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dreamtoreality · 8 years ago

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Debunking Society: Mad is the New Normal

There’s a fine line between what constitutes one as “normal” or “mad.” One knows when they see it, or at least, they think they do. Ken Kessey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest blurs the line – destroys it – and creates a new division between the former “sane” and “insane” in which their roles are switched. This is the cause of a flawed system, as will be elaborated on in the following paragraphs, in which control is heavily implemented. “’Have You Ever Seen the Inside of One of those Places?’: Psycho, Foucault, and the Postwar Context of Madness” by Cynthia Erb supports this view as it challenges the mental institutional system while Michael Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Fred Madden’s “Sanity and Responsibility: Big Chief as Narrator and Executioner” and Madan Sarup’s An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism provide further insight to extract from.

First and foremost, what defines one as normal? Normality is often characterized by the ability to cope; namely, to be stable. According to Erb, “The subject of madness is the one who does not know [them]self” (47). By this logic, sanity, its polar opposite, must be characterized in terms of being able to know oneself. To be able to do so would therefore be the product of one who possesses subjectivity, yet this seems odd in light of Kessey’s character, the Big Nurse, who Chief describes as such: “I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants” (47). She is also described as becoming really distraught when the mental institutional system is kept from “running like a smooth, accurate, precision-made machine” (47). There are two problems with these descriptions: first, that the Big Nurse is robotic, and secondly, the system is made to function equally as robotic. The equation of ‘subjectivity plus stability equaling sanity’ completely falls apart under this speculation. What separates humans from robots is that they have awareness (or subjectivity), and if the Big Nurse is like a robot, she is not aware. Furthermore, she can’t be stable if she’s like a robot since robots are neither stable nor unstable; they are neutral, due to their lack of subjectivity.

In the big scheme of things, to have a robotic system maintained by a robotic authority figure is troubling. If the Big Nurse controls the mental facility, then who controls her? The Chief voices these very fears when he admits, “I was an electrician's assistant in training camp before the Army shipped me to Germany and…I learned about the way these things can be rigged” (47). The danger of being like a robot is that one can be swayed into doing things all the while thinking they did it on their own accord, when really, they’re actually being controlled. This is the phenomenon of conformity at its finest, and in “Sanity and Responsibility,” Madden informs his readers: “For Kessey, any sort of conformity means a loss of individual sanity” (206). The reason conformity is so effective is because it’s much easier to control a large mass of people when they are all acting and thinking exactly the same. Their sameness allows an observer to predict every intended thought or action. If one is able to do this, they can act accordingly based on everybody’s calculations, much like inputting a solution in a command prompt that is read by a machine, a robot.

Back to the question asking who the Big Nurse is controlled by: Chief argues it’s “the ‘Combine,’ which is a huge organization that aims to adjust the Outside as well as she has the Inside, [and] has made her a real veteran at adjusting things” (47). The Combine can be likened to the government, the true holders of power. It’s not much different from Cuckoo’s Nest in the way that the president is a puppet in an equally controlled society with the government working the strings. While the government contends that society has its say in the decisions it makes based on a voting system, it persuades the president to act and say certain things to sway the public into also abiding by the workings of authority. Kessey’s Cuckoo’s Nest mirrors this on a microscopic level when the Big Nurse taught a new recruit to “not to show his hate and to be calm and wait, wait for a little advantage, a little slack, then twist the rope and keep the pressure steady. All the time. That's the way you get them into shape, she taught him” (49). While this description is mainly metaphoric, force is often used to control as well. When Taber doesn’t take his pills because he refuses to take them without first knowing what they are or what they do, the “nurse comes down the hall, smearing Vaseline on a long needle, pulls the door shut so they're out of sight for a second, then…Taber is wheeled out of the lab on a Gurney bed” (54). The nurse uses the needle as a tool just as the government uses technology as a tool for distracting the general public from what’s really happening around them. While America is concerned about whether or not a Kardashian had Botox, Colorado’s drinking water has been infiltrated by methane, a highly flammable chemical.

