Black Genocide

The president was on a roll. He had this immigration thing down. He was righting wrongs. He had been doing some research, i.e., talking to cronies and hangers-on (“great people”). He had never heard of apartheid before and the word baffled him (something to do with not letting blacks live in your neighborhood, he gathered). He had the president of South Africa in his office in front of the cameras and was determined to let the truth be told at last. They had been killing the farmers, the white farmers, the black people had, many of them, some said thousands. It’s what they call a genocide—an old-fashioned word meaning “very unfair killing of good people who love their country, and are probably white, though there were good people on both sides”. The president of South Africa, as the president had learned, was part of this genocide thing (the word kept reminding him of pesticide). His government was probably behind it. It was a terrorist government, just so you understand, many terrorists in it, many. The white farmers had to leave the country the genocide was so bad. We were accepting them with open arms, no background check (not necessary). It wasn’t the whiteness, as the evil fake media said, but the farming—these were farmers, just so you understand, good people, we love the farmers. We want to bring back farming, like coal, asbestos, other rare earth minerals, and make America great again. Anyway, the president had the other president at his mercy—the base was going to love it. He was going to stop all the racist genocide going on in that country.

He started strong, announcing that there used to be slavery in South Africa, as well as gangs doing it. But the fake media had it all wrong: the slave owners were the black people and the whites were the slaves. In history, the president explained, there was a lot of this—like the Jews in Egypt. The Jews were white and the Egyptians were black or nearly black. In South Africa hundreds of years ago the blacks enslaved the whites—took them from Dutchland or somewhere nice. This is why later the white freedom fighters didn’t like living near the black slave owners and wanted to live apart from them (hence “apart-ite”). So now the blacks were killing all the whites who farmed, the president explained. He was thinking of invading South Africa to put a stop to this genocide. The president of South Africa smiled tolerantly as the president rehearsed this history and said simply “None of that is true”. At this insult the president brandished a handful of articles culled from the internet attesting to the widespread murder of white farmers. The other president shook his head and said, “The internet is not a reliable source of information”. This angered the first president considerably and he started shouting hoarsely: “They did it, it’s all here, everyone knows it! They are killing the farmers and eating their dogs! They are raping the farmers’ wives and possibly their daughters!” His face went from orange to red. The other president said, as if to calm the first one, “I wish I had a plane to give you” and smiled warmly, as if the president was making a joke. “I don’t need another plane, but if you have one, we can consider it”, replied the president.

It was a beautiful meeting, he summarized later. We had excellent talks about trade and I made clear that no terrorist genocide against white farmers would be tolerated. According to the president, the other president had promised to crack down on farmer genocide, especially when white. He had saved all white South Africans from mass murder—only he could do it. He reported that the other president had said, with tears in his eyes, “Thank you, sir, for saving my country from black gangs killing white farmers”. Of course, he had said no such thing, but the president was convinced that this was the upshot of the meeting. No one else could have done it, because of the respect and strength he showed. All in all, a good day in the White House (so aptly named).

On Not Knowing What It’s Like

How much do I not know about what it’s like? How extensive is my ignorance of the different forms of consciousness? I do know what it’s like to be me now—about my current conscious states. They act as input to my knowledge faculty and that faculty produces knowledge of them as output. We can also safely say that I know what it’s like to be a molecular duplicate of me now, because it has precisely the same conscious states as I do now. On the other hand, I don’t know everything about what it’s like to be a bat: I do know a bit about some of the bat’s experiences, because I have similar experiences, but not about its echolocation experiences, which I don’t have. Phenomenal similarity determines what I know and don’t know. Between these two extremes, however, opinions may differ. I will argue that we have a spectrum of ignorance here, with some cases hard to decide, not a sharp binary distinction. On balance, I think our ignorance is far more extensive than is commonly recognized—we know precious little about what it’s like for subjects of consciousness. At the same time, we know more about it in certain cases than has sometimes been supposed. The operative notion is incomplete knowledge: we have varying degrees of knowledge, more or less complete, with incompleteness as the rule. The bat is more known than some people seem to think and the human less known. There is actually a vast range of cases to consider and much epistemic complexity. Complete knowledge of what it’s like is actually sharply limited, as it turns out. In some cases, we might not know (or be able to know) whether we can know another subject’s consciousness, because we cannot gauge the degree of similarity between us. Maybe I know what it’s like to be him (or it) and maybe I don’t know—it’s difficult to tell. And this kind of ignorance can have practical and ethical significance—such knowledge can be useful.

