There's been another
well-intentioned discussion over at Salon TableTalk about animal
rights, as Soybean, the originator and moderator of the discussion,
attempted to persuade other progressives that "Using animals for food
and clothing causes suffering, is bad for human health, is bad for the
environment and is a huge public safety risk." When the discussion, as
in past similar threads, degenerated into name-calling, Soybean asked
me to diagnose what had gone wrong. My answer was that discussion
forums are not a particularly good vehicle for persuasion at the best
of times (they're more useful for debating, and for gathering ideas and
collaborating with others), and also that there is a tendency for those
of us who are idealists on the subject of animal rights (or any
progressive subject for that matter) to tick off pragmatists by not
offering a practical, achievable process to achieve our stated
objective.
That got me thinking about a pragmatic approach to animal rights, one
which could unite all progressives in common cause, and become an
integral part of all progressive organizations' agendas.
The end-game on animal rights for us radical idealists -- a large part
of the planet set aside as wilderness with minimal human intervention
allowed; an end to factory farming (and perhaps even all animal
agriculture) as a means of providing human food and clothing, and
acceptance of a vegan lifestyle -- is just too big a jump for many
progressives to accept in a single leap. Some progressives even see
such an agenda as anti-humanist, at a time when the people of many
countries are desperately striving to achieve self-sufficiency and an
end to poverty, through the raising of farmed animals. To them, more
wilderness means less land for the struggling poor, and they have a
point.
What I have been chatting with Soybean on is a two-stage approach with
both a short-term and long-term vision. The short-term vision, the
first stage, is to enact laws that
punish people who needlessly abuse domesticated animals or subject
farmed, laboratory, or wild animals to extreme or protracted cruelty or
suffering. This is, I think, an acceptable goal to the vast
majority of people on the planet: It is consistent with almost every
human moral code and its acceptance does not impose significant
economic hardship on anyone. Even this first stage, however, will
require both sides on the sometimes rancorous debate over animal rights
to hold their nose when they agree: For many of us, the word
'needlessly' is a weasel word that could be used to excuse otherwise
inexcusable behaviour. It is, for those with more advanced animal
rights agendas, a pitifully small step in the right direction. At the
same time, even this will be troublesome to farmers and laboratories
who will be concerned about how the courts could interpret
'needlessly', 'abuse', and 'extreme or protracted cruelty or
suffering'. They will see it as threatening to their livelihood by
opening them up to 'frivolous' prosecution by animal rights
'extremists', and as the thin edge of the wedge to further incursions
and eventual shut-down of their operations.
I believe the courts would be able to establish precedents fairly
quickly and easily on the definition of these terms, and we would then
finally have laws with teeth that could reduce the extraordinary number
of heinous and deplorable cases of unprosecuted and unprosecutable
animal abuse and neglect that occur every day. At the same time, we
need to start working to develop
genuine innovations that would replace much of the need for the most
morally repugnant factory farm and laboratory practices, and so allow the broadening of the term 'needlessly' in these first-stage laws. Such innovations could include:
Procedures for testing on tissue cultures instead of live
animals (already in use in much of Europe, and in Japan);
Processes to make free-range organic farming economically
competitive with factory farming (these could be greatly enabled by
eliminating the agricultural
subsidies that today go almost entirely to big agribusiness, or at
least by making such subsidies available equally to organic and small
family farms, so that there is a level playing field); and
Invention
of new organic, vegetable-based proteins with flavours, colours and
consistency
and nutritional value indistinguishable from animal foods (without
genetic manufacturing or the use of petrochemicals, please), to
ultimately render
raising animals for food unnecessary.
As these new innovations occur, we could remove the economic objections
to the ending of factory farming, laboratory and medical testing and
other inhumane treatment of animals as part of commercial activities, by providing viable alternatives.
These alternatives would also remove some of the moral objections to
the ending of the use of animals in medical research, by rendering the
use of live animals in such research unnecessary.
