In the opening of Dick, we see one of the most obvious animalistic traits of the human condition: “I just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor.” [3] Iran’s desire to vegetate is a natural response in any living organism, I think. It is instinct, to have the want to do nothing, to shut off, and to be ignorant. I note cows grazing and cats napping—what are they doing? The answer is nothing. Is that not ideal? Perhaps that is what separates humans from all other species—we get too tied up in things.
Yes, I am an animal, I think that is the first and perhaps the only admission I can make. But unless I connect with another animal, I am not going to give a shit about it. Humans, even. Genocide and poverty flood Africa, but I still resist the ebbing tide of pity, pulling me to the other side of the ocean to do something about it. A little girl is kidnapped and found dead in Florida. “Horrible,” I say, but after the brief moment of imagining the same thing happening to someone I know and care about, sympathy escapes me. Selfishness defines the natural way of animals. Selflessness, altruism, sacrifice—all of these inhibit the process of evolution by natural selection and species are left weaker because of it. Derrida writes about his relationship with his cat that, “Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized. And a mortal existence, for from the moment that it has a name, its name survives it.”[4] Compassion, sympathy, feelings—these can all exist once a connection has been made. But remotely, this bond cannot exist, and a trans-species gap spans far greater than any ocean.
That is a vast body to cross and one that I won’t.
I think the second admission to make is that I am a bastard. But is that not the human, nay, the animal condition? To be selfish except when selfless actions can make us feel happy? In Dick, Rick remarks that not caring for animals is “a crime and anti-empathetic.”[5] Empathy rather than sympathy is used for a reason, whether or not we are to be defined as animals, we are at least a different species. Sympathy does not apply. We see further in Dick’s work the treatment of a “lesser” being: “After all, if a chickenhead could fathom Latin he would cease to be a chickenhead.” John Isidore is regarded as a “special” because of the “distorted genes which he carried.” [6] Though he is human, his inferiority is microcosmic of the greater chasm between our species and others. I find it a fair criterion that if a species of animal can fathom Latin, then that species should be granted the same rights as ours. But even then, I don’t know that I would feel sympathy for it. Sympathy is defined by, “An affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence.”[7] As a human, the similarity is negated. We synthesize emotions from individual experiences. In fact, emotions in the broadest sense are only compared once they are arbitrarily named, so I find it impossible to believe that even among humans some sort of “sympathetic imagination” can exist, let alone from human to cow or dog.
This is a human, yet not one person in this class has a structure exactly like this. As this discrepancy is physical, imagine the emotional discrepancy.
Derrida brings up the argument that this gap is closing as we come to new realizations about ourselves and all animals, “It is all too evident that in the course of the last two centuries these traditional forms of treatment of the animal have been turned upside down by the joint developments of zoological, ethological, biological and genetic forms of knowledge…” [8]. More than anything else, we have realized how close we are to the animal, using the denomination in the broadest since. Our genomes are so similar, in many cases our structures are almost identical, and in all we rely on calories and oxygen (among other things) to get us through the day. But despite this, there is a difference so staggering that we don’t readily identify with the name animal. It is a broader nominal designation that we fall under, but it is not our most distinct. We are animals, but first we are humans. A chimp, for instance, is an animal to us first, and a chimp to us second.
Finally, Bentham asks, “Can they suffer?” They do—we all do. Sometimes the question is not whether the line crosses at the “faculty of discourse,” [9] but whether it is our responsibility to take every modicum of sufferance into account. I don’t think that it is, but then again, I am a bastard.
[1]definition of “humanity”, Oxford English Dictionary, X37
[2]definition of “humane”, Oxford English Dictionary, X36
[3] Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 7
[5]Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 13
[6]Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 19
[7]definition of “sympathy”, Oxford English Dictionary, X43
[8]Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (Following),” X30
[9]Jeremy Bentham, “the Principles of Morals and Legislation”, X47
Pictures:
[1]http://www.fondosescritorio.net/wallpapers/Dibujos-Animados/Garfield/Garfield-06.jpg
[2]http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs348b-competition/cs348b-01/ocean_scenes/ocean2.gif
[3]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Human_skeleton_back.svg/350px-Human_skeleton_back.svg.png
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