By Dr. Steven Best - [email protected]
"The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret. I have come to
believe
that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its
full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not
limit itself to mankind." ~ Dr. Albert Schweitzer
Animals have always been central to human lives, in the best and worst
ways. To begin with the obvious, we are animals and so we exist in a
continuum with the nonhuman animals who are our evolutionary ancestors.
We share physiology, genetics, and key behaviors; arguably, fundamental
aspects of our ethics and family structures come from primates. So we
are of the animals, not above them as presumed by the Western psychosis.
Throughout history, animals have been key to human beings not only as
resources for food or clothing, but also religiously, spiritually, and
philosophically. Animals are crucial figures in human mythologies: they
are the stuff of animistic conceptions of the universe, Gods and
Goddesses, totemic icons, and spirit guides. On the whole, they have
brought the cosmos alive and made the earth something less than a
barren, lonely planet. The existential solitude of humans on the earth
without animal companions is one of the fascinating themes explored in
Philip K Dick�s sci-fi novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(which very loosely was the basis for the screenplay for the 1982 film
Blade Runner). Thoreau�s statement, �In wilderness is the preservation
of the world,� should be understood not only in the literal sense of
maintaining the natural world and its life forms from being devoured by
technocapitalism, but also in the philosophical sense that our humanity
depends on sustaining an intimate relationship with nature.
"For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed,
he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."
~ Pythagoras
In areas of the world such as India, of course, animals still have
spiritual significance, and Eastern religions do not sharply separate
human and nonhuman animals. But the historically dominant interpretation
of the Christian religion has constructed an ontological cleavage, and
in the Western world animals have been treated mainly as objects of
exploitation, profit-making, and even targets upon which to release
pathological forms of hatred and aggression, making cruelty a magnifier
of human identity. Thus, we have related to animals primarily in two
ways: as sacred beings akin to us and as instrumental resources apart
from us.
Because of a long history of speciesism and capitalism, I hazard to
guess that most people in the Western world today have no caring or
spiritual � in the best pagan sense of that term to mean connectedness
and respect -- relation with animals or nature as a whole. Instrumental
outlooks frame the view of the world, such that trees are timber, cows
are hamburgers, and dogs are security systems tied to a backyard chain.
But when human beings replace a caring relationship to animals with an
exploitative relationship, they too suffer, more than they ever realize.
As a consequence of animal slaughter and abuse, human beings bring more
violence into their families and communities; their health deteriorates;
and they severely degrade the natural environmental -- squandering
valuable resources such as food, water, and land in a grossly
inefficient system of food production; destroying grasslands, riverbeds,
and rainforests; polluting water systems; and heating up the planet
through global warming.
But more happens. Human beings become morally impaired and spiritually
handicapped. They need animals and the natural world for their
psychological growth. Ecological philosopher Paul Shepard has explored
the importance of the relation of between human with nonhuman life. He
claims that concrete relationships with animals were crucial for the
healthy psychological development of human beings as individuals and as
a species. In works such as The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred
Game, Shepard argues provocatively that as a consequence of
human alienation from animals, a breach that began ten thousand years
ago with the decline of hunting and gathering society and the emergence
of agricultural society, human psychological growth became severely
retarded, and the �ontogeny� of infant development no longer
recapitulates the �phylogeny� of species evolution.
For Shepard, �the human mind needs [wild animals and plants in their
natural habitats] in order to develop and work. Human intelligence is
bound to the presence of animals.� Instead, humanist ideologies
arrogantly presume order and meaning are generated through history alone
and define �progress� as proportional to the extent humanity untangles
itself from the chaos of nature to create the empires of culture. Humans
clearly have their own trajectory, but the only successful way to
negotiate their identities is through a complex interplay with the
�otherness� of animals. One of the most crucial failures of modern
�education� and of psychological understanding itself is to recognize
the need to ritually bond with wild nature during childhood and
adolescence. The consequences of this skewed development unfold
throughout the general landscape of human insanity.
"But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth,
you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity."
~ Krishnamurti
One need not embrace Shepard�s atavistic call to return to the primitive
past or his romanticization of hunting and gathering to probe his main
question: What happens to the human psyche when people oppress and abuse
animals? Among other things, human beings block channels of love and
empathy, they inhibit capacities for care and compassion, and they
thwart greater sources of identification that bring spiritual awakening
and growth.
Human beings can survive without caring relations, but they cannot
flourish. Humanity needs to give and to receive love and recognition.
The fundamental quest in every human life not fixated on survival is for
love and wholeness. Human beings cannot attain this through separation
and alienation, and they must learn that their spiritual quest
ultimately must be deepened beyond the human species into a
connectedness with nonhuman animals and the natural world. For harmony
with other humans in conditions of alienation from the natural world
still leaves a huge existential vacuum and a looming socio-environmental
catastrophe.
Consider for a moment how animals add immeasurable value to one�s life.
