On Death and Dying.

I want to Die!

Passing away is wimpy!

28 May 2022

"You" he said. "You're like one of those Dark-Chocolate-box chocolates; "You know, the ones that have a quicksilver liquore filling that bursts out on the tongue when the hard chocolate shell finally yields to the warmth of cautious sucking."

Brother Babs.

Humor

"A Pastor found a baboon that could talk. So he taught it how to sing, pray and preach. 

At one Sunday service, the Pastor said to the congregation, 

"The Baboon is going to pray today." 

The Baboon sat still and the Pastor repeated over and over again "The Baboon is going to pray today", but the Baboon did not respond. 

After the service pastor asked the Baboon, "Why didn't you want to pray when I asked you to?" and the Baboon answered, "Was it necessary to call me Baboon? Everybody here is referred to as Brother irrespective of their status in life. You could have at least said Brother Babs!" 😂😂😂😃😃Everyone deserve little R*E*S*P*E*C*T"

Oakland

Tommy played a mean pinball.

The personality of chimpanzees is once again in the news and in the courts. A novel case caught the attention of the media this last week.

New York courts are probably too black and white to have dealt with this question in any other way than a reference to rights, responsibilities and legal accountability.

The protagonists did the usual thing of trundling out the scientific research and cataloging the marvelous human capabilities that chimpanzees are known to have, when they brought their petition for writ of habeas corpus 

When the complaint was filed, in early December 2013, Steven Wise, the president of the Nonhuman Rights Project, said: “Not long ago, people generally agreed that human slaves could not be legal persons, but were simply the property of their owners. . . We will assert, based on clear scientific evidence, that it’s time to take the next step and recognize that these nonhuman animals cannot continue to be exploited as the property of their human ‘owners.’”

Adam Smiths "On the Wealth of Nations" -- on which the Post-Reagan-Thatcher ethos of globalization is based -- explicitly accounts slaves as property. The "correctness" of Smith's economic tenets, so beloved of conservative economists, is therefore implicitly founded on a model of society in which a large number of persons live without human rights under the law. Perhaps this explains why the global equation still refuses to balance into any kind of utopian state of well-being among all men and women-- half of us still need to be treated as property for the model to work. 

Of course the economist attitude towards the rest of nature of Smith's time was equally without regard to personality and its implications for the role of intelligence in the proper functioning of our planet. It is long overdue that we took the next step. It would also have been better if we had done it before globalization.

The decision quotes the legal definition of a person thus:

"So far as legal theory is concerned, a person is any being whom the law regards as capable of rights and duties.. . .
Persons are the substances of which rights and duties are the attributes. It is only in this respect that persons possess juridical significance, and this is the exclusive point of view from which personality receives legal recognition"

Centuries of dutifully recorded observation confirm that non-human species enjoy rights and perform reciprocal duties in the context of their own social contracts, and in the wider community of species in their native ecosystems. We even borrow terms like "alpha male" and "maternal instinct" from the language of such observations. In deed, such reciprocal balance is almost always a required attribute for individual survival in any species.


The Court's ruling on Tommy's personhood turn on the inability of chimpanzees to comply with human law. Presiding Justice Karen Peters is reported to have written that:

"Needless to say, unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their actions. In our view, it is this incapability to bear any legal responsibilities and societal duties that renders it inappropriate to confer upon chimpanzees the legal rights – such as the fundamental right to liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus – that have been afforded to human beings."

The question is, what is the origin of the rightness or wrongness of human actions? Why does society need responsibilities and duties in the first place if not the maintenance of our relationship to the natural world? Economy is a proxy for ecology. Money is only as good as the food, shelter and water it can provide -- no matter how high the sky-scraper, the Bodegas or Starbucks' on the groundfloor are still proxies for fruit trees.

Judging the personhood of chimpanzees according to their ability to comply with our proxy ecosystems is disingenous at best, and at worse, replete with with the cruelty of a circus Ringmaster. Thus when a New York law professor is quoted by the Boston Globe as saying:

“The blunt point is that we have had and will continue to have different moral obligations to members of our own species than we do to chimps or members of any other species.”

it ignores the foundation of moral obligations in the right of living things to participate in the very act of living-- of eating, drinking and sleeping. 

If we observe that animals have personality, it is precisely because they manifest obligations to their fellow creatures (including humans) in their acts of living. A human being, locked in a cage would no more be able to "bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their actions" than Tommy the chimp. There is some double jeopardy in denying a chimp his rights to life and liberty because he cannot comply with the proxy ecosystem of New York's concrete jungle.

In due synchronicitistic justice, the name of the "owner" of Tommy-the-Chimp is Lavery, a mere slip of the tongue away from 'slavery':

"Lavery said that he agreed with the judges, adding that T[o]mmy received state-of-the-art care and was on a waiting list to be taken in by a sanctuary.
"It will be my decision where he goes and not someone else's," he said." 