Let’s start with our old pal, the bat. We know quite a bit about what it’s like to be a bat, as much as we know for any mammal: the bat sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels fear, etc. He isn’t all that mysterious. It is only when the bat gets to echolocating that our knowledge encounters an obstacle, because we don’t echolocate—there is nothing internal we can consult. But even here all is not ignorance, since the bat is using its ears to process the echoes—and we have ears too. So, we know a little about what it’s like to echolocate like a bat—we have heard echoes. Also, we are familiar with judging distance and movement by means of the visual sense, so we can use this knowledge to get an idea of the bat’s sensory state. What we don’t know is what it’s like to use sounds to judge spatial properties—though even that might be surmountable by learning. Let’s say the bat’s experience overall is 95% knowable, as things stand. The bat is thus (only) a partial mystery to us. But what about the cat? Cats are nocturnal, so they have no qualms about the spending the night outside alone. My cat has no problem lying down on a concrete driveway all night when he could just as easily sleep on a comfy bed inside (he prefers this during the day). I find this incomprehensible; presumably, he feels the “call of the wild” when night falls, whereas I feel the “call of the bed”. He must have an experience at night that I don’t have; I don’t know what it’s like to have this experience. Is it anything like my experience of enjoying natural scenery or the starry sky? Not much. To that extent, my cat is a mystery to me. He also likes to bite the tails off living lizards and eat them; I don’t have this preference. I can’t really compare his experience to my own, except to say it’s a sort of eating. I don’t know what it’s like to eat a lizard’s still-writhing tail; it’s a bit like eating asparagus, perhaps, but not completely. Ditto for holding a live rat in my mouth—I have never done anything close to that. Do I know what it’s like to fly like a bird? Not really; I can only guess and imagine. Do I know what it’s like to have the body of a whale? Er, no. And so on and so on. I don’t know much about what it’s like to be any other species, because my experience is limited to being of the human species. I don’t even know what it’s like to brachiate like a bonobo, and we are close genetically. This is an area of deep (though partial) ignorance.

But the point also applies within the human species. Do I know what it’s like to be a woman? Up to a point, but no further. I don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant and give birth, or feed a baby at my nipple. I don’t know what it’s like to menstruate. These are all mysteries to me, more or less deep. I can try to imagine, but I can’t really know—fully, completely. Maybe my imaginative efforts are woefully wide of the mark. How much do I know about what it’s like to be a man of another race, of another size, in a different place, at a different time? I can guess, but how accurately I can’t say. I know a certain amount about what it’s like to be another man, but not everything. Come to think of it, how much do I know about what it’s like to be me in the past, or the future, or in a counterfactual situation? I don’t know what it was like for me as a baby or even as a teenager (though I have faint recollections), and I don’t know what it will be like to be me when I am old and feeble and losing my mind. Still less do I know what it would be like to be me in the field of battle or paralyzed or super-rich. It took having a serious operation to teach me what it is like to have a serious operation (not great). So it goes with illnesses and the like. We don’t know a lot about ourselves outside of our actual present experience; we may think we do, but we don’t, not fully. You don’t know what it is like to be consumed with anger until you are consumed with anger (again, not great). States of consciousness are hard to know unless you have experienced them directly (and can recall them accurately). We really know only a tiny island in a vast sea (which includes our own experience outside the here and now). The bat lies within the gates. The human hangs upside down in a cave and uses echolocation, an alien to himself. Can I really know what it is like to be you—with your body, your background, your desires, your personality? Aren’t you something of a mystery to me, though I have partial knowledge of your form of consciousness. Aren’t we all like bats to each other? I think I know what it’s like to be you, roughly, but maybe I am mistaken—maybe you are not as similar to me internally as I naively suppose. Consciousness is supremely knowable from the inside, but from the outside it is frustratingly elusive. We know it when we see it, but we often don’t see it. Consciousness has an egocentric epistemology.[1]

[1] The physical world, by contrast, has an allocentric epistemology: that is, knowledge of it is focused on the other rather than the self. Physical objects are objects of sensory knowledge, especially visual; we do not know our own body better than other bodies, as a matter of principle. I can know a bat’s body as well as I know a human body. There is no restriction of physical knowledge to one’s own body and anything similar to it. But knowledge of consciousness in general is restricted to knowledge of one’s own consciousness and anything similar to it. Alien minds defeat our cognitive capacities; not so alien bodies. We can then put the point of Nagel’s “Bat?” paper by saying that physicalism cannot be true of consciousness because consciousness has an egocentric epistemology while the body and brain have an allocentric epistemology.

Animal Worship

If you google “animal worship” you will get some surprising results (I did). It turns out that animal worship (“zoolatry”) was much more widespread than might be supposed. It is present in nearly all ancient religions and extends right across the animal kingdom. I made a list: bears, whales, cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, horses, elephants, hares, deer, wolves, foxes, cats (big and small), tigers, monkeys, hippopotami, birds, serpents, crocodiles, fish, scorpions, dung beetles—but not kangaroos or mice or worms or butterflies. In those bygone days there were no supernatural gods of vaguely human caste, multiple or unitary; it was just ordinary animals divinized. Early humans saw divinity in nature. They revered and worshipped the natural world. But this form of religion was steadily erased over time (or so we are taught), discarded as the primitive thinking of primitive humans, eventually leading to a religion of supernatural semi-humans. In the end we had God in the singular—viewed as not animal at all (scarcely human).  The natural world was left behind as an object of worship, ritual, inspiration, awe. This process was gradual, with traces of zoolatry retained. The Greek gods had animal associates or counterparts (Zeus had the eagle). The Abrahamic religions made the firmest break with zoolatry, though Judaism did make use of lions, deer, and birds in its symbolism. Even in the New Testament we find reference to the lamb, the dove, and the serpent. Still, animals were no longer worshipped for themselves and as such. Religion had progressed beyond these crude beginnings, moving on to more rarified deities and dogmas. You wouldn’t be caught dead giving thanks to a monkey or a crocodile, or even depicting them in your shrines. Oh no, we had advanced well beyond all that; now it was angels and omniscient omnipotent beings existing outside space and time. Zoolatry was a species of idolatry (the golden calf, etc.). We might choose to think of the Holy Spirit as a dove, but that was only to give this hazy idea a concrete relatable form; we didn’t think that the Holy Spirit is a dove (that very bird). We passed from zoolatry to theism, as it is understood today.

But there is one marked difference between these two belief systems: animals exist but supernatural beings don’t. That’s a big difference. There are no agnostics or atheists regarding animals; you don’t need faith to believe in them. Thus, a lot of people don’t believe in gods anymore. They are then left with no religion at all—nothing to worship, revere, celebrate, idealize, emulate. This lack of existence is a bit of a loss compared to more primitive times: the new religion of supernatural beings is difficult to believe in, existentially. It’s a far cry from naturalistic zoology in this respect. Indeed, the entire history of religion since its Abrahamic formulations has been fraught with ontological questions—quantifier hesitation, as it were. What if this kind of anxiety eventually undermines the whole enterprise? What if agnosticism and atheism come to be orthodox? Religion, as we now know it, will be gone, extinct. Whatever feelings motivate it will be left to dangle, robbed of suitable objects. This is likely to be the situation if current trends continue. The advance of religion from its animalistic beginnings will lead inevitably to its collapse after a few thousand years of dominance. Is this an entirely good thing? Is there a way to keep the good and discard the bad? Can there be a non-theistic religion worthy of the name?

