The Dr. Steve Best Narratives:
Part 4: On the origins of anthropocentrism, speciesism, and hierarchy
The biases, discrimination, injustices, and moral inconsistencies of humanism lead to a shallow holism and pseudo-universalism that does not extend beyond provincial and bigoted human boundaries, as if humans were not deeply embedded in a planetary web of life. Consequently, climate justice—this alleged “movement of movements”—seems oblivious to two of the most dramatic intellectual breakthroughs in the last 60 years: the philosophical-moral revolution of animal rights/liberation and the scientific revolution of cognitive ethology which, building on Darwin’s (2009) pathbreaking insights, documents the complexity of animals’ cognition, emotions, behavior, and communication. Climate justice proponents demand “epistemic justice” and extol the plurality of non-Western ways of knowing and being, yet are blithely unaware of the amazingly complex and diverse forms of animal intelligence and culture. Humanists are blind to the salient similarities in the plight of humans and animals and fail to show solidarity with their extreme oppression.
Moreover, the call for a pluralistic and “intersectional” alliance politics among climate justice movements is insufficient to the extent it ignores or excludes animal rights/liberation and ethical vegan groups that typically struggle on numerous fronts—humans, animals, the environment, justice generally, and, with the more radical animal liberationists, anti-capitalist and anti-statist as well. Many animal rights groups are political, diverse, and open to or involved with social justice groups. Animal liberationists and anti-speciesist vegans would greatly enliven the theory and politics of the climate justice movement, by giving more philosophical depth, greater diversity, and stronger numbers. Unfortunately, the speciesism prevalent throughout social justice movements generally leads proponents to ignore the vital historical, social, philosophical, and political perspectives that stem from what I call the “animal standpoint” (see Best 2014). Consequently, they dismiss or marginalize animal advocates, holistic vegan perspectives, and the urgency of animal liberation for human and earth liberation.
Animal/vegan advocates have invaluable contributions to make to the goal of a just transition to sustainable societies. Animal advocates understand relations such as between animal cruelty and domestic violence; forms of oppression such as speciesism, patriarchy, and racism; the objectification of meat and of women in images and ideology; the enslavement of animals in early agriculture and the enslavement of peoples in the 16th–19th centuries, the destruction of animal habitats and the spread of pandemics; the extermination of animal species and the disruption of ecosystems vital to life; and countless other connections often hidden from humanist purviews.
Among the broad range of critical contributions of animal and vegan standpoints, I will consider two. First, I emphasize the powerful insights the animal standpoint has on the origins and evolution of hierarchy, dominator societies, anthropocentrism, overlapping and reinforcing systems of oppression including patriarchy, racism, and colonialism. And although animal standpoint theorists analyze human-animal relations in positive forms—such as the crucial role animals have played in shaping human minds and lives, from the earliest primal reverence of animals to the ways they stimulated human cognitive development and give love and support — a major focus of their analyses and I focus below on the innumerable negative social and psychological consequences of human alienation from and domination over other animals. Second, in the next section, the animal standpoint exposes the catastrophic social and ecological consequences of global industrial farming and worrying spikes in world meat consumption.
Like many theories, the animal standpoint, in grand narrative form, begins with the monumental historical transition from hunter-gatherer or foraging cultures to agricultural society with farming and pastoral cultures, emphasizing that the changed human-animal relations were fundamental to the origins and development of dominator societies. Some ten thousand years ago, in the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, throughout the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, humans initiated a shift from hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural society premised on the domestication of plants and animals.
In agricultural societies, for the first time, systems of hierarchical domination emerged, involving human over human and human over nature and other species. Having lived in partnership societies for 95% of their history, humans now interact in dominator societies rooted in inequality and power systems. In the transition from foraging to farming, the cultivation of crops for immediate consumption yielded surplus production, and societies became larger and more complex. A state apparatus emerged, led by kings, priests, warriors, and functionaries, to control production, trade, and tax goods, and to advance and protect territories and power. Governed by men and their patriarchal ideologies and male Gods, women were devalued and reduced to breeding and domestic functions. As higher levels of production spurred economic and population growth, agricultural societies expanded aggressively into Europe by 9,000 BCE, as well as into East Africa, India, and other regions, and by 5,000 BCE.
