I have a yen for fantasy geography. Some might say I just generally live in Cloud Cuckoo Land, but I’ve always been keen on maps. I wrote a post on here imagining that Great Britain had been divided in the same way as North and South Korea and the way things would be for us if it had, which may have helped make the situation over there more vivid. Well, right now we’re in a very divided kingdom, as evinced by the divisive “Unite The Kingdom” march last weekend in London, and of course in a sense I’d prefer us to be even more divided in the sense that I believe strongly in Scottish independence. I’ve taken to writing “U”K recently too, and the divisions are of course not simply geographical. This is an artifact of social media, bots and AI, among other things, orchestrated of course by those who profit from division, and I mean that literally, I mean, you know all this. We all do.
I’m very, very White, and I’m from East Kent. My sister, I’m pretty sure, votes Reform. As a White person, I’m racist, sometimes consciously and deliberately so and at other times unconsciously so. Last weekend I made the observation to another White person that all White people are racist, which I firmly accept, and he appeared to take exception to this. I’m not sure whether I should explain this or not, or whether if I do, it will reach the right ears. It’s absolutely not about being a self-hating White person, any more than opposition to Zionism makes someone a self-hating Jew, but about recognising one’s privilege and working against one’s own racism. The point at which a White person decides they’re not racist is also the point at which they will stop becoming less racist.
A few months ago I was at a vigil for the victims in Palestine when a White guy involved in an anti-immigration protest stood up at the front and said “I’m not racist”. This is factually untrue, not because of his motivations for being on the demo but because he’s White and therefore racist. He’s in the position of being able to be oblivious to his racism, as do I much of the time, because of our White privilege. The problem with being able to perceive himself as racist is similar to my problem of being able to perceive myself as breathing or having a heartbeat, and also due to the fact that racism tends to be conceptualised as something one does, perhaps consciously, rather than being a product of living in a White supermacist society such as this one. Ironically, this is one reason why I’m only a very reluctant Remainer. To me, the EU is a club of rich nations which have looted and stolen money and resources from the rest of the world, consisting largely of racialised people, and are continuing to do so through megacorps and banks. One interesting fact about the European Union which a lot of people seem to gloss over is that an early adopter and possibly the inventor of that term was none other than British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, who wanted a White homeland for Europeans as he saw them. Another irony is that the reason we’re getting so many asylum seekers is that we’ve left the EU and therefore the Dublin III Regulation, which prevented people from making more than one application in a signatory state, which the “U”K no longer is. So Brexit is responsible for this.
If you’re White, at least if you live in a White majority country, the chances are you will have grown up without the enforced education of what it means to be a member of a racialised minority, and that obliviousness involves unconscious bias. I’ve used this example before, but the woman in Central Park who threatened to call the police on a Black birdwatcher out of fear was unaware of the danger she was putting him in by doing so because she was able to conceive of the police as primarily an institution which upheld the law without being much of a threat to racialised people when the reality is very different. Fear is also important here. If you can get someone to be afraid, you can get them to be less fair and more irrational, and to make decisions which endanger others, which they may no longer perceive as individuals but as dominated by a particular immutable characteristic. I was kidnapped by a White man in 1989 CE, and became disproportionately afraid of White men in general for maybe a year or so afterwards. In fact I found my fear of them expanding and including more White men in a manner I found quite worrying and discussed in therapy. Suppose instead of that I’d been kidnapped by a Black person. I probably would’ve experienced the same effect the other way round, and would’ve become more racist than I already am. If I didn’t get the chance to process that and come to terms with it in some way, it might’ve become a fixed feature of my personality. Transferring this to homophobia, I used to know a man who was homophobic because he was sexually abused a lot in his independent school by other males. I don’t know whether he still is because it was a long time ago now and I’ve long since lost touch with him. You don’t necessarily have much control over your prejudice, and whereas it’s undesirable it isn’t an accusation to call someone racist. It might be inaccurate, but it’s an observation.
Another aspect of racism which I’ve mentioned before here is its potential link to veganism, which I personally make and promote to a certain extent. I may be unusual for a vegan because I’m not interested in making anyone else vegan on the grounds that there’s already so much suffering and death in the world inherent in the food chain that any decisions we make to avoid animal products have little consequence for that. Veganism, though, is about everyone, i.e. all animals, and I do mean animals. I’m not going to reduce that circle merely to animals with brains or otherwise cephalised. But this post is not about veganism specifically. It’s easy to introduce racism into one’s veganism, for instance by ignoring the internalised oppression of soul food or the difficulty of eating a healthy plant-based diet in a food desert, but even without this there’s a racist element in it, one which I actually fully embrace despite being generally anti-racist. The issue is that indigenous peoples are never plant-based, and expecting them to be so will destroy their way of life. Although this is a long way down the road from where we are now, with the majority of even White people being carnist, ultimately the species indigenous people exploit don’t belong to them any more than slaves belong to slave “owners”, and in spite of the reverence they hold their prey in and no matter how efficiently they use the remains, they don’t have the right to kill them. And this is a serious problem, because for instance the Inuit will sometimes end their own lives because they can’t pursue the slaughter of seals. It’s a central part of the lives of thousands of non-White people and I do want to take that away, and some of them will probably kill themselves as a result. Therefore, I am absolutely and emphatically, actively and consciously racist. So yes, all White people are racist and I in particular am deliberately so, although the issue is unlikely to arise because of the focus on factory farming and vivisection, which is far more important. Marginalisation is nested. Partly for this reason also, I disagree with vegans who say veganism is a feminist issue because of the rape and forced birth involved. The deaths of half the chicks to enable the other half to lay eggs arises from their maleness, and in the wild it’s very likely that there are species whose females are always raped and wouldn’t exist if they weren’t, meaning that you can’t apply feminism to most other species, and again veganism trumps feminism there. At the same time, the issue of my racism against indigenous peoples, most of the time, is not a real problem because by the time veganism becomes a significant issue for them, they will probably have become assimilated into a scarcity-based economic system. However, there are also intermediate cases, such as the Faroese slaughter of pilot whales. On this issue, though, the slaughter is of wild animals rather than farmed ones and is on a smaller scale than the slaughter of farm animals in nearby countries, including Scotland. There is a sense in which whaling is actually the most humane form of slaughter because a one hundred ton animal can feed a lot more people than a thousand ewes whose total weight is the same, but I’d much rather there was none at all. So yeah, I’m racist, I know I am and I’m not planning to change in that respect, although I am in others.
Nonetheless, in other areas I am vigorously willing to discover and challenge my racism and White privilege. This doesn’t mean I have a guilt complex or think less of myself simply because I’m White, but I did grow up with the privilege of being able to be oblivious of racialisation because I was myself not racialised.
Given all that, I identify ethnically as a White person from northwest Europe, by which I mean an area including the islands of the North Atlantic, France, Benelux, Scandinavia and the German-speaking parts of Europe. That’s an area of seven million square kilometres, including fifteen sovereign states and covering 1.3% of the total surface of this planet. Most of the states involved are either part of the EU or have a special relationship with it. However, I’m not impressed with the EU unless it becomes a democratic federal state and it’s a case of it being the least worst option rather than something one can enthuse about. It’s just a mass of rich White people taking money and resources from the rest of the world and their own poor and making a massive pile of dosh. Nothing to celebrate.
However – well, indulge me, and this is where I get to the Tees-Exe Line and the Hexagon. Back in geography lessons, I’m not sure when, like probably every British schoolchild, I was taught about the line that can be drawn between the mouths of the Tees and the Exe rivers, northwest of which lie the highland areas of this island and southeast of which lie the “Lowlands”. Remember that name. This line divides the archipelago culturally too, with the northwest being more “Celtic”, although apparently the concept of Celtic identity is pretty nebulous and I tend to think the British parts of that area forget the Nordic influence. As I’ve mentioned before, in Scotland in particular edges are central, and one way in which this applies is with the water. Lochs, isles and firths are important to Scottish physical geography, influencing transport, language, economics, climate and doubtless a load of other things. Moving southwest of this line, though, brings one to an area with fewer islands, a less twiddly coastline and of course lower, flatter land. What it doesn’t do, however, is eliminate the sea. There’s the “German Ocean”/North Sea and the Manche/English Channel, and all the history and commerce which has taken place along its coasts. In Mediaeval times it sometimes consisted of territory straddling the two coasts and the English language is both Ingvaeonic and heavily influenced by French. The English crown made claims to France until surprisingly recently, in 1802 at the Treaty of Amiens due to France having become a republic. The White Ship and the subsequent arrival of the Anarchy was linked to the ferrying back and forth of royalty between France and England, and very significantly to me, Calais was only officially lost in January 1558.
Going further southeast, we have the Hexagon. France has this thing about being hexagonal, which to my mind excludes Britanny, Flanders, the Basque Country and French Catalonia (for want of a better term). Britanny still has somewhere to go due to its linguistic links to Cornwall, so that also belongs, so to speak, to the west of an extended Tees-Exe Line. On going into France, and in fact a long way into it towards Paris from the North Downs in Kent, one gets a strong impression of continuity. It basically feels and looks like Kent with different marks of human activity on it. Then there’s Benelux, a trio of countries which are closely associated with each other.
An apparent tangent:
On Mars, there are perhaps three words for extensive areas with distinctive features: vastitas, planum and planitia. Plana are plateaux, vastitas means “desert” and is just the large lowland area around the north polar ice cap where most of the ocean used to be, and there are also planitiae, the best known of which it Utopia Planitia, which is where they build the starships in ‘Star Trek’. A planitia is a low-lying area. It translates as “plain” in English, and one of the more interesting planitiae is Hellas, which includes the lowest-lying areas of the planet and was once thought to be instrumental in causing Tharsis to form near the antipodes of the planet. Planitia, then, is a low-lying area.
I think the area of the Low Countries, that near the coast and someway inland from Hauts De France and the area of this island southeast of the Tees-Exe Line could be considered a single geographical unit, and in fact should be considered a single political unit. Or rather, I don’t, but it would be sufficiently annoying that it constitutes a proposal. In the former France, this should include Picardie, Hauts de France, Grand-Est and Normandy. The capital should be Lille, or the capital should be polycentric. Why do I want this? Well, when I lived in East Kent and after I left, I felt it was weird how, far from celebrating our connections with places over the Channel, we all seemed to dig our heels in and become “extra extra English”. Lille was the closest big city to me and I’ve never been there, and to me that seems absurd. Dover is much closer to Calais than it is to London. The name Kent itself means “edge”, but it’s only on an edge if you ignore everywhere outside Britain. My home village has a vineyard which produces excellent wines. And yet the people living there basically ignore their position entirely and either act like France and the Low Countries are on the other side of the world or are affronted at the audacity of their neighbours visiting. And then of course there are the famous people in boats. Various problems there, one of which is that Calais and Dover are in different countries separated by thirty kilometres of often rough and very busy seas. This wouldn’t be a problem if we’d kept Calais in 1558.
So, why not forget about England entirely and just decide there’s a new country called Planitia comprising these areas. Put the capital in Lille, build some bridges and tunnels to link it together across the Channel similarly to the bridge linking Denmark and Sweden and celebrate the common history and culture. No more problems with boats because once the people reach Planitia, they’re in a unified political entity. It looks very roughly like this:
I have no idea why this came out so small. WordPress is not behaving itself today. Anyway, you get the idea. It’s a republic. It has a number of official languages, including French, Dutch, Letzebuergesch, West Frisian, English, Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati, Polish and so on. It unifies a diverse number of ethnicities with a lot in common. It has a large city in the middle of it on the island which does a lot of commercial stuff but needs its wealth redistributing more equally through the area.
In the meantime, out of the area is a kind of Celtic alliance, though not really Celtic, to the north and west, and a diminished hexagon of France to the south, extending to the Pyrenees and the Alps. As for Planitia, its cuisine, sadly, is far from vegan. It consists of pancakes, cheese on toast, loads of fish, bivalves, gastropods, various cheeses, wines (very nice, but are they vegan?), beer, cider, and more positively curries and general South Asian-influenced cuisines with plenty of chilli. People are not so keen on tea as some of them used to be. There’s Britpop with French lyrics, theatre in French, Dutch and English all in the same play, everyone learns each others’ languages in school including the South Asian ones and there’s existentialist Gothic literature. The former England has terrazzas and people hanging out having lunch for hours. Everyone drinks coffee. There is respect for learning for its own sake. Foreigners are so welcome they hardly count as foreigners at all beyond respect for their cultures. People are proud of their composite identity and how they’ve managed to bridge the gaps between the six nations composing their territory and people, often literally. The Channel has several bridges along its length which open in the middle like Tower Bridge to let the supertankers through. There are artificial islands offshore along both coasts. Many people cycle to work, Cannibis is legal for personal use and accordions and brass instruments play together. There’s probably a lot more rabies, unfortunately.
OK, all that’s a bit stereotypical, but what I’m saying is, can we for goodness’s sake forget that we’re living on an island and stop pretending we’re some special people apart rather than accept our unity with the rest of Europe? In this scenario there’s either no EU or Planitia is a province of a democratic European republic. The people in boats is a self-inflicted problem caused by leaving the EU, and also they’re people running from situations so appalling most people in Britain can’t even imagine them. They’re often people whose education has been paid for by another country and we get their talents, skills and experience for free, but instead of that we house them in crappy hotels and pay them a pittance when they could be contributing massively to the economy.
We can keep the St George’s cross though. A Turk who’s the patron saint of Palestine is fine by me. A red cross on an orange field with a couple of fleurs des lyses in the corners would seem appropriate.
A few years back a baboon took a selfie on a camera and PETA decided to use it as a test case to move towards establishing personhood for non-human individuals. As usual, this was to my mind a meaningless and pointless stunt – I’m not a fan of PETA by any means. The reason I think this was misguided is that I don’t believe in rights. To my mind, the idea of moral rights is based on human custom or analogy with the law, and it has no basis in reality. I think in terms of duties alone in that respect, because duties arise from one’s own situation with regard to others. I’m not sure what practical significance that has.
This whole attitude of mine is based on two things. One is that I’m philosophically anarchist, although the issue rarely arises in practical terms. This means I think of the law as solely enforced through the threat of violence with no authority, and although it often does coincide with morality this is not its basis. The other is that viewing the Universe dispassionately in terms of what is most real, I have traditionally been nominalist. This means that I didn’t believe that any human concepts were more than arbitrary. I’ve since changed my mind on this because one unfortunate consequence of this view is that it seems to make facts relative, which seems unhealthy. I now think I do believe in natural kinds, for instance in elements and species, but the problem of what actually are natural kinds remains. Nonetheless, in terms of the law, it’s just a deadly serious game humans play, and whereas it has plenty of philosophically interesting aspects these are relative to that fact and operate within what amounts to a contingent human custom. Extending this, rights in a moral sense only exist when not having them respected would make it difficult to discharge duties. For instance, if someone has medical knowledge, skills and experience, she may be obliged to practice as a doctor but that could be difficult if she’s a refugee in another country, so she might have to have her human rights respected in order to be of greatest use to that society. She has those rights, but they exist because she has obligations prior to those rights. That actually applies to most people, although of course I tend to think of people as having infinite value.
In a similar way, when we decide to practice a vegan lifestyle we’re adopting a human custom and set of practices which are based on our possession of concepts of right and wrong, or perhaps good and bad. It appears that most other species, although they often do experience love, compassion, loyalty and companionship, it rarely consciously adds up for them into a global obligation beyond their own species. We are in any case surrounded by a biosphere which only works because food is circulating through it, and in many cases this food consists of the bodies of animals who suffer and die of necessity so that others may survive. Next to this, as I’ve observed before, the amount of suffering conceived in terms of individuals suffering, and also deaths, associated with human activity is utterly trivial. Nonetheless I feel obliged to avoid being party to avoidable suffering and death, so I’m vegan. To pick an exclusively human example, a series of disasters such as quakes, tsunami, volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes could lead someone to compassion fatigue or burnout in the end and that needs to be treated sympathetically, but it would still be better for someone living in such a world to take steps to treat others well and avoid harming or killing them on the whole. Abandoning veganism because of the vast scale of carnage around us would be similar.
This is one respect in which veganism is essentially for humans. The wider living world knows suffering and death, but we alone are responsible towards it. More specifically, in fact, I can only say that I’m responsible towards it because attributing responsibility to others is an unwarranted imposition. Obviously I do think it would be a lot better if most Westerners were vegan, but it’s their decision. This is to some extent inconsistent, because one action I could take is to persuade others to go vegan too, and through me there would then be less suffering and death. Nonetheless I don’t go there. So in that sense, veganism is for humans.
A few posts ago, I was writing about food deserts, which seems to be one area in which it’s practically difficult to become vegan for some. In the same way as I can’t presume to extend my pacifism to every political situation and every marginalised group, I also have to recognise that some people may find it impossible to go vegan in the world as it’s currently constituted. However, in such a situation it isn’t enough to sit back and leave it alone. The question must always be of how to make it easier to go vegan. The same applies to health situations. Although I’ve never encountered a patient who couldn’t adopt a plant-based diet for health reasons, I’m prepared to believe there may be a few who can’t currently do this. In this situation, the problem is not that they can’t go vegan in absolute terms, but that either the research or economic situation is such that they can’t do it, so the priority is to address that so that they can. It does, however, mean that they may not be directly responsible for their own non-veganism. All this means that even just considered as plant-based eating, veganism has wider implications than just people choosing not to consume animal products. Moreover, doing this for people would generally be positive for them in any case. Once again, veganism is for humans.
This links to a third sense in which veganism is for humans. Humans are animals. We are also the animals with whom many of us have the most socially extensive and meaningful connections. Because we’re animals, and veganism is against the exploitation of animals, vegans must oppose the exploitation of humans. Therefore veganism is more like pacifism than vegetarianism. You can’t consistently be vegan for the sake of other species. You also need to be against avoidable human death and suffering, and because we are ourselves human this is in fact the most important aspect of veganism. If I worked on an animal farm, I probably would have more to do with other species than humans and my direct obligations might be different, but because I live surrounded by other humans, most of my immediate duties are to other humans, and through them to ending a chain of exploitation as is found in mineral resource extraction, working conditions, their income, unionisation and so on. It’s just as vegan to oppose the Palestinian genocide as it is to refuse to consume dairy products.
So this is probably going to be quite a short post, just to say that paradoxically although veganism might look as if it’s about non-human animals, there are several senses in which it’s actually a human thing, and it’s none the worse for that.
Cards on the table time again: I’m vegan. However, just as back in the ’80s we campaigned for Leicester University not to demolish some houses to build a bioweapons lab for the Iraqi government, there are other good reasons for bringing this to people’s attention.
I’ve got bogged down with some other blog posts, which have proven to be quite complicated. This is also complicated, but it’s more straightforward than the rest: food deserts.
Food deserts are areas where it’s difficult to buy nutritious food and follow a balanced diet. Whereas this is relevant to veganism, it’s also relevant to being human. It is alleged to be harder to adopt a plant-based diet in a food desert than elsewhere, but that’s because it’s alleged to be harder to eat healthily there. However, the reasons why it’s less likely to happen may be complicated and not just due to the lack of good food.
