Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (103 page)
Ancient Greece and Rome had a similar view of the place of animals in the scheme of things. Aristotle wrote that “plants are created for the sake of animals, and the animals for the sake of man.”
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Greek scientists put this attitude into practice by dissecting live mammals, including, occasionally,
Homo sapiens
. (According to the Roman medical writer Celsus, physicians in Hellenic Alexandria “procured criminals out of prison by royal permission, and dissecting them alive, contemplated, while they were yet breathing, the parts which nature had before concealed.”)
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The Roman anatomist Galen wrote that he preferred to work with pigs rather than monkeys because of the “unpleasant expression” on the monkeys’ faces when he cut into them.
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His compatriots, of course, delighted in the torture and slaughter of animals in the Colosseum, again not excluding a certain bipedal primate. In Christendom, Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas combined biblical with Greek views to ratify the amoral treatment of animals. Aquinas wrote, “By the divine providence [animals] are intended for man’s use.... Hence it is not wrong for man to make use of them, either by killing or in any other way whatsoever.”
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Greek scientists put this attitude into practice by dissecting live mammals, including, occasionally,
Homo sapiens
. (According to the Roman medical writer Celsus, physicians in Hellenic Alexandria “procured criminals out of prison by royal permission, and dissecting them alive, contemplated, while they were yet breathing, the parts which nature had before concealed.”)
251
The Roman anatomist Galen wrote that he preferred to work with pigs rather than monkeys because of the “unpleasant expression” on the monkeys’ faces when he cut into them.
252
His compatriots, of course, delighted in the torture and slaughter of animals in the Colosseum, again not excluding a certain bipedal primate. In Christendom, Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas combined biblical with Greek views to ratify the amoral treatment of animals. Aquinas wrote, “By the divine providence [animals] are intended for man’s use.... Hence it is not wrong for man to make use of them, either by killing or in any other way whatsoever.”
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When it came to the treatment of animals, modern philosophy got off to a bad start. Descartes wrote that animals were clockwork, so there was no one home to feel pain or pleasure. What sound to us like cries of distress were merely the output of a noisemaker, like a warning buzzer on a machine. Descartes knew that the nervous systems of animals and humans were similar, so from our perspective it’s odd that he could grant consciousness to humans while denying it to animals. But Descartes was committed to the existence of the soul, granted to humans by God, and the soul was the locus of consciousness. When he introspected on his own consciousness, he wrote, he could not “distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.... The faculties of willing, feeling, conceiving, etc. cannot be properly speaking said to be its parts, for it is one and the same mind which employs itself in willing and in feeling and understanding.”
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Language too is a faculty of this indivisible thing we call mind or soul. Since animals lack language, they must lack souls; hence they must be without consciousness. A human has a clockwork body and brain, like an animal, but also a soul, which interacts with the brain through a special structure, the pineal gland.
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Language too is a faculty of this indivisible thing we call mind or soul. Since animals lack language, they must lack souls; hence they must be without consciousness. A human has a clockwork body and brain, like an animal, but also a soul, which interacts with the brain through a special structure, the pineal gland.
From the standpoint of modern neuroscience, the argument is loopy. Today we know that consciousness depends, down to the last glimmer and itch, on the physiological activity of the brain. We also know that language can be dissociated from the rest of consciousness, most obviously in stroke patients who have lost their ability to speak but have not been turned into insensate robots. But aphasia would not be documented until 1861 (by Descartes’ compatriot Paul Broca), and the theory sounded plausible enough at the time. For centuries live animals would be dissected in medical laboratories, encouraged by the church’s disapproval of the dissection of human cadavers. Scientists cut the limbs off living animals to see if they would regenerate, drew out their bowels, pulled off their skin, and removed their organs, including their eyes.
