Between humans and other animals
This is an entry from my journal concerning cultural trends that are all about hating others in juxtaposition to the experience of emotionally connecting with another animal.
Every day I try to read the websites I follow as well as research any interesting topic they mention. I am open to different perspectives and will give each side a fair chance. Most study sessions follow a predictable pattern of me learning more about a fairly narrowly defined issue. This day was an exception. My curiosity led me down the path of reading more about this “Rad Fem Hitler” (RFH) female character and then contrasting it with a completely unrelated memoir from another female, a primatologist called Keriann McGoogan, and her experience with wildlife conservation. Different people, different worlds, both revealing an aspect of the human condition. Concretely, these are the articles:
- How I Became A Misandrist, which tells us how the author vindicated her prejudice in hating men.
- Through Zuri’s eyes, which is a story about a gorilla and personal connections in general.
What I see as the main contrast between the two is the greater than life, social media engineered persona of the former, with the composed demeanour of the latter. RFH makes valid points against abusive men combined with unfair generalisations about males qua males. She echoes the same sentiment of distrust and perhaps disgust that misogynists have about females, only directing it towards men. In this regard, she reflects what is already there. RFH is yet another emanation of an impulse that is common in our world, namely, of putting people into groups based on some invariant feature of theirs, not seeing the diversity within each group and the commonalities across groups, and then treating each person as if they embody all of the undesired traits prevalent in their respective group.
Furthermore, RFH has this increasingly common quality of political commentary which is so over the top to the point where it appears as a parody of its own position. Any given statement could be interpreted as some exaggerated remark meant to induce laughter but could also be seen as a true expression of the person’s beliefs. What we take seriously often starts out as a joke, after all. It is a matter of how much we buy into it. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, comedy or not, including blanket generalisations about how all men are these downright terrible beings. It does not speak to me, just how the masculinity merchants fail to impress me.
Keriann’s story has a completely different vibe to it. It describes the genuine connection a human can feel with another animal, in this case a gorilla called “Zuri.” We learn about the struggles of gorillas and the specific difficulties that Zuri was facing. Some humans were there to help the animals. Other humans are responsible for endangering wildlife and threatening it with extinction. The picture about humankind is thus one of admixture between extremes. Certain parts are nice, others ugly. Keriann’s connection with the gorilla extends to other interpersonal affairs and then to concerted actions for some common good. We are reminded of the nuances of this world and how not all hope is lost.
Through our initiatives we can stand for something more lofty than casually hating others. Ultimately, Keriann tells us about personal stories which we find all around us, yet we may be underappreciating or overlooking, simply because they are not exaggerated enough. Amid the vicious people there are virtuous ones. Where there is crime, love exists as well. This has always been the case and each of us can do their part in contributing a little bit to their immediate experience and that of others in their milieu.
I have never met a gorilla though I can relate to Keriann’s feelings through my many years of living with dogs. I have two. My dogs always wag their tail at me when they notice me and I smile back at them, giving them the attention they want: sometimes a little scratch under the snout, at others a hug or a kiss on the forehead. I do it for me and for them. It is simple and beautiful. Animals show us how we do not need something elaborate to be happy. It is about the little things.
With humans it gets complicated really quickly if we do not try to get along. We need to be patient and show empathy, else we misunderstand one another. Every word has the potential to be treated with suspicion and each initiative can be perceived as instrumental to some malicious ulterior end. The typical urban setting either creates or exacerbates the phenomenon, because each person is an individual among strangers. Most people do not have a permanent residence. They move places subject to the ups and downs of the business cycle. One cannot tell who lives next door, let alone who their neighbour’s relatives and friends are and what their backstory is. This sort of community, of sharing a place and a culture with familiar people, mostly exists in rural areas. Adults in the city tread with extreme caution, while kids are not allowed to play outside, living in the permanent captivity of their walls and computers.
Internet spaces are inadequate substitutes for in-person communities. They do provide us with a sense of belonging, while they offer us much valuable information or engagement. What they typically lack is the face-to-face human experience. Users of a service are avatars with pseudonyms who, like the city life, come and go out of nowhere into anonymity. The connections are more about the topics of common interest rather than those involved. One will not, for example, get much emotional support about their everyday struggles from their mechanical keyboard enthusiast group. Not that it is impossible to develop such connections online, but that those are not the default.
I suspect that at the root of the hateful attitude, in all of its manifestations, is the lack of personal attachment. Our interactions are increasingly done through proxies. All we see is a picture or a handle, which is not representative of a person. Each one has a profile, corresponding to a persona that may or may not express a facet of their self. Avatars are the intermediaries, subject to the dictates of the underlying platform’s algorithms. When we exchange views with someone, we are effectively dealing with a wall of text. Even when an Internet stranger harbours no ill will, we cannot feel any warmth. Or maybe we do by inferring it from the text, except then we have to wonder whether we are just imagining things. Text is distant no matter what. Chatbots only reinforce the sense that there is no meaningful distinction between a robot that impersonates someone and a person who is reduced to robotic forms of communication. We do not get to see each other in the eyes, non-verbal communication is not present, the context of each person is missing. In short, these conditions generate misunderstandings.
Social media has turbocharged our propensity for black-or-white kind of descriptions. Nuance is lost as we oscillate from one extreme position to the other. This is not limited to a certain political group, mind you. It is the norm across the political spectrum. The way it is typically expressed is through the reduction of a complex set of features to a singular defining characteristic. Think of concepts such as “men”, “women”, “trans”, “blacks”, and so on. At a basic level, these terms have descriptive value. Yet what we learn from them is limited and ultimately counterproductive if taken as the sole input. They do not—and cannot—capture the diversity within the group they name. For example, the concept of “all men” includes everybody from saints to warmongers or, to connect to Keriann’s article, it covers both the poachers and the conservationists. We can find cases at the edges of the analytical extremes and others that will be some permutation in between. It then is a matter of responsibility to delve into the specifics, to do the work of understanding people beyond the superficiliaties. Assuming responsibility and doing the hard work is not easy, of course, hence our predicament.
The story of connecting with Zuri the gorilla teaches us that we can be friends despite our differences. The likes of RFH and all who trade in hatred are not the main problem. If anything, they are the victims who then go on to victimise others. What we need is spaces where we can meet each other without filters; spaces where we subsist collectively and are exposed to real people who contribute to our shared material conditions; spaces where solidarity is felt. To me, this entails a greater degree of decentralisation away from the meat grinder of the megalopolis. In the countryside we find more benign natural rhythms, cleaner air, and encouraging open vistas filled with birds and plants of all sorts. Nature beyond humans but also with humans is all around us, yet we cannot see it while we are being distracted by our squabbles and their concomitant reward mechanisms.