The intent of this book and video review guide is to help us to live according to Kingdom standards which bring Heaven to earth.
I first met John Sanbonmatsu, a professor of philosophy at Worcester
Polytechnic Institute, at a 2007 conference on animals at Brock University,
in Ontario Canada, where we were both speakers. John urged me to develop my
talk, “Procrustean Solutions to Animal Identity Problems,” into the essay
which, following his masterful Introduction, leads off this volume of
critical inquiries into the social and psychological bases of humanity’s
relationship to nonhuman animals and the natural world. [See See Chapter 5,
“Procrustean Solutions,” in my book
The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale.]
Contributors examine how our hidden, institutionalized violence to animals,
epitomized by industrial farming and laboratory experimentation, coexists
with spectacles of human-caused suffering, degradation and destruction of
animals in “visible but not seen” forms, such as circuses and road kill. A
theme throughout is the conflict in human life between a desire for
“absolute mastery” over animals versus “a deep, primary disposition of
sympathy” for animals. Thus far, the desire for mastery has outstripped the
disposition of sympathy to such a degree that the driving forces of modern
life and their psychological underpinnings are inflicting unprecedented
terror and violence on animals across the earth.
Contributor Josephine Donovan cites a “process of deep social conditioning”
that obscures and represses humanity’s sympathetic identification with other
beings. In traditional societies, elaborate expiation ceremonies frequently
attend animal killings, and in modern society the public is prevented from
seeing laboratory experiments and slaughterhouse practices, suggesting that
people care about animals and shudder at hurting and murdering them. Yet the
question is why, instead of nurturing and cherishing the human-animal bond,
do human societies expend enormous ceremonial and institutional energy to
dampen, distort, and destroy this bond? If human sympathy with other
creatures is so deep, why is it so weak? Why do we create social
conditioning processes that subvert and pervert our bond with other animals,
damaging our psyches and theirs and the planet we live on?
Noting the obstacles that animals and animal liberation face, contributor
Renzo Llorente observes that even within social justice communities, most
people assume that, unlike oppressed human beings, animals are not part of
the moral community. Marx’s theory of human emancipation from “alienation”
and oppression underlying Leftist politics is antagonistic to animals and
animality. For humans to develop their full potential, Marxism holds that
the “animal life lingering in the human body and psyche” must be left behind
– an idea that contributor Zipporah Weisberg explores with a view to the
melancholia and other sorrows this way of thinking causes and which helps to
explain the indifference to animals even among people who oppose
exploitation and oppression, yet regard animal liberation as a “parody of
other liberation movements.”
Even so, Llorente and other contributors argue that Marx’s analysis of the
“alienation” and abuse endured by industrial workers, particularly those
toiling in the bottommost tiers of manufacture under capitalism in Third
World countries, applies to the situation of animals. Industrial workers
invisibly make the stuff we buy cheap without a thought of the toil that
went into each thing, because the “traces of production” are effaced from
sight in the final product. Similarly, the crushing oppression and wracking
afflictions of animals trapped in the hell of our oblivious consumer culture
are “seen” as “a nothingness,” as Carol J. Adams bleakly observes in her
discussion of the disappearance of living, breathing sentient beings into
food objects, pharmaceuticals and other consumer items in which the animals
who suffered and died miserably in their making are obliterated.
In “Procrustean Solutions to Animal Identity and Welfare Problems,” I examine the plight of chickens and other animals through the symbol of Procrustes, a mythological bandit who captures wayfarers and forces them to fit his iron bed. “Watching his victims approach his stronghold, Procrustes stretches or shrinks the bed in advance to predetermine their failure to fit into it so that he may torturously reshape them to suit his will. If the victims are too tall, he amputates their excess length; if they are too short, he stretches them to size.” I suggest that Procrustes is a particularly fit symbol of the false anthropomorphism humans use to force nonhuman animals to conform to constructions that are fundamentally alien and inimical to them. Because the needs and desires of animals and the wishes and desires of the humans who exploit them seldom coincide, a Procrustean solution is sought whereby the animal/argument is either cut down to size or stretched to fit the agenda. Animals are physically altered, rhetorically disfigured, and ontologically obliterated to mirror and model the goals of their exploiters. The Procrustean solution cuts and pastes the bodies and identities of other animals so that we may do with them as we please.
