Perspicacity

\pur-spuh-KAS-uh-tee\, noun:
Clearness of understanding or insight; penetration, discernment.

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Cruelty is our peculiarity. Consider this: let’s say those mussels, as discussed in class today, were introduced to their new environment naturally, immediately taking over and exterminating/altering huge populations of wildlife. Is this cruel? Of course not. Biological nature’s ebb and flow cannot be blamed for cruelty, even if the creatures themselves died horrible deaths, and in huge numbers. We can intellectualize the event as such, but that sympathy will remain ours alone. Survival demands death, even on a large scale.

Now let’s go with an alien example. We’re living out our lives here on Earth, and one day a spaceship descends from the cosmos, lands in Idaho, and from it steps a low-sentient creature (let’s say a higher sentient species sent it here because they didn’t like its frilly head) that exhales a toxin deadly to humans alone (I don’t know what it would be, but it’s just an example). All over the world humans would be dying because this new, instinct-governed creature appeared and has the naturally ability to dominate us. The creature is not cruel, it’s just acting according to its genetic programming. In a way, this is much the same scenario as above, as would be any natural disasters that cause creatures harm: Nature is impersonal, and does not have compassion for compassion’s sake. It is neither loving nor cruel, nor can it be blamed for acting as it does.

So why can we? We are natural too, right? Indeed we are, but I feel confident in making the argument that while our intellects are still natural, they operate, in part, outside of the dictations of mere survival. And as that is the case, our introduction to situations cannot be mistaken as willed by Nature alone and excusable on that account. We are the aliens sending away the deadly creature.

We have the most responsibilities of anything on this planet. It is not possible for us to go along with Nature’s dictations anymore (I hope I’m not sounding too distant at this point, Nature isn’t some spiritual force). The best that we can do is what we are good at: problematize what would otherwise be simple, and unearth its relevance to the rest of the world. Each and every one of us are philosophers—a beaver builds a dam for shelter, but we have and intellectually indulge billions of different reasons for constructing homes. As such, we cannot hide under the shroud of impersonal Nature, for we are (more often than not, in interspecies and earthly relations) not its minions. We are relatively autonomous.

As such, we are the breeders of cruelty. For if we were to go into Lake Eerie, and personally kill everything that lives there, we would probably not be doing so to survive (as, of course, if we were somehow doing it to survive, it would likely be justifiable). We utilize a natural sympathy in those instances where we understand, and extend a natural cruelty where we do not or do not want to.

We cannot follow Nature’s orders because we recognize how some of them are flawed in an intellectual perspective: it may make emotional or instinctual sense to kill the person who accidentally ran over and killed your wife, but we must have sympathy, we must have reason to keep ourselves from acting supremely in the interests of underpinned survival techniques (other examples: prejudice, sexual aggression, etc). If we were the mussels, we’d second guess how negative our effects are on that lake. We actually must intellectualize, for the sake of ourselves and others. And thankfully for all of us, more often than not an intellectualization of an affair with most facts brought to light sides us on the arm of sympathy and compassion. How else would we survive with one another?