may be found in my earlier posts can only be fully appreciated in the light of a certain context.

And here it is.

The political opinions most commonly and openly expressed on these boards are too far to the Right to take any participation in the system seriously.

What I see over and over again is a narrative that goes something like this:

Now, forgive me if I'm being uncharitable in this extremely condensed paraphrase. I've placed it as a quote block on the page, but it is emphatically my own stubborn and skewed paraphrase of a viewpoint that I see here again and again, and that I consider a mixture of youthful idealism and moral insanity. And since this ultra-Libertarianism is the most common political refrain on this message board, it stands that not only is the Left not heard very often, but the Center, if there is one, doesn't get much of a hearing either. Maybe moderation, consensus building, and small but judicious measures are simply too bland to read about.

It is in this context that I speak.

I don't consider the exercise of the voting right the principle moral test of a human being. The way you treat your closest loved ones and the way you treat your mortal enemies both count for far more. I take it up only because you can become too radicalized and paranoid or too apathetic and cynical to engage in any larger participation whatsoever. It's peas versus carrots to me whether you're too far to the Right or too far to the Left to spend even one minute of your life fully engaged in your society.

Furthermore, I make no apologies at all for painting in broad brushstrokes when decorating Man as the only political animal. I make no apologies for being a humanist for it is my own species that I know and love best. I love my dogs and consider them capable of amazing smarts and loyalty, but they are not persons. It's fine with me if something of old-fashioned humanism rests in fallacy. It's equally fine with me if the differences between ourselves and our canines are more differences of degree than differences in kind.

Can't you see that I was opening with very broad analogies to lay down some first principles of my own thought amid a community so heterogeneous in dispositions that almost no assumptions can pass unexamined?

My early posts on this thread are like Paul Cézanne paintings that you need to look at with soft eyes and from a certain distance and for an appreciable length of time. It does not mean they proceed from or require a soft mind.

Seems I've been called a lot of names here, none of them very good. I myself have tried very hard not to stoop to the same level, Mirka, and have always given someone the benefit of the doubt, especially when dealing with strangers. Thanks though for the vote of confidence, Razorsharp; seems you didn't come by that name by accident. You and I differ semantically on points of animal behavior, but that's all well and good. I'll spare you all my thoughts on the arrogance of Humanism, except to say that maybe if we were to change our perceptions reguarding the rest of our fellow members of the animal kingdom, for we are all just animals after all, political beasts in a dog eat dog world and such, maybe then we wouldn't be presiding over the sixth greatest extinction in our planet's history.
As always, I didn't mean any offense, Mark, but simply choose to use your own engaging prose as a springboard into my own individual philosophical musings. Did I come off as critical? I envisioned it as more of a friendly debate.

springboarding has a definite meaning in communications theory. It isn't criminal, it just isn't good communications. It's a simulation of engagement.

Everyone has the experience of someone in fleshy interpersonal space who pretends to listen to you while rehearsing what to say next. You can see it in their pupil dilation, breathing, and patterns of eye movement while you speak. Whether they lean forward or back or stare at the ceiling or smile at something they just thought about that has nothing at all to do with what you just said. It gets confirmed when you pause mid-sentence for a single breath, the length of pause a single comma indicates on a page, and the other person jumps in and takes over the conversation.

Often, the springboarder will take a single thing you said completely out of context and launch into a long personal tangent completely unrelated to what you had been talking about. The conversation is never on an equal footing with this person of compulsive outflow. You find that you must listen interminably and if you wish to speak then you must engage the same tactic of interrupting during a natural pause. Everything you say reminds the springboarder of something else and something more important to talk about. Nothing you say ever produces a stunned or even appreciative silence. Nothing you say causes the springboarder to ask a polite question that will cause you to elaborate and reveal more of yourself.

I'm the sort of person who registers as a "good listener" out in the flesh world. Quiet, compassionate, curious, observant. Like Fitzgerald's narrator in Gatsby reports early of himself, a certain type of person who's never been listened to properly notices this quality in me. This makes me privy to "the secret griefs of wild unknown men."

