Category: Violence

is it not more cruel to eat plants?

we know that plants (Archaeplastida) are alive 1 2

we know they form memories 3

we know they can react to their environment in the short medium and long terms 4

we know they communicate 5

we know they have melatonin, serotonin, and a host of other chemicals that our own brain uses to convey information and do its sentience 6 7

we know they experience discomfort or some subjective experience 8 9 (counterpoint 10)

they are a living thing that has survived 2300 million years of evolution which is enough time and complexity to evolve sentience

it is possible they have language that we do not think of as symbolic representation.

in fact its entirely possible that they not only possess sentience in botanic terms, but also in neuronal terms.

it is possible they have volition and agency that does not fit the animal mechanisms of these, these are all possible and not all that difficult to imagine

all of these put together indicates that they are highly likely to be sentient even if not in the human/animal sentience spectrum or mechanism terms. 11 12

the thing that makes them different from animals, and animal sentience and their pain different from animal pain , is that we do not have sensory immediate direct empathetic (SIDEy) access to it.

empathetic access to animal pain is why we consider them sentient. there’s a model of pain in our selves that has an uncanny resemblance to the model of pain in almost all other animal bodies which we are able to access or simulate or react to via empathy (and experiments).

so the reason why we think its OK to eat plants is really that we feel no empathy for them that is automatic and hardwired the way a mirror neuron 13 is hardwired. (it’s not, i know, but you know what i mean)

we find it problematic when people and governments do not listen to those without a voice or the people without a voice that we understand, those who do not have guns, have the wrong germs and no steel. do we not have an entire industry or two built around just giving voices to those who do not have voices?

we do recognize that committing violence on them is wrong and reprehensible.

so do plants not have a good reason to have rights?

at the very least the right to be recognized as alive and possibly sentient

and the right to be not snuffed out thoughtlessly

and the promise that we will do everything we can to hear their voices and one day the confederacy will have voting plants and not just planted votes.

Note:

For non-facetious reading material from real professionals, consider the following instead:

Hansen, M.J. A critical review of plant sentience: moving beyond traditional approaches. Biol Philos 39, 13 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-024-09953-1

Myers, N. (2015). Conversations on Plant Sensing : Notes From the Field. Nature and Culture, 3, 35-66. Link to PDF

Hamilton, A., & McBrayer, J. (2020). Do plants feel pain?. Disputatio, 12(56), 71-98.

The minimal Intelligence lab – they try to figure out what intelligence is. Rigorous and philosophically exciting.

