Click image to listen to the interview
Last night I listened to Tom Ashbrook’s interview with psychologist/author Alexandra Horowitz. In her book, “Inside of a Dog”, she set out to explain the behavior of dogs in society with humans, from the dog’s point of view.
They’re not simple humans. They’re not friendly wolves. Dogs are highly evolved for compatibility with homo sapiens. But the way they sense the world is vastly different from our own. These “creature of the nose,” she says, can actually smell time. And when they do see, they see more of the world in every second (than us).
She asserts that the bond between dogs and humans began with the dawn of Homo sapiens. The dogs were pre-wolfish, scavenging camp followers. The characteristic that triggered a benign symbiotic interaction between the two species (human and canine) was almost surely the fact that canines lock eyes with each other….and with humans. She contends that it was the deep mutual gaze between dogs and humans that bridged the unbridgeable gap between dog being and being human.
But the bridge between dog and human is not a meeting of the minds. It is not a mutual understanding grounded in shared intentions. The dog’s view of the world and the human’s world view may be compatible, but in all other respects, are wholly different! Says NY Times Sunday Times book reviewer, Cathleen Schine:
“[Horowitz's] work draws on that of an early-20th- century German biologist, Jakob von Uexküll, who proposed that “anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umwelt . . . : their subjective or ‘self-world.’ ” Hard as we may try, a dog’s-eye view is not immediately accessible to us, however, for we reside within our own umwelt, our own self-world bubble, which clouds our vision.”
In the balance of her interview, Horowitiz explains her ideas about how a dog sees the world and why they do what they do.
In one example, Horwowitz suggests that the face licking we get from our dogs when we return home, is not an act of affection. It is a behavior that triggers the regurgitation of food acquired by other pack members during their day’s hunt.
Now here’s what really caught my attention. A caller offered an observation to Horowitz and Ashbrook. She said, and I paraphrase, “I am not sure I want your explanation of my dog’s doggish motives. If I saw doggy ends in his every act, what joy would remain in my relationship with him? Suspicion would come between myself and his every facial lick. It wouldn’t work.”
The caller had touched on a profound idea. Does my dog lick my face in order to make me regurgitate? I have never regurgitated for her, so why would she continue to lick in abject futility? It doesn’t work!
When we impute motives to a dog’s behavior we deconstruct the physical and emotional symbiotic bridge between us. The dog’s does not think about his human buddy as a means to his doggy ends, and those of us who revel in our relationship with our doggy buddies do not regard them as a means to our human ends. The bonds between canine and human were carved out of a long evolutionary process. Those bonds are what they are and they continue to be what they are because they work! There is no more to it than that, and when we deconstruct those bonds by imputing means-to-end motivations, our suspicion destroys the relationship that works — dog and human, moving forward in the business of living.
One of the themes I constantly return to is something I call the fallacy of motivation. My position is that the psychological concept of motivation, in which all individuals action is interpreted as a means to some self-interested end, is a destroyer of the bonds that define us as human beings. We are told that although we cannot see the motives of others, and we cannot rely on others to confess their “true” motives, we can and should infer their motives. This suggests that it is only by doing this that we can defend ourselves against malevolent intentions and manipulate the actions of others by appealing to the motives behind their actions. In other words, we must always regard the acts of others with unrelenting suspicion.
I contend that the reduction of human interaction to a theory of psychological, means-to-end motivation, is a powerfully self-fulfilling accident of human knowing. Our tendency to reduce the world into orderly parts spills over into a process of reducing ourselves to parts. In our relentless drive to turn all the world into a predictable clockwork mechanism, we destroy the bonds carved out over millions of years of evolution, that have brought us into existence as social beings and propelled us forward in the creation of our society and culture — the bonds that work!
Consider this idea. What if the motives you use to explain your behavior and the behavior of others, are no more than inventions (rationalizations) you create to make the world sensible? Is it possible that the forces that shape your doing what you do, and others in doing what they do, are not what you imagine them to be? Can you imagine that?
There is a great deal of scientific evidence to suggest that this may be so.
Moore builds his story around case studies that illustrate the abuses of power that occur when wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of groups who are absolved of responsibility to their community by the amoral dictates of increasing profits. His story is not so much a polemic about the theory of Capitalism as a call to conscience. How is it, he asks, that human beings can act in ways that do profound harm to others, and not be overwhelmed by paralyzing shame?
“In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile—and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep.”
