Tag: Cruelty

I was asking that question about why revulsion from torture isn’t universal five years ago, too, almost to the day. I’ll just repost it.

Lynn Hunt asks a pertinent question in Inventing Human Rights:

Voltaire railed against the miscarriage of justice in the Calas case, but he did not originally object to the fact that the old man had been tortured or broken on the wheel. If natural compassion makes everyone detest the cruelty of judicial torture, as Voltaire said later, then why was this not obvious before the 1760s, even to him? Evidently some kind of blinders had operated to inhibit the operation of empathy before then.

The facts aren’t enough. Science isn’t enough. There has to be emotion too. People have to care. It’s that simple. If people don’t care, the facts are just facts, they’re inert.

This is also why relief organizations use one person (and animal welfare organizations use one animal) on fund-raising appeals: we’re wired so that we empathize with one person much more strongly than we empathize with a million. If facts were enough for morality, we ought to respond a million times more strongly to reports of a million people in desperate straits, but in fact we respond much less strongly to a million people than we do to one.

Originally a comment by latsot on Torturing animals, for instance, was just good clean fun.

For some reason the area I live in is a national blackspot for animal cruelty. People around here keep amassing vast collections of animals they can’t look after and then causing them to suffer until someone calls the RSPCA.

It’s a strange kind of cruelty. These people want the animals and presumably care about them in some sense…. but somehow don’t recognise that they’re harming them. Making them miserable. Ruining their health.

There’s a riding school close to my house. The horses look like they’re in good condition but the owner was found to have a dozen dogs in a cage, some of which were found eating the corpses of other dogs that had died from starvation and neglect.

There’s a kind of smallholding, again within half a mile of my house, which for some reason had lots of rare and very expensive goats. They were kept in abysmal conditions. Starving, riddled with painful disease, cruelly confined.

There’s an Iguana rescue centre a little further away. This is the North East of England. Iguanas are among the least likely animals to survive here if left to their own devices. Yet enough people buy them and release them into the wild to warrant an actual Iguana rescue centre. The staff told me that people find these iguanas roaming around and bring them into the centre. Iguanas are not like tortoises – natural escape artists – they aren’t getting out of someone’s house on their own.

I’ve no idea why the North East – and particularly this little part of the North East – is such a hotbed of apparently unthinking animal cruelty, but it is. Drives me crazy that my neighbours are apparently all the time torturing animals and presumably thinking it’s acceptable behaviour.

I felt guilty that one time I overslept and gave my cat her breakfast an hour late.

Guest post by Michael Šimková, originally a comment on the Facebook autopost of the Torturing animals, for instance, was just good clean fun post; published with permission.

Very interesting discussion. I am not sure what to think about it myself. It does worry me a lot. I believe we won’t survive if we don’t change ourselves to be non-violent, and probably this will require some genetic tinkering. Even if we could survive it is not very pleasant to live in this world of… er… angry chimps.

When I was younger I think in some sense I was more empathic than now, or applied it more universally. I fought my cousin because she cut up live earthworms to see if they would regrow. When there was a mouse in the house my gran boiled up a pot of water to throw on it to kill it, and when I realised what she intended to do I literally flung myself between the mouse and her to stop it. She very nearly threw the water on me. I screamed at a group of four older boys who otherwise intimidated me for thoughtlessly stepping on a caterpillar, even somehow made them carry it around in an attempt at performing ‘intensive care’.

As I got older I think I’ve progressively become desensitised, less inclusive. I’ll smush insects. I do still get the funny feeling, “I’ve ended this little thing’s experiences.” But I do it anyway. I would still try to stop anyone burning a mouse to death, but I doubt I’d fling myself into the path of oncoming boiling water like when I was 6. I certainly wouldn’t start a fight over an earthworm, though I still hate the thought of cutting one up. And of course I have to relativise. “That’s gruesome, but so many random experiences of this world are.” I didn’t relativise as a child because I didn’t know enough.

I’ve noticed at work with my colleagues we play a sort of self-mocking coy game if there is pesky bug around. Who will be the beast who smushes it, and who will feign the moral high ground? You mention revulsion as a factor in stopping violence, but I think it is also precisely our revulsion that often fuels it. It is considered normal to feel revulsion at insects, even those whose presence is benign. It is not considered normal now to feel revulsion at a dog – though some people do anyway. And batterers report feelings of revulsion toward the people they batter. The coy game with the bug is that whoever is overcome first by her revulsion is the ‘beast’ who eliminates the pest for us and we pretend to have nothing to do with such a thing, but are actually relieved and obviously enabling it. The revulsion is the trigger.

I also remember that when I was young, if I got angry or felt put upon, I was much more volatile, and more liable to forego empathy. I could throw myself in front of boiling water to protect a mouse, but if the mouse bit me I might be angry enough to want to hurt it back. As I’ve gotten older I’ve repressed or rationalised that desire away for anything but the worst atrocities. You know, the thing bit me, but it doesn’t even know any better, it’s just anxious, makes no sense to be angry at it. So and so hurt me but it would just bring more suffering to retaliate, better to find a way out of the situation. Things like that, I am much better older. I suppose that is what Janet L. Factor calls the influence of civilisation. Yet instinctive empathising with an earthworm, I was better at younger.

