The Rights and Privileges

Leave a comment August 4, 2017 Steve A. Wiggins

Bostonia is but one of several alumni magazines that makes its way to our humble apartment. Between my wife and I we have many colleges and universities begging us for money while offering us no jobs. Despite being a denied professor I have little time for magazines. I’ve always been a book man. If I’m going to put time into something I want an ISBN to claim at the end of the day. Still, the cover of the Bostonia asks a relevant question: “Should Chimps Have Human Rights?” I have long argued, based on books I’ve read and on personal experience, that animals are conscious beings, like we are. If consciousness evolved, it has to have its roots in other animals, otherwise scientists are positing “special creation,” call it what you will. If animals share consciousness, they should share rights.

People have used animals for as long as they could figure out how to do so. It may have been a two-way street at first, since we’re pretty good at protecting critters we find valuable and who doesn’t like a free lunch? They stick around us. The earliest domesticated animal seems to have been the wolf, which we made into a dog. Other common mammals joined the mule train after that. Humans: they treat you rough, but they’ll make getting food a snap. There’s a kind of consciousness involved already, don’t you think? If they can’t figure out that we’re not going to harm them (at least not yet) then they’re smart enough to keep their distance. Not all wolves became dogs.

Primates, however, are a special case. They sort of look like us. Chimpanzees, especially, act like us. They don’t get human rights because those are reserved for others of our own species. I mean, consider those in charge of the free world! They believe in the right to acquire as much of the world’s resources as they can for themselves. They guard the use of those resources so they can live in unutterable luxury and make everyone else pay through the nose for the very necessities of keeping alive. The masses pay taxes while those who have more than enough do not. We are a domesticated species, it seems to me. Don’t get me wrong—I do believe chimps should have human rights. Other animals too. We’re all connected. But the real question I have, looking at the headlines from Washington, DC, is turned the other way around: should humans have the rights of chimps? Don’t ask me; universities won’t hire my likes when others will bring them greater glory. They’ll gladly accept my money, however. It’s their right.

As a Child

Leave a comment July 31, 2014 Steve A. Wiggins

At a certain age, when alumni magazines arrive (and they will), one starts first by opening to the necrology. Who didn’t make it as far as me, after all? There’s a poignancy to it—knowing that at any age we’re vulnerable—but many of us felt a kind of immortality in our younger years that is only belied and effaced with the passing of time. The articles in the alumni magazines feature those who made it better than you, fellow students and faculty who made a genuine breakthrough. You should be proud of having the privilege, they seem to say, of having attended in her or his shadow. But once in a while, those self-serving articles do touch on the issues of the necrology where I always start. Boston University’s most recent edition boasts an article “You Are What You Feel” by Barbara Moran.

Intellectuals, in what I like to call the Spock Fallacy, frequently suggest that rationality is the whole story. Or at least the better part of it. If the left brain could only just subdue the right, and all decisions could be logical, wouldn’t this world be a better place? Better, maybe perhaps, but not human. We require our emotions for more than just feeling good. Studies suggest that thinking would be difficult, if not impossible, without them. So Bostonia profiles the work of Natalie Emmons, suggesting that ideas of immortality are more than just cultural relics. Perhaps our brains reason eternity for ourselves from some deep well we’ve not yet discovered. Emmons, and co-author Deborah Kelemen, are psychologists who study children’s idea of prelife—where we were before this. It is pretty difficult to imagine the world getting along without us. But the research suggests that intuition, rather than culture, gives us religious concepts such as immortality.

Substituting intuition for an actual essence, however, puts us in that odd place of using a word we can’t define. Scientists frequently fall back on intuition as an explanation for animal behavior that, in most instances, seems to suggest thinking that couldn’t have been acquired the usual way. How do salmon, fish that hardly seem like doctoral material, know to return home and swim upstream? How do newly hatched sea turtles know to crawl toward the water? Birds and butterflies to migrate? Instinct is a handy fallback, for sure. The research of Emmons and Kelemen suggest that children reason (note) prelife based on observations of actual life. The mind is the product of the brain. In my department at Boston University, another set of variables applied, focused mainly on surviving through the other end of the journey. It is with those in mind that I thumb through the necrology and hope, irrational as it may be to do so, that maybe the children are right.