The situation is basically this. Although food deserts exist in various parts of the world, including deserts come to think of it, they’ve tended to be associated with the US, and therefore the situation is known in more detail in that setting, which is unlike that of many other parts of the world. It amounts to this: very large areas are devoid of adequate grocery stores or other means of acquiring healthy foods, whereas they are very well-provided with fast food outlets selling very affordable junk food. This applies particularly to majority Black neighbourhoods and areas of Native American habitation. It’s reasonable to ask why the residents can’t travel to places where better grocery stores are available, but many American cities are very unfriendly to pedestrians without proper pavements/sidewalks and many stores are planned with the car in mind, so if you can’t afford a car it’s a big problem. Public transport is of course available but there can be a limit of two grocery bags. Within the ‘hoods themselves, quite perverse regulations exist with, for example, it being illegal to share food between houses, grow food crops or trees in the front garden (even assuming there is one) and for some reason the sites of grocery stores being banned from being used for new grocery stores for fifteen to twenty years. At this point it’s tempting to go off on one and say that this is by design, but there’s no need to do that because the fact is that all these things contribute to ill-health among Blacks and Native Americans.
The Native American situation is somewhat different, though just as bad. Rural populations on reservations are often not living in their original territory because they were moved by White settlers onto less productive soil, their animal food sources were killed en masse and their crops burnt. In one particular reservation almost the size of Scotland, there are only ten grocery stores. Over the whole of the US there are more gun stores than there are groceries and alcohol is of course always easy to obtain. Among the Black population, what’s now regarded as “soul food”, representing familial love and togetherness and therefore very popular, is descended from the food available to slaves, such as pigs’ ears and trotters.
This has led to internalised oppression, where even where grocery stores with affordable healthy food open, they tend not to be patronised by members of ethnic minorities because they stock White food. There is a cultural association with unhealthy food, which often has very positive connotations. So it isn’t that simple. Even in an America with good public transport, pedestrian-friendly cities and plentiful healthy food shops with cheap food, it’s possible that ethnic minorities would still eat unhealthy diets. It seems insensitive to criticise them for that but as with so many things, their identities are substantially defined by their oppression. All this of course means that they die younger and have more chronic diseases than White Americans.
All this, though, raises questions in my own mind. I never found it difficult to find nutritious food in Leicester, partly because of the market, which is now apparently gone, but also because of the large South Asian population. Even when I lived in Highfields, in the inner city, it was easy. It was also easy to eat unhealthily but the choice existed, and it existed in small corner shops. It was also easy to do that in Leeds, and not just in Headingley but also Chapeltown. One of the possible differences between Black people in the US and here is that although many of them do come from the same origins as part of the Atlantic slave trade, they’re also quite likely to be RastafarIan. Although it may be honoured mainly from a distance, one of the features of that faith is I-Tal cuisine, which is ideally raw food plant-based. It’s compulsory in some mansions. The difference is that the cultures of the ethnicities involved was better preserved, in a sense, among the immigrant communities than it had been in the US. The shops in question are also run by people of South Asian and West Indian heritage. British cities are also easier to traverse on foot.
They can arise in this country in a number of ways. They can, for example, be rural. Areas can exist where there’s little food simply because there aren’t many people, and this situation can ironically arise in areas whose farms are growing plenty of it, although usually not much variety. It also happens where people are too busy to cook, because fresh produce outlets wouldn’t be economically viable. Other examples are areas with low wages, council schemes, suburbs where people shop by car, which is harder for pensioners and town and city centres which are missing out to out of town shopping centres. The area I live in now has not been researched at all so far as I can tell, and this is another problem: one might simply have no idea from outside whether something is a food desert. Poverty in general is expensive: it costs more for poor people to get what they need than it does for rich people, for various reasons. They can’t buy in bulk, may not be able to afford to travel to out of town supermarkets, might be using card meters and be paying more in rent than if they could get a mortgage. I have some personal experience of this. Online grocery shopping, which has a minimum spend, also leads to the closure of shops, as does of course the presence of some supermarket chains, which can offer low prices as a temporary strategy. Economies of scale also work with those, and they can also throw their weight around more with their suppliers, leading to poverty there too.
With other countries the situation may be considerably more obscure, but in East Afrika urbanisation is said to have led to them. Although subsistence agriculture has been more common there, this is harder to continue or establish in expanding cities and the soil erosion in that continent is particularly bad. The growth of supermarkets there is not helping communities’ self-sufficiency. Afrikan cities generally are not as dense on average, meaning that more travel may be necessary between different settlements, and the roads aren’t well-maintained.
So this is not going to be one of my long waffly posts, partly because I don’t know much about them, but the question of ethical consumption is complicated by the presence of food deserts because it can be a lot harder to do that due to poverty and poor infrastructure. But veganism is a broader ethic than might be apparent: it means the well-being of humans at least as much as it does other species, and fixing the structural problems here, such as systemic racism, infrastructure, good public transport, not only directly improves quality of life but also facilitates veganism as a choice. But I don’t want to make it look as if I only want to sort these problems out for the sake of non-human animals. I want these problems to be successfully addressed because it’s good for everyone to have better lives. That is also veganism. The internalisation of poor heating habits and their identification with culture shows how deep these problems go. Maybe it also makes sense to ask what eating animal products means to people.
I’m in the middle of writing a post about graph theory which has got rather bogged down, partly due to me not knowing that branch of maths as well as I’d like. It will probably see the light of day eventually. In a linked set of thoughts, I’ve become interested in the ways living things in general send signals through their own networks, or graphs in fact. Neural nets, biological ones.
This is not entirely new for this blog as I’ve discussed nervous systems before on here, but this time I want to make it broader and more focussed on their capabilities. There has recently been a movement adjacent to veganism which attempts to define bivalves as vegan because adherents see them as non-conscious by virtue of their neural anatomy. Before I launch into the scientific side of all this, I want to make an ethical point. The philosopher Peter Singer wrote a book called ‘The Expanding Circle’. I have a copy of it somewhere and it makes broad points about ethics, as his work usually does, focussing on the idea of increasing the range of entities which we should consider morally speaking. There’s been a general trend in this direction in the West which has led to such progress as the Magna Carta, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage and so forth. Ethical vegetarianism begins to expand this horizon to other species, and veganism expands it further in the sense of the consideration given to those species. In general, it’s important to be suspicious of one’s biasses if they happen to support one’s own identity over others’.
So, there are several things needing to be addressed here. One is the nature of signalling systems in different organisms without regard to their consciousness or otherwise. Another is the “hard problem”, as it’s called, of consciousness. It might make more sense to deal with that bit first.
Okay, so there is a problem with consciousness because it seems to be impossible to explain. I was startlingly alerted to the shenanigans associated with this as a postgraduate when a particular academic, not Nick Land for once, informed me that they didn’t believe members of other species were conscious because they didn’t use language or some other sign-based system to communicate. This is an example of the logocentrism of continental philosophy, and actually even much analytical, and is again suspiciously convenient because it basically concludes that the voiceless have nothing to complain about. To be honest, this was one of the most disgusting things I’d ever heard. It means, for example, that nobody has any duties towards completely non-verbal adults because they’re simply not conscious. The turn of the ’80s and ’90s was quite a traumatic and also enlightening couple of years for me which led to disillusionment regarding academic philosophy, or at least how it’s practiced at Margaret Thatcher’s favourite university.
I could long-windedly plough through the whole thing but just to summarise:
Psychophysical dualism is flawed because of the difficulty of interaction between physical and non-physical realms.
Physicalism has the drawback that replacing a description of a physical state with one of a mental state doesn’t preserve the meaning of the description.
Behaviourism denies the existence of the internal mental states which we all know we have.
Functionalism would mean that a big committee room passing around bits of paper to replicate the behaviour of a person through carefully analysed internal brain activity would have to have its own individual consciousness.
Anomalous monism is kind of okay but the problem for me here is that I’m too intimately involved with supervenience and lost control of the creative process.
So my solution, of course, is that consciousness is a property of matter similar to magnetism in that whereas all atoms, ions and charged particles have their own magnetic fields, actual ferromagnetism only occurs in a few specially arranged structures of atoms, so a magnet has to consist either of a lump of iron or an alloy including rare earths (and possibly some other arrangements I don’t know about), and likewise consciousness can only become manifest and produce observable phenomena in special arrangements such as a living, conscious human central nervous system. In other words, panpsychism. Nothing else makes any sense I’m afraid.
Given this, then, I have a problem. Living humans are conscious while awake. We have a certain kind of system or arrangement of the matter making up our bodies conferring consciousness. If you like, and you believe in souls in the sense of entities which exist in the same way as bodies do, maybe you can instead see this arrangement as like a radio transmitter/receiver. My own view of what a soul is differs from that. In any event, another arrangement of matter could serve the same purpose, just as there are iron magnets and also rare earth magnets. The fact that we know we’re conscious and have a particular kind of nervous system, and possibly other body parts such as our endocrine system which overlaps in structure and function, the nervous system in the intestines and the like, doesn’t mean that other systems and structures cannot be conscious. I’ll be considering those structures and systems here.
People say “I don’t eat anything with a face”. Well, something with a face is at least in that way a little like a human. That seems to me to be a form of prejudice, because not all animals have faces. Bivalves and sponges haven’t any. What we need to tease out here is whether there’s any reason to exclude some animals from consideration. I don’t think there is.
There are, first of all, important practical reasons for not eating bivalves. Shellfish allergies are common and can be caused by eating bad oysters. Being filter feeders, molluscs tend to concentrate both human pathogens and heavy metals. This last does make them nutritionally good sources of minerals, but it also makes them somewhat toxic. However, these are all practical considerations, not ethical, but it seems odd to pick on bivalves in particular when even carnists would be ill-advised to include them in their diets. I’ll start with them because they’re the animals most often quoted as possible exceptions for veganism.
Behaviourally, many bivalves clearly behave like other animals. Razor shells burrow deeper into sand to escape predators. Scallops swim away from predators by clapping their shells open and shut, shooting out jets of water. Some bivalves have eyes, up to ten apparently, and close when a shadow passes over them. Others monitor salinity and open and close accordingly, and they also open and close according to the tides, even if they’re in a tank hundreds of kilometres away from the sea, presumably because they can detect lunar gravity. They also close when exposed by the tide or receding waves to avoid desiccation, which they must therefore be able to detect. That’s at least four senses, and Aristotle said even humans only have five. Venus clams, cockles, trough shells, tellins and carpet shells all burrow into the sand and move down when the tide goes out. Tellins are not strictly filter feeders but vacuum the sand or mud around them to pick up microscopic food organisms. Razor shells and tellins can also detect vibration nearby, which warns them of approaching threats and to which they respond by burrowing very quickly downwards. Cuspidaria, which lives offshore, “hoovers” the sea bed like tellins but unlike them detects dead or dying animals to eat, which is once again active and purposeful behaviour. The nut shell only uses gills for breathing and drags itself across the sea bed. One species of scallop has tentacles permanently projecting from the shell and constructs an internal nest for their young, although this shouldn’t be taken to imply consciousness as it’s reminiscent of the build-up of endometrial tissue, i.e. not a conscious or intentional action. Piddocks and shipworms bore into clay, rock or wood, using their shells like drill bits, and piddocks squirt water when disturbed, even if just the rock nearby is tapped. One Venus clam also bores into rock. To be fair, plants also sometimes penetrate rock with their roots, so this may not indicate anything particularly mindful provided it’s also assumed that plants aren’t acting purposefully when they do that. Given all this, then, it doesn’t seem to me that bivalves as a class are just “plants”. They’re way more purposeful than we perceive plants to be, and they’re not passive, unlike say an arum lily or fig relying on trapped insects to get pollinated or pollinate others.
That’s all external stuff. It makes sense to infer that there are structures and systems in place which lead the animals to exhibit this quite sophisticated behaviour, and I’m tempted to suspect that those who advocate for the consumption of bivalves do so in ignorance of all this, maybe even wilful ignorance or assumption, and we all know what that does don’t we?
What, then, of the bivalve nervous system? I’m partly posting this out of interest but I should point out that this information, and probably much of the information I’m going to share later, was gained at a disturbingly high cost to the animals concerned, and just as we would show reverence and reticence at sharing information gained through torture and genocide, this should be taken with considerable seriousness. This isn’t just some casually interesting detail about bird migration or duckweed population dynamics gained in a non-invasive manner. However, we now have the information and what’s done is done, so it may as well be employed in a manner which helps as yet non-abused animals.
Zoologists categorise nervous systems into several categories according to their perceived complexity, but they are also substantially like each other. Studying the behaviour of a whole animal is by definition more holistic than considering the nervous system of that animal in isolation, which is quite an impoverished way of understanding the individual in question. There are also other control systems than just the nervous system, such as the endocrine system, and other forms of information storage. The basic principles of all nervous systems are the same. They involve the separation of internal and external environments by cell membranes which are elongated and along which electrical potentials occur due to differences in distribution of the same ions across the animal kingdom, usually sodium and potassium, which pass in and out of the cells involved. Sense organs pick up signals in the form of various types of energy which are converted into the same kind of information when transmitted along nerves, enabling information to be transmitted around the body. The signals are always “all or nothing”: they either happen or they don’t, and they don’t carry information through their strength but through the number and frequency of signals of the same level. In this way they’re basically digital rather than analogue in nature. The signal jumps between successive uninsulated points along the nerve fibre and is regenerated at those locations. Neurones always have elongated processes which are sometimes branched. They are supported by mechanically protective glial cells, and they communicate via synapses which release the contents of vesicles across these gaps contained in knobs at the ends of fibres. These are neurotransmitters chemically similar to each other in two classes. All of this is true across the animal kingdom and in those respects the human nervous system is similar to that of any other animal who actually possesses a nervous system. All that supports the notion that all animals with nervous systems are conscious, although there could be other reasons why they might not be.
The broad categories of nervous system are those consisting only of nerve nets and those with varying degrees of centralisation. However, and this is crucial, the brain itself is made up of nerve nets, which are of course more concentrated and centralised than in animals such as jellyfish whose nerve net ranges across the entire body. In the case of bivalves, most species have a pair of ganglia either – sorry, ganglia are usually swellings on nerves consisting of a number of neuronal bodies as opposed to their fibres – either side of the oesophagus, known as cerebropleural ganglia. One on each side is responsible for the sense organs and the other connects to the nerves for the mantle. There are also ganglia controlling the foot and there can be quite large ones for the viscera, particularly in swimming bivalves. If the animal also has siphons, these are also controlled by a set of ganglia. This is of course centralisation, and actually it reminds me of the basal ganglia of the human brain. All bivalves have light sensitive cells which can detect shadows falling on them and the eyes of scallops are based on retinae receiving light from dish mirrors like the mirror lenses used in astronomy and birdwatching photography. Hence the eyes can be quite complex. The ganglia around the oesophagus are also linked to each other in a ring, and this general arrangement is also found in the cephalopods such as the octopus.
I’ve realised that I haven’t spelt out the anatomy of molluscs in general and bivalves in particular, so here’s that. Molluscs tend to have various features, being primitively segmented but usually having lost that, unlike humans incidentally who are segmented, and their bodies are usually divided into five parts: the visceral hump, containing most of the organs; the mantle, a soft cover, often over the visceral hump and sometimes creating a body cavity which contains the gills; a foot, often used for locomotion (this is what snails slither on and forms tentacles in cephalopods including the cuttlefish, squid and octopus); the head and often a shell. As with most animals with heads, this has evolved because the animal moves in a particular direction and needs sense organs and a mouth at that end more than at the other, and this in turn leads to the development of a concentration of nervous tissue to analyse sense data and perform other tasks.
Bivalves are effectively squashed sideways, or “laterally compressed” as the term has it, like fleas and unlike head lice, and for that matter also like many fish. The sessile ones are lying on their sides, although as I’ve just talked about a lot of them are not sedentary at all, burrowing, boring or swimming.
Whether something is a brain or not is a judgement call. What we humans have in our heads is definitely a brain of course, although nowadays it’s actually kind of in the wrong place because we stand upright and our heads aren’t usually the first part of our bodies to enter an environment, but evolutionary commitments have been made. We have a bias because of our own anatomies. Bivalves don’t have heads, and consequently the centralisation of their nervous systems into a region which is close to specialised sense organs such as eyes, ears and tongues is unnecessary. Scallop eyes peep out through the gaps between the shell halves. The arrangement of nervous tissue in a bivalve is therefore less driven by such imperatives, and their nervous systems, although somewhat centralised near the mouth, are not primarily organised into a brain and nerve cords. However, they do have sophisticated nervous systems compared to many other animals such as jellyfish. Moreover, the same kinds of structures as are found in human brains are found more diffusely in bivalve nervous systems. Just because they aren’t gathered together in a head doesn’t mean they don’t work like a brain. The scallop eyes seem to be apt for some kind of sophisticated processing and to be honest they puzzle me a little because I can’t see what use they are to the animal. Human eyes begin to process vision in the retina, which is not just a projection screen, so maybe scallop eyes do the same. To what end I have no idea.
Given all that then, it really does seem like some form of denial that bivalves lack mental states. They’re certainly very different from vertebrates and even other molluscs, but that difference shouldn’t be taken to mean they aren’t worthy of respect. The measure is not how different we are but whether they can suffer.
A possible factor in other animals is symmetry. Vertebrates are bilaterally symmetrical and often have heads. However, there are at least five phyla which are not, namely porifera (sponges), placozoa, echinoderms and the two coelenterate phyla ctenophora and cnidaria. None of these animals really have heads because they can generally move in any direction, so they lack a front and a back. They’re radially symmetrical, and in the case of echinoderms pentaradiately so. The echinoderms, such as sea urchins, starfish, crinoids and sea cucumbers, are a lot more complex than the others and it shows in their nervous systems. Echinoderm nervous systems can do a lot more than those of the others, where they have them. Unlike bivalves, echinoderms can regenerate body parts when they’re severed, and in fact the severed part can sometimes regenerate the rest of the body, depending on how close to the centre the part extends. Consequently it might be slightly less unethical to experiment on starfish in certain ways, I suppose.
Anyway, these experiments have been done and it can be seen that starfish have unusual nervous systems. Their sensory nerves hardly move from the outer layer they form in. Human nerves are also ectodermal in origin but mainly end up further inside the body. The oral surface has motor neurones concerned with moving the arms and deploying, pacing and lifting the tube feet, which are coordinated with each other across the whole surface. Arms can also curl up and down, and a starfish can pull open a bivalve in this way to feast on the flesh within, so they’re extremely strong. There’s a central ring at the base of the arms. Signals seem to be sent both locally and across the body, so they’re a mixture of a simple neural net and a more centralised arrangement like vertebrate nervous systems. Echinoderms are in fact related to vertebrates, which explains the similar chemical composition of their neurones. This as such may be significant.
Like bivalves, echinoderms may lack brains but they also lack the need to have them. Sea urchins burrow, crawl and create latrines in their burrows to keep excreta out of their way. I’ve long thought that tribbles are like sea urchins, even to the extent of consisting substantially of reproductive organs by proportion. The crinoids, who are flower-like and may have stalks, are probably the closest relatives of the chordates, the stalk having possibly been ancestral to the tail. Whereas this has no bearing on the sophistication of the nervous system, there may be a chemical affinity due to the relatedness and this, depending on your view of consciousness, could be significant, because there is a controversial theory of consciousness called orchestrated reduction.
