Good readers,
help! Help me think through a few things
here. My central project over several
years now has been to explore how people have expressed attitudes towards elephants
in various genres of southern African literature: indigenous forms, early
European travelogues, hunting accounts, novels, poems, game ranger memoirs and
so on. I’m focusing it all through the
idea of compassion: Who expresses
compassion towards elephants, who doesn’t, and why?
Elephants are in
dire straits again. They were virtually obliterated
from most of Africa by European hunters in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and resurged for a while in the heyday of late-colonial conservation
efforts in the twentieth. Today, slaughter
of elephants for ivory throughout Africa is once again proceeding at a
terrifying pace; in one estimate, an elephant is being killed every fifteen
minutes. At that rate, in just a few
short years they will be extinct north of the Zambezi – and the ivory-merchants’
attentions will be turned ever more forcibly towards the still relatively-abundant
herds of southern Africa.
On the one hand, a
network of profiteers that has no compassion whatsoever for elephants; on the
other, an embattled coterie of conservationists, local and international, who
literally weep at the fate of our most charismatic mammal. But all the literature, art, sentimentality,
scientific research and fencing in the world seems next to powerless to resist
the fatal snares, bullets and poisons deployed by Mammon, the God of Greed.
How might one
increase the quotient of compassion in the world? What is
“compassion” anyway?
To give an example
of the definitional difficulty here, take this passage from Edward and
Cathelijne Eastwood’s fascinating book Capturing
the Spoor, which surveys ‘Bushman’ rock art (including examples of
elephants) and tries to divine the attitudes that inform it:
The San have not only an intimate
knowledge of animal behaviour but empathy with the animals themselves, sensing
through their mythology and folktales and through experience that all creatures
are kindred beings. Hunters, for
example, might feel a strong bond of sympathy with the animals they hunt,
experiencing sensations in their bodies that correspond with salient
characteristics of the animal, such as the bearing of horns or bodily markings.
This
attitude of respect and sympathy is best illustrated by the respectful way in
which the San will talk about ‘meat’, meaning large prey animals. When a story demands that large prey animals
are listed and mentioned, they are called by special respect names. The storyteller will say the names in a
hushed tone, full of awe, and enumerates the animals as though entranced.
This passage raises as many questions as it answers. It fudges the differences between ‘empathy’
and ‘sympathy’, between ‘respect’ and ‘reverence’, and perhaps between
imaginative story-telling and reality.
At any rate, there is no sign, in either the artwork or the
interpretation, that the reverence and awe which these paintings seem to express
might be combined with anything resembling compassion.
The dictionaries don’t help much, tending to allow sympathy,
empathy, compassion, to overlap or be vaguely equivalent. They derive the word compassion from the Latin pati,
passus, to suffer (hence ‘passive’), and therefore align it with pity. But pity
implies an inequality of conditions, an hierarchy of privilege over
deprivation: as William Blake wrote, ‘Pity would be no more/ If we did not make
somebody poor.’
I want rather to
place ‘compassion’ in an echo-chamber of communal meanings, to relate it (with
no etymological justification, mind) to the Latin passus meaning ‘step’, so that to be compassionate also brings up
the idea of being companionably in step with, being alongside. I want to snuggle it up with the words
‘compass’ and ‘encompass’, so that to be compassionate also means finding
direction together with the other, and within some encompassing envelope, an
ecosystem, if you like. Compassion says
to the other, whether human or elephant: Hey,
we’re on this journey together.
So... if we can find
little or no compassion in either indigenous art-forms or European encounters
up to the nineteenth century, can we say that compassion towards animals is a
pretty modern invention? Is it an innate
emotion, or a social construct? Does it
change form and direction? If so,
why? Does it arise in some way along with
domestication and control? We can see
plenty of evidence of people being compassionate towards cats and dogs over the
last two centuries, but is this necessarily different from compassion towards
something as wild, unreachable and different from us as an elephant?
It’s often said that
what makes the elephant a suitable ‘target’ for compassion is its near-human features:
intelligence, memory, maternal tenderness, an evidently rich emotional life,
and so on. So what makes some people
from within the same culture feel so
differently? I grieve with every
elephant death and abuse I hear about; a school contemporary of mine, who had
pretty much the same upbringing as me, has no compunction whatever in shooting
them. And attitudes can change even
within one person, in the course of a life: I know a state vet who for years calmly
justified culling elephants in the service of the ‘bigger picture’ – the economics
of it, ecological balance – but finally found it “distasteful”, as he put it –
and I could see that the thought of killing another elephant deeply pained him.
The literature I’ve
read so far hasn’t helped much. The
philosophy of compassion is mostly related to political relations between the
state and its citizens, or psychological relations between people. These can be extended to human-animal
relations in some ways – but probably only by radically re-defining what a ‘community’
is, and what it can include. It’s hard
to do that with a five-ton elephant intent on gobbling up your whole year’s
mealie crop and flattening you, too, given half a provocation.
The comparative
psychologist Marc Hauser includes a section on “ Compassionate Cooperation” in
his book Moral Minds, which talks
exclusively about envy and competition, with a dash of game theory, and hardly
mentions the word compassion again. (He
does discuss forms of empathy, and distinguishes it from ‘sympathy’, but doesn’t
work with ‘compassion’ especially. Is it
different?) The French philosopher Luce
Irigaray’s essay “Animal Compassion” is all about how helpful and therapeutic
animals companions can be, not about how or why we might be compassionate
towards them. Ralph Acampora comes closer in Corporal Compassion, a book in which he argues
with great finesse for compassion as the product of dynamic bodily
contact. But there aren’t many of us who
can actually get to cuddle an elephant, or look closely into a lustrous,
thoughtful elephant eye.
Is it possible then to
have “imaginative compassion”? Is it
possible to be compassionate at a distance?
Is this blog compassionate, or something else? Or should compassion be defined to involve action, in a way that pity doesn’t, and
even empathy might not? “Are you an
elefriend?” one IUCN campaign for funds asks.
Is it true compassion to pop a few spare bucks in their account?
Is compassion
towards elephants paradoxically a matter of leaving
them alone as much as possible?
Lauren Berleant, in
the introduction to her volume of essays, Compassion:
The culture and politics of an emotion, has this to say:
When the response to suffering’s scene is compassion – as opposed to,
say, pleasure, fascination, hopelessness, or resentment – compassion measures
one’s values (or one’s government’s values) in terms of the demonstrated
capacity not to turn one’s head away but to embrace a sense of obligation to
remember what one has seen and, in response to that haunting, to become
involved in a story of rescue or amelioration: to take a sad song and make it
better.
That’s rather lovely
– and challenging. Goodness knows the
elephant desperately needs us – a caring majority – to actively do something against the depredations of
what is, after all, a relatively small if elusive number of poachers,
middlemen, gang bosses, and consumers of ivory.