Clinamen

The Moon or Québec?

[From Cyrano de Bergerac's L'autre monde, ou les états et empires de la lune (1657). To read the original French, click 'keep reading' below.]

I attached to my body a number of phials filled with dew, and the heat of the sun that attracts them raised me up so high, that in the end I found myself up above the highest clouds. But since this attraction caused me to rise too quickly, and instead of drawing closer to the moon as I had anticipated, it seemed to me further than it had been at my departure, I broke several of my phials, until I felt that my weight surpassed the attraction and I descended towards the earth. 

My impression was not at all incorrect, for I fell back down some time after, and judging from the time that I left, it should now have been the middle of the night. However, I recognized that the sun was still at its highest point above the horizon, and that it was noon. I leave it to you to imagine how surprised I was: certainly, I was so surprised that, not knowing to what I should attribute this miracle, I had the insolence to imagine that, in recognition of my hardiness, God had once again fixed the sun in the heavens, in order to enlighten such an important endeavor.

What increased my surprise was that I did not recognize the country where I was, seeing that it seemed to me that, having risen straight up, I should have come down in the same place from which I had left. Outfitted as I was, I set off towards a thatch-roofed inn, from which I saw smoke rising. And I was barely a pistol's shot away when I found myself surrounded by a great number of savages. They seemed very surprised to meet me, as I was, I believe, the first person they had ever seen dressed in bottles. And to confound still further any interpretations that they might have given to this equipment, they saw that in walking I barely touched the earth at all...

I wanted to confront them, but, as if their fear had transformed them into birds, they quickly disappeared into the neighboring forest. Nevertheless I caught one of them, whose legs had no doubt betrayed his body. I asked him, with much difficulty (for I was out of breath), how far we were from Paris, since when people went around naked in France, and why they ran away from me with such fright. This man to whom I spoke was olive-skinned and elderly, and he threw himself right away at my feet. He clasped his hands in the air behind his head, opened his mouth and closed his eyes. He mumbled for quite some time, but I could not make out anything he was saying, so that I took his language for the babbling of a mute.

Some time later, I saw a company of soldiers arrive, beating their drums, and I noticed two of them breaking away from the group to come and greet me. When they were close enough to be heard, I asked them where I was.

--You are in France, they replied. But what the devil has brought you into such a state? And how come we don't know you? Have the ships arrived? Are you going to notify the governor? And why have you put your eau de vie in so many bottles?

To all of this, I replied that it was not the devil who brought me into such a state; that they did not know me, because they could not know everyone; that I didn't know that the Seine could accommodate ships; that I had nothing to tell M. Montbazon; and that I was not carrying any eau de vie. 

--Alright, they said, taking me by the arm, you want to joke around? The governor will know about you, he will!

They took me towards their group, saying this, and I learned from them that I was in France, but I was not in Europe: I was in New France.

Elephant Wars

Tim Flannery notes in a recent review, of books that to me look mostly bad, that "elephants have been known to raid a shed filled with the body parts of slaughtered elephants, removing the feet and ears (which were destined to be turned into umbrella stands) and burying them." This follows the various reports over the past decade of complicated premeditated raids by elephants on villages inhabited by humans who, often years before, had killed members of their elephant families.

In the Politics Aristotle says that hunting is a form of war, and the common wisdom has it that this is a war that has been decisively won by humans in the past few millennia. We have killed off the great majority of other megafauna species, and now the only creatures that pose any real threat to us are mosquito-sized and smaller. But elephants remind us that the war is still on in some spots. The particular expression of their violence can only lead one to conclude that 'war' is not an analogy here. In fact, what their behavior most resembles is that of besieged guerillas, who are ultimately doomed and have no real hope of winning against their enemy, and are fighting, whether they know it or not, precisely because they are doomed.

What more, I wonder, do elephants have to do in order to have their moral personhood acknowledged? Write an elephant version of The Praise of Folly? What does a creature have to do in order for humans to stop dismissing as 'anthropocentrism' what looks in every way like the behavior of a reflective, moral agent?

Some might of course feel emboldened in their dismissal of the moral status of elephants by the fact that they act with such violence. But the interesting thing about this violence is that it is a feature of their behavioral repertoire that can either be manifested, or not. The refusal to attribute a moral character to animal behavior in the history of philosophy has often been grounded in the belief that animal behavior simply flows from animal nature, that there is nothing an animal does that it could just as well not have done. But elephants, like people, appear much more likely to flip out when they or their loved ones have been messed with. Elephant attacks have nothing of the character of, say, shark attacks, which really do flow directly from the shark's nature. It is simply a scientific mistake to suppose that the elephant attack ought to be studied in more or less the same way as the shark attack, rather than, say, a Naxalite attack in rural India. 

Maoist insurrection has as its root cause the inability of human beings to share land and resources; it is a problem of demography and geography. One way of solving this problem would be to cull human populations to the point where everyone could share resources to the satisfaction of all. But of course no one seriously considers this an option, since each individual human is supposed to have an irreducible moral status that precludes the possibility of treating them as anything other than an end in themselves. Yet it remains a fringe view to suggest that elephant populations should not be culled for their own good. Flannery, for example, who appears to recognize all of the different respects in which elephants behave as individual moral agents, still advocates culling. Why is this? Again, it is not enough to say that if we don't cull them, then they are doomed, since evidently the same reasoning could not possibly be invoked with respect to any human population. Human beings as a species probably are doomed, in fact, for reasons having much to do with overpopulation and competition for resources, but what righteous and decent people do nonetheless is to look for ways to save every last one of them, rather than just some of them. I want to know what it is that permits us to reason differently in the different cases, other than the fact that they are elephants, and we are human. This is true, but it's not an argument.

The great Pleistocene megafauna kill-off must have been quite a scene. Part of me --and perhaps this comes from reading too much Walter Burkert recently-- wants to think that Aristotle's characterization of hunting as a form of war derives from some ancestral memory of a time when European pachyderms were still putting up a good fight against their human competitors. In other parts of the world, in the hunting of other species, this activity has been conceptualized not on the model of war, but on the model of gift-giving. It's hard to imagine that anyone ever thought a mammoth was 'giving itself', especially if what we now know about existing elephant species --that they do in fact fight wars-- can be projected back to the extinct ones.