I'm not saying this will be easy. It will take a concerted effort by a
lot of creative and motivated entrepreneurial businesses. But what
better goal for a young entrepreneur with a scientific bent than to
invent something that will enormously reduce the suffering of animals
without adversely affecting the achievement of human ends that
currently require such suffering?
Let's be clear about one implication of what we're talking about here:
Ultimately, we will be reducing suffering to farmed animals by
substantially eliminating these creatures, which are utterly dependent
on humans for their well-being (or lack of it), from the planet. With
very few exceptions (like foxes and mink) farmed animals could not and
would not survive in the wild. The 70% of the arable land mass of Earth
currently used to graze such animals would then go to other uses:
either human uses (mostly urban sprawl) or semi-wilderness (increasing
the planet's biodiversity).
In Soybean's discussion thread, there was absolutely no disagreement
over the objective of reducing unnecessary animal suffering. We all
seem to 'get' this as being a worthwhile end. It's that word 'rights'
that gets people up in arms, and that's what the second stage, and
achievement of the longer-term goal, is all about.
The second stage of this pragmatic approach to animal rights is to
provide just two 'rights' for all sentient creatures on the planet: the
right to self-determination (i.e. not to be treated as 'property' of
humans) and the right to live in a healthy and sustainable ecosystem.
Animals are, under the law, either property (in which case they have no
rights) or
not (in which case they can have some rights). Until relatively
recently in civilization's history both women and slaves were
considered 'property'. As society became enlightened, laws were enacted
in most countries under which both these human groups ceased to be
property, and were given some or all of the same rights as other
humans. The two basic rights, what might be called the Core Inalienable
Rights, are the rights of self-determination and healthy survival that
I describe above. They are consistent with both the laws of nature and
the fundamental expressions of rights in many human charters (they even
equate, roughly, with the right to "life, liberty, and pursuit of
happiness".
Granting these two rights to all sentient species will be a much
longer-term proposition, because to do so strikes at some fundamental economic and moral tenets of civilized man, tenets that have been around for thirty millennia, as long as civilization itself.
As I've described in an earlier post, books like Richard Manning's Against the
Grain explain the history of agriculture and how and why animals
went from being free creatures (with essentially the same implicit rights as
humans, in gatherer-hunter cultures) to being human 'property'. These books also explain the evolution
of land as 'private property' as human population soared with the
advent of agriculture to the point that, for the first time, it became scarce.
The only way we can extend the right to live in a healthy and
sustainable ecosystem (in a broad sense, the right to life itself) to
animals would be to do one or more of the following: (a) abolish the
concept of private property entirely, (b) reduce it to apply only to
small parts of the Earth's surface, and allow the rest of the planet to
return to near-wilderness state, or (c) so massively reduce human
population that land ceases to be scarce and the whole need for private
property goes away. My personal belief is that (a) and (b) are
non-starters: The only way we will be able to give the rest of the
creatures on this planet 'the right to life' would be if, as a result
of a sharp drop in our own numbers, we no longer needed all the land
that currently precludes us leaving it to other species. I'm not
holding my breath. The current Sierra Club debate over immigration,
which pits one set of progressive values (including animals' right to
life) against another (including our responsibility to look after all
our fellow humans on the planet), shows how intractable this problem is.
And even if we could miraculously solve the economic
challenges that preclude us giving animals a fair share of the planet's
resources in a reasonably livable state, we would still have to
overcome the moral challenges. Even among progressives, there are many who challenge whether animals are sentient beings, capable of
self-awareness, self-management, intelligent thought and deep emotion
-- as When Elephants Weep
and other scholarly works have patiently
and thoroughly demonstrated. But such science can take centuries to
overcome religious and other moral dogma, which is why the term 'animal
rights'
stirs up such a stink while 'animal welfare' does not. It's also the
reason why farmers and labs so vehemently and irrationally deny that
animals have self-awareness and feelings -- how could they live with
themselves if they acknowledged it?
