We’re gonna need a bigger ontology

Orca attacks prompt questions about being.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A boat holding a camera crew drifts next to a whale fin.

Filming Shetland's orcas.

BBC.

In May 2023, British sailor Iain Hamilton was aboard his yacht in the Strait of Gibraltar when it was set upon by a pod of five orcas who succeeded in biting off both rudders, leaving him with no means of steering his boat back to shore. These enormous killer whales could have destroyed the small boat in its entirety, rounding off their escapades by making a quick lunch of Hamilton and his crew. But instead, they seemed content to merely play with the small vessel, pushing it around “like a ragdoll” for a while, before swimming away to find their next meal elsewhere.

How do we explain such behaviour? Environmentalists have been quick to suggest that the orcas are demonstrating their frustration with the human race – carrying out revenge attacks on those callous two-legged beings who overfish their waters and pollute their habitat. Other commentators propose a less anthropocentric view. One leading zoologist, Mark Cowardine, attributes the whales’ behaviour simply to play, “Boisterous play, yes, by animals weighing up to six tonnes, but nothing more sinister than that.”

The phenomenon of whales attacking boats is not new. Herman Melville’s magnum opus Moby Dick (published in 1851) is a fictional tale of one such encounter, inspired in part by the real-life sinking of a ship, The Essex, during a whale attack in 1820. However, there appears to have been a surge in such incidents in European waters over the past few years – more than 500 orca attacks were recorded between 2020 and 2023 alone. It is thought to be largely the same pod of whales who are responsible, but scientist fear that other pods are beginning to learn the behaviour.

This raises the question: at what point should humanity intervene to prevent the spread of knowledge? Theoretically, it would be possible, to isolate the ring leaders and remove them from whale ‘society’ (send them to ‘whale jail’ if you like). And, let’s be honest, in previous generations, trophy hunters would have blithely exterminated the troublesome pod without a second thought. But we live in more enlightened times, wherein we respect nature’s right to be protected from human interference.

The whale world has its own language, with distinct dialects, and is even thought to have culture, including celebration of life events and rituals for grieving the death of a family member.

On the other side of the globe, this right has even been enshrined in law. Pacific Indigenous leaders from the Cook Islands, French Polynesia, New Zealand and Tonga have agreed a treaty that officially recognises whales and dolphins as having legal personhood. The Whanganui River in New Zealand is also recognised as a “legal person” – a move intended both to enact reparations for the damage done to the river by European settlers, and to protect it from any future harm by the human race.

A being that is recognised as having legal personhood is one which has “rights and duties itself and which can enforce these rights against other legal persons.” So far so good for a river, which is vulnerable, not sentient, and certainly needs protecting from our shocking ability to exploit and pollute the natural world. But what can we say about whales and dolphins? Unlike the river, they are sentient. The whale world has its own language, with distinct dialects, and is even thought to have culture, including celebration of life events and rituals for grieving the death of a family member. With such obvious evidence of moral intelligence, should we be considering the ‘duties’ inherent to a whale’s legal personhood, as well as the rights?

The whales still seem to be communicating the same message: our ocean is vast, and we can make you humans feel your tininess in it.

In parts of the Hebrew Bible, animals are already described as having personhood. In the creation story both humans and animals are described as having nephesh – a Hebrew word that is sometimes translated as ‘soul’, and which indicates certain aspects of what it means to be sentient and have a moral conscience. Intriguingly, God seems to employ this sentience – at times employing animals to communicate with humans.

One famous example even includes a whale. When the runaway prophet Jonah was thrown from a ship into the ocean, we are told that God directed a large fish to swallow him up, and after three days return Jonah to dry land to continue the work to which God has asked him to do. In another example, when the donkey of the prophet Balaam was being unfairly beaten, the Bible records that the donkey turned and said to his master, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me?”

It is clear that some of the biblical writers believed that God could and would use animals to communicate with the human race, either through their behaviour or even through direct speech. Therefore, these orca “attacks” make me wonder if God may still be doing so today. Whilst both humans and animals are described as having nephesh in the creation story, the story does then go on to distinguish humans as having ‘dominion’ over the created order. The idea of what it means to have ‘dominion’ has been interpreted differently through the centuries of Christian thought. In the time of Moby Dick, when the fashion for trophy hunting and taxidermy was at its height in the western world, dominion had a feel of superiority and dominance to it. These days, it is more common to hear ‘dominion over creation’ described in terms of responsible stewardship and care.

But whilst human culture has changed (arguably for the better) it is noticeable that between Moby Dick’s time and now, the whales still seem to be communicating the same message: our ocean is vast, and we can make you humans feel your tininess in it. The temptation is there for us to intervene, to prevent these boisterous orcas from perpetuating their violent behaviour. This would serve to silence the voice that reminds us, uncomfortably, of our fundamental human vulnerability on the ocean. But perhaps we should not be too hasty. We cannot know if, inherent to the personhood of whales, they have a ‘duty’ to keep us in our place. Perhaps it is even their God-given call to behave in a way that reminds us that creation is ultimately, untameably, wild. Listening carefully, we might yet discover that God is speaking to us in whale song.

Article

Belief

Christmas culture

Creed

Wisdom

16 December 2024

5 min read

How to have a philosophically happy Christmas

Raise a glass to the invasion of history by the author of history.

Charles Foster

Professor Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Law Faculty.

