Cyril Nadar Week 11 - Greed is Our Doctrine, Cruelty is Our Blade
Out of the seven deadly sins – pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth– I would say that humans are the epitome of greed. Not of the tally of coins, but our eternal drive to conquer and dominate. This is not necessarily a bad thing, this “greed” allowed our ancestors to survive, however when you look at it from the perspective of nature, our actions are truly…evil.
In the 1850’s the whaling industry in America was booming. Before the discovery of crude oil, whale oil was used for illuminating lanterns, lubricating industrial machines, and used in products like soaps and candles. This industry was very lucrative, each whale catch netting $3000 or about $125,000 today. The whale – once the object of curiosity and wonder – ceased to be a sentient masterpiece of evolution and became instead, liquid gold.
Whaling expeditions would be sent from docks, famous ones such as New Bedford in Massachusetts sent hundreds of whaling expeditions that lasted years. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick gave us insight on how life was on these whaling ships and the visceral subjugations of the White Whale. Melville describes a “Nantucket sleighride,” where a whaleboat is dragged by a harpoon which is stuck inside a whale. The whale desperately tries to escape, pulling the boat miles across the ocean in a panicked state. The whale, exhausted and bleeding, starts to slow down, in which the whalers take their opportunities to hurl harpoons at its vital organs and sever its tail tendons. Then it dies, a miserable death of fear and agony.
What I find most greedy is our actions in this world. Human decisions to dismantle beauty, is it truly our place? The greed that once ensured our survival now disconnects us from the living world.
Hi Cyril! I found your perspective on the greed of humanity to be quite captivating, and also concerningly true. This very greed was what originally allowed humankind to establish civilizations, as even early humans were motivated by a desire to secure the most fertile land for the cultivation of their crops. Then, that greed expanded when humans began to want more territory than was strictly necessary for survival, and before long, humans were competing with each other for the best resources or land. Greed was also primarily what fueled the widespread practices of imperialism and colonization.
ReplyDeleteEven now, we humans have virtually no hesitations about destroying entire habitats and ecosystems for our own benefit. One of the most notable examples of this has got to be the severe deforestation that is occurring in so many places, as humans somehow believe that it is okay to chop down large portions of forests and jungles just so that we can have more space for things like cattle ranching, or other forms of industrial agriculture. We are literally trading away our beautiful trees, which provide us with oxygen and help fight climate change (which we also play a major role in causing!), for larger quantities of products that can hardly be considered worthwhile for the damage that they cost.
Also, humanity’s treatment of animals that they deem valuable, such as whales, as you mentioned, is sickening. Another example your blog reminded me of was about elephants being exploited for their tusks because of the luxury value of ivory. Even if one does not particularly consider themselves to be an animal lover, I don’t see how they could possibly look at a creature as magnificent as a whale or elephant and only see the beauty in the material things it has to offer. Thank you for sharing such a meaningful blog!
Cyril, I really appreciate the way you demonstrated the greed of humans with such a precise and relevant example. The first thing I thought of upon reading this blog was the question of whether or not humans truly deserve the title of the most advanced species. We may be intelligent and we may have created a functioning society but when it comes to power, I cannot think of a word other than primitive to describe the state of our society. People will do whatever they have to do to acquire power. As you demonstrated with the example of a whaling boat, morality and empathy are not given a second thought when the reward of power is on the line. As you express when you ask “is it truly our place,” who gave humans the right to consider ourselves above the rest of the animal kingdom? We developed long after many of them and will cease to exist while they are still here. There is so much that we should learn from the rest of the living world yet we are so ignorant simply because we have this preconceived notion that we are better. So many issues within our society could be fixed if we adopted the loyalty of elephants, or the empathy of dogs, or the community of whales. They are so much more advanced than us in so many regards yet we have a language with a name so obviously that makes us better (I am hoping my sarcasm is being conveyed). If there is one thing we can truly consider ourselves the best at, it is greed. It is our everlasting desire to be placed above everything else that exists. It is a sad reality we live in. Our greed should have ended once our survival was ensured. But now we feel as though we cannot stop until we have decimated the survival of everything that exists around us. Thank you for sharing this topic, I know I will be thinking about this for a long time to come.
ReplyDeleteHi Cyril! I find your blog extremely intriguing and incredibly true. Greed is one of the most dangerous things a human can feel, and leads to treacherous consequences that we are left to deal with. Yes, greed is what caused us to civilize, to gain land, to grow more powerful, to industrialize, and help reach the stage of evolution we are at now. However, it has also led us to take land that wasn’t ours, kill countless lives, and also fight with eachother over territories. There are even countless examples of greed besides our bloody history. Emotional greed, the pursuit of as much emotional power as possible, is a prime example of manipulation, in which someone seeks to gain control over the other. Or when humans strive to kill ecosystems of animals and plants just to gain fur for clothing or jewelry. Items that are extremely unnecessary are being bought and sold for our own pleasing are the result of us killing animals who have done us no harm. Creatures, who have every right to live in society just as us, are being hunted for food. Greed is never-ending, and can be the very thing that kills us all if we don’t learn how to control it.
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