The Mindset of Domination

Do you get asked a lot of questions about your reasons for being vegan? Do you ask others why they are vegan and what this whole thing with animal rights is? Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve noticed a common thread running through many questions concerning animal liberation that are repeatedly asked, pondered and answered. And it gives me the creeps.

There are a lot of questions about veganism and animal liberation in circulation. They have given rise to many internet vegan faqs and forums which offer answers – some valuable, and some that leave much to wish for. More and more questions arise, and will continue to arise endlessly: lots of them brand new and prompting vegans to deepen their reflection, others being the same old questions I’ve gotten used to hearing over and over again.

I try to answer many of them as well as I can in the conversations I have with people who are interested in the subjects. I am very fond of being able to talk to sincere people about the things dearest to me. And it’s natural that those who want to know ask questions. This time, however, I would like to focus not on looking at the answers, but on questioning the questions themselves. I would like to shed light on an assumption located beneath their explicit content – an attitude behind the questions that at once fundamentalist and callous.

People I talk to generally understand that causing other animals to suffer is bad. You don’t need Peter Singer to understand that. It is a quite common intuition in the hearts and minds of many modern people and has found its institutional expression in a multiplicity of welfarist organizations, which purportedly act to diminish nonhuman suffering. So far, so good. The problem starts when I try to push the discussion further by introducing the theme of animal liberation. Suddenly I feel like I’ve run into a wall. With almost no exception people take a very peculiar perspective regarding nonhuman animals, one I call ‘the mindset of domination’, which can be defined as:

a conviction that, once enslaved, nonhumans don’t mind being dominated, and since they don’t, then domination is justified and acceptable.

Many species of nonhuman animals have been made perpetually dependent on human beings. Their self-sufficiency and their worlds were taken away from them and replaced with lives of servitude*. The systematic processes through which human domination was realized carry basic features of total control, which is aimed at extending domination indefinitely, until the wills of the subjugated others are identical with the wishes of the oppressor. Not many people are willing to admit having such a way of seeing things. Even flesh-eating people like to think of themselves as caring for the welfare of the animals whose slavery and death they support in their actions. But domination is frequently masked as care, and their thinking is based on a premise due to which the other is viewed as a living tool to be controlled, a tool so broken that, since it does not actively oppose control anymore** and has long forgotten free life, is only worthy of being silently oppressed. This is perfect for the dominator: manipulation made so subtle, so quiet that it is internalized so as to seem benign. Or maybe domination can be benign,

maybe exploitation is not only excusable, but favorable to the lives of nonhumans, since it offers safety and protection from the dangers of the violent world outside the cage.

In a quite perverted sense and to a very limited degree, this is factually true. The barbed wire keeps predators (foxes etc.) from feasting on the prey (hens etc.) So, captivity does grant a degree of security. If you know anything about the reality of industrialized animal exploitation, you’ll say that this is an extremely partial picture – that hens will have their throats slit by humans, that they’ll never go outside to see the light of day, that they are routinely debeaked and crowded indoors in the thousands. I’m with you there. But let’s assume we live in a world where nonhuman animals are not exploited in industrialized settings, a world where they are just held captive and have access to the outdoors and are allowed to maintain many of their natural social relationships, and are not killed, but allowed to live out their days on farms and die of natural causes. Is this form of enslaving nonhumans OK? Is it as benign as it might seem at first?

By definition, slavery denies nonhumans their freedom – freedom from human domination and manipulation, and freedom to live their lives their own way. Perhaps many of us humans don’t know what freedom is anymore? Perhaps many of us are wearing invisible chains at this very moment, passive and tied to our sense of comfort and coziness? I think it is essential to realize and remember that living a full life requires taking risks and acknowledging danger as an inherent and indispensible element of everyday existence. While being a threat and a barrier to security, it keeps us humans in a state of aliveness and perhaps even a state of gratitude for being alive. Of course, we hate the fact that we have to take risks and suffer the consequences of bad choices, but it’s how we learn and it’s how we become who we are as human animals. It’s clear to me that for nonhumans to live full lives they have to be able to deal with circumstances of risk and danger as well – appropriate for their evolutionary condition. In this sense, even if holding them captive provided them with a degree of safety – it would constitute doing them a disservice in the long run. To live full lives, nonhumans have to be emancipated from human domination and the limitations it encompasses.