Within the prefrontal cortex in humans are pyramidal neurones, within which are microtubules made of a protein called tubulin. These are substantially composed of amino acids containing heterocyclic rings oriented in particular directions, including tryptophan, tyrosine and phenylalanine. These rings are hexagonal arrangements of carbon atoms with alternating double and single electron bonds around the ring. One of the orbitals in these carbon atoms is a pi bond, i.e. a dumb bell shaped region of maximum probability of the electron’s rotation centred on the nucleus, and these are all lined up parallel to each other. This arrangement appears to be reliably disturbed by all general anaesthetics, i.e. anaesthetics which suspend consciousness, and for that reason some scientists and philosophers believe that this situation explains consciousness in a way which is linked to quantum phenomena. However, there are still problems with this. For instance, salva veritate is still impossible: this description, no matter how detailed, is clearly never going to be equivalent to a description of a conscious experience. They’re fundamentally different by nature. But suppose it is true. If so, perhaps consciousness can be confined to systems where this can occur. You may have noticed also that this description is incomplete. Other organs than nerves and brains also have microtubules, so the question arises of whether these are also conscious if this is true.
The mention of echinoderms brings up another point. So far, nervous systems are the only structures which have been considered, with the various characteristics mentioned earlier. However, nervous systems are not the only networks which can carry and process information, and echinoderm bodies contain another, unique, system which has that potential: the water vascular system. No other animals have this. It’s a system of tubes carrying fluid which can control the tube feet, move waste, food and respiratory gases around the body, in other words somewhat similar to the lymphatic and circulatory systems but different. Flow through the tubes is controlled by musculature. Just as a digital electric circuit or a nervous system can process and transmit information and signals, so can a water vascular system, in principle. The philosopher David Lewis, in his ‘Mad Pain And Martian Pain’, imagined two entities. One was a human whose pain was triggered by unusual stimuli, such as exercise on an empty stomach, and who found that pain made them concentrate on mathematics without showing the usual signs of pain such as wincing and writhing. The other was a “Martian” who had a water vascular system like that of a starfish and no nervous system, but on being injured would be liable to complain and avoid the damaging stimulus. Lewis claimed that both such entities would experience pain. For the purposes of this post, I want to focus on the second, as the first is more to do with establishing the existence of qualia, which is interesting but not entirely germane to matters here.
Just to make it clear, there is no claim that echinoderms do experience pain in this way. They have nervous systems and their water vascular systems don’t primarily function in that way. However, there are other organisms who do have other kinds of signalling and control systems rather than nervous systems, and I want to cover several here: certain plants, forests, fungi and bacteria.
Plants move, and not just through growing or the wind, and they respond to events happening to them and around them. I’ll start with the most obvious examples among the flowering plants: active insectivorous plants and the plant Mimosa pudica. The Venus Flytrap Dionaea muscipula is a classic example, whose traps only close after an object has touched one of the sensory hairs three times. I don’t actually know if this has to happen in quick succession, but it kind of means they can count up to three. Wikipedia says two, but I’ve heard three. This is an example of a plant doing arithmetic. The contact has to occur within about twenty seconds, so the plant can also time things. Moreover, the hairs have to be touched five times before digestion starts. It’s also claimed that thale cress converts less starch to glucose in darkness if it gets dark unusually early, but there are other possible explanations for this. Hence the Venus Flytrap is the interesting one here.
Mimosa pudica, the “Sensitive Plant”, is well-known for having leaves which collapse when touched, later recovering. I’m not sure it’s very good for the plant to do this a lot because I remember one dying after an enthusiastic class of pupils each tried it, but that may have been coincidence. Mimosas are in the bean family, like quite a few surprising plants such as broom, clover and laburnum. Like starfish, they have a local and a general reaction to being touched. They can just collapse individual leaves or the whole plant can “suffer”, although this may be more to do with the physical propagation of the vibrations than a whole plant signalling system. They’re sensitive to warmth as well as mechanical stimulation and as with animal nervous systems, the signal is transmitted as an action potential. In other words, Mimosa pudica is very close to having a nervous system and functionally speaking it basically has one.
Other rapidly-moving plants include the bladderworts and the waterwheel plant, all of which are carnivorous. Plants more generally also move more slowly than this, for instance opening and closing their flowers or moving their leaves at dawn and dusk. Some of the way we perceive plants as passive and stationary is based on how slowly they move, and this too could be seen as our bias. Just speaking on a personal level, and I don’t think I’m unusual here, if I haven’t watered a plant I’m concerned about, I feel thirsty out of sympathy and it really bothers me. Although this could simply be dismissed as silly, empathy is important generally and it seems good to extend it. I experienced a relationship with a pair of plants so intense recently it was like a companion animal – the Nepenthes pitcher plants I couldn’t take with me when I moved. Nepenthes are passively insectivorous, and in fact can even be herbivorous sometimes – they don’t move to capture insects but simply grow traps for them, like other pitcher plants. In a not very vegan move, under pressure from other people I bought two such plants a few years ago to keep the Drosophila (fruit flies) out of the kitchen. It worked quite well, and I imagine they generate a scent which attracts them. When I finally had to find them a new home, I’d grown very attached to them and it really felt like I was rehousing cats or some other placental mammals. I surprised myself, and it also bothered me somewhat because they were carnivorous and it felt like it was that which enabled me to bond with them.
This may all sound quite silly to you, but not only do I not think I’m unusual in feeling attached to house and garden plants, but on the larger scale of trees and forests I’m prepared to say this is actually how most people feel who are familiar with the countryside. Two incidents in particular spring to mind. One is the Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall, who was felled by two people on 28th September 2023, causing widespread outrage and mourning. The other is an incident in Sevenoaks after the Great Storm of autumn 1987 blew down some of the oaks associated with the town’s name. The saplings planted to replace them were chopped down by some “friends” of mine who “wanted to piss off the middle class people in the town”. I haven’t reported them, but their attitude generally sucked at the time and was also, I think, quite childish, and reflected the idea that the world was ours to modify regardless of what else might be living in it. I fully expect most other people to be equally irate about this, never mind their economic position, and I might even go so far as to say that this is an element of instinctive altruism, although of course it might be social and cultural conditioning. If it’s true that the working class were less concerned about the situation than the elite, this may not mean that it’s not present in there somewhere but has been blunted by trauma. I freely admit that I can’t justify this claim though.
Plants also communicate with each other by chemical means. In some species, if one of them happens to be infested with insects, it will send chemical signals through the air to others nearby to prepare them to defend themselves against their parasites more effectively by changing the chemicals they produce and poisoning those insects. In others, particularly trees, an old dying adult will transfer nutrients via an underground network of fungal mycelium to young seedlings, sacrificing its life for the sake of the offspring. This is a symbiotic relationship between individuals of two different kingdoms. For this reason, I do tend to attribute consciousness to plants but to entire communities rather than individuals. It also makes sense to eat fruit on this basis as we are the means whereby they distibute their seeds.
It seems quite poetic that a forest could have a mind, particularly considering the resemblance between trees and brain cells. The mixture of species may not be a barrier either because our own cells include long-since assimilated microbes who release energy from glucose for us, and therefore we are ourselves collective consciousnesses. Speaking of microorganisms, there’s another level on which consciousness might be thought to operate among those too. There’s a process known as quorum signalling or quorum sensing which takes place within colonies of bacteria similar to paracrine signalling in multicellular organisms, which is similar to how hormones are passed around the body but between cells not specialised to produce them and not always at a distance. For instance, during a bacterial infection individual organisms might send signals to each other to hold back on the absorption of particular nutrients so as not to starve the host, as it’s not usually in their interests to kill them. The situation also occurs outside the context of pathology, as in the formation of biofilms, a good example of which is dental plaque. These are close to being multicellular organisms themselves. I have to admit to not knowing a huge amount about quorum signalling but I am aware that it does occur outside the bacterial kingdom too, for instance in ant nests.
All this is quite interesting but it’s unclear how much this connects to the initial issue of whether any of this indicates consciousness or its active expression. All of these things are signalling and control systems where responses are provoked from external events. That may or may not mean consciousness, but it’s worth considering that we may ourselves be chauvinistic about brains. Maybe our own consciousness is not just based in our brains, but in our guts, glands and muscles, well beyond the bone box in our heads, and maybe beyond even our own bodies out into society and the whole of humanity.
I’m currently sitting on our favourite couch. It is in turn sitting in a room downstairs in our house in Scotland. We bought it in England and tried to get it up the stairs of our English house because our living room was upstairs there. We had enormous trouble getting it past the bends in the stairs and eventually I decided to measure the bend and the couch, so I measured the depth and height of the couch and then the three dimensions of which the bend consisted. Using the well known right angle triangle equation a²+b²=c² and taking the square root of c, I was able to calculate the hypotenuse of the couch. I then made the slightly more complex calculation of using the hypotenuse of the dimensions of the stair bend with the height of the ceiling above the stairs to work out the maximum length of an object which could be fitted through the gap, and since that second figure was smaller than c, I was able to prove, and I have to state this carefully to be precise, that the couch would not be able to fit into the space on the stair bend, and therefore it would be impossible to take it up the stairs and put it in our living room, so it remained downstairs. Now there could’ve been some other approaches, such as taking the feet off or the banisters down, but in fact both of those were part of the objects concerned and it wasn’t going to happen because I’m not Bernard Cribbins.
This is of course Pythagoras’s Theorem. People often say they never apply anything they learnt in maths to their lives after leaving school, leading me to conclude that either their lives are unnecessarily hard or that they don’t realise they’re using it, because this kind of problem comes up all the time in everyday adult life and I can only surmise that people think really strangely in this area. I scraped an O-level pass in maths and this is obvious to me. In fact I almost stayed in the CSE group and was the lowest grade person to go “up”. I should also mention that there is a famous Moving Sofa Problem in mathematics, but this isn’t that. The moving sofa problem is the question of which rigid two-dimensional shape of the largest area can be manoeuvred through an L-shaped planar region with legs of unit width. It didn’t help us because the stairs were three dimensional, i.e. they went up diagonally, turned through two ninety degree angles while continuing to ascend and the ceiling of the ground floor was in the way too. There migh be some couch-stair combinations which it could’ve been useful for, but not this one.
Most people know one thing about Pythagoras, and that’s that he’s responsible for Pythagoras’s Theorem that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the some of the squares on the other two sides of a right angled triangle. This also brings up the issue of the square root of two being irrational, i.e. not being expressible through a ratio, i.e. a fraction, because an isosceles right angled triangle with unit opposite and adjacent sides will have a hypotenuse length equivalent to the square root of two in units. As a child I thought this proved that units of measurement didn’t exist, but obviously that was my child’s mind failing to grasp things properly. The only thing is, Pythagoras probably didn’t think of his theorem. It’s more likely that in order to give it some kudos, people decided to attribute it to him, and it was known about before his time.
Unfortunately I don’t seem to be able to satisfactorily answer the question of whether Pythagoras existed. He may well not have done. I want to start by mentioning a few other figures: Nero was the Roman emperor who fiddled while Rome burned and rebuild the city in a much improved condition; George Washington was the guy who cut down the fruit tree as a boy and admitted to it, saying “I cannot tell a lie” and Archimedes was that bloke who got in the bath which overflowed, giving him the inspiration to tell whether a crown was solid gold, and shouted “Eureka!”, running down the street naked. Or maybe not. I haven’t checked these and they’re very likely to be just stories, and actually the question of whom we refer to when we tell stories like this is a modern philosophical problem. So Pythagoras, by the same token, was an ancient Greek philosopher who discovered something important about triangles, was vegetarian, wouldn’t eat beans and thought numbers were very important to the nature of reality. That’s probably more than most people “know” about him.
So I’m going to start with the question of whether he existed. At least three other important Greek men wrote about him and his life: Aristotle the philosopher, Herodotus the historian and Iamblichus the Neoplatonist philosopher. There was a whole school of philosophy named after him which he’s said to have founded, although that doesn’t mean he existed. That school of philosophy has a consistent belief system rather than just being arbitrary unconnected beliefs, so there is such a thing as a Pythagorean philosophy. However, no writings at all can be attributed to him because Pythagorean philosophy was an oral tradition. It was passed on by word of mouth long before it started to be written down, and this of course means it could’ve ended up being distorted even if he did exist. There was also a tendency in the Greco-Roman world for people to attribute ideas and quotes to people to make them seem more important and respectable than they would’ve been perceived as otherwise, rather like how lots of quotes today are attributed to Churchill and Einstein that they never said.
And the thing is, Pythagoras as he was understood in ancient Greek sounds absolutely bizarre. He had a thigh made of gold, was able to be in two places at once and could converse with non-human animals, and there were a few other things about him which were odd-sounding. He comes across as a kind of magical cult leader and demigod, perhaps a shaman or a sage rather than a philosopher. This partly reflects how philosophy was not neatly parcelled off from religion and spirituality as it is today, at least in academia, and what we separate today was actually considered together until at least the time of Newton. The difficulty, in fact, is similar to those of establishing the nature of the real Jesus and Socrates. So we’re in a situation where the one thing everyone thinks they know about him isn’t true and he was seen as some kind of superhero with incredible psychic powers. But in a way the question of whether he existed or not is the most boring thing about him. Everything I say about him from this point on has therefore to be attributed to some kind of possibly mythical or otherwise fictional figure rather than any real person called Pythagoras living in Ancient Greece.
He was seen as an expert on the soul. In Ancient Greek times before him, nobody thought there was a separate soul which survives death. This was more an Ancient Egyptian thing, and for all we know that’s where it originated. Because of this expertise, combined with his belief in reincarnation he was said to be able to remember his past lives. He once got someone to stop beating a dog because he recognised the cries as those of a dead friend reincarnated in the dog’s body. This is also why he was able to talk to members of other species. And whether or not he existed, there was clearly a cult based on his apparent beliefs, and this cult was also rather strange. They believed that the right shoe should always be taken off before the left one but that the left foot should always be washed before the right, that no-one should eat anything red, and they were seriously into numerology and vegetarianism. In fact, before the invention of the English word “vegetarian”, we were called “Pythagoreans”. They also included both women and men, which seems to have been unusual at the time. We may assume that the idea of an institution which admits women to be the exception back then but we don’t actually know. You also had to be silent for five years once you joined. Returning to the vegetarianism, although they did believe in it, justified through the idea of human souls being reincarnated in other forms, they also believed in sacrificing animals to deities. There’s even a story that Pythagoras was once seen eating chicken and replying to the objection that he was supposed to be veggie and not eat live animals by saying that the animal he was eating was dead, and this makes me wonder if they were actually vegetarian or simply sacrificing animals so they could eat them. Even so, many veggies do have stories like that made up about them, and most surviving records about Pythagoras are about criticising him and his followers or lauding him and them. There isn’t much attempting to be objective. Incidentally, although he had a religious cult of his own, he still worshipped the Greek deities of the time and what they did was “extra”: it was still dodekatheism, as it’s known nowadays, but a kind of denomination of it rather than a separate religion.
Pythagoras was of course into maths, which he combined with numerology because at the time there was no distinction. He seems to have been the first person to connect mathematics to an attempt to explain the world. This particular notion has been extremely influential. Even today, a hard science has to include maths to be taken seriously. One of the reasons psychology emphasises statistics so heavily is that it wants to be a “proper” natural science. However, the way Pythagoreans approached maths and its relationship to the physical world back then seems quite different to how they’re approached now. For instance, even numbers were considered female and odd numbers male, and since the number 1 wasn’t considered a number at all because it didn’t have a beginning and an end, five was considered the number of marriage, as it was the union of the first female number with the first male number. The number seven was considered sacred because, being prime, nothing could make it up and it could make up nothing. Two was considered the number of justice because it enabled things to be divided equally into two halves. Three was considered to sum up the whole Universe as it was the first number to have a beginning, middle and end. He also discovered triangular numbers. The number three was considered to represent a human being, and was of course male, representing the threefold virtues of prudence, good fortune and drive. That almost sounds like it’s out of a contemporary self-help book.
Although the links Pythagoras made between numbers and the Universe were peculiar, he also connected geometry and arithmetic more thoroughly than his predecessors, because of the hypotenuse connection with the square root of 2, and because of his theorem, although that had been known to the Babylonians. He was the first person to come up with a method for constructing a dodecahedron, and connected many shapes to the Cosmos, bringing me to what ought to be the most famous thing he was known for: he was the first person to claim Earth was round. Remarkably, although this has turned out to be incorrect, his reasoning had no connection to any observations because science wasn’t there yet. In addition to that, he came up with the idea that Earth and other planets moved in orbits, although oddly not around the Sun but a central fire, and also that there was a counter-Earth, required to make up the numbers in the system. There are convoluted reasons for all this.
This initially peculiar link between the Universe and mathematics, once forged, has stayed ever since and may not in fact be as obvious as it seems. I have suggested before that one solution to the Fermi Paradox (“where are all the aliens?”) might be that they’re all really bad at maths compared to humans, but another solution may be that although they’re perfectly good at maths, they never had a Pythagoras to make a link between the two and it’s never occurred to them to apply maths in this way. Hence their science is still Babylonian in nature, or even less like Western European science than that. They never got any further. If that’s true, it makes Pythagoras, even if he never existed, an incredibly important figure.
Another aspect of all this is that we can look back from our own “rational” viewpoint and poo-poo the idea that he was an ancient Doctor Dolittle, could be in two places at once and remember past lives, when actually maybe he could do all of that and it’s our own restrictive mind sets which have stopped that from happening. This doesn’t sound sane, but when we consider what many Christians believe about Jesus it becomes more a case of us simply having decided that one ancient semi-mythical person has such attributes rather than the other. It only sounds crazy today because we chose to retain the deification of Christ rather than Pythagoras, which could be seen as practically a coin-toss. There is a world not far from here where many millions of people still believe Pythagoras had something in common with C3PO.
Another numerological aspect of Pythagoreanism was that nobody should gather in groups of more than ten because the number ten was 1+2+3+4, so ten in particular was a sacred number to them. This extended to them composing prayers to that number, and I find this interesting because it creates a link between mathematical entities and deities and other spirits. Platonism and intuitionism are two opposing views of maths. Intuitionism holds that humans invent maths as we go along, i.e. it’s a creation of the mind just like a poem might be, whereas Platonism holds that maths is discovered. It’s already out there before we get to it. So for example, there are considered to be eight planets in this solar system. Assuming there are no others, there were also eight planets when the first trilobites appeared 521 million years ago. In fact, at that point there was a number representing the global population of trilobites, as there still is today: zero. So does that mean that the number eight exists independently of human consciousness or, more precisely, the ability to count? I have a strongly atheist friend who is also a Platonist, and she acknowledges that it’s an odd position to be in. The Ontological Argument for God tries to bootstrap God into existence from the concept of God, and this perhaps reflects the notion that God exists as a concept in a more objective manner than an atheist or agnostic would usually be expected to think. The concept of God is “out there” in the Cosmos in some way, and maybe in the same way as maths is said to be by Platonists. But this, well, I’m going to have to use the word “idea” at some point, of deities existing abstractly is usually considered separately nowadays from the idea that squares or numbers exist. We have a partition in our thoughts which Pythagoreans had yet to erect.
This can be directed back on Pythagoras. Clearly the idea of Pythagoras does exist, although it seems to have varied. We have Pythagoras as the triangle guy and the first person to suggest that the world is round, although actually that might’ve been one of his successors. But Pythagoras himself may not have existed in the same sense that Elizabeth I of England did, and as such this accords quite well with the general attitudes of the time and the problems of ancient history. Also, back at that time and place, the Greeks seem to have taken their religion quite literally so for them Zeus was as real as Pythagoras whether or not we think of him as real.
