A Thinking Reed

Category: Animal Rights and Issues

  • C.S. Lews on democracy and authority

    I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.

    That I believe to be the true ground of democracy. I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. I believe that if we had not fallen, Filmer would be right, and partiarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government. But since we have learned sin, we have found, as Lord Acton says, that “all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The only remedy has been to take away the powers and substitute a legal fiction of equality. The authority of father and husband has been rightly abolished on the legal plane, not because this authority is in itself bad (on the contrary, it is, I hold, divine in origin), but because fathers and husbands are bad. Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that learned priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us. Even the authority of man over beast has had to be interfered with because it is constantly abused. (C.S. Lewis, “Membership,” from The Weight of Glory, pp. 168-7)

    I agree with Lewis that democracy (by which I think he would have agreed that he meant limited, constitutional democracy) is grounded in the sinfulness of human beings. Because we are not only frail, ignorant, and limited, but because we are sinful, our power over each other has to be circumscribed. However, I disagree that the kinds of authority he mentions are part of God’s original plan for things, at least as we would likely be tempted to understand it. If anything, I’m inclined to say that men’s “authority” over women is the consequence of sin, not God’s intention. Even a “benign,” paternalistic rule, while perhaps preferable to outright tyranny, falls short of the ideal as a description of a relationship between equals.

    Children and animals are different cases for obvious reasons. Though even here there are qualifications. The “rule” of parent over child is generally agreed to be for the sake of the child’s good. The same, I would argue, is the case for animals. What I think a genuinely Christian notion of “lordship” requires is a subversion of any “vulgar Aristotelian” notion that the “lower” exists for the sake of the “higher” (I don’t think Aristotle himself would have given unqualified endorsement to it, but it’s a sentiment that has sometimes creeped into Christian theology under the authority of Aristotle). Andrew Linzey comes closer to the mark when he describes human beings as the “servant species,” with a lordship patterned after the one who came to serve, not to be served. I think this calls into question the idea that animals can simply be used for our good (however “humanely” we do so). If anything, an unfallen world would be more like an anarchy than a monarchy, at least as far as relations among creatures go. It would be characterized by mutual love and service without the need for coercive restraint.

  • Radical faith and creation

    As my previous post may have suggested, I’ve been dipping into the greatest hits of H. Richard Niebuhr (Reinhold’s younger brother and no mean theologian himself).

    Right now I’m finishing up his Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, which I had read as an undergrad, and I remember it making an impression on me at the time even though I was in a very different place, religiously speaking.

    Faith, for N., has two aspects, the trust aspect and the loyalty aspect. To have faith in something is to trust it as a source of our worth and well-being. But it is also to have loyalty to that thing, to ally ourselves with it and take it up as our cause.

    N. distinguishes “radical” monotheism from polytheism and henotheism. The latter term referred, originally, to the worship of one god, but a god who is recognized as one among several. This god might be a national or tribal deity, but isn’t identified with the universal lord and creator. It’s generally agreed, as far as I’m aware, that the OT scriptures exhibit a mix of henotheism and monotheism.

    But N. wants to use both polytheism and henotheism in a more extended sense to refer to the ways in which we invest our trust and loyalty. For instance, if my loyalties are divided among devotion to work, family, community, leisure, etc. without any unifying or ordering principle, then I am a functional polytheist.

    N. is more interested in modern forms of henotheism, however, both because forms of henotheism are more significant and because they often masquerade as monotheism. A classic case is when our ultimate loyalty is given to our country. Goodness as such is identified with what is good for the nation. And this is often draped in the clothing of civil religion. The cause of god is identified with the cause of our society. Henotheism always involves elevating the penultimate to the place of the ultimate.

    By contrast, radical monotheism identifies the ultimate principle of value with the ultimate principle of being. Giving our loyalty to God as understood by radical monotheism means recognizing God as the bestower of existence and of worth. It also involves making God’s cause our cause:

    For radical monotheism the value-center is neither closed society nor the principle of such a society but the principle of being itself; its reference is to no one reality among the many but to One beyond all the many, whence all the many derive their being, and by participation in which they exist. As faith, it is reliance on the source of all being for the significance of the self and of all that exists. It is the assurance that because I am, I am valued, and because you are, you are beloved, and because whatever is has being,therefore it is worthy of love. It is the confidence that whatever is, is good, because it exists as one thing among the many which all have their origin and their being in the One–the principle of being which is also the principle of value. In Him we live and move and have our being not only as existent but as worthy of existence and worthy in existence. It is not a relation to any finite, natural or supernatural, value-center that confers value on self and some of its companions in being, but it is the value relation to the One to whom all being is related. Monotheism is less than radical if it makes a distinction between the principle of being and the principle of value; so that while all being is acknowledged as absolutely dependent for existence on the One, only some beings are valued as having worth for it; or if, speaking in religious language, the Creator and the God of grace are not identified. (p. 32)

    God’s “cause” or project is nothing less than all being. N. strikes an impeccably Augustinian note when he says that, for the radical monotheist, being qua being is good. God calls all that is into existence and calls it good. And wills its flourishing.