When near total control becomes a fact, which I think in many cases of nonhuman animal exploitation it has, then you cannot look to the subjugated ones to recognize the abomination which this order of things entails – they might just look sedated and half-alive, even peaceful in their passivity. It is with the masters that total control rests. In their minds and attitudes you will see the dynamic of oppression start its circular flow. The basic concern within the mindset of domination is how to subjugate the other so that he/she doesn’t mind being controlled or, better yet, is not aware that the surrounding apparatus is one of exploitation at all. I was once asked what I thought of exploiting wild hens for their eggs by just enclosing the natural habitats in which they dwell (with no need to go beyond them) with a fence. I was told that they wouldn’t mind the fence, as they wouldn’t be tempted to leave the natural habitat. Apart from my objection against exploitation of sentient beings, I could reply: if you’re so sure they don’t enjoy freedom beyond their habitat, then why the fence? For freedom, there is always a beyond, an openness that defies even the subtlest methods of control. Freedom needs space to break out of the forced immobility which is implied by domination. I maintain that the revolution that is animal liberation rests ultimately on a deep change in the questions we ask as human beings: both about ourselves and about other animals. In fact, the problem starts with the kind of questions we ask. The question of how to control with as little harm as possible (the benign omnivore) reveals a truly totalitarian attitude. It comes with a long story and a complex background, but it is desirable to mention some of its major features here.

While the factors enabling and facilitating the emergence of the dominating mindset are numerous, they can be broken down to at least two grave (for nonhumans, that is) ontological mistakes. First, the problem is viewing other animals essentially as a resource, a special kind of resource perhaps, but a resource non the less. Another reason for the continued dominating attitude described here is the failure to see nonhuman animals as unique individuals with unrepeatable experiences and life histories. Each nonhuman animal is a person and not just a member of a population or a species or a part of her ecosystem. To treat her as merely that is an insult which frequently results in her enslavement, exploitation and death. In contrast, as a vegan I ask myself the question of how to grant other animals emancipation from human domination. One of the ways through which to topple its massive structure is to challenge the mistaken notions which underlie it and serve to reinforce prejudice against nonhumans.

* see Charles Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka for a description of the early days of animal enslavement.

** at least some nonhumans desperately oppose human domination in its more overt forms, such as confinement and beatings. See Joan Dunayer’s Speciesism and Animal Equality for numerous anecdotal evidence.

Defensive Omnivore Bingo

So I had a blast this morning with this ‘vegan bingo’ (as some of us vegans like to call it) thing. Maybe it’s old news, but not for me. I looked it up on the web to offer a link here and found a couple of comments/questions that some fellow vegans have found missing on the chart. Here’s a couple:

- Where do you get your iron?

- But I don’t really eat that much meat…

- But no animals are killed for milk and eggs.

Awesome. Surely there are hundreds more we might add on there. Still, DOB makes me laugh and feel better and closer to other vegans who go through the same daily inconvenience of living among omnivores and being faced with those same questions. By the way, my next post is gonna be about what links many of the questions themselves.

Also, I might go ahead and come up with a similar bingo chart for anarchism/socialism/radical left. Who on the real Left (not the liberal parliamentary centrist version) hasn’t heard stuff like: ‘But anarchism is chaos‘ or ‘But socialism is authoritarianism, just look at the Soviet Union‘. Right.

Thanks to Brian VanderVeen who came up with the DOB.

Emotion, Objectivity and the Bias Towards Non-exploitation

Why do I want a vegan humanity? Why do I oppose exploitation of any and all animals? Because that aspiration constitutes an ‘objective moral good’? No. It’s because of heartfelt empathy toward the enslaved and suffering ones, and a bias toward their freedom from human control.

The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know, as Blaise Pascal is supposed to have said. That applies to my being vegan, no doubt. To be honest, I don’t entirely understand why I’m a vegan. Surely I had become one before I could wrap my head around what it meant. Today I realize I’m not a vegan because of the firm rational, disengaged, disinterested arguments which can be made for veganism. Those play their important part in making consistent choices, but they are not the basis of my conviction. That’s right: even before I sit down at a table to discuss this stuff with you, I’m already biased. My bias is a heartfelt expression of a fellow-feeling for other animals of the earth, with whom I share an existential proximity – they are embodied minds, embodied awareness.

I am a vegan out of this fellow-feeling, and it is heart that guides me into what is important, worthwhile and meaningful. Whenever I attach a sense of self-importance to it – which is, admittedly, my shortcoming – I soon thereafter realize veganism is not about being right or about winning an argument. I engage in so many discussions that it’s sometimes easy to forget.

