Author: Adriel

The Rights of Clams (Pt. 2)

~ Adriel ~ Leave a comment

Peter Singer takes up the case contra clams in Chapter 4 of Animal Liberation: A New Ethic For Our Treatment of Animals (1975). He discusses where to draw the line between those we should not kill and eat and those living things which are far too elemental and primitive to earn the right to live. He writes “Oysters, clams, mussels, scallops, and the like are mollusks, and mollusks are in general very primitive organisms.” An exception is made for the octopus which is a much classier and a super cool mollusk. Since Singer is okay with killing insects, which are primitive invertebrates, he throws lobsters in the pot with the mosquitoes and locusts. Well, if you have ever thrown a living lobster in the boiling pot or dared to watch the horrific procedure, you know that lobsters feel pain. And they have a pronounced desire to continue to live which is why the murderous cook will bind their claws lest he lose a finger. Singer admits it is difficult to draw the line. Unless you are Leviticus I suppose.

So why not avoid the impossible task of making these fine distinctions and simply value life over killing wherever possible. It is unnecessary to kill the clam, unless you are marooned and hungry on a Pacific island, and just eat your broccoli, beans, and barley? Humanity is not a superior life force. [Editor’s Note: here Adriel is going back to Part 1 q.v.]. Peter Singer seems to acknowledge that point in Chapter 1: “All Animals Are Equal.” He writes (in a sort of Kantian fashion) “If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to eat another for his own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose.” (this is page 7 of the Avon paperback edition.)

So let’s don’t avert our eyes from the boiling lobster or butchered cow. If it seems awful then it is. C. S. Peirce, the developer of the philosophy of Pragmatism, viewed the instinctual response as a valuable tool in resolving ethical dilemmas. (entry on Pragmatism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Some moral decisions simply have no clear rule or guidebook. The fact that we must rely on natural feelings and are not reliably reasoning beings would seem to mean that you listen to your heart, and don’t destroy creatures whether they have a heart or not.

The Rights of Clams (Pt. 1)

~ Adriel ~ Leave a comment

Adriel won’t eat clams or fish. But the author of Animal Liberation, the utilitarian Peter Singer, eats clams but not fish. Singer (I took his remarkable class on Coursera) emphasizes the suffering of fish. The fish is not just sentient but is aware of its own existence, struggles mightily to continue to live, and most of all, obviously feels pain and can suffer physical pain and suffer from loss of life itself. It is not ethical to cause unnecessary suffering and it is unnecessary to eat fish. Despite being the foremost living utilitarian philosopher, Singer uses two Kantian ideas in his seminal book. In his ethics he espouses the “rights” of animals and also claims that animals are to be treated as ends in themselves, not as a means to our ends. Both the ideas are most associated with Immanuel Kant but Kant, who was a carnivore, viewed rational humans as having rights but not animals that could be used as serving the needs of humans. We have a duty to avoid causing pain to animals but they do not have rights equal to reasoning beings according to Kant.

On the other hand, Peter Singer sees the qualities of animals for their somewhat limited self-understanding and their avoidance of suffering as an equivalence to the same qualities in humans. Therefore animals have the same rights as us folks. But not for the poor, dumb clams. The life of a clam is not equivalent to that of me, or Sally, or even Rover. Singer says simply “I don’t think that bivalves — mussels and clams — I don’t think they can suffer, so I eat them” (Vox interview https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/10/27/21529060/animal-rights-philosopher-peter-singer-why-vegan-book).

So Peter Singer eats clams, and I supposed Immanuel Kant did too if they were nicely fried. But I won’t. For two reasons. First, with regard to the Kantian view, I don’t see humans as “higher” animals because of the (seldom used) ability to reason. The idea that we are something special, something spectacular, and rule the universe by reason is not acceptable to me or even to science. Current scientific research show more the amazing abilities of animals and the limits of human reason. The kind of cruelty and evil perpetrated by humans has no peer in the non-human animal kingdom. We are animals, the equals of other animals. Our rights are equivalent, not superior. Second, with regard to Singer’s emphasis on preventing suffering, I think the avoidance of causing pain is fundamental but not decisive. Rather, life itself should be the ultimate value, not just life free of suffering and not just human life. Of course, even bacteria or plants have a kind of life but so primitive and limited as to not be regarded on the level of sentient creatures. Even if a clam or an insect might not be considered “sentient” or having the ability to feel pain, a decent respect for life itself ought to cause an ethical person to avoid killing non-thinking creatures. I understand that it is sometimes necessary to kill lesser creatures, certainly dangerous animals or a deadly bacteria or virus, but it is not necessary to eat a clam or a hamburger to live. It is certainly important to kill disease bearing mosquitoes but unnecessary to kill an annoying jaybird.