    This is why radical monotheism qualifies all partial loyalties, at least when they threaten to displace the whole. Even putatively monotheistic faiths like Judaism and Christianity aren’t immune from henotheistic tendencies. A Christian tribalism that confines its concern to “the brethren” or an ecclesiasticism that comes close to identifying the church with God is a betrayal of the principle of radical monotheism:

    In church-centered faith the community of those who hold common beliefs, practice common rites, and submit to a common rule becomes the immediate object of trust and the cause of loyalty. The church is so relied upon as source of truth that what the church teaches is believed and to be believed because it is the church’s teaching; it is trusted as the judge of right and wrong and as the guarantor of salvation from meaninglessness and death. To have faith in God and to believe the church become one and the same thing. To be turned toward God and to be converted to the church become almost identical; the way to God is through the church. So the subtle change occurs from radical monotheism to henotheism. The community that pointed to the faithfulness of the One now points to itself as his representative, but God and church have become so identified that often the word “God” seems to mean the collective representation of the church. God is almost defined as the one who is encountered in the church or the one in whom the church believes. (p. 58 )

    The ethical implication of this radical faith, according to N., is to make the cause of all being our cause. Radical monotheism breaks down the barriers between the sacred and profane. Rather than there being “holy” places, objects, and classes of people are “secularized.” “When the principle of being is God–i.e., the object of trust and loyalty–then he alone is holy and ultimate [and] sacredness must be denied to any special being” and a “Puritan iconoclasm has ever accompanied the rise of radical faith” (p. 52). But the flip side of this iconoclasm is “the sanctification of all things”:

    Now every day is the day that the Lord has made; every nation is a holy people called by him into existence in its place and time and to his glory; every person is sacred, made in his image and likeness; every living thing, on earth, in the heavens, and in the waters is his creation and points in its existence toward him; the whole earth is filled with his glory; the infinity of space is his temple where all creation is summoned to silence before him. Here is the basis then not only of a transformed ethics, founded on the recognition that whatever is, is good, but of transformed piety or religion, founded on the realization that every being is holy. (pp. 52-3)

    One thing that struck me is how N. follows his own logic to its rather non-anthropocentric end; non-human creation has its own intrinsic non-utilitarian value:

    How difficult the monotheistic reorganization of the sense of the holy is, the history of Western organized religion makes plain. In it we encounter ever new efforts to draw some new line of division between the holy and profane. A holy church is separated from a secular world; a sacred priesthood from an unhallowed laity; a holy history of salvation from the unsanctified course of human events; the sacredness of human personality, or of life, is maintained along with the acceptance of a purely utilitiarian valuation of animal existence or nonliving being. (p.53)

    N.’s Augustinian outlook provides a foundation for a theocentric worldview. As Christopher has recently blogged, Christianity is still stuck much of the time in an anthropocentric perspective, seeing God’s concern aimed primarily at us. For N. this would just be another form of henotheism; God is being used to prop up the human project.

    However, what N. doesn’t provide (which is perhaps understandable given the brevity of this book) is a criterion for ranking the importance of the needs of different kinds of beings. Are we too embrace a flat egalitarianism where all existents have the same value? That doesn’t seem right. And yet, any hierarchical ordering threatens to bring anthropocentrism in through the back door.

    What I’m inclined to say is that ethics have to be grounded in the nature of different beings and the needs that arise from those natures, along with their relationships with other beings. What’s good for x is what x needs to flourish as the kind of being it is.

    For instance, it’s sometimes absurdly claimed that proponents of animal rights want animals to have the same rights as human beings. But a right to vote or to an education, say, isn’t going to do a pig much good. Rather, what a pig needs arises out of her nature: room to root around, be social, to nest, and nurture offspring. If we are depriving our fellow creatures of the opportunity to express their essential natures, then that’s a good sign that we’ve overstepped the bounds of what we truly need to flourish. To attend to all being, then, doesn’t require us to reduce everything to the same level, but it may require us to curtail our own desires when they threaten the essential needs of other creatures.