Logic clearly helps me navigate through the complexities of life with a vegan felt philosophy at heart – but this logic is my logic, i.e. a human, embodied logic, never as disinterested and objective as some would hope for. Morality, however nicely put into the form of logically consistent statements, starts out, I feel, from a pre-reflective call of the heart, with its emotions of caring and compassion. You can call it a bias if you want to, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

Dani of the Vegan Ideal website mentions this when discussing a site devoted to the exploitation of bees. She says that its author makes ‘a great argument about how veganism is about creating a world based on nonexploitation, which of course means starting from a bias favoring the nonexploitation of other animals’. While I am a supporter of the work of authors and activists such as Gary Francione and Joan Dunayer, I must admit they seem to be subscribing to a trend in the Animal Liberation Movement which tends to downplay emotion as rationale for veganism. Emotion is rarely discussed and seen as unpredictable, unstable and unreliable. As such, it cannot form a good basis of a solid moral theory. But I think this cuts off too much of what is valuable in us human animals.

I was once in the company of a person who said that the Nazi Holocaust was rational in its essence. He wasn’t justifying it, I think he simply held that once some assumptions are accepted, then what logically follows is extermination. While I don’t think it’s a proper place to analyze this at length, even if I were competent to undertake such a task, he might have been right. There is no objectively valid reason not to exploit others, there is no reason not to exterminate, there is no reason not to utilize your strength to efficiently use disempowered others to your benefit – if you’re powerful enough, then you’ve no punishment to fear, right? Or you could exploit some and be nice to others whom you might need for genuine company. If morality was purely a matter of rationality, we would have no ethical ground to stand on and no true connection to the Other. But it is a matter of the heart in that we start from heartfelt assumptions like: hierarchy and authority must be justified, freedom matters, we can’t deny their freedom anymore because of a mistaken assumption that we know what is best for them and are their caretakers. Those are all normative, non-objective, biased statements. While they have no grounding in absolutes (God, Natual Law), what I want is to popularize them throughout humanity, make other people uncover empathy in themselves and not repress it, so the desire for a world of non-exploitation can become global in scale and concrete in outlook.

As long as humans perceive other animals as things to be used, how can they empathize with them? A lot of ideology stands in the way of nonhumans being recognized as equal to humans. And a lot of thinking and strategizing is needed to dismantle that ideology. But it is empathy, in my view, that gets us biased in favor of animal liberation and makes us want to take up the fight. It is empathy that opens a door for human beings to shift to a new perception of other animals and to envisage a vegan humanity.

Love, K

Promoting Vegetarianism Does Not Lead to Animal Liberation

People become vegetarians (folks who abstain from animal flesh while continuing to endorse other products of animal exploitation: milk, skin, eggs, honey etc.). Is it good? Is it bad? Or is it just meaningless?…

This morning I heard an acquaintance say in exhilaration that apparently someone turned vegetarian after a recent Vegan Weekend in my hometown of Wroclaw. At once I thought to myself:  ’Did it really get to them that it was a vegan weekend?’ Perhaps it was not a vegan weekend after all, beyond the cuisine and the name itself. Perhaps what was promoted there was ‘animal friendliness’ in general, and not the aspiration to liberate nonhuman animals from human domination. The way I see it, the message sent out to the public was welfarist or reformist, implicitly referring to non-vegan vegetarianism (diet) as a kind of mini-veganism, a step in the right direction. But this morning I was not so happy to hear that somebody had turned vegetarian. To me the term is obsolete. Here’s why…

Imagine an alcoholic is being destroyed by the disease of drinking. He is a victim of his addiction. I’m no expert at this, but it seems to me that the only way for him to recover is to eliminate all alcohol from his system – to abstain from alcohol entirely. The only way to be sober and healthy in the long term is to become sober in the short term. That is not enough, but it’s undisputably a first condition. Ask anyone who knows firsthand.

It’s absurd to say that by giving up brandy and continuing to indulge in vodka, the alcoholic is gradually moving in the right direction. To get better, he must take a much more fundamental, if difficult, step – he must not drink.

By analogy, I think of systematic animal commodification and exploitation as a kind of civilizational disease. Nonhuman animals – bred, confined, raised and killed for the satisfaction of human pleasure, entertainment, habit etc. – are it main victims. I claim that vegetarianism, embodied by individuals and promoted collectively, is NOT a cure. More than that, I claim that it’s dangerous and counterproductive to the long term goal of the Animal Libration Movement – complete liberation of nonhuman animals from being exploited by humans. Vegetarianism (lacto-ovo-whatever, anything other than veganism),  rejects selected elements of nonhuman exploitation, while openly continuing to indulge in others*. It rejects animal flesh and other body parts which are obtained from the killing of nonhumans, but does not have a problem with animal enslavement per se. Thus, it does not address the fundamental problem of animal commodification and subjugation for human needs. It does not bring nonhumans closer to liberation. It does not criticize enslavement itself and so speaks only a minor part of the truth the world needs to hear and know.