And I've loved many friends who fit that description well, but I reach a point of saturation and an exhaustion of my empathy. Eventually, I become hard and cold despite myself and I withdraw, and someone who never asked me more than three soft and spacious questions about myself in as many years wonders at my lack of intimacy and feels hurt, no doubt, at my withdrawal.

But this is a thread on a message board that invites political debate. You have as long as you like to construct a reply and the rules of engagement are somewhat different. Nonetheless, when you "seem" to engage directly with what I've said and to nitpick, perhaps, or lift something out of context, or leap in a way that misses the larger drift of what I was saying, then I'm likely to take that gesture at face value. For I, too, may sit in silence and compose my response for just as long as it takes. Springboarding gets nullified by this equality of unbounded and silent composition.

When I was a teenager, my family had a terrific but ignorant dog named Max. He was a wire-haired fox terrier and he'd gone straight from the breeder to the pet shop where my brother worked part-time. Max was so denatured and accustomed to little cages that when we brought him home he didn't much know what to do. You could put him down in the the floor of a nice spacious room and he wouldn't explore it; he'd sit there and look at you. You then exit into another room and he wouldn't get curious and follow you. He was so accustomed to his limitations that he wouldn't cross the threshold from one room to another for any reason. He was smart, though, and it was just a matter of time until he grew out of his weird little shell. As he became a part of our family, he became a lot of fun, too. One person could hold him and cover his eyes, while another took a piece of cheese and dragged it lightly across the floor and over various surfaces, finally hiding it beneath a cushion or under furniture. Release him and Max would invariably follow his nose, pressing it to the carpet and tracing the route of the cheese inch-by-inch until finding it. Also, you could bounce a rubber ball and he'd go crazy, leaping straight into the air again and again just as high as the ball. It was almost imperceptible that he was jumping, as he sprang from all four legs equally; it was more like he was made out of the same stuff as the ball.

In 1989, I'd moved away from home and I was living in the city. My brother, still in high school, was taking care of Max. Jason would come home from school and turn Max out to the front yard. Since Max was still more or less a sweet but senseless house dog, he didn't get the run of our whole neighborhood like some of our previous pets. We had a long metal stake buried in the front yard just beyond the porch and a heavy wire coated in neoprene was looped through the top of the stake. The opposite end had a clasp to attach to Max's collar. This gave him the run of our relatively small front yard, but not much more. Plenty of free movement, though, so long as he didn't get excited and wind himself around the porch columns or the mailbox.

One day after school, Jason turned Max out and then promptly went to his room and fell deeply asleep. What teenager ever gets enough sleep during the school year, right?

During the nap, two dogs who were always off leash and ran the neighborhood at will came along and started a fight. Max was yappy and dumbly aggressive for his size, no doubt, but he was also staked to the yard on 20 feet of wire and easy to avoid. They didn't avoid him. The fight continued until they'd run him around the porch columns and tangled him up past getting away. It continued until one or both of these two larger dogs had damn near beheaded him. The least bit of tissue suggested there had ever been any connection between his head and his body. The white stone of the porch was a wash of red. The number two dog, who'd just been following on the heels of the alpha dog, was observed by a neighbor returning to our porch ten or fifteen minutes later and lapping up some of the spoils.

That's what my brother, at sixteen, had to wake up to and feel some responsibility for. He went after "Buster" the alpha dog, with a large stick, intent on beating him to death. He didn't find the bastard. But it had been witnessed and was known who the culprit was. The same dog was known as a biter. I'm pretty sure he'd even bitten a child or two, but the complaints never went anywhere. This was a little hillbilly town with no leash laws.

My mom took it directly to the dog's owner, suggesting Buster should be removed from the neighborhood and even "put to sleep." The neighbor protested on the grounds the dog was her son's pet and she refused to empathize much regarding the horror we'd been through. But my mom persisted with the argument that Buster was a menace. The owner shuffled him off to a relative with a farm, or whatever. I'm pretty sure they sent him away for awhile and even had the audacity to bring him back into the neighborhood sometime later.