On consideration though, I do think he existed in the way we generally understand existence today, i.e. not just as an abstract or mythological entity. The reason for this is that his cult existed and was quite forceful and distinct in nature. It seems to me that a requirement for a large group of people to avoid speaking for five years and never to eat beans sounds like the kind of thing a charismatic leader would get their followers to do, and it really sounds like cultish behaviour by today’s standards. It makes cults seem like constant fixtures in human life rather than phenomena characteristic of the modern world. This is probably not terribly surprising, but maybe this assumes too much, because it might be that cults with leaders are more recent developments connected to individualism and a tendency for people to seek complete answers to life’s problems. I haven’t checked, but I don’t think the Essenes had a founder or leaders.
Here’s the weird bit though. As I’ve said before, although Pythagoreans seem to have been the first people to link maths and science, from today’s perspective they seem to have come up with a list of arbitrary superstitions and ideas without a thorough connection to reality. But despite this, somehow they were able to assert the correct idea that the world is round, which to us seems to depend on observation rather than philosophical or mathematical abstraction. Nobody seems to have had that idea before. Later Greek philosophers came up with ways of testing this and measuring Earth’s size, but it wasn’t those careful tests which led to the initial thought. What are we to make of this? Maybe the idea crept in from somewhere else.
We still have the metric system. Does that maybe represent a similar superstition about numbers? We happen to have ten digits on our hands and it’s led to us producing a system which is easier to use than imperial because of how we count, but are we also partaking of Pythagorean mysticism there? We’ve put that into the box of rationality, but maybe it’s more to do with custom. Also it seems that the real mystery is how maths actually manages to engage with the world at all. Why would this be?
The other day I was replying to a comment by one of my faithful and much-appreciated readers when my finger slipped and I accidentally classed it as spam and deleted it. It was a good response of his though, and I wanted to reply to it properly here.
He should feel free to re-present the comment and his opinion here because I may be misrepresenting it, but as I understand it, he’s no longer veggie because he became aware of the constant carnage between non-human animals in the wild, and concluded that vegetarianism was a pointless gesture, and also questioned the value of replacing leather. Just regarding the second, this may have been on another blog but I wrestled with this question some years ago in response to someone else’s (Organised Pauper in case you’re interested) question and was unfortunately unable to answer it satisfactorily, mainly because as well as answering the question itself I also went into the metaethics of it, which are significant as will shortly become apparent here too, and their response was “I can’t wear theory on my feet”, which was an inspired rejoinder I thought. At the same time there were some misconceptions about electric vehicles I wanted to clear up.
Vegetarian and VeganDiets
Firstly, I haven’t looked at the figures and I will, but right now I agree that it’s very likely that the number of non-human animals killing other animals and eating them, or even not eating them, dwarfs the number of animals humans kill, even including other humans. When you consider, for example, whales eating krill, the maths can be done. A single blue whale eats sixteen tons of krill a day and an individual krill weighs about a gramme, so that’s sixteen million individuals a day. Blue whales live eighty years or more, so that’s around 460 thousand million (I’ll talk about the long and short scales at some point soon) krill in each blue whale’s lifetime. The world population of blue whales is at least ten thousand, so 160 thousand million krill are eaten just by blue whales every day, and blue whales are just one species of baleen whale. There are nine species of rorqual, the family of whales they belong to. The most common such whale, who is quite small, is the minke, of whom there are half a million individuals. If they get through the same numbers of krill as blues, and they also eat other animals such as fish and copepods, that’s eight billion of them every day, which is a thousand times the human population of the planet, and that’s just whales and krill, although it’s probably an overestimate.
By contrast, how many animals are deliberately killed by humans each day? Excluding fish, this has been estimated at 200 million. The number of fish could be in the thousands of millions. Compared to that, the numbers of crustaceans and molluscs is quite small at only twelve million every day. However, there are countless accidental deaths, and with those I’m guessing the majority are actually roundworms getting eaten and crushed to death incidentally, and vegans probably do that too. In fact, well, I’ll give you an example from many decades ago. In the early 1990s CE, I bought some mushrooms from a greengrocer and chopped up, cooked and ate half of them. The rest I left in the fridge until the day after, when I took them out and found they were crawling with maggots, so I put them in the compost. Therefore I ate quite a few baby flies. Not a good outcome, but it probably happens all the time.
So you might think this makes veganism futile. What it does do, for me, is lead to me not judging others for their dietary choices, because in terms of individual members of the animal kingdom, the number of animals whose death and suffering we’re party to is minute compared to the everyday functioning of the food chain. Well, I say I don’t judge, but the situation is complicated by the damage done by animal farming more widely, but leaving that aside, I’ve come across a lot of vegans online recently who really do seem to be quite fiercely condemnatory of carnists. This may be the result of what being online does to people. In daily life, vegans I know face to face usually seem perfectly polite and peaceful.
Why then does it make no difference to me that the number of animals I caused suffering and death to by providing a market or a mouth for their products is tiny compared to what’s going on all the time between other animals? Because for me, veganism is not about what others do but what I do and can avoid. The chain of cause and effect flows through me and that’s what I can do something about. I don’t have to eat animal products and it isn’t even difficult for me not to do so provided one ignores things like dead insects in food and so on, which again are not part of my intention and are very difficult to avoid. Incidentally, I don’t mean the likes of shellac, as found in a lot of food products.
Each individual conscious being is basically an entire universe, so destroying it destroys an entire universe. This means that the numbers game is unimportant in some sense. If I do or fail to do something which results in an individual animal being killed, that act has very negative consequences, and the fact that there are other processes not under control of the will is not relevant to this. Unlike some vegans, I’m not utilitarian. Just in case this is something people don’t know, utilitarianism in its basic form is that actions are right in proportion to the extent that they produce the greatest happiness to the greatest number, and it sounds right of course but there are big problems with it. However, because Peter Singer, who is one of the most influential philosophers for veganism, is utilitarian, many vegans are also. I had a go at fixing utilitarianism, kind of, in my undergraduate dissertation, but it probably isn’t fixable. My view was that if you turned it into negative utilitarianism (minimising suffering rather than maximising happiness), included some other consequences than suffering and went for a modal measure of central tendency rather than what’s often taken to be the mean, the form of consequentialism that results is a lot more practical. Even so, it still doesn’t work. Death needs to be included because instant painless death alone which is never discovered is not a bad thing according to strict utilitarianism, and it also doesn’t include justice. My own ethics centres duty to others, and this is why I don’t consider the carnage of the ecosystem to be relevant. The point is what I owe other conscious entities. Because I wrote a dissertation on this, I’m tempted to go into more depth, but it would be a tangent.
Leather
The comment made a couple of statements I’d take serious issue with. One is that leather, and I would extend that to other animal products such as food additives or jewellery made from feathers although leather occupies a special position because it’s used for footwear, which is more important in some ways than other items, although it’s also good if something is hard-wearing because it reduces the inevitable damage to the environment, which consists of living entities, caused by manufacturing. So all of this needs to be taken into consideration when making a decision about leather. It’s also the case that because leather is durable, it often occurs second-hand and may continue in use after someone has gone vegetarian or vegan unless they give it away or sell it. I used to have a razor strop from my grandfather, which come to think of it was probably bought in Glasgow in Edwardian times, and used it long after I went vegan, mainly to increase the useful lifetime of razor blades. Some vegans either sell or give away their leather goods because that way it’s likely to reduce the consumption of new leather, although the chances of someone getting a new razor strop nowadays are probably quite small. So there’s that.
Leather is sometimes seen as a by-product of the beef and dairy industry. The foot-and-mouth crisis seems to have brought down the price of the product due to all the dead nameless animals, making a more vivid connection between slaughter and leather. I haven’t broken down the prices, but leather is expensive compared to beef and dairy, although the supply of the latter is over a long period of time. It isn’t clear which can be regarded as a by-product due to this. It probably doesn’t need saying that animal farming has a huge carbon footprint. There’s also cordwain, equine leather, which is, I hope, taken from horses who have died in the usual course of events rather than having been slaughtered. As well as that, I do wonder if on a relatively small scale leather could be made from road kill, which would presumably be much more of a cottage industry or perhaps part of self-sufficiency.
This is of course my second go at this topic, and my first go got bogged down in metaethics. They are supremely relevant to this issue as they strongly influence how one accounts for the moral significance of the materials used, and I’m going to adopt a fairly bad-faith approach here because my own metaethics are rather exotic. I’m just going to say that I’m going to include intentional use of animal products causing inevitable suffering and death to the animals as the central issue, with a crude measure of how many deaths and how much suffering results. I do agree that it isn’t exactly obvious what works best, but I want to assert in advance that there are still very good ethical reasons not to use new leather from an intentional supplier involved in animal abuse.
The first thing to consider is the environmental impact of leather itself. Leather is not a “natural” product. There was a time when it was, but this is no longer so. To spell out what this means, leather is not simply a biological material. In the past it used to be animal hide whose proteins had been coagulated by tannins, but like many other processes the chemicals used to manufacture and prepare leather are now radically different from in the past, what are known as “xenobiotics”. I should point out that I reject the distinction between natural and unnatural as meaningless or useless. It isn’t a case of there being the plasticky stuff on the one hand which damages the environment, although of course it does, and the stuff off the backs of ruminants which doesn’t. In fact, even if the manufacture of leather didn’t cause any other problems and also ignoring the vegan angle, the sheer fact of its source makes it problematic because Brazil is a major producer of leather, from animals reared on ex-rainforest land. Bovines in (English, bizarrely, lacks a generic word for these animals!) are particularly wasteful, taking up twenty-two times as much area as food from crops on average, pigs, sheep and goats all being far more efficient. It is of course possible to use other sources for leather, but bovine leather is by far the most common.
Then there’s the tanning process. In the past, tannins were used, sourced from plants. As a herbalist, I’m exceedingly familiar with tannins. These have now been replaced by chromium (II) and (III) sulphate. Chromium (III) sulphate is a corrosive agent classified as an environmental hazard. It does actually occur as the minerals bentorite (not to be confused with bentonite) and putnisite. Chromium (II) sulphate is synthesised by the action of sulphuric acid on chromium metal. Whichever is used, the chromium can become hexavalent, which is the carcinogenic form, if heated. In the absence of chrome-based agents, “syntans” replace the phytochemicals once used, such as aldehydes, which are polluting. All methods can consume oxygen in water when disposed of, which is harmful to aquatic life and also increases the risk of algal blooms, which are often toxic to terrestrial animals such as ourselves. There was an incident in Argentina recently where hair and unusable offcuts were being dumped in a nearby stream along with the chromium salts and aniline dye which turned the water blood red. Aniline dyes are probably carcinogenic to humans and does in fact cause human bladder cancer. They’re also toxic when absorbed through the skin, ingested or inhaled.
The other chemicals used include lime, formic acid, caustic soda, bicarbonate of soda (obviously something we’re familiar with and relatively innocuous to us), fungicides, biocides, magnesium oxide, sulphuric acid, ammonium sulphate and chloride, and others. Vegetable tanned leather still exists, but is expensive and less resistant to damage when folded than synthetically tanned leather, and is mainly used for luggage, furniture, footwear and belts.
It’s fairly clear, then, that leather, even if tanned using tannins, which it usually isn’t, is not an environmentally friendly product due to deforestation and the damage done by the substances involved. What are the other options?
If you’re talking of direct leather substitutes, i.e. hardwearing sheets of flexible waterproof breathable material, off the top of my head I’m aware of mushroom leather, polyurethane, PVC and cork. The leather replacement I considered when I was thinking of living in an Airstream has a luxurious quality and is tougher and more breathable than real leather as well as being more flexible. It’s made of polyurethane with a foam backing. Artificial leather can also be made from yeast or bacteria. However, I’m going to talk about the worst other option first: PVC.
PVC is no longer as popular as it used to be, having been largely replaced by polyurethane. It’s made from fossil fuel. That is, as it stands it’s made from the chemicals derived from mineral oil, but as I’ve said before this doesn’t have to be from that source but can be made using the same process as biodiesel, though this isn’t necessarily good because it tends to drive up the price of oil crops and therefore food, and one obvious source is palm oil. Others are soya and canola, neither of which are particularly environmentally friendly. This isn’t the big, distinctive problem with PVC though. It’s been said that possibly the biggest error made in the history of industrial chemistry was the decision to combine organic compounds with chlorine. Chlorinated biochemical compounds do exist, for instance chloromethane, produced by phytoplankton and fungi along with the occasional plant to the order of four million tons a year. Ochratoxin A is a chlorinated toxin produced by the very common Penicillium and Aspergillus moulds. Vancomycin is an antibiotic produced by the bacterium Streptomyces. There are others, but they’re unusual among biochemicals because they’re reactive, tend to be toxic and require complex pathways to synthesise which are unlikely to evolve due to the number of steps involved and the energy required. Chlorinated compounds also tend to be unstable in water. There are some organisms who can break manufactured chlorinated compounds down too, but again it’s unusual.
PVC is considered the most environmentally harmful plastic. Although it has a triangle symbol on it for recycling, “3”, that exists to indicate that it can’t be recycled and not so it can be sorted for recycling itself. Although it technically can be recycled, in practice it’s complicated due to the many additives it usually has. Its production involves the notorious dioxin, of which it’s the largest source world-wide. It’s a hormone disruptor, carcinogen and damages the immune system. The soft form, used as a leather substitute, uses phthalate esters, and again almost all of these are used in PVC and are endocrine disruptors. Vinyl chloride, the monomer from which PVC is made, is carcinogenic and causes a scleroderma-like condition called vinyl chloride disease. PVC is also a source of microplastics. Environmentally, PVC is a terrible option for replacing leather. I do have something else to say about this though, which I’ll leave until after covering the other options.
Somewhat better than PVC is PU, or polyurethane. I do actually use polyurethane myself. For instance, I have a skirt made of it and I think all my boots are probably made of it, so we’re moving into the realm of rationalisation and cognitive dissonance. Polyurethane is again made from fossil fuels and doesn’t have to be, just like PVC. However, it lacks many of the other’s drawbacks. PU is more durable than many of the substances it replaces, it isn’t an endocrine disruptor, doesn’t alter the pH of soil or water and it can be recycled. Outside the function of leather replacement, it can be 3-D printed because it’s a thermoplastic. Just briefly, there are two broad types of plastic: thermoplastics, which melt and re-solidify without any chemical reactions, and thermosetting resins, which decompose into usually (or maybe always) toxic compounds on heating. PU is made from polyols and diisocyanates, both of which are produced biochemically, it uses less energy to make than PVC and it’s also non-toxic. However, as it stands it is made from fossil fuels, although it needn’t be.
Botanol is another option. It’s a floor covering made of ninety percent fixed vegetable oils and chalks, and is designed as a more environmentally friendly alternative to PU. As far as I can tell, it’s never been used to make footwear or clothing, or even upholstery, so I’ll move on.
Mushroom leather intrigues me. It makes me think of the tougher bracket fungi, which are certainly leathery although they may not last. However, it’s made from mycelium, the network of subterranean fibres of which mushrooms and toadstools are the mere fruiting bodies. As this network becomes denser, it’s possible to compress it into a leather-like material, which is biodegradable and compostable at the end of its life. It can also be grown on organic waste. However, I’ve come across claims that it contains plastic, and because it’s currently only manufactured on a small scale it’s currently quite expensive. A handbag made from it costs £2000 and Lululemon do a Yoga mat which seems to be out of stock but considering it’s them is probably ridiculously expensive, and of course entirely foreign to the spirit of Yoga like everything else they make. It’s called Mylo, but unfortunately seems to have been turned into some high-end poserish thing, so that’s rubbish, but at some point it might become promising. I have a sneaky feeling it’s overhyped and is going to turn out to be problematic in some way but that’s not a good thing to rely upon.
Another option is Piñatex, which is made from pineapple leaves and polylactic acid. Not all lactic acid is from dairy, incidentally, and obviously if it were this would make the material pointless environmentally and ethically so that’s just as well. Polylactic acid (PLA) has been used to make bics in the past, which I used to use although now I mainly use fountain pens on the basis that it involves less consumption, particularly if you have one with a bladder rather than cartridges (mine is currently mislaid so I am using cartridges). PLA is, well I was going to say a very plastic-like material but in fact it is plastic. It’s like a chewy version of ABS, the stuff lego bricks are made of, and of course my pens ended up with toothmarks all over them. In this case, piñatex is made from waste leaves from pineapple plants, whereof forty thousand tons are thrown away or incinerated per annum. PLA is made from corn starch. However, the substance is coated in a plastic resin, which rather detracts from its environmental friendliness. It’s also not biodegradable and the UN concluded that it wouldn’t reduce the amount of microplastics entering the environment.
One quite promising option is cork leather. Cork oaks can be used for up to five centuries to provide the substance, which is then dried for six months and compressed before being bonded to a fabric backing such as cotton or linen. No harmful chemicals are used in its production and cork forests are net carbon sinks, absorbing fourteen tons of carbon dioxide per hectare. The material is flame-proof and waterproof and doesn’t absorb dust, although it isn’t as tough as animal leather. On the other hand, it may not need to be from an environmental perspective because it is so much more environmentally friendly than real leather. It’s biodegradable. Nor is it necessary to ring-bark the tree to gather it – it’s not “mined”, unlike many tree bark products. It arose due to the decline in the use of corks for wine bottles. It’s lighter than real leather too, stain-resistant and so on. The durability is similar to that of PVC, and apparently it cracks more easily when being worked with. On the other hand, it can be cleaned with soap and water, unlike leather.
Other plant-based options include coconut and cactus leather. At this point I feel like I’m embarking on a massive long list, so I’m going to summarise. It might be thought that the former is made from coir, and on reflection it’s almost certainly possible to do that, but in fact it’s made from coconut water. This has bacteria grow on it to produce cellulose, which is then mixed with gum or banana fibres. Cactus leather is made from the prickly pear and has the obvious advantage of not needing much water to produce it since the plant acquires moisture from the dew via its stomata. It isn’t entirely biological because plastic is used in its production although it is biodegradable and the cacti, being an invasive species, don’t require pesticides or fertiliser. Apple leather involves either purée combined with PU or a powder combined with polyester, so neither of those methods seem to have much advantage over the likes of just using polyurethane, and polyester in particular is a major source of microplastics. Other options include grape vines, agave, olive and coffee.
Leaving aside all of this, I have historically preferred canvas shoes to anything resembling leather although it isn’t very waterproof. I seem to remember owning a pair of trainers once which were made from hemp-based plastic in some way. There’s also some controversy about whether to continue using leather products after either going vegan or if they’re second hand. On the one hand, most of the damage has already been done, but on the other people may otherwise go out and buy leather goods new if it isn’t available second hand or as a hand-me-down. There are also two other big problems. One is that wearing leather opens one to criticism from strangers or acquaintances that one is still using animal products, and to that end I have an anecdote to relate. In the 1980s I was demonstrating with some friends outside a fur show, and we’d made a point of not wearing anything derived from animal products to avoid this criticism, and someone attending the show walked past us as they left and without looking at us said “well you’re wearing leather shoes”! This was absolutely not the case of course. Wearing leather might also encourage other people to do the same. I knew someone who was very impressed by the fact that I’d managed to find a pair of boots which fit me because she had very large feet too. It so happened that I had only succeeded in getting them by about two years of constant trawling of charity shops, but if they’d been new that could have led to her buying new leather, and the fact that they were second-hand didn’t help. In fact I get most of my shoes from a special supplier because they’re both vegan and unusually large, and this means I seldom buy new shoes.
