Linked Oppressions: Privilege vs. Stench
Animals: Tradition - Philosophy - Religion Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

The Peaceable Table
December 2016

The world has often been seen as divided between the privileged and those deprived of privilege. In fact there are in some cases a large gray area between them, middle classes of various sorts. But in societies with an extreme imbalance of power-- where the privileged humans are very few, very wealthy, and very powerful while the vast majority are oppressed, exploited, and subject to violence, one factor that usually separates them is the presence or absence of bad smells.

Nowadays, in the vast animal death-row prisons confining thousands of innocents condemned since before birth to be killed and eaten, the stench is so horrendous as to sear the victims’ lungs, and probably contributes to the rather high rate of those who die even before the reaching the slaughterhell.

This issue of foul smells points up one of the areas of overlap between oppressions.

maggie's farm
Photo is from Maggie’s Farm

The links between the oppressions of humans and of animals are not news, but it is always helpful to increase our awareness of both. Not only does being able to speak thoughtfully of human oppressions equip our minds and widen our hearts, it helps to show human-rights activists and others that we cannot be dismissed as one-issue people, unable to care or talk about anything but animals. We human animals are bound together with all the other kinds.

The world has often been seen as divided between the privileged and those deprived of privilege. In fact there are in some cases a large gray area between them, middle classes of various sorts. But in societies with an extreme imbalance of power-- where the privileged humans are very few, very wealthy, and very powerful while the vast majority are oppressed, exploited, and subject to violence, one factor that usually separates them is the presence or absence of bad smells.

Stench, Past and Present

Like the Foul Stable: What I Learned on a Family Farm in the December 2011 Peaceable Table, dealt with the uncomfortable fact that one of the elements in the Nativity story of Jesus’ birth in a stable--an element that is nearly always omitted from discussions and artistic treatment--is the fact that animal sheds of all kinds invariably include nasty sights and smells. Nowadays, in the vast animal death-row prisons confining thousands of innocents condemned since before birth to be killed and eaten, the stench is so horrendous as to sear the victims’ lungs, and probably contributes to the rather high rate of those who die even before the reaching the slaughterhell.
This issue of foul smells points up one of the areas of overlap between oppressions. Before running water and machine-powered transportation, people commonly used animals, especially horses, as mounts or hooked them up to pull the vehicles in which they traveled or transported goods. A few of these animals were cherished, but for the most part draft and other “domestic” animals’ lives were grim, as typified in the expression “England was a hell for horses.” The jobs of driving them (in all weathers) and caring for their physical needs, including the particularly obnoxious one of cleanup, was usually relegated to poorly-paid, “low” people, grooms and stable “hands.” Small-hold farmers, who themselves had to do the driving and tending of “their” animals, were also “low.” Butchers, surrounded by both stench and blood, were and are held in contempt as “low” by those who approved and paid for the products.

teacup

In Western cultures, leisured gentry and aristocrats employed “low” servants, most of them ill-paid, to take care of the work of their households, including disposal of their garbage and excreta. Whether these servants were fully human was often questionable; they were usually invisible, and marriage of a gentry or aristocratic individual to virtually any of them was unthinkable (though of course they could be raped with impunity, and one of them who was accused of raping a “real” person might face death). In countries where chattel enslavement of humans was an integral part of the economy, race and class exploitation coincided; for centuries, Black lives have emphatically not mattered.

In the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries and into the twentieth, people who made their living by factory work, with its long hours and small pay, crowded into dense cities where they lived in jerry-built houses and apartment buildings sans plumbing. The poor usually lacked time or energy to carry in more water than just enough for drinking and simple cooking; they had no servants to carry in bath water, wash their clothes, or carry out their excreta (nor, often, any place except the street to dispose of it), and the upper classes disdainfully referred to them as “the Great Unwashed.” They stank; their neighborhoods stank. (In 1850s London, a series of breakdowns in the inadequate and aging sewer system emptying into the Thames culminated in an unusually hot, dry summer that caused the river to run low. The result was the Great Stink of 1858. The horribly foul air in central London invaded the nostrils of the wealthy and powerful, including Parliamentarians, and not just the poor. The result was creation of a greatly improved sewer system, most parts of which are still functioning, and a much-cleaner river.)

As the twentieth century advanced plumbing was extended even into the homes of working-class people, beginning probably in the 1920s in some areas. In The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937, George Orwell describes the smell among working-class persons and “tramps;” officers in the British military in WWII were shocked by the smell of working-class inductees. [The reference to working-class smells in Orwell’s book is from pages 128-31. For the stresses faced by working-class persons moving into the middle class or academia, see Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams by Alfred Lubrano.] Recovery was of course slowed in Europe by the vast destruction the war caused. But most working-class folk now can take bathrooms, deodorants, and access to washing machines for granted.

Homelessness and Holiness

Nowadays the poorest of the poor among humans are “the homeless” (seldom “homeless persons”), the ones regarded by many as semi-human. Some of them manage to keep clean and wash clothes in public bathrooms; some regularly use the showers provided by shelters. But many, especially the mentally ill, may do neither, and consequently smell bad. Knowing from the averted eyes and other gestures of avoidance by the public that their presence is unwelcome, homeless persons in many cases must keep on the move voluntarily or be uprooted by police. When most people in a culture do not smell, is being free from offensive odors still a privilege? To most of us in the washed majority, it doesn’t feel like it, perhaps because we so seldom think of it.