Adriel follows the Buddhist hope that all sentient beings may live in peace. As I say to my friends, I am a vegetarian because I just want to live in peace with my fellow creatures on this earth. If that fly is bothering you, try to throw it outdoors. If you see a clam, let it lie. Or is it lay? Never can get that right.

Proof

~ Adriel ~ Leave a comment

Kurt Gödel, the crazy genius who was a companion of Einstein at Princeton, is best known for his enormous contribution to logic, the incompleteness principle. Despite reading a full and tedious book about this brilliant man (A World Without Time, by Palle Yourgrau), I have really no idea of how the principle works although it apparently points out some kind of flaw in all logical proofs. But there is to my mind a sort of proof of his belief that there is a flaw in the United States constitution. When Gödel appeared with Einstein at his examination for U.S. citizenship, the examiner told him that as an Austrian immigrant he is lucky the constitution prevents a take-over by a dictator. To Einstein’s consternation, Gödel declared he could prove that the U.S. constitution would indeed allow for the legal rise of a dictator. No one knows how he arrived at that proof, but he was swiftly hushed up at the hearing and was granted his papers. It has been a long time since that incident, but surely the ascendancy of former President Donald T*** provides some sort of proof Gödel was right. (a record of the incident at the hearing can be found here: https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/morgenstern.html).

Pandemic Did This

~ Adriel ~ Leave a comment

So we are still at home almost perpetually and Adriel is plenty sick of staring at a computer screen. I have been doing Duolingo lessons since Hector was a pup. Now when the screens tells me “I am so proud of you” I feel good. It’s the best thing that happens to me all day. How did it come to this? When Duolingo tells me “keep trying” or “a common mistake” I am sorely hurt. This has gone far enough.

Ye Olde Schwa

~ Adriel ~ Leave a comment

So if you want your shop, or I should say your shoppe, to sound authentically antique, you might call it Ye Olde Shoppe. This is faux Middle English.  A Modern English speaker would pronounce this as “ye old shop” but the e at the end of olde signifies a schwa.  In Middle English, “old” might have been spelled “olde” and was no doubt pronounced with the schwa ending.  Spelling at that time was not standardized at all. In Middle English the ye would have been “the” because, well, that’s what it was.  The “y” was used by early printers to represent the letter ð from Old English which is still used in IPA symbols to represent the voiced “th” as in the before a vowel. In addition, printing was expensive and th is so common that printers may substituted the y for th.  But of course Middle English is just crazywith the schwa endings contributing to a appealing rhythmic sort of lilt just perfect for poetry.  The one line everybody remembers from Chaucer is:

            Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The “Aprille” had three syllables with three stresses.  Low stress-high stress-unstressed.  In Modern English Aprille becomes April and loses the schwa.  Nowadays, the schwa gets short shrift in elementary and secondary school English classes, but actually the schwa is very important in English.  After all, the most common word in English is the definite article the.  Before a consonant, the is pronounced with the schwa IPA /ðə/ with the upside “e” symbol representing an unstressed vowel sound. The schwa can be a reduction from any vowel that is reduced and unstressed sort of a minor throwaway vowel sound that has not the status of a full fledged vowel.  The development of the schwa sound is a process of language change; the schwa is prominent in later periods of Old English but probably was not present in the early days of the Anglo-Saxon period but by Middle English it was common. Chaucer used not only soote but also swete for our modern “sweet”.  In Modern English spelling the “e” ending sometimes lingers as a signal that indicates that the internal vowel is long or a diphthong, a sound change due to the Great Vowel Shift. The standardization of spelling in English was a long time in the making but any printing begins to help make spelling standard.  The Great Vowel Shift really got going after printing was begun in England so we now spell many words the way they were pronounced but the vowels shifted while the spelling remained.  In Middle English the word “name” was no doubt pronounced like Old English “nama” but there was a shift from [a:] to [ei].  The  “e”  ending remains to indicate the diphthong in modern “name”. 