To return to the other part of the analogy, vegetarianism is the attitude of a an alcoholic who, in order to recover, should quit drinking, but chooses not to. Instead he fools himself that by switching the kind of alcohol he drinks, he can have the cake and eat it, too. But he can’t. He should not tell himself that some manner of drinking is better than another. Similarly, animal advocates can’t tell people that some forms of exploitation are acceptable, and that vegetarianism is desirable. Not if they want a world devoid of animal objectification.

You may say, as perhaps is the case with recovery from some sorts of drug addiction, that one needs to go step by step. In the case of animal advocacy  first we should promote veganism and vegetarianism (and ‘happy meat’, oh, what’s the difference, ‘happy meat’ or ‘happy’ milk and even ‘happier’ eggs), then go further. But no – I claim it is possible to be frank with people and, treating them like adults for once, share our truth with them instead of twisting it around. It’s right to say that nonhuman animals deserve freedom from subjugation to humans. We should, I believe, speak our truth, and let the listeners decide for themselves, and not modulate the truth to trick people into adopting ways of life that still endorse animal slavery.

That’s why I wasn’t so happy to hear of ‘new vegetarians’ this morning. Though I do appreciate their effort!, I’m afraid it’s not a matter of gradual steps if they are meaningless- and vegetarianism is not a meaningful step towards animal liberation that we are fighting for. It is most probably an expression of good will, but a confused one at that – directed at alleviating the suffering of slaves, but not openly questioning the rationale of slavery itself . This is very important. People say that vegetarianism is a step towards veganism. I’m not so sure there is a causal relation here. The only thing vegetarianism has to do with the abolition of animal slavery is that it brings people into the discussion, while at the outset providing them with a short-sighted perspective that they have to clear out later on by becoming vegans. This is exactly what happened to me. Vegetarianism wasn’t a step towards veganism. It brought me to think about other animals, while at the same time it was making me feel very confused with regard to them. But I didn’t know another perspective – the vegan one – and once I came across it – I knew what to do. I went vegan.

We need to recover from the civilizational disease through which other animals are subjugated, and the way to do it on the individual level – is through veganism, the problematization rejection of status of nonhumans as ‘living things that can be owned’, and not vegetarianism, implicitly expressing the view that other animals are things that it is OK to exploit while being ‘nice’ to them and providing them with ‘happy’ lives. Like Gary Francione and Anna Charlton write in an abolitionist pamphlet which I have translated for them:

‘There is no meaningful distinction between eating flesh and eating dairy and other animal products’.

Besides making the point which they make: that the nonhumans exploited for eggs, skin, etc. end up being killed in the same slaughterhouse, there is an  ever bigger point to make: saying ‘yes’ to commodification of nonhumans by openly accepting any animal use allows the cycle of oppression to start.

Go vegan!, thanks

K

* It is true that one cannot abstain from benefiting from animal exploitation living in a society which has been built on it and supports it. So, it follows, one cannot be completely vegan today. That’s a shame, but at the same time I remind myself that veganism is not about me and my purity, but about bringing a desired change to the plight of nonhuman others. What fundamentally differentiates vegans from vegetarians is that even though both groups benefit from the use of at least some animal products, vegans problematize the whole matter and seek, if imperfectly, to express abolition today in their own lives.

 

Animal Equality and Insecticide

The international organization for the abolition of animal slavery, Igualdad Animal (Animal Equality) promotes a very bold and admirable slogan referring to all of us animals, human and nonhuman, ‘we are different and equal’. This is the ultimate antispeciesist statement. But doesn’t it sound a bit abstract, especially the latter part of it? What does it mean concretely? And it invites ridicule from the ordinary speciesist: If I kill a fly or a mosquito, will I face the same criminal charges as when I kill a human? Let’s see…

In having a part in the introduction of a paradigm of interspecies equality into contemporary civilization, I am saying that nonhuman animals are equal to human beings in that they are sentient, feeling, thinking beings. They are in fact different – they think differently, feel differently, surely in ways I will never comprehend due to the differences of our bodily forms. I can’t feel what a wolf or a mosquito does, for their world, although shared with mine, is at once radically different. But I know they are sentient. One look at Nuno, a dog who lives with me, and I know. I don’t feel exactly what you feel right know, but you won’t see me postulate that you’re an insentient thing.