Thinking back to Madden’s quote above, if to conform meant to be mad, then it appears that the “normal,” in terms of Cuckoo’s Nest, and perhaps the world, are actually insane. What does this say about those who were formally characterized as mad then? Insanity should be the flipside to normality, so that would mean an inability to cope, or to be in a state of constant instability. Cynthia Erb admits, “The culture at large treats madness as an incoherence of subjectivity (or as Foucault put it, a state of unreason),” which means an inability to know oneself, but she rebuttals this by adding, “Those of us who identify ourselves as mad know that madness affords a place of observation, knowledge, and critique comparable to that of the other identity positions” (47). It would appear then that Chief’s decision to remain silent is not an act of madness, as is sometimes an attribute that defines madness, but rather, it allows him to observe, learn, and critique – a means of knowing himself. Yet he also uses it strategically as he admits, “They [Big Nurse’s recruits] don't bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when I'm nearby because they think I'm deaf and dumb” (27). Silence is linked with madness because it is animalistic in some sense. Usually language is connected to humans, and so not having spoken word to communicate with other human beings, that person is more like an animal. Yet Madan Sarup’s Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism offers an interesting viewpoint on this matter: “[M]eaningful speech is the silent conversation of consciousness with oneself in solitary mental life” (36). Chief, then, can perhaps be characterized as the only one in the whole novel who truly knows himself and is aware. After all, it was his awareness of everything around him that enabled him to reclaim his right as “sane” and escape the asylum in the end.

Awareness is the key to breaking free of the cage that authority puts one in. The reason is because knowledge is power. If society as a whole became aware as a whole, they would rip apart the system. It’s for reasons like these, in his Madness and Civilization, Michael Foucault argues, “[M]adness fascinates because it is knowledge… all these absurd figures are in reality elements of a difficult, hermetic, esoteric learning… This knowledge, so inaccessible, so formidable, the Fool, in the innocent idiocy, already possesses” (193). Foucault’s take on madness skirts the foundation of having reason which, as mentioned earlier, is something madmen were said to not have, according to general public – but clearly they were wrong. This is evident when Chief is able to escape the asylum. Even Madden contends this in his “Sanity and Responsibility” when he says, “This awareness of the power…allows him to free himself from the members and to define himself as an individual” (213). If a madman is capable of reasoning and awareness, important parts in the criteria for what defines one as normal, then it must be that authority, who laid down these unspoken rules, are the ones that are really mad.

Of course, pointing the finger of blame with no proof gets one nowhere. Cynthia Erb’s “Have You Ever Seen the Inside of One of those Places,” however, provides shocking evidence:

[M]ental hospitals functioned as little more than concentration camps… detailed summaries of abuses: beatings that occasionally resulted in death, starvation, chemical restraint (overdrugging), isolation, nakedness, filth, and overcrowding… the mental institution functions as an apparatus of control. (49-50)

Kessey’s Cuckoo’s Nest mirrors this depiction through repeated scenes of giving patients unknown pills, forced injections, electrotherapy, and aggressive acts which led to violent behavior against the patients. Although it may appear that such a comparison is taking the situation a little too far for Cuckoo’s Nest, an even greater link to the concentration camps is further mirrored in Chief’s infamous opening lines, “I been silent so long now it's gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please…it's the truth even if it didn't happen” (31). Just as Holocaust survivors refused to tell their stories out of the fear of not being believed, Chief too, shares this fear. Instead of taking these lines to mean it might have been all a hallucination (the reader doesn’t trust him already since he’s in an asylum), it should really be taken to mean, Believe it or don’t believe it; but this is my story.

Bearing all this in mind, it is clear Ken Kessey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest very effectively portrays a hidden truth: based on the criteria for what constitutes one as “normal” and “mad,” it appears the ones who are supposed to be mad are really the sane people while the normal people are actually mad. Therefore, it is the Chief who is sane while the Big Nurse and the ‘Combine’ are the mad ones. It is a switching of roles that creates an annihilation of a world that was constructed in such a way to be orderly; through its perverse reasoning and soundness only unreason is created in turn. A world order is not an orderly world: it is disorder. This novel of twisted logic also sheds light on a disturbing fact of its readers: we all live in the world of Kessey’s novel. We are stuck in the asylum we call society. If we are claimed mad it is because we know too much, not because we are not the type of “normal” that the face of authority would like us to be: robotic and easy to control through conformity. Perhaps that’s why Foucault goes on to say that “madness is the false punishment of a false solution” (200).

