Whales

News item: Small nations lead vote to resume commercial whaling.

A slim majority of nations on the International Whaling Commission voted Sunday in support of a resumption of commercial whaling, but pro-whaling nations still lack the numbers needed to overturn a 20-year-old ban.

with a followup:

The International Whaling Commission narrowly voted that a 20-year ban on commercial whale hunting no longer was necessary because marine mammals have recovered from near extinction.

Chris at AmericaBlog summarizes my sentiments:

The public reasoning behind these moves are incredible, essentially blaming whales for depleting fish populations around the world, so they must now be controlled. No, dwindling fish populations have nothing to do at all with over fishing just like the dwindling whale populations in the past had nothing to do with over whaling. It was the whales that were limiting their own populations and harpooning themselves into near extinction, not whalers.

So, the mindless slaughter of non-humans may now be resumed. This post pretty much stands on its own without comment: either you understand the moral dimensions of non-human genocide, or you don't.

However, I would like to take this opportunity to plug a science fiction novel I enjoyed reading a few months back. (Don't worry, I promise I'll tie this back to whales in a moment.) Hyperion, written by Dan Simmons and named after the unfinished poem by John Keats, is typically marketed as a sci-fi horror novel that concerns a monster who threatens seven pilgrims on a quest to visit the "time tombs". I was motivated to read it after coming across a recommendation somewhere in my internet travels and receiving an intuition that the book would be helpful in my spiritual journey. (The library angel often visits me in this way.)

Throughout much of the novel I was annoyed with the apparent technophilia that in general turns me off to the genre. However, one of the compelling features of the novel is how the author assumes an about-face, in fact repudiating the ideology of the machine. It turns out that the pivotal issue is the fate of cetaceans.

The structure of the award-winning novel is often compared to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in that the plot is propelled by the narration of six of the seven pilgrims, each of whom tells their own story, how they came to accept a pilgrimage that would almost certainly end in gruesome death. The introductory narrative is given by the "Consul", who is commanded by the "CEO" to make the grim journey, and is told matter-of-factly that there may be a spy or traitor among his fellow pilgrims.

The history of Simmon's made-up civilization is told in a fragmented way through the narratives of the characters. In particular, we learn of an interstellar empire (the "worldweb") bound together by a unique mode of transportation, and a particular planet, an unwilling member of the empire, populated by an ecologically conscious, simple people who live in harmony with the dolphins and sentient floating islands (which I imagine as gigantic manatees). We learn how their rebellion against the forces of capitalism and technology was brutally crushed by this interstellar empire, and how the dolphins and the bigger cetaceans were slaughtered. And we learn of the "shrike", the monster that is worshipped by the "Church of the Final Atonement", and that somehow has escaped his tethers to the time tombs and now possibly threatens humanity.

[Spoiler alert] The shocker is who the traitor is. It is in fact the Consul himself, who tells his story last: he is the grandson of the leader of the rebellion that had been crushed over a century ago, and has carefully bided his time, waiting for a moment when he could strike back. After discovering how to set the Shrike free, he does so.

Hyperion was unusually moving for a sci-fi novel, mostly because the characters seem to be driven by very human motives and because the Consul, the anti-hero, acts to strike a blow against the culture of the machine. That the author really is talking about the ideology of the machine becomes apparent in the sequel, Fall of Hyperion, which completes the story of the war started in the first novel and in which the true enemy ends up being the artificial intelligences who have quietly declared war on humanity.

Science fiction is at its best when it explores the consequences of the culture of the machine, which is really the culture of the panopticon. The moral pivot of Hyperion was in fact the dolphins, whose destruction makes the moral case against the machine.

Would that we take heed: humanity will be judged by how we treat our nonhuman brethren.