What I am saying as an antispeciesist is that the differences between human and other animals do not justify dealing with nonhumans as with insentient things. Same as differences in skin color or cultural (and thus partly existential) background, deep as they may be, do not justify men in acting toward women as toward objects, or whites toward blacks, or blacks toward whites, for that matter.

Sentient beings have their own worlds, lives, and experiences. There is no reason, besides prejudice and fear (which don’t constitute a valid rationale at all), to oppress those other modes of being-in-the-world. There is all the reason to admire and be astonished by the richness of sentient life-forms and their experiences on this planet.

So this is equality on paper. Of course, it’s not perfect, nor will it be perfect when the test of hard reality is applied to it. How about notions of human equality? Those, too, wait to be fully realized, and they will evidently never be realized perfectly in a dynamically changing and unpredictably complex world such as ours. I hold that even an imperfect but REAL implementation of those notions has yet to come. It will take the dismemberment of the current capitalist world-system and replacing it with a more egalitarian and empathy-based one. And that’s incredibly difficult to even envision. But that does not invalidate our basic conviction that we are essentially equal as human beings, does it?

Most of us have no theoretical idea of what human equality actually means or could mean, but somehow many have a basic intuition of slavery, murder, rape, unjustified confinement etc. as moral wrongs. It will take an eternity to work out better and better ways in which human equality can be embodied and to really work out what it means to see yourself as someones equal. And it’s a continual process.

As we shift our speciesist, hierarchical and oppressive notions about nonhumans, we will develop a new moral intuition based on equality. Simultaneously we will start looking for detailed ways in which that equality can best be manifested by our civilization and in our individual actions.

As we totally abolish institutionalized animal slavery, we will continue to face conceptual challenges to which we will have to find intelligent solutions, just as we keep facing challenges standing in the way of human equality, which also call for innovative responses.

I don’t know if I would send a human to prison for intentionally killing a fly or 20 flies. Intentional, deliberate killing of sentient creatures would be considered a crime in a just world. Why can’t we lock up a human for killing flies? Because it is ridiculous? Only to a speciesist. To a nonspeciesist with a punitive attitude, it is justified. Is it technically impossible? Yes. But, and I gotta be rough for a moment – if someone intentionally kills (murders) your brother, sister or friend, and for some reason they can’t be punished, do you find the idea of punishing them ANY less justified?

So punishment applies, if we want to continue with a system based on a punitive (how to punish after the crime) instead of a preventative approach (no crime in the first place). I don’t think we should, ’cause I don’t think it’s working. On the other hand, there will always be individual instances of crime, so we gotta  figure out some form of punishment, right?

But we gotta figure out a punishment precisely because a crime is a crime. We can’t maintain that a crime is NOT  a crime, because it’s hard to apply punishment for it. We can’t say that it’s even remotely OK to kill any sentient creature, human or nonhuman, just because it’s difficult to work out the details of a ‘proper punishment’. Or because today it ’sounds ridiculous’ to the ears of a regular (speciesist) human being. Lots of reasonable things sound ridiculous of people. Does that mean we should condone the injustice they espouse and approach them from a perspective that denies our own convictions? Never. I insist that we should be firm and bold and stand for what we believe while acting in a smart and wholehearted way.

We cannot know the details of how things are gonna work themselves out in a future non-speciesist world. This will take a lot of thinking. To want that world to become reality takes a lot of creativity and conviction to speak your truth in the face of ridicule. This is what I hold we ought to do right now. This is what Igualdad Animal are doing. And I support them.

Now, please excuse me, but Nuno’s inviting me to a walk. Sometimes I think he’s using me. And I let him…

The Way to Animal Liberation

The end-goal of a collective force known as the animal liberation movement is the complete liberation of nonhuman animals from human use, enslavement, domination and killing. I can see only one way leading to the realization of that goal. It consists in:

shifting perceptual patterns (holistic, including emotional and prereflective, as well as discursive and logic-based, understanding) of human beings ingrained in this civilization with regard to other-than-human beings – from viewing them as objects to use – to subjects (sensitive, aware beings with lives and experiences of their own, which they themselves value), from seeing nonhumans as exploitable things to viewing them as beings who are different than human, but not less than human.

The thing to do for the animal liberation movement in the long run is to transform those human assumptions(stemming from perception and expressed as ideology) which violate other animals by enabling and facilitating their enslavement and oppression. If the perceptual landscape underlying institutional oppression remains untouched, the structures of oppression will proliferate.