I myself have 11 cats, and each one gives me a unique gift every day, a
smile and subtle joy well worth the destruction they wreak on my
furniture. It is worth pondering whether one can think of a time in
one�s life when learning, healing, growth, or awareness came through the
assistance of an animal rather than a human. Two years ago, filmmakers
James LaVeck and Jenny Stein made a powerful documentary film, The
Witness, which shows how a Bronx construction worker named Eddie
Lama underwent a spiritual transformation through the gift of love given
to him by a cat. The same experience happened to the late animal rights
activist Henry Spira, prompting his shift from a human rights to an
animal rights activist. Significantly, both men loathed cats before a
particular individual feline won their hearts and transformed their
consciousness.
In this case, as happens so often, the �angel of grace� came in the form
of a whiskered being, not a God or human sage. But lest we conclude that
the lessons come only from the beings our society privileges � cats and
dogs � writers like Karen Davis and Lorri Bauston remind us that farmed
animals like chickens, sheep, pigs, and cattle � arbitrarily positioned
outside the boundary of moral and legal concerns � are every bit as much
complex individuals who can touch and transform our lives, and these
authors tell profound stories indeed of their encounters with wonderful
winged or hoofed beings.
�Animals of the planet are in desperate peril. Without free animal life
I believe we lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.�
~ Alice Walker
Animals can play various crucial roles in our lives, including being
profound teachers and healers. We think we teach animals things, but we
forget the most important thing is what they teach us, if we allow them.
Animals can teach us patience, happiness, courage, simple joys, and love
� unconditional love. When we learn to love beyond the human barrier,
when we grasp our fundamental similarities with nonhuman animals, we
become aware of the deep unity of all life. This realization is the
basis for a profound awakening and it is exhilarating in its liberation
from the psychosis of dualism. The enlightenment of Buddha involved
precisely his intuitive grasp of the unity of life, and that the
suffering of all living beings merited our compassion.
The teaching we receive from animals is also a healing. It is well-known
that they can reach violent, autistic, or asocial children in a way
humans cannot; that having companion animals helps to lower stress and
blood pressure and elevate levels of happiness; that animals can speed
healing in the sick and make the difference between life and death in
the elderly.
Most importantly, animals can heal our broken connections to nature. As
science shows, reality is whole, not broken; separation is not the true
mode of being or a sustainable or viable existence. In one sense,
connection to animals is more important than connection to human beings,
because animals bring us closer to the natural world. We can never
experience true wholeness and the interconnectedness of life until we
transcend the limitations of our species boundaries and grasp our
fundamental interconnectedness with other beings and the whole of
nature. The awakening to connectedness and compassion is central to
moral and spiritual development because it takes us beyond the prison of
the Ego and even species perspective into a larger realm of life and
identification. Compassion is a way of knowing unmediated by
distinctions of any kind.
"Where there is disharmony in the world, death follows." ~
Ancient Navajo saying
We might someday attain Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.�s vision of a �worldhouse,�
a global community of peace and justice. But until we radically alter
our relations to our nonhuman companions in the journey of evolution,
King�s worldhouse will remain a vast, bloody slaughterhouse operated by
a stunted and violent humanity. King�s dream would be a nightmare, not
only for the tens of billions of animals butchered each year for
gluttonous human consumption (certainly in the advanced sectors of the
globe organized around fast food empires), but also for the human world
itself, as it remains plagued by a vast array of social and
environmental problems that perplex and bewilder the minds stranded in
myopic humanist paradigms wherein the importance of nonhuman nature for
human social life remains a mystery.
Animals are central to the solution to the riddle of human history, to
its evolutionary trajectory, overall coherence, and ultimate
possibilities. The future of this history depends not only on the
rejection of global capitalism in favor of planetary justice, but also
on the emergence of a new sensibility that devolves around animal
rights, environmental ethics, and reverence for life. Instead of
embarking on the current disastrous project of remaking nature through
genetic engineering, we ought to be developing the far more sane and
profound goal of remaking ourselves, in a fashion that restores the
connection between humanity and humility, between economy and ecology,
between the laws of society and the �laws� of nature.
�More humility is needed in our perspective. The combination of species
rarity and individuality based on a highly specialized life cycle and
exceedingly complex brain is new and dangerous and may not succeed;
indeed its extinction is already threatening.� ~
Paul Shepard
This view is not opposed to technological intervention, only to the
methods and mentalities that fail to promote the harmonization of the
natural and social worlds. Besides, our interference with living
processes has been so great that to simply stop now would abrogate our
need to restore and repair the damage, such as through replanting the
forests and reintroducing wolves to the wild. In a world of global
warming, rainforest destruction, massive species extinction, and
hyper-barbarism, the animals need us as much as we need them. But where
interspecies dynamics are breaking down under the impact of driftnets,
steel traps, gunfire, bulldozers, and knives and forks, our identities
and very existence grows more precarious with each passing day.
Dr. Steven Best
http://utminers.utep.edu/best/
Go on to Collateral
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