Hacker News Reader

Comment by doorman2 | Hacker News Reader

What was it about the 20th century that produced such heartless people? Lead exposure? I understand that the 20th century is far from an aberration in terms of human cruelty, but there is an element of sadism that feels different than other centuries.

For instance, read the first sentence from Harlow's Wikipedia page:

> Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905 – December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development.

Did we really need to torture these creatures for decades to understand the importance of care giving? The experiments seem like a flimsy pretext for torture.

View on HN

You can't really explain these things, but you might be able to explain this guy.

>In 1971, Harlow's wife died of cancer and he began to suffer from depression. He was treated and returned to work but, as Lauren Slater writes, his colleagues noticed a difference in his demeanor.[6] He abandoned his research into maternal attachment and developed an interest in isolation and depression.

From the wikipedia page.

I don't know about you, but when I think about the cruelty and sadism of the 20th century, I think about all of the wars and mass murders. Animal cruelty sort of pales in comparison to all of that. I'm not saying this to deflect from your question; I literally think this is part of the explanation.

Going back to poor Laika for a moment, you could adapt an old, morbid joke: "we're going to murder all the kulaks and one dog." "Why the dog?" "Why the kulaks?"

Just anecdotal, but some older people I've known who grew up on farms are probably the most indifferent to animal suffering, as long as the animal provides meat or whatever their utility is. Animal welfare is only a thing kids are concerned about that they need to grow out of. Combine that attitude with the growing scientific revolution and desire to partake in scientific experiments and such, and I could see how this emerges.

I don't know about the US, but in my neck of the woods that's still the case. Rural folk don't care about animal welfare at all — you'd be laughed out of the room for trying to discuss something like that. Feeding chickens and pigs for meat and then slaughtering them is just something you normally do.

Having spent a decent chunk of my childhood in a rural area (and seen many pigs being killed by various methods, none of them very humane), I also don't care about this stuff too much tbh.

To them animals are tools, not feeling creatures. And in their defense for virtually all of human history, except for recently animals were always tools.

Judaism actually has a law called "Tza'ar ba'alei chayim" which prohibits unnecessary suffering to animals, and mandates a procedure for painless slaughter. This was unprecedented for its time - back then no one cared at all.

> Did we really need to torture these creatures for decades to understand the importance of care giving?

Yes, we did. Look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitalism people didn't even understand how much humans need care, never mind animals. The people placing these babies into care did so with the best intentions, but insufficient knowledge.

Your knowledge comes from these experiments.

> In 1945, the psychoanalyst René Spitz published an article in which he explained how deprivation of social interactions can lead to a condition named "hospitalism" in infants. According to Spitz, young children who are cared for in institutions can suffer from severe impairment in their development because they are not provided with sufficient maternal care.

We figured this out without needing to torture monkeys. Apparently, though, this was not sufficient for Harlow, as he created his pit of despair almost 30 years later.

We could have done most animal experiments on humans instead but our species has long set up rules that favor the exploitation of "other" over ourselves.

2022 and some people are still being tortured for more than 20 years in Guantanamo bay without charge or a proof of committing a crime, we can just blame lead exposure of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com