The Ethical Dilemma of Preservation

Have you ever wondered what it might be like to live in the stone age? Fred and Wilma Flintstone had it easy compared to modern stone age peoples who survive in remote corners of the globe.

Scientists speak of “Uncontacted Tribes” that live in remote regions of South America, India, and a few other places. Every now and then, one of these tribes is mentioned in the news and there is a brief international sensation until the next drama draws away media attention.

In addition to those Uncontacted Tribes there are various groups of people who speak rare languages. Not entirely cut off from the modern world, these small groups don’t sit in skyscrapers or drive cars to work. The newest discovered language, Koro, is spoken by fewer than 1,000 people in northeast India and researchers fear the language may be dead and forgotten in 10-20 years.

There are approximately 6900 spoken languages around the world today. The Linguistic Society of America has published a paper that attempts to frame the number of spoken languages in a way that makes sense to the average person. The Ethnologue Website is sort of the unspoken authority on how many languages there are. They list over 7400 primary language names. As of this writing, Koro is not yet listed among India’s languages.

One should wonder how many other lost languages are wandering around the globe, forgotten or never encountered by outsiders. These languages represent philological imprints on the human experience. Language preserves what we know of our past far better than many books, museums, and artifacts. The words we keep and the words we cast aside say a great deal about what is important to us.

Those words also provide us with insight into how our ancestors lived, the world they lived in, and the things that were important to them. In some ways, languages are snapshots of moments in human social evolution, but living languages are constantly evolving. It is that constant evolution that points out an ethical dilemma that has yet to be recognized or resolved.

Let us suppose that scientists announce today that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth. And let us further suppose that scientists have figured out a way to save 25% of the human population on Earth, along with a subset of plants and animals that should allow humankind to survive.

This scenario raises several ethical questions. First, do we have the right to decide whether another intelligent species should live or die? You might be thinking of whales or dolphins, but there are many more intelligent species on Earth. In fact, we haven’t really pinned down what constitutes intelligence and many people often confuse self-awareness with intelligence.

It is commonly believed that an intelligent creature must be self-aware — but science has yet to prove that. In fact, science has cast doubts on the self-awareness of many intelligent species. A recent experiment showed that monkeys can be self-aware. People have noticed through the years that dogs and cats may be fascinated with their own reflections. Not long ago my own dog was barking at himself in a mirror, apparently thinking he was barking at another dog. When I absent-mindedly said to him, “Stop that! That’s you!” he looked at me with what I could call a quizzical expression and then looked back at his reflection. He stood there staring at himself for several minutes, seemingly fascinated.

Dogs, we now believe, can understand about 300 words. I can tell my dog to get on the couch, go to mommy, come eat, or do many other things and he behaves as if he understands me. If I had to choose definitively — based on what I have seen in dogs — whether dogs are self-aware, intelligent creatures, I would favor the YES category. I might be wrong, but science hasn’t really figured out what the correct answer is.

If dogs and monkeys are or can be self-aware, however, then what does that say about apes and cetaceans (whales and dolphins)? What about parrots, some of whom have reportedly held interesting and possibly intelligent conversations with strangers? Are they intelligent enough to be considered an interesting species? Some researchers say they are.

Intelligence even extends down to the bees, who use democracy better than humankind. Ants set up farms and practice animal husbandry. Only a few years ago anyone would have said these animals are doing things “by instinct” but instinct is a poorly defined catchall that doesn’t really explain why animals (or people) do anything at all. Instinct is a word we use to mask our ignorance about why animals behave the way they do.

There is, undoubtedly, a truthfulness to instinct. Animals that have never given birth before seem to do pretty well at birthing babies without boiling water and calling for the midwife. And yet, is that instinct or just the genetic code of our bodies forcing things to happen in a certain way? Do migratory animals hone in on their pathways by instinct or are there biological processes at work that pretty much guide them?

