Robert Harrison on animal rights—Entitled Opinions 05/08/2013

05/08/2013

Robert Harrison on animal rights

This is KZSU Stanford.

Welcome to a special edition of entitled opinions.

My name is Robert Harrison.

And I'm taking the occasion today to respond to the concerns

that some of our listeners raised with me about the show on bioethics

that we aired just recently.

On the day that show aired, I received a couple of emails from animal rights advocates

who were perplexed and even bewildered that my guest tomorrow,

Kiali and I neglected to address the topic of animal cruelty

and suffering during our dialogue.

It's the first time I had heard from these individuals,

both of whom are longtime listeners of entitled opinions,

and with their permission, I will quote their emails to me.

Yvonne wrote me the following.

I thoroughly enjoy every one of your shows.

I find them enlightening, educating, and entertaining as well.

However, I wish very much that either an entire show

or some part of a show be dedicated to animal rights and welfare.

It is disappointing that in today's episode on bioethics,

there was no mention about the plight of animal suffering currently occurring

in factory farms, labs, et cetera.

I respectfully request that you consider giving animal centered issues

from airtime as I believe you would provide a very eloquent and insightful viewpoint

on a matter that very much needs to be given attention.

The other listeners' name is Robbie was more adamant in his objections.

I quote from his email, "I have an issue that over the last few weeks

you've completely disregarded the concept of animals."

In the episode on photography, you called bullfighting a performance.

If an enslaved animal being publicly murdered is what you call a performance,

then I believe you have an ignorant perspective on the concepts of innocence and pain.

You haven't done an episode on animal rights yet, yet many on religion.

You speak dismissively of other species.

In the most recent show, you talk about meat stuff in a playful rhyme

at the beginning uttered with pleasure.

For someone whose show is about expanding thought, breaking down the walls of ignorance,

and in liveening the mind with new views and perspectives that matter for our development as a species,

it seems hypocritical that your comments, declarations, and apparent dismissal of animals on your show

is that of an ativistic, dumb, blood-hungry perspective

that garners no temperance to the concepts of compassion and anti-cruelty.

Cruelty is defined most commonly as the causing of unnecessary pain.

As modern nutritional science tells you that killing animals is unnecessary from a dietary perspective,

I have not heard one reason justification for the mass injustices and slaughters

that poor animals undergo at the hands of men, not one reasonable justification.

As a man of thought, you should recognize your position on animals has been contrary

to the so-called principles and ideals of the show.

As someone who has followed the show for a few years and introduced it to many others,

I ask you to please take my word seriously and give them the consideration they're due.

Both Yvonne and Robbie are right that we have never dedicated a show to the issue of animal rights on entitled opinions.

I did do a solo show on birds during the very first year of the program in the spring of 2006,

and my guest Andrew Mitchell and I talked a lot about animals on the Nietzsche show a few years back.

But I will acknowledge that for a radio program devoted to the cause of self-knowledge,

entitled opinions should have devoted multiple shows to animal issues by now.

Nothing is more important when it comes to understanding who we are as human beings and gaining clarity

about the human animal divide or non-divide depending on your perspective.

That's why I'm here in the studio today to share with our listeners some of my own thoughts about this difficult thorny and ultimately tragic topic of the human animal relation.

In the future, if I can find an appropriate guest to invite on the program, I hope to devote a show specifically to the question of animal rights.

But that won't be this show per se.

Before I begin, let me respond to something that Robbie mentioned in his email to the effect that my quote him in the most recent show you talked about meat stuff in a playful rhyme at the beginning uttered with pleasure.

He's referring to my intro to the bioethics show where I said, "They can eat their dinner on philosophy talk, eat their pork and beans.

On entitled opinions, we eat more chicken and a man ever seen."

Now for the record, that rhyme comes from a song written by the Blues musician Willie Dixon back in 1961.

The song is called "Backdoor Man" and the verse in question has a humorous, if not ironic intent.

In southern culture, a backdoor man refers to someone having an affair with a married woman using the backdoor as an exit before the husband comes home.

And in the song, that line about chicken has a double, if not triple meaning.

Chicken eating was rare in 1961, much rare than it is today, it amounted to less than half the consumption of pork at the time.

So in the line, I eat more chicken and a man ever seen. The singer is boasting that married women cook chicken for him and save the pork and beans for their husbands.

He's also boasting that he feasts on the wife's full bodied love while the husband gets lesser grade sex.

