I slap a mosquito and flick it off my arm. I squish a spider and wipe it off the counter. I use a paper towel to grab a centipede, wad it into a tight ball and throw it into the trash. Ick. Good riddance.
But what is it I'm doing?
Occasionally when I'm reading a book, a passage will twang something deep. Hugh Raffles' *Insectopedia, a book that garnered some notoriety a few years back, contained a number of bits like that, but one in particular really hit home. Here Raffles is paraphrasing a popular Japanese science writer named Yoro Takeshi:
Each tree is its own world, each leaf is different. Insects taught him that general nouns like "insects," "trees," and "leaves" and especially "nature" destroy our sensitivity to detail. They make us, conceptually as well as physically, violent. Oh, an insect, we say, seeing only a category, not the being itself.
The being itself. An insect. Millions of years of evolution producing a biological marvel we don't fully understand and, I would argue, can't fully understand. It's just and insect.
How much more of the world and the beings in it do we diminish with our categories, our nouns?
This is a philosophical can of worms that goes back to at least Plato. I can't claim to have sorted it all out but, for my part, I have reached a peace accord with the insects and arachnids: If they don't bother me, I won't kill them.
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