I’ve met people who put mice in microwaves for fun and they joke about it, and laugh about it. It’s funny to them. The suffering of the mouse and my own horror at their telling of it seemed equally amusing to them. That does make me desire to hurt them back, ironically, deep down. Again the feeling is revulsion.

I’ve no doubt a large part of it is learned. My grandmother for example was raised in a culture in which it simply was taken for granted that animals have no feelings. I think she saw them as philosophical zombies. They moved, seemingly with purpose, but were empty inside to her. She believed I was crazy for attributing complex emotions to the dog, while I believed she was blind for not perceiving them. I wonder though if the ability to empathise is a separate thing from sadism, and if revulsion doesn’t play a role in wanting to cause harm rather than wanting to avoid it.

These are just meandering thoughts. I really don’t have a clear picture of any of it.

One of the things religion does is create artificial misery. One of the ways religion does this is by making people feel agonizing terror about eternal torture for themselves or people they love or both, or by making them feel agonizing despair and grief at angering or alienating God. This is especially vile when the putative eternal torture or alienation from God is caused by actions or thoughts that are in no way bad. The misery is doubly artificial (and thus gratuitous and cruel) in these situations: there is no eternal punishment, and the putative Sin is not bad or wicked.

The entrenched belief that not being straight is Sin is a classic and still very active example. Consider Peterson Toscano for instance, a survivor of “ex-gay” therapy.

Mr Toscano, now 47, grew up in an average Italian American Catholic home in Upstate New York.

But as a devout Christian, and member of the Evangelical Church, he found it difficult to resolve what he saw as a conflict between his sexual orientation and his faith.

“I was doing something spiritually and morally wrong that I would be punished for in the afterlife. And so there was a lot of fear and terrible desperation,” he told BBC Religion.

That’s horrible. It happens all the time, and it’s horrible.

Humans have more than enough natural misery to deal with. It’s horrible to make up new kinds.

What’s wrong with torturing animals for fun? Why not, after all?

Nothing should be off the table when skeptics get together for a chin-wag, right? So recreational animal torture should be on the table. It shouldn’t be a given that that’s not ok, just the way “treat people as equals” shouldn’t be a given, because skepticism. Right? We can’t just assume that torturing animals for shits&giggles is a crap idea; we have to demonstrate that it is, with evidence.

Why, for instance, is there anything wrong with the fact that someone encased a live kitten in concrete up to the front legs on the property of FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints) patriarch Isaac Wyler? Why is it stomach-turning to read that a sheriff’s officer laughed about it?

I hate to do this, because it freaks me out and I know it will freak others out, but I’m going to include the picture. Be warned: it’s painful to look at.  I took the picture down, by request. It’s on the post linked just above. It’s worth having it on the record, because it conveys the horribleness required to carry out the act – but that certainly doesn’t mean everyone has to look at it.

The kitten died soon after being rescued.

The brains of children raised in violent families resemble the brains of soldiers exposed to combat, according to an article in Wired.

They’re primed to perceive threat and anticipate pain, adaptations that may be helpful in abusive environments but produce long-term problems with stress and anxiety.

“For them to detect early cues that might signal danger is adaptive. It allows them to react, to try and avoid the danger,” said psychologist Eamon McCrory of University College London. However, “a very similar neural signature characterizes quite a few anxiety disorders.”

Absolutely nothing surprising there. Bad things keep happening, so you develop a strong tendency to react quickly…and you’re stuck with it. A lifetime of feeling extra, exaggerated fear and dread. What a gift.

It’s not at all surprising but it’s deeply sad.

And then there’s Gulnare Freewill Baptist church, which told a parishioner – ever so politely, you understand – that her fiancé couldn’t come to the church again, on account of how he’s not a white person. Perfectly understandable. It’s because they (church members who voted on “the issue”) want to promote greater unity among the church body and the community. Obviously you can’t do that if there’s a not-white person at the church when all the other persons there are white. That would promote lesser unity. Everybody would look around uneasily and kind of split apart.

Melvin Thompson, former pastor of Gulnare Freewill Baptist church, proposed the ban after Stella Harville brought her fiance, Ticha Chikuni, to services in June. Harville, who goes by the name Suzie, played the piano while Chikuni sang.

Before stepping down as pastor in August, Thompson told Harville that her fiance could not sing at the church again. Harville is white and Chikuni, a native of Zimbabwe, is black.

Last Sunday, church members voted 9-6 in favor of Thompson’s proposed ban. Others attending the church business meeting declined to take a stand on the issue.

“That the Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church does not condone interracial marriage,” the resolution states, according to WKYT.

“Parties of such marriages will not be received as members, nor will they be used in worship services and other church functions, with the exception being funerals. All are welcome to our public worship services. This recommendation is not intended to judge the salvation of anyone, but is intended to promote greater unity among the church body and the community we serve.”

God is love.