Yesterday I killed a baby.It was a baby squirrel. I saw it on the grass, its cute head poking out with its big doey eyes. Only then I noticed that it had fallen from a tree and had broken its back and was obviously dying a slow and painful death. So, I pulled off my right boot and administered the coup de grace - a violent and savage act which felt very unfamiliar to me in my protected suburban experience. Its little body lies on the lawn now, drenched with the overnight rain.
In discussions about abortion and other ethical issues the emotive and splenetic reactions of those involved are often discarded. To be thoroughly rational and modern people, we are supposed to relativise our emotional responses, or protect ourselves from them. We can accept abortion but not infanticide because we can easily protect ourselves from the cuteness of the baby involved: it is a face hidden from us, a ghostly presence we can shield ourselves from. We are afraid that we will love what we see, so we try hard not to look. Strangely, we know our own 'weakness' - our recidivism as far as guilt goes and so on, and our attachment to cute things. There is a feeling of contempt for those who act merely out of emotion.
But shouldn't our feelings - whether of compassion or disgust or sorrow - be rather a guide for us ? Isn't our capacity for empathy one of the best things that human beings have to help us make moral decisions? To be sure, we can manipulate this tendency: the animal rights/anti-abortion campaigners who show us shocking images of dismembered babies and tortured animals play on our disgust as much as our tenderness. But they are onto something, aren't they? Not to say of course that we should act only out of our visceral reactions to things; only rather to suggest that this visceral reaction is not as unhelpful and distorting as we might think. We are meant, as new parents (for example) to fall for our babies, because we are meant to care for them. Cuteness protects children from infanticide, or ought to.
Jesus himself was often moved by the plight of those he encountered. He appears rather prone to follow his gut reaction, if truth be told! He sees the leaderlessness of Israel, or the corruption of the temple courts, or the pain-racked body before him, and he is quite clearly - and physically - 'moved' to action.
As for the squirrel: I noticed that in deciding to end its life I had to both feel and think. My response to its cuteness and then shock at its pain meant that I had think how to act in a way that cared (in a small way) for it. It wasn't the dilemma of the century of course! And, I don't feel that its cuteness is overcome or put aside by thinking through what the most practical and reasonable thing to do was. I still feel a small sorrow for the squirrel.
14 comments:
How do you know it had a broken back? It might have been having a momentary muscle spasm which rendered it immobile. You could have taken it to a vet. To kill it was so Sydney Anglican of you.
That a bird had come along and pecked a wound in its side was evidence that this beast had been immobile for some time.
If you had been there, you would have done the same.
I am a proud Sydney Anglican: are you?
And then to leave its poor little body lying in the rain. Call that compassion? Honestly, no respect for the creature...just a chance to exert power by determining the problem without proper consultation and then proceeding with your own violent solution. I bet you then went off and played lawn tennis while drinking lemon squash between sets while tut-tutting all the obvious communists in the Labour Party. "Pass me my racquet James, I think I spy another rascal squirrel!!!"
"I miss my mommy"
*sniff*
Baby Squirrel
P.S. Thanks for not posting a photo of it...
Thanks for this thought provoking post Michael. It raises some important issues that I will probably chew over on the weekend. Thanks too for your post on The Joshua Tree. Made me get out the old album and have a relisten. Great on CD ... but always much better on vinyl.
You didn't bury it ?
Are you really a clergyperson ?
I used to burn ants with a magnifying glass with my sunglasses on. But don't expect me to blog about it!
My current author-crush Mary Midgley has written on the role of instinctual and intuitive reactions in ethics a number of times: she's generally in favour, and in particular is keen to defend the rationality --- or, better, the reasonableness --- of such reactions. One such essay is called "Biotechnology and the yuk factor": there are others.
Michael this was a reasonable (if hardly revolutionary) post and I am bewildered by the apparent need of other correspondents to be flippant about it. I know ours is not an ethically-oriented tradition, and on some days I even think I'm resigned to it. But guys. Seriously. What is your damage?
If it was a grey squirrel, I know a few people who would say you should have killed it no matter what state it was in. I suspect the culls would be supported much more if they weren't so cute.
I think generally we are a long way from a kind of perverse morality where we are so caught up in rules that we have lost touch with our gut reactions! A healthy ethics, and Jesus is an example, must have a role for gut compassion I agree, but tempers it always with an overriding morality based on theorectical ethics. Otherwise we are children, and (arguably its true) we are living in an ever more childish society. Why did you bretray your wife? My co-worker was cute. Why did you reinvent the church to toerate homosexuality? They are a cute, likeable couple. For every moment where Jesus was more gentle and compassionate than the moment required, socially, there seems to be one where he made the moment more difficult and awkward.
poor little bugger...
maybe our gut reactions to cuteness stem from our beings as desiring ('eros') subjects. hence the effectiveness of ads that manipulate our desires (or revulsion).
Graham Ward's got an interesting point when he reckons that "desire is fundamental to our nature as human beings as God created us."
so maybe its a matter of channeling desire.
anyways, I'm off to creche then.
That Ward quote is certainly relevant: desires and other feelings are part --- better, an aspect --- of our nature, and any general account must include them. If we exclude them when discussing ethical positions (supposing that this can really be done in any wholesale and consistent way), it must be because we know them to be misleading, and because we have something else which will guide us more truly. But what is this thing?
paul's statement, that (for example) gut compassion should be tempered by an overriding morality based on theorectical ethics, certainly has a lot of precedent on its side. But is this reasonable? Can such a theoretical ethics really be constructed without use of, or appeal to, "gut" reactions?
I don't see how we can understand human nature, or (more narrowly) what is good and bad for us and for others, without such reactions. We are contingent and there's no way to work out everything about us from first principles. Take child-rearing for an example. Children need physical and emotional connection, and boundaries, in addition to sustenance; and they have wider social needs too. Everything I just said is true (right?), but how do we know that? Such knowledge is not separate from our children's gut reactions, or our own in raising them or observing the children of others, or --- even as observers --- our own feelings used empathetically, as a way of putting ourselves in others' shoes. But of course that knowledge is not the same as the gut reactions either, but involves experience and foresight and reflection on all the above, and reflection on the reflection. And theoretical opinions themselves have an emotional component, even very abstract ones: you should hear physicists argue ...
(Appeal to Scripture won't work without a place for our feelings either, since much of its language it affective. I could also make a point here about the relatively holistic view of the person implied in [at least much of] Scripture, but this is a commonplace.)
we are a long way from a kind of perverse morality where we are so caught up in rules that we have lost touch with our gut reactions
Who is this "we"? If it is the wider society, then Michael's point regarding abortion is a counter-example: there is a consensus that emotional reactions to doing-harm-to-foetuses should be set aside on theoretical grounds (choice, consistency, boundaries as to who counts as human "individuals").
If it is the evangelical church, then others' indulgence of their immediate reactions is no reason for us to be repressing ours.
Here are some of Loobylu's links on cute. I thought this quote was especially striking:
“Cuteness is not an aesthetic in the ordinary sense of the word and must not be mistaken for the physically appealing, the attractive. In fact, it is closely linked to the grotesque, the malformed. The grotesque is cute because the grotesque is pitiable, and pity is the primary emotion of this seductive and manipulative aesthetic, which arouses our sympathies by creating anatomical pariahs, like E.T. or the Cabbage Patch Kids.”
The cuteness I am speaking of here, I don't mean like that. Pity is a genuine emotion one might feel. When it is manufactured as in ET, then that's a different story, but there is a natural pity that is quite worthy as an emotion, surely.
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