Looking back at the nearly ten years that this blog has been going in it’s various incarnations (in fact predating the word "blogging" – I used to call it my online-diary) I notice some interesting changes in my style over the years. As my style changed, so did my audience. Ten years ago most of what I wrote was intensely personal. There was some tech and some philosophy but what I mostly wrote about was my life. My relationships. My worldview. Time moved on and that became perhaps the most common blog-topic out there.
Not that there is anything wrong with that, I follow and comment on many such highly-personal blogs. But I became a bit more private in a sense. Over the years, rather than writing about my life – it became more important to me to write about my thoughts. My philosophical musings (as amatuerish as they may perhaps be), my take on technology news and more recently -roleplaying. How interesting that I stopped writing about my own personal life – and started to write about the personal lives of fictional characters. Personal lives with only the most tenuous connections to the game in which they are in fact set. The quests and events happen – but the thougths and feelings of those characters as they experience them – in fact their every experience of them, exist only in my mind.
I don’t want to try and analyze why the blog changed in this way because frankly – I haven’t got a clue where to start. I remain as adamantly on my quest of studying my own psyche for deeper meanings as I ever was, I suppose however that somewhere along the line I lost the capacity to express what I saw anymore – and that rather rules out the idea of crowd-sourcing the process.
Instead, the blog became an expression of my ideas and my fantasies rather than myself. I’m not unhappy about this, nor for that matter particularly extatic about it, I just find it interesting – and perhaps if I continue along this line of thought I’ll draw some useful conclusions to write a future post about. For now, I’ll go on with the philosophical post I was planning in my head as I lay in my bed late last night, which is in fact about pets.
It’s been said that having pets are the most uniquely human behaviour there is. No other species would raise, shelter, feed, protect and nurture another species for no other reward than the pleasure of it’s company. Evolutionary biologists generally believe however that it didn’t start out that way (though whose to say the first wolf-puppies brought into the cave by our ancestors as children was not brought in because he was cute and playful ? That the whole "hey he can help us hunt" thing only happened later ?). But let’s stick to the more orthodox theories for now, particularly as it aligns with the ones that fit into recorded history. Cats, horses – in fact almost every single pet humans keep did not start out as "pets". They started out as a simple symbiosis – the same kind of interspecies cooperation that is well documented throughout the animal kingdom.
Horses carried us around and pulled our vehicles- in return we gave them food, shelter and all the other amenities we could – allowing both species to exist in far greater numbers than either could have done alone. Some like rabits were originally domesticated purely for food reasons. Cats were kept primarily to keep down pests in grain stores and most likely – dogs were kept to guard and help hunt.
There is nothing particularly uniquely human about this. Sharks and Remoras have almost identically the same relationship as humans had with cats not long ago. In fact it almost appears that pets as we know it only even appeared on the scene in the last century or so – after the automobile was invented. Suddenly horses weren’t needed anymore – so they only ones left are kept for love. Urbanization largely removed the need for working cats – so cats came to be household companions like dogs. The result is that there has been interesting documented changes in cat behaviour over the past century. Cats still pretend to be highly independent creatures who could drop and forget their human hosts at a whim and only stick around and put up with the whole "affection" thing for the free food.
Any cat-owner knows it’s an act though – every cat knows it too. Cats need and seek out the love and affection of their human hosts, but the old loner-genes are still there, telling them they shouldn’t need it. So they pretend not to, as long as we are happy to let them pretend – they are happy to play along. Dogs however have been proper pets for far longer. Sure there are still hunting and guarding dogs out there – but they are a shrinking minority and most dogs haven’t been working dogs in any way at all for centuries.
Dogs have, in fact, managed to turn the whole master-pet relationship on it’s head. The best dogs are obedient and subservient – but also know they will never be asked anything more strenuous than a few simple tricks like "sit". In return for which – humans shelter them, feed them, clean up their poop, give them warmth and the loving affection which these pack animals are genetically programmed to crave as much as we do. Humans are masters only in name. We may believe we give the orders – but show me one decent human who can look at a hungry dog and refuse to give it food ? They may not vocalise the commands – but the commands are there nonetheless.
Domesticated animals have a deal with humans – they provide us something in return we provide them with things. When that which they provided us once loses value- and we keep providing without asking anything more than their company… we move beyond symbiosis, these animals become pets. If ever there was proof that humans are not merely slaves to our evolution but can transcend it – pets are it. Beyond symbiosis love survived, on both sides of the deal.
But if my hypothesis is correct then this civilized pet-keeping genuinely didn’t exist even a hundred years ago. Just 50 years ago the vast majority of people were still in favor of racial segregation (sure those people still exist but they are a shrinking minority now). The last 100 years or so of human history was not just the period of the most rapid scientific and technological advance in our history – it seems to me it was the period of the most rapid social and civilizational advance as well.
And in this there is a message perhaps of hope. Those who feel that peace for humanity is impossible because all of human history is war – are missing this. We were evolved to be a warfaring species, but we can transcend our evolution. The proof is all around us, pets being just one of the obvious examples. It’s not going to happen fast. It’s not going to happen easilly. But it certainly can happen – and the trend seems to be toward that change. Slow as it may be.
So do I believe world peace is possible ? I do in fact yes. Humanity is still evolving, our brains are, much faster than our bodies could. We’re getting better as a species. I don’t know if I, or anybody who reads this, will be around to see it. But look what we did in the last 100 years… imagine where we will be by 2110 ? Forget the technology and science, try to imagine what we can do socially… there is real reason to hope.
Having said that – hope alone has never done anything good. There is still in the world today many who relish our inherited, destructive natures. Who commit genocides and atrocities and call it "justice". Who order soldiers to kill and call it "honor". There are still soldiers who take pleasure in shooting a schoolbus to pieces from a helicopter – as many in the "good" nations as in the "bad". There are still politicians who will call torture "harsh interogation" and then go and claim it’s justified.
If we leave them be – we won’t progress. Progress depends on our efforts to speak out against these things. Decry them – and face the ire of their supporters. We won’t live to see world peace. But every time we open our mouths to say "no, it’s NOT okay" – we help make sure that our children or grandchildren might.
Those we call heroes, and those we call despots tend to sound exactly the same when you listen to their speeches superficially. Because they use the exact same vocabulary. They use words like "justice" and "honor" and "rights". To tell the difference you must look not at what words are used – but what they say with those words.
So when you next take your dog for a walk, when it licks your hand and you see that utter love in it’s eyes. Remember that once we used them like slaves – and they became our friends, our brothers. We crossed the line of perfectly peaceful coexistence with other species. Species who were evolved to be OUR predators ! In just a century – we evolved that friendship to persist past "usefulness" – into pure love and affection and companionship.
If our ancestors could do that with wolves – then there is absolutely no reason we cannot do it with one another.