Just as homelessness among humans arouses contempt and sometimes even criminalization, among “food” animals it is also effectively criminalized. Those few who succeed in getting free from transport trucks or slaughterhells, despite being innocent of any crimes, are treated like escaped convicts from Death Row (which, in a sense, they are) and are subject to murderous attacks and arrest by police and other authorities, as though armed and dangerous. One big difference from human prison escapees is that refugee animals arouse widespread sympathy among the public, and thus some lucky ones, when captured, are cherished and taken to shelters rather than being returned to high-security prisons and execution. In keeping with their status of being bred to be killed in adolescence, common language usage even denies them the dignity of gender and consciousness. If a pig is “it” even while alive, the horror of killing her to procure the “it” of a ham is barely a blip in human awareness. Her death is, as Carol J. Adams taught us, “the absent referent.”

jesus and the poor

Probably the two most highly-regarded religious figures in Western history are Jesus of Nazareth and Francis of Assisi, both of whom chose homelessness following a divine call to devote themselves to preaching God’s nonviolent peace and infinite love for all, from the highest to the lowest--including, for Francis and perhaps Jesus, animals). Holy men though they were, they were still fully human, which means that sweat and grime built up on their bodies from walking dusty roads in hot weather. They sometimes encountered streams in which they could bathe and wash their clothes; ancient Palestine also had pools for ritual purification. But when night after night found them in waterless areas, and they had not been invited to stay at the homes of supporters, they would have no chance for washing, as well as “nowhere to lay [their] head.” We may well wonder whether well-groomed devotees throughout history who revered statues and pictures of them and imagined themselves into those scenes, would really have wanted to come near and listen, even venerate them, on the days when they stank?

For centuries most of those with means called themselves Christians and attended churches, but Jesus’ servant-action of carrying in water and washing his disciples’ dirty feet before the Last Supper, together with a command to his friends to do likewise, very seldom “took” among them. They stayed in their own space where, thanks to their servants, the air was fresher. The Great Unwashed remained unwashed.

Privilege

The word “privilege” comes from Latin words that originally referred to the creation of laws applying only to one special person. The term has long been applied to to a small minority who get unfair advantages that in justice they ought not to have, favored treatment that is denied to the great majority of the population. Prime examples are people who are born to vast wealth, or gain it by exploitation and/or violence. Of course privileges are not all of this sort; some can be earned, such as the right of a person who has won a race or other sports competition to wear a medal; some that are in fact determined by birth, such as the right to wear a particular Scottish plaid, might not even interest most persons.

But we are concerned here with those that do matter to many or all. The right to an education, especially college education, traditionally was a privilege which males with wealth and property kept to themselves. But in the last two centuries in the West, the “Women Not Allowed” signs have gradually come down, changing the association of this privilege with its small-minority status. It is still varyingly linked to gender, money and class; persons of working-class background may have so poor a grade- and high-school education (not to mention lacking funds) that college is out of reach. Lower-class persons who do enter colleges and especially graduate schools will usually encounter psychological hurdles that create additional stresses for them, and lead to chronic anxiety that is hard to deal with because its source in class barriers is never mentioned. Barriers to women are not all gone, either; we women are doing comparatively well in the humanities, but the sciences, technology, engineering, and math are still largely male-dominated.

Even more crucially important than access to higher education is the one of fair or unfair treatment by the police and the justice system, an issue both of class and race that has existed for centuries. Once unseen by most, it has become glaringly visible to nearly all the reading public in recent years, thanks to an unending stream of news stories of unarmed Black men being shot by police with virtual impunity, on any street but perhaps even more in lower-class neighborhoods. On paper the US justice system is fair to all persons. But over and over again, investigations show that people of color and those living in poverty fare much worse in the courts than those who are moneyed and White. Correspondingly, the imprisoned and the executed are Black and Latino, and/or poor, out of all proportion to their percentages of the population, and have been for many years.

Increasing awareness by most US residents of this issue, and many other areas of unfair treatment by class and race, has resulted in widespread use of the term “white privilege.” This is another instance where the associations of the word are changed, with the privileged being in the majority. It also differs from the traditional meaning of the word in that the privileged do not have advantages that by right ought to be largely taken away from them and given to the many others. Rather, the better-off should maintain the benefits in question, but those benefits urgently need to be extended to all those unjustly denied them.

How relevant is majority or minority status to being privileged? How wide a range of conditions can the term cover? Would it be accurate to say that all we human animals, whether our lives are mostly wretched or mostly gratifying, are privileged because millions of us are born into relative freedom--and not, like billions of farmed animals, born into lifelong, crowded, stinking confinement, the dates of our terrifying executions already set? Can the term apply alike to the healthy child born to loving millionaire parents, and the abandoned person trapped in an inner hell, homeless, hungry, and reeking?

Clearly it is not easy to find the courage to see clearly and speak honestly of the evils so many living beings endure, in language accurate both in denotation and connotation, what it refers to and the feelings it arouses. Sometimes we need to look for new terms. Perhaps most important of all is for those who Care to have the courage to take wise and compassionate action on behalf of the ones we are called to help, those denied the privileges that are really rights.  


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