As I was Saying before I was so Rudely Interrupted by Having to go to Work.....
Yesterday the track was closed. Covered in ice and snow. Charles stopped over there yesterday to have a look and told me that they were working it, so I suspect that it’s going to be open today. And it will surely be a busy day.
What I was saying before, about the horse sense for people, and where our behavior is rooted. We assume that evolution follows a path of adaptation, culminating, for example, in the opposing thumb and the development of our own ability to create any number of meanings for any single object or event. So we are always looking at animals as ‘lower’ forms of intelligence. I don’t deny this, but I want to make a point about the way we look at things:
Since we see things in terms of moving in a direction from simple to complex, we refuse to accept animal behavior as something that is alike to our own. We call it anthropomorphism and argue that people who do this are wrong to think that animals can be like us.
You see how our direction points us to blindness? It is not that they are like us. No way. They don’t get their behavior and language (such as it is) from us.
It is WE who are alike to THEM. It is we whose behavior is rooted in the more primitive behavior and languages we ascribe to them. If you want to see where we came from, look at them. See the Seven Sins as the things we once needed to commit in order to survive.
I’m not advocating that we ever adjust our expectations of humans to be lower than it is now – that’s not where I am going.
I am saying if you want to modify behavior in a human, see how it’s done with the animal, and use the advanced tools at our disposal to anticipate and channel our kids and our coworkers; it doesn’t even matter if we know we are attempting to modify each other’s behavior; to understand that, one already knows that when we behave as sociopaths, we behave as a primitive organism, for which there is no space in modern society. There you go. No need for morality – just “what works” and what doesn’t.
What I was saying before, about the horse sense for people, and where our behavior is rooted. We assume that evolution follows a path of adaptation, culminating, for example, in the opposing thumb and the development of our own ability to create any number of meanings for any single object or event. So we are always looking at animals as ‘lower’ forms of intelligence. I don’t deny this, but I want to make a point about the way we look at things:
Since we see things in terms of moving in a direction from simple to complex, we refuse to accept animal behavior as something that is alike to our own. We call it anthropomorphism and argue that people who do this are wrong to think that animals can be like us.
You see how our direction points us to blindness? It is not that they are like us. No way. They don’t get their behavior and language (such as it is) from us.
It is WE who are alike to THEM. It is we whose behavior is rooted in the more primitive behavior and languages we ascribe to them. If you want to see where we came from, look at them. See the Seven Sins as the things we once needed to commit in order to survive.
I’m not advocating that we ever adjust our expectations of humans to be lower than it is now – that’s not where I am going.
I am saying if you want to modify behavior in a human, see how it’s done with the animal, and use the advanced tools at our disposal to anticipate and channel our kids and our coworkers; it doesn’t even matter if we know we are attempting to modify each other’s behavior; to understand that, one already knows that when we behave as sociopaths, we behave as a primitive organism, for which there is no space in modern society. There you go. No need for morality – just “what works” and what doesn’t.
posted by hoofstep at
3:53 AM
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