    The most appealing version of this vision that I’ve come across is Stephen R. L. Clark’s “cosmic democracy,” where each kind of creature is provided with sufficient space to thrive. But this presupposes a couple of things, first that the world is set up in such a way to permit this (which is, in part, a question about providence) and second, and more pressing, that human beings can learn to see themselves as one species among many.

  • The sanctimonious carnivore

    I really don’t want to turn this into the all vegetarianism all the time blog. For one thing, I do have other interests. For another, I can only assume most readers don’t like being hectored about their dietary choices all the time. Plus, I’ve never been the proselityzing type.

    But for whatever reason there seems to be a lot of stuff on the topic lately. Like this from the Post:

    The path to becoming a more conscious carnivore has become a publishing industry trendlet. This spring also saw the release of “The Compassionate Carnivore: Or How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat,” by Catherine Friend (Da Capo, May 1), and “The Shameless Carnivore: A Manifesto for Meat Lovers,” by Scott Gold (Broadway Books, March 18). All three follow on the heels of last year’s critically acclaimed launch of a quarterly magazine, Meatpaper, which aims to assess the American “fleischgeist.”

    The books address a topic that has long been taboo among carnivores. Many of them prefer not to think too much about the moral, ethical and environmental implications of eating meat. But recent exposés about inhumane treatment of food animals have made it harder for thinking meat-eaters to put such thoughts aside. At the same time, artisanal charcuterie, grass-fed beef and, most of all, bacon have become “it” foods for chefs and chowhounds.

    As I’ve said repeatedly that I’m all for people eating less meat and eating more sustainable and humanely-raised meat. For one thing, there is, as I’m fond of quoting Andrew Linzey, no “pure land” on which to stand; I, for one, not being a vegan am responsible in part for the male chicks and male calves who are killed as “byproducts” of the egg and dairy industries (and that’s true even if you stick to cage-free eggs and organic dairy products). And even thoroughgoing vegans compete with animals for resources. So, no one here is in a position to cast stones.

    I can’t help, though, but pick a few nits with some of the claims put forward by the new breed of compassionate carnivores. For instance:

    Gold’s tale is likeably swashbuckling. (Chef and gustatory adventurer Anthony Bourdain clearly is one of his heroes.) But he doesn’t shy away from the meat of the matter. For Gold, being “shameless” means eating meat without shame, not eating it in a way that’s unprincipled or corrupt, the word’s secondary definition. “To be a real carnivore, a true carnivore, you have to be conscientious and discerning,” Gold says. “Eat good meat and source it well. Acknowledge where it comes from. And respect the fact that the animal died for your dinner.”

    “The Compassionate Carnivore” takes a more nuanced approach. Author Friend paints a picture of her life on a sheep farm in Zumbrota, Minn., and provides a guide on how to be both an animal lover and an animal eater. In a chapter titled “Letter to the Lambs,” she writes: “Tomorrow morning, when we load you onto the trailer for your trip to the abattoir, we will be thinking about the life you’ve lived on this farm — running around the pasture at dusk, sleeping in the sun, and grazing enthusiastically for the tenderest bits of grass. We will say out loud, ‘Thank you.’ ”

    This sort of pseudo-mystical talk about “thanking” the animals we kill for food reminds me a little too much of Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. As you may recall, Girard proposes that the myths of many cultures are actually ways of covering up, or forgetting about, the murders of innocent victims. They posthumously turn the unwilling victims into quasi-divine sources of mystical power, power to heal the divisions within a community. This power is real in a sense because the scapegoat mechanism is the means by which conflicts within a community are defused – rivalry threatening to turn into violent conflict is focused on one, arbitrarily chosen victim whose “expulsion” restores, for a time at least, comity and peace.

    Similarly, I can’t help but see the image of the animal who we “thank” for their “sacrifice” as a cover up of what is, if we’re being honest, the killing of an unwilling victim. Obscuring that fact strikes me as dishonest. Maybe it says something about our bad conscience that we feel the need to sanctify it this way.

