Bottled Up! (part III)

We have all heard tales of alien abductors taking people in their sleep and subjecting them to grotesque forms of torture, apparently in the name of alien science.  Well, that was us.  To the gecko, through the glass of its new cage at the museum, my learned colleagues and I would no doubt have looked just as absurd and just as obscene.

Our friend who was quite content to let the animal regrow its tail only to slay it for the sake of knowledge was no amoral monster.  On the contrary:  concern about the tiny area of habitat where the gecko was found led him to restrict the museum's specimen-taking there to avoid stressing the population further.  In my view this careful weighing of the needs of the gecko population, against the almost obsessive requirements of an abstract agenda (in this case: the statistical need to have as large a sample size as possible) may be taken as evidence of sophisticated ethical reasoning, probably surpassing that of any known arboreal reptile and certainly that of the average lawyer, for example.

However, his concern for the advancement of his own studies and abstract agenda to the exclusion of more mundane ethical issues (such as what the individual gecko might think about it) is shared by all of us, including psychopathic killers and lawyers.  It is part of our human psyche:  the ability to exclude certain points of view from consideration in order to get a job done.

In "normal", healthy humans this is balanced by the unconscious tendency to put one’s self in the shoes of another: the anthropomorphic urge (the very faculty which the psychopath allegedly lacks).  It is this which counters the urge to pursue our goals without regard for the consequences for other truths or points of view (such as the lizard’s).

In the same way, the scientists habit of reducing the subject to a pure abstraction (lizard=data) must be balanced in the study of Ecology by the ethical and epistemological need to consider the subject holistically and in its natural context (lizard=living being and part of an ecology).  Forgetting this leaves one open to commit not only genocide, but also the great atrocity of compromising the integrity of the data!

We all blind ourselves quite deliberately to the killing all around in the universe in order to go about our daily life.  Lest we end up like the lunatic sage (whose name I fail to recall):  who could not take a single step for fear of treading on a worm or inhaling a fly or causing some other harm to some other unsuspecting creature.  But it is also greatly to be hoped that natural empathy prevents us (generally speaking) from going to the other extreme and seeing killing in the way I imagine a psychopath sees it:  as a trifle; a pleasure, or merely expedient.

Killing is killing.  It is just that the trained and required responses to the killing of anything are determined by the community in which that individual finds or puts themselves.  We are arguably able to empathise with anything alive yet we do not always respond to killing in the same way.

Imagine if my father’s favourite joke with vegetarians (“Can’t you hear that poor broccoli screaming?”) came true, and we were made suddenly aware of the suffering of all beings.  Quite apart from the insuperable trauma of such a revelation generally, why the very idea of an animated foodstuff which endorses its own consumption would become intolerable.  The entire food advertising industry would come to a standstill.

Douglas Adams’ dialogue between Arthur Dent and the sanguine dish of the day in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was not just sending up meat-eaters who affect humanitarian concerns for their food, but the whole process by which life feeds on life.  Any organism exposed to crippling concerns for the welfare of its food is likely to have been a victim of natural selection long ago.  But a healthy awareness of where it comes from and how it got to the plate is, well... healthy!

Don’t get me wrong.  I eat meat, and as any green-blooded vego will tell you:  meat is murder.  When I look for certified organic meat I don’t kid myself (even if it is goat – sorry bad pun) that it went to its death thinking it was going to a bachelor party.  But I am trying to send a message to the killing machine that is the meat industry.  And a part of that message is that animals and other forms of life, regardless of how we utilise them, should be treated with humanity and respect and never taken for granted as just parts of the machinery of our disastrous "postmodern", post-Fordist, military-industrial society.

It is logically impossible to avoid killing things regardless of what lifestyle or dietary arrangements one adopts.  Even a vegan can’t make a real omelette without breaking some eggs.  And every hour you allow your body to live, it slays many millions of organisms trying to fulfil their lives within and upon it.  The doctrine of non-killing is merely the renunciation of deliberate harm to a group of organisms arbitrarily defined by the particular intellectual position or lineage one subscribes to.

The lesson of the sage above is informed by the knowledge that life feeds on life.  In Buddhist terms:  in order for a being to leave the wheel it is necessary for all beings to leave the wheel.  There is either movement, or there is stillness.  If we subscribe to life (as we do with each breath), then we must tolerate death and killing.  But we are free, to the degree society allows it, to draw the line for ourselves between the carrion and the corpses.

As for the gecko which so nobly sacrificed itself, but not its original tail, for the furtherance of science and perhaps just as importantly (i.e. not very) of our careers as scientists:  The last time I saw it, it was bottled and shelved with the hundreds of thousands of other specimens in the bowels of the museum:  sequestered carbon.  Waiting for flood or fire or apocalypse to break the continuity of the museum’s collection, and release the pale and bloated bodies from their pickle-jars.  To free the ancient members of the Order Taxidermata from their statuesque un-death.

Despite all I know about the importance of museum collections and the enormous amount of information they represent, I cannot help thinking that it is a strange fate for organic matter, to be mummified like that.  It reminds me of the ancient pharaohs in their monumental cryo-chambers, awaiting some unknown resurrection by some unknown civilisation.  Genetic tourists.

Still, though the fact of its existence makes me a little uneasy, even the embalmed flesh of a long-dead lizard (or king) has a place in the universe.  To tell the story that once upon a time, it lived and breathed... ate, shat and fucked.  Before it was chosen for the long cold journey into the future.