The reason Usain Bolt is fast is not that his surname has a speedy word in it. And nobody would think it is. Similarly, the reason Tiger Woods is amazing at golf isn’t that his name has a type of club in it. Nobody would think it is either, except for the humorist in the New Scientist who suggested the theory of “Nominative Determinism” in 1994, theorizing that perhaps some people gravitate to fields that match their names. Really, these are just serendipitous coincidences. Names don’t give us clues about people in real life the same way they do in literature — where Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment means “divided one,” Dolores Haze from Lolita means “fog of pain,” and, in the other causal direction, the main character of Don Quixote gives us the word “quixotic.”
People usually have a pretty easy time keeping the idea straight that in the nonfictional world around us, names are not essences. Except when they don’t. One frustrating argument that came up over and over during the end of the Trump period was that “antifa” must be good because its name means “anti-fascist.” Antifa is the descendant of Antifaschistische Aktion, a Stalin-aligned group in Weimar Germany that Hitler found to be a very useful foil.
In 2020, the organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals leveled a charge at Chaokoh, a company that sells coconut products: Chaokoh’s supply chain involved “forced labor.” But it’s not what you think! Trained monkeys climb trees and throw coconuts down way faster, better, and more safely than humans can. In Thailand, they’ve been used to do so for 400 years or more. In October, a PETA campaign caused Costco to drop Chaokoh products. In the last week of January, PETA notched another big win, per ABC: “Target Drops Chaokoh Coconut Products Over Forced Monkey Labor Allegations.”
Forced monkey labor? I tripped on those words, because without getting into too much of a digression into philosophical theories of rights, my whole understanding of the problem with forced labor is that it is a breach of human rights. Humans have to be paid for their work, and we have to be allowed to decide to walk away from work. Animals? A horse in the rodeo obviously shouldn’t be beaten or starved, but it’s not a breach of the horse’s rights to keep it in a stable or deny it a wage. There are certainly unethical ways to treat animals. But breaching their labor rights? That’s not a thing.
Can monkeys do willful labor, anyway? PETA complained that the monkeys had been in chains, as though walking a pet dog on a leash would be like keeping a person on a rope. We’re both for the ethical treatment of animals, but my ethics and theirs are different.
Whatever ethical issues the Thai coconut monkeys raise are different from that of human bondage. Yet, looking further back at the coverage, I found an NPR piece that uses perhaps the most delightfully deranged phrase I’ve ever heard, from a PETA-aligned group, explaining their objection to the monkey coconut-pickers: “Animal-aware people are increasingly avoiding coconut products that come from monkey slavery.”
This is why you have to be very careful about nominative determinism. You may think “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals” sounds like they are sane people trying to do good, but that’s only if you’re going off their name. And names aren’t natures.
