Jonathan Balcombe – Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good

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Book Review, Ethics, Jonathan Balcombe, Philosophy, Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good, Reflection, Science and nature

A challenge to blinkered speciesism

This is a terrific book, giving the lie to those who dismissively accuse those of us who ascribe emotions to animals as ‘anthropomorphising’ Its always seemed to me to be rather crucially the other way round. As human beings are after all also animals, and as we can see clearly the development of anatomical structures across aeons of time, and across species, its absolutely obvious that all the aspects of physiology have also been a-developing. Animals – not just other mammals, but other vertebrates, have neurological and endocrine systems like ours. It has always seemed to me to be supreme arrogance to interpret human behaviour and human emotion one way, and deny that complex behaviour and emotion also exist in animals. Why should we interpret the playful human one way, and see other animals, both wild and domesticated, behaving in a manner which looks playful, and looks as if the animal is enjoying itself, and not draw the conclusion that he/she is also having fun. I have used the term he/she deliberately, as Balcombe does, pointing out that our language, calling animals ‘it’ removes them from individuality. His tenet in this book is that we have failed to investigate the clear evidence that animals feel ‘pleasure’ in all its many guises – pleasure from companionship and social bonds with other animals, pleasure in play, a sense of beauty, enjoyment in the feel-good of sex – not just a mechanical urge, but pleasurable, like it is for humans. Even, in one startling image, he presents the idea that certainly other primates may experience a sense of awe.

As he points out, carefully tracing what appears to be complex emotion back and back – even to invertebrates, to insects, once we begin to see the adaptive, in evolutionary terms, nature of ‘feel-good’ and to see that ‘dumb animals’ not only feel pain, but also the complexities of the pleasurable (a much more individualised, personal identity response than the pain response) we should be forced to change our thinking about the separation between ourselves and other species.

The further I read into this book, the more Jainism, with its deep respect for all that lives, makes scientific, not just ethical sense.

My only cavil about this excellently put together, well-written, carefully argued and researched book is that I wish the extensive bibliography and citing of published research material had been footnote referenced, rather than all the books and studies cited in a chapter collected together at the end of the book, as I wanted to look for the evidence of some of the more surprising information given.

Its possible that this may have been done in the physical text, but certainly is not a feature of the Kindle edition.
Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good Amazon UK
Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good Amazon USA

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Bruce Hood – Supersense: From Superstition to Religion – The Brain Science of Belief

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Book Review, Bruce Hood, Neurobiology, Science and nature, Supersense: From Superstition to Religion - The Brain Science of Belief

A most unjudgemental, unfundamentalist, atheism

I found this a most absorbing read, particularly because though I agreed with the rationale behind much of it I did also find myself arguing, enjoyably rather than angrily, as there are manifestations of `supersense’ which I believe he rather ignores, dismissing certain things which exist and there have been statistical studies on (e.g. telepathy)

Hood examines he reason why we are, as a species, prone to `supernatural’ thinking and have an inbuilt tendency, rather than just a cultural tendency, to the perception of `sacred’. Briefly, we are programmed to see patterns and connections. The world may be full of randomness, but we see patterns which connect some of that randomness and make it meaningful. We are a patterning, and a cause and effect species. We are a species which invests meaning. Hood does not quite say this, but it seems to me to make perfect gut sense that as a trade-off for our awareness of mortality, and perhaps an overwhelming felt sense of a random, uncaring universe, we make certain connections, and invest meaning, and benevolent design to our world.

I admit to being a `patterner’. I probably always was. However, curiously, now seeing patterns of benevolence rather than patterns of indifference, there is no doubt that this has had a profoundly positive effect on me as an individual and as an individual in society.