            In fact, I never heard of the schwa until I studied Old English in graduate school.  I wrote my entirely forgettable master’s thesis on the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood where I examined the counting of stressed syllables, an important element in English prosody.  The schwa sound is counted simply as secondary stress and may have been more emphasized than in Modern English.  Now, the schwa sound is not secondary stress but unstressed, short and sort of just thrown away.  Here is a perfect iambic pentameter line in Early Modern English from Marlowe:

            Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships

The Was is secondary stress and this is primary stress and the secondary then primary stress goes on for the pattern of five units.  Even though the face starts with an unstressed syllable it is counted as secondary stress.  The fact that launch’d uses an apostrophe to indicate a missing “e” tells me that Marlowe did not want launched to be pronounce with two syllables as it was formerly.

            To hear a scholar who is in love with the English schwa, a strange enough love but highly entertaining, listen to the podcast Lingthusiasm #44, “Schwa, the most versatile English vowel”.

Frederick Douglass, Up from Property

~ Adriel ~ Leave a comment

The historian David W. Blight wrote a thorough biography of Frederick Douglass that records his transition from slave to world famous freedom fighter (Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, Simon and Schuster, 2020). Probably most educated Americans are familiar with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, an autobiography that was only one of Douglass’ biographical books. And all American school children are familiar with the story of slavery and the Civil War, but most are unfamiliar with the post-war period or have been told the lies promoted by the Southern racist power structure that, in effect, returned black Americans to servitude in a subservient and de-humanized state. Douglass celebrated the freedom wrought by war, in fact he lobbied for the war to end slavery, but he never stopped fighting for freedom. In my own elementary school, the whole Reconstruction and Jim Crow period was more or less skimmed or even deliberately ignored in class. After class, I rode home on a segregated bus. My private school was not segregated, but all the public schools were whites only or blacks only and I was friends with only one black child, the son of a physician. At that time, the local governments, schools, and businesses dealt with the minority communities as a problem, an issue, something not quite completely on the level with white humanity, something they had, something closer to property.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence, he had the famous phrase as the triple rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property”. Clearly, this was following John Locke who viewed property as the essence of freedom, as a natural right. When Benjamin Franklin who famously changed the draft declaration from “we hold these truths to be sacred” to “we hold these truths to be self-evident” he introduced another element of the philosophy from the Age of Reason, a change from religion to reason. Jefferson raised the notion of human rights from to a more broad right than property, the pursuit of happiness. But property remained as a fundamental concept upholding eighteenth century political philosophy. A charitable view of Jefferson’s own edit is that perhaps he thought that asserting a right to property might strengthen the notion of slave owning as a right, the right to own property.

In many of Douglass’ brilliant speeches he reminded listeners that he once was property. Douglass was enraged by the horrific Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court which was based on the notion of the right to own property. Because slaves were property, slavers had the right to hire thugs to go north to retrieve what they owned, human beings as property. When he was an old man, years after the war and the passage of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, Frederick Douglass made a trip to visit his former owner. Thomas Ault was the man we all read about in the slave Narrative autobiography, the terrifying rage-motivated beater and owner of the boy Douglass. Ault was the man that the tall and strong Douglass fought and later fled. But now Ault was tempered by age and infirmity. There was no longer the fear and hatred between them. Douglass was no longer property.

The Book of Mountweasels

~ Adriel ~ Leave a comment

Mountweasel. That’s only one of the many English words, and non-words, I learned from a truly delightful novel by Eley Williams: The Liar’s Dictionary. I had heard about fictitious entries in maps and encyclopedias that were inserted deliberately by the editors to entrap plagiarizers. For example, a map maker might insert a false street called Fictive Lane. Of course this is well before google maps anyway. Another publisher who included included Fictive Lane would be caught. In The Liar’s Dictionary the Swansby’s Encyclopedia is taking generations of editors and bored scriveners to construct. One of them, the fictitious lisper Winceworth goes a bit overboard with his imaginative neologisms secreted away among the slips to be imported years hence into the dictionary. Many years later, a descendant of the original founder Swansby, is trying to complete the marathon project and discovers some of the fake entries. A young intern, Mallory is assigned to root them out. The novel tells of the cat and mouse game between the long passed on Winceworth and the modern day Mallory. The story is a light hearted quick read that I followed enjoying all obscure words both real and fake until the whole shebang goes up in smoke.