Animal welfare (as opposed to abolitionist) action takes the reduction of the sum total of nonhuman suffering as its strategic focus, without unabashedly trying to achieve full recognition of nonhuman animals as persons. Effectively it says: “if you think ‘animals’ are ’subhuman’ and want to continue to own and use them, at least be nicer to them, ok? Give them a couple of square inches more space, kill them faster and less painfully and eat ‘less meat’” It doesn’t express a clear and unequivocal call for and end to exploitation, but de facto, despite its rhethoric, takes it to be an unchangeable given, and procedes to alleviate its most horrific symptoms. Since it does not openly call for nonhuman liberation and does nothing to challenge the perception of nonhuman animals as less-than-human living tools, it implicitly says it’s ok for humans to use other animals as things. It is speciesist and essentially subscribes to the current paradigm and reaffirms it. As such, it stands in the way of long-term perception shifting and thus in the way of fundamental change that will put an end to the objectification of nonhumans. If the movement does not aim at this fundamental change today, in each and every action it undertakes, the cycle of oppression is bound to reproduce itself without end.

So our strategic goal is formidable. It’s almost paralyzing. But does that mean that in the short run we can’t do anything? (not everybody’s gonna be vegan tomorrow, right?) Absolutely not. We must act now. To get where we want to go, we must start walking. The thing is to walk in the right direction. As a movement, we ought to take action on behalf of oppressed nonhumans, but choose ways of acting – tactics – that don’t impede the movement’s long-term, ultimate goal. What we say and do cannot assume that we think using other animals as exploitable objects is tolerable and justifiable. We cannot endorse any form of animal exploitation, albeit in a less oppressive manner. We cannot promote vegetarianism, ‘happy’ meat or eggs, or any other attitude that from the start suggests that some forms of animal use are acceptable, justifiable or desirable. We cannot argue from a position that says ‘yes’ to any form of animal exploitation, commodification, confinement and killing.

We should invest our energy in action that supports our strategic goal of total animal liberation – into what sends a message that will contribute to shifting the harmful perceptual patterns I mentioned – a message that says: Nonhuman beings are essentially equal to humans, i.e. equal to humans in their essence as sentient creatures.

Animal

I am not a ghost. Not a bodiless spirit. I am an animal body. Because I am an animal body, I can die, be tired, wounded, injured, or my brain can be chemically imbalanced. And because I am an animal body, I can think, feel, communicate, have sex with my partner, and have perception. Because I am the embodied being that I am, I find myself in the world and can look for my way in it, continually getting a better or worse grip on it. It’s thanks to my being a body that I am placed in the world and I fear losing my place. Being a body, I can wish more people read and understood what I write.

My perceptions, moods and sense of meaning are influenced and colored by nutrition, rest, physical presence with others, the condition of my senses, my memories and patterns of functioning I’ve tested as the embodied awareness I’ve come to be through years of  coping in life.

I am not a mere thing. I am no mere piece of meat…

… But I am living flesh.

As a body, I am my own limitation. And as a body, I am living openness to the world… This is what I call my human facticity, my animal facticity. And if you’re an embodied awareness, it is your facticity as well. The undeniable. The Radically Real.

K

Ontological Suffering and Ethical Action

‘…the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (ontological suffering), the courage to change the things I can (ethical action), and the wisdom to know the difference…’

Masao Abe’s book Zen and Western Thought has a reprint of a discussion of Zen, at the very beginning of which the author makes a distinction between two kinds of suffering. It at once struck me as crucial and relevant to my own moral intuition. He distinguishes between what he calls ontological issues and ethical issues of ‘man’ (I prefer to say ‘human beings’ and avoid sexist language. I also want to make it clear that I think what prof. Abe talks about holds true for any sentient being, at least when ontology is discussed. Ethics are quite a different matter. Keep reading). What I take Abe to mean by ontological issues is essentially suffering inherent to the existence of a sentient being. In this sense, to live is to suffer:

‘The different forms of suffering are in Buddhism understood as birth, sickness, old age and death’ (p.194).

To live, one must be born, and, inevitably, one ages, and dies, most succumb to one sort of sickness or another at some stage of their lives. This kind of suffering is inherent in life – it’s fundamentally unavoidable, even if efforts can be made to postpone or minimize it.

Now, ethics are a matter of a different order. They are of the order of potentially avoidable, preventable suffering, unfreedom, death. When answering a question about guilt in its relation to Buddhism, prof. Abe places it in context not of ontological issues, but of ethical issues, thinking it to be

‘more concerned with the ethical relationship between men‘ (p.194).

