TOK@ISPrague

Why can’t the symphony require all music to be happy? Why can’t a human require all her moods to be happy? Art is supposed to represent, reflect, and confirm the fullness of the human experience; art is the means by which we, as a species, communicate with ourselves. To illuminate even a single soul requires evocation of an infinite depth of emotion, not just one emotion but a whole teeming catalog of them, spilling across days and years and lives, common moods popping up like motifs and disappearing. The sounds of life are written in every key; the sights are painted in every color. To deny this is to deny yourself. To deny art which is not happy is to wall off nearly all of your being from contact with the outside world. I suspect that someone who demands all music be happy has forgotten how to be truly happy.

An art display which invited the public to put live goldfish through a food blender did not constitute cruelty to animals, a Danish court has ruled. The goldfish were placed on display swimming in the blenders, and visitors were told they could press the "on" button if they wanted. At least one visitor did, killing two goldfish.

That cynicism was echoed this week across Pakistan, where conspiracy-minded citizens loudly branded Ms. Yousafzai a C.I.A. agent, part of a nebulous Western plot to humiliate their country and pressure their government. Muhammad Asim, a student standing outside the gates of Punjab University in the eastern city of Lahore, dismissed the Taliban attack on Ms. Yousafzai as a made-for-TV drama. “How can a girl survive after being shot in the head?” he asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Rather than selectively allowing certain critters into the club of species that are like us, we should probably simply remember that humans aren’t as special as we think we are. Instead of advocating for the protection of animals by leaning on their apparent similarity to our own species, perhaps we can just work to avoid needless suffering in all animals — human-like or not.

The borderlines between genuine science and pseudoscience may be fuzzy, but this should be even more of a call for careful distinctions, based on systematic facts and sound reasoning. To try a modicum of turtle blood here and a little aspirin there is not the hallmark of wisdom and even-mindedness. It is a dangerous gateway to superstition and irrationality.