It's a crude figure of speech to be sure, and I invoke that verse not to celebrate the consumption of animal flesh, but to poke fun at another radio show called "Philosophy Talk" hosted by two analytic philosophers from Stanford's "Philosophy Department."

But onto the graver issue of animal death, animal pain, and animal consumption at the hands of human beings.

And it is a grave issue indeed.

Last week, I was in Italy for a round table discussion with a well-known, secular Catholic theologian to discuss issues having to do with our contemporary images of Eden, guilt and innocence, and what makes for human happiness.

At a certain point, we were asked by the moderator about the concept of original sin.

The theologian who was taken it upon himself to render Christian doctrine more palatable to a 21st century secular society that has largely lost its dogmatic faith, but is still nostalgic about religion.

This theologian went completely abstract and invited us to think of original sin as original chaos that gives way to increasing form and order and what he called cosmic intelligence, as if this were the fate of the universe to go from a state of primordial chaos to one of pure pristine order and luminosity.

So, in some, original sin would be the earth when it was without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep.

I'm helping him out there by quoting the first verses of Genesis.

Now, when it was my turn, I said that personally, I do believe in an original sin.

Not so much in the traditional Christian sense, but in the sense that humanity, whether consciously or not, lives with a species guilt that comes from our original immemorial, ongoing abuse and daily slaughter of animals.

I am not a vegetarian myself, so maybe I feel this guilt in a more personal way, yet even if I were a vegetarian, I would still suffer from it.

Since my own species, in its relation to the animal world, lives in a deep, constant altogether original state of guilt, if only because of the Holocaust's of meat,

a poultry, fish and foul that it perpetrates day in and day out, year after year, century after century, millennium after millennium.

For the animal world, in general, the human race represents nothing less than a natural disaster.

There is nothing we can do to a tone for this guilt, or maybe there is, but the likelihood of our doing it is so minimal that it may as well not exist.

And if I'm right that we can't a tone for it, then maybe we must be punished for it.

Not in the name of moral justice, but rather natural justice.

And in fact, sometimes I wonder whether our human social and political history has been so nightmarish precisely because it represents a whole world.

Because it represents a form of mortification for this species guilt, which, as if by nature's law, causes us to bring heaps of misery upon ourselves through war, exploitation, brutality, and so forth.

Frederick Nietzsche put forward a piece of ludicrous nonsense in his genealogy of morals when he wrote, like, "I have no doubt that the combined

suffering of all the animals ever subjected to the knife for scientific ends is utterly negligible compared with one painful night of a single, hysterical blue stalking."

A blue stalking is, or was, an educated intellectual woman who frequented learned clubs or salons in the 18th and 19th century.

So the question one needs to ask here is, "What did Nietzsche, a man, know about animal pain from the inside, I mean?"

And for that matter, what did he know about the suffering of a hysterical blue stalking that he should declare that one night of it contained infinitely more pain than that suffered by all the animals who died in the name of scientific research?

And we might do well to recall here that Nietzsche suffered a complete mental collapse when he saw a horse being flogged by a coachman in the city of Turin.

He embraced the neck of the horse and wept, and that was that for Nietzsche.

Nevertheless, what Nietzsche is trying to stress in the passage from the genealogy, I believe, is undeniable, namely,

that human beings have a colossal, almost unlimited capacity for suffering.

So yes, the unspeakable suffering our species has endured over the millennia.

Most of itself engender, this suffering may well be linked to the species guilt that defines our relations to the animal world in ways we may be unaware of in our conscious lives.

Now regarding my naturalized notion of original sin, if I can call it that, it's interesting to consult some of the ancient sages, plutarch, for example, wrote a treatise on the eating of animal flesh in which he declared, I quote him,

for the sake of a little flesh, we deprive them of the son, of the light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being.

Can you really ask, he goes on, what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh?

For my part, I rather wonder, both by what accident, and in what state of soul or mind, the first man did so.

Touched his mouth to gore, and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead stale bodies,

and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived.

How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and het?

How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides, flayed and limbs torn from limb?

How could his nose endure the stench?

How was it that the pollution did not turn away as taste which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?

Plutarch references the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who was a notorious vegetarian,

and this character Pythagoras makes an important appearance in another text from Roman antiquity,

Ovid's metamorphoses, where he, Pythagoras, gives a long speech at the end of that book that puts forward a philosophy of vegetarianism.

Let me quote a few passages from that, Book 15 of the metamorphoses.

