There is a hell...
Or rather, there are hells. Here on Earth, even. Places of unimaginable pain and the deepest of suffering that is physically possible. Before you allow your preconceptions and judgments to cloud your feelings of such a place, try to vaugely imagine what it might be. Can you?
These places are called factory farms. Although the victims that are enduring these hells are not human, they are just as capable of experiencing the pain and suffering forced upon them as you would be. This is not an opinion, but a fact that they have nervous systems and brains that function in the exact same way that your's does. They may lack the ability to do such things as vote, organize, or defend themselves, intellectually, or in the immediate physical sense, but they can feel as much as you can. They have commited no crimes, harmed no one, have not even wished ill upon others, but they are tortured and murdered. Their only fault is that their flesh or bodily fluids are pleasing to the palatte. For this reason, and for the profit of big business, these sentient beings are subjected to hell day after day, year after year, by the billions. And every time you buy a slab of their flesh or a carton of their fluids you are not only supporting their torturers, you are giving the order via your dollar to have it done. You are perpetuating hell. If injustice exists at all, is there any a greater than this?
I wrote that a while back, and though it sadly, sickeningly is still a reality, there was an ultimately insufficient but still very significant step taken in the direction of rectifying this injustice this week. Here in California, Proposition 2 was passed, limiting (though not ceasing) the torture of many farm animals. This, I hope, was merely the first in a series of reformations to reduce the extreme suffering of "for-food animals" by recognizing them as entities capable of sensation instead of products to be treated in any way that maximizes productivity or profit margins. There is still a long way to go, but the landslide passing of this proposition gives me a sense of hope I have not felt for a long time in terms of animal welfare as well as in terms of the human capacity for compassion. And I've got to say... it feels damn good.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Stop and Smell the Ratiocination
I've come to realize, as many others have before me, that there is an emotional depth that can be reached by contemplating the mechanisms, the systems, the relationships, and the sheer reality of existence. I'd like to think that I've always been inspired by attempts to understand how the pieces of a whole fit together as well as had a general curiosity about the world. But in some ways, this profound awe, this love I now have for the human ability to reflect on existence has slowly developed over time. Though I often indulge in this sense of awe within private thought, the experience sometimes feels incomplete if I cannot share it with someone else. I'm sure that a part of my motivation for starting this blog was a (mostly) unconscious effort to do just that. I think that we sometimes forget to consider the reality that resides outside the realm of our daily experience, that we sometimes forget to stop and think about the things we are actually seeing. When you "stop to smell the roses," why not also stop and realize why you can smell the roses? Realize that your brain has an ability, evolved over millennia, to analyze the chemical makeup of molecules that have landed on specialized nerve cells in your nasal passages that are literally shaped to fit the various types of the volatile molecules which are responsible for scent like the pieces of puzzle. This allows you to smell because those nerve cells will send electric signals to your brain, which will then undergo a cascade of other electric and chemical events culminating in the sensation of a sweet scent. As that scent conjures up images from associations stored in your brain, realize also that roses have evolved to give off those particular chemicals in order to attract pollinators like bees and other insects, even hummingbirds which lend a helping hand in spreading the roses' genetic material over distances that flower-producing plants can't themselves traverse so that they can reproduce to make more such plants containing the genes to perpetuate the cycle. Not only is the rose and its scent pleasant, but the reasons behind them are fascinating too. I think that we can only benefit from taking a little time now and then, to step outside the regular way of observing (or failing to observe, as the case may be) the things around us, and actively try to comprehend a reality that has been revealed to us through centuries of trying to understand the universe in which we find ourselves.
With that sentiment in mind, I'd like to make a suggestion... another way to smell a rose: The next time you get a chance, walk outside, or merely look out a window and find the Moon. Without forgetting its romantic symbolism or the complicated blend of love, awe, respect, mystique and even fear that cultures throughout history have associated with the Moon, consider what it really is that you are now looking at. It is another world. A place that exists every bit as much as the ground upon which you now stand. A place people have been to! It's not another street lamp, just appearing to float in a dark sky, nor is it an image on your computer screen, a CGI effect in the latest movie, or even a photograph of something you've never seen in person. For as you now fix your gaze upon it, in person, you are looking at the surface of another world. This fact is amazing enough, especially when one considers that this was not always known to a humanity that has always seen it, so prominently in the sky. But this is just the beginning. Keep looking.
Unless the Moon is full, positioned in the sky opposite the sun, you're also looking at that world from a perspective that allows you to see its day and its night at the same instant. The glowing arc or semicircle you see of the moon is the part of it that sunlight is falling on. In other words, daytime. The other side of the sphere is there, but is veiled in darkness and is simply the part of the Moon currently within the cast of its own shadow. Nighttime. Of course, we're used to being able to see only daytime or only nighttime here on Earth, or the twilight between the two, but never do we see both at once. If we could fly, climbing ever higher in the sky, and continue to rise away from Earth even as the atmosphere around us thinned and disappeared, then turn to face the planet again, look down upon it from that grand height, we could see day and night both below us. The border we would see separating the light from the dark, that is twilight. Would it not be a heady and beautiful sight? Though we can't easily achieve such a distance from Earth, it is the only easy distance we find ourselves at in relation to Earth's companion. That other world you are looking at, as you stand on Earth? You're seeing part of the day time side of it, and part of the night time side. And that line between the two is twilight on the moon. Look at that boundary. Right now, you are staring at a part of another world that is in its twilight. It is a twilight that is severely different than what we have on Earth, though, mostly because of the lack of air on the moon. The Earth has about eighty times more mass than the moon, and the more massive an object, the more gravity it has. The moon does not have the gravity required to retain a shell of gas around its solid surface the way that Earth does. The Moon has no air. Air can scatter photons of light, which allows the sky to glow on Earth, even when the sun is still hidden below the horizon. The famously eerie and mysterious colors of dusk, like the purples and reds, and the deep blue background silhouetted by the looming shapes of the foreground that surrounds us during the terrestrial twilight would be shockingly absent in the lunar twilight. Were you to stand there now, dawn on Earth's natural satellite would lack the soft gradients we are accustomed to here. The shadows would be just as long, but they would be razor sharp, cutting into a stark and desolate landscape of hard contrast and harsh ambit. For all it's severity, it would still be strikingly gorgeous, but it would also seem, as well it should, otherworldly.
Come back for a moment. Now look at the sill of the window you have been peering out of, or a building or tree nearby, or better yet, a fellow human if you are fortunate enough to have one close to you who wouldn't be made uncomfortable by your gaze. Just like you are looking at that person, absorbing the light that is reflecting off of them with photoreceptor cells in your eyes, you were just looking at the dusk or dawn of another world. (If the moon is waxing, you are seeing dawn, if it is waning, you are seeing dusk.)
The Moon, however, is but our closest celestial neighbor. It is very far away; if you could walk to it, your walk would be about the equivalent of hiking around the entire circumference of Earth nine and half times. But on the cosmic scale, like a vast desert that stretches to the horizon in all directions, the moon is a speck of dust, and the Earth a grain of sand upon which the dust particle has settled. So look past the moon now, and scan the sky until you have found ten stars (the greater your proximity to city lights, the easier will be the task). By current estimates, the odds are that at least one of those stars has planets in orbit around it. That means, you are looking at the sun of a distant world. Not only are you actually seeing it, as real and as tangible as your human companion, you are also seeing the past. You are witnessing what happened on that distant sun years ago because it took many years for that light to travel the vast expanses of interstellar space. But everything you look at, it is that thing's past that you see. The same is true with the person next to you, but the light left her only a billionth of a second ago. You see her as she was one billionth of a second into the past. Our eyes never catch the present for we can see only history. The views our eyes usually receive are of objects close enough to us that this effect makes no perceptible difference. What's one or two nanoseconds between friends? But when you stare out at the stars, what you are seeing, not on a TV screen, not in a picture, and not just in your mind's eye, but actually seeing are the Suns of distant worlds as they were long ago. In some cases, as they were thousands of years ago, for they are so very far away, thousands of years have passed during the transit of photons from them. If you added up all the distance that every human has ever traveled by foot, by car, train, plane... every inch that every person ever moved, it would be nowhere near the same amount as the distance to those suns. But you are seeing them anyway. When you look up into the sky and you see these points of light, realize what they are, understand what you are seeing. Is it not exalting? Is it not heart-wrenchingly glorious? As many a poet has limned, the Moon and stars make for a dazzling and spectacular tableau regardless of the reasons that they appear to us. But the true depth of their splendor cannot be perceived without an understanding of their nature, our nature, and how each interacts in such a way that we behold the sight at all. And only through science has it become possible to experience the powerful sensations that result from this unity of purely aesthetic beauty with the knowledge, the noumenon behind its existence. The beauty that is offered to us by science is unique and it is deeper than we ever could have imagined.
With that sentiment in mind, I'd like to make a suggestion... another way to smell a rose: The next time you get a chance, walk outside, or merely look out a window and find the Moon. Without forgetting its romantic symbolism or the complicated blend of love, awe, respect, mystique and even fear that cultures throughout history have associated with the Moon, consider what it really is that you are now looking at. It is another world. A place that exists every bit as much as the ground upon which you now stand. A place people have been to! It's not another street lamp, just appearing to float in a dark sky, nor is it an image on your computer screen, a CGI effect in the latest movie, or even a photograph of something you've never seen in person. For as you now fix your gaze upon it, in person, you are looking at the surface of another world. This fact is amazing enough, especially when one considers that this was not always known to a humanity that has always seen it, so prominently in the sky. But this is just the beginning. Keep looking.
