Day 206
New template today as you can see. It was time for a little switch-up, and I particularly like the relaxed colour scheme of this one.
Often we activate a sort of mirror imaging process when we analyze objects. Ever gone into a very old house, all cluttered up with things spanning a century? Ever said something like "Wow, there must be a lot of memories in here." I do, often. Of course we mean to say there must be many memories of the place, not inside it. But, I wonder if that's what we feel when we make the statement. I get a certain feeling that the room, or old object of whatever sort, somehow contains within itself a memory of all the times it has impacted the senses and emotions of people over time.
This cannot be true. It is a quirk about the mind, another tiny indication that in order to understand the world, and especially to relate to it, we tend to anthropomorphize it. I believe that our moral compasses are often impacted in unseeable ways when it comes to anthropomorphization. When we look at creatures we are forced into one or two rubrics: either they are like us, or they aren't like us at all. Grey areas and fuzzy lines don't mix well with our categorizations of creatures on an intuitive moral level.
Which is why, in my bet, you'll tend to find people either taking a very keen sense of compassion toward animals, or virtually no compassion at all. The so-called middle ground we've pursued, in which we love our dogs, cry over our baby white seals, and eat the cooked flesh of our cows and pigs and chickens, the middle ground in which we outrage at the death of dolphins while munching down the tuna that swim and migrate and struggle alongside them, isn't a product of making intuitive moral distinctions, but a product of ignorance.
Honest to goodness people just don't stop to think about this sort of thing. I believe, nay, hope, that if people had a hard look at the conditions under which our food supply animals live and the way they die, people would either stop eating meat altogether, or find themselves suddenly detached from their lovable pets. The former, obviously, would be preferable because we're mapping on to something closer to the truth when we love and relate to an animal then when we eat an animal.
"If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason."
- Jack Handy
Often we activate a sort of mirror imaging process when we analyze objects. Ever gone into a very old house, all cluttered up with things spanning a century? Ever said something like "Wow, there must be a lot of memories in here." I do, often. Of course we mean to say there must be many memories of the place, not inside it. But, I wonder if that's what we feel when we make the statement. I get a certain feeling that the room, or old object of whatever sort, somehow contains within itself a memory of all the times it has impacted the senses and emotions of people over time.
This cannot be true. It is a quirk about the mind, another tiny indication that in order to understand the world, and especially to relate to it, we tend to anthropomorphize it. I believe that our moral compasses are often impacted in unseeable ways when it comes to anthropomorphization. When we look at creatures we are forced into one or two rubrics: either they are like us, or they aren't like us at all. Grey areas and fuzzy lines don't mix well with our categorizations of creatures on an intuitive moral level.
Which is why, in my bet, you'll tend to find people either taking a very keen sense of compassion toward animals, or virtually no compassion at all. The so-called middle ground we've pursued, in which we love our dogs, cry over our baby white seals, and eat the cooked flesh of our cows and pigs and chickens, the middle ground in which we outrage at the death of dolphins while munching down the tuna that swim and migrate and struggle alongside them, isn't a product of making intuitive moral distinctions, but a product of ignorance.
Honest to goodness people just don't stop to think about this sort of thing. I believe, nay, hope, that if people had a hard look at the conditions under which our food supply animals live and the way they die, people would either stop eating meat altogether, or find themselves suddenly detached from their lovable pets. The former, obviously, would be preferable because we're mapping on to something closer to the truth when we love and relate to an animal then when we eat an animal.
"If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason."
- Jack Handy
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