    Better, I think, is Karl Barth’s perspective:

    If there is a freedom of man to kill animals, this signifies in any case the adoption of a qualified and in some sense enhanced responsibility. If that of his lordship over the living beast is serious enough, it takes on a new gravity when he sees himself compelled to express his lordship by depriving it of its life. He obviously cannot do this except under the pressure of necessity. Far less than all the other things which he dares to do in relation to animals, may this be ventured unthinkingly and as though it were self-evident. He must never treat this need for defensive and offensive action against the animal world as a natural one, nor include it as a normal element in his thinking and conduct. He must always shrink from the possibility even when he makes use of it. It always contains the sharp counter-question: Who are you, man, to claim that you must venture this to maintain, support, enrich and beautify your own life? What is there in your life that you feel compelled to take this aggressive step in its favour? We cannot but be reminded of the perversion from which the whole historical existence of the creature suffers and the guilt of which does not really reside in the beast but ultimately in man himself. (Quoted in Linzey, Animal Theology, p. 130)

    Barth’s point here seems to be that killing shouldn’t be taken lightly or prettified or dressed up with some kind of nature mysticism. Whatever we may feel required to do under the pressure of necessity, it’s important to recognize that killing is not God’s ultimate will for creation, even if it is permitted under some circumstances (the analogy with Barth’s view of war as an ultima ratio is clear).

    Further on, vegetarians are scolded for not playing the compassionate meat game:

    “People who become complete vegetarians for the sake of animals are basically getting up from the table and leaving the room. Although they might work to help better animals’ lives through their words, those words won’t keep a sustainable farmer in business,” she writes in a chapter called “Making a Difference.” “Flexitarians, vegetarians who eat meat occasionally, are remaining at the table. Carnivores who choose to go meatless now and then are remaining at the table.”

    Here’s the thing. While I’m all for supporting sustainable agriculture, veggies who think it’s wrong to kill an animal needlessly for food aren’t in the business of supporting animal agriculture. That doesn’t mean that sustainable farms aren’t preferable – for animals and people – to factory farms, but it’s an odd argument to accuse principled vegetarians of not wanting to make meat eating more palatable (pardon the expression).

    Plus, there’s nothing stopping vegetarians from supporting sustainable agriculture and/or moves toward more humane forms of animal husbandry. Buying vegetables and other non-meat products from local farmers is one very good way. One can also support measures to reform animal agriculture even if one doesn’t consume its products. For instance, I’m happy to support the efforts of groups like the Humane Society, which are reformist rather than abolitionist organizations. I’m not sure that the complete abolition of animal agriculture is either possible or desirable, so I consider the efforts of these groups to ameliorate the worst abuses of factory farming to be good and necessary. Why is that “getting up from the table”?

    OK I’ll try and make that my last shrill vegetarian post for a while. 🙂

  • Northcott’s A Moral Climate

    Michael Northcott, a Scottish theologian, has a new book out on theological ethics and climate change. Northcott previously wrote a good book on the environment and Christian ethics, and this new one got a glowing write up in the Christian Century by Duke University chaplain Sam Wells. I’ve already ordered the book; it looks like it’s right up my alley: theology of creation, environmentalism, political economy, and animal rights thrown in for good measure.

  • The value of abstaining

    One objection you sometimes get to vegetarianism is that there’s no point in bothering because a single person giving up meat isn’t going to make a dent in the meat industry and, in all likelihood, isn’t going to save any animals.

    While this question might rest on some dubious premises (are we sure that no animals are saved by your going veggie?), it’s enough of a puzzle to cause me some consternation.

    So, I was interested to come across this paper by philosopher Tzachi Zamir called “Killing for Pleasure.” Zamir concedes that eating animal flesh is not “causally connected” to animals’ deaths, but argues that there are alternative ways of understanding the act which show why refraining from it is a good thing.

    Zamir argues that we should see killing the animal and eating its flesh (when the animal was killed in order to produce the meat) as two parts of the same action. Thus, the eating is the completion of the action:

    the consumption is a completion of the initial action. By “completion” I refer to a temporally extended action, in which the part of the action done in the past, foresaw and was predicated on an unspecified individual who will function in a particular way. By becoming that individual, one completes the action, making it whole (another way of articulating this thought, suggested to me by Stan Godlovitch, is that by consumption one is commissioning the killing).

    Consumption, Zamir says, is not “distinct from the initial wrong, but […] a carrying out of it.”

    A second way of thinking about the act of meat eating that Zamir identifies is “participating in a wrong practice, even when one’s consumption does not increase suffering.” In other words, the entire nexus of raising and killing of animals for food is something one does well to extricate oneself from as much as possible.

    Clearly, this argument rests on the premise that it is, in fact, wrong to kill animals for food, something that most people – even many who abhor factory farming – won’t concede (though Zamir goes on to argue that it is).