Ovid writes he was the first to say that animal food should not be eaten and learned as he was men did not always believe him when he preached.

"Oh, what a wicked thing it is for flesh to be the tomb of flesh," said Pythagoras, "for the body's craving to fatten on the body of another.

For one living creature to continue living through one live creature's death."

None but an ingrate unworthy of the gift of grain could ever take off the weight of the yoke and with the axe strike at the neck that bore it,

kill his fellow who helped him break the soil and raise the harvest.

It is bad enough to do these things, but we make the gods our partners in the abomination.

Later in his speech, Pythagoras goes on to say that everything is in a constant state of change and flux, that everything moves, everything perishes in their forms, and then says the following.

Remember this, the heavens and all below them, earth and her creatures all change and we, part of creation, also must suffer change.

We are not bodies all only, but wing its spirits with the power to enter animal forms housed in the bodies of cattle.

Therefore we should respect those dwelling places which may have given shelter to the spirit of fathers, brothers, cousins, human beings, at least, and we should never do them damage.

So here you have a classical argument in favor of vegetarianism and against animal cruelty.

And when Pythagoras says that we are not bodies also, but wing its spirits with the power to enter animal forms, he is referring really to what the whole book of the metamorphoses about, which is a series of stories, fables, myths about human beings who undergo a transformation into other species.

Other animal species, plant species, and in some case even stellar constellations.

But this argument in favor of vegetarianism suggests that animals are not only our brute neighbors as the row called them, brute neighbors, but that there are also our helpers and co-workers.

And not only that, they are in a profound sense, our kin.

The whole of of its metamorphoses, as I mentioned, puts into play this notion of genetic kinship by recounting one story after another, about transformation and interspecies mutation.

As if to dramatize the fact that while our forms may differ, or what we would call our life forms, or the species, the underlying substance of all things comes from a genetic and common source that Pythagoras calls in Ovidstex the spirit that informs that circulates liberally and promiscuously between all living things.

Now that's a beautiful concept to be sure that of an anima moon-dee or world soul which interconnects all living things and makes of them variations on a common theme.

And I personally am convinced that what we need more than anything else in these days is a new infusion of spirit in a new faith in or commitment to this kind of animism.

But that's no easy task. You cannot merely will a new attitude or a new religion into being. It has to take root in our species by some other means than the arguments put forward by Pythagoras or animal rights advocates or philosophers or even biologists.

These arguments may be irrefutable, but in themselves they do not necessarily change human behavior. It's difficult enough, in fact nearly impossible to change human behavior when arguments show beyond any doubt that not changing behavior will lead to our own self-destruction. Plenty of evidence about that.

The Plutarch and Ovid quotes I just read are dominated by a taboo against the murder of animals and the consumption of animal flesh.

Today we are of course far removed from the reality of animal murder and far removed from the actual source of our food stuffs.

Unlike the vast majority of our ancestors, even our most recent ancestors, most of us today have no idea where the food we eat comes from.

We're oblivious of the fields that yielded our grain, the gardens are vegetables sprouted in, the orchards where our fruits were gathered, we're not familiar with the individual animals we eat anymore. We don't tend to them, we don't watch them grow,

we don't know what flock they came from or on which pastures they graze and above all we have had no hand in their sacrifice.

The daily slaughters that supply the world markets demands for meat, fish and poultry take place in another world than the one most of us inhabit.

And yet we live off such slaughters, gorge ourselves on them at higher per capita rates than ever before.

In the past our forebears had a much more vivid sense of the sacrificial nature of a meal.

Today we tend no longer to take cognizance of or give thanks for the animal that has died on our behalf.

This makes our species guilt all the more virulent.

Now the fact that so many of today's children have never seen a cow is not necessarily a problem for the cows,

but it is a problem in the larger scheme of things.

Milk remains more or less the same substance, whether we know where it comes from or not, but when a staggering proportion of first-world children respond to the question,

where does milk come from, with answers to the effect that it comes from the carton or in the case of meat, it comes from the supermarket.

There is reason to believe that more is at stake here than urban distanciation from the conditions of food production.

Origins are in some ultimate sense unknowable, yet there is a difference between not knowing where life in its original input,

and its original impulse comes from and not knowing where milk comes from.

When the from of things we consume becomes not only remote but essentially unreal, the world we live in draws a veil over the earth we live on.

A veil that obscures not only the source of our foodstuffs, but also the source of our relation to the earth, which is that of birth and death.

Natality and mortality.