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Agriculture was no more humane. Practices like gelding, branding, piercing, and the docking of ears and tails have been common in farms for centuries. And cruel practices to fatten animals or tenderize their meat (familiar to us today from protests against foie gras and milk-fed veal) are by no means a modern invention. A history of the British kitchen describes some of the methods of tenderization in the 17th century:
Poultry, in order to put on flesh after its long journey from the farms, was sewn up by the gut . . . ; turkey were bled to death by hanging them upside down with a small incision in the vein of the mouth; geese were nailed to the floor; salmon and carp were hacked into collops while living to make their flesh firmer; eels were skinned alive, coiled around skewers and fixed through the eye so they could not move.... The flesh of the bull, it was believed, was indigestible and unwholesome if the animal was killed without being baited.... Calves and pigs were whipped to death with knotted ropes to make the meat more tender, rather than our modern practice of beating the flesh when dead. “Take a red cock that is not too old and beat him to death,” begins one . . . recipe.
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Factory farming is also not a phenomenon of the 20th century:
The Elizabethan method of “brawning” or fattening pigs was “to keep them in so close a room that they cannot turn themselves round about . . . whereby they are forced always to lie on their bellies.” “They feed in pain,” said a contemporary, “lie in pain and sleep in pain.” Poultry and game-birds were often fattened in darkness and confinement, sometimes being blinded as well.... Geese were thought to put on weight if the webs of their feet were nailed to the floor, and it was the custom of some seventeenth-century housewives to cut the legs off living fowl in the belief that it made their flesh more tender. In 1686 Sir Robert Southwell announced a new invention of “an oxhouse, where the cattle are to eat and drink in the same crib and not to stir until they be fitted for the slaughter.” Dorset lambs were specially reared for the Christmas tables of the gentry by being imprisoned in little dark cabins.
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Many other millennia-old practices are thoroughly indifferent to animal suffering. Fishhooks and harpoons go back to the stone age, and even fishnets kill by slow suffocation. Bits, whips, spurs, yokes, and heavy loads made life miserable for beasts of burden, especially those who spent their days pushing drive shafts in dark mills and pumping stations. Any reader of
Moby-Dick
knows about the age-old cruelties of whaling. And then there were the blood sports that we saw in chapters 3 and 4, such as head-butting a cat nailed to a post, clubbing a pig, baiting a bear, and watching a cat burn to death.
Moby-Dick
knows about the age-old cruelties of whaling. And then there were the blood sports that we saw in chapters 3 and 4, such as head-butting a cat nailed to a post, clubbing a pig, baiting a bear, and watching a cat burn to death.
During this long history of exploitation and cruelty, there had always been forces that pushed for restraint in the treatment of animals. But the driving motive was rarely an empathic concern for their inner lives. Vegetarianism, antivivisectionism, and other pro-animal movements have always had a wide range of rationales.
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Let’s consider a few of them.
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Let’s consider a few of them.
I have mentioned in a number of places the mind’s tendency to moralize the disgust-purity continuum. The equation holds at both ends of the scale: at one pole, we equate immorality with filth, carnality, hedonism, and dissoluteness; at the other, we equate virtue with purity, chastity, asceticism, and temperance.
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This cross talk affects our emotions about food. Meat-eating is messy and pleasurable, therefore bad; vegetarianism is clean and abstemious, therefore good.
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This cross talk affects our emotions about food. Meat-eating is messy and pleasurable, therefore bad; vegetarianism is clean and abstemious, therefore good.
Also, since the human mind is prone to essentialism, we are apt to take the cliché “you are what you eat” a bit too literally. Incorporating dead flesh into one’s body can feel like a kind of contamination, and ingesting a concentrate of animality can threaten to imbue the eater with beastly traits. Even Ivy League university students are vulnerable to the illusion. The psychologist Paul Rozin has shown that students are apt to believe that a tribe that hunts turtles for their meat and wild boar for their bristles are probably good swimmers, whereas a tribe that hunts wild boar for their meat and turtles for their shells are probably tough fighters.
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People can be turned against meat by romantic ideologies as well. Prelapsarian, pagan, and blood-and-soil creeds can depict the elaborate process of procuring and preparing animals as a decadent artifice, and vegetarianism as a wholesome living off the land.