Footnotes

  1. Because they have an entry in the EOL: C Michael Hogan (Lead Author);Daniel Robert Taub (Topic Editor) “Plant”. In: Encyclopedia of Earth. Eds. Cutler J. Cleveland (Washington, D.C.: Environmental Information Coalition, National Council for Science and the Environment). [First published in the Encyclopedia of Earth July 19, 2010; Last revised Date August 15, 2011; Retrieved September 27, 2012. Encyclopedia of Earth. https://eol.org/docs/discover/plants ↩︎
  2. Also here: https://www.eol.org/pages/42430800 ↩︎
  3. Gabriela Auge, Valentin Hankofer, Martin Groth, Rea Antoniou-Kourounioti, Irja Ratikainen, Christian Lampei, Plant environmental memory: implications, mechanisms and opportunities for plant scientists and beyond, AoB PLANTS, Volume 15, Issue 4, July 2023, plad032, https://doi.org/10.1093/aobpla/plad032 ↩︎
  4. Baucom RS, Heath KD, Chambers SM. Plant-environment interactions from the lens of plant stress, reproduction, and mutualisms. Am J Bot. 2020 Feb;107(2):175-178. doi: 10.1002/ajb2.1437. Epub 2020 Feb 14. PMID: 32060910; PMCID: PMC7186814. ↩︎
  5. Farmer EE, Ryan CA. Interplant communication: airborne methyl jasmonate induces synthesis of proteinase inhibitors in plant leaves. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1990 Oct;87(19):7713-6. doi: 10.1073/pnas.87.19.7713. PMID: 11607107; PMCID: PMC54818. ↩︎
  6. Ramakrishna A, Giridhar P, Ravishankar GA. Phytoserotonin: a review. Plant Signal Behav. 2011 Jun;6(6):800-9. doi: 10.4161/psb.6.6.15242. Epub 2011 Jun 1. PMID: 21617371; PMCID: PMC3218476. ↩︎
  7. Baluška, F., Mukherjee, S., & Ramakrishna, A. (Eds.). (2020). Neurotransmitters in plant signaling and communication. Springer. ↩︎
  8. Appel, H.M., Cocroft, R.B. Plants respond to leaf vibrations caused by insect herbivore chewing. Oecologia 175, 1257–1266 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-2995-6 ↩︎
  9. Anda-Larisa Iosip et al, DYSCALCULIA, a Venus flytrap mutant without the ability to count action potentials, Current Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.12.058 ↩︎
  10. Draguhn, A., Mallatt, J.M. & Robinson, D.G. Anesthetics and plants: no pain, no brain, and therefore no consciousness. Protoplasma 258, 239–248 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00709-020-01550-9 ↩︎
  11. Trewavas A (2016) Intelligence, Cognition, and Language of Green Plants. Front. Psychol. 7:588. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00588 ↩︎
  12. Baluska, Frantisek. (2016). Should fish feel pain? A plant perspective. Animal Sentience. 1. 10.51291/2377-7478.1052. ↩︎
  13. Lamm C, Decety J, Singer T (February 2011). “Meta-analytic evidence for common and distinct neural networks associated with directly experienced pain and empathy for pain”. NeuroImage. 54 (3): 2492–2502. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.10.014. PMID 20946964. S2CID 6021487. ↩︎

A call for radical Unforgiveness

Source: Azaad, Amba. “Fire to the Grass.” The Massachusetts Review, Volume 65, Issue 1, 2024, massreview.org/sites/default/files/10_65.1Azaad.pdf.

IN this essay Amba Azaad makes a strong and comprehensive case for radical unforgiveness.

It’s a gorgeous gorgeous essay and everyone should read it, the following are some quotations that spoke to me.

Resentment and bitterness are treated like bruise marks—evidence of a past crime, but of no further use, meant to be erased as soon as possible.

Victims of abuse have been told so often that true love is forgiving that it feels like a lie to state that their love and unforgiveness can coexist, equally authentic

Just as you cannot truly envision the complex reality of what abuse is without granting that a person can be both loving and abusive, you cannot begin to talk about battered love without talking about unforgiveness.

To love someone who has harmed you, and to fully name and recognize that harm, and to deem it unforgivable, and to continue living in some relationship with each other: that is what the vast majority of people in abusive relationships do. As we come to more open and investigative reckonings of abuse, it behooves us to treat unforgiveness as praxis of survival—not as a dirty byproduct of harm, but as a multifaceted philosophy worth theorizing.

Forgiveness certainly has a place in our social strategizing and mental toolkit; however, deglamorizing its status as a mark of born-again Bodhisattva will help to prevent abusive demands for it. To legitimize unforgiveness, it is necessary to start by toppling the idol of forgiveness: a virtue enshrined in several religious traditions and wielded with particular brutality by modern Christian ideologies against anyone with the temerity to hold the powerful accountable. If we remove divinity from the equation, it is clear that both “to err” and “to forgive” must be analyzed strictly in profane terms of power.

Radical unforgiveness renames your experience from acceptable, and therefore good enough for others, to unacceptable and not to be replicated.

We have been told that unforgiveness is useless so often that it can be hard to redefine what productivity looks like when marginalized and derided forms of labor are taken into account. Holding space, bearing witness: these are seemingly passive forms of productivity. It takes energy to stand still in a crowd that pushes you to move on. The unforgivers are the ones who stay petty, who don’t just get along, and they are the ones who force changes through in organizations where it is easier to let it go.