Just as the status of women changed radically with patriarchy, so too did that of animals as the animistic and sacred worldview of primal cultures gave way to the anthropocentric and alienated and objectifying worldview of dominator societies. In emergent farming cultures, humans began not only to take from nature, but also to transform it, cultivating fields of wheat and barley, raising small animals such as fowl and pigs for food, and herding large animals such as cattle and sheep in once grassy fields. Where hunter-gatherers saw themselves simply as part of an inherently productive environment, farmers regarded their environment as something to manipulate, tame, and control. They confused having a partial autonomy from nature with radical autonomy, and eventually even to fear, loathe, and wage war against it. Unlike the spiritual and unifying cosmos of primal peoples, agricultural society defined culture in rigid opposition to nature, and humans as radically different from animals. Reason and civilization were counterposed to brute beasts and the chaos of nature. Primal kinship relations with animals gave way to anthropocentric worldviews that stressed the singularity of humans and framed nature and animals as mere objects, resources, and commodities to be exploited for human purposes. One cannot exploit other beings if they are kin rather than Others.
The advent of agriculture marked a profound alienation of human beings from other animals and initiated a pathology of dominating nature, expressed in anthropocentric worldviews, that persisted in the ancient and medieval eras and reached full fruition in modernity. Arguably, the first conceptual oppositions that inform the logic of domination are the dichotomies between human/animal and culture/nature, where each traces wholly separate ontological realms divided by inert nature and brute beasts on one side and rational human beings on the other.
The human/animal dualism that underpins speciesism enables not only the subjugation of other animals but also human beings themselves. Because the human/animal opposition parallels and informs the dualisms that underpin patriarchy, racism, and colonialism, it arguably predates and informs these other hierarchical systems. By constructing human identity in opposition to animals, by elevating reason as the quintessence of “human,” and by relegating animals to the moral basement, as the nonrational and nonhuman Other, speciesism provided key conceptual tools and foundations for dehumanizing women, people of color, and non-Western ethnicities and cultures—all stigmatized as irrational, subhuman, mere “beasts” or “animals” lacking reason and the niceties of “civilization” (see Spiegel, 1997; Patterson, 2002).
The animal standpoint is vital for a historical understanding of how commonalities of oppression—such as linking sexism, racism, and colonialism—are rooted in and reinforced by speciesism and the domination of humans over animals. The discrimination, prejudice, violence, and pathologies informing “white supremacism” and “male supremacism” are deeply implicated in human supremacism and the exploitation and massacre of animals. Creating the category of the animal other, animalizing and dehumanizing entire peoples, is the first step toward treating them like animals in practice, as colonialists did in their encounters with indigenous peoples by denouncing them as “savages,” and “barbarians” in need of civilization. Before swordplay, there is always wordplay.
Thus, a key insight from the animal standpoint is the recognition that the human/animal and culture/nature dualisms underpinned other oppositions in hierarchical societies, and speciesism deeply informed sexism, racism, and colonialism. One key line of critical analysis turns on the distinction between the sedentary cultivation of crops (farming) and the domestication and herding of large animals by nomadic peoples (pastoralism). The analyses of ecological historians and social theorists such as Alfred Crosby, Jim Mason, and Jeremy Rifkin locate key roots of dominator societies in the first hunter-herder cultures of the Kurdish hill country of northern Iraq and the Middle East, centers of large-animal domestication, including cattle, horses, camels, goats, and sheep. Throughout the world, they find, herding peoples share an obsession with their animals, the pastureland needed to feed them, the conquests needed to sustain their parasitic cultures, as well as property and money (the words “cattle” and “money” share the same roots, and as the Aryan word for “warfare” translates into “the desire for more cattle”). Herder cultures are uniquely expansionistic, fierce, and militaristic and their values infect whole cultures. Rifkin traces a direct lineage from early hunters to herders to later warmongers and colonialists. Throughout history, the exploitation of animals was central to social expansion, developing economic systems, and amassing profit, especially with global capitalism. Although speciesism, like patriarchy, predates capitalism, it is deeply imbricated with it, and with patriarchy and racism as well.
Selected references
Darwin (2009) The expression of the emotions in man and animals. London: Penguin Classics.
Best, Steven (2014). The politics of total liberation: rethinking revolution in the 21st century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rifkin, Jeremy (1993). Beyond beef: the rise and fall of the cattle culture. New York: Plume.
Spiegel, Marjorie (1997). The dreaded comparison: human and animal slavery. New York: Mirror Books.
Patterson, Charles (2002). Eternal treblinka: our treatment of animals and the holocaust. New York: Lantern
_____________________________
Leave a Reply