Warning: More human than human

[smokingboot]

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions/wpy/photo.do?photo=2370&category=52&group=3

Comments

[happybat.livejournal.com]

Shit...

*seriously shaken*

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

The exhibition has great beauty and joy in it too. But this stands alone.

[squeezypaws.livejournal.com]

My first thought was couldn't he rescue the poor thing rather than taking it's picture. But yes powerful stuff.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

It never occurred to me that the animal might have been alive when he first saw it. I really hope not.

I am trying to work out why this photo hits so hard.

[squeezypaws.livejournal.com]

I don't know for sure and I don't want to click again to check! I hope you're right. I think being confronted with something helpless like animals or children dying or recently dead can be particularly shocking, dead cats on the side of the road, those cows on pyres following foot and mouth, not least slaughtered infants in news bulletins... something about the embarrassing futility of their existence; there are no silver linings are there? No "well they had a happy life/good innings".

[steve-c.livejournal.com]

Monkey/pig - not really all that much to separate them. That animal is different though, because the people who are eating it probably need to do so to survive. Whereas the rest of us are simply eating living creatures for our own fleeting pleasure. The shape of something's face might change the emotional response, but it doesn't have a moral bearing.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Apparently, in Gabon at least, bushmeat is booming business, with an inference of wealth and status in some places, in others a hankering after the past...those who hunt it are basically poachers. They get a pittance. The meat itself brings high prices. It's a luxury, the rarer the 'better'.

Is it the near humanity of the head that makes it so shocking? I agree exactly with what you say about the moral bearing. Do we only care if we recognise the victim as like ourselves? Is human compassion based on extended narcissism?

[steve-c.livejournal.com]

Compassion and empathy have to be about so much more than that. I suspect that the objects of them depend to a great deal upon socialisation.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

I agree that compassion is nothing if it depends on something or someone looking like us. Forgve me for being obtuse, but I didn't understand your second sentence. Does 'socialisation' mean being brought up to be empathic or does it mean being brought up to identify with others or their victimhood? I'll bet it's something really obvious that my early morning brain can't grasp...

[steve-c.livejournal.com]

My point, poorly expressed, was that who we most empathise with depends, to a strong degree, on who society tells us we should feel compassion for - be it class, race, nationality, species etc. Though I think the meaning you read in to the sentence: that we are taught to empathise; is also true.

[half-orc.livejournal.com]

Is survival not in itself a fleeting pleasure?

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

It may please, but that's not why we work so hard at it...surely our impetus is to avoid the opposite.