Two
Legs Good, Four Legs Equal
By Jason Miller
16 August, 2007
Countercurrents.org
“The moral duty
of man consists of imitating the moral goodness and benificence of God
manifested in the creation towards all his creatures. Everything of
persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty
to animals is a violation of moral duty.”
–Thomas Paine
from The Age of Reason
Despite
the trappings of a civilized culture and the incredibly persistent myth
of our moral exceptionalism, we in the United States are collectively
a group of mean-spirited, depraved barbarians. Sparing our psyches the
pangs of conscience by ferociously devouring the corporate media’s
seemingly endless supply of rationalizations, euphemisms, historical
revisions, distractions, denials, distortions, and affirmations of our
pathological self-absorption, we each carry a degree of responsibility
in the infliction of immeasurable unnecessary pain and suffering upon
the rest of the Earth’s sentient beings.
Deeply integrated into a
cultural and economic system in which compassion is considered to be
a weakness and in which greed, exploitation, profits, property, winning,
bellicosity and selfishness are sacrosanct, we cannot escape the reality
that each of us participates in the American version of Hannah Arendt’s
“banality of evil” to some extent. Unless we isolate ourselves
in a mountain cabin or expatriate, as US citizens we are each damned
to be one of the 300 million “Little Eichmanns” who enable
our cynical plutocratic masters to dominate the world both economically
and militarily.
Struggling to make itself
heard above the cacophonous din of sound bites, advertising jingles,
clichés, tropes, memes, mythos, and various other manifestations
of the false consciousness that afflicts so many of us, the voice of
conscience occasionally grabs our attention and violently reminds us
how badly we are fucking the rest of the world.
And when it does, the question
we each need to ask ourselves is, “How much like “Eich”
do I want to be?”
While there are myriad ways
we can each minimize our culpability in the egregious crimes of savage
capitalism and its most banal representation, consumerism, the struggle
to end speciesism is at the vanguard of our much needed moral evolution.
Yet is often minimized and ridiculed by sociopolitical thinkers of nearly
all stripes.
Seeking to provoke a re-examination of our ghastly practices toward
animals, Patrice Greanville, a force in the animal liberation movement
for many years, has defined speciesism as akin to German fascism. While
the comparison is doubtless inflammatory, it is well grounded in fact,
since both speciesism and Nazism share a core ideology of entitlement
to total dominion over anyone outside the “”master race”
:
“[as] the oldest, crudest
and most pervasive form of fascism or tyranny around…speciesism
must be understood…as an unrecognized fascism…not so much
as the organization of a mass party of thugs to beat back labor, or
an outright rightwing military dictatorship, but as a form of institutionalized
supremacism whereby a particular nationality, group, class, race (or
species), unilaterally proclaims its ‘superiority’ over
others, and proceeds to confer upon itself the right to exploit, murder,
and tyrannize at will with absolute impunity.”
Infectious and insidious
as racism or sexism, speciesism permeates nearly every facet of our
existence—and it’s class blind: both poor and rich practice
it with alacrity. Raising 4-5 billion non-human animals each year in
the concentration camp-like conditions of factory farms, we torture
and slaughter fellow sentient beings merely to satiate our carnivorous
desires(1) or to justify any project, no matter how inane. As Peter
Singer documented so well in his seminal work, Animal Liberation, we
annually perform an array of horrendously brutal experiments on millions
of non-human animals, including acids and solvents on restrained rabbits’
eyes (given their great sensitivity). Singer’s book clearly demonstrates
that much of the “research” conducted by torturing animals
involves redundant university studies that yield conclusions one could
have intuited, frivolous government or military projects, and unnecessary
consumer product tests designed to validate “new” brand
claims.
Gandhi noted that “the
greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be measured by the
way its animals are treated,” and he was right.
If the United States has
a prayer of attaining even a fraction of the “greatness”
and “moral progress” it already attributes to itself, we
must engage in a fearless moral inventory and prepare ourselves to make
sweeping and dramatic social, economic, and political changes.
Treating non-human animals
as objects for our convenience (hence subjecting them to horrendous
suffering and abuse) is certainly one of our most shameful misdeeds.
It is also one for which each of us can readily begin making amends.
One simple step we can take is to refuse to consume meat or products
from the fast food industry, a hideous manifestation of capitalism that
catalyzed and necessitates factory farming.
[As a point of disclosure,
this writer is a former carnivore. While in reality he was omnivorous,
his diet revolved mostly around meat and he lived to eat it. There is
rarely a day that passes that he does not crave a steak, a cheeseburger,
or some other form of non-human animal flesh. However, as he explained
in “Another Bacon Burger Anyone?” (http://rinf.com/alt-news/contributions/
another-bacon-burger-anyone/57/), he remains committed to vegetarianism
based on his rejection of speciesism, the detrimental effect factory
farming has on the environment, and the fact that meat production is
a huge contributor to world hunger because it consumes vast resources
better utilized elsewhere. While veganism is probably not on his immediate
horizon, he does minimize his egg consumption and makes a conscious
effort to eschew the use of animal products derived from or tested upon
animals.]
Rising to the moral challenge
Every human being has a moral
stake in the struggle against speciesism, whether they define themselves
as Left, Right, centrist, liberal, or Libertarian. Drawing perilously
close to the event horizon of the spiritual black hole spawned by the
excesses of the declining American Empire, our capacity to evoke change
as individuals in the face of an opulent ruling class steeped in historically
unprecedented wealth and power is limited, but we are not impotent in
the battle for our souls.
