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Writer's pictureCrone

We muse in the mist

Actually, you know, it really isn’t culture that I wanted to talk about. What I really wanted to say was that, yes, great, regard animals as individuals – so that what matters is the suffering of this cat here not a kind of abstract blob of suffering that adds to a calculation (utilitarianism) or as ‘one of a species’ to be protected or culled (environmentalism). But that isn’t enough because the cat is not divorced from his environment and social relations – he’s embedded in this web of relationships with conspecifics, predators, prey and the environment. Changes to that changes him.


And I guess I want to use social learning as a way to illustrate this.


I want to say that the good life of an elephant depends on that elephant having a mother and other elephants around to learn from and to create an environment that isn’t completely riven by stressors.


Older animals are ‘repositories of knowledge’ – and to pass on that knowledge they have to be there and they have to have functioning relationships and communication systems.


While learning and culture in animals often involves conformity and can be very conservative, the building blocks of innovation may be the knowledge that already resides in the community. The opportunity for innovation may be an environment… that may be a dead end.


The development of various cultural traditions within a single species is like an insurance policy… those that rely on salmon may die out, which is not good, of course, but the one that focused on seals may flourish…


So different cultures may not be valuable in their own right but the variety they allow for or enable may be the critical thing – and these cultural variations can only develop given sufficient… freedom? High enough numbers? Long enough life spans?


So I am saying that culture has an instrumental value.


Ben says that as it seems unlikely animals can ‘value’ culture, if I wanted to show that culture per se mattered I would have to suggest that animals may have a disposition to value a lost culture… That sounds complex.


One might be able to say something like, for animals to live a good life and flourish they need culture… I’m not sure about that. But I do think one could say that they might have a disposition to value knowledge and learning. Certainly they can use it (instrumental value) but perhaps there’s more to it.


More birds together, more whales together, learn more complex songs… naming or recognising large numbers of individuals demands more variety in song… females often prefer good singers…. But there does not appear to be a correlation between good singers and good problem solving… For some reason the females like it. Like they like very flamboyant macaws or bowers… there’s something that seems valued in striving for… art? Beauty?


Carl Safina, in discussing macaws, talks about how much more of the light spectrum birds can see – they see the glorious ultraviolet in feathers as well as what we see. He says they value beauty. The beauty of feathers, of course, isn’t cultural, but songs are and bowers are.


I started off by wanting to make a clear point: human interactions that damage the ability of other animals to make sense of or ascertain the truth about their environment are bad. I’ve made it unduly complicated.


Maybe it’s this: animals should have the right to construct their own reality…. God, that’s not exactly right. Just like we conceptualise reality according to our needs or umwelts or particular size and sense apparatus and so on… something like that.


I’m lost in the mist.

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