Animals in Farming (The Vegetarian Myth)

Animism

Again: for someone to live, someone else has to die. A friend offered that to me once, and it helped. This was the ancestral wisdom of her people. I don’t have an unbroken line back to a living, pre-agricultural tradition, but the fragments that survive whisper to a similar theology.

In the animist world view, everything is alive: rocks, rain, rivers, birds. According to Luther Standing Bear:

From Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, there came a great uni- fying force that flowed in and through all things—the flowers of the plains, blowing wind, rocks, trees, birds, animals—and was the same force that had been breathed into the first [human]. Thus all things were kindred...

Here, there is no hierarchy where humans and maybe a few animals like us are the beings that count as sentient, or conscious, or somehow more worthy. We are all made of the same substance, a substance animate and sacred. Because of that similarity, because we are all siblings, communication with plants, animals, stars, and even the dead is an accepted and expected activity. The animating substance is more energy than mass, more motion than thing. It passes through us, temporarily taking the form of a fish or a flower, and then it’s transformed into a heron or a hummingbird, and then again into a coyote or an apple. And even though fish and flowers die, Fish and Flowers continue. Jessica Prentice, the mother of the word locavore, explains:

In ancient Greek, for example, there were two different words for life: bios and zoë ... [A]ll living things rely on the death of other living things ... zoë-life, life in the biggest sense of enduring life, Life with a capital L, requires the sacrifice of bios-life, the particular lives of living creatures. Zoë takes (kills, consumes, eats, sacrifices, requires) bios. A core understanding of this adult knowledge lies at the heart of many spiritual practices and religious traditions worldwide. Death extinguishes a particular life, of course, but it doesn’t extinguish Life. Life endures and transcends death.

And the beauty in this is that, nice as it would be to have a wise, ancient grandmother to teach us, we don’t have to have one. All we need to do is observe. Find a small wild spot somewhere, the edge of a parking lot, the tree outside your window, and watch. Really watch. This is what you will see: everything is eating and then being eaten, and through it all life endures. There is no hierarchy, only hunger. And it’s through our hunger that we participate in the cosmos, in an endless cycle of life, death, and regeneration. For 98 percent of our time on Earth this was our religion.

The religions of the civilized are equally similar. Gore Vidal calls them the Sky God people. God is removed from the living world (and changes gender), leaving the earth defined as inert matter. The sacred is reduced to a punishing Father, split from all life processes. The only thing holy is far above—and you disobey Him at your own peril. Morality is a rigid code, the one true way, not a lived experience. The further humans move (or are moved, often by force) from hunters to horticulturalists to agriculturalists to urbanists to industrialists, the further the sacred recedes, first to heaven, then condensed to monotheism, until finally it dies in irony.

Humanism

In one sense, humanism was simply the last step in the process of desacralization. Man dispenses with the sacred altogether, putting himself at the center of the moral universe. And in some ways this is an improvement. Personally, I would rather live in a liberal democracy than a religious theocracy. Funny how little things like voting and, say, being able to leave the house without a male relative’s permission, matter. But religious theocracies are the result of agriculture. That level of organized hierarchy didn’t exist until civilization. And I recognize fully that human rights have been won only at the cost of generations of struggle and that we aren’t finished yet. Just for instance, there are 27 million people still enslaved around the world, including 1.3 million women and girls bought and sold into sexual slavery.

But the narrative of capital-P Progress reads a little too much like the story of Manifest Destiny or God dispensing Promised Lands. Because while we—human race we—have made theoretical and material strides toward a single, universal standard of human rights, we’ve also lost in ways that are crucial to the survival of life on earth.

The ancient world of the West saw the earth and the cosmos as a living body, and even into Christian Europe there were still religious strictures against human harm to the earth. But humanism removed those last restraints on human activity by killing off God, and replacing the metaphor of a body with that of a machine. The world has been dying at an exponential rate ever since. Kind'a hard to call that progress.

Humanism leaves us a contradictory legacy. In some ways it is an unfulfilled promise: all people should have the rights guaranteed by documents like the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At least humanism gives us an ethical platform to argue from. If all men are created equal, then all can’t just mean white and rich and men can’t just mean male. The struggle involved has cost people their lives, but the idea—the ideal—that we have inalienable rights, that we are inherently equal, that we should all have a collective say in how our societies are organized, has had a profound impact on systems of domination around the world. Hierarchies like to declare themselves the natural order, arranged by a supreme being in the office at the top. And don’t even try making an appointment— He’s busy into eternity. First there’s God, complete with thunderbolts, guilt-inducing moral code, and penis. Then there’s the king. Then the priests and the generals, usually vying for power. Beneath them are the merchant traders, beneath them the skilled craftspeople. The base of the pyramid is reserved for the laborers, usually serfs or slaves, and the base extends deep and wide. In ancient Athens, the revered origin of democracy, 90 percent of the population was enslaved. Adam Hochschild, in his extraordinary book Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, writes that in 1800, 80 percent of the world lived in serfdom or slavery. Whatever else humanism has done, it has given people some tools to resist oppression both psychologically and politically.

So God may have given man dominion over women, animals, and the earth, but once we knock him off his throne, the question is: does the whole kingdom crumble?

Not necessarily. Putting humans at the center of the moral universe still leaves us with the dichotomy of culture vs. nature. The attributes assigned to humans are elevated into the defining distinction. Only humans are rational or self-conscious, or have agency, or are aware of our mortality, and that sets us above and apart. Humans may matter, but everything else is dead matter. Some currents of this philosophy say that humans are how the earth knows itself, the pinnacle of evolution, what the planet has done all this for. The reason to save the rainforest is not because the rainforest has the right to exist, but because there might be plants there that can cure human cancer. In this culture, humans aren’t part of the natural world—we act against it and then have to weigh human needs against the destruction of other species. And there is nothing in humanism to argue against this behavior.

