Peace on Earth (1939)
Good animated shorts are hard to come by. I have a few favorites I keep going back to, especially in the mornings before work. There's one in particular however that I have a special fondness for, but it's the kind of fondness that leaves you with a weird ache inside. The following short features your typical menagerie of talking creatures, but it did something unique by placing them in a future where humans have eradicated all human life on Earth. A World War 3 scenario of sorts. The woodland creatures rebuild from the ashes of man, and make the most of the remains of a terrifying past. There is something humbling about this one that rises above and beyond mere sentimentality.
Which begs the question: since when did we become afraid of sentimentality? I know why we became afraid. That's not a very hard answer to situate at all: it's paradoxically linked to the rise of the cult of the intellectual and the unsentimental as a mode of life. As an unproductive mode of life, if I may add. And I do not mean to sound condescending when I speak of the "intellectual": on the contrary, and this is going to be a discussion for another day, but the intellectual life, the true intellectual life, is also running the risk these days of scaring people away, if not repulsing them at the same time. A love for reasoning, for intellect for intellect's sake, will be politely scorned today. This is precisely why sentimentality is scorned at too. The worm of productivity has invaded both sides, and each side thinks the other is the enemy.
However, animals and sentimentality are a wholly different set of bedfellows. I think back to Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (a novella I think about far more often than I thought possible). Without boring you with what it's about, I want to draw attention to one particular scene in that book: an ageing writer, quite renowned for her books, is giving a lecture at an University, attended by scholars and the public alike. But instead of discussing her books, she decides to talk about animals and animal abuse, which takes people by surprise, to say the least. It irritates a few, who have become so inured to repeated tirades by activists that they can almost smell the rhetoric that's coming their way before it even arrives. However, Elizabeth Costello takes a decidedly different approach: while her ultimate message is that we have been carrying out a crime of unprecedented scope for the last century or so which is even more catastrophic since it's not even recognized as such, her justification for taking this issue seriously strays far away from philosophical "proofs" as to why we should be kind to animals: not because they suffer, or are "almost as intelligent", or because they can reason or have children and so on and so forth, but because in their presence, it's almost impossible not to do so unless you're psychopathic. This is not quite how Coetzee puts it, but my reading of his book. Nevertheless, what Coetzee draws attention to is this notion of "presence": of actually being in the company of an animal, and how that changes your perspective towards the creature that is at stake. We don't see the animals we eat. If we did, perhaps we wouldn't be nearly as gratuitous in our celebration of a meat culture. This is, of course, a phenomenological argument and not a scientific one, but since when did we learn to distrust our senses so much? Granted, our senses are not immune from error, but there is a threshold after all. Who's to say that that threshold isn't enough?
Which brings us back to Harman's cartoon short, and the issue of sentimentality. Sentimentality is a paradoxical phenomenon, because arguably it's the most popular brand of emotion on sale these days, but it's almost universally reprimanded as well. A large part of this, I feel, is because of that threshold of error. For non-productive life, error is entertainment. Error is illusion, and illusion keeps anti-productive forces in check of course. It's only when error transgresses and infects the rational capability that it must be hunted down. But as I suggested earlier, reason and the intellect isn't immune to that strain either.
It's funny when you think about how Pynchon had decided to call Gravity's Rainbow Mindless Pleasures instead. A motif in that great book is how pleasures which serve no identifiable social purpose are perhaps what needs protecting the most in the time of mass disenchantment and wartime suffering. It does the heart good to see that it's not just me, but one of the greatest writers of our century too who subscribes to that view.
Which begs the question: since when did we become afraid of sentimentality? I know why we became afraid. That's not a very hard answer to situate at all: it's paradoxically linked to the rise of the cult of the intellectual and the unsentimental as a mode of life. As an unproductive mode of life, if I may add. And I do not mean to sound condescending when I speak of the "intellectual": on the contrary, and this is going to be a discussion for another day, but the intellectual life, the true intellectual life, is also running the risk these days of scaring people away, if not repulsing them at the same time. A love for reasoning, for intellect for intellect's sake, will be politely scorned today. This is precisely why sentimentality is scorned at too. The worm of productivity has invaded both sides, and each side thinks the other is the enemy.
However, animals and sentimentality are a wholly different set of bedfellows. I think back to Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (a novella I think about far more often than I thought possible). Without boring you with what it's about, I want to draw attention to one particular scene in that book: an ageing writer, quite renowned for her books, is giving a lecture at an University, attended by scholars and the public alike. But instead of discussing her books, she decides to talk about animals and animal abuse, which takes people by surprise, to say the least. It irritates a few, who have become so inured to repeated tirades by activists that they can almost smell the rhetoric that's coming their way before it even arrives. However, Elizabeth Costello takes a decidedly different approach: while her ultimate message is that we have been carrying out a crime of unprecedented scope for the last century or so which is even more catastrophic since it's not even recognized as such, her justification for taking this issue seriously strays far away from philosophical "proofs" as to why we should be kind to animals: not because they suffer, or are "almost as intelligent", or because they can reason or have children and so on and so forth, but because in their presence, it's almost impossible not to do so unless you're psychopathic. This is not quite how Coetzee puts it, but my reading of his book. Nevertheless, what Coetzee draws attention to is this notion of "presence": of actually being in the company of an animal, and how that changes your perspective towards the creature that is at stake. We don't see the animals we eat. If we did, perhaps we wouldn't be nearly as gratuitous in our celebration of a meat culture. This is, of course, a phenomenological argument and not a scientific one, but since when did we learn to distrust our senses so much? Granted, our senses are not immune from error, but there is a threshold after all. Who's to say that that threshold isn't enough?
Which brings us back to Harman's cartoon short, and the issue of sentimentality. Sentimentality is a paradoxical phenomenon, because arguably it's the most popular brand of emotion on sale these days, but it's almost universally reprimanded as well. A large part of this, I feel, is because of that threshold of error. For non-productive life, error is entertainment. Error is illusion, and illusion keeps anti-productive forces in check of course. It's only when error transgresses and infects the rational capability that it must be hunted down. But as I suggested earlier, reason and the intellect isn't immune to that strain either.
It's funny when you think about how Pynchon had decided to call Gravity's Rainbow Mindless Pleasures instead. A motif in that great book is how pleasures which serve no identifiable social purpose are perhaps what needs protecting the most in the time of mass disenchantment and wartime suffering. It does the heart good to see that it's not just me, but one of the greatest writers of our century too who subscribes to that view.
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