Perhaps you see where this is headed. What about a return to zoolatry? Aren’t the seeds already there? Have we ever really left it behind? For we have always been fascinated by animals, drawn to them, in awe of them, fond of them, slightly afraid of them, mystified by them, symbolically obsessed by them. They are like us but curiously different—rather like the Greek gods, in fact. Isn’t the King of the Jungle a sort of zoological Zeus? Animals are capable of amazing feats, superior to us in many ways, also beautiful. Just think of birds: they sing, fly, dazzle, and delight. Some of them even talk. There are people who spend their lives observing them. The eagle, in particular, excites feelings of transcendence and awe (but let’s not forget the humble budgerigar). It isn’t that God created these marvelous creatures; rather, they created God—in that they suggest the idea of God to us in embryonic form. Zoolatry led naturally to theism, because it incorporates the religious impulse. Angels are thought to fly and even have wings. Then too, we have a thriving pet culture, which taps into ancient emotions. After all, we depend on animals, or did: to feed us, clothe us, move us around, keep us warm, keep us company. They perform many of the functions traditionally ascribed to God. They give us each day our daily bread and deliver us from evil. They deserve our worship, or at least gratitude. Children love them. They are different from us, but not too different; we almost know what it is like to be them. Who does not thrill to the sight of a lion or tiger, or whale or elephant? We are primed to admire them. They populate our thoughts, shape our feelings, entertain and amuse us. Above all, they exist, observably, warmly; and they are willing to be our friends. Like God, they never let us down. It is really quite surprising that we insist on viewing God as a member of our own species, though vastly magnified and upgraded; why not think of God as bird-like or elephant-like, but much enhanced? God might be a woman, but he also might be an eagle. Why are we so sure God is a man? Isn’t this suspiciously speciesist of us? If we think that we have spirits in some sense, why not extend this privilege to other animals? Many people have thought that animals have souls—and I don’t doubt that they do (though not immortal ones, sadly). All in all, animals are suitable subjects for a religious attitude, though not the attitude encouraged by our modern Abrahamic religions (and what good have they done us?).[1]

What would such a religion look like concretely? Black Beauty and the Dr. Dolittle books would be sacred texts, required reading, sources of moral instruction—as would many other animal stories. Moby Dick would be for adults. Zoology at school would be mandatory. Animal rights would be normal and accepted. There would be animal holidays—Bird Week, Cat Day, Dogmass. There would be get-togethers on Sundays devoted to animal studies and hymns. Darwin would be revered. Children would be made aware of historical animal abuses in school. There would be iconography devoted to animals of different kinds; art galleries of animal portraits and scenes. There would be a Mona Lisa painting of a beautiful gazelle or horse. We would be steeped in animal imagery, animal literature, animal science. We would have animal friends. There might even be animal religious denominations. Imagine an animal-centered Catholicism! It sounds pretty nice to me: good for them, good for us. It would be a return to our religious past, but with all the modern trappings of civilization. We never really left this past psychologically, nor should we have. It might lead to saving the planet. It might end religious conflict. It might even revolutionize politics (though given human nature, that may remain a den of vipers). You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.[2]

[1] Let’s remember that Jesus was part animal, because part human; and we have worshipped him. God could have inserted part of himself into another species of animal, say a bear, and then we would have worshipped that animal. The incarnating species is contingent. After all, God is supposed to have created animals and thus installed something divine in them, as in us; so, even from a theistic perspective, there is nothing wrong in according them due reverence. Now subtract God: what really changes? Are guide dogs any less estimable?

[2] Actually, as far as I know, I am the only one to contemplate such a religious revolution, though I suspect John Lennon would have approved of it (“I am the walrus”). I wonder what Nietzsche would have thought. From a lofty historical perspective, the Abrahamic religions might be seen as an unfortunate meme that lasted way too long—like racist supremacy, the patriarchy, and puritanical sexual repression. In a state of nature, we are natural animal worshippers (lovers, admirers).

Assertion and Command

There is such a thing as speech act theory, but ought there to be? Philosophers and linguists usually distinguish assertion, command, and question: these are the three main types of speech act. Questions are often assimilated to commands (requests) because they can be construed as requests for information (“Please tell me whether it’s raining”). I will follow this practice for simplicity, though my points go through even if we keep questions as a separate category. The idea is that these categories of speech act are exclusive and exhaustive—so that what is an assertion is not a command and what is a command is not an assertion (and these categories exhaust the territory). The question, then, is whether this is true.