    But it also helps to show why avoiding the products of factory farming can be a good thing even if one doesn’t expect thereby to meaningfully reduce the total amount of animal suffering. And, for that matter, it might help illuminate other moral dilemmas where we sense that we ought to refrain from participating in a particular activity even if we don’t expect our abstention to have a practical effect.

  • Vegetarian Secrets Revealed!

    A member of that strange cult of vegetarians pulls back the veil and reveals their innermost secrets. Turns out they’re … pretty normal, actually.

    I will cop to being a veggie who fully understands the pleasures of meat-eating, but I also agree that after you go without for a long time it does start to seem kind of gross.

  • Unnecessary roughness

    John Schwenkler, who blogs here, wrote, in a comment to this post:

    [It’s] hard to see [given what I characterized as the “traditional” view of our place in the cosmic scheme of things — ed.] why we, unlike other animals, should be under an absolute (or even less than absolute) obligation not to consume members of other species. Put differently, there seems to me to be a slippery slope between a vegetarian ethic and the desire to “‘manage’ the natural world in order to make it over into an edenic pleasure garden where all creatures are protected” that is not present when one’s position on the rights of other animals is centered on the demand that they be raised in ways that promote their own flourishing, slaughtered humanely, and more generally thought of and treated with reverence and respect. Humanist “exceptionalism”, in other words, lends itself toward “well-meant benevolence” in much the same way as it can be used to excuse the mistreatment of other species, while what you’re (rightly) calling the “traditional view” at once permits us to feed on other animals in ways similar to those in which they are nourished by each other, demands that we do so in a restrained and respectful way that befits our natures and theirs, and prohibits us from trying to manage their environments and make them into something they aren’t.

    I think Clark’s response to this objection would be that refraining from killing and eating animals is not “well-meant benevolence” in the presumptuous sense of aiming to manage the biosphere. Earlier in the book he says that, whatever else may be true about the metaphysical status of us or our animal kin, it surely must be wrong to be the cause of avoidable harm.

    Clark writes (from an excerpt here):

    Consider then: it is not necessary to imprison, torture or kill animals if we are to eat. The laborious transformation of plant proteins into animal protein, indeed, is notoriously inefficient, and wastes a great deal of food that would greatly assist human beings in less carnivorous places. It is not necessary for us to do this: I say nothing of what may be necessary for the Eskimos, for whom the orthodox display a sudden, strange affection when confronted by zoophiles (though the health of Eskimos might be better served by supplying plant-food). It is not necessary for us, and our affection for other human beings would perhaps be better shown by ceasing to steal their plant protein in order to process it into a form that pleases our palates.

    In other words, refusing to eat meat is not an arrogant attempt at managing the natural order, but a refusal to be the cause of other creatures’ suffering when it isn’t necessary. Fundamentally, it’s about leaving them alone.

    This isn’t to say that Clark wouldn’t regard traditional animal husbandry as an improvement over our current practices. But even here he would question whether even “humane farming” really does respect the animals’ natures. Just to mention one point, even humanely raised animals are painfully slaughtered well before the end of their natural lifespan.

    Utilitarians like Peter Singer say that killing an animal (“humanely”) and replacing it with an animal that is, at least from our point of view, pretty much identical, can result in a net gain in utility. So the animal is not wronged if we kill her. But Clark wouldn’t go along with the idea that killing an animal doesn’t count as a harm. At least from the animal’s point of view it would seem to make a difference whether she lives or dies. So, I think there’s still a case to be made that unnecessary (even if “humane”) killing is, at least prima facie, unjustified.

    It’s sometimes said that, if we didn’t raise them for food, domesticated farm animals wouldn’t exist. Whether or not that’s true, it surely doesn’t follow that we can do whatever we like with them, anymore than you can torture or murder your child just because he wouldn’t exist if not for you. Though, if it is true, it may speak to John’s original point: if farm animals are, in a sense, artifacts of human intervention, then it can’t be interference in a natural process if we stop killing them for food. Besides, if we’re really concerned that our domestic cattle, pigs, and chickens might become extinct, we could always set up animal preserves to make sure that their kind will be perpetuated.

    Of course, it would be foolish to expect an act of human forbearance on that kind of scale anytime soon, which is why I personally would be happy just to see a large-scale shift to more traditional methods of farming. And there are plenty of self-interested reasons for human beings to start treating farm animals better (the environmental and health costs of industrial meat chief among them).

