Fish Out of Water (Notes on Evolution and Cruelty)

According to a report in the New Scientist, blenny fish - fed-up with the predatory behaviour of their aquatic neighbours - are abandoning life beneath the waves of the South Pacific Ocean and gradually relocating to dry land. It's 400 million years after others of their kind first made the move and kick-started an evolutionary process that eventually produced us. But still, better late than never and I wish 'em the best of British.

The case is interesting because scientists have never been entirely certain why fish first chose to exit the sea and crawl gasping onto terra firma. After studying several species of blenny, however, researchers at the University of New South Wales have concluded that it's most likely an attempt to avoid being eaten by bigger fish, such as flounders. This desire to escape is an understandably strong impetus.

Of course, it's not all sweetness and light up here on land and there are still dangers awaiting for the blennies as they shuffle around the rocks - such as bird attacks. But predation risk is significantly less, however, than it is underwater. In fact, once they pick up their piscine courage and make the full transition - developing stronger tail fins so as to be able to leap about more successfully - their chances of being eaten drop by about two-thirds (66%).

Further, moving onto land has additional benefits for blennies; holes in the rocks, for example, provide conveniently sheltered spaces for laying eggs. So it's really a move worth considering seriously if you're a small fish. In fact, one is surprised that it hasn't been tried more often and by more types of fish other than the estimated 30-odd families that have made the crossing between worlds. 

That said, Nietzsche reminds us in the Genealogy that it is never easy for any creature to make such a fundamental change. For fish, becoming land animals was as difficult, as painful, and as terrifying as it was for the animal man to become a creature capable of making promises; a creature restrained by a morality of custom and subject to an internalisation of cruelty; a creature made regular and predictable and weighed down by bad conscience; a creature, in short, made human, all too human.    

Like us, the blenny fish is the result of millions of years of evolution. But only man has shaped himself through thousands of years of self-torture; indeed, this is what we have had the longest practice doing and wherein our genius as a species lies.    


See:

Alice Klein, 'These fish are evolving right now to become land-dwellers', New Scientist (16 March 2017): click here to read.

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), particularly the Second Essay. 

La tyrannie de la pénitence

Princeton University Press (2010)

Described by Douglas Murray as one of the landmark books of our time, Pascal Bruckner's The Tyranny of Guilt develops a line of argument that he first advanced two decades earlier in The Tears of the White Man. Namely, that the Western world has spent the last sixty years so consumed by remorse for its own history that it is now on the verge of apologizing itself out of existence.    

Our self-hatred and self-contempt is matched only by our sentimental insistence on the innocence and innate moral goodness of those peoples upon whom we once imposed our imperial values and the evils of slavery, racism, and genocide; evils which, mistakenly, the West now believes it invented and have a monopoly on.

Nietzsche describes this pathology of guilt, shame, and self-division as bad conscience and whilst Bruckner doesn't refer directly to the second essay of the Genealogy, he acknowledges that Nietzsche understood better than most how the internalization of cruelty, practiced so remorselessly within Judeo-Christian culture, was continuing within secular liberal society; intensifying the pain and creating a duty of repentance.       

Bruckner seeks to understand this phenomenon and how it unfolds in the world today. And, importantly, he attempts to counter it by offering us some theoretical tools of opposition. Of course, to his enemies - and he has many - this attempt at a revaluation of values within the West is seen as reactionary and ethnocentric. He is accused in France of neo-conservatism and Islamophobia due to his opposition to multiculturalism, his staunch defence of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and his admiration for the United States. 

But accusations such as this are as tiresome and as trite as they are predictable. Bruckner may not get everything right, but he deserves to be read and taken seriously. The Tyranny of Guilt is a brave, lucid, and provocative text that challenges readers not only to think - but to care and be concerned about the world in which they live. 

 
Note: Pascal Bruckner studied under Roland Barthes and belongs to that generation of French intellectuals who emerged during the 1970s known as les nouveaux philosophes. He is the award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novel Lunes de fiel (1981), which was made into a little remembered film, Bitter Moon (1992), directed by Roman Polanski, starring Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas.