Brian Griffith's Blog, page 9

The Queen Mother of the West

"According to popular legend, the Queen Mother of the West came to the court of Han Emperor Wu in 110 BCE to deliver her judgment against him. This emperor had launched victorious wars against the barbarians, building the might of China to rival that of Rome. He had adopted an official version of Confucianism as the state religion, in which the main moral obligation was for subjects to serve their superiors. In his political and spiritual roles, Emperor Wu would be roughly equivalent to the combined figures of Roman emperors Augustus and Constantine. And to this great figure, the goddess reportedly said, “You were born licentious, extravagant, and violent; and you live in the midst of blood and force—no matter how many Daoists you invite here in hopes of immortality, you will only wear yourself out.” Maybe that suggests something about the role of women’s religions in Chinese history." -- A Galaxy of Immortal Women: The Yin Side of Chinese Civilization

My questions about animals

In War and Peace with the Beasts, I look at the range of ways we relate to animals and the stories we tell about them. I ask how we choose whether buddyhood, fearful respect, businesslike predation, or genocidal war is the most appropriate response to each species we meet. I watch how our treatment of “inferior beings” affects our treatment of “inferior people,” and trace some of the chain reactions we unleash when we try to weed out species we don’t like. Without much hope of making animals fit my personal preferences, I wonder how good our relations can get.

demonization

So are we demonizing the wrong people, or is it demonization itself that's demonic?

the more we clean ...

"... the more we clean our indoor environments, the more we impoverish our outdoor environments from biodiverse farm and wood, the more diseases and auto-immune conditions we risk. " -- from Claire O'Beara's review of Never Home Alone

How women have changed religion

Down to only a century or two ago, it was widely accepted that Christianity stood for male supremacy, absolute monarchy, a holy mission of world conquest, and even the institution of slavery. Down to WWII, probably most Christians still accepted an autocrat’s world view, in which the universe was an empire with an emperor, and all lesser beings were judged by how well they obeyed the emperor’s men. In that worldview, it seemed that the primary question in life, between men, women, children, or neighbors, was “Who has the higher rank? Who will command, and who will obey?” It was mainly Christian women who offered a different worldview, in which the created universe is a community, and the most important question among its members is “How good can our relations get?”

The history of sexual abuse

As anyone who can recall the 1950s or ’60s in North America probably knows, sexual harassment in public places used to be pretty much “inevitable.” And however we define “the good-old-days,” most men of those days used to be far more sexually abusive. The further back in recorded history we go, the worse it generally gets. When the Catholic popes of the 1500s tried to forbid Europe’s nuns from going out beyond their cloister walls to be of service “in the world,” their male supervisors’ main concern was that the nuns would be raped. What else, they wondered, could unprotected women possibly expect?

Killing animals for cultural reasons

Naturally, hunters and prey have always been rivals in a deadly game, and farming animals for food is a variant of the parasite-host relations that are common in nature. Like all creatures, we need to defend ourselves from organisms that feed on our bodies or supplies. But killing for cultural reasons tends to become an end in itself. It’s not just a matter of killing for food, fighting off attacks, or giving animals the death sentence for crimes against humanity. Culture-based hostility tends to become a kind of race war. In that case, great warriors go beyond proving their heroism by slaying monsters, and start seeking a final solution to monsters. We start thinking in terms of genocide for a growing list of unwanted creatures, be they wolves, rodents, or budworms. It becomes a sort of “biopolitics.” -- War and Peace with the Beasts

Eugentics toward "useless" animals

Over the course of history we fought a lot of wars to eliminate animals we hate or just can’t respect, and sometimes, unfortunately, we won. Francis Galton, the Victorian-age founding father of eugenics put it this way: “As civilization extends, they [the world’s non-domesticated animals] are doomed to be gradually destroyed off the face of the earth as useless consumers of cultivated produce.” -- War and Peace with the Beasts

The learning curve of governance for more than one species

We are on a gigantic learning curve in living alongside other creatures. For example in Africa, it seemed fairly simple at first to designate game parks to protect wildlife. Just post some guards and leave the animals alone. But actually, managing these parks grew devilishly complex. It was not just a matter of controlling the poachers, or dealing with evicted local people, or coping with attacks by park animals on the surrounding villages. Within the parks, the wardens found themselves responsible for managing imbalances and conflicts between the animals themselves. To keep an environmental balance over time, the managers felt they had to intervene, responding to booms and busts in animal populations. To do that, the rangers had to concoct ecological policies, as if trying to keep gigantic aquariums from going toxic. The delimited parks were inevitably smaller than what the animals actually needed. Parks were just potential bases of operations, and the semi-protected lions, elephants, zebras, or buffaloes needed to range more widely, through an ever-more densely populated human landscape. The realms of protected wild animals and human communities had to interpenetrate, with the multiple needs of each creature somehow accommodated. It was as if the animals had acquired a kind of citizenship—as if they were ethnic minorities, and an animal’s need could now sometimes trump a human’s greed. This was governance not just in obedience to a central authority or to the popular will of a certain human community. It was an attempt to meet a more basic challenge—how to manage the conflicting interests of all the life forms of a multi-species community within a limited space. To handle it involved a steep learning curve, full of dramatic trials and errors. It was a challenge that took the co-evolution of humans and beasts to a new level. -- War and Peace with the Beasts

The evolution of our predation

“... from the Stone Age on, the weapons of war and the chase have been interchangeable, and one activity has been a preparation and training for the other. In modern war we learn to kill each other at great distances and on a scale which actually threatens the life of our own species. In intervals of peace we proceed to turn the technology so developed … against the lower animalsˮ -- Roy Bedichek https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...