He shows how much all of us, even the most `rational’ are affected by `essential thinking’ – that is, an irrational investiture of some meaningful quality in both animate and inanimate object, which can be caught, or `infect’ a person in some way. A couple of interesting experiments are put forward to demonstrate this – would you knowingly wear the washed cardigan of a serial killer such as Fred West, and even if you would, do you have a frisson of discomfort at the idea? Would you without any qualms, take a photograph of someone infinitely precious to you – say, your young child, and stab scissors through the child’s eyes, on the photograph? If you can do this, because of course, the photo is not the child, were you able to do it without an initial feeling of horror at the idea. Most of us answer no, even those who are profoundly materialistic in their thinking and feeling.

There are a couple of points where Hood I think did not see beyond his own `these are the rules by which the world works, therefore anything which happens which does not accord with how the world works, and can’t fit into the theory, can’t exist’

Hood talks through how these feelings of meaning, essence, sacred, may have cohered us as a species, whilst he dismisses the real existence of `essence’ – however, he then tells a couple of stories which don’t quite bear out his `there is no such thing as essence’ thinking. One is the recounting of the choosing of the Dalai Lama – traditionally, the very young child demonstrates that he IS the new incarnation of the Dalai Lama by picking, from a group of very similar looking sacred objects, those that belonged to the previous Dalai Lama. No doubt the hardened sceptic would say that some fraud is being perpetuated by those who are searching for the new Dalai Lama, but as those devoutly wanting to find their spiritual leader believe most profoundly that it is the Dalai Lama who must reveal himself, and not them who must choose him, what is the selection of the right objects really proving?

The other is a final story linked to Fred West.

Homoeopathy (something of an open season for sceptics) comes of course under Hood’s dismissed errors of thinking, at best as `just placebo’ – whilst he does acknowledge the power of placebo. However, it does work with babies and with animals, and presumably the placebo effect cannot explain that.

What I particularly like about Hood is his ability, pretty thoroughly, to debate religion and spiritual beliefs, from the clear stance of an unbeliever and a rationalist, without the highly charged emotionalism which Dawkins brings to the arena. None of us escape our subjective view of the world, and how it colours what we experience, but Hood is pretty good at seeing, given the widespread belief in `the sacred’ that whether the sacred exists or not, the sense of meaning and sacredness has evolved for a reason, and must confer an evolutionary advantage.

I think this is an excellent book, for those of us who are meaningful patterners, and for those who dismiss the whole thing as hokum – Hood I believe will make both sides think.
Supersense: From Superstition to Religion – The Brain Science of Belief Amazon UK
Supersense: Why we believe in the Unbelievable Amazon USA

This is the same book, published with different explanatory subtitles, UK and USA, for reasons we can, I’m sure, imagine!

Damon Galgut – In A Strange Room

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Book Review, Damon Galgut, In A Strange Room, Literary Fiction, South African writing or setting

The strange room in a strange place called Life

This is a quietly bleak, haunting journey, which snags and ellipses its themes. The book is a spider’s web, easily trapping the reader by its simple, pared back prose. Enter into its surroundings, and you won’t get out easily. The central character in this book by the South African author Damon Galgut is a restlessly travelling South African author called Damon. Presumably, he both is and isn’t the author, as we are made aware the travelling Damon is not the one who is now writing the book. Memory and the imposed patterns of reflection on the past have made a story of events. Its possible/probable that the ‘real’ Damon writer who wrote this book has shaped the written story that the ‘I’ of the book has shaped about his central character’s journey.

Confused? This is part of the book’s charm – it lures you onwards, leaving you, like ‘Damon’ unable to rest. You have to keep on seeking, trying to get to the centre.

In the first of the 3 long journeying events, Damon walks widening ellipses across the landscape of Lesotho, with an enigmatic and beautiful German doppelganger of sorts. In the second story, he is again journeying with a group of strangers, and another beautiful young man haunts him. ‘Damon’ yearns to connect (as he did with the German, Reiner, at times), but his own flaw is that though on one level he yearns for connection, and tires of his restlessness, he cannot take the plunge into intimacy. In the third journey, in India, his companion is a female friend teetering and plunging into madness. In friendship he is capable of deep tenderness and commitment, deep feeling, in fact overwhelmed by feeling, in a way that he is unable to give himself up to with the potential lovers.