– Janine A. Acherman 3 May 2014

Works Cited

Erb, Cynthia. “‘Have You Ever Seen the Inside of One of Those Places?’: Psycho, Foucault, and the Postwar Context of Madness.” Cinema Journal 45.4 (2006): 45-63. Print.

Foucault, Michael. Madness and Civilization. New York: Vintage, 1988. Print.

Kessey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. Print.

Madden, Fred. “Sanity and Responsibility: Big Chief as Narrator and Executioner.” Modern

Fiction Studies 32.2 (1986): 203-217. Print.

Sarup, Madan. An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism. New York: Pearson Education, n.d. Print.

#essay #thoughts #madness #normal #normality #mental illness #mental health #society #controversy #controversial #one flew over the cuckoo's nest

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dreamtoreality · 8 years ago

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This Just In: Humanity Allegedly Date-Rapes Nature

At what point did man decide that he was exempt from nature? Does such a contrast exist? One need only ask today’s modern society if they draw a line between humanity and the “wilderness”[1] to see that such a phenomenon holds true in their eyes. Yet the question that needs some real explaining is why such a division even exists – for is not man just as “wild” as the fox is intelligent? And further, are the two not equal participants in this so-called “beautiful” nature that man so eagerly tries to disassociate and run from? This is where our culture steps in to answer in our stead. From the very moment of birth, we are so influenced by our culture that we become predisposed to believe that a life is measurable, and the life of man specifically sits comfortably at the very top. Taking a look at works by William Wordsworth, Frederick Seidel, P. B. Shelley, and Daniel Quinn we take one step closer to understanding this push-and-pull relationship between man and the rest of the world. Only after this can we identify what might ensue if he would simply cross over this (nonexistent) border that divides them.

John Keats once said, “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body… creatures of impulse [which] are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity” (“The Chameleon Poet,” Letter to Richard Woodhouse, Oct. 27, 1818). If the Poet is not poetical, then it must be that he is prosaic. Factual. Plain. Ordinary. He merely says things as they are, his words encompassing every fiber of his body; his subject matters the building blocks of his identity. But at the end of the day, he is just another artist who knows how to make words sound pretty. His words are an unsuccessful pitch for the local newspaper; a dusty item in a yard sale that nobody is buying. Just like the Shakespearian fool, the Poet says everything and anything, but the only thing that is really funny is how his words can hold attention, but not intrinsic value. Is this not odd considering we live in a society that places value upon everything – every single living or nonliving thing – on this planet? (Now that is hilarious.)

A key component to man’s decision as to what is or is not “valuable” relies heavily on his own self-interest in maintaining some sense of control over nature (whether or not he is ready to admit to it), and perhaps this is what Keats is trying to get at when he uses the phrase “creatures of impulse.” That is to say, nature is the Poet and we are its “content” which, as Keith Hossack puts it, acts as “the inferential role of the belief it expresses” (The Metaphysics of Knowledge, 4). So while it may seem that the Poet is the one in control of what he writes, it is actually the content that impels or moves him to write, acting as a magnet that pulls at quicker and stronger intervals upon entering its luring sphere – this being our impulse. And when we allow this inward pull and embrace the Poet (i.e. “nature”), we likewise allow him to ceaselessly write away in fluid motions, his output a chasm of flowing ideas; in contrast, when we push outward and reject the Poet, we cause breaks in his writing – disruption; disorder; chaos – areas where he should have stopped at because there is no saving this poem.

The “poem,” of course, is the result of the complex relationship that forms between the Poet and content, all of life and humanity. The poem, in other terms, is what one might refer to as a “culture.” Daniel Quinn’s novel, Ismael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, first defines a culture as “a people enacting a story” (41), but later expands to the fuller meaning: “[T]he sum total of what’s passed along… not just information and techniques. It’s beliefs, assumptions, theories, customs, legends, songs, stories, dances, jokes, superstitions, prejudices, tastes, attitudes. Everything” (198-9). As we shall see, to continuously pass down everything that makes up a poem (i.e. “culture”) can be disastrous for the Poet if his content runs counter to what he would like the poem to express.