  • The humanist half-way house

    God save us even from well-meant benevolence. It is possible to be sure, in individual cases, what is or is not to an entity’s profit or harm. It seems entirely obvious that we should not wantonly do harm, but only (at the most) for our necessities. That we should do good is a much more dangerous thesis: it is not one I could conscientiously deny, but equally I cannot wholly affirm it, whether for beasts or birds or men. Very often, when we think to do good we are only enlarging our self-esteem. I have not doubt at all that that would be the chief motive in any attempt on our part to turn the wilderness to paradise, and we would therefore fail. It is better to do small works within the wilderness than one large work to change the whole. (Stephen R.L. Clark, The Moral Status of Animals, p. 167)

    Clark is talking here about an imagined attempt to “manage” the natural world in order to make it over into an edenic pleasure garden where all creatures are protected. Earlier he had considered the oft-repeated objection against animal rights that it would entail an obligation for us to protect the rights of animals in the wild:

    To respect the interests and ways of our fellows is incumbent upon us: to respect, not necessarily to enforce them. Much of nature may often seem to be inextricably involved in a sort of reciprocated injustice, where prey and predator are at once individually at odds and racially symbiotic. There may be little we can, or should, do about this: it is not the world we think we would have chosen, but interference will usually make things worse–tares and wheat must grow together till the Day (Matthew 13:29f.). Let us abandon our own iniquities before troubling overmuch about what is done under necessity by our undomesticated kin. [D.G] Ritchie (p. 109) sneered at [H.S.] Salt that if animals had rights we must set about defending them against other animals, and organize proper juries of their peers to try the case: a symptom of Ritchie’s imperialistic outlook, that he could seriously suppose that we, the criminals par excellence, were worthy as police. (p. 35)

    This laissez-faire attitude is at odds with more conventional liberal-humanitarian thinking, which tends to be deeply consequentialist. But Clark is suggesting that, when we come up against the natural world, we run into something that is beyond our powers to manage. The conditions are too complex, and the consequences too unpredictable, to yield to the utilitarian calculus. An analogy with our attempts to manage other societies – often at the point of a gun – is obvious.

    But Clark’s reasoning doesn’t give comfort to traditional conservatives either, since what he is essentially urging us to recognize is that we are one species among many. And that we should take our place in the whole rather than try to master or overwhelm it. To recognize that we are part of something, and that the other parts are owed consideration, would require us to limit our own drives to reduce the natural world to so much material for our projects. Even a lot of mainstream environmentalism is characterized by a kind of technophilia and puts its hopes in the invention of some new technology that will let us keep on pretty much as before.

    Clark’s point is that humanism – the idea that humans are special and therefore entitled to exploit nature pretty much as we see fit – is licensed neither by traditional philosophy and religion, or by modern science. For the traditional view we are a link in the Great Chain of Being, special, maybe, in occupying a kind of “amphibious” position between the material and spiritual realms (though, even this is debatable), but still just a part of the cosmic whole, with entire hierarchies of beings above us. Meanwhile, the worldview of scientific naturalism gives no comfort to humanism: we are just as much an accident of matter as anything else and, from an objective point of view, no more or less important than anything else.

    Humanism, then, is a kind of half-way house between the old Christian metaphysic and the new scientistic one. Except, having lopped off Christianity’s spiritual supports, its valuation of human beings is rationally unsupported. And Clark sees humanism as more pernicious than either traditional metaphysics or a thoroughgoing naturalism. The latter might at least prod us to see our projects in a more proportionate light rather than of ridiculously inflated importance. Instead, humanism, the sheer assertion of our own superiority, ends up licensing all manners of depradation.

    This argument is somewhat similar to John Gray’s in Straw Dogs, except Clark is far more comfortable with traditional Christian metaphysics. As a kind of Christian neo-Platonist he sees all parts of creation as participating in God, and, therefore, as worthy of consideration. I find this deep-green variety of Christian Platonism rather appealing.

  • The death knell of factory farming?

    Matt Halteman has a good round up of coverage on the Pew factory farming report. Could be that things are coming to a head as the confluence of a lot of factors (climate change, the price of oil, Pollan-inspired foodieism) seems to be convincing more and more people that our industrial food system is unsustainable.

  • Pew Commission vs. factory farming

    Wayne Pacelle’s Humane Society blog reports that the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has released a report recommending a “a phase-out of ‘the most intensive and inhumane confinement practices’—gestation and veal crates and battery cages.” This fall California will be voting on a ballot measure to do just that.