The Daily: 24 September 24

I have been working on an essay that should have been posted today. It deals with belief and practice, orthodoxy vs orthopraxy. We have too much of the former and almost none of the latter. As you can imagine, I have much to say on this. The essay is up to 5300 words. In addition to the unfortunate length, none of those words are playing nicely together. It’s going to take more than the fifteen minutes or so that I have here before passing out tonight to edit those words into coherence, preferably at something close to half that length. Or maybe more than one essay. So that got kicked down the line a bit.

But as I was washing the dinner dishes, a shorter but more coherent idea came to me.

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I’ve been buying squash this year. This annoys me because I have already spent considerable labor and money on making the conditions in which there would be squash in my garden. This also annoys me because I love growing squash, and buying one, even directly from the farmer, is just no substitute for the pleasure of nurturing my own. But what really annoys me about buying squash is that this is not my fault. I can grow squash in any climate. I have successfully fended off powdery mildew and squash bugs. I know how to cope with too much or too little water and know all the signs of stress. I know what to feed the soil that grows the strongest plants (seaweed… and sometimes bone meal…). I have devised rotation schedules to keep the soil free of squash pests. I grow squash.

Until now…

And the only reason I am not growing squash now is predation from rodents… especially one fat annoyance that has methodically ripped apart most of my garden.

This is not my fault!

So, anyway, I’ve been grousing about that, and I was grousing while washing the dishes, dishes from a delicious meal that featured not-my-squash. As often happens when groundhog grousing, my brain returned to Michael Pollan’s groundhog story and an essay he titled “Nature Abhors a Garden”. (These may be the same essay. I can’t remember. It/they can be found in his wonderful book on gardening, Second Nature — my copy of which was destroyed last year.)

Then I thought, “It’s not nature, it’s the groundhog. Because he destroys so much more than he eats. The groundhog abhors a garden… but at least he’s not as bad as the squirrels… who are just malicious.”

As we are conditioned to do, I pulled back from ascribing intent to the squirrels. They can’t be malicious if they don’t have will and we don’t believe that they have will. They’re not malicious. Just tragically stupid. And apparently conditioned to find pleasure in destroying the food of others. Because they don’t eat much of what they dig up or gnaw on. They don’t even follow the squirrel script of burying it. They leave it lying wherever they decide they really don’t like it after all. And then they go back for more of the same. This tells me that the food is not the reward; it’s the stealing and destroying that sets their little endorphins singing.

And then I thought, “Well why not malicious?” If a human does this, we name it malice. If a squirrel does it we shake our heads and say it’s just squirrel behavior. It’s okay to be a shitty person if you’re in a squirrel body because that body doesn’t have a will.

Well… I’m not sure humans do either…

But I am quite sure that there is nothing especially special about the human organism. Where does this will reside in our body? What does it emerge from? And if you can answer those questions — and nobody ever has after thousands of years of thinking hard on the subject — then tell me how that body part is different from other mammals. Tell me how the individual beings within that body part, some of which are not human, relate to “your” will. Tell me what part of your behavior is not motivated by exactly the same stimuli as a squirrel’s. Then tell me the difference between your behavior and the squirrel’s. Why is what you do willful while the squirrel’s actions are “just nature”?

As I said, I am not convinced there is a will, but I know that there is no difference between humans and other animals. There aren’t even solid boundaries around humanity that could set it apart as a special case. If we have will, so does the squirrel.

Now, the other way to cope with that lack of specialness is to say that there is no will. In which case there is no maliciousness at all, not in squirrels, not in humans. In which case there is no evil. In which case there is no rationale behind punishment or castigation. Because there was no intent. It was all an organism behaving according to its mindless programming, all response, no cause. In squirrels and humans alike.

We like to think such things of squirrels, but just as we shy away from ascribing intent to squirrels, we also recoil from the idea that humans are also just mindless automata responding to stimuli. For one thing, all this thinking is moot… So because I am a writer who is constantly churning out internal narratives and therefore somewhat biased toward thought, I err on the side of mind for all. If we have intentions, then so do the damn squirrels. If we behave maliciously, then so does any organism that behaves as we do.

Now, very few organisms waste things for pleasure. A cow doesn’t rip a plant up by the roots to just leave it dead on the ground. A tiger doesn’t kill a monkey and then just abandon the carcass. Most animals have complex behaviors and bodily systems that are designed to minimize waste, to get the most out of every life taken. Most organisms take only what they need from the world. Organisms that are even capable of wasting are unusual. Organisms that put so much effort into pure waste are rare indeed. But that doesn’t make us singular. Not even singularly broken as organisms.

Because squirrels are just as bad.

If we privilege our own behavior by calling it intention, good or bad or otherwise, then we are setting ourselves outside of the rest of the world. We are naming ourselves different. Special. As soon as you relinquish that privilege, as soon as you completely banish the idea that humans are the only organisms that think, that have a will, as soon as you see humans as we are — just another organism among billions (on this planet alone!) — then you not only are allowed to see intention in other organisms, but that is a requirement of logical thought. A basic fact. If we intend, then so do all. Case closed.

Either go the nothing thinks route, or everything does. There is no logical division. Well, this being has a really large brain, so it must have intentions (when we know that intentions don’t much form in the brain…). Either nothing has will, or everything does. Either nothing is malicious, or every malicious act is in fact just that.

Either there is no evil… or squirrels are… among others…

This thought of evil squirrels feels wrong. That’s how deeply ingrained is the idea that we humans are set apart. We can’t name manifestly evil behavior as evil unless we enact it. I am just as guilty of this as anyone, and I don’t even fully believe in will, never mind human distinction. I have to consciously remind myself that if what I do is malicious, then when a squirrel acts in the same manner that is also malicious behavior. Moreover, if my actions are intentional, then there is nothing special about me that precludes the squirrel from holding squirrel-versions of those same intentions. If I have malicious intent, so does the squirrel.

See how hard it is to think that way? I am tempted to just stop thinking…

Except this idea of human specialness is a really big problem, and it needs to be stamped out. It is not only that we think we are the only ones who think. It is not only that we set ourselves apart from all the others. It is not only that we, alone among all beings, think we are deserving, that we merit reward or punishment. It is not only that we have convinced ourselves that we are alone…

This idea of human exceptionalism is the reason we are able to destroy this planet. We could not possibly waste or poison or kill or cause suffering if we believed that we were just another being nestled in a world of beings. Causing wasteful harm would elicit the same horror and revulsion regardless of whether the object was a human infant or a zebra or a lizard or a mountain. I know this… because I feel it. Hurting others hurts me. If everyone shared that revulsion, the waste would stop…

But that is a bigger topic than squirrels… and groundhogs… and even gardens. Though it is very much related to my annoyance at buying squash after I have cultivated proper skills and soil and plants to no avail. I am annoyed because I am trying to lessen the harm that I am causing the world. And these damn rodents won’t let me.

I can’t quite bring myself to label this malicious intent. I can’t quite name squirrels evil… but if humans were doing this, it absolutely would be, so… logically…

If there is malice… then every body is capable thereof. If there is merit, then every body is deserving. If an act is evil in one kind of organism, then it is evil in all. It is not nature in some and wrong-doing in a select few who know the difference between right and wrong and choose to ignore it. If there are choices made here, there are choices made everywhere… All of which leads me back to Michael Pollan… Nature abhors a garden… but mostly rodents abhor a garden…

And they expend a great deal of effort willfully destroying that thing they abhor…

Making me buy squash…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024