“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, August 2, 2015

"Shooting a Lion Is Bad, But What's Worse Is the Anthropomorphicization [sic]"

First of all, Mr. BBC Broadcasting House commenter, we can't help anthropomorphizing.

Second of all, wow.

2 comments:

cgerrish said...

Seems like your last two posts come together on our drive to optimize. And by that I mean reduce to the smallest most powerful configuration. One event may be bad, but it's not the worst thing. Our care and attention, a limited resource, must only be directed toward the worst cases. Here, since a lion is not a human, it is a second or third tier concern. And, of course, there's only ever time for number one.

Handwriting is inefficient (meaning, it doesn't work well with digital technologies), therefore it should be eliminated in favor of the smallest set of mark-making techniques that work well with computers and digital communications systems.

It's odd that in an era when we talk endlessly about economies of abundance, we can't seem to afford to care about a whole range of things. That we can't support the idea of expanding the number of techniques that we use to make meaningful marks on surfaces. At the bottom of the technological economy of abundance is a fierce reductionism. The price of abundance is only the whole universe of things.

John T. Maher said...

A have long advocated a possible ahuman future where humans are culled in order to avoid harms to a less anthropocentric form of nature.In terms of anthropomorphasizing, I say the reverse holds true as well and so-called 'animal' characteristics must emerge more freely in humans. Thus Cecil becomes a top predator entitled to feed on humans and not a trophy. He can also make art if he likes. I am hopeful that O3 aligns lions are equal to humans or us.anti matter and where dark ecology really makes magic is driving old ontologies of mind from addled brains so we can 'see' a lion, whether Wittgenstein's or Morton's, and hear him in lion. Here in New York the Courts again rules that chimpanzees are not vested with legal personhood although corporations are.