If the Poet becomes unpoetical, then his content does not merit a compliment such as “beautiful.” But just what is beautiful? Is it the way William Wordsworth tells us he “mastered nature” in The Prelude, or was it perhaps his other piece, “Nutting,” where he whispers rape in the backdrop of some “virgin scene” (20)? The term “rape” might appear vulgar, and possibly even nonsensical at face value, but one cannot deny that Wordsworth’s poems reflect the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of rape, which is “the act of taking anything by force” (2008). This becomes especially clear in light of Wordsworth’s diction in “Nutting” when he says, “I forc’d my way [through the woods]… / Unvisited, where not a broken bough / droop’d” (14, 16-7), as well as the moment when he “dragg’d to earth both branch and bough, with crash / And merciless ravage; and the shady nook… / Deform’d and sullied, patiently gave up” (43-4, 46). The picture Wordsworth paints for us here is of a man raping nature, or in less crude terms, taking forceful control over it in a harmful way. By understanding the poem in these terms, it becomes strangely reminiscent of the opening line to the poem called “Spring” by Frederick Seidel…

I want to date-rape life.

And yet, such an image is easy enough to imagine because Wordsworth’s and Seidel’s poems alike are quite literally a reflection (and product) of our modern society’s culture. This is what happened to be coined as “Mother Culture” in Quinn’s Ismael, for “culture is a mother everywhere and at every time, because culture is inherently a nurturer – the nurturer of human societies and lifestyles” wherein our current culture has become something “she explains and preserves [as] a lifestyle that has proven to be unhealthy and self-destructive” (148). In fact, we find that our current culture keeps us from acting in accordance to our very nature (that is, the tendency or “impulse” to embrace nature as equal participants within it), resulting in twisted thoughts and actions we believe to be “logical.” Take Quinn’s novel Ismael for instance, considering the scene where the two main characters discuss a paradox in human civilization: the “intensification of production to feed an increased population [which] leads to a still greater increase in population” (109). To stop the process would run counter to what Mother Culture has taught us, which is that one’s self-interests come first – in this case (and almost all other cases), making profit – and the repercussions, if there are any, can easily be “fixed” upon emergence.

One does not have to search very hard to see that such a mindset is disastrous and nothing good can come out of it. As history has shown, humanity has experienced a series of errors – actions of which that are repetitiously unlearned from as more and more errors unfold, and predictions of turmoil become a matter of when, and no longer a matter of if. For instance, we must reconsider one very painful memory of the past: the Holocaust. In Quinn’s novel, Ismael, one of the main characters highlights a key issue regarding this event. He says, “[T]his is what the people of Germany were doing under Hitler… They were trying to make the story he was telling them come true” (41). It is frightening to think how easily one man was able to accomplish horrific things – all of which he had been able to reason and make sense of in his “story,” resulting in many others believing it was all completely “logical” as well, while today, we are still left scratching our heads in utter disbelief. As Martin Heidegger puts it in his “Memorial Address,” this was due in part to “allow[ing] ourselves to be entertained by such a talk. In listening to such a story, no thinking at all is needed, no reflecting is demanded on what concerns each one of us immediately and continuously in his very being” (Discourse on Thinking, 44). It is equally frightening that the bulk of society would much rather have somebody tell them what to do instead of think for themselves. And this is only one such example that proves how deeply engrained our culture has become: the severity of this apparent need to fulfill our self-interests at the expense of others will ultimately lead to our ruin.

So is there really any hope for humanity? Fortunately, the answer is yes. Humanity could radically change the course of the future through the very simple act of thinking. Heidegger refers to this specific method of thinking as meditative thinking, which demands of us to “grow thoughtful and ask [questions]” (47) because such a method opens the door to learning opportunities and a chance to grow, to think beyond one’s original thought and not “cling one-sidedly to a single idea” (53). Another such advancement might involve a model similar to Aldo Leopold’s proposal of the installation of a “land ethic” as a means for shifting the perception of future generations and cultures yet to come, erasing borders and furthering our appreciation for life around us. If done correctly, we should expect to see how the “land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it,” and most importantly, it would reteach humanity its lost virtue: how to have “respect for his [man’s] fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such” (“The Land Ethic,” 204). We are magnets in opposition: different, but it is a fact that we are meant to stick together. The only borders that exist are the ones in our minds.

