squirrels against humanity: a rant on the convenient narrowing of responsibility
and on the necessity of unpaid favours!
I lately read/listened to the story of Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s second round of dead squirrel drama, and the primary antagonists’ behaviour struck me as a perfect example of a kind of antisociality that bothers me: hyper-specification of what people think is their social duty; social decency as job description.
What went down, best as I can summarise, is this: during sidewalk construction outside PMB’s home, a squirrel died, tragically. Knowing from her last dead squirrel saga and from common sense what happens to a squirrel’s corpse and the general inconvenience of having one on a pathway, PMB wanted the squirrel disposed of. The sidewalk construction presented some complications, making it difficult at best for PMB to dispose of the corpse herself. Okay, enough with the logistics, here’s where all of society is threatened, which is what I want to write about.
PMB asked nearby city workers to deal with their puffy-tailed victim, and they refused to. At one point—and this is what wiggled my cultural analysis antennae—one of the workers claimed angrily that PMB should’ve asked more politely, and as she put it: “The phrase ‘not my job’ I believe entered into it.” (Sorry for breaching the paywall, but I hope my minor post gets that post at least two more views to make up for it?)
Okay, “not my job.” There we have it, that’s the subject of my rant. I can only speak for where I grew up, but I can imagine if a manly man were asked—especially by a woman—to move a small dead animal, he would typically be thrilled to do the duty. It would just be normal within the duties and enjoyment of being a dude. Yes, I’m gender-stereotyping here, but I’m being up-front about this being anecdotal. Note that this duty would not be carried out as a city worker, it would be as a guy.
To genderswap that scenario for a second, as a teen, I knew a big man who was terrified of snakes. Being as I am irrationally terrified of dogs, yes of h*cking pupperinos, I can understand extreme fears of smallish critters. I also had a woman friend, a mentor of mine, who was absolutely not afraid of snakes. She’d grab a black or garter snake just to show it to her kids. I recall that at one point the big man had to have someone else come extract a black snake from his patio, and I don’t think it was my friend who did it, but I can imagine her making the short drive to do that. The gender stereotypes are reversed there, which backs up my radical idea that any one person who can do a thing goes and does a thing for a person who can’t, for no pay, not as a job, just as a… I don’t know, as a thing one does!
When my family had some big oak trees cut down (sad!) at my childhood home, the workers realised I’d like a giant chunk of one of the stumps, so they put it on a bulldozer and drove it out to the woods, where I then used it as a platform on which to meditate, read, and write for a good while. And as a kind of gravestone at which to mourn the trees. They did this because they were dudes who like doing things for people and had the tools to do this big task for a kid. (And they were maybe aware I was sad that the trees were gone, I don’t remember the deets.)
Hypothetical reader, you get my point.
During Squirrel Saga 2, the city workers likely had plenty of basic equipment lying around with which to dispose of the squirrel — shovels, even just gloves, probably a dumpster or at least some trash bins. The ironic twist is that it literally was their job to deal with any damage they’d caused, but even if it weren’t, being decent citizens of the world, the normal behaviour should be: a person can’t do something necessary, I can do it easily, I do it. Simple. Normal behaviour. I hate to call it “prosocial,” because that term can make normal behaviour sound like it’s a calculated, rationalist method of optimising society.
In my domain, which is academia, we’ve become hyper-specialised, of necessity. Aristotle, who died at least twenty years ago, could write about basically whatever. By applying his brainpower, philosophical training, and work ethic, he could reach new discoveries in almost any new field he picked. His writings dominated the sciences for centuries in both the Islamic and Christian worlds.
Since modern scientific advances, we’ve simply learned a lot more about the world. There are too many pieces of information to keep them all in one brain, let alone to gather them all in one lifetime. Due to the sheer bulk of data and increasing precision across most academic disciplines, nobody can be the Aristotle of today. Nobody will be the world’s best physicist, biologist, botanist, psychologist, and so on, at the same time, in one lifetime. We pick lanes.
Even in the humanities, where Aristotle still exerts his greatest influence—his Poetics remains widely discussed in literary studies, for instance, and he influences Christian theology and ethics to this day thanks to figures like St. Thomas—he could not be a dominant figure across all domains. He could not be the world’s best literary critic and the world’s best theologian and the world’s best philosopher at the same time, simply because millions of pages have been written in myriad languages since his time that necessarily divide our attention. In Aristotle’s time, the reading required to master multiple disciplines was a lot smaller. Even what we now refer to as philosophy and science were one topic of study back then. Such is no longer the case.
I know that I need to be very tentative with my claims in fields that I haven’t studied much. This happens even in subfields of Shakespeare studies! I recently referenced an older paper that had blown my mind regarding one of the Bard’s plays in a room full of fellow early modernists, and multiple people instantly chimed in with discussion of important papers that had at best nuanced, at worst dismissed the claims of the paper I brought up. They weren’t rude, to be clear, but — it was not my subdisciplinary lane, truly. A lane within a lane within a lane… And I know better than to try to master all the lanes. It’s not my responsibility to, either. Nobody demands that a PhD candidate in English become an expert in quantum physics, or of every subfield in literary studies.
Unfortunately, I feel like intellectual pursuits’ fragmentation into precise lanes of responsibility is also becoming a norm in social life more broadly, in a damaging way. Excessive therapyspeak discussions of “boundaries” conveniently map ever smaller domains of responsibility for an individual, letting them off the hook for virtually any social decency. Everything can be framed as out of bounds if you dump lit Greek fire in your eyes and try to draw your boundaries with a crayon. Smarter people than I have written enough about the concept creep of “emotional labour” and I won’t try to add to that critique. Take what you can, give the bare minimum, is the vibe.
I like to think of society and relationships as give-give dynamics, not give-take. Life would suck if nobody at all ever gave to you, but still, I don’t think it’s helpful to think of favours as a balance sheet. It is really, really hard to quantify favours, and I hold that the over-statistics-ification of life is a terrible trend.
At this point I have begun chanting platitudes, engaging in my least favourite hobby of beating a dead horse (dead squirrel? too soon) but the story of the squirrel piqued my “schoolmarm” instincts — someone just called me a schoolmarm on here, minutes ago! What an honour. Squirrel Saga 2’s antagonist reframed a normal courtesy as labour, and his job description is his boundary of decency. The worker was in fact wrong about his job description, but even if he weren’t, that’s not the issue. The issue is that he didn’t automatically think to do the normal human thing of getting a shovel and disposing of the squirrel. He was instead litigious in a way that should’ve been embarrassing, thinking his social duties end at the limits of his contract. Hence my hasty writeup.
May the squirrel’s memory be a blessing, guiding us all to a better world. Amen.
"May the squirrel's memory be a blessing" - brilliant.