Anaesthesia for Cabbages...

One of the major reasons often quoted for an empathic and protective attitude towards our nearest evolutionary cousins in the primate family, Orang Utans, Chimpanzees and Great Apes, is that their DNA corresponds so much to our own that we often have more than ninety percent of commonality with them. At present there is the birth of strong feeling that animals higher up the ladder of perceived consciousness should be given rights in a "pantocracy," a non-speciestic attitude towards animalian sentience, and that these rights should be entrenched in a new global bill of rights for animals, universally respected and enforced.

The consideration of a hierarchical "scheme of rights" in a pancentric orientation towards other lifeforms is indeed rather ridiculous, and pathetic, when it is based purely, only, on degrees of physiological similarity and genetic correspondence. What about spiritual orientation? Percentages of DNA concordance between differing species may at best be considered to be corroborative evidence of evolutionary mechanisms finding similar solutions to similar environmental problems. Such evolutionary "convergence" is known to have operated in the genetically adaptive development of many specific functional organs, such as the human eye and the eye of the squid, which have found very similar solutions. The spectrum of eyes developed across the species of fauna, specialised optical transducers, is astounding, and numbers into the hundreds of overlapping and unique solutions. Conversely, the optimistic view enthusiastically appoints degrees of convergence to a commonality of origin in the phylogenetic tree.

The fundamental, pragmatic fact, is that Human (I avoid the genderistic "Man") as a species and as individual needs to eat, and utilise for survival - unfortunately nature has not found a way to circumvent the need to ingest products and component organic assemblies of fellow species inhabiting our planet. Although it seems unlikely in the light of, to me, many rather gross existing mechanisms, perhaps somewhere in our far evolutionary future more refined mechanisms for energy procurement and processing may be developed.

Calculations of the quantity known as the quantum vacuum energy or zero-point energy (ZPE) suggest that a single cubic centimetre of empty space contains more energy than contained in all matter in the known universe. David Bohm (1980) concludes from this result: "space, which has so much energy, is full rather than empty." The primevally ancient and elegant miracle of transforming solar energy by means of photosynthesis may one day be matched by an analogous cosmic energy processing mechanism in which no single individual entity needs be a source of simple digestive resource for another...

Human has a choice - as example, carnivorism differs only in degree from cannibalism. Where your personal thresholds of edible foodstuffs lie is a matter more fundamentally centred on ethics and its intellectualised extensions, than of dietary considerations, vogue, tradition or habit.

Any suggestion that humans should have a pancentric orientation towards life in all its forms, as contrasted to an anthropocentric one, is of course also paradoxically an anthropocentrism - its resolution consists in the realisation that pancentrism and anthropocentrism are accents in a continuum of attitude. In an analogous sense there is the concept of "ego", an accent approaching the core of self, yet in another way any individual may be seen as an extension of the universe with which any entity is indissolvably interpenetrated - a vision that causes the sublimation and disappearance of a self-concept. Dualism, bi-duality and paradox are intrinsic to the nature of reality.

The fundamental precept of a pantocracy and a pantocratic "Bill of Rights" should be based on underlying cosmic democracy of which it is an extension, a sense of inviolable interdependence and a sense of living one's individual life not only with the ambition of doing the most good but also the least harm... Here of course there are the fathomless considerations of 'good' and 'harm' which cannot be separated from the germinative phase of personal development, of the self in a spiritual sense, that gives rise to attitudes concerning all that is "non-self." Cruelty just cannot be recognised by some - it is often a transparent, culturally engrained paradigm.

The lifting of the societal burden of disease is an undoubted plus. In contrast, the possibility of creating anencephalic creatures enslaved to Human for organ production, or eugenically altered strains of species that are motivated by an anthropocentric focus instead of a pancentric one, seem hideous nightmares. Such are the extremes of the potential and so it has always been with the historically developed ability to manipulate finer and more resolved components of reality.

The techniques that developed thermonuclear weapons also developed tumour palliating radiation therapy. The computer electronics and control techniques that operate the Hubble Space Telescope and Mars explorers, also allow the destruction of incidental targets by the dispensing of terminally guided submunitions by an ALCM. Biological techniques that have allowed the development of vaccines have also led to the iniquities of biological warfare.

Always both ends of the envelope are stretched and the spectrum of ethical inclination in Human has always been inclined to implement all possibilities within the extremes of that envelope.In an ideal world where a sense of mutual interdependence and mutual sensitivity go hand-in hand with an as yet unmanifest absence of inclination towards destructive utilisation of others, there would be no need for the explicit statement and enforcing of rights. In such a still utopian society Human might discover an integrated species-goal, the ambition of a race and not just the incidental integration of individual human strivings. We have made some progress, no longer do we often find human bones marked by human teeth, whaling has been curtailed albeit with some condemnable exceptions, much effort is invested in promoting genetic variation in endangered species by selective breeding programmes. The action plans of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the International Union for Conservation of Nature and natural resources (IUCN) and CITES listings are progressively implemented to protect fauna and flora of sensitive populations.

We are beginning to find, and conceptualise, the criteria of a new and vitally necessary equilibrium that optimises species balance and the health of our ecosphere.

Perhaps an ultimate realisation of concern for other life is that it is the expression and enactment of sensitivity towards, and care of a larger Self.

The gene for digestive juice

The cabbage I ate had no valid death certificate
I ate nuts still capable of germinating
A peach that would have realised tree-being
To climb in with opinions nourished
By what they all had garnered from the earth
Attenuating my tenuous connection with its surface
In the altitude of my ethical extemporisations
Themselves an outgrowth of the earth's crust
Growing towards distant starbirth
Going home

Copyright © FVO 1999 - 2004

¹ From "The Making of Mankind," Richard E. Leaky; Abacus
² From "The Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Evolution of Man," J. Jelinek; Hamlyn 1975; ISBN 0 600 37030 5
³ From "The Nature of Being," Frank Valentyn: SQUIDS (Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices) can detect spatially resolved magnetic activity of cerebral electrical processes (all current flow generates proportional magnetic field effects,) at levels down to 10^-14 Tesla. In comparison to this intrinsic sensitivity, skeletal muscles can be monitored at around 10^-11 T, spontaneous or evoked cerebral activity at 10^-12 T and retinal activity at some 10^-13 T. The Earth's magnetic field can be monitored at geomagnetic field-strengths some 10¹⁰ times larger than typical SQUID sensitivity. See also: I. A. Kholodov; Magnetic fields of biological objects; Nauka Publishers