Consider the position of
Matthew Scully, who authored Dominion: the Power of Man, the Suffering
of Animals, and the Call to Mercy and who was a speechwriter for George
W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, and Bob Dole (not exactly the credentials
of a “bleeding heart liberal”):
“Conservatives like
to think of animal protection as a trendy leftist cause, which makes
it easier to brush off. And I hope that more of us will open our hearts
to animals. I also believe that in factory farming and other cruelties
conservatives will find some familiar problems — moral relativism,
self-centered materialism, license passing itself off as freedom, and
the culture of death.”
Vegetarianism, one potential
cure for the disease of speciesism, has a long and rich history. A number
of individuals noted for their impressive moral, intellectual, social,
literary, or political accomplishments were vegetarians, including Edison,
Einstein, Gandhi, Kafka, Pythagoras, da Vinci, Tesla, Plato, Tolstoy,
Thoreau, Jane Goodall, Cesar Chavez, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and George
Bernard Shaw.
Almost undoubtedly these
conscientious individuals who respected non-human animals enough to
stop eating them confronted some of the same specious, often snide,
arguments against vegetarianism that defenders of speciesism still use
today.
Consider a brief deconstruction
of a few of them:
“A vegetarian diet
is protein-deficient and vegetarians become weak, frail, and sickly.”
There is abundant medical
and anecdotal evidence to demonstrate that a plant-based diet provides
ample proteins for a human being to sustain health to the same extent
as those eating meat. There are also some indications that we were almost
exclusively vegetarian at one point in the evolutionary process (2).
“Animals do not have
the same capabilities as humans, so they are not entitled to the same
rights.”
That is a true statement.
The first part, that is. It would be patently absurd to argue that a
pig has the right to bear arms. The point is that few serious-minded
people pursuing animal liberation think in terms of animal rights, per
se. However, the moral equality sought by animal defenders for animals
is not based on a ludicrous equality of “intelligence” between
non-human and human species, since if intelligence (or lack thereof)
were the criterion to confer protection from abuse, torture and death,
then we would be logically justified to kill, eat and use mentally handicapped
or brain-dead people in such manner, and we clearly are not about to
do so. As has been repeated for a couple of decades now, the basic point
is not whether they can reason like us, but whether they can feel pain
as we do, and they clearly, obviously, and loudly do, as anyone can
readily attest by spending just a few minutes in a slaughterhouse or
similar hells. Animals are ends in themselves, and not mere means to
our designs.
In Animal Liberation Singer
defined the above principles in this manner:
“The argument for extending
the principle of equality beyond our own species is simple, so simple
that it amounts to no more than a clear understanding of the nature
of the principle of equal consideration of interests. We have seen that
this principle implies that our concern for others ought not to depend
on what they are like, or what abilities they possess (although precisely
what this concern requires us to do may vary according to the characteristics
of those affected by what we do). It is on this basis that we are able
to say that the fact that some people are not members of our race does
not entitle us to exploit them, and similarly the fact that some people
are less intelligent than others does not mean that their interests
may be disregarded. But the principle also implies that the fact that
beings are not members of our species does not entitle us to exploit
them, and similarly the fact that other animals are less intelligent
than we are does not mean that their interests may be disregarded.”
“To live is to destroy
and kill.”
There is an element of truth
to this statement. For instance, we inadvertently kill insects and microbes
with great frequency. However, as self-conscious, relatively intelligent
beings, we bear the responsibility and have the power to minimize the
destruction, suffering, and death we cause. One certain way to achieve
this end is to end one’s support of the industrialized murder
of the meat industry.
“Vegetarians have no
regard for the “suffering” of plants.”
One of the principal reasons
most animal liberationists oppose meat consumption is the suffering
it imposes upon non-human animals. Arguing that vegetarians are hypocritical
because they eat plants is fallacious for two reasons (which are probably
obvious even to those who disingenuously make this ridiculous assertion).
Lacking a central nervous
system and even a rudimentary consciousness necessary to experience
pain, it would be impossible for plants to “suffer” in the
sense that human and non-human animals do.
Admittedly, we do violate
the sanctity of life in an absolute sense when we consume a plant, which
is why there is some validity to the assertion that “to live is
to destroy and kill.” Yet again, as self-aware beings capable
of making moral decisions, it is incumbent upon us to minimize the suffering
and death which we cause simply by being. Choosing to eat plants rather
than animals is one of the most viable means we have of doing so.
Abstention from eating flesh
aside, many ardent speciesists argue that the entire notion of animal
liberation is puerile and trivial because the world is filled with problems
that are “more important” than relieving the misery of non-human
animals. But remember that many of these same individuals thrive in
a system of savage capitalism which provides them with an “inalienable
right” to prosper through exploitation. Terrified of losing their
profits, they work vigorously to prevent our society from adopting a
more enlightened moral position with respect to animals.
Certainly the United States
is not alone in committing shocking atrocities against non-human animals
as a matter of routine, but we are the epicenter of the most advanced
and malignant stages of predatory capitalism. With the complicity of
all of us Little Eichmans (even those who consciously keep their participation
to a bare minimum), the moneyed class comprising our de facto government
is literally committing crimes on par with those for which we hanged
the architects of Nazism at Nuremburg.
Despite the environment of
bitter dissent and rage directed at the status quo in the United States,
taking extreme action against an increasingly rickety yet still incredibly
powerful system would be premature, self-defeating, and perhaps suicidal
at this point.
Yet regardless of the considerable
number of constraints the ruling elites have upon us, we are still the
stewards of our own souls and possess the means to rise above the abject
moral poverty of our nation. What better place to start than in the
defense of the most vulnerable amongst us?
Here’s to the liberation
of animals and of our spirits…..
SOURCES:
1. http://www.cultureandanimals.org
/animalrights.htm#overabundance
2. http://www.diet-and-health.net/Diet/veg_diet.html
Jason Miller is a wage slave
of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually.
He is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/)
and publishes Thomas Paine’s Corner within Cyrano’s at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/.
You can reach him at [email protected]
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