What we have here, at the canine level, is a simple case of dominance and brutality. I'm pretty sure that Buster didn't reflect on killing Max or experience pangs of guilt afterward. I'm pretty sure if he'd been punished sometime well after the fact, he would have made no logical connection regarding what the punishment was for. And I'm pretty sure if he'd been given a trial and then put to death in front of every dog in the neighborhood, the repercussion wouldn't have communicated anything to the minds of other dogs. We would still have a neighborhood in a small country town with no leash laws, where people enjoy seeing dogs and kids running everywhere in the summer, but where alpha dogs can sometimes be brutal.

No, the political aspects - whether Buster should be removed from the neighborhood, whether he should be put down, whether we should ask for the passing and enforcement of leash laws - all of these are entirely human considerations and forever beyond a dog's consciousness and understanding. As smart as dogs are, they are unreflective beasts and devoid of politics, because they are devoid of conscience.

Instead of saying that we are political beings, I could have said we are moral animals and meant by that almost exactly the same thing.

About a decade after the Max incident, some kids from back home formed their own vampire cult. It went beyond nerdy role-playing games. Rumor has it they took their demonology seriously and were keen on kinky shit like drinking each others blood. It didn't stop there. One night, at a roadside rest area near Natural Bridge, in Slade, Kentucky, they descended upon a young family from Tennessee. The family had a van and the vampire cult wanted it. Lacking fangs or supernatural strength, they shot them all dead with a gun. Mother, father, children. They took the van and hit the road.

It's been ages since I've looked at any details on that case, but it's a fair bet that one of them was the pack leader. It's also a fair bet that either the pack leader or a second lieutenant deeply frightened of and in the grip of the pack leader carried out the shooting. I'm willing to bet that at least one or two of those vampire kids where scared out of their minds and had gotten way over their heads without the slightest clue what the repercussions would be. Of course they were apprehended, put on trial, and locked away.

Whatever compassion we can have for those kids, we still have to treat them as moral agents. However much biological determinism and pack behavior may pertain to us, we aren't morally exempt from our actions. Whatever science comes up with that might moderate our treatment of criminals, we will always have the concept of the criminal. We will always have competency hearings that exempt only the more extreme cases of insanity and metal retardation from normal criminal proceedings.

So rather than an ego-centric and triumphalist Humanism, I'm actually with Sartre or whichever Existentialist it was who said that Man is Condemned to be Free. With our higher capacities comes a dark side and a moral culpability that no study of genetic predispositions or wolf packs will ever reduce or unravel. A sane and competent human being will foster a relationship with the larger society and its customs, and will know that descent into primordial pack behavior is a degradation.

Why, oh why, must VP be so fucking eloquent?

Thanks for reading, y'all. I know my posts can grow a little longish. I concentrate to be concise without shortchanging the argument or foregoing helpful illustrations. I like to bring it to the senses, as well as to reason. You can bet I spend lots more time writing a post like that than it will ever take for you to read it, and I'm cheered on and spurred a good bit by the appreciative response.

I might also add that my delimitation of Human Beings as the only Moral Animals (that I'm aware of) in no way diminishes the importance of advocacy for animal welfare and environmental consciousness, in general. Quite the contrary, in fact. Animals can't advocate for themselves, they can only fend for themselves. And sometimes they can't even do that. In an increasingly polluted and industrialized world, they can be extinguished.

There is no such thing, strictly speaking, as "animal rights." Rights pertain to political beings.

This does not mean I lack respect for "animal rights" activists. And it doesn't mean that I lack in care for other species. I'm just being finicky about language for a second for the sake of precision.

I know that we, as moral agents and beings with rights, are the only species even remotely capable of large-scale stewardship regarding other species.

Likewise, we are the only species capable of bringing large-scale devastation against other species.

Therefore, we are morally culpable for their condition and continued well-being in a way that they are not.

By pointing out the differences and the uniquely moral dimension of the human experience, I actually increase perception of the legitimate burden we carry in regards to the rest of nature; that is, now that the matter is brought into the discussion. Animal welfare simply wasn't a special concern in my opening remarks.

Since the comparison of people with dogs served another purpose in setting up my argument, the imputation of a facile human superiority complex and callous disregard is utterly unwarranted.

Not that I want to continue to poor gasoline on this fire...