The comparison to slavery is entirely fair -- abolitionists threatened
not only the economic foundations but the moral foundations
of America, which is why they
fought a bloody civil war over it. The comparison to women's rights is
also entirely fair -- equality for women is deeply troubling in many
third world countries where they have always treated women as property.
Imagine yourself as someone who had bought a slave or a wife, trying to
reconcile your actions with a dawning realization that what you have
done, and what you have been brought up to believe, is actually morally
repugnant, ghastly, horribly wrong. This same illumination about
animals will be a slow, agonizing process.
So I think, pragmatically, animal rights advocates should start by
getting all progressive organizations to adopt, as a key plank in their
platforms, the need for laws against the needless abuse of domesticated
animals and against the subjecting of any sentient creature to extreme
or sustained cruelty or suffering, and the desirability of finding
innovative, economically viable alternatives to factory farming and the
use of live animals in laboratory testing and medical research.
Giving animals 'rights' is a great ideal, but one our civilization has
neither the economic capacity nor the moral will to grant, so there is
no point yet in pushing this as part of the progressive agenda. And
while a vegan lifestyle is a healthy and worthy personal life choice,
it will not become a mainstream choice until it becomes an easy,
affordable, and aesthetically preferable one. Innovation, not moral
suasion, is the key to making it so in our lifetime.
The use of the wolf image is a reference to the decision last year of the government of Alaska to allow the resumption
of the despicable practice of shooting wolves from airplanes, a
practice that causes enormous suffering, and whose sole economic
purpose is to increase the size of caribou and elk herds so hunters can
pay for the privilege of killing the artificially-created excess.
Following is the first
part of a new, previously-unpublished three-part essay about the
implications of last year's US election, written by Glenn Parton, best
known for his eco-philosophic and psychological essays The Machine in our Heads and Humans in the Wilderness. The ideas in the essay are Glenn's, not mine, and you can tell him what you think through the comment facility below, or e-mail him directly. I'll add my two cents at the end of part three.
Exterminism, by Glenn Parton
The 2004 Election established a
new stage of American Empire or Global Capitalism, beyond Fascism to
what is best described as Exterminism, because the end of the Bush
Republican agenda is not merely the conquest and exploitation of the
entire world, but rather, The End Of The World or Armageddon, either by
causing World War 3 or catastrophic ecological collapse. This agenda
cannot be adequately explained in terms of selfishness, greed, or the
endless pursuit of money. Something much more irrational and
pathological is going on: there is mental illness in the White House,
Congress, Courts, Pentagon, and various intelligence agencies such as
the CIA, FBI and Homeland Security. If politically aware people do not
stop the self-destructive insanity that has taken over the American
political process, the course of world history, and the fate of the
earth, then we might as well say that we want to die because that is
definitely what is going to happen to all of us, sooner or later.
The Republican Party is getting away with terrible things—for examples,
state-sponsored torture and murder, and massive poisoning of fish,
meat, air, water, drugs—because tens of millions of psychologically
damaged people are seeking, consciously and unconsciously, deliverance
or release from personal suffering through political and social
suicide. These people voted not only against their own economic
interests, but also against their own survival, and the survival or
biological interests of everyone. What is the underlying pathology that
has pushed “crazies” such as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz to
the top? If we don’t understand this problem, and solve it, then the
replacement of Rumsfeld and DeLay, and Bush and all his appointees is
futile because many others will rise.
In a word, fear is propelling us toward global disaster, but in order
to understand it we must distinguish between rational fear and
irrational fear. If you are in Sudan or Iraq right now, then your fear
is rational because of imminent danger. Irrational fear, on the other
hand, is the fear of something that is not there, or a gross
exaggeration of something that is there; it is a misinterpretation of
reality. Another term for irrational fear is paranoia, and the inner
mechanism of paranoia is projection (what is inside is experienced as
coming from the outside). This means that paranoids are afraid of
themselves. What is it that so many Americans fear about themselves?