The other problem is of course fetishism. It seems extremely unfair to deny leather fetishists their pleasure and could amount to kink-shaming if you’re not careful. Not being one myself, I don’t know if they would be prepared to give up leather for other options or whether the material has certain irreplaceable qualities which cannot be fairly mimicked by the rest of what’s on my list. The same, actually, applies to one of those already, namely PVC, because this is another common and separate fetish. I feel very much inclined to cut leather fetishists an enormous amount of slack here. I imagine that everyone who’s into leather sexually is unique, and that some would be happy to replace it and others wouldn’t, and the same goes for PVC.
This, then, is my conclusion: leather is in itself not environmentally friendly and its production kills more animals, as do most industrial processes, but as it’s made today it’s pretty bad already. Of the possible replacements for leather, some are just as bad but many are better and some are almost entirely benign. Animal agriculture as such is inherently harmful to the environment and although some measures can be taken to lighten this burden, the fact remains that even leaving veganism aside, it’s a very bad idea. Ironically, the most humane form of animal consumption is probably whaling, which is strange because environmentalists have historically been more strongly opposed to that than other kinds. That doesn’t mean it’s okay by the way: it still involves mass murder. However, in terms of the number of deaths caused per calorie, killing a blue whale for food is about a hundred times less harmful than eating beef, and the animal hasn’t been farmed either. This applies more directly to the pilot whale slaughter in the Faroes, which is again less harmful than animal farming. I’m not saying this in support of these activities but to point out that the shock many people feel about these activities and the cliché “save the whale” needs to have its place in opposition to animal agriculture too. I’m also ignoring other environmental aspects of whaling.
The other bit then:
Electric Vehicles
The first thing to say about this is that right now, having an electric vehicle is a privilege not everyone can afford. It can also mean a bump in the use of petrol vehicles which are past their best in terms of efficiency and emissions, because it isn’t like the old one stops being used unless it’s scrapped. However, this would also happen if you kept that vehicle. There’s also a wider context. Anyone who can should be walking, cycling or taking public transport, though these require circumstances friendly to doing so, and there can be all sorts of reasons why this is unfeasible due to personal situations. Another aspect to this, which I don’t seem to see people focus on very much, is that to some extent taxis and jinrickshaws are often environmentally better, because rather than driving to a town to do something and then driving all over that place, one could take the train and then take taxis more locally. It also seems that over most of the world, it’s very common to use mopeds, although of course there are electric motorbikes and I presume scooters. What I’m saying, basically, is that an electric car is very much a privilege.
What follows is a highly impressionistic and subjective portrayal of my experience travelling in an electric vehicle to visit our grandchildren in England from Scotland and back. It isn’t the well-researched or informed opinion of an experienced motorist. I can’t drive and to me a car is a metal box on wheels which usually looks the same as all the others and I know very little of their inner workings. There is a place for more considered analysis, and unfortunately that place is probably here, but I haven’t done that. Yet. But for what it’s worth, here’s my experience.
Most countries have a single standard mains power outlet for domestic appliances, with some exceptions such as Japan, and in these isles we’ve had the round pin sockets followed by the very long-lived 13 amp square pin ones, and more recently integrated USB connectors. I don’t know about petrol pumps but I imagine the situation is that diesel and petrol nozzles are different to prevent the wrong fuel being put into the wrong vehicle and that there might be some provision for red diesel, but on the whole if you have a petrol car, you simply stick the same hose in without issues. This is the degree of my ignorance about the situation. This does not apply to EVs. EVs currently have different connectors for different standards. This will presumably settle down at some point, but right now there’s no guarantee that a public charging point will be compatible with a particular vehicle, and the next suitable point may be many kilometres away. There may have been a similar situation in the past with other tech. Recently in fact, I had to get a proprietary power supply for a PC because it didn’t use either a USB or a “kettle” socket, so it still happens domestically.
Another problem is caused by apps. Many charging points want you to download these so the company can benefit from your metadata, but this requires a sufficiently charged smartphone and a good signal. The charging station may also require a good signal for payment.
All of that, then, is not good, and follows a pattern which fits in with the rest of the economy as it “works” nowadays. There’s little direct benefit to the consumer to have an app and the only indirect benefit it might offer is if the customer happens to need, as opposed to want, anything on the targetted ads, at least as far as I can perceive it. However, it’s more likely to be to their disadvantage because advertised items are not selling themselves and to me that suggests there’s a good reason not to buy them.
When we entered County Durham, we found that most chargers were in use with a queue, not compatible, broken, seemed to require an app or were inaccessible. By the last, I mean that they were temporarily or permanently (it’s hard to tell) out of action, perhaps being upgraded for more general use. I did think that the issue was population density, but on checking County Durham is around ten times as densely populated as Dumfries and Galloway, so that’s really not it. We’ve never had a problem here. In the past few years, Scotland had one of the highest densities of public car chargers in the world although I think this has now changed. My current impression is that on this island there’s a belt of poor provision in the north of England which I’m guessing is not the case in the south of that country due to the very high population density in that part of northwestern Europe. We just generally have the impression that Scotland is simply more committed to EVs. I should also mention that the number of domestic charging points is much higher and may become a standard for new build housing in the near future if it hasn’t already. There are literally millions. Besides that, there’s the “granny charger” for plugging into a 13 amp socket, but this is apparently not good for the lifetime of the batteries.
I don’t want to give the impression that an EV is some magical environmental solution. An immediately obvious problem with them is their use of lithium ion batteries rather than sodium. It is true that they currently have higher energy density, which is the amount of energy stored per volume, and is incidentally not the same as specific energy, or energy stored per mass. This last distinction is important for various reasons, not the least of which is that hydrogen has very high specific energy but because it’s the lightest gas its energy density is very low indeed. I’ve probably talked about hydrogen on here before. Lithium is of course the lightest element solid at room temperature and sea level, whereas sodium, although still lighter than water, is quite a bit denser than lithium and also has lower energy density than the lighter metal, so it does seem to make sense to use lithium ion batteries rather than sodium ones in vehicles, which need to be light and have good energy density. All that said, sodium is plentiful in sea water and salt flats and deposits, unlike lithium which is for some reason quite rare despite being early in the periodic table. Concentrated lithium deposits tend to be local and quite widely separated from each other, meaning that reliable supply routes to the sources are hard to maintain and energetically costly. Just as we currently do in the West with Sa`udi Arabia, it pays to maintain good relationships with régimes we probably shouldn’t if they can supply us with lithium. Sodium batteries would be good for areas where there’s easy access to sea water, salt flats or salt deposits, and that includes places where people live near water, which is often the case. The other places might need to rely more on lithium because that’s where the lithium is, although a lot of lithium is actually in salt flats. The problem is largely related to processes in stars which use lithium, and also beryllium and boron, as building blocks for heavier elements.
Charging anxiety (there’s probably a more widely-used term for this) is a significant issue although again it’s not that simple. I’d be interested in knowing if this interferes with concentration while driving and therefore safety. If it does, there’s a safety-based case for more and friendlier well-maintained chargers but it isn’t an argument against EVs per se except on an individual level. The only reason this doesn’t happen with petrol is that there are plenty of pumps and no apps prominently associated with them. It isn’t a fair comparison. It is, though, not accurate to say that electric vehicles are new technology because they’ve existed since 1827, which is a somewhat misleading date because those were small models. The earliest vehicle able to carry a person was a tricycle, invented in 1881. We all know about forklift trucks and milk floats, although of course the research and development was much more limited than that funded by the fossil fuel industry.
The environmental impact of manufacture and use of EVs cradle to grave and otherwise is of course significant. They’re lumps of metal with wheels, tyres and upholstery, resembling to some extent an automatic petrol-driven vehicle, and environmental considerations apply equally to all these aspects regardless of how a vehicle is powered. For instance, twenty-eight percent of microplastics are from tyres at six million tons annually. Although this is only one of several aspects of vehicles of this type more generally, it’s worth zooming in on a bit as a problem shared equally between EVs and fossil fuel vehicles. Tyres contain zinc oxide, which is highly toxic to aquatic life even in small amounts. Due to the weight of their batteries, EVs of the same size as the more conventional vehicles are also heavier, thereby producing more wear on their tyres and more microplastic shedding. Tyre particles are also a somewhat unknown quantity as they’re shed differently than, for instance, polyester from fabric or microparticles from paint, another major source of plastic pollution, and the research has not been done on them. Plant-based rubber constitutes only a fifth of a tyre nowadays though. So we’re definitely not out of the woods yet and the impact is definitely not entirely benign. In fact, electric vehicles are probably worse than petrol ones of the same size in this respect. And cars are also painted, which is another source of microplastics. EVs do not have halos.
All that said, EVs are simpler and easier to maintain. Less can go wrong with them. There’s no gearbox, no cylinders, no carburettor, no exhaust, meaning that they consume less energy and material resources during their lifetime in that particular way. The question of electricity versus combustible fuels such as biodiesel and gasohol, or for that matter hydrogen, is complicated by the way generation is happening, and like the lithium issue, how far away it is. In the case of hydrogen, the situation can be quite similar because it’s more like a way of transporting and storing energy than releasing it. Fossil fuels are stored solar energy and the same applies to rechargeable batteries, and the parallel is more similar if the electricity to recharge an EV is from oil- or gas-fired power stations. As far as I can tell, although there might be different spins on this the only difference in emissions between a petrol vehicle and an EV recharged by the dirtier power stations is that they’re happening in different places. They’d still be doing the same damage. Unless an EV is charged using renewable power sources, it seems a bit pointless. Moveover, power is lost to heat as it’s carried over wires to the point of consumption, so microgeneration and EV charging go well together. Locally generated energy from solar panels or wind power directly feeding a car battery are the way forward.
Thanks to the money we’ve managed to acquire, this is what we’ve done, but this is an individualistic solution, a personal one. We’re very happy to have the privilege to opt for this, but it isn’t as good as a more widely social solution. Here in Scotland, we have this to some extent, for instance with renewable power sources and public transport which is free for wider sections of the population than in England. There is of course also room for improvement. In some other places, lack of money means not only do you not have much choice but to rely on dirty energy but also you may be experiencing particularly starkly the paradoxical fact that poverty is expensive – card meters. Your transport options might be very limited indeed – unaffordable trains, discontinued bus services, no trams at all most of the time. Bikes might be an option, but I say that from a position of privilege so maybe there are problems with those too.
In closing, I need to point out that the final part of this post was not well-researched but was put together while we were experiencing the hassle of attempting to get to and across the West Riding. If we’d been more experienced, maybe we could’ve found a better route or been more aware of our options. It does, however, reflect the fact that a nationalised and standardised infrastructure not based on the profit motive would work better and also support the economy. If people are having to travel to and from work in expensive public transport rather than subsidised, they have less disposable income and less money circulates among ordinary people.
Finally, I want to relate an experience we had early in our relationship when we were in the habit of going barefoot. For very practical reasons, the closer one is to the ground, the more likely one is to come to harm. Wearing shoes protects you from the broken glass and dog poo, riding a bike gets you out of trouble more quickly (think of the liberating effect it had for women in the nineteenth century) and driving a car, particularly a 4×4, protects the motorist at the expense of pedestrians. This may be connected to why I don’t fear flying. I do, however, feel very guilty about flying.
Last Thursday, the Metropolitan police broke into Westminster Friends’ Meeting House to arrest six women members of the pressure group Youth Demand, which ironically probably helps to publicise them and encourages people to join their cause. Although their plans for action are interesting, I want to focus on another aspect of this situation and also compare it to the child abuse allegation farce which took place in the Orkneys at the end of the 1980s CE. Before that though, I want to talk about the place of Friends’ Meeting Houses and the Quakers in my life, mainly the one in Leicester.
The first time I darkened the doors of Leicester Friends’ Meeting House on Queens Road was in autumn 1986. At the time I had recently joined the Green Party and was also involved in hunt sabbing, animal liberation and the university Green group Leicester Environmental Action Force. It was dark and around 7:30 pm on a Thursday evening, and I was walking behind my friend Vicky whom I probably shouldn’t have been behind at that time of night, but you live and learn. At this point, she was for some reason constantly surprised when I turned up to this kind of thing, possibly because her image of me had been dominated by how I’d been over the previous year. Both she and I were on our way to a Supporters Of Greenpeace Leicester meeting, the first of many groups I’d be involved with there over the coming years. Other groups included Friends of the Earth, Leicester CND and, a few years later during the 1991 Gulf War, the Stop The War Coalition. As well as all that, we got married there in a humanist ceremony (well, sort of humanist – long story), went to a complementary medicine taster group, attended Yoga sessions, a parent and toddler group (abortively) and also Leicestershire Education Otherwise. I can’t quite remember, but I don’t think the Green Party or the animal welfare groups I was involved with ever went there, but it was a pretty central part of the alternative scene in Leicester, and particularly Clarendon Park, at the time. It was a venue used by lots of groups, with a tendency towards peace, sustainability, socialism, Green issues and to some extent anarchism. In general, the approaches taken by such groups accords with the Quaker world view. The donkey coöperation cartoon was outside on a board for many years, which seems to me to be pretty much in accordance with these organisations.
There was conflict, even aggressively so, within these groups. In particular the Stop The War Coalition was rife with friction because it involved peace groups and splinter communist groups trying to work together and soon after the end of the first Gulf War it fell apart. That was quite a shouty group, with the overt aggression largely coming from the smaller communist parties. There were members of the main Communist Party of Britain in the group, though, who were generally quiet and in fact didn’t advertise their communism. CND has many of that variety of communists within its ranks, but also people of a more spiritual bent. Supporters of Greenpeace Leicester was merely a fundraising body and in fact we got into trouble for trying to do more, so on the whole the same people worked within Friends of the Earth instead, meeting in the same place. There’s a conversation to be had about this, but not here. FoE also have their issues. Sarada and I concur in the opinion, also expressed by many others, that the more peace and well-being groups could do with being more politically-aware and the more overtly political groups could benefit from being more spiritual. Now I look back on it, the other stuff going on in Leicester at the time didn’t tend to organise from the building, and CND also had its own office, where I was office manager for a while, among other things. Leicester CND was slowly winding down over the whole period I was involved with it, which was from 1991 to about 2011, and was dominated by older people, mainly women. I preferred CND to the other organisations in the ’90s because of their spiritual tendencies. The revolution starts from within. It really helps the world if you become a better person.
That, then, is the kind of group you might expect to meet in a Friends’ Meeting House. Many Quakers don’t have their own premises for various reasons: there aren’t enough of them to afford one or it becomes a case of property ownership in the same way as many churches are saddled with expensive buildings which eat up the money which could be used to benefit the community and the vulnerable in Europe and beyond. That said, it’s a nice thing to have, and although they’re not Quakers themselves there is often quite an overlap in their memberships. In particular, Leicester CND had a lot of Quakers in it, which is not surprising because of the latter’s commitment to pacifism. CND is not a pacifist group although it does contain many such individuals. Quakers also tend to be older, as do members of many religious communities in Britain. Incidentally, I’m talking about Quakers in the “U”K here. What happens elsewhere is probably different. For instance, American Quakers often have what are called “programmed meetings” with singing and they don’t sit in circles.
The reason I’m saying all this is to put the incident in Westminster in context. It’s possible that Youth Demand has Quaker members but not inevitable. However, their witness and mission to pursue peace, justice and sustainability accords closely with the Quakers, and they belong under their umbrella. At a guess, Youth Demand probably don’t overlap with membership just because they’re young. Hence it’s an organisation using the centre, with whose aims the Quakers are likely to agree, but it isn’t a Quaker organisation. The situation is therefore that a place of worship hosting a planning meeting by a non-violent group was invaded by the police and their members were arrested.
I may have some of the details wrong but there is a page on the incident here from the British Quakers themselves which is worthwhile for cutting through the verbiage and spin of the mass media, although it has to be said also that the actual mass media coverage is quite sympathetic to the Quakers themselves. There were twenty police officers and six women were arrested for planning a now-criminalised Non-Violent Direct Action. Several aspects of this come to mind. One is the question of whether the police would’ve done the same thing with other places of worship. I heard someone yesterday claim that they wouldn’t have done this with a synagogue or a mosque. I personally think they would’ve done it with a mosque but the fact that synagogues are often guarded and have turnstiles would have made doing it in such a place difficult regardless of how it would’ve looked. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have done it to an Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, URC, Roman Catholic or Orthodox church. Regarding gurdwaras, they did actually use a SWAT team in Leicester to my knowledge because they thought the lives of the people within it, who were being held hostage, were in danger. I have no idea how heavy-handed they were. Bearing in mind the direct child abuse and murder which occurs in some churches, for instance when exorcisms have been performed on children, I would expect and in fact hope that they would intervene in such cases. So it isn’t completely out of order to do this, although the provocation would’ve probably been stronger. It’s also not proportionate, and it’s at least interesting that it seems to have been a woman-only group. The implication is that this action would’ve been sufficiently serious and reprehensible to warrant such a response, possibly partly as a deterrent to others.
I mentioned incidents of child abuse within churches. Although this usually calls to mind child sexual abuse, which is indeed a serious problem, I actually had exorcisms in mind. I have actually tried to help someone access exorcism, which they wanted for themselves, and it was difficult to do so due to their lack of association with any particular church. It doesn’t seem easy to get this service within the Episcopal Church. Without this milieu, however, things are sometimes different because some other churches are less reserved or cautious. A fifteen year old boy was drowned during an exorcism in Newham in 2012 and a two-year old was hit fatally in Wolverhampton more recently. It isn’t clear whether either was part of a church-sanctioned process, but these things do happen and the potential victims need to be protected. However, the separate issue of child sexual abuse linked with a general suspicion of Quakers was also called to mind by last week’s events.
This seems to have been almost forgotten today, which may be a good thing except that forgetting history risks repeating it, which in a sense is what’s happened here. You may, though, remember the Satanic panic of the ’80s and ’90s, which is how this was able to take place. I can remember the first time I noticed this in about 1979 when my mother showed me a list of what the London Healing Mission regarded as Satanic activities, including of course Yoga, which I was very keen on at the time. I wish I was still that keen. This initially included heavy metal music and roleplaying games, as in Dungeons And Dragons. Much more recently it included Harry Potter although that’s faded considerably nowadays. By the late ’80s, the focus was on the idea that communities were being infiltrated by Satanists who were engaging in widespread ritual abuse including child murder and sexual abuse. No evidence was ever found, but that didn’t stop a training course for the police being devised. The claim was meanwhile made of fifty thousand murders per year with expert disposal of the corpses. To put this in proportion, this is on the scale of the casualties of a major international war. All this was happening in North America. To quote some of the promoters of these claims, “no evidence can be evidence” and “the most dangerous groups are the ones we know nothing about. . .They are the real underground”. It was eventually concluded that the children involved were being interviewed in a manner which would encourage them to make up stories about being abused due to the poor quality of the questioning techniques, such as closed questions, and in therapy false memories were also created. Because children often deny being abused during interviews, the approach was to keep repeating the question, and it’s fairly simple to recognise even as an adult that that repetition is akin to Hitler’s technique of repeating a lie often enough for it to be accepted as true, a technique currently in use in the US. However, it beggars belief that anyone could have accepted that the process was taking place on such a gigantic scale. It’s the reverse of Holocaust denial in some ways: where are all the relatives of the Roma and Jewish people who were murdered in the Holocaust if they weren’t murdered? Conversely, how could there be tens of thousands of victims of systematic serial murder whose bodies are never recovered and whose absence is never noted by anyone? There were allegations of injuries which would’ve required emergency treatment but no evidence for them either.
