Imprecatio Vickus: A Racist Archaeopagan Justification of Compassion

Let me start by saying that the Michael Vicks incident intrigues me.  Day after day, here on Kos, we lament the studied distractions of the MSM which elevate trivial activities and sins of "celebrities" notable only for their vast media exposure over the real and serious matters of national and international importance.  Nevertheless, given the opportunity to obsess over the sins of a football player, what hits the Kos headlines day after day?  You guessed it.

Do I approve of Vicks' actions?  Hell, no, of course not.  I even admit to prefering several of the discussions to ever-more bash and counter-bash on the merits of a Hillary candidacy.  Vicks' case allows us to discuss the day to day weighing of ethical choices, relative equality of crimes and punishment, the importance of compassion and the continuing influence of archaic concepts of human superiority and the Chain of Being in the post-Enlightenment era.  Stroszek has recently written a fine diary here prompted by his reaction to articles appearing on the HuffingtonPost, and rather than subject you’all to an obscenely long comment, I thought it might be better to tackle my response in a separate diary.

Stroszek’s diary is passionate, intelligent, rational, and to my philosophy, wrong.  Oh, I’ll support him if he wants when he talks to the Judges, because it leads to right actions and good results and following his path isn’t going to hurt the world and may help it a lot.  But it’s grounded in the rationality of the Displaced Human, an existentialist view that there is no God, no Natural Law; that there is, in fact, Nothing Out There except what we as humans create.  So create Compassion, and that’s Good.  But it continues with the essential hubris of Modern Man, that "man is the measure of all things", the source and origin of all morality, and that ethics is a solely human occupation and has no fundamental basis except what we make for it.  And there you go again, making Man an essentially quantum leap separated from all the other animals and denizens of the Universe, Steward direct under God descended from Adam, or as the Hellenists would have it, a different Order of Being.  I don’t buy that.

Humans are animals.  Yes, animals.  Fundamentally, we differ from the Dog by a few minor steps on the genetic tree.  We’re members of the same family, the Mammalia.  We became separated in the dim vastness of the post-Jurassic era, and after competing in the same ecological niche for millenia, we decided that competition wasn’t nearly as effective as COOPERATION, and so roughly 15,000 years ago we made a Deal: our packs would become symbiotic; we would run together, camp together, and share food.  The Dog would be our ears and noses, a really useful assist because as far as noses go, humans are close to dead last in the mammalian genepool.  On the other hand, we have some of the best eyes around, and our brains aren’t too shabby, either.  Working together, Human and Dog could bring in far more food than either of us working alone.

The development of this relationship wouldn’t have been possible if both Human and Dog hadn’t already come to this conclusion INSIDE our own species.  Cooperation wasn’t some newfangled, improperly understood idea, as it was later with the Cat.  Humans had been cooperating with other humans for at least a million years, and Dogs had been cooperating with dogs probably for longer.  And this is where I think Stroszek is wrong.  There is such a thing as Natural Law, and in modern terms it’s called Evolution.

Humans aren’t humans solely by personal choice, you know.  Just as we’re born in a certain size and shape and skin color determined by our genes, some of our behavior is predisposed, if not predetermined, by genetics.  HUMANS ARE A COOPERATIVE, SOCIAL SPECIES.  Just like dogs, who, in wild packs, are compassionate, loving, and social creatures who care for their young, their old, and their sick members.  Humans have developed a high level of communications skills to help us implement and capitalize on our social organization; for instance, by talking, writing, and now sharing on the Internet, anything that one human knows can be made available in fairly precise fashion to ANY OTHER HUMAN.  Think about what an advantage that is to us as a species.  This is why our species dominates our native planet; it is why no other species can out-compete us and we have the capacity to destroy the world by bad behavior.  And we figured out how to do this, slowly over the course of tens of thousands of years, so that we could help each other.  Because helping each other is how we survive.  How we thrive.  How we procure mates, keep our children alive, and dominate the world.  Cooperation is one of the Prime Directives of our genetic program.  Our genes instill the basic tendency, and our society teaches us the specifics.  But make no mistakes about it: this IS Natural Law.  The Law of the Gene is to survive, transcribe, and multiply.  The Law of the Organism is to ennable survival of its genes in the most efficient manner.  And the Law of the Human – and of the Dog – is to ennable survival of its genes, the more the better, by a strategy of Cooperation.  The more genes we share, the stronger the push to cooperate.  Family first.  Extended family next.  Tribe, nation, and similar species.   Primates first, except if their competition (like that of other humans) directly threatens those who share even more of our genes.  Then other Mammalia, like bears, tigers, horses, cats, Dogs.