Critical Theory and Animal Liberation looks not only at the obviously hidden
suffering of animals on industrial farms and in laboratories but at the
plight of animals who suffer and die openly in front of our eyes through
human causation. The intersection of our “liberating” industrial highway
systems and the toll of animals wounded and killed by automobiles – not to
mention this system’s massive ecological and habitat destruction – is grimly
illuminated by David Soron in “Road Kill.” Soron shows how the quotidian
ubiquity of animals maimed and killed by automobiles has spawned a
profitable range of sadistic road kill toys, marketed to children, in which
the animal’s mangled body is mockingly “abstracted from the violent
encounter that caused its death,” similar to the way animals slaughtered for
food are abstracted from the violent destruction of their bodies on display
at the meat counter and mocked by advertisers as dying (eager) to be eaten.
Viewed impassively as mere collateral damage in the march of progress,
appropriated by entrepreneurs as a cheap source of marketable humor, animals
destroyed by vehicular traffic are relegated to the realm of “nobody’s
responsibility.” Even when they are visibly dead on the highway, road kill
animals are as unseen and unmourned by most drivers as are the millions of
animals painfully wounded by cars and trucks who “stumble off the road to
die out of sight.” Soron describes how one animal rights group (PETA) has
even gone so far as to exploit this situation by conducting a “victimless
meat” campaign, urging “die-hard meat lovers” to “turn vehicular victims
into vittles.”
Humanity’s wrongful relationship with others animals is attributed in this
book mainly to the corrosive effect of capitalism on our psyches and the
baleful effects of mainstream philosophy in the history of Western culture.
Animals through the ages have been variously portrayed as lacking souls,
minds and feelings. Humanity by contrast has accorded itself an array of
self-idolizing virtues and godlike attributes placing us closer to the
invented deities we worship than to our fellow animal mortals. Even the
doctrine of metempsychosis (transmigration of souls) has traditionally
viewed nonhuman animals, not as individuals in their own right deserving of
compassion and respect, but as possible embodiments of the unhappy souls of
humans under penalty for their sins by being trapped in a lower life form.
Depending on how this doctrine is interpreted, we either should not
slaughter animals because they may harbor a human soul in disguise (e.g.
Pythagorean doctrine), or else we should slaughter them in order to liberate
the human soul trapped within the lowly body of the calf or chicken we
coincidentally desire to eat (e.g. Hasidic doctrine).
Capitalism and the Western philosophic tradition reflect, reinforce, and
magnify our maleficence, but they are not its ultimate causes. Long before
capitalism, people were physically and conceptually assaulting animals.
Bullfights, cockfighting, gladiatorial spectacles, blood fiestas, voodoo
rituals, Hindu animal massacres, Muslim animal massacres, kaporos ceremonies
and countless other animal abuse practices predate capitalism across
cultural and religious lines. Being called “sacred” does not save animals.
Animals regarded as sacred have traditionally been mutilated and murdered in
that very guise for that very reason. Animals deemed “sacred” disappear into
symbolic, sacrificial designations and uses that are every bit as
obliterating of their actual selves, as disrespectful and indifferent to
them as individuals with feelings and lives of their own, as their
disappearance into meat is.