Acts of God Algorithm

1 Comment July 13, 2010 Steve A. Wiggins

One of the oddest industry-standard phrases in use in secular contexts is “acts of God.” In a recent edition of Bostonia, the Boston University alumni magazine, an article entitled “The Acts of God Algorithm” seemed to promise some insight into this bizarre phenomenon. The piece, it turns out, is about an insurance analyst named Karen Clark. Of course, the place where “acts of God” are regularly invoked is in the insurance business. The reason this is so interesting is that in a nation as religiously motivated as the United States, people simply accept the slush-pile, default “act of God” as a given. The phrase, however, betrays a depth of fuzzy thinking and bad theology.

Does an “act of God” apply to an atheist? Does a devout Hindu have to accept any disaster that the monotheistic god and insurance companies present her or him with? Who tests to see if “God” is behind any of these acts? Given that monotheists differ widely on the day-to-day involvement of God in the natural world – certainly the world of insurance companies – how are any acts allocated to God? Legally! Predestinarians would assert that all acts are acts of God, and thus their insurance companies should be prepared for all such contingencies (they would, of course, have been predestined to deny this). Even those who accept less regular interference from on high would have trouble discerning whether a human-caused accident might or might not have had some hidden message from God. Are insurance moguls the ones qualified to decide?

To call any natural event an “act of God” betrays a level of jaded, if not indolent thinking that is inappropriate to all except those in the business of making money. Life is uncertain; it comes with no guarantees. Somehow our society accepts that if we pay good money to top-heavy, overly wealthy companies, bad things won’t happen to us, and if they do we get paid back. This kind of theology is diametrically opposed to the worldviews of the Bible and many monotheistic religious outlooks. Yet we accept that hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods are “acts of God.” The sneeze that causes a motorist to accidentally run a red light is not. And insurance brokers are weeping all the way to the bank.

Biblical Outlooks and Science Fiction

2 Comments March 18, 2010 Steve A. Wiggins

Alumni magazines depress me. Between my wife and I, we receive a half-dozen every month. I thumb through and see the cheery faces of classmates, most of whom I don’t know, who’ve gone on to great things – writing books, world travel, scientific breakthroughs. They’re not on the couch Saturday afternoons in New Jersey watching 1950’s sci-fi and wandering what went wrong. Especially bad is Bostonia, since I attended Boston University with many noteworthy individuals. Being forced from academia early in my career because of petty religious differences, I just want to bury my head and grab the remote. An article in this month’s BU shame-fest, however, pictured a professor, younger than myself, who joined the school of theology after I left. The title of the piece is “Biblical Sexuality.” Well, the connection with this blog couldn’t be more obvious.

Dr. Jennifer Knust is a professor of Christian Scriptures at BU who has written a couple of books on sexuality and the Bible. I’ve read widely on this topic in the Hebrew Bible, and was curious as to what the post-Jesus crowd was saying these days. The article specifically addresses homosexuality, but I did applaud one of Dr. Knust’s statements: “My main argument is that biblical texts do not speak with one voice.” Amen. Bravo. Goal! Our society is so imbued with the bibliolatry of the Religious Right that it is difficult for most Americans to understand that the Bible was written by many people over a few centuries and these people did not always share the same outlook. The Bible is an exercise in multiple voice-overs. Specific religions, as many denominations of Christianity testify, have harmonized these divergent voices into a coherent, if biblically untrue, theology. Some voices must be stifled so that others may dominate.

We live in a religiously plural world. There are about as many religions as there are believing people. We experience the world through our own lenses and within our own gray-matter. Our perspectives are uniquely our own. And yet religious leaders bend, worry, and force views closer to their own so that they might have a theological quorum, a consensus that one viewpoint is right. They silence the Bible’s divergent voices and claim they do not exist. I wish Dr. Knust well. She’s got the right perspective, in the opinion of my own weary gray-matter. And speaking of gray, where did I put the remote?