As of the moment, we may feel that we have nothing beautiful worth sharing. Yet perhaps if we would only open our eyes to acknowledge the real beauty of all things, we might begin to understand why Keats believed the Poet had no identity. There is no need or (any means) to measure or calculate the value in something that resists classification. The beauty of all things is the complex relationship between all things, and to simply understand this fact… It is enough.

That garden sweet, that lady fair

And all sweet shapes and odours there

In truth have never past away –

‘Tis we, ‘tis ours, are changed – not they.

— P. B. Shelley, “The Sensitive-Plant” (17-20)

– Janine A. Acherman 26 May 2015

Works Cited

Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. “Memorial Address.” New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Print.

Hossack, Keith. The Metaphysics of Knowledge. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.

Keats, John. “The Chameleon Poet.” Letter. To Richard Woodhouse Oct. 1818. Print.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. “The Land Ethic.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1949. Print.

Quinn, Daniel. Ismael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. Print.

“Rape.” Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd ed. 2008. Web.

Seidel, Frederick. Poems 1959 – 2009. “Spring.” New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

Print. Shelley, P. B. “The Sensitive Plant.” 1820. Print.

[1] For the purpose of keeping my paper simple, I use the terms wilderness and nature interchangeably to mean “everything other than man,” or “life in its totality (wherein man acts as though he is superior and in control).”

#thoughts #nature #human #man #animals #essay

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dreamtoreality · 8 years ago

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Dialogues with my Dog: An Open-Eyed Approach

The loss of Brandy has never been easy. I say this because this wasn’t just the loss of some pet; it had been the loss of a family member. Just like any human, she had a personality that was specific to her alone, possessed long-term memory, and even had the ability to communicate. It was through the remainder of her lifetime by my side that I readily understood that animals could be self-aware – yet another trait that is said to be exclusively “human.” Yet these observations will never be brought to light unless one starts from the right position – one of friendship and closeness, rather than one for mere scientific purposes where no real bond can be formed. Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves mirrors this idea throughout, as Rosemary tells of Fern, who she describes as her sister even though Fern is a chimpanzee. Taking a closer look at Animalism: Respecting the Living World by Graham Harvey and “How Dogs Know when Communication is Intended for Them” by Juliane Kaminski, Linda Schulz, and Michael Tomasello shed light on the intelligence of these animals, while Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter’s “Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence” lays down the foundation as to one way knowledge is understood today and why it is a problem.

A dog is a man’s best friend. This well-known phrase is not meant to be cute, but rather, it states the fact: man is social and so, too, are dogs. It’s no surprise that we should form relationships with an animal from another species that is just as communicative as our own. I understood this growing up as I lived with dogs all my life, yet it had never been blatantly obvious until the particular loss of Brandy. She was my best friend, yet we were so close I might even be tempted to call her my sister – just as Rosemary does with Fern in Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. It is because I’ve started from this standpoint that I was able to make the conclusion that an animal’s intelligence is not any less “intelligent” than our own, but rather, it is manifested in different forms. Any animal lover can confirm these facts, no matter what animal at hand. It is for this reason Lowell, Rosemary’s brother, says their father was wrong for “always saying that we were all animals, but when he dealt with Fern, he didn’t start from that place of congruence…It was always her failure for not being able to talk to us, never ours for not being able to understand her” (202). Unfortunately, this is true of many scientists: they claim to observe that animals do not have any human-like intelligence, but really, maybe the problem is they just aren’t observing correctly.