In February 1990, the McEwen family in South Ronaldsay was almost broken apart by a dawn police raid on their home where four children were removed and taken into care on the Scottish mainland. A worker in the NSPCC had made the claim that in Britain four thousand children were murdered through Satanic ritual abuse annually. What had happened was that there had been conferences on Satanic ritual abuse in Britain, notably in Nottingham in connection with a genuine incest case in Broxtowe. Ten adults were jailed for this having been found guilty, but no suggestion of a Satanic element had been made at that time. This connection was made by a group of psychiatrists, social workers and an anthropologist specialising in occult rituals in Afrika. This was happening at a time of growth of evangelical Protestant churches in Britain, which led to the production of a training video called ‘Christian Response To The Occult’. Workers in children’s foster homes and foster parents recorded claims made by the children, which while beginning with accounts of their abuse in relatively prosaic terms tended to veer off into accounts of ritual abuse. There were attempts to explain this in any other way possible, because of the uncanny similarities between the claims. The social workers concluded that they’d uncovered an organised network of ritual abuse in Broxtowe. A checklist was used which contained a large number of non-specific signs of indicators such as bed-wetting, and the foster parents and others had used this as the basis for the interviews, so they’d ended up guiding the process through leading questions. While there was no factual basis for these claims, the fear of not listening to children when they report genuine abuse leads to swinging too far the other way.
By 1994, an inquiry had established that there was no evidence at all for the claims. It’s worth noting that this sounds very like Pizzagate. Now I have a problem. I’ve ransacked the internet for fair accounts of the situation regarding the Ronaldsay Quakers without any success, so I’m going to have to try to reconstruct this from rather ancient personal memories. What I can remember is that someone of national significance among the Quakers was contacted by a worried member of the meeting who expressed her concern that police action was liable to bring the meeting and the wider Quaker movement into disrepute without any firm basis for that. She was reluctant to say more, but in the end she talked about how the police suspected them of Satanic ritual abuse. In particular, she said that the police were suspicious of the Quaker practice of sitting in circles and waiting for the Holy Spirit (as I put it – many Quakers such as atheists and Buddhists would probably disagree with this characterisation but it’s hard to think of a personally authentic way to describe it more diplomatically) to move them to give ministry. This was apparently something the police and many of their associates were unfamiliar with and attributed evil intent to. Putting my evangelical Protestant hat on, something Quakers would disapprove of, I’m familiar with the claim that allowing silence and emptiness of this kind is liable to give Satan a way into the group, and I wonder if this was their take on this. I honestly don’t know what happened in much detail, and I’m finding this quite frustrating right now.
These two incidents, the Westminster invasion and the Orkney Satanic panic, to me both have elements of othering by the authorities, something with which the Quakers will be very familiar as they’ve endured it for centuries. The very heart of Quaker practice, of sitting in circles and waiting to be moved by the Spirit, was attacked by the establishment back in the early ’90s, and last week the general Quaker ethos was attacked in the same way. I’ve long since shed the illusion that the current Westminster government is worthy of being described as Labour and I note the extreme keenness and conformity with which they applied the Tory law introduced in 2022 to enable this kind of thing to happen. But it’s the Tory party which is supposed to be about God, King and Country, and by extension the Anglican church, which is after all also a broad church, much of which would back the actions of the pressure group in question, but the question arises of why a party founded partly by Methodists would decide to persecute Quakers for supporting peaceful protest against the global suicide (yes, it’s a moral crime in this context, but not usually, so it’s “suicide” for the purposes of this paragraph) pact. Why are we in a situation where a group renowned for its non-violence and tireless work for peace is repeatedly treated in this way? And why haven’t we made progress on this since Thatcher’s time in office?
But there’s more.
Quakers seek to see the spark of God in everyone, and they mean that in a positive way which anti-theists may find hard to perceive. I think it was Viktor Frankl who said that the line between good and evil runs down the centre of the human heart. We all have within us the potential for peace and violence in his view. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but the fact remains that this situation is likely to provoke anger in those who have been persecuted, directly and indirectly. There is a potential antidote to this, because the very police officers and social workers involved in these incidents are human, and as such there’s that of God in them too.
It reminded me of two other incidents, and again I’m having to rely on somewhat shaky memories. One is of an incident regarding the peace movement and the police, possibly on Menwith Hill or Faslane – it’s vague. A group of people were trying to project peaceful and healing energy to the police force involved in this conflict. The metaphysical basis for this may be questionable but bear with me. One of the male police officers involved in protecting the base burst into tears in this incident, and it was found later that he’d been at Hillsborough, where the fatal crush had happened in the football ground and after which South Yorkshire Police spread false stories criticising the fans, as did the Sun newspaper. Whatever his involvement in that, he had been emotionally traumatised by what he witnessed because guess what, police officers are also human beings. The other incident was much more recent and involved another police officer who was guarding a fossil fuel facility of some kind – I’m having to dredge my memory here, sorry about any mistakes. One of the protestors mentioned to her that Just Stop Oil, if it was them, were among other things trying to protect her children’s and other descendants’ future, and once again, she was in tears. I don’t know the details of this incident. It could’ve been to do with a family tragedy, some other experience or maybe the interpretation given is correct. It was in any case a remarkable incident, once again revealing what might be called the humanity of police officers. Because there is that of God in everyone.
But there is also a police officer in everyone. By this I don’t mean a “bobby on the beat”, although maybe there is, but someone more like a member of the Special Patrol Group or the Carabinieri. We all have an inner fascist boot boy too, and we need to be conscious of it.
I was sitting in a sociology lecture once about the 1981 inner city riots, and suddenly had the thought that the police were not just Thatcher’s Army but also ordinary human beings with romantic relationships and families, and the thought had such a profound affect on me that it literally gave me vertigo. It made my head spin. I feel bad about that incident because it clearly means I was seriously objectifying the people concerned, but of course it’s true. When the Met broke into the Friends’ Meeting House in Westminster the other day, what they did was reprehensible and bizarre, but after it they presumably went home to their families, read their children bedtime stories, did the vacuuming, made love to their spouses and watched telly with them. They are also human. It shouldn’t need saying, but we need to have the mental reach to recognise the temptation to other and behave like them in ourselves and condemn and work against that in us as well as in them, and also to do what we can to see their divine nature, and this is very difficult.
There’s an immediate problem with writing this because I need to refer to an infohazard without giving enough details to make it clear what it is. It’s also what’s been called a “zero-infinity problem”, in that the chances of it being valid are small but the scale of the bad things which would happen if it is valid are very large. Probability, incidentally, doesn’t work in such a way that its probability is measurable.
So what I’m going to do is use ROT-13 to obfuscate what this thing is, but before that I should probably tell you what an infohazard is. An infohazard is something which is innately harmful if known or believed. These things can also be memetic, that is, they can spread from mind to mind. Many people would agree that certain forms of fundamentalist Abrahamic religions are infohazards and they are also memetic. Evangelical Christianity which espouses the idea of eternal conscious torment is a potential infohazard if true because believers think God’s telling them to spread it but if someone hears and rejects it, they’ll go to Hell, whereas if they hadn’t heard it in the first place they’d be “judged accordingly”, as the Bible says at some point. That is, they will be judged by God as if they had been presented with the gospel in a manner as sympathetic to their situation and character as possible and reacted accordingly. Since evangelical Christians are likely to believe that God will be better at doing this than they would by their own efforts, this seems to mean that they shouldn’t spread the gospel, but they also read the gospel as telling them to spread it. Other forms of Christianity are of course available.
Outside the realm of religion, if you watched ‘East Enders’ in the ’80s, when Michelle tells Sharon who her baby’s father is, that’s an infohazard. It’s also possible that what Ian remembers after the car crash is an infohazard. It’s something “Man Was Not Meant To Know”. A related concept is the cognitohazard, and this does exist, at least in a minor form, as the McCollough Effect, which is a series of stripy colours which can mess up your visual perception for months if you look at it for more than a couple of minutes. I think I probably do have such a brain that certain visual perceptions like the McCollough Effect do have an adverse influence on me, although they were worse when I was a child. If you’re familiar with the way that looking at stripes makes things look “swirly” afterwards, that’s similar to a cognitohazard. They’re basically things which permanently mess up your brain if you encounter them, and for some people apparently the thing I’m about to refer to counts as that.
The vast majority of people, when they hear about the thing I’m about to mention, will just shrug it off as silly, and it does indeed stand a good chance of just being silly. There are actually very good rational arguments for the idea that it’s a harmless mind game like a creepypasta, and that’s my judgement as well as the judgement of a lot of other people who call themselves rationalists. When the idea was first proposed on the rationalist website lesswrong.org in 2010, discussion of it was banned after a short period. This was probably a mistake because banning something can draw attention to it and it would be better just to ignore it.
To go off on one briefly, ‘Ghostwatch’ seemed like a harmless hoax when broadcast. This was a mockumentary in a series of clearly fictional programmes, this time about a haunted house and presented by people such as Michael Parkinson who are generally associated with the factual realm and are well-trusted, which was unfortunately taken as gospel, as it were, by certain members of the public, one of whom, Martin Denham, ended up killing himself. For him, ‘Ghostwatch’ was an infohazard and a cognitohazard, though one created in all innocence by the Screen One team. This can’t always be anticipated.
The infohazard posted on Lesswrong in 2010 is now known as Roko’s Basilisk. Whereas I think it’s harmless to most people, I don’t think it is to everyone, and whereas it may be silly, that’s my judgement and I don’t want anyone to suffer, a phrase I’ll be coming back to, just in case I’m wrong. It definitely did not seem to be harmless to Ziz and her followers, or certain people unfortunate to come into contact with them.
Just to describe ROT-13 then, imagine you have two wheels with the letters of the alphabet written on them all the way round, one on top of and smaller than the other. When you start, the two are lined up so that A on the bigger one lines up with A on the smaller and so on all the way to Z. You spin the smaller wheel so that it’s thirteen places ahead of the bigger one, then you take a text and copy it to the corresponding letters on the wheel, so that A becomes N, M becomes Z and so on. This system is known as ROT-13, and it’s dead easy to use and therefore useless for real encryption although it has mistakenly been used for it due to being given as an example in some places by virtue of being easy to understand. It’s used for spoilers a lot. To decrypt, you just do it again and it’ll become clear. This is what I’m going to use to disguise Roko’s Basilisk. The next paragraph describes it. If you want to read what it says, and it’ll probably be harmless although it might not be, go here and copy-paste the paragraph.
Fhccbfr gurer vf n trarenyyl oraribyrag fhcrevagryyvtrag NV va gur shgher juvpu jvyy orarsvg gur jubyr bs uhznavgl naq znxr gur jbeyq n hgbcvn. Vg pna qb nalguvat. Bar bs gur guvatf vg pna qb vf gb gbegher sbe rgreavgl nalbar jub xabjf nobhg gur cbffvovyvgl bs vg orvat vairagrq naq qbrfa’g znkvzvfr gur cebonovyvgl bs vg orvat perngrq nf fbba nf cbffvoyr, vapyhqvat qrnq crbcyr, jubz vg jvyy erfheerpg va beqre gb qb guvf. Nalbar jub qbrfa’g xabj nobhg vg vf rkrzcg sebz guvf sngr.
Okay, so that’s it, and at this point I’m reminded of the Charn Bell in ‘The Magician’s Nephew’, which hung next to this inscription:
Make your choice, adventurous Stranger; Strike the bell and bide the danger, Or wonder, till it drives you mad, What would have followed if you had
So if you’re curious, actually don’t worry about it. The chief problem for me now is how to proceed from this point and continue to make any sense, assuming anything I’ve said so far does make sense. But there are certain dangerous ideas which are only dangerous for some people, or dangerous to others if they’re known to some people. Roko’s Basilisk did turn out to be dangerous in the wrong minds.
If you’ve read that, you can see the argument that knowledge of it endangers the knower, but there are also, as I said, strong arguments against this. For instance, it isn’t clear that identity is persistent over time if there’s a break in that identity. Maybe an identical future person isn’t you. It also isn’t clear what the Basilisk would really stand to gain or how it would think. This is what a mere human is thinking about it, and it’s probably wrong. A popular lesswrong argument against it involves a chain of objections which, taken together and multiplied, make the probability of it being valid vanishingly small, one figure quoted being ten thousand sextillion to one against, long scale. Since there are several existential threats to the human species right now which are all quite urgent and clearly, uncontroversially real, it probably doesn’t matter as such. What does unfortunately matter is that some people strongly believe in it.
A bit more background is needed here. The renowned Peter Singer, whose arguments persuaded me and many other people to go vegan, has various other views which are quite thought-provoking. One of them is the idea that most of us are actually pretty evil. The argument he used to support this idea is this: suppose you are wearing expensive clothes and are on your way to an event when you come across a drowning child in a pond near you. You can wade in at no risk to yourself and rescue the child, but it will ruin your clothes. If instead of saving the child you continue to your event and tell anyone there the anecdote, most people are likely to be rightly shocked and horrified by your failure to act. So far, this is uncontroversial. However, consider this. There are children all over the world whose deaths you can prevent in one way or another but which you choose not to do anything about for your own status or comfort. Therefore, you’re evil. The mere distance and lack of acquaintance with these children, or for that matter adults in the same kind of situation, are not considered morally relevant.
This, by the way, is related to my “doing the hoovering in Dunedin” thought experiment.
One thing which we can be fairly confident about is that everyone is not about to give all their disposable income to a charity to save children in the Third World in various ways. However, it has happened that the occasional very rich person has given a lot of their money away to do this kind of thing, the obvious example being Bill and Melinda Gates. This is part of a movement, associated with rationalism, known as “Effective Altruism”. Ideas include donating to carefully chosen charities and following careers which are likely to further the greater good, and this “greater good” is very much thought of in utilitarian terms – “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. There’s also negative utilitarianism, which aims to minimise suffering rather than maximise happiness. This sounds relatively okay, if ineffective. However, it can also be coupled with “longtermism”, which also sounds okay. This is rather obviously the idea that we should, morally speaking, consider things in the long term rather than the immediate future. In utilitarian terms, this could mean ensuring that as many people exist over the whole span of human history as possible, living lives as happy, or at least as devoid of suffering, as possible. A popular way of understanding how to make this happen is to invent a superintelligent AI which can do this for us better than we ever could, because, y’know, it’s superintelligent isn’t it? Someone has calculated, I’m sure bogusly, that a nonillion (long scale) humans will ever exist, so they are the best object of our moral focus. Next to them, everyone living today is insignificant. There is, by the way, a cryptocurrency fraud issue connected to all this but that’s not what I’m talking about here.
Roko’s Basilisk is an example of Timeless Decision Theory, which is the idea that one should act as if one is determining the result of the decision one is making. Effectively this means that the present can influence the past. Significantly, this is linked to Bayesian probability, which is counterintuitive to most people but, and this is of some concern to me, not to myself. TDT is quite plausibly deeply flawed, as is utilitarianism, negative or otherwise, but this is not the point. The point is their draw on certain types of people, and the disturbing fact that Bayesian probability is intuitive to me suggests that I may be such a person.
There’s a lot of this before I can get to clarity here, and I’m now going to mention something else. There is out there an enormous piece of Harry Potter fan fiction, written in the late ‘noughties, which comes in here. It’s 660 000 words long with 122 chapters, and is called ‘Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality’, and envisages Aunt Petunia marrying a philosophy professor and Harry Potter entering Ravenclaw instead of Gryffindor, and the main aim is to introduce rationalism as a power greater than magic even in the Wizarding World but which unlike that form of magic, actually exists in the real world and can be applied. This is more than half as long as the entire original Harry Potter series, and ended up being very influential on young people attracted to the rationalist community. This is partly a sign of the huge success Harry Potter had at the time. Clearly J K Rowling is not responsible for what grew out of the movement, and it’s worth noting this in the light of one of its other characteristics.
Who, then, is Ziz, and why is she associated with this movement? Well, Ziz is one of a number of people linked to Zizianism and the movement has been named after her, but not by her. This should be taken in proportion. Their divergence from the main rationalist community should be borne in mind, just as a small Christian sect shouldn’t be seen as representative of the mainstream Church. Ziz and some of the others is why I find the movement particularly interesting, because she and they have been vegan trans anarchists strongly influenced by analytical philosophy. This is exactly who I am. I am all of these things. It’s also why I mention the fact that J K Rowling has indirectly influenced them, because just as she can’t be held responsible for their actions, nor can them being trans. Being vegan, on the other hand, is significant.
Ziz LaSota has been underemployed and had an internship at NASA after qualifying in computer engineering from the University of Alaska, dropped out of a Masters at the University of Illinois and at some point became committed to the Effective Altruism (EA) movement and moved to California to get more involved. Like many other people who have moved to some parts of that state, she had to resort to first sharing a house, which she moved out of due to transphobia and lack of money, and then sharing a boat with other EA people. Her plan was then to set up a fleet of boats to promote her ideas. One big issue she had with the rest of EA was their exclusive focus on human well-being rather than that of other species, and she also felt the pull of Roko’s Basilisk. Hence her aim, and that of other Zizians, was to promote the existence of an AI working for the good of all animals rather than simply humans. She also claimed that AE was institutionally transphobic, although other trans members of EA deny this is so. She did not transition medically or surgically.
Owing to their general commitment to a game theory-like and TDT approach to the world, Zizians believe in immediate escalation to opposition, so they believe in murdering anyone who gets in their way or otherwise confronts them. This policy is supposed to prevent anyone from attacking them in advance because they know they’ll lose. It actually goes further than that but I don’t want to go there. Ziz concentrated on recruiting particularly intelligent autistic trans women to her cause. Most of that makes sense, and by that I don’t mean it’s a good idea but that it’s consistent with her world view. Elon Musk actually seems to have a somewhat similar idea in that prosecute appears to have played with the concept of banning neurotypical people from voting on the grounds that they don’t make rational decisions, but I think this is probably connected to prosecute’s idea that empathy harms civilisations. This may also be connected to Ziz’s worldview, because she also seems to believe that sociopathy needs to be encouraged for the future’s sake. The way she planned to do this was odd, needless to say.
