10-20-2019, 09:37 AM
(10-20-2019, 07:31 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(10-20-2019, 05:31 AM)Ldr Wrote:(10-20-2019, 05:23 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(10-11-2019, 09:33 AM)Ldr Wrote: I agree, Bill, but it is important to notice that all of the concepts you mentioned hold true for animals too, although humanism is obviously replaced with the correct species name.
I don't think so, since animals don't have the brainpower needed to grasp these concepts. They can be loyal to their pack like dogs, wolves and bonobos, but nothing more. Do you really think a dog is capable of "species solidarity" with oppressed dogs in a puppy mill?
Bill, concepts like altruism and empathy do not require "brainpower" in the way I believe you see it. Altruism and empathy are emotions, and animals like humans and chimpanzees have these emotions. We humans have created advanced languages to talk about these emotions and form them into concepts, but that's all, they're in no way human "inventions".
Altruism and empathy are indeed instinctive and animals are capable of them. But expanding one's horizon of identification beyond one's pack or immediate family does require abstract thinking. A dog can empathize with another whimpering dog, but it cannot conceive the idea of all dogs as a group with shared interests.
Aside from one-on-one empathy, dogs as a group are usually thinking of prey as with lionesses in a pride. Really, there is hardly an enemy more formidable than a dog pack*. Dogs attack and kill as one giant predator, and four 80-pound dogs for all practical purposes make one 320-pound tiger. Break into a house with four rottweilers, Dobermans, or German Shepherds, and you might as well be in the tiger-infested Sundarbans in which the tigers have a taste for human flesh. (Dogs are the best reason that I can think of other than recognition of the rights of others and respect for the criminal code to not be a burglar).
The human-canine bond recalls that a human family and a wolf pack have similar structure. Man tamed wolves because wolves could not tame us; we cannot live long on diets of raw meat and fish as can wolves, but wolves and dogs (dogs have evolved to tolerate grain in their diets) can live on a human diet.
*the worst? -- the human-canine combination in a hunt. Police K-9 units are particularly effective.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.