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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| I suppose one way to get clicks is to proclaim right off the bat that some famous person was wrong, like this eight-year-old article from aeon does. Well, if that's the claim, why not also assert that Thoreau was wrong? Because he definitely was. According to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. Yeah, it's only a person before it's born, after which no one cares. Oh, wait, that's modern Alabama, not ancient Africa. People are born without ‘ena’, or selfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time. So the ‘self’/‘other’ distinction that’s axiomatic in Western philosophy is much blurrier in Ubuntu thought. I'm not arguing against this philosophy, but "the ‘self’/‘other’ distinction" goes completely away once you realize you're the only actual consciousness. But solipsism is difficult to defend, because everyone you argue with about it is really you. Who I am depends on many ‘others’: my family, my friends, my culture, my work colleagues. Why are you limiting that to people? Your experiences are shaped by nonhuman animals, plants, and your inanimate environment too. Also shrooms. Mostly shrooms, if you're doing philosophy like this. Yet the notion of a fluctuating and ambiguous self can be disconcerting. We can chalk up this discomfort, in large part, to René Descartes. The 17th-century French philosopher believed that a human being was essentially self-contained and self-sufficient; an inherently rational, mind-bound subject, who ought to encounter the world outside her head with skepticism. And I do not yet see a contradiction between these philosophies. We can only perceive the world around us through our senses, which are processed by our brains. There's a bit about the background of Descartes' philosophy, but I ended up viewing the narrative with skepticism, mainly because of this later example provided by the author: In the 1960s, the American psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané became interested in the murder of Kitty Genovese, a young white woman who had been stabbed and assaulted on her way home one night in New York. Multiple people had witnessed the crime but none stepped in to prevent it. Darley and Latané designed a series of experiments in which they simulated a crisis, such as an epileptic fit, or smoke billowing in from the next room, to observe what people did. They were the first to identify the so-called ‘bystander effect’, in which people seem to respond more slowly to someone in distress if others are around. See, the Kitty Genovese thing was a prime example of sensationalist reporting. It turns out that "multiple people" did not witness the crime; that was overblown to sell papers to a shocked and disgusted public (an example of the pre-internet version of clickbait). Also, it's somewhat contradictory to simultaneously claim, as this article does, that the "self" is dependent upon one's environment while touting the results of a scientific study in a controlled setting; it turns out that the Bystander Effect  may not be as robust in real-world situations. There are also cultural variations involved.Point being, if you're going to write an article that hinges, in part, on the truth of the Kitty Genovese incident, and you're unaware that it was debunked years ago, one has to wonder what else might be wrong or misleading in the article. Is there a way of reconciling these two accounts of the self – the relational, world-embracing version, and the autonomous, inward one? The 20th-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that the answer lay in dialogue. We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image. Or, you know, "others" are an illusion projected by your own subconsciousness. Okay, no, I'm not actually a solipsist. And I do accept that we're only who we are in relation to our environment. I mean, that's the "nurture" part in the old nature / nurture question. There will likely continue to be arguments about how much of each makes us "us," but I think people who assume it's either one or the other are pretty rare nowadays. But for the most part, scientific psychology is only too willing to adopt individualistic Cartesian assumptions that cut away the webbing that ties the self to others. There is a Zulu phrase, ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’, which means ‘A person is a person through other persons.’ This is a richer and better account, I think, than ‘I think, therefore I am.’ And yet, as I said, I don't see an inherent contradiction here. You know you exist because you think. But that doesn't rule out the existence of the world around us or the beings that inhabit it, or their effect on us. "Cogito ergo sum" is the beginning of philosophy, not its end point, in my view anyway. Perhaps I'm just not enough of a philosopher to understand what the author is trying to say; or, maybe, I'm simply a bystander. |
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