Unless the Moon is full, positioned in the sky opposite the sun, you're also looking at that world from a perspective that allows you to see its day and its night at the same instant. The glowing arc or semicircle you see of the moon is the part of it that sunlight is falling on. In other words, daytime. The other side of the sphere is there, but is veiled in darkness and is simply the part of the Moon currently within the cast of its own shadow. Nighttime. Of course, we're used to being able to see only daytime or only nighttime here on Earth, or the twilight between the two, but never do we see both at once. If we could fly, climbing ever higher in the sky, and continue to rise away from Earth even as the atmosphere around us thinned and disappeared, then turn to face the planet again, look down upon it from that grand height, we could see day and night both below us. The border we would see separating the light from the dark, that is twilight. Would it not be a heady and beautiful sight? Though we can't easily achieve such a distance from Earth, it is the only easy distance we find ourselves at in relation to Earth's companion. That other world you are looking at, as you stand on Earth? You're seeing part of the day time side of it, and part of the night time side. And that line between the two is twilight on the moon. Look at that boundary. Right now, you are staring at a part of another world that is in its twilight. It is a twilight that is severely different than what we have on Earth, though, mostly because of the lack of air on the moon. The Earth has about eighty times more mass than the moon, and the more massive an object, the more gravity it has. The moon does not have the gravity required to retain a shell of gas around its solid surface the way that Earth does. The Moon has no air. Air can scatter photons of light, which allows the sky to glow on Earth, even when the sun is still hidden below the horizon. The famously eerie and mysterious colors of dusk, like the purples and reds, and the deep blue background silhouetted by the looming shapes of the foreground that surrounds us during the terrestrial twilight would be shockingly absent in the lunar twilight. Were you to stand there now, dawn on Earth's natural satellite would lack the soft gradients we are accustomed to here. The shadows would be just as long, but they would be razor sharp, cutting into a stark and desolate landscape of hard contrast and harsh ambit. For all it's severity, it would still be strikingly gorgeous, but it would also seem, as well it should, otherworldly.
Come back for a moment. Now look at the sill of the window you have been peering out of, or a building or tree nearby, or better yet, a fellow human if you are fortunate enough to have one close to you who wouldn't be made uncomfortable by your gaze. Just like you are looking at that person, absorbing the light that is reflecting off of them with photoreceptor cells in your eyes, you were just looking at the dusk or dawn of another world. (If the moon is waxing, you are seeing dawn, if it is waning, you are seeing dusk.)
The Moon, however, is but our closest celestial neighbor. It is very far away; if you could walk to it, your walk would be about the equivalent of hiking around the entire circumference of Earth nine and half times. But on the cosmic scale, like a vast desert that stretches to the horizon in all directions, the moon is a speck of dust, and the Earth a grain of sand upon which the dust particle has settled. So look past the moon now, and scan the sky until you have found ten stars (the greater your proximity to city lights, the easier will be the task). By current estimates, the odds are that at least one of those stars has planets in orbit around it. That means, you are looking at the sun of a distant world. Not only are you actually seeing it, as real and as tangible as your human companion, you are also seeing the past. You are witnessing what happened on that distant sun years ago because it took many years for that light to travel the vast expanses of interstellar space. But everything you look at, it is that thing's past that you see. The same is true with the person next to you, but the light left her only a billionth of a second ago. You see her as she was one billionth of a second into the past. Our eyes never catch the present for we can see only history. The views our eyes usually receive are of objects close enough to us that this effect makes no perceptible difference. What's one or two nanoseconds between friends? But when you stare out at the stars, what you are seeing, not on a TV screen, not in a picture, and not just in your mind's eye, but actually seeing are the Suns of distant worlds as they were long ago. In some cases, as they were thousands of years ago, for they are so very far away, thousands of years have passed during the transit of photons from them. If you added up all the distance that every human has ever traveled by foot, by car, train, plane... every inch that every person ever moved, it would be nowhere near the same amount as the distance to those suns. But you are seeing them anyway. When you look up into the sky and you see these points of light, realize what they are, understand what you are seeing. Is it not exalting? Is it not heart-wrenchingly glorious? As many a poet has limned, the Moon and stars make for a dazzling and spectacular tableau regardless of the reasons that they appear to us. But the true depth of their splendor cannot be perceived without an understanding of their nature, our nature, and how each interacts in such a way that we behold the sight at all. And only through science has it become possible to experience the powerful sensations that result from this unity of purely aesthetic beauty with the knowledge, the noumenon behind its existence. The beauty that is offered to us by science is unique and it is deeper than we ever could have imagined.
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