The right question is whether Tommy would be personable if he lived in a sanctuary -- or better still, in the ecosystems of West and Central Africa in which his ancestors defined their own moral obligations, societal obligations and accountability, and in which chimp intelligence continues to support the pitifully few forest remnants still free of human disruption. 

So, if Tarzan were caged in the middle of the forest, unable to understand and comply with the norms of chimpanzee society, would he cease to be a person?

Death of Hilary Koprowski

NYT

The Lancet

Amercian Society of Microbiology

The Huffington Post

Chimpanzees on Tiwai Island III

2006.

I met John DiMarco and Jeremy at Capitol, just as the energy of Saturday night in Kenema was making itself felt. Salay had walked with me towards the lights, across the gray mud puddled field of the police station and sat next to me while we waited for the Europeans to come.

"Funny, huh?" I said to her, "Seems like its the white people who are on Black man's time today!"

The beer was half-frozen, so waiting was not an issue. Several other Lebanese and Europeans and a table of Africans occupied the restaurant.

The conversation drifted around for a while after they first arrived.  The biodiversity survey of the Gola Forest which was about 60% complete was described in some detail, while Jeremy's guest, a small European nun acquainted me with the existence of a nursing school I had never heard of before.
Salay, indicated her knowledge of it by her body movements but was silent,  enjoying  her Maltina. She said after that she would never join such a conversation among men.

We eventually got to the business at hand, which concerned access to the National Herbarium at Njala over which I had charge.  I got some interesting information about its history and their interest to restock some of the specimens with the collections from this modern day collection exercise. Evidently, Kew Gardens in the UK was also interested to make a connection.

I don't remember how the topic arose, but I replied simply that I thought the best thing that could be done on Tiwai Island was to establish a Primate Academy.  Of course it met with immediate laughter, but I watched and listened as the small flame caught fire.  I fanned it with the parellel of JFK and the Moonshot; then with Michael Milkens statistics about how many different species of plants chimpanzees know how to eat (more than 3000). I mentioned Tacugama. John thought they might eventually want independence-- "Chimp Nation".

Jeremy exhibited the typical British academic skepticism-- especially when I pushed them both over the Darwinian ledge and into the free-fall of Europe's historical relationship to Africans.
" Well we all know that when the Europeans first came to Africa, they considered Africans to be sub-human. We were thought to have lesser intelligence. Our languages were-- and still are implicitly-- considered to be jibberish, incapable of supporting sophisticated intellectual ideas, and not even worthy of study.  This has of course turned out to be the opposite of the truth, as anyone might expect for systems of languages and cultures with roots as deep as those found in Africa."

The free-fall continued.

"Are you are aware that this area-- the Gola Forest is home to one of West Africa's written scripts? The village of Vaama, which is just one village away from Tiwai Island was the birthplace of Kissimi Kamara who invented the Ki Ka Ku script.  His descendants still live there and the adobe foundations of his house are still there.  He is believed to have derived it from the Vai syllabary which was also first encountered by Europeans right here in these same villages where we are doing our conservation work. Its still a mystery where Dualu Bukele, the Vai teenager who elaborated the script got his ideas from-- it has 220 characters, and systematically describes all the sounds that can be made in the Vai language -- ki ka ku, bi ba bu, di da du, etc.  --hence the name. So though we are here trying to preserve the last remnants of the Gola rain forest, of  "Darkest Africa", we are also wardens of the place from which much of our new world culture, know how, and intelligence sprang."

Then, in a gesture of conciliation, I pointed out the importance Europeans had attached to the responsibility of saving African souls:

"To their credit, the first thing the Europeans thought of doing after exploiting our natural resources was to tell us about God. If we believe as scientific research and African anecdotes tell us that our cousin primates are just as intelligent as we are, what is the first thing we should try to teach them about? God? Science? Peace?  Personally, I suspect that it is us that has something to learn from them."

"As environmentalists, we should be particularly sensitive to this issue. Any environment, any ecosystem  supports the most intelligent creatures. These species are found at the top of the food web, with the second, and the third, etc.  beneath them.  If we really want to protect the environment, don't we have an obligation to foster the progress of the second, third, etc. most intelligent creatures? Teach them about conservation? What if we humans were all wiped out by the bird flu? Who would take over the preservation of the forest? Or for that matter, who would worship God?"

"We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams."

Ralph Waldo Emerson "Self-Reliance"

Chimpanzees on Tiwai Island

I showed Salay the picture of the chimpanzee anvil with the stone near by and explained it as it had been explained to me by Momodu.  "Temmui" -- that's the Mende word for Chimpanzee she explained. She described the antics and the intelligence of her brother's pet monkey. And then she told me about the man who went to bathe by the river, and emerged to find a chimpanzee combing its hair with his comb. He got beaten up by it. Then the story takes a darker turn: The young child molested, raped by a chimpanzee.  The   violator was killed on the spot, even before the child was taken to the hospital.