When caught being cruel to an animal, my daughter was told: “Animals have feelings.” To this she responded: “Yes, but do they know it?” I plan to talk about this and other philosophical problems during my first Pop Life reading at Hidmo. The whole business happens on Sunday between 5 and 6 pm.

Another thing to consider: an ant is more complex than a star.

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Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

19 replies on “The Meaning of Pop Life”

  7. Also consider that every atom in the ant (and everything else you see) besides hydrogen and some lithium was produced by stars billions of years ago, thousands of light-years away.

    Not that it’s a counter-point or anything, it’s just great to think about.

  8. I am somehow not shocked that the child of a Stranger staffer would be cruel to an animal. Kids usually fall into one of two camps: 1) those that instinctively like, and want to interact with, animals, and 2) cruel little shits. That your child would be dubious of an animal’s feelings seems par for the course. Complete her Stranger education by making sure she loves bacon and bicyclists, and despises President Obama because he hasn’t fought for gay rights at the expense of everything else.

  12. _of course_ it’s more complex than a star. Simple objects come first. Otherwise the universe would be rather more weird, illogical and hard-to-figure-out than it is.

  16. Philosophical problems? Mudede needs to get his head out of the clouds and return to his mundane parental responsibilities if his daughter is so devoid of empathy that she’ll abuse animals and then manipulate daddy with a glib “Yes, but do they know it?” after he’s informed her that animals have feelings.

    Then again, maybe her mother is a Viking.

  17. If they have feelings, that implies that they can feel their feelings, and therefore they know they have feelings.

  18. I just want to push back against the idea that stars are less complex than ants. There are two problems: 1) what measure of “complexity” are you using? If the complexity has to do with the kind that’s necessary for life, then of course ants win, but I don’t know what objective measure you’d use to determine this.

    2) Stars are actually really complex! I had a friend with a phD in physics from Oxford and his thesis was on one aspect of solar physics. He was amazed at how much there was to a single star, so that he said in wonder one day that “I wonder if we will ever have the capacity to understand the whole of a single star.” The sun has layers, and each layer has currents like our ocean, the sun goes through seasons and has weather patterns, and there is very much about what causes these that we don’t understand. It just looks simple from the outside because it’s a giant ball that burns, but there’s a lot more subtlety to it than that.

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