Everything I’ve come to know and love about Brandy stems from the very first moment I set eyes on her – quite literally. I remember our meeting at the age of five because it struck me so significantly that I still think back on it even to this day. While my mother and I had originally come into the dog pound to search for our neighbor’s missing dog, we were in for a bit of a surprise when she was the one we’d be taking out of there (we unfortunately never found our neighbor’s dog). All dog pounds I’ve ever been to are the same: the animals are very unhappy, in small cages, but they are particular in the way that most dogs bark when people walk through them. That day, it seemed as though every dog was barking as my mother and I searched for our neighbor’s dog – that is, until I noticed Brandy. I stopped in my tracks, unable to break that eye contact. No words can describe the things I felt. Her big brown eyes told me how hopeless she truly felt. I could only imagine how many people walked past her in a single day and gave no notice to these sad brown eyes. I walked up to her, despite that every other dog in her cage was barking, and crouched down so that we were eye level. I held my hand out for her to smell it (as I’d been taught to do by my father). My mother, clearly shocked that I had outstretched my hand into a cage of barking dogs, urgently walked over and told me not to pet her. I asked her to just look at Brandy. She crouched down beside me, and before she even knew what she was doing, she petted her. And that was when we knew.

It was those same big brown eyes that would continue to tell me everything – from how she was happy to when she was sick. Nothing ever escaped me when I looked into her eyes. I spoke for Brandy just as Rosemary would speak for Fern: “‘Fern wants a kitten,’ I told my mother” (246). “Brandy isn’t hungry,” I would tell my mother when Brandy began to lose her appetite, due to oncoming cancer. Yet when I sat beside Brandy during her dinner time, I would catch her eye and while petting her I’d beckon her to eat, and most times she would. According to a study in “How Dogs Know when Communication is Intended for Them,” Kaminski, Schulz, and Tomasello contend that, “Results demonstrated the importance of eye contact in human–dog communication…with no difference between adult dogs and young puppies – which are precisely the communicative cues used by human infants for identifying communicative intent” (222). I knew it at the time, despite my age, that Brandy understood when I had asked her to eat. It was for this reason I would continue to ask her to eat every time I noticed she neglected her dinner. When her appetite really took a downward spiral, we would bargain with one another: she would eat everything only if I had thrown extra things into her dish, such as her favorite savory doggie treats from China (which, we later found out, may have been the initial cause for her cancer).

In her earlier days, food may have been her best friend. But something I’d like to point out about her personality was that she had what many might regard as a strong personality. She was very jealous and, overall, did not trust others. When she sat on the couch being petted, she would growl when another dog drew near – she wanted all the attention she could get. And when she had been given her morning treats, she would growl at anyone who approached her, at times even charge. This is what Harvey means in Animalism when he argues, “Animals sometimes participate in ceremonies and kinship systems alongside humans, and even engage in their own ceremonies and kinship systems, demonstrating their intentionality, self-awareness, and willingness to communicate” (102). When we first met, that was the moment we entered into a kinship in which she could trust me. This was clear in the way she would often bring her treats into my room and allow me to pick them up and look at them. She never growled at me. I was the only one who could get near her when she had food. She trusted me with her food, and also at times when she was afraid. She would run over to me, shaking, during New Year’s and the Fourth of July when fireworks would pop in front of our house. These instances made it clear to me that she remembered the day I first saw her. I knew in her eyes, I had been the one who saved her and she would continue to sing her praises in the ways she communicated with me.

The ghost of Brandy’s companionship would continue to linger as the years went by without her. She outlined the qualities of a true best friend when she would come into my room and sit by my side when I had fought with a friend that day and was crying. When I wanted to be alone, whether I pointed to the door for her to leave or not, she always understood and always gave me the space I needed, just as Harvey’s Animalism mentions: “[B]oth animals and humans communicate in particular ways, and both are communal but also manage various degrees of individuality and solitude when necessary or desired” (100). Because we regarded one another as kin, despite the obviousness of our outwardly differences, we took to learning how to communicate and understand each other. She could easily read my body language just as I could read hers. No detached scientist could ever accomplish as much as this.

