Seeking Authenticity by Walter Cummins

Del Sol

Review by Jack Smith

In this collection of essays and reviews, Walter Cummins, short story writer and essayist, deals with a broad range of topics, among them DNA and identity, the state of health and medicine, the sources of morality, cultural diversity, robotics, work, and eating animals.

One topic is the question of evil, which Cummins raises in “The Sources of Morality,” his review of Frans de Waal’s The Atheist and the Bobobo. Are humans basically good or evil? Do they need divinity and the threat of eternal punishment to do the right thing?  For de Waal, the “‘hearts of most species are not dark at all.’” According to Cummins, “de Waal might be considered to be reversing The Great Chain of Being, with our—human—better sides not the result of angelic emulation but rather rooted in the altruistic inclinations of so-called beasts.” But is it a matter of “degree or kind?” For instance, asks Cummins, would a “furious bonobo” nuke an enemy? Or is it just that humans have more advanced technology?

 Cummins’ response to de Waal stimulates thought. He states, “People, for the most part know in advance the learned acceptable behaviors of their societies.” The question is, how thin is the veneer of civilization?  If there isn’t a Conradian heart of darkness in the human species, how do we account for the great evils of the past?

One of the most argumentative issues Cummins takes up is animal agriculture.  In his review essay “Eating Intelligent Beings,” he considers three different perspectives on meat eating.  Overall, the authors of the three books Cummins reviews “view nonhuman animals as complex beings deserving benevolent consideration, arguing for better treatment than now exists.” Where they disagree, he states, is on the question of slaughtering animals for food in spite of their shared position that animals should have “certain basic rights.”  But, as Cummins notes, if animals don’t have the right not to be slaughtered for food, “do any other rights matter?”

One author on the subject, Elisabeth de Fontenay, in Without Offending Humans: A Critique of Animal Rights, grants animals rights but not the same rights as humans.  Fontenay argues for benevolent slaughter. Another author, Alasdair Cochane, in Animal Rights Without Liberation, argues that it’s wrong to kill sentient animals. They have a right not to be killed.  The third, Margo DeMello, in Animals and Society, writing from the perspective of a new field, Critical Animal Studies, states: “As humanoids evolved and brains became larger, they formed societies of big-game hunters….twenty-first century humans descend from thousands of years of meat-eating ancestors.” DeMello opposes factory farming since it’s not “natural.” Animals are reduced to “products” and not treated as “sentient beings.” Still, she doesn’t say that animals have a right not to be killed. She’s just opposed to cruelty in factory farms.

 Of the three authors on this subject of animal rights, Cummins goes with Cochrane: “Before reading him, I would have been satisfied by the similar positions of de Fontenay and DeMello.” He was already eating free-range chickens. “But now I cannot deny that after a few months of good times the range-free hen is still killed and hacked apart so I can devour a drumstick or a slice of white meat.”

The subject of eating animals is a very sensitive one.  Cummins, for instance, writes that the reality is that people won’t want to give up their steaks and Big Macs. Most meat-eaters purchase meat that’s been factory farmed. “I can survive without being a carnivore,” states Cummins. “Life is the ultimate right for both human and nonhuman animals. To conclude less is a rationalization.”  How do we justify animal suffering in factory farms outside of the highly questionable ethic that might is right?  In The Ethics of What We Eat, Peter Singer and Jim Mason state: “What factory farms do to animals, nearby residents, and the entire planet’s environment, they do because people are accustomed to eating these animal products and can’t imagine a meal without them, or because they like the way they taste.  These are not ethical justifications, given the harm these practices cause.  Supporting factory farming by knowingly buying its products is wrong.”

As these authors point out, concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, not only treat animals inhumanely but are also destructive to the environment.  As Cummins notes, these factory operations result in 1.5 billion annual tons of waste.  They are also a major contributor to global warming.  Even so, the ten big environmental groups have shied away from dealing with animal agriculture, as we see in a recent Netflix expose, Cowspiracy

If animals are threatened by humans, we humans are threatened by robots.  Is what is slouching toward Bethlehem a post-human world?  And is it slouching or rapidly advancing, fully cognizant of what it’s doing—and aiming for? How serious should we take AI and robotics?  In “Will Robots Displace Human Workers,” Cummins looks closely at this issue.  He quotes Stephen Hawking: “‘The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’”  For Cummins, “The most extreme threat identified by a number of alarmed and famous scientists is human domination by a ‘race’ of intelligent and self-replicating computerized devices, robotic and otherwise.”  But this apocalyptic view isn’t the only way of looking at the problem. “A less existential possibility would have humans becoming superfluous for many occupations, and not just the production of Volkswagens and the like.  On the list would be medicine, law, finance, and other fields that provide high salaries.” For the pessimist, “robotics and AI will make the great majority of human workers obsolete and irrelevant.” For the optimist, robotics will mean “new careers, new opportunities, and new occupational satisfactions.”

Cummins’ chapter is sobering. The domination view might remind one of HAL—or IBM (with each letter moved backwards one notch)—in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Are we humans about to be subjected to the workings of a complex computer—an AI takeover?  At one time this was science fiction, but it seems much less the product of the imagination today if we consider machine learning. How autonomous might robots eventually be? If the grim Hawking view isn’t something that will ever materialize, then what about the possible loss of many, if not most, career opportunities and jobs?

Seeking Authenticity deals with a broad range of topics of social and cultural importance: humanoids, meaningless work, guns in our culture—and the purpose of college.  This book digs deeply into its subjects. Each chapter, whether essay or review, is thought-provoking and engrossing.