How often do you really make an effort to put ourselves in someone’s shoes, and try to see things as they see them? And how often do you do that for animals? I suspect the answer to the first question for most people is sometimes, and that that is rarely for the latter. I’ve long had a debate with my wife on the question of whether lions have consciousness or not, and much of our debate has centered on how exactly one defines consciousness. My point of view has been that consciousness is a particular sort of self-awareness unique to humans, but increasingly the folks who research the topic have framed this question as to what sorts of consciousness exist among animals rather than whether animal consciousness exists. Anyone who has seen My Octopus Teacher probably has some sort of view on octopus consciousness, and most people probably wouldn’t deny the existence of some sort of consciousness among the animals we typically associate with intelligence from chimpanzees to dogs. But what about spiders? Until last week I never gave it a thought.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novel Children of Time explores spider consciousness (among a variety of other thought-provoking ideas) in such a compelling fashion, that I couldn’t help but wonder about how spiders and other animals experience the world. I’m going to keep this discussion spoiler-free and assume anyone reading might not have read the book. In short, the novel starts from the premise that a human-engineered nanovirus mistakenly causes insects to selectively evolve at an extremely rapid rate, and over the course of the story you get to know a series of evolved spiders that experience the world as Tchaikovksy hypothesizes conscious spiders might. In short, this is a relationship with the world based on spider senses and while it bears some fundamental similarities to the human experience of the world, it is also vastly different. Tchaikovksy imagines communication based on spider palps, and the development of a functioning yet anarchic spider society based on female dominance with heritable understandings passed from generation to generation. In short, it is a masterly effort to imagine non-human consciousness as well as a damning inditement of some of the concerning trends in our own human evolution, particularly our use/abuse of fossil fuels and a tendency to orient towards conflict with each other and the natural environment.
The novel has me thinking: why is it so challenging for us to imagine non-human consciousness and also to feel empathy for other living beings, human and animal? The science is pretty conclusive that animals can feel pain and can suffer. Humans also suffer, and there’s probably an argument to be made for the fact that suffering is a core part of what makes humans human. Most humans feel the most empathy for other humans who are suffering, in part because suffering is a basic human commonality. We see pain, and we feel bad. Our solution in the modern world is generally to try to ignore human suffering when we see it, and particularly when we don’t (generally ignoring the hundreds of millions of people globally living in extreme poverty). So in some respects, it’s not such a surprise that we consign millions of domesticated animals to lives of extraordinary pain because we enjoy the taste of their flesh, their eggs, or their milk. In fact, for most of human history, there wasn’t even a word to describe the ideology of meat-eating until carnism as coined by Melanie Joy. If we were able to have a more acute sense of empathy for life and the consciousness of our own and other species, perhaps we wouldn’t be so quick to avoid looking at and taking action on human suffering while eating a cheeseburger.
My suspicion, in line with some of the central premises of Joy’s book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, is that not feeling empathy for “edible” animals is part of an effort to avoid considering the possibility of animal consciousness and to justify carnism (much as avoiding human suffering allows us to justify the particular form of capitalism we have that creates vast amounts of inequality and thus perpetuates human suffering). So, avoiding the acknowledgement of non-human consciousness then is part of a strategy of profit on the suffering of animals, and a culture that avoids that which makes us uncomfortable and that which challenges our human-centered view of the world. Children of Time poses a reality in which a human-centered view of the world has quite literally destroyed the world, and in doing so forces us to consider life outside of our narrow and limited perspective. Indeed, as Tchaikovsky puts it, “Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”
If we are to do better, we must have more empathy for how other humans and animals experience the world.