So Natural Law impells us to have compassion.  Compassion is the bedrock of Cooperation, and cooperation is our strategy for survival.  Next comes The Deal.    Ethnologists call it "reciprocity".  I scratch your back, you scratch mine.  The Deal is so important that all the ancient Indo-Europeans (most Americans have ancestors among them, although not purely so) had a God to watch over and certify Deals, or Compacts.  His name was Mithras, and Apollo, and Tyr, and Taranis, among others of course.   He oversaw Contracts, which are not Natural Law, but specific implementations of  the Natural Law of Cooperation.  The first and most basic Deals involved gender-role duties, and revolved around how much assistance a father was going to provide a woman for lugging his children around.  Protect the Genes is the Prime Directive.  Mammalian physiology forces a female to bear heavy resource/energy expenditures in order to reproduce; by Social Contract the female re-apportions some of those costs back to the male, who contributes fifty percent of the genes and therefore isn’t entitled to a free ride.  But around 15,000 BCE we made the very first cross-species Deal; the one whereby we formally adopted Dog into our Family.  And this is why Michael Vicks’ behavior is so hideous to us on such a visceral level.

Does it matter that Vicks was torturing Dogs and not humans?  Not really.  Because Dogs are adopted members of our family, holding the status of children in relationship to our our Alpha Males.  The emotional equation Dog = Child isn’t something new and neurotic triggered by empty baby-boomer nests.  It’s a part of our social structure that’s been around since before agriculture was invented.   Adult Dogs have the size and dominance in a human pack of roughly a 10-year-old, and if trained properly can provide equal or better work-contribution in hunting and farming activities.   Vicks was abusing his position as a dominant male by forcing CHILDREN (as our instincts see it, by Compact, under a Deal 15,000 years old) to fight to the death.  And human "fostering" or "aunting" instincts are so strong that in the absence of our own babies, we will adopt damned near anything as a substitute child – you have only to remember the "Pet Rock" and "E-pet" crazes, if you will, or attempt to separate your own child from a beloved stuffed animal.  

Neurotic?  No.  Human babies are totally, completely helpless and can’t survive for nearly ten years without intensive parenting.  Human females have a 1 in 5 chance of not surviving natural childbirth.  Our cooperative instincts MUST be so strong that virtually no human will abandon a baby or small child, regardless of relationship, or we would have ceased to exist as a species long ago.  Natural Law demands that we attach fiercely to protecting children, and any response that is that intense is going to have some bleedover, just like the impulse of male dogs to initiate sex is so intense that, well, they WILL hump anything that has even vague resemblance to their appropriate target.  So the dog humps your leg in the vain hope that you might be a fertile bitch in disguise, and you feed and pamper the dog because if you squint real hard, it SOMEWHAT resembles a baby. And no, killing a flopping fish or a cow or sheep for dinner doesn’t elicit the same reaction in most people, because we share fewer genes with fish, and because our Deal with cows and sheep has always included eating a few of them and wasn’t the close familial relationship we have had with dogs.  Still, some people’s compassionate instincts are strong enough that they extend their feelings to these creatures, too, and that’s also a  NORMAL extension of an instinct that is one of the overriding principles of human behavior.  Compassion HAS to be strong in a species that depends on cooperation for its survival.  That’s Natural Law.  

And Natural Law is Good.  It’s the foundation and beginning of all human law and morality.  What makes us human is that we’re more conscious about it than other creatures, and we think about these things more abstractly so that we can communicate with other humans and share our understandings ... because the Law of the Human is Cooperation, and Communication is a fundamental strategy to support effective Cooperation.