A fish eye lens view of a person standing silhouetted, looking up to a colourful night sky with the Milky Way across it

Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.

A few years ago, I had dinner with a well-known philosopher. Knowing that he is no friend of religion, and curious how he’d respond, I set about mocking the credulity of Christians and parroting the lines I’d so often heard: superstition degrades and obfuscates; let’s act and think like grown-ups, not craven children; we’re free to write our own rules, and we can write better rules than barbarous Levantine goat-herders; we’re brave enough to say that when we die we rot. And so on. The standard fare.

He looked at me over the top of his glass. ‘Have you never been taught’, he said acidly, ‘that if you destroy the premises of an argument, the argument collapses? The same is true of history.’

I’ve slowly learned that he was right.

‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’, asked John Cleese, as the leader of the People’s Front of Judea. He’s famously answered by his troops. The modern version of the question, which is just as embarrassing, is ‘What have the Christians ever done for us?’ The historian Tom Holland, not (as far as we know) himself a professed Christian, has made a good living by providing a long and meticulously documented list. I’m not going to review it here. My own personal list would include Chartres Cathedral, Paul’s tectonic notion that there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’ (and hence universal human dignity and suffrage), and Christmas.

The Christians say that Christmas is the commemoration of a historical fact: an invasion of history by the author of history; of creation by the creator.

This is too much for many to swallow. If that’s true for you, is it dishonest to celebrate Christmas?

A mathematician friend works on imaginary numbers. An imaginary number is a real number multiplied by the ‘imaginary unit’, i. i2 = -1, and so i = √-1. Think about it. It’s an impossibility. It’s absurd. Descartes talked about ‘imaginary numbers’ only to laugh at the idea. But they are enormously useful in real life. You are reading this on a phone or computer screen courtesy of imaginary numbers. Sometimes it’s worth suppressing, or at least muting, a contemptuous laugh. Tom Holland’s list, and mine, depend on theological and historical numbers that might (or might not) be imaginary. You don’t have to stop dubbing the numbers ‘imaginary’ – don’t stop having to call them ludicrous – to carry on reading your screen.

Christmas, for me, is a celebration not only of family, gluttony and intoxication, but of four facts (if the Christians are historically correct) and four principles which are generated by those facts - whether the facts are real or imaginary. The principles work, just as my computer screen does.

First: human agency is cosmically colossal. The invasion I mentioned above was invited (so preventing it from being rape) by a Palestinian Jewish girl. She could have said ‘No’, and so scuppered the whole project.

Second: Christmas drafts a completely new account of power. In the Christian story of Easter, all the powers of darkness are disarmed by one broken man dying on a piece of wood between dying criminals. It was a continuation of the story that began at Christmas: the birth, in a shitty stable, to a teenage mother accused of fornication, of a child soon to be a refugee, driven to another country to escape the murderous authorities. It’s all about the subversion of political and military power by the irresistible power of the powerless.

Third: the universe is surprising. Nobody predicted the invasion. Yes, I know the Christians say, with the confidence given by the retrospectocope, that there were hints in the Hebrew scriptures, but they weren’t seen at the time, and the most learned Jews today, even with the retrospectoscope, still don’t see them. Yes, I know that the ancient world was awash with tales of the impregnation of mortals by gods, and with virgin births (think of Dionysos, Attis, Romulus and Remus and many others). But they didn’t look remotely like this. Those tales were told to prop up conventional claims to power, not explode them. Bethlehem burst onto the blind side of history, injecting unforeseen possibility. The virgin conception smashed pre-conceptions. A new way of being had gestated. If that was possible, what wasn’t?

Fourth: The most revolutionary thing about Christmas, perhaps, is that it shows that mythos is real – part of the web and weave of reality.

After dinner at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 20 September 1931, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Hugo Dyson walked together along Addison’s Walk, part of Magdalen’s grounds. They were discussing the resurrection of Jesus. Lewis knew all about the ubiquitous tales of dying and rising gods. The Christian resurrection stories were no different, he said. They were poetically resonant, no doubt, but essentially ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.’

‘No’, said Tolkien. ‘They are not lies,’ There was a sudden rush of wind in the still night. In Lewis’s rooms the conversation continued into the early hours. The stories were indeed myths, Tolkien contended, but true myths.

This conversation propelled Lewis finally into Christianity.

The Christmas story suggests that Tolkien was right (and those notoriously mystical quantum physicists – some of the most adept handlers of imaginary numbers, by the way - are right): there is no robust boundary between history and legend, between physics and metaphysics, between matter and spirit. This, in fact, is our working assumption, whether we’re explicitly religious or not. However icy our reductionism, we think that we matter, that there is more than matter, and that whatever that ‘more’ is, it is heavier and more enduring than matter, and matters more than matter. We love our children far more than reciprocal altruism or kin selection suggests we should. However sturdy our atheism we dab our eyes at the St Matthew Passion and put flowers on our parents’ graves.

It is reassuring to have a festival which enjoins us to lift our glasses and toast the way we live when we’re being the kind of people we urge our children, our friends and our politicians to be. It commands us to admit mystery to the dining table, and to celebrate being as mysterious as we know we are.

Christmas, authentically celebrated, is part of the foundation on which rest Chartres cathedral, freedom, suffrage, dignity and many things we innocently and dangerously take for granted. Like it or not, that foundation, as the austere philosopher observed, is the premise of the argument for the civilization that until recently succoured us before we replaced it with – well, with what?