What are these restless journeys, this inability to be? What is Damon ever seeking? His journey is laden with a sense of a search for some meaning, for life, for existence to have meaning. Death haunts and is a tangible presence in each story. Each journey is a journey towards death, like all lives journey towards death.

I was reminded of a shadow tale behind ‘In A Strange Room’ – the myth of the man who is told he will die today. He flees the city he is living in, to escape ‘death’ and journeys to a strange place, where he meets ‘Death’ who tells him that he, Death, suddenly had a message to travel from the city to this place, in order to keep his appointment with the man. Run as we may, death awaits us.

This is a very beautiful and haunting book, a meditation on what it means to travel, what we may run from, and what we are always journeying towards.

“You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are”
In A Strange Room Amazon UK
In A Strange Room Amazon USA

Mark Rowlands – The Philosopher and The Wolf

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Autobiography, Book Review, Ethics, Mark Rowlands, Philosophy of Mind, Science and nature, The Philosopher and The Wolf

This story of the relationship between Dr of Philosophy Mark Rowlands, and a wolf he bought as a cub, whilst a very young lecturer in Arizona in the 1990s, is fascinating, touching, meditative, troubled, thought provoking and as heartbreaking at times as it is amusing at others.

Rowlands was, as he admits, on one level quite a troubled individual – misanthropic, intensely reflective but not particularly comfortable with himself or other members of his own species, and veering into a relationship, far less instructive and elevating than his relationship with a wolf or part wolf part dog – with the bottle. The ability to drink a couple of litres of spirit in agonised despair on one particular, heartbreaking night, as he recounts, is clear evidence of hardened heavy drinking.

This book is part a loving recount of an 11 year relationship with Brenin, but, as importantly, a reflection on what it is to be human – or, as Rowlands, in disgust puts it ‘ape’ or ‘simian’, by contrast with what it means to be a lupine, vulpine or canine animal.

There is much which fascinatingly turns our own perception of ourselves as fine and advanced, on its head – Rowlands marks all our achievements down, from the highest to the lowest, as based on the evolutionary road which started in other primates, before homo sapiens, namely, the ability to work an advantage in deceiving each other, carried forward in speech, to grandiose mendacity, to ourselves as well as others, and, in order that the deceived do not lose evolutionary advantages, the development of the ability to read each other, see through lies and deceptions, and the never ending content between deceivers and deceived which then goes on permanently. And of course, the fact that each of us is both, simultaneously.

He contrasts the colder, cleaner concept of relationships built on loyalty within the pack of non-primate social species, with the sort of tricky behaviour (so similar to our own) which can be observed by animal behaviourists who study primate tribes over years in the wild.

I very much appreciated the debunking of arrogant superiority which we are prone to, as a species, but, increasingly, as I read, I could not help but be reminded, again and again, that the insistance, almost, on our innate debased nature, in comparison to a more noble non-human animal nature, seemed as flawed as those who believe we are the pinnacle, and the rest, dumb beasts.

Much of the book seemed to inhabit a place of self-loathing – and that loathing was projected outwards to the species as a whole of which the author seemed to be a reluctant and repulsed member.

Man, like wolf, is neither wholly flawed nor wholly perfect and part of our ape-ish evolution also leads to that very ability to self-reflect, even at times to be brutally honest in our self-reflection and attempt to see the world through another’s eyes.

Yes, for all I know non-primates may indeed be able to try and empathise with what it might mean to be lupine or avian, or even to try to perceive the world through cockroach or evergreen tree perspective, but I think this is definitely a pronounced human characteristic – and one which, if developed, can work to overturn the undoubtedly also present duplicity of simian development.

At times I very much was in 5 star territory with this book, as it made me think and ponder deeply, but I got pulled back to 4 star because some of the arguments really felt due to the fact Rowlands’ own nature made him often peer at the world through ordure-tinted spectacles. Which, in the end may be just as partial in view as rose-tinted ones
The Philosopher and The Wolf Amazon UK
The Philosopher and The Wolf Amazon USA