But couldn't you say we are cursed with this morality or sense of political awareness? I mean, not to disagree with you, but both of those are extreme cases. (the dog and the vampire). There ARE plenty of examples in human history oh pack leaders working well within a small society. I hate to use the word, but for lack of a better one, "Tribal". Humans are really the only species that are capable of beautiful dreams and terrible nightmares. We do have this moral sense to us, but who says we must use it the way we are today? And at what expense? The expense of over-population or our environment? I mean, I'm you're you'll agree that we are the only species thats totally disconnected from our natural surroundings, the surroundings that made us who we are today.

But, I could be totally off with this. Again, not challenging what you're saying. Simply because of experience, you can put it down in words better than I.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL8OaCW1X5c

This is really interesting stuff. I don't think we give them enough credit. Another video showed Chimpanzees understanding compound sentence commands like "pick up the needle and give the baby a shot".

To the best of my knowledge, Man is the only species capable of communicating about the past, the future, and the hypothetical.

Though I get that you are mostly using this in the most abstract of ways, there are some instances that make me question that.

For instance, these monkies. In order to harvest the nuts they eat, they have a multi-day, multi-location process set up to allow them to actually get to the food. Surely some of this has to be taught from one generation to the other and there has to be some sort of understanding that they are stripping the nuts today, so that when they come back 3 days later they will then be able to crack open the shells.

The whole process involves selection, harvesting, ripening, transportation and tool use.

Very nice find, Kirk. I'd like to think that Apes and maybe some canines are capable of the way we think on a basic to intermediate level. We pride ourselves in language and conceptual thought but look at it from a timeline perspective. How long have we been sarcastic? Or how long have been able to make euphemisms? Not very long, what, 30,000 years?

Ever watch a dog dream? What is more abstract than the subconscious? Who's to say if they are dreaming about the past, present, or the future?
Unfortunately for all the die-hard creationists in the world who take an absolutist view on the supremacy of mankind (and man more than woman-kind for most of these regressive types, from what I've witnessed), scientists have mapped the human genome in the last few years, only to find we possess almost exactly the same amount of chromosomes as a dolphin, as a chimpanzee... as a dog. The differences between us and the animal kingdom are so infinitesimal as to make the differences between an Italian, a Jew, and an African-American almost non-existent.
Unless you're listening to Rush Limbaugh. Or Pat Robertson. The more and more I look at these people, the less convinced I am of the supremacy of man or his capacity for higher reasoning (please prove me wrong, Mark).
So how then do you separate and divide us?
That's where religion and politics come in.

DNA is a language built on only four letters, A,T,C, & G. (Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, Guanine) and the complexity arises only through long, long repetitions, and within those repetitions, a few precise sequences that produce coherent words and sentences telling the genes what to express and what to inhibit.

One crazy and frustrating revelation of the most recent research is that the human genome apparently has long, long tracts of sheer and utter nonsense. We have novels upon novels that are nothing inside but randomly grouped letters that don't express anything. So the sheer amount of chromosomal data bears no clear relationship with the few coherent sentences that make us what we are.

It isn't problematic to my argument that we possess, what, 99% of the same DNA as a Chimpanzee? I'm also quite cool with monkeys who use tools and have extended harvesting expeditions. In fact, I love learning stuff like that. And thanks for posting it.

My argument also doesn't rest in religion or anything that emanates specifically from the reactionaries and dull-witted apes of the Far Right.

My point is that our status as moral and political beings is a given, an existential fact. We are more than the sum of our parts. And we come to an awareness of our complexity and interrelationship in a way that makes certain demands upon us and in a way that predates and doesn't even necessarily depend upon an accurate appraisal of many finer points of scientific knowledge.

From their own perspective, those tool-wielding monkeys may experience their own society and the individuals within it as complex and as varied as we experience our own. They may even have some sense, as individuals, of the roles they're expected to play. Tremendously cool.

Again, it isn't my project in this thread to draw a hard and irrefutable line between our own and every other species. Rather, I want to lay down some broad ideas about what it is to be human, and then proceed toward an exploration of - among other things - how difficult and necessary it is for human beings to be consistently humane. I think we've ventured a great start in that direction.

Okay, you're just showing off now.