Zizians are very keen on the idea that the separate hemispheres of the brain express different personalities. I would “gently” suggest that this should be subject to the usual scepticism about the nature of the bicameral mind, because really this seems very much like pop psychology to me. Anyway, they – actually I need to clear something up here: Zizian blogs are very long and verbose and it’s difficult to maintain the attention needed to follow everything that’s going on in them, so whereas I may be getting the details wrong here, it’s actually quite hard not to get the details wrong and it may even be inadvisable to try. Hence what I’m about to say may be inaccurate or incorrect, but this is how I understand it. Their understanding of the brain is that the two hemispheres express different personalities, and one hemisphere is usually “better” than the other. There are also “double-good” people out there, both of whose hemispheres are effectively altruistic. Unsurprisingly, considering that for some reason a lot of them are trans, they also believe it’s possible for each hemisphere to be gendered differently, and at this point I’m going to have to leap in. The differences between female and male brains are much less significant than the differences between human brains generally, but one frequent difference is that the corpus callosum, i.e. the bundle of nerve fibres linking the two hemispheres, has more fibres in it on average in female brains, and another difference arises from the karyotype – chromosomes. In bodies with two X chromosomes there’s a mosaic of cell lines, some of which express the genes in one of the very large X chromosomes and some of which express those in the other. Since the X chromosome is the largest, it also carries the most genes at around a thousand, meaning that many of them are going to be involved in brain structure and function. This means that the brains of people with more than one X chromosome consist of mosaics of nerve cells expressing different traits working together, whereas those of people with only one X chromosome don’t. Incidentally, the reason I’m saying “more than one X chromosome” is nothing to do with not being transphobic, because it means that people with multiple X chromosomes, XY cis women, women with Turner’s Syndrome, people with Klinefelter’s Syndrome and probably also women with Fragile X will all have brains of an atypical kind for their gross external phenotypical sex. Taking all of this together, the Zizian view that hemispheres can be gendered differently at least seems to reflect ignorance of basic brain anatomy and physiology. In particular, the corpus callosum issue seems to be completely ignored. It might still work if gender identity is socially constructed in a significantly internalised way, but hemispheres operating independently is usually constructed socially as a disability. If the corpus callosum itself is a significant factor, it seems to be complete nonsense.
This is of course partly me caving in to the urge to go on and on, but it isn’t just that. My point is that in this particular instance the Zizians seem to have adopted a naïve approach to the nature of the brain which is based on popular misconceptions about brain anatomy and physiology and is, as the phrase has it, “not even wrong” rather than “less wrong”. I’ll come back to this.
A long time ago, I met a group of people who were avoiding sleep and attempting to deactivate the right hemispheres of their brains because they hypothesised that the Fall in Christian terms involved the absence of monoamine oxidase inhibitors from the diet which led to the left hemisphere becoming dominant and controlling the right hemisphere through fear. I don’t subscribe to that point of view but I do think the influence of nutrition on brain development and function is important – that’s such a given that it’s a platitude. They were planning to attempt to anaesthetise their right hemispheres. I don’t know what became of them, but their approach is strongly reminiscent of the Zizian approach to this – “unihemispheric sleep”. Dolphins are well-known for sleeping with half of their brains at a time because otherwise they’d drown. The Zizians try to induce the left and right hemispheres of their brains to sleep at different times in a similar way. This idea crops up in at least two places in SF, and probably others. Iain M Banks has a character in the ‘Culture’ novels who does it, and the Space Marines in ‘Warhammer 40000’ also have this. This makes me wonder if they’ve just plucked ideas out of sci-fi rather than actually properly researched them in a sensible and rigorous way, and in fact I think I can see a theme emerging here. What it means in immediate practical terms is that there was, and possibly still is but I’ve lost track, a small, isolated community of individuals who were sleep-deprived and only talking among themselves. This is of course what happens in cults.
Another part of their approach is that they aim to find people who are unusually good in their estimation, recruit them to their organisation and turn them into sociopaths for the sake of the long-term common good. This is because of, of all things, ‘The Office’ sitcom! And yes, this all seems to be becoming increasingly bizarre. They see the character of David Brent as the ideal organisational leader, and that the most effective altruistic organisation would be led by such people. So we’ve got some Warhammer 40K stuff, Harry Potter, Peter Singer and ‘The Office’ all mixed together with rationalism, game theory, utilitarianism and Timeless Decision Theory. There’s nothing wrong with being eclectic of course, but this really seems from the outside to be a rather arbitrary collection of ideas which don’t really belong together, or if they do, to have been assembled and interconnected in a manner which is not very logical at all.
There’s also some stuff about being a “vegan sith lord” which I don’t understand because I’ve always considered Star Wars to be an irredeemable pile of garbage hardly worth my time to get my head round.
So anyway, then they went out and murdered people. They murdered their landlord, or rather their “sealord” (unless this is a different landlord) because they didn’t think it was ethical to pay him rent and he was likely to prevent them from pursuing their end. I think this was probably because the rent was thought to be better invested in developing a superintelligent AI to take over the world than paying their landlord, Curtis Lind. The fact that he was murdered, after a previous attempted murder, is partly to do with this, partly to do with the idea that property is theft and partly linked to the idea of immediate escalation of violence as a deterrent, which for them is presumably a game theory thing. Some time before this, I think, Ziz faked her death, which led to a very resource-intensive search of San Francisco Bay. The parents of one Zizian were also murdered but it isn’t clear if this was connected to them. If it was, it was probably for inheritance purposes, again to invest in the development of a superintelligent AI, but the law there (and I hope everywhere except maybe for euthanasia purposes) prevents heirs from inheriting from someone they’ve killed. Regarding the rent situation, the line of thought seems to have been that the landlord needed to be killed because he was having them evicted, and this would ultimately involve police officers who would probably kill them. I guess TDT sees this as pre-emptive self-defence. They then went on the run and attempted to cross into Canada at Vermont, at which point there was a shoot-out with border guards, one of whom was killed along with one of the Zizians. I’m going to ignore the details of the news reports I’ve found on this because of certain inaccuracies, but they do seem to agree with this account of the events.
So that didn’t end well, but this seems particularly germane to me because of who I am. It is very clearly far away from my approach to life, but also very close. Discussing it is a little hampered by the fact that I won’t describe Roko’s Basilisk and also by the déluge of writing produced by these people. This has also been alleged to be potentially harmful. They use a lot of specific jargon which makes little sense to most outsiders and somewhere there’s a glossary which is itself considered an infohazard as reading it tends to convince certain people they’re right. There are some notable parallels with a certain notorious and litigious cult, for instance the use of boats and some overlapping terminology such as “tech” to describe activities aimed at upgrading consciousness. It’s also possible that if rental prices in the area hadn’t been so high, a lot of this wouldn’t’ve happened because they’d’ve been less isolated, although it’s entirely feasible to be lonely in a crowd of course.
When you don’t know how to do something, internet access in particular allows you to “dig a tunnel” down to the knowledge and skill necessary to find out. Examples of this are Mackenzie Friends, who are people without legal training but are able to accompany accused people to court and advise them, sometimes successfully, because they have some legal knowledge, and phrase books, where you learn the minimum needed to get by in a foreign language rather than the whole language. Another example would be what I’ve just done, which is to look up how to use our bread machine to make pizza dough, or you might want to find out how to change a car battery. The internet isn’t necessary to take this approach but it can be very handy. What it doesn’t bring is wide-ranging knowledge and experience. We are of course currently learning Gàidhlig, so for example I might be able to ask someone “where do you stay?” in Gàidhlig, bearing in mind things like pre-aspiration of stops and a good approximation of slender T and R, and with my lack of experience (nearly four dozen years with very little progress on account of living in Kent followed by the English Midlands), I’ll probably end up uttering something which can just about be made out by a native speaker who will then answer me in English, which is just as well because I doubt I’d be able to understand her answer. This will, I hope, gradually improve, and it’s already better than fishing the necessary question out of Omniglot or typing it into Google Translate, or, heaven forfend, actually looking it up in a paper phrasebook!
Is this relevant? Yes! Because what the Zizians have done is tunnel into the corpus of academic philosophy and dug out the narrow range of things they think is relevant to their experience along with a load of other stuff like Harry Potter, Roko’s Basilisk and so forth without a broad experience of the actual discipline of the subject, and then discussed it in a tiny clique unconnected to the academic community, and they’ve done so with misplaced bravado which has led them to certain conclusions. To use a somewhat analogous example, from the ’70s on there were attempts to help chimps and gorillas learn American Sign Language. It’s a long story but the human effort to do this only achieved illusory success, and there were various reasons for this, and although this did change later it began with an attitude that signing was something a hearing person who has used exclusively spoken language for decades could easily pick up what he (and it was usually a man, I’m not using this pronoun wantonly here) considered a simple system of communication without even including any native signers in the process and then “teach” this to a chimpanzee feeling secure that he’d mastered it because it was apparently so simple. And now, thanks to the Zizians, a number of people have been murdered or maimed and various other people have killed themselves due to concluding that their lives were of “negative value”. The reason for this was that they were not philosophers. Ziz’s degree is in computer engineering, and that is connected to analytical philosophy but it isn’t philosophy. As far as I know, few to none of the Zizians are philosophers. If they were, they would’ve been exposed to various schools of thought, a wider range of ideas, alternative ways of looking at ethics than just plain, simplistic old utilitarianism from over two centuries ago and some cobbled together ideas from a newsgroup with no professional philosophers in it.
This is what happens when the education system orients itself mainly towards training for scientific and, well I would say vocational except that a lot of paid work nowadays is hardly a vocation, work and ignores the intrinsic value of the humanities as well as their value when applied to the workplace. They thought they could do without philosophy and the result is that some crass group of over-confident individuals go out and murder people or kill themselves in pursuit of an aim which makes zero sense to almost anyone. It does make sense to me, and I don’t want to be arrogant here but I do have two degrees in philosophy and kept my hand in afterwards, and I’m aware even so of my relative isolation from the community, but despite that, and despite these people being superficially almost me, i.e. vegan trans women on the autistic spectrum, their missteps are as plain to me as they are to the general public.
The value of philosophy has been ignored for so long that there are maggots burrowing into it and infesting its corpse. That happens to be my area, but similar problems arise from the neglect of the other humanities such as history and literature. Neither are my forte, but even I know the adage that those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it and am aware of the value of literature to emotional intelligence and the awareness of techniques of persuasion as used in propaganda. What the Zizians have done is just the tip of the iceberg here, and there you go, if I had a degree in English Literature I probably wouldn’t’ve used that cliché but come up with a more effective and original turn of phrase of my own, but instead of studying that I studied a different and equally valuable humanities subject, and when you do that you tend to lack the time to hone your skills in other areas. The Zizians are absolutely wrong-doers and are substantially responsible for their actions if anyone is, and that’s a philosophical question too, but they’re not alone, and part of the guilt can be attributed to those who denigrated liberal arts and underfunded it for decades and set up a system discouraging people from reading such degrees. This is why I haven’t been living on a houseboat and stabbing my landlord and they have.
There’s a fun website (well I like it anyway) whose URL I’ve forgotten which lets you put in the name of most well-known pairs of living clades and it estimates how long it’s been since they had a common ancestor, so for example you can input Mus musculus – house mouse – and Rattus norvegicus – Norwegian rat (which are really common incidentally – this is not an arbitrary choice) and it’ll tell you how many million years it’s been since some species split in two on their way to being the organisms we know today. It raises certain questions in my mind about what else was around when these two fundamental species were one, because if rats and mice were a single species back then what were all the other rat-like or mouse-like rodents like and what happened to them or is that just a feature of today’s world or something, but it’s also interesting. It’ll even work for humans and bananas, and sometimes it gives surprising results because two pretty similar species which are undoubtedly closely related turn out to have been separate for many millions of years. In such cases, and I’ll come back to this, the organisms in question might simply have evolved very slowly.
So I played a game with this site to find how young and how old I could find splits. I should point out that the figures in question are median values and not definitive. It’s amazing how reliably it turns up results. Really obscure species seem to have been investigated genetically enough to find such relationships. A very few I’ve tried have turned up blank. Even so, it’s fair to say that it does give you a vague idea and numbers can be nice and comforting. Bananas and humans share a common ancestor around 1530 million years ago, and yes, that’s spurious accuracy. My mind went blank when I tried to think of archaea so I took the less ambitious approach of bacteria and animals or plants, and so for example Lactobacillus and Apis (honey bee) gets us to 3618 million years. With that one in particular, they may even go back to roughly the time of LUCA – the Last Universal Common Ancestor, i.e. the ancestor of all organisms alive today, which seems to be 4250 million years ago. The fact that it’s so far back has led to some people wondering if our planet’s life is even from here in the first place because at that point in Earth’s history it was being constantly pounded by asteroids and its surface may have been substantially molten. I’m not sure to be honest.
Doing it the other way is equally interesting, to me anyway. Feel free to give up now if you don’t care but I am going somewhere with this. I tried with Triticum and Agropyron, wheat and couch grass, getting the median result of only nine million years, so good luck with baking bread in the early Miocene, but on the other hand coeliacs would be happy. Various animals did okay with the youth of their cleavage, but the most recent split I was able to find was between Citrus sinensis and Citrus limon, which are roughly oranges and lemons, and was surprised to find it had only happened 780 millennia ago, which is a relatively tiny amount of time, around five ice ages ago and well after the discovery of fire. It’s complicated by the fact that Citrus fruits tend to be hybrids so the figures are perhaps misleading, but the very fact that they hybridise so readily suggests they only split quite recently. Therefore, some time back in the Pleistocene there was a tree which produced hesperidia, the rather pointless name for Citrus fruits which does describe a distinctive kind of fruit but not one which is produced by any other plants except possibly kumquats, and this fruit had a rind covered in oil-bearing glands and pores and was, I presume, either yellow or orange, but perhaps not. To be fair, rue fruits, tiny though they be, may have something in common with hesperidia. I mean, just why? Anyway, since humans have presumably bred Citrus to have bigger and juicier fruits, I also imagine that these were quite small and not very juicy, but two questions arise in my mind: what colour were they? and, what did they smell of?
Lemon smells that way because of limonene, but so does orange. The difference is that the molecules are mirror images of each other. Now it’s much more common for plants to smell lemony than orangy, so I assume that the orange smell and flavour is the innovation and that their ancestors smelt of lemon. Oranges are also near-spherical whereas lemons are lemon-shaped, so that’s another issue. It’s probably quite easy to resolve these issues if I could be bothered to look ’em up but I won’t be doing that because that’s not the point of this post.
Oranges are highly distinctive. They’re not the only fruit. Their names don’t rhyme with anything. In fact, although it got abandoned I initially made it a minor plot point of my published novel ‘Replicas’ that a fruit was going to be discovered on a distant planet which looked like a teal-coloured orange and was going to be called a name which rhymes with orange, but it was not to be. Also, they have a colour named after them, and whereas it’s not unusual to name a colour after a plant, most basic colour terms simply have their own words, such as “blue” and “yellow”, but apparently not orange. The word “orange” is also said to be one of those English words which used to begin with an N but lost it to the indefinite article, such as “a napron”, “a nadder”, and of course “a norange”, a process known as “rebracketing”, and at this point I should interject puzzlement, because although the Spanish “naranja” means “orange”, the Seville orange has the Latin name Citrus x aurantium, i.e. a name which seems to refer to gold, which makes sense, and really does sound quite a bit like “orange” and definitely does not begin with an N, so that smells a bit fishy. Some languages use a word related to “Portugal” to refer to oranges.
Orange is my least favourite colour. That said, it has its moments and place, for instance the flames of Pentecost. Also, and I’ve never heard anyone comment on this so it may just be me, but in spite of the remarkably faithful reproduction of most colours on television, video and photography nowadays, for some reason orange never translates well to the screen and never looks orange. Is that just me? As such it shares this problem with violet, which is never actually violet in such media either, and oddly those are respectively my least and most favourite colours. Orange is also associated with, well, cultivated carrots apart from the purple ones, William of Orange and therefore the Netherlands and the Orangemen, and also for some reason Glaswegian public transport. I can’t help thinking the last two are connected so maybe it’s my Sassenach brain which can’t wrap itself around orange.
Becoming a post about the colour orange is not however the destiny of this post. We have two closely related clades, one orange, the other not. This happens elsewhere in the tree of life, and this is thisses post’s point, so to speak (I’m not re-writing the last two sentences, they’re fine). I have in mind Hominins and Ponginae. Hominins are the bunch of apes who spent most of their time evolving in Afrika, whereas Pongins, and that may not be the right word, are the extent Asian hominids, i.e. orangutan. Human genetic relationships with other great apes are like this: (orangutan (gorilla (chimp, human))). I’ve simplified this by omitting the different species in each genus. That is, orangutan are the outliers with respect to the other living apes and we’re closest to the chimps, and more specifically the bonobos. This isn’t the whole story though, because the relationships between them are in a way quite surprising. It’s true that we’re most closely related to bonobos in the sense that we diverged from each other, or more precisely the common ancestors of chimps and bonobos, 6.4 million years ago. Then chimps and bonobos diverged only 2.4 million years ago, and in a way the most “advanced” species of ape is not Homo sapiens at all but chimpanzees. Chimps have several features which are unlike humans because they have “evolved more”, i.e. they’ve become specialised. It’s actually closer to the truth to say that chimps evolved from humans than that we evolved from them, although of course neither of those is more than a caricature of the truth.
Weirdly, given our appearance, humans more distantly related to gorillas than chimps even though gorillas seem more human. I don’t know the details but it seems to me that this arises from gorillas’ size, meaning that their bones and muscles need to be more like humans’ than chimps’. Chimps are notoriously much stronger than the other apes, and also more aggressive. In general, most human-sized animals are stronger than humans, presumably due to our tool use making sheer physical strength less important and emphasising our cyborg essence, but this is particularly true of chimpanzees. Gorillas are, though, also famously strong. A major difference between humans on the one side and chimps and gorillas on the other is that the last two are mainly quadrupedal and walk on their knuckles. Animals who do that usually benefit from specialised forelimbs, so for example anteaters. This seems also to be why gorillas and chimps do it, and is one of the biggest differences between them and us. Our hands are in a more primitive condition than theirs in that respect, and this implies also that their knuckle-walking evolved twice. The very few humans with Üner Tan Syndrome, which involves cerebellar ataxia and human quadrupedalism, don’t walk on their knuckles and we haven’t evolved out of knuckle-walking. Instead, gorillas and chimps have evolved into it, and have done so separately. In that sense, we, not they, are the primitive ones, although this is also overstated, and it gives the lie to the idea that evolution is a ladder. It isn’t: in a sense, gorillas and chimps evolved from us. We are the missing link.
Evolution is not a ladder, and thinking of it that way distorts our perception. In particular, a hopefully outmoded trope in racism is to see Black people as less evolved than Whites, and because such a perspective would probably also perceive humans as not being apes but having evolved from a category of non-human animals we call “apes”, in a racist mind it seems to make sense that the most advanced humans are the palest and that Black people are more like gorillas. It pains me even to type these words, but fortunately they’re arrant lies. Unfortunately they are also notoriously also errors made by an AI when it was asked to identify human faces and said they were gorillas if their skin tone was dark, due to the racist selection of the dataset on which it was trained. If, on the other hand, we turn this round, and this is equally a falsification of the real situation, and see gorillas as more “advanced” than we are, White people then become more primitive. This is only useful for rhetorical purposes though and is equally a distortion of the truth.
And this brings me back to orangeness. As far as I know, only two clades of great ape ever have orange hair: orangutan and humans. I may be wrong: maybe there are orange gorillas and there has definitely been at least one albino gorilla, although that was due to interbreeding. It may be worth pointing out at this point that it’s only the short interval of time that hair spends on our scalps which stops all humans from being ginger, as can be seen with Egyptian mummies. Apparently frozen mammoths tend to be ginger for this reason. Humans who are red-haired are so because the version of melanin they have is more susceptible to becoming orange. The pigment in question is called “phaeomelanin”, and also occurs in the skin of redheads. I sometimes wonder if my own hair is auburn, i.e. that I’m heterozygous for phaeomelanin and eumelanin, although I lack the detachment to know, and the fact that my hair is never cut could also mean it’s bleached by ultraviolet more than average. It wouldn’t be surprising if I did have the phaeomelanin allele because I’m a quarter Scottish, one of the concentrations of red hair in the world. One Scot in eight has red hair and there’s another concentration far to the east on the continent of Eurasia, namely the Udmurt people of the Permian group of Uralic speakers, in eastern European Russia. As far as I know, only fair-skinned humans have red hair, and of course red hair is not literally red unless dyed. Those of who are “red-haired” seem to have developed that facility in connection with living in a relatively sun-free environment, where the pressure to protect the skin from cancer is weaker. As White people, we’re able to identify with ginger hairedness more than most other humans, and this is important from an anti-racist and anti-speciesist perspective.