Today a movement on behalf of locally grown food, known as locavorism, is
underway. Inspired by Michael Pollan and others who boast their enjoyment of
butchering animals and watching them die, and the pleasure they derive from
these experiences and the resulting meals, the locavore movement is
informatively critiqued by Vasile Stanescu in “‘Green’ Eggs and Ham? The
Myth of Sustainable Meat and the Danger of the Local.” Locavores, unlike
Marxists, worship not only their own “souls” but also their own “animality”
instead of despising it, although they do despise actual animals. Animals
are not “sacred” to locavores like Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, who claims
that the chickens and other animals he “processes” have no souls, hence
killing them means nothing because they are nothing: “Animals are not
created in God’s image. So when they die, they just die,” he says, causing
Stanescu to observe that “One of the oddest parts of the locavore literature
is that even as its proponents graphically and indeed poetically describe
the abuses of the factory farms, at the same time they remove any reason why
anyone should be concerned at all. Since animals lack souls, we cannot
understand what, or even if, they think or feel. . . . As importantly, the
locavore position effectively undercuts future efforts to protect animals,
since it naturalizes the primary relation of domination upon which all forms
of violence against other animals hinge.”
Critical Theory and Animal Liberation contains much more food for thought
than I can begin to convey in this review. And whether capitalism is a cause
of animal misery and abuse that a different economic system might alleviate,
the fact is that modern capitalism is the overwhelmingly dominant system of
ruthless cruelty in whose grip the majority of animals now live, labor,
suffer, and die. For this reason, editor John Sanbonmatsu argues that animal
rights campaigns cannot afford to ignore the capitalist enterprise in which
animals are trapped, mutilated, murdered and shuffled around the globe by
the hundreds of millions every single minute of every day and night. To
ignore this reality, he says, “puts the movement at risk of merely
displacing, rather than eliminating, particular forms of animal slavery.”
Pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and agribusiness companies already outsource
animal experimentation and factory farming to countries where labor is cheap
and environmental and animal welfare laws are weak or nonexistent. Billions
of people want cheap animal products and animals have no ethical protection,
no ethical status whatsoever in the worldwide business community.
The plight of animals under global capitalism is revealed in Feedstuffs, the
weekly newspaper for agribusiness. An article on March 28, 2011 reports for
example that the U.S. and China are renegotiating U.S. pig exports to China
after the H1N1 swine flu virus epidemic in the United States caused China to
ban U.S. pig imports in 2009. The year before the ban went into effect,
“purebred swine exporters, collectively marketing under NSR’s [National
Swine Registry’s] America’s Best Genetics program, had shipped a record
7,200 head of swine to China valued at $12 million.” Moreover, “the live
swine trade issue was largely compounded by unrelated poultry trade
conflicts between the U.S. and China that stalled negotiations,” Feedstuffs
says.
A question for animal rights activists is how to formulate effective
campaigns that take global capitalism into account without burying the
animals in a rhetoric of abstraction and conglomerating them in so many
bundles of global issues and verbal obfuscation that, instead of helping
them, we further their disappearance from public consciousness. An example
of the many problems farmed animals face is the burgeoning business of farm
animal welfare “certification” programs, ranging from “standards” set forth
by industry trade groups like the National Chicken Council to groups
sincerely interested in improving the lives of animals but without
disturbing their status as food such as the Animal Welfare Institute.
A new player on the certification stage is the Whole-Foods-initiated
nonprofit organization called Global Animal Partnership. Founded in 2008,
GAP rates the husbandry practices and conditions of factory-farm companies
willing to pay for this service in order to boost their business, on a scale
of 1 to 5, and markets the ratings to consumers. The details of the overall
certification enterprise exceed the limits of this review, but there is
every reason to expect that the travails of farmed animals will increasingly
be marketed in Smiley Face guises of so-called Compassionate Standards.
Whole Foods and its imitators, as John Sanbonmatsu points out in
Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, have found a way to increase
consumption of animal products through a slick rhetoric of “green”
capitalism and “humane” farming couched in campaigns that, appearing to care
about animals, actually exploit them and sabotage animal rights.
Fortunately, the ethical vegan movement is growing. It is up to all of us
who truly care about animals, who hear their voices and respect them for who
they are, to swell this movement mightily and bring others – all others –
along with us.
Art by Sue Coe
Thus far, the desire for mastery has outstripped our disposition of sympathy
with animals, but we can change ourselves and the course of our culture if
we want to.
John Sanbonmatsu is associate professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of The Postmodern Prince.
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