Eley Williams mentions in the acknowledgements the book by Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: the Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. I had read Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman years ago and it was a truly compelling tale that has been made into a somewhat dull movie of the same name, available from Hoopla. A book that tells the full story of the OED is a favorite of mine, Caught in the Web of Words: James A.H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary written by Murray’s descendant (I think his granddaughter) K. M. Elisabeth Murray.

Literally Floored

~ Adriel ~ Leave a comment

During the second impeachment trial of former president T***, one of the attorneys described some evidence as having “literally eviscerated” the opposing side. Adriel was literally floored. I had mentioned before that “literally” is a Janus word, one having two opposite meanings. It can mean actually or metaphorically. In either case, it is an intensifier. And it is perfectly okay to use it either way although language scolds wrongly claim it can only mean actually, according to the meaning of the words. Possibly the objection is based on a sort of etymological fallacy, that is, it is a descendant of “literal” therefore it should be used as such, as “according to the word”. I am usually content to use it in either sense and I am usually content with its use metaphorically by any English speaker. After all, there are easily found citations of the word used metaphorically by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, James Joyce and even Adriel. Kory Stamper, who I mentioned earlier, wrote in her wonderful book Word by Word, the Secret Life of Dictionaries that Merriam-Webster does receive letters of complaint on many words in there dictionary. They have a brief defense against the complaints here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-literally .

But “literally eviscerated”? I had the image in my head of one attorney being disemboweled by another lawyer. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not a pleasant picture. There must be some usage rule that cautions against the figurative use of “literally” where it takes hyperbole to hyperbolic heights.

A Moot Point

~ Adriel ~ Leave a comment

I am not at all a fussy about spoken English. Of course, written English ought to adhere a little more to standard, more precise usage. However, when my old boss Mr. T. would say, dismissively, that’s a “mute point” I just cringed. Yes, he would write it, too. And that’s not the only evidence that Mr. T. was a certifiable asshole, there is a lot more. I’ll save it for later.

I was reminded of Mr. T by another couple of assholes who were the defense lawyers for Donald Trump for his second impeachment trial. One properly used the term moot in his presentation when he said that since the former president (the other even bigger asshole Mr. T.) was already out of office so removal from office was moot. Meaning null, gone, useless. Lawyers also use moot as in “moot court” a practice or pretend court used primarily by students.

In England, the Anglo-Saxons would have a moot to gear up for battle or to celebrate victory or assemble for discussing their affairs. A moot was simply an assembly, a meeting, in Old English, it was gemot. The ge- prefix forms the past participle of mot. Modern English “meeting” and “meet” are related word all going back to PIE *mod- “to meet.” England has today places of assembly called moot-halls like a town assembly hall. However, in Anglo-Saxon times, the hall of assembly was the “mead-hall” like the one ravaged by Grendel. I suppose a meeting of the guys called for a great deal of mead drinking. And not entirely off the point, there was a lot of drinking required at an ancient Greek assembly of the boys, called a symposium. You could look it up. It’s a Greek guy-party, a “drinking-together”.

Spurious Puny Child

~ Adriel ~ Leave a comment

This belongs to the category of “wow, I never knew”. The word spurious in common usage means false or fake. The word comes from Latin spurius meaning illegitimate as in illegitimate child, a bastard. This was its original use in English, later becoming to refer to anything that is not quite genuine. Like the word genuine itself, there must be an enormous number of words a phrases related to birth. Genuine goes back to the P-IE *gene- root referring to birth. Genuine, gender, gene, generation, genetics, even genius and many others, and in a roundabout way even the word kin. And then there are words born of Latin natus (born). There is native, natural, natal, nativity, even natural and so many others with the same heritage.

In Kentucky, you will often hear of someone feeling puny. Commonly, the word puny means small or insignificant. In colloquial Kentuckian, it means sick, or slightly unwell. Puny also is a birth word. Puny is an anglicized French puisne or puis (after) ne (born) that is, a child born after another child. That is, a lesser child. How this comes to mean not feeling well, is well, I am not sure, although I have used it myself and rather like it.