The racist equation of Black humans with “apes”, actually meaning non-human apes, is not only that but also excludes orangutan, because the latter species are harder to fit into the caricature. Orangutan have red hair, can have blue eyes and have fairer skin, but they are less human. Is it possible to turn this racist trope around to portray Black people as more human because White people are more reminiscent of orangutan? It seems to me this could be productive.
Misconceptions about evolution can also be demolished by the comparing humans and orangutan in the wider context of anthropoid apes. I’ve done a bit of amateur calculations about us all, but I should point out there are three species of orangutan, two of gorillas and two of chimpanzees, though only one surviving species of admittedly hybridised humans, and in these observations I’m lumping all the orangutan, gorillas and chimps together. In terms of weight, orangutan are the most sexually dimorphic of the four, with males getting on for two and a half times the mass of females. The trend here is from orangutan, through gorillas and chimps to humans. However, in height terms the situation is different, with gorillas having the greatest difference in stature, orangutan and chimps being close together in the middle and humans the least. Scaling these as if they were human and imagining the average height of a woman at 160 centimetres, if the difference were as great as among gorillas, men would be 224 centimetres tall and doing the same comparison with orangutan, they’d have an average height of two metres exactly, which is about as tall as men ever get with the exception of a few outliers. The human lack of sexual dimorphism in either of these terms may therefore be a recent development which marks us out as different. This also means that the disparity we perceive ourselves as having in terms of bulk and physical strength, though serious enough as it is and adequate fuel for patriarchy, could actually be far worse, and that the trend is towards sexual equality. At this point, it seems germane to do a BMI calculation, useless though those may be to realistic assessment of human weight and height. In this assessment, gorillas illustrate how much contribution muscle makes to BMI, as their average BMI is fifty-eight! The trend here then becomes, in descending order, gorillas, humans, orangutan and chimps. The outliers are gorillas, by far, and in fact female gorillas are about as bulky as males. In these terms, the two closest taxa are actually humans and orangutan: we are proportionately similar, with the difference at only four percent. It’s not an ideal index by any means, but it does seem to have measured something meaningful, or at least produced a result which pleases me. On the other hand, male gorillas and men are basically the exact same height.
The Encephalisation Quotient, another measure, indicates how humans are different from other apes. This is a measure of how far an animal’s brain size relative to body sides deviates from an expected norm, based on a formula I’m not going to quote here on the principle that every equation halves readership and therefore readers’ interest, more relevant here due to my minute readership. Shorthand for that: I won’t bore you with how it’s worked out. That said, I will bore you with more figures. Gorillas are the least encephalised, followed by orangutan, then chimps and finally humans, and humans in fact have about five times the encephalisation of gorillas. The EQ provides us with the starkest example among all the measures so far of how humans are the outliers, but it’s still important that by different criteria, gorillas or other species are.
Two reproductive measures show humans and orangutan as very much the most similar. Chimps have the shortest pregnancies, at 237 days on average. This is probably linked to their smaller size. However, gorillas have the second shortest at 257 days, and orangutan are the closest to humans with 260. One way of looking at this is that gorillas and orangutan are the closest, possibly representing a primordial gestation period, with chimps and humans as the odd two out. Average menstrual cycles are also closest between humans and orangutan, with the latter at twenty-nine days. Considered in terms of number of menstrual cycles as a yardstick for measuring pregnancy, the figures are more drastically variant. Orangutan are still the most human in this respect and chimps the least, with their gestations being only 6.4 times their cycles.
It’s always possible to cherry-pick similarities between different items in this way, and it’s a value judgement which ones to consider the most significant. However, before going on to less quantified traits, I should probably talk about how I’ve simplified the taxonomic situation. Among the living apes, only humans constitute a single species. Moreover, the diversity between individual humans is much smaller than between most other species of mammals, other great apes included. This is another anti-racist point, as we can look at the relatively unfamiliar gorillas and orangutan without vividly realising that they are not only more dissimilar than we are within their species but that they in fact constitute a larger number of species than we thought. We’re focussed on things like skin tone, hair texture and eye colour among our own species while failing to notice the much bigger differences which exist between other apes, inside and outside their own species. Before I go on, I want to look at these species.
Nowadays, we do make a well-known distinction between bonobos and chimpanzees, the first formerly being referred to as “pygmy chimpanzees”. Likewise, we are, I think, aware of the rather complicated situation gorillas find themselves in, with two species, Eastern and Western, and several subspecies. Among the orangutan there are actually at least three species: Sumatran, Bornean and Tapanuli. The final species only evolved in the last seven hundred millennia and may therefore be the most recent of all species of great ape. Only recently has it been possible to distinguish between species this finely, due to advances in DNA sequencing, so although in the mid-twentieth century CE only four or five species of great ape were thought to exist and there are now thought to be eight, because the same degree of distinction is now possible across the tree of life there are not proportionately more species of ape than previously though. Also, historically the classification separated humans from all other great apes due to reliance on morphology rather than genetics, and also perhaps focussing on features which are less diagnostic than the ones used today, so at the time there would have been pongids and hominids, with four apes in the former category and one in the other, i.e. humans, not considered apes at all. Today the pongids still exist as a group, but only include the orangutan.
The Sumatran and Bornean orangutan separated somewhat over four million years ago. There were also one or possibly two other extinct species. The Chinese orangutan was around until about fifty-seven thousand years ago, suggesting that they used to range over a much wider area than they now do. The ones left over are remnants in a kind of enclave, which interestingly also seems to be the case for at least two other species of great ape rather closer to home, namely the hobbits and Denisovans. Today’s humans with the highest Denisovan DNA content are also found in the islands of Southeast Asia in the Philippines, who are up to one-twentieth Denisovan, equivalent to having a Denisovan great-great grandparent. Hobbits were also found in Indonesia until about fifty millennia ago, so there seems to be something about that area which makes it easier for great apes to thrive, including ourselves.
The image I have in my mind of our family tree right now is of an initial mainly arboreal great ape giving rise to several branches, some of which have in evolutionary terms travelled further than others, and despite their greater diversity orangutan seem to have changed the least. Hence the features we share with them were likely to have been in our common ancestors, though not always as the possession of red hair seems to have evolved independently in humans. Their hands in particular are more like ours than those of other apes, and more so in their babies. As mentioned before, gorilla and chimp hands are both adapted for knuckle-walking, with for example longer fingers, and this they have in common with other mammals with specialised hands such as pangolins and anteaters. Orangutan don’t walk on their knuckles and our hands are therefore similar. Orangutan are also the second least hairy ape and their hair is long like human hair, not “cropped” like that of other apes. In fact, considering all apes together as a group of related animals, the species least like the others is probably actually the chimp, as opposed to the bonobo. Those are the ones who have travelled the furthest. It’s also probably true that orangutan and gorillas share traits which no other apes have, and ditto with chimps. For instance, the females are similar sizes.
This apparent affinity between us was noted by the physical anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz in his book ‘The Red Ape: Orangutans and Human Origins’, published in 1987. I actually read this book at the time. It dates from before DNA sequencing took everything over and Schwartz maintains that the characteristics shared by orangutan and us trumps the DNA evidence even though he acknowledges that we’re genetically closer to chimps and gorillas. This is the kind of statement which is unlikely to be accepted in biology nowadays but there are in fact quite a few things true only of us and them, many of which I’ve already mentioned. Our teeth are apparently so similar that they’ve been confused for each other by professionals.
The differences, too, are multiple. Orangutan are the most tree-living apes, which is one reason they don’t knuckle-walk. The flanges of the males give them very non-humanoid faces, probably the least human-looking of all apes in fact. They are also the least social apes, very unlike us, and their hips and shoulders are more flexible than ours.
The points of divergence between humans and other apes are estimated to be 6.4 million years for us and chimps, 8.6 million for us and gorillas and 15.2 million for us and orangutan. As we go back over that period of time, just as gorillas and chimps are in the process of becoming less human, the respective ancestors would be both more like humans than today’s other apes are and ultimately also more like orangutan. If an unethical experiment were to be engaged in to splice the common DNA between humans and orangutan together, any surviving entity would be most like the common ancestor of all apes. This would apparently be a relatively hairless, long-haired ape with human-like hands, living primarily in trees, larger than a chimp with a relatively long pregnancy and markèd sexual dimorphism. As to what colour their hair was, there is presumably a way of examining the phaeomelanin allele in orangutan to determine its approximate age, but without that information it seems to me entirely feasible that the hair was dark and not reddish, simply because chimps, bonobos, both species of gorilla and humans all have dark hair, although the colour of human hair varies.
To conclude, then, just because two species are outwardly similar doesn’t mean that they’re the most closely related in a group, and superficial differences can mark genetic similarities. Closely related species can also acquire similar traits through evolution. For instance, it doesn’t seem that the ancestors of orangutan and humans had red hair, pale skin and blue eyes, or that the ancestors of gorillas and chimps were knuckle-walkers, but in both cases individuals from each species have developed those characteristics independently, possibly because both already had pressure to do so and a propensity to undergo the appropriate chain of mutations. But most of all, orangutan’s similarity to in particular White humans is a useful tool for combating racism and speciesism.
Almost certainly a copyright violation: this will be removed if you ask.
Although I did watch and enjoy it, I was never really a fan of ‘The X-Files’ because it had a couple of annoying things about it (apart from saying “The Church of Ephesia” at one point which was just funny). One of them was what I think of as lazy writing. It was common for a standalone episode to end without resolution, and from a writer’s perspective, that’s just irritating, because most people who write work hard to tie things up at the end, and rather than doing that, this series did the opposite and actually tried to make it into a virtue. So it’s like, there’s this guy who has an extra skeletal muscle over all of his skin which enables him to shapeshift, and then – oh I dunno, a load of stuff happens and maybe he hadn’t anyway but I don’t care, here’s next week’s episode, forget that. And then the same thing would happen until the end of the series.
That was one annoying thing. Another one was “I Want To Believe”. Mulder is a detective. He is not supposed to “want to believe” that a particular person is guilty or innocent or that a particular modus operandi (sorry, modum operandi) characterised a particular incident. “I Want To Believe” was for the viewers, maybe because they wanted to believe, but unless he was mocking himself and wanted to cast doubt on his reputation, he definitely should not have put a massive great poster on his wall advertising his unsuitability for his line of work.
But yes, I also want to believe something. Not in flying saucers particularly, although I do think it’s interesting that spheroids, discs and cigar-shaped objects are all convincing three-dimensional slices of a simple hyperspatial superovoid thingy. It’s the wrong attitude because it leads to cognitive bias and not seeing what’s in front of your face. Basically delusion. In one case, it really worried me. Now I’ve never been anti-vaccination, but as usual I have opinions which are different from most other people’s on the matter. I was worried about this and I wanted to believe that vaccines were a good thing, so I started to read up on immunology. I got two standard textbooks on immunology and two standard textbooks on microbiology and started to plough through them, confident that their sources and arguments would be high-quality and well-presented. Unfortunately, as I read more into the subject I started to feel my faith in vaccination ebb away. I feel the need to emphasise that I most definitely do continue to support vaccination in general, more than I used to in fact because the objections I had in the 1990s have now largely been addressed. However, I didn’t have the courage to pursue what was increasingly appearing to be the truth about the situation as backed up by rigorous scientific research. I didn’t fail to understand the reasoning, didn’t doubt the evidence or research, but I still found that very reasoning and information was taking me rapidly away from the consensus, and I strongly suspect that if I’d continued to learn more about the immune system and infectious diseases, by now I would have become an anti-vaxxer. But I’m not. The reason I’m not is partly peer pressure and partly because I trust the expertise of immunologists and microbiologists. For some reason, my brain works that way but theirs obviously doesn’t, and the flaw is probably in my own thought processes.
Opposite to this is Mulder’s attitude in ‘The X-Files’. His desire to believe was probably confirmed by in-universe events and he got what he wanted: his wish to believe was granted. I’d be interested in knowing what other people find here because I haven’t heard that this happens for other people, but I often find that precisely when I want to believe passionately in something, I actually find it harder to believe than if I didn’t really care about it. Whatever else was going on in my process to convince myself that vaccination is a good thing, I’m pretty sure my strong desire to believe it was a big factor in me not finding it convincing. Even so, to my conscious mind it seemed to present itself as an ever-growing list of reasons for believing the opposite. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this tendency if it does exist in me, but I suppose on this occasion I just decided to trust the brains of people with apparently less unusual cognitive styles than my own.
So, the rest of this is about something I want to believe.
I’ll start with straightforward memory, learning and information transfer in living organisms, mainly humans because I am one, allegèdly. The two things many people think of as information in ourselves are our memories and thoughts on the one hand and our heredity on the other. There are at least two other systems in our bodies which do something similar, namely the specific immune response and the endocrine system. I can’t make too many comments on the former because of what I talked about earlier, but the endocrine system is easier to discuss. Some of the transformations our bodies undergo due to hormones is even similar to memory. For instance, growth hormone makes us taller and then we stay taller after it stops taking effect. There are other examples not easily categorised. I have a transverse scar on my wrist from when I cut myself on an aluminium drink can bale in 1992 and it was dressed incorrectly by using cotton wool, which I then had to yank out from inside the healing wound. That’s not just a memory, but a clearly observable physical mark on my body recorded by a physiological process, in the same way a memory is. Things do leave their mark on us. Looking at me, you can tell it’s been more than three years since I had a haircut, that I’m no longer in my twenties and so on. In terms of deep time, the fact that I have a navel records an incident in the Cretaceous when some of my ancestors caught a viral infection which led to them retaining their eggs rather than laying them, causing a placenta to form. The fact that I have nails rather than claws recalls the fact that later ancestors of mine climbed trees and the fact that I breathe oxygen is a legacy of the most catastrophic event to befall life on this planet in its entire history: the production of free oxygen by microörganisms.
But I digress. We carry the traces of our past, and the past before our own lives, in our bodies and in a way those things are memories. They’re records of the past. Some of them are recorded in tissues we’d never normally think of as being able to carry memories. Others are much closer to being what we’d think of as remembrance than others. There’s muscle memory of course, but that doesn’t refer to memories stored by muscles, but a learned habit which can be repeated through physical actions. What does definitely seem like memory, though, is the ability of single-celled organisms to learn.
It stands to reason that a small, mobile organism swimming through a hostile aquatic environment would benefit from being able to learn from its mistakes, but of course if it consists of a single cell, it has no multicellular organs and systems such as a brain and a nervous system. It may, however, have sensors. Euglena, for example, is a single-celled organism with a red “eye spot” which helps it to detect light and react accordingly. But how does it respond, and do its responses change after repeating the same stimuli? If they do, isn’t that a form of memory?
Well, yes it does happen. Slightly annoyingly, slime moulds are well-known to do things like learn to avoid caffeine, solve mazes and would probably have been able to redesign the British rail network if given the chance, and no, that is not a joke. However, slime moulds are not typical single-celled organisms and probably when most people hear that, they think of something like this:
Although this is a large organism in single-celled terms, it probably goes without saying that it resembles the human lymphocytes, B-cells, T-cells and macrophages in the human body, and in many cases these latter cells actually do exhibit altered behaviour depending on circumstances due to their recognition of antigens, but this learning process is carried out by the larger immune system rather than individual cells.
Paramecia are a better prospect than either of these amoeboid doobreys:
A paramecium can make associations between electric shocks and lighting conditions. If it’s shocked a few times in the light, it will avoid the light after a while. However, it can’t make associations between darkness and electric shocks. There’s said to be an association between learning and cyclic AMP, which is a common compound found across the animal kingdom as well. It’s a second messenger in humans, meaning that it sends a signal inside the cell in response to a substance received by the cell, in nervous systems for example neurotransmitters, so there’s also an association with learning for us.
Stentor, whose examples are seen here, can also learn. This protist anchors itself to a substrate and draws water and food into itself by creating a vortex by a ring of cilia around the wide end of the trumpet. It also leans over in order to locate richer food sources. In its environment, it may encounter a stream of food at an angle on a particular side, and when it does so it can move in this way. It also contracts in response to strong mechanical stimuli, presumably as a defence response. If it’s repeatedly poked, it gets used to it and not shrink so readily, so it clearly has some kind of memory of being poked before, but if it’s poked harder it still responds. It also doesn’t bother to lean over any more if it isn’t getting anything from that direction, and it can not only choose to detach itself from its substrate to seek food elsewhere but also prioritises between different decisions based on conditions. It also reverses the direction of the vortex if it encounters noxious tastes, and will do so more readily if it’s encountered them before. It does all this, of course, without any brain or nervous system.
Writing all this makes me feel uncomfortable. As a vegan, I disapprove of animal experimentation and in these cases I’m aware that these protists have been experimented on to get these results, and I find that unsettling. I haven’t seen a Paramecium or a Stentor behave this way but I have seen a Vorticella, one of these:
. . . flinch and coil its stalk in response to a threat, and I was aware that after I’d looked at them through a microscope I probably wasn’t going to be able to return the protist to its original environment in a stream at the bottom of the lane. I was six years old at the time and not yet even vegetarian, but even still.
Here, then, is the next bit, the contentious bit, something I want to believe.
Individual, unicellular organisms can learn and in some cases make decisions and prioritise. They’re not entirely dumb. Incidentally, intelligence and information processing are not the same thing as consciousness, and being panpsychist I obviously believe all these organisms are conscious in some sense, but I don’t want to consider that at this point. No, what I want to consider is this: our whole selves can learn, in various ways but prominently we learn and remember using our nervous systems. We also develop immunity, allergies and auto-immune diseases, so that system also has memory, and likewise our hormones show parallels to learning. Beyond that, our bodies show the marks of our journeys through life, although that’s only learning in a very loose sense. However, we do appear to be the descendants of single-celled organisms very similar and probably closely related to the ciliates I’ve mentioned here (and our bodies also contain amoeboid cells but we’re not so closely related), whose representatives today do in fact show definite signs of learning and memory. So the question is: do we also have cellular memory? Do our own cells carry memory-like traces of their past experience besides their genes or hormonal changes if they’re not among the classes of cells which literally carry memories or “immune education”?
At first, that does seem logical. However, our cells are not themselves single-celled organisms and they live in bodies where everything depends on everything else, everything has its functions and has surrendered many of its functions to other cells. Muscle cells contract and move the body or aid in organ function and some other cells move quite rapidly and readily, but many of them just sit there and are passengers in a moving body. Protists have little choice but to move unless they’re permanently stuck to something and even then they may contract or expand. Our own cells generally lack the pressures of having to fend for themselves, and consequently they may have lost a lot of functions their ancestors had. Even our gametes live within our bodies and although each of us starts as a single-celled animal, that’s internal too, except when deliberately extracted or fertilised via technological means which are unlikely to have had much influence on our tendency to remember or not.
Nevertheless I want it to be true that our cells as well as ourselves remember.
A Box Of Chocolates 