Precisely because the earth is our "um" day or from, as well as our "quo" or "whereto".

Now this is heavy stuff. I understand that and I'm thinking that maybe one of the reasons I haven't done a show on this topic before is because it's extremely depressing.

With little glimmers of light or hope and however now that I've embarked on this topic, I feel compelled to insist that things are far more perverse and far more sinister than they ever were when Plutarch or Pythagoras express their limits.

It's not only the scale of animal death that has increased exponentially.

It's the fact that animal death is no longer the main issue.

The main issue is the forced reproduction and perpetuation of animal life under infernal conditions.

The issue is not so much that we terminate the lives of animals that will, usually prematurely, but that we have taken absolute control of the biological processes of animal genesis,

growth and stockage. This is biopower in the most technical sense where we force animals into life, force them into the life process, put their flesh, dead or alive on standing reserve for the world's food supply.

This is exactly what Heidegger called "Bishtand", the stockpiling of natural resources.

Gashteau, the inframing, transforms all of nature and in particular the flesh of living creatures into a standing reserve of raw materials for future consumption.

There is something far more demonic about this subjugation of animals to a standing reserve of consumable stock than their straightforward slaughter has occurred in the past.

Okay, enough said about our unabated, aggravated state of original sin.

Let me shift the focus now to the question of our kinship within an animal world.

Now, while this kinship exists, while many of us feel it palpably, it's extremely difficult if not impossible to speak of it in the language of logic, reason and concepts.

This is because humans are the only living creatures that we know of who have this highly developed capacity for language logic and reason.

Ovid managed to express the notion of kinship through myths of metamorphoses, which I don't want to call merely fanciful, but we do know that species are far more disposed to repudiate and war with one another than to mutate into one another out of a sense of kinship.

In fact, speciation has come about over the course of evolution through a great deal of hostility between one life form and all other life forms.

If life forms did not have a natural aversion, one to another, we would not have this richly diversified bayata that characterizes our biosphere.

So this great communal spirit, this anima moon-dee, it may flow through all things, but we don't have adequate words for it.

We don't have conceptual access to it.

Every now and then a poet finds words to express the lack of words at his or her disposal.

Thus, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, wrote a poem that begins, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age that blasts the roots of trees as my destroyer."

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose, my youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks drives my red blood that dries the mouthing streams, turns mine to wax.

And I am dumb to mow them to my veins, how at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

This limitation, this isolation, this barrier that Dylan Thomas talks about across which flows in ineffable spirit at times, is a fact of nature.

There exists a divide not only between humans and other living entities, but between all species in general.

Without it, there would be no differentiation, hence no speciation as such, and our planet would be a pretty dead place.

Instead of this wondrous biosphere that contains innumerable life forms.

Steven J. Gould rightly called it a "full house." Our planet is chock full of life, manifold, and diverse.

There is no denying that there is a common life matrix, a primordial, undifferentiated, diennesian promiscuity lurking underneath the exuberant proliferation of forms.

But there is also no denying that there exists a kind of aversion between the species, an implacable impulse towards separation, division, repulsion, and hence local autonomy.

I mean, the autonomy of individual species.

This is the great paradox of life on this planet, all living things have a common origin, as far as we know, life bursts into being only once, not twice, not three times, but once, and once only.

So it's true that all life, including humans, belong ultimately to the same genealogy, but at the same time, evolution pushes in the direction of differentiation and antagonism and radical otherness between geniuses and species.

Every species forms a world unto itself.

Not only that, for every life form, there is something that it is like to be that life form.

And I'm alluding here to a famous article by the philosopher Thomas Nagel called "What is it like to be a bat?"

Where he argues that "sentience or consciousness or a living life forms mode of being in the world is essentially subjective and cannot be known according to objective laws."

And part of the corollary of his argument is that there are essentially no intersubjective relations between species, or no interspecies intersubjectivity.

I cannot know what it is like to be a bat.

I cannot know what it is like to be a fish, a glowworm, a bee.

In fact, as a man, I probably can't know in a truly subjective way what it is like to be a blue stocking.

And I probably can't know what it is like to be someone from a very different historical era than the one I was born into.

When we look at the diversity of life fun, this planet, I mean really look at it, we're astonished at how little in the surrounding world or cosmos reflects an image of ourselves back to us.

The British naturalist Richard Jeffries, who lived in the second half of the 19th century, looked with wide open eyes at everything around him, and though he marveled at the natural world,