Here’s a freeing thought: What if one has a responsibility to unforgive, what if one is achieving some measure of restitution by being a stone against the flood that tries to wash away the evidence of wrongdoing? By not being able to forgive, you are not failing at humanity. You are reforming humanity—by being a record keeper, by bearing witness.

Unforgiveness is not the negative space of the absence of a thing; it is a concrete, voluntary action, a choice. Broken relationships are not failures; they are proof of the work of unforgiveness.

I really want to add more quotes but I think this is enough.

Amba ends the essay with acknowledging how unforgiveness has been misappropriated by revenge, and what we can do to prevent that.

Overall, I think this is a call I will be thinking about a lot.

Not silence but Verse: Call for poetry against Violence

It’s violence against women (VAW) awareness month, and Prajnya  is calling you to submit poetry

Send us original, powerful, evocative poems in English, Hindi or Tamil
(Haikus or Tankas only!)
on the theme
‘No Violence, No Silence’

Last date for submissions: 10 November 2012

Email us: prajnya.16days@gmail.com

(Download the .pdf version of the call here.)

 

So, all you poets, write!

Some Questions that need to be answered on Domestic Violence

Background: Poet and Dalit activist Meena kandasamy recently wrote about her story of domestic violence. She is an evocative writer and her article has resulted in a lot of conversation on various web-platforms.  Among the usual “hear, hear” and “she must be lying”  comments were a few a few questions that are earnest and need to be answered. This is a post addressing those questions.

Note: I am not trying to explain Meena Kandasamy’s story, I have no business doing that. I am strictly answering general questions on the topic of Domestic violence.

How can feminists be victims of violence?

One of the earliest reactions to this story was “how can someone so “strong”, a fierce feminist, put up with domestic violence?”. I hope this leads to people searching for truths about domestic violence, and not concluding that her story is fabricated based on a presupposition that strong women do not get beaten up. On my timeline on twitter, stories were pouring in about VP’s of companies, Doctors, and NGO owners who were victims of violence who suffered in silence for a long time. This is, no doubt, puzzling and I hope to explain why it happens.

Continue reading “Some Questions that need to be answered on Domestic Violence”

Has Feminism failed Women?

Feminism is failing in the war against women says Virginia Haussegger in a thought provoking article.

She writes

There is a totalizing ideology on the march across the world, and it’s anti-women. This is not about religion, piety or virtue. Rather it’s about misogyny and a global war against women. It’s about the rights and freedoms of women. The ownership and control over women’s bodies has become the chief battleground.

Examples abound that all the increase in salaries of women in the corporate world has not addressed what happens under the untouchable umbrella of social customs and cultural practices.

In India, we have more than enough of this happening. From governments being mum on ridiculous judgments of khap panchayats and dishonor killings to daily stories of abandoned and battered girl children, we have ample reason to sit up in alarm.

It is not not that the fight against brutality to women is a purely feminist responsibility, far from it. In her book “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” Sheryl WuDunn proposes that the

Central moral challenge of this century is gender inequity

You should watch the whole video.

The important thing to learn from the video and from any work that highlights the issue of inequity is that gender inequity is not a womens problem only. Gender discrimination is the single greatest reason we are unable to face some of the greatest challenges of this decade like religious extremesm and HIV/AIDS pandemic.

While some of you might be skeptical that just educating and empowering women might be a panacea for all of worlds problems, for those who care to look and listen, (not just the video) the transforming power empowered women have on societies is fairly obvious.

I know that there are organizations like Bell bajao and CEHAT that work in the area of Domestic violence, but I am unaware of many others and whether these would call themselves feminist.

In the coming days I hope to gain some insight into the role of feminism in gender equity movement in India and hopefully a better understanding of how the feminist movement in India can take up this challenge with the urgency that it requires.