The scientific view on animal intelligence is flawed as it does not start on this same ground of similarity or closeness. This is argued in Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, when Rosemary admits, “It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique – our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language – some other species comes along to snatch it away” (302). Yet this observation is also very telling about the way humans understand their lives and the lives around them. Although this wasn’t the case in the far past, today’s society preaches that the human race is superior, extraordinary, and unique; society tells its members that they are the center of the universe. It is for this reason that people can often regard other animals as very separate from themselves – it allows them to run cruel and often pointless tests on animals, to put them in a straddle so their feet never touch the ground in slaughter houses, and inevitably have them eaten. Harvey’s Animalism tackles this issue by discussing the eating of salmon which he describes as “good to eat, good to offer gifts to, and good to receive life from. Salmon are cultural persons, not merely objects used for food and thought in human culture” (104). This implies that humans and other living creatures enter into a sort of ritual where they give and receive from one another as opposed to humans being the only beneficiary. While this does not remove the issue of meat-eating, it does mean that animals would not be killed in mass numbers, but rather, only by a bare minimum. And while I myself am no angel – for I still do eat meat – I often think about how things could be better if only we realized that the lives around us are just as precious as our own. If we were to adopt this way of thinking that Harvey supplies, less lives of animals would be at stake.

Issues like these cloud my mind and I know for certain it wouldn’t be this way if I had never looked into Brandy’s eyes that day, or had never owned any pets, for that matter. I realized that if more people were troubled by the same issues, perhaps the world could come up with new solutions. Yet this can only be brought to light if the world first becomes more informed about the intelligence animals around us really possess. One issue concerning this suggestion, however, frames a large portion of the scientific mind: some believe that animals are merely machine-like in that their actions are the natural reactions to outward stimuli. In Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter’s “Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence,” they attempt to differentiate between the intelligence of machines and intelligence of humans, as well other animals. Their argument is as follows:

One response to this problem might be to develop specific tests for specific kinds of entities… [But] to measure the intelligence of such diverse systems in a meaningful way we must step back from the specifics of particular systems and establish the underlying fundamentals of what it is that we are really trying to measure. (393)

In an age where scientists find it easy – at times, horrifyingly so – to conduct excruciatingly painful experiments on animals that lead to no real results or conclusions we didn’t already know, it is too often the product of a detached mindset in which scientists believe animals are machine-like, or are simply not intelligent. Aside from not observing correctly, in particular experiments pertaining to intelligence among animals, scientists often discard the idea that their tests are framed the wrong way: one cannot expect a dog to think in exactly the same way a human can. Their intelligence is not any less than ours, just simply different. We should learn to accept these differences instead of regarding them as unintelligence. I’ve been fortunate enough to have learned this through the many encounters I’ve had with Brandy and many other animals.

I try to imagine how different the world could be if people could embrace the intelligence of animals with an open mind. As children, we’re all told not to judge a book by its cover, but why does it seem like that’s all we ever do when it comes to other animals? Brandy couldn’t speak my language but I never held it against her or deemed it as some sort of mindlessness or deficiency – I merely accepted it, and because I was able to accept this fact, I grew to understand her and learned how to communicate with her without words, often through the simplicity of mere eye contact. I did not need to read any scientific studies or experiments on dogs (“How Dogs Know when Communication is Intended for Them” included) to know about the things I already knew growing up with Brandy. I did not need confirmation that dogs have the capability to love, for when Brandy passed away we kept her collar, and years later when I took it out to look at, our other dog Sonny happened to be in the room. I turned it over in my hands and for a heartbreaking moment I noticed he recognized the sound her collar made when the tags clanged together, his ears perked and eyes hopeful. He looked up at me and the collar in my hands, stared at it for a moment, bowed his head and left the room – that moment of sheer joy instantly stolen from his eyes. I didn’t need any of that. All I needed was to open my eyes.

– Janine A. Acherman 21 May 2014

Works Cited

Fowler, Karen Joy. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. New York: Penguin Group, 2013.

Harvey, Graham. Animalism: Respecting the Living World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Print.

Kaminski, Juliane, Linda Schulz, and Michael Tomasello. “How Dogs Know when Communication is Intended for Them.” Developmental Science 15:2 (2012): 222-232. Print.

Legg, Shane, and Marcus Hutter. “Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence.” Minds & Machines 17:4 (2007): 391-444. Print.

#animals #animal #essay #english #communication

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