Thus, ethics are established as a sphere of inter-human relations. I object insofar as I don’t believe ethical, empathetic behavior is exclusive to human beings. Empathetic responses to situations have been observed in other animals as well. I find empathy in octopi, pigeons, bonobos etc. very inspiring. But, because of the ways in which we comport ourselves in the world as humans, it’s easiest to look for examples on how to manifest love, care and respect among those, with whom we are physically closest and those, to whom we are most similar: other humans. This way ethics  can be spread throughout the human community, because we, humans, have a potential for similar empathetic responses and can most easily understand each other’s behavior. I’ll look for examples of how to live life among other human beings first, as they are most like me, in terms of the physical and social circumstances of living. That’s especially true when pondering complicated  political systems apparently exclusive to the human species. So, in this quite narrow sense, ethics is an inter-human relationship.

But the subject of ethics, i.e. what we look for when we behave ethically, is not merely human, it includes all sentient beings: all sensitive creatures affected by our actions, are taken into consideration by a caring human heart. All those whom we might hurt, kill, enslave, oppress, exploit. In this sense, ethics are a fundamentally meta-human, or, as I prefer to say, animal relationship. As such, it extends far beyond ‘men’.

The other thing to realize is arrived at by contrasting ontological and ethical orders of being. While ontological suffering is, lamentably, unavoidable, and at times useful and crucial to the survival of individuals and their communities, when suffering is preventable, then it rightly belongs to the realm of the ethical. It’s true that the distinction between what suffering is avoidable and unavoidable is frequently unclear. But provisional lines must be drawn so that ethical action can begin. As activists, as human beings, we are naturally called (ok, some of us are naturally called) to enter this realm and eliminate the systems and instances of oppression, suffering and death, which it is possible to extinguish. As empathetic animals, we imperfectly do whatever we can to minimize the minimizable misery of the world. We never completely succeed. And we never stop trying to oppose what we can oppose and accept what we cannot avoid.

Love, Dependence, Freedom and Equality. Big words meaning what?

I don’t think there are absolutely correct, objectively true answers to the perpetually open questions of equality, freedom etc., that one could dig up from the Realm of Ideas. No. But there seem to be ones that work pretty well… And some that, in my view, don’t work at all. Some are relatively good ones and some I would throw out the window. Next, I don’t believe those questions should be pondered as abstractions. Instead, they should be felt and lived, and only secondarily verbalized  as terms of  discourse. Truth is not abstract. As sentient beings, we first and foremost live our freedom or oppression, then we do or don’t have a chance to reflect on that primary experience. Accordingly, I’m gonna use the terms mentioned in the title without assigning proper formal definitions to them, hoping that you will thus get a feel for what I’m talking about rather then develop a set of static, abstract ideas. Following this preface, let me go ahead and share some insights which, hopefully, you’ll find thought-provoking with regard to inter-human and nonhuman-human relationships.

Billions of nonhuman animals of multiple species in existence today remain fundamentally enslaved and unfree. They have been ‘domesticated’ by homo sapiens. ‘Domestication’, when one looks at what lurks behind the seemingly benign term, serves as a euphemism masking a brutal reality of breaking bodies and minds of nonhumans, so that they become easily controllable, manageable and subservient to humans. ‘Domestication’ comes down to subjugation and, over time, selective breeding through coercive control of nonhumans’ reproductive cycles, as Joan Dunayer writes in her Speciesism:

‘With regard to human breeding of nonhumans, there is no such thing as ”responsible breeding”. Breeding other animals for human pleasure or use exploits nonhumans and violates their autonomy. We have no moral right to genetically manipulate other beings or manufacture their existence for our purposes.’ (p.XIII)

‘Domesticated’ nonhuman animals are sentient creatures torn away from their natures (ways of living in the world and coping with challenges in their lives), from their essential freedom to live out their lives in THEIR worlds, their ecological niches.

Our relationship with nonhuman animals, while they remain unfree, cannot be a truly symmetrical loving relationship. In any case, the love between a nonhuman animal and a human caretaker cannot be based on equality, just as the love between a parent and a child is not a relationship of equals. That does not mean love is not present, but it surely is accompanied by dependence of the child or nonhuman for their life on their caretaker. It’s beautiful in the sense that it may be a loving relationship, and often is, but it is perhaps corrupted by the lack of freedom inherent in it.

In the child-parent relationship the situation is bound to change, if the relationship evolves healthily, allowing the child to become an adult equal. In the nonhuman-human relationship, there is no prospect for such equality and freedom, because a nonhuman cannot function in a human community as an adult (an equal).

