Jim Mason
February 2018
At the same time, we ought to think about some of our habits and traditions formed by a long period of dominionist (human supremacist) culture: Things like our consumerism/materialism, our sprawling cities, our gluttony for water and energy, our urge to breed, our population growth, and all of our ways of living that are destroying forests, coastal wetlands, wilderness, the oceans, the atmosphere, and too many of the species of non-human beings who live therein.
In An Unnatural Order you talk about dominionism. What exactly
is dominionism?
It is the worldview of the human supremacist: The view or belief held by one
species, Homo sapiens sapiens, that it has a divine right — a God-given
license — to use animals and everything else in the living world for its own
benefit. This worldview is strongest in Western traditions, but it has
spread to Russia, China, Japan and most of the rest of the world along with
our industrialism, consumerism, and modernism.
How did the development of “animal agriculture” impact the way
humans relate to animals, nature and each other?
Before animal agriculture began 10,000 years ago, people regarded animals
with fascination, awe, and respect because they were lively and active and
were thought to harbor many of the powers and forces of nature. Those people
had a strong sense of kinship with animals which gave them a sense of
belonging in the living world. Animal agriculture — or the enslavement of
animals for human benefit — turned it all upside down. Animals had to be
taken down off their pedestals so that they could be controlled, worked, and
bought and sold. The old sense of kinship with the living world was replaced
with fear, loathing, dread, and alienation. Western history and
“civilization” begin c. 3,000 BC in the land now called Iraq with wars,
slavery, inequality, and women’s subjugation.
To what extent do you feel this is tied to how desensitized humans in
western culture have become from the way our society treats animals?
100 percent. We couldn’t very well carry on the cruelties inherent in animal
slavery if we clung to the old ideas of kinship with and respect for
animals. So early agri-societies constructed sets of myths to maintain
animal slavery and the subjugation of the nature for agriculture. One set of
myths I call “misothery,” literally (from Greek), hatred of animals.
Misothery breaks down into all of the lies and denials about animals that we
deal with every day: Animals are often vicious, dangerous, sneaky,
threatening, or evil and always beneath our regard. Misothery not only
desensitizes us, it gives us false and unscientific ideas about animals and
nature.
What sorts of lessons can anti-factory farming activists learn from the
history you trace in An Unnatural Order?
That history is helpful not only to activism against factory farms, but all
activism for animals. Our movement is struggling against some very old
traditions, and I think it is helpful to understand those traditions from
their roots. More specifically, two of the big issues in animal rights today
are:
a. Factory farming, handling, shipping, slaughter, which account for about
98 percent of all animal suffering, and killing: If we understand the
history, then we understand the myths and other underpinnings of modern
animal agribusiness. And activists on other issues should understand that
animal enslavement for farming is the mother — or father — of all animal
oppression because it set up the many myths that make up the dominionist
worldview.
b. The property status of animals: Western concepts of property probably
grew out of animal slavery in the ancient world. Animals were probably the
first form of money, property, and wealth. For example: Capital, a word for
wealth, derives from capita, Latin for head; the wealth of a herding tribe,
such as the early Romans, was measured by the head count — how many cattle
(or sheep, goats, camels, etc.) it owned. To this day, ranchers say things
like: “We hauled a couple hundred head to market yesterday.”
What impact has our alienation from nature had on the way we live our lives
and what sorts of problems does it present?
Too many to list here, but start with consumerism: People buy stuff like
there’s no tomorrow — most of them not knowing or caring where it all comes
from. People are oblivious to the mining, lumbering, damming, and rampant
industrialization of the earth. Under dominionism, every living creature is
regarded as either resource or pest. For another, consider the problem of
sex and our bodies. We have a tradition of shame and loathing about these
aspects of life because they remind us of our mammalhood — our kinship with
animals and nature. We deny and distort the most essential elements of human
life in order to maintain the unbridgeable gap between our species and all
others.
To what extent do you see racism, sexism, homophobia and colonialism as
being rooted in dominionism?
Racism grows out of misothery — hatred and contempt for animals and nature.
We transfer our misothery to people whom we regard as closer to animals and
nature than us. Sexism, or male supremacy, is a fixture of the patriarchal
culture invented by the warring, herding societies that dominated the rise
of Western civilization in the ancient Middle East.
Homophobia is one of the by-products of patriarchal culture, which sees
human breeding as so all-important that every kind of sexual gratification
is outlawed unless it places male sperm near female ova. Colonialism is
dominionism applied to other peoples and their lands. In its earliest
stages, Europeans regarded native Americans, Africans, Pacific Islanders,
and others as “savages” and sub-humans — animals, in other words. The
Europeans’ misothery guaranteed that they would be treated accordingly — as
slaves.
What would you say to activists from other causes who are fighting various
forms of oppression of their fellow humans, but who still dismiss concerns
about animals as irrelevant?
Read An Unnatural Order, particularly Chapter Three, “Animals: The Most
Moving Things in the World” and Chapter Nine: “Beyond Dominionism.” Animals
are basic to our worldview — or any other worldview, for that matter.
Misothery — hatred of animality and nature — feeds racism and fosters
unhealthy attitudes about sex, gender, and our bodies. Intellectuals have
been discussing the problem of alienation and other parts of the “Nature
Question” for a century and a half, making no progress because they have a
blind spot (because of hostility, because of misothery) regarding animals.
We simply cannot come to terms with nature unless we come to terms with
animals, for animals are central to the entire Nature Question.
If all these forms of oppression are linked and so heavily integrated into
our culture, how can we help foster a new ethic that will not be focused on
dominionism?
Expose the lies and de-construct the myths about animals, nature, and human
beings. Science can help a lot if we use it properly, so let’s not be
anti-science. Science is already helping us (well, those of us who read and
think anyway) understand our very real, biological and evolutionary kinship
with animals.
Of course this scares and infuriates a lot of people, loaded up as they are
with misothery; they consider it the gravest insult even to be mentioned in
the same breath with animals. Science also is telling us a lot about the
realities of animals’ lives — their sentience, their emotions, their social
bonds and many other aspects of life that we have historically denied in
them and reserved exclusively for ourselves.
Good science exposes the lies and myths about human and animal life that
have built up over nearly 100 centuries of animal slavery. Expose and
destroy lies and myths about the living world, to include us — Homo sapiens
sapiens — living in it. That’s what we must do. To destroy all of these is
to destroy misothery which props up dominionism (let’s just call it human
supremacy) and maintains a void or a gulf instead of a sense of kinship
between humans and other animals.
At the same time, we ought to think about some of our habits and traditions
formed by a long period of dominionist (human supremacist) culture: Things
like our consumerism/materialism, our sprawling cities, our gluttony for
water and energy, our urge to breed, our population growth, and all of our
ways of living that are destroying forests, coastal wetlands, wilderness,
the oceans, the atmosphere, and too many of the species of non-human beings
who live therein.
If you would like a goal to keep in mind, let’s say bring the planet’s human
population and consumption impact back to the levels it was on the eve of
agriculture 10,000 years ago: 5 to 10 million people using a very small
amount of all-biodegradable stuff in a lifetime. That was the last time that
the human species lived on the planet more or less in equilibrium with all
other life. Of course we would want to make this change humanely and fairly;
no taking of lives, just good, effective birth control and industrial
management.
Will this plan sell to the masses? Try it and see. What the hell have we got
to lose?
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