It is important to distinguish types of speech act from types of sentence. We certainly have three distinct grammatical categories of sentence: indicatives, imperatives, and interrogatives. An indicative sentence is not an imperative sentence, and so for the others. But types of speech act are another thing altogether: they relate to intentions, context, and consequences. Thus, theorists speak of illocutionary force: the illocutionary force of an assertion is not the same as the illocutionary force of a command and vice versa. The act of assertion is not the act of request and the act of request is not the act of assertion. The act of assertion, it may be said, is intended to impart information, while the act of request is intended to produce behavior. These are acts of different types, so the utterances have different illocutionary force. A single speech act does not have bothsorts of force. But is this true? Suppose I utter the sentence “It’s raining”, directing my remark at a particular person, intending to convey the information that it is raining. Don’t I also intend to get my interlocutor’s attention and bring about a certain action? I want the hearer to act in a certain way—attentively and prudently (e.g., to take an umbrella). I could equally have said, “Listen, it’s raining, so take an umbrella”. This is a request, or even a command if I have the requisite authority; I don’t just want to convey information. We sometimes say, “Look at me” when we want to secure the full attention of our interlocutor, which is clearly a request or command. The speech act of assertion is also a speech act of command; indeed, it is the former in virtue of the latter. I am not just asserting a proposition into the void with no action in mind on the part of the hearer. We might also say that I am requesting that my hearer take me seriously and believe what I am telling him (“Believe me, John, it’s raining buckets!”). Assertion and request are bundled together, inseparably joined. The same is true in the other direction: commands build in assertion (though imperatives don’t build in indicatives). If I say to you, “Please shut the door”, I am requesting an action, but I am also conveying the information that the door is open and that I’d like it closed. If the hearer questioned these propositions, I would assert that the door is open and that I would like it closed (I am freezing). I convey information in making the request—I am tacitly asserting certain things (actually, not so tacitly). I could just as well say, “The door is wide open and letting in a draught, so please close it”. I am not only commanding but also asserting—intentionally conveying information. The two types of speech act are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they are woven together. So, the central idea of speech act theory is mistaken: assertion and command are not separate categories of speech act; they are aspects of the same speech act. They are different ways of describing a single act—an act of intentional utterance.

There is a deep point here: speech is governed by a multitude of intentions (and desires and beliefs); it is not possible to read the speaker’s intentions off the grammatical form of the sentences he utters. What he meansis not deducible from what he says (literally). This is essentially what speech act theory tries to do—infer intention from grammar. I have many intentions when I utter even a simple sentence like “It’s raining”; I don’t have just one that lines up with the grammatical category of the sentence. Pragmatics is not semantics (still less syntax). So-called speech act theory is really a mishmash of grammar and psychology; and the psychology is a lot more complex than the semantics. It is really quite misleading to speak of “assertoric utterances” and “imperatival utterances”, as if referring to separate categories of speech act. All acts of speech are both, inextricably. It is not that there are a great many more types of speech act than assertion and command (also question), as Wittgenstein insisted; there are actually less—because each speech act incorporates several aspects (intentional descriptions). There is really just the act of utterance, which falls under many descriptions—or two if we boil them all down to these basic categories. There is no assertive speech act that excludes other speech acts; there is just utterance backed by various intentions, all mingling together. There is no neat system here, no firm taxonomy of acts of speech. The idea of the illocutionary force of an utterance is a myth. There is no such thing as speech act theory as commonly conceived.[1]

[1] We use sentences to achieve certain ends, motivated by assorted intentions. These ends are multiple; each corresponds to a description of the act. When I assert something, I have a variety of intentions, some concerning actions on the part of the hearer. When I make a request, I also have a variety of intentions, some pertaining to information I need to convey. There is overlap of illocutionary force in both cases. It might be said that one of these illocutionary forces is primary and the others secondary, but still there is more than one involved. All speech acts can be variously described in respect of illocutionary force, depending on what we choose to focus on. In other words, communication is complex.