Animal Rights

Animal Rights (AR) as a political philosophy is an offshoot of humanism. Just as the inalienable rights of liberal individualism have been extended past white rich men to include (theoretically) the rest of humanity, they should be extended to animals. Not all animals, though the Animal Rights people never come out and say that. The animals that matter are the ones that are like humans in very specific ways.

I won’t eat anything that has a mother or a face. There are three unspoken characteristics that define which animals the AR people advocate for. Does it care for its young? Does it have facial features that are recognizable? Does it vocalize when it’s in pain? These are characteristics that define more than who is like us. There are plenty of other attributes that some animals share with humans, say, hypermobile fingers or the ability to store food. But those three are the dividing lines because they are the ones that are primary to the survival of a human child. Without parental care, we die. The only way an infant can communicate distress—hunger, pain, fear—is by crying. And we apparently are born with a template for the human face. There is something crucial to our survival about our ability to bond mother-to-infant, an ability that depends on this recognition.

And everyone who’s had a baby knows about the endless hours that can slip away in simply staring into your baby’s eyes. I don’t even have my own and I know how compelling that experience can be. It feels primal, instinctive, I’d say preverbal, but it doesn’t lead to or need words. It doesn’t feel like a stage. It feels like the thing itself, the universe entire.

These are not qualities we value for the sake of the animals. They say nothing about, for instance, an animal’s ability to feel pain, or fear, or dread. Those of us who care about animal suffering are endlessly accused of sentimentality, and to our accusers the insult in that word is self-evident. The problem is that, in some sense, the accusation is true.

For the sentimentalist it is not the object but the subject of the emotion which is important. Real love focuses on another individual: It is gladdened by his [sic] pleasure and grieved by his pain. The unreal love of the sentimentalist reaches no further than the self and gives precedence to pleasures and pains of its own, or else invents for itself a gratifying image of the pleasures and pains of its object.

The quote is from Roger Scruton’s Animal Rights and Wrongs, a book that to me was the equivalent of prodding Sappho’s rubble on the beach, and yes, I am squeamish. I’m uneasy criticizing a movement that is working to stop torture. And it leaves me with a wrenching sense of moral cognitive dissonance to find my criticism expressed by someone who is otherwise repugnant to me. But sometimes your enemies are your best critics, and Scruton is precisely right about sentimentality.

The AR movement is liberal individualism applied to animals. It is a reflection of human needs and desires, not the needs and desires of animals themselves. The animals, for instance, want to hunt. They want to eat the food evolution has designed them for. Like the vegan who suggested putting a fence down the length of the Serengeti, the ARs end up having a problem with the animal nature of animals because they’re arguing from a philosophical base of humanism. It’s a bad idea for humans to kill other humans, for our culture to socialize its members to violence, sadism, hierarchy. We need justice, not domination, to make a human society worth the name. But those are human concepts.

To the extent that ARs stop factory farms and vivisection, on a practical level who cares about their philosophy? But if the larger goal is an egalitarian culture nestled sustainably inside its land base, the AR model will fail. It will fail because the diet the ARs aspire to is an environmental nightmare and the planet is out of topsoil. The annual grains of the vegetarians are causing mass destruction. But it will also fail because humanism contains no philosophical or moral constraints on human activity, no check on human hubris or our destructive capacity. An AR position derived from a humanist ethic will also fail because it’s completely at odds with the nature of nature, including the nature of animals. Animals kill. So, for that matter, do plants. Do you know why the world smells so good after a rainstorm? The sweet scents are chemicals released by plants to attract the insects that attack their neighbors, their competitors. Thou shalt not kill—or the Buddhist version Abstain from killing— is a fine moral guideline for human society. It is nonsensical when applied to the natural world. Matthew Scully, in his book Dominion, uses the phrase moral degradation to describe cats, foxes, and weasels. Moral degradation? replies Michael Pollan in full italics. Nature is no more moral than it is immoral. It’s amoral, by definition. Life is literally a process of one creature eating another, whether it’s bacteria breaking down plants or animals, plants strangling each other, animals going for the throat, or viruses attacking animals. All of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the words of William Ralph Inge.

The paradigm that asks us to reject death certainly provides a simple ethical code, a code that can rally the righteous, but it is the black-and-white thinking of a child. The tremendous moral vigor that is the gift of youth seems to demand such rules, but they are essentially slogans and ethical platitudes, which are the root of fundamentalism. Adult knowledge demands more, starting with more information, and it includes the ability to incorporate that new information, to recast as necessary the behaviors informed by our values. Adults don’t just absorb, they learn. The challenge of adulthood is to remember our ethical dreams and visions in the face of the complexities and frank disappointments of reality.

I used ideology like a sledgehammer and I thought I could bend the world to my demands. I couldn’t. The needs of soil, the truth of the carbon cycle, and the nutritional requirements of the basic human template were a reality of brute, physical facts that would not be moved. I had built my entire identity on death being an ethical taboo, a moral horror, one that provoked a visceral shudder through body and soul. But death-free is not an option that the processes of life offer us. We can dominate or we can participate, but there’s no way out, a friend who grows her own food offered. We can rail and cry all we want, but in the end we have to make peace with the world, the good, green earth we claim to love so much but understand not at all. In dreams begin responsibilities, yes, but with understanding comes more. Eventually we see our only choices: the death that’s destroying life or the death that’s a part of life.