The answer that this Election provides is that paranoid people fear
their own erotic nature because they have adopted (through force) a
false morality, an anti-sexual morality that persecutes and punishes
them for expressing or even acknowledging this dimension of essential
human nature. For two thousand years, Christianity has been trying to
wipe out or deny the sexual nature of human beings, spreading sexual
sickness across the land, and now many Americans have been made
mentally ill by the accumulating effects of self-hatred to the point
that they are ready to die, want to die, believe that they deserve to
die.
Thanks to the “genius” of Karl Rove and the Republican propaganda
machine, the sexually sick have been politicized, republicanized, and
neoconed. War and hate-propaganda appeals to those who have wounds that
never heal because it offers them a Final Solution to their suffering.
Not having the courage to improve their own miserable lives, many are
drawn to the indirect and coded Republican strategy of social suicide,
called the War On Terror, which is nothing but a detour to one’s own
death via the death of everyone. The War On Terror must be understood,
at its source, as a war against the true self, whose core is Eros, and
it can only be won (in a morbid way) through Exterminism.
Not everyone in the GOP is sexually sick, some are ignorant, while
others are too rich to care or think. Nor are sick people only in the
Republican Party, or in the Churches, but the Party has become a
gathering place for ideologues, with the sickest of the sick as
leaders, who are determined to achieve the impossible goal of
self-conquest at all costs. 11/2, 2004 (not 9/11, 2001) was a critical
threshold in American history, the day that self-destructive people
consolidated and expanded control over the lives of everyone.
In response, Democrats, Greens, Socialists, Communitarians, and
everyone above Republicans on the evolutionary scale of consciousness
should form a coalition of the politically awake with a dual strategy:
1) we need to develop and practice a politics of emergency (electoral
politics, petitions, demonstrations, educational films, political
conversations, and other acts of resistance) that stops, or
significantly slows down, the Republican Party agenda, and 2) we need
to articulate and practice a long-range visionary agenda that
transcends Party politics.
The political issues that mobilized Republicans and independently sick
Americans—for examples, anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-sex
education, anti-Hollywood—had to do, directly or indirectly, with
opposing sexual freedom. Those with “spines of tempered steel” (to
quote Zell Miller) are threatened by the breakdown of “traditional
family values,” with its rigid self-discipline and self-denial of sex,
so they are escalating a cultural war against the natural self, but it
will not work because the more a person represses sexual desire, the
more it grows, distorting and twisting the resisting personality into
madness. This Culture War has already organized itself into a Project
for the New American Century, which is about suffering to death by
means of our own Imperial Will.
With Republican self-loathers pulling the political and economic
levers, life in America and elsewhere is going to get ugly fast. Be
prepared to work harder and longer for less, for an ascetic culture
with a vengeance, with no appeal or sympathetic ear in the corridors of
power. Squeezing the joy out of life, reducing its quality, is the
Republican plan for converting everyone to the worldview that human
nature is “seriously flawed” (as the patron saint of the neocons, Leo
Strauss, said), or that the world is “a dark and forbidding place” (as
the conservative columnist, George Will, said), leading eventually to
the collective conclusion that life is not worth living. The
evangelical spirit of capitalism, making the earth a living hell, is
the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Apocalypse.
In sum, it was both fear and “morality” that decided the outcome of
this Election, or more precisely stated, it was the fear of sadistic
morality, fear of a false value system, that is at war with the natural
erotic self. No amount of rational argumentation, facts or evidence
will influence people who are caught in the self-destructive
eschatology of original sin, Atonement, and the Rapture. With nuclear
weapons in America still on hair-trigger alert, launch-on-warning,
there is real danger of a miscalculated, unauthorized nuclear war, but
on a deeper level a nuclear or ecological holocaust has already been
born in the deranged mind of Bush Americans, and if we “stay the
course,” then The End Of The World will not be an accident.
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