These questions are bound up with the question of intrinsic value. What is the intrinsic value of a species? Who has the right to make that determination? We have the ability to project ourselves beyond the Earth. To the best of our knowledge, no other intelligent species on Earth has done this. Does that one distinguishing factor give us the right to decide which species should survive in the event of a world-threatening disaster?

This question is pertinent to our ethical purposes because it exaggerates into a clearly visible level the issue of what moral rights we have to make choices for others. Take those stone age peoples who remain “uncontacted”. If the world were to be destroyed, would we make an effort to save at least a few of those tribes? Would we take the Star Trek path of putting them to sleep and transporting them without their knowledge, or would we try to tell them what is going on? Would we force them to go with us, if we could save everyone on the planet?

For that matter, is it morally and ethically right to leave stone age peoples living in the stone age? History teaches us that aboriginal peoples tend to suffer tremendously when they come into contact with advanced civilizations. Disease and abuse may wipe out an entire population. When the Europeans came to the Americas, they treated the Native Americans like primitive Europeans — that is, they fought with the natives, traded with the natives, mingled with the natives, enslaved the natives — even went so far as to impose their own laws and governments on the natives.

The 400-year-long experiment in social engagement between long lost branches of humanity was tumultous, riddled with conflict, and resulted in the loss of uncounted numbers of nascent societies and languages. But today many people of Native American descent live alongside people of European descent. Socially the European descendants are doing better for the most part but Native American peoples in some areas are starting to develop and wield considerable economic and political power. It may take several more centuries before all things are equalized.

We live with a certain amount of guilt over the excesses that the European nations engaged in across the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Africa. Throughout human history cultures and civilizations have clashed and the victors have divided the spoils among themselves. No corner of the human-inhabited Earth has escaped conflict and wars. Primitive peoples have fought with each other for thousands of years.

For the first time in human history, mankind has begun to pause and wonder if maybe all the killing isn’t irrational and completely detrimental to the survival of the species. We have begun to establish protections for primitive, isolated peoples so they are not ruined by the outside world. And it can be reasonably shown that those peoples — making no effort to contact the outside world — seem uninterested in it.

But even so, if we could manufacture an ideal society today –one where peace and plenty allow us to prosper and eliminate conflict, where we enjoy long lives and good health, and where we can do whatever we wish — would such a society be doing the right thing to exclude our more primitive brothers? Does keeping primitive peoples primitive not constitute a form of slavery, where they become our protected pets?

At what point is it right to share knowledge (without imposing it) and when does the withholding of knowledge become abusive and detrimental to the wellbeing of others?

We have to answer these questions because as more dying languages are identified the call to “preserve” them will grow louder. But who will benefit from the preservation of dying languages? Certainly the preservers will benefi for they find a certain sense of accomplishment in the act of preservation. But what about the peoples who are abandoning their own languages? Are they not making at least a semi-informed choice to abandon the languages spoken by their ancestors?

Is it not their right to make that choice?

If a stone age man wanders out to a boat filled with scientists and by gestures indicates to them, “Take me with you”, are they not ethically and morally obligated to introduce him to the outside world? If they were to do so and be roundly condemned by various scientific and governmental bodies around the world, would it not be the scientific and governmental bodies that were in the wrong because they were denying free choice to a primitive human?

At what point do we accept other people — indeed, other intelligences — into our circle of privilege and allow them to share in the decisions we make each day about what stays and what must go? We are inevitably changing our landscape and our ecology — and those processes have been ongoing since life first arose on this planet. We are not, as self-aware humans, any more guilty or entitled — or any less so — than the primitive algae that first breathed oxygen into the atmosphere, forever altering the Earth’s biochemistry.

Life has made its choices time and time again through the eons but now we here and we know that we are here and we are struggling to make conscious, collective choices. If this is the first time in the history of Earth’s life that such choices are being pondered, then will our attempts at preservation not complicate those choices, rather than simplify them?