It’s a little known fact that others of our species are not very tasty, at least not to us. I say it’s a little known fact, though I grant that it’s widely believed. This is because the only people who can know, as distinct from merely having-heard-tell, are those who’ve actually tried it, and apparently they’re relatively few and far between. But as with so many of our beliefs, in this case I think we can take a having-heard-tell as reasonably reliable. Certainly more reliable than the Empty Tomb.
And why is this important? Because I want to distinguish between two kinds of prey: those who are killed for food, and those who are killed because they’re competing with their predator for food. Or for other mediating resources. So, I’ve heard tell at least, others of our species are our most dangerous predators, and, as such, almost exclusively because we’re competing for resources.
This was something our more ‘primitive’ ancestors understood as common knowledge. Other humans were regarded, and rightly so, as fair game, as fair as, well, any other fair game. Until at some no-longer-remembered moment – don’t know when or why – for some reason we forgot this was so. Which is not to say it ceased to be so. It’s just that we forgot there was nothing unfair with what had always been perfectly fair game.
Some anthropologists chalk it up to religion. Predation of this particular species made us prey to them, and so a kind of Mavrodean convention emerged such that I won’t prey on you if you won’t prey on me. And then to reinforce this arrangement we invented a god who’d punish us if we violated this arrangement, at least without cause.
But that cause could not be understood as including that we’d just returned to a state of nature. On the contrary, the cause now had to be political, or better yet moral. The Germans could kill the Jews not because they were other humans competing for limited resources, but because they were of another species, literally vermin. And, of course, the same ‘reclassification’ is what’s allowing the genocide taking place in Gaza and the West Bank today.
So when I ask, How did it come to this?, I’m not so much lamenting these reclassifications as I am baffled by why they should be necessary. Certainly my ancestors had no such qualms about wiping out the Amalekites. So what’s up?!
Admittedly, this is an old saw. But my bafflement goes much deeper. A lion sneaks into the village and mauls a child to death. We don’t shake our fist at the lion. We hunt it down and kill it, to prevent any repetition. But we don’t condemn it. It’s doing what’s its nature to do. A man rapes and kills a woman jogging in the park. But somehow that’s contra natura. How so? Because, not unlike Plato’s pedigree dog, we taught him to behave otherwise? Well, apparently not.
When a drug addict breaks into my car and rummages through my things, I’m outraged. I feel violated. We all do. Why? Because we’ve classified him as what the lion is not. We’ve made him into a moral agent. But we’ve done so, it seems to me, without his leave. We’re making (what Gilbert Ryle has called) a category mistake. The lion needs meat. The addict needs a fix. Morality is about overriding such needs with a stronger need, a social need. But neither the lion nor the addict is looking for friends. Thinking otherwise of either betrays the maturity of a three-year-old.
Is that all this tells us about ourselves? Maybe not. Maybe, just maybe, it tells us something else. In the same way that the family lab is no longer a wolf, we too have undergone millennia of natural and artificial selection. We’ve become, for all intents and purposes, a different species. So what baffles me shouldn’t. It might come as a disappointment but not as a surprise that there are throwbacks like Netanyahu among us. Nor should it disturb us that we all preserve a Netanyahu somewhere in our reptilian brain, just in case. So yes, nature preserves the seemingly aberrant. But very likely for good reason.
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
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