U started an insightful series of comments on the “We are primates all the way down“, which I want to elaborate on.
The premise of the initial article was simple: We are very similar to primates in our behavior and thinking. In other words, I wanted to state that we are nothing more than the brainy apes, which coming from an evolutionary biologists, also represent a critique of human arrogance, and if you stretch it a little, the breaking of mind and soul dichotomy (i.e., the soul is an extension of a complex network of neurons). One of the good examples of this idea in my social circle is the writings of Ferhat Kaya in his blog Evrimsel Koken.
However, U made it clear that this view, even it is accurate, does not suffice to accurately address the political problems. He wrote:
I’ve just read the article attached to this picture. Although it is certainly touchy and reminds us of the deficiencies of the ‘homo sapiens-centered’ worldview, the reaction of the photographer in the interview takes an equally misleading direction: to bring about an image of animals, as if they are human beings.
Look at this quotation: “After a hunter killed her mother, Dorothy was sold as a “mascot” to an amusement park in Cameroon. For the next 25 years she was tethered to the ground by a chain around her neck, taunted, teased, and taught to drink beer and smoke cigarettes for sport. In May 2000 Dorothy—obese from poor diet and lack of exercise—was rescued and relocated along with ten other primates”.
It is as if we talk about a human being. I don’t see anything wrong to have a deep sympathy for the animals suffering from the cruelty of human beings. However, that suffering doesn’t turn them into human beings.
The inherent problem in this attitude is in the deficiency of turning the environmental catastrophy we experience into a set of isolated problems. Chimpanzees are very cute. They look like, act like, and even think like human beings at some level. But, then, what about caterpillars and birds sharing the same forest?
In order to ’save the rainforest’, this photographer should be ready to consume less. She should be used to subsisting on food that is not produced without excessive use of energy. As long as she buys food, one calorie of which is produced by spending ten calories, it is no wonder that the ecological system is so damaged.
And, of course, I even won’t go to the embeedded ‘colonialism’ here. People in Cameroon are so horrible that they even pay to see a chimpanzee be tortured. Another detail in this picture is the African guy carrying the body (manual labor), while the European-looking woman sitting and mourning (emotions).
Monkeys are monkeys. Human beings are human beings. By presenting them more like human beings, we do not make a positive contributions to our problems, which in one way or another cause their problems.
This is a very important critique and I am still confused about how to answer that. One immediate response, of course, is that you have to pick your fights, and a complete holistic war against inequality is bound to fail. This, however, is not a good answer as U points out in a later comment:
That’s the challenge, yet that fact that it’s a challenge does not justify the attittude in this article.
Nature-society relationship has been at the core of the previous modes of production, as it still is for the capitalist mode of production: just looking at the history within the last two centuries (colonization, world wars, and recent crisis about peak oil should account for satisfactory examples) justifies this point.
Maybe a useful starting point is to evade the way many formulate the question as the ‘nature-man’ or ‘nature-human’ interaction. No, it’s the very distinction that emerged at some point in the pre-historical ages of humanity as a result of the transformation of the social formations as webs of relations that act independently of what we call today ‘nature’.
Let me rephrase this: if we talk about ‘nature’, we already talk about the mind-boggling unity of all ‘things’ outside the human society. There, we pretend as if we deal with a simple phenomenon. We act and think as if there is no ‘bigger picture’.
However, when we talk about society, then the question of ‘big picture’ immediately kicks in.
Nature does not have a big picture. Nor is it the big picture. There are monkeys, cute and peaceful whales, and trees. Also maybe bananas and some African tribes. The collection of these eclectical (and extremely deragotary for those tribes) picture is the only picture that we have whenever we think of nature.
But it is somehow the biggest challenge to insert any society-related concern into this equation, since it requires us understand ‘the big picture’.
Why is nature taken as such an ‘easy’ subject, while why do we abstain so much from talking about the actual social interactions that are primarily responsible for the tragedy in this picture?
Very simple: since, if we go there, this mourning and completely innocent woman should rethink her job there and what she is doing there. Then, she should question her position and relationship with that guy carrying the monkey.
I think biology and molecular/physical anthropology partially contributes to this theoretical lethargy thanks to their methods to handle the nature as an entity independent from society in the first place.
But to come up with a fully-fledged criticism of the methodological matters of these disciplines is certainly a job beyond my knowledge…
I will end it here for now. Expect some more writing about this issue in the coming weeks. Good stuff!