Insofar as freedom is an essential element of a relationship based on equality, nonhuman animals, with their longstanding conditioning to captivity and dependence on humans, cannot exercise their freedom to remain in or leave a human-nonhuman relationship. The nonhumans we love and feel loved by, are perpetually dependent on us for their life, and so their love is not accompanied by freedom (doesn’t flow from it and isn’t expressed through it), as they’re not able to exit relationships in which they find themselves embedded due to both material (including genetic) and internalized psychological dependence.

As an advocate of animal liberation and animal equality, I understand that human caretakers should continue to care for nonhumans in dire need, but that the phenomenon of nonhuman dependence on humans should not be perpetuated beyond the strictest necessity (the survival of nonhuman individuals).

Much as I love the dogs and cat I live with, I do realize that our relationship (don’t know about their relationship to each other) is not one of equals. Being a loving relationship, and I feel their love daily, it is still more akin to one in which I am their parent than an equal partner. Inasmuch as I want to provide as much freedom as reasonably possible for them, I am the one who decides it, and my decision is arbitrary. I decide, not they. This is especially true of dogs. Human-cat relationships may be superficially different, but essentially also tend to make cats more and more dependent on humans. I assume that this will only progress to a situation, where cats are as dependent on human animals as dogs and other nonhumans. Maybe it won’t. But if there is a chance that it does, we should be careful not to make more and more nonhumans perpetually dependent on us.

I encourage you to examine, with your heart and mind, your relationship with nonhumans, and develop a unique perspective for yourself. Let me sum up with this: do you really think (if you do) that it’s ok to ‘have pets’ because it’s good for them, or because it is primarily good for us, and does not harm them? I feel that, on some level, even in the presence of love, lack of equality and freedom, do constitute a certain deprivation and therefore harm.

Being aware of our natural, if long forgotten, kinship with other animals, I don’t necessarily insist on forever remaining in isolation from them, but on living in nature and with them, in truly noncoercive ways. How such relationships could be manifested remains a conundrum to me. Sadly, in our highly industrialized way of life there seems to be no place for nonhuman nature at all.

Oh, I almost forgot. However you feel about the quite subtle questions discussed here, there is no justification for systematic exploitation and oppression of other animals. Put and end to it in your own life by going vegan, then we can start thinking about both the subtleties and big issues of building a movement to achieve a critical mass of people who can really challenge human systems of domination over nonhumans. But we have to lead by example and show through our actions that this is both possible and desirable.

K

Decenter Thinking

‘What is there before a thought is born…’

I sense my bodily state proprioceptively. Sometimes there’s  unease, a tension physically present and undeniable (a ‘no’). At other times there’s a feeling of ease and relaxation, embodied peace (a ‘yes’). It’s prereflective and assumes a form which is always open, incomplete and ungraspable. Remaining nonverbal and  floating like a field-of-feeling, it changes and vibrates before any thought of what it relates to or signifies can be constituted.

From this feeling, from this ‘I don’t know what is wrong’ or ‘I don’t know what is right’, future ideas (verbal, conceptual patterns) may be born. The living, breathing body ‘knows’, feels that something is right or wrong way before the analyzing mind can tear the feeling from the body and into the realm of words.

When the feeling arises, the thinking mind is always late in me. Lived feelings are new, fresh and pulsating. The body can already situate itself in relation to the phenomenon that  gives birth to the feeling, it already knows ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (or is confused, which, too, is tension and consequently a ‘no’, a negation). I don’t have to ponder the logical order of how the situation I’m in fits into a more or less fixed web of my conscious thought-out world view. I already know what to do, just not why I do it.

Tension and sadness arose in me a couple of minutes ago with regard to something, and I know what that something is, I was present and attentive to the phenomenon which caused this unease in me, but I still can’t put any words on it. If, as Merleau-Ponty seemed to think, the world lives in me just as much as I live in the world, then, moment by moment, it settles into my flesh and bones before it finds its place in my thoughts. In other words, I know what I ‘don’t like’ as the embodied being that I am, but, at least for a time, I can’t verbalize the reasons for feeling this particular feeling at that particular time (a radically new and unique one in terms of lived experience). This is not to say that feelings don’t have reasons behind them. What I’m saying is that those reasons are first ‘intercepted’ by the feeling, sensing body, and are only secondarily verbalized and interpreted by the conceptualizing mind as if from a distance.

My chattering mind rages in the background, trying to relegate the mysterious, unclear feeling into the past tense, to solidify and afterwards control it. It is afraid of what is unmanageable and new. It is crazy when it can’t understand something in a disembodied, verbal manner. In truth, however, I already know the world long before I can say something about it. Maybe it’s time to shut up and trust this feeling. I know, it sounds scary…

K