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For similar reasons, a concern over the use of animals in research can feed off an antipathy toward science and intellect in general, as when Wordsworth wrote in “The Tables Turned”:
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For similar reasons, a concern over the use of animals in research can feed off an antipathy toward science and intellect in general, as when Wordsworth wrote in “The Tables Turned”:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Finally, since different subcultures treat animals in different ways, a moralistic concern with how the other guy treats his animals (while ignoring the way we do) can be a form of social one-upmanship. Blood sports in particular offer satisfying opportunities for class warfare, as when the middle class lobbies to outlaw the cockfighting enjoyed by the lower classes and the foxhunts enjoyed by the upper ones.
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Thomas Macaulay’s remark that “the Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators” can mean that campaigns against violence tend to target the mindset of cruelty rather than just the harm to victims. But it also captures the insight that zoophily can shade into misanthropy.
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Thomas Macaulay’s remark that “the Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators” can mean that campaigns against violence tend to target the mindset of cruelty rather than just the harm to victims. But it also captures the insight that zoophily can shade into misanthropy.
The Jewish dietary laws are an ancient example of the confused motives behind taboos on meat. Leviticus and Deuteronomy present the laws as unadorned diktats, since God is under no obligation to justify his commandments to mere mortals. But according to later rabbinical interpretations, the laws foster a concern with animal welfare, if only by forcing Jews to stop and think about the fact that the source of their meat is a living thing, ultimately belonging to God.
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Animals must be dispatched by a professional slaughterer who severs the animal’s carotid artery, trachea, and esophagus with a clean swipe of a nick-free knife. This indeed may have been the most humane technology of the time, and was certainly better than cutting parts off a living animal or roasting it alive. But it is far from a painless death, and some humane societies today have sought to ban the practice. The commandment not to “seethe a kid in its mother’s milk,” the basis for the prohibition of mixing meat with dairy products, has also been interpreted as an expression of compassion for animals. But when you think about it, it’s really an expression of the sensibilities of the observer. To a kid that is about to be turned into stewing meat, the ingredients of the sauce are the least of its concerns.
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Animals must be dispatched by a professional slaughterer who severs the animal’s carotid artery, trachea, and esophagus with a clean swipe of a nick-free knife. This indeed may have been the most humane technology of the time, and was certainly better than cutting parts off a living animal or roasting it alive. But it is far from a painless death, and some humane societies today have sought to ban the practice. The commandment not to “seethe a kid in its mother’s milk,” the basis for the prohibition of mixing meat with dairy products, has also been interpreted as an expression of compassion for animals. But when you think about it, it’s really an expression of the sensibilities of the observer. To a kid that is about to be turned into stewing meat, the ingredients of the sauce are the least of its concerns.
Cultures that have gone all the way to vegetarianism are also driven by a mixture of motives.
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In the 6th century BCE Pythagoras started a cult that did more than measure the sides of triangles: he and his followers avoided meat, largely because they believed in the transmigration of souls from body to body, including those of animals. Before the word
vegetarian
was coined in the 1840s, an abstention from meat and fish was called “the Pythagorean diet.” The Hindus too based their vegetarianism on the doctrine of reincarnation, though cynical anthropologists like Marvin Harris have offered a more prosaic explanation: cattle in India were more precious as plow animals and dispensers of milk and dung (used as fuel and fertilizer) than they would have been as the main ingredient in beef curry.
265
The spiritual rationale of Hindu vegetarianism was carried over into Buddhism and Jainism, though with a more explicit concern for animals rooted in a philosophy of nonviolence. Jain monks sweep the ground in front of them so as not to tread on insects, and some wear masks to avoid killing microbes by inhaling them.
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In the 6th century BCE Pythagoras started a cult that did more than measure the sides of triangles: he and his followers avoided meat, largely because they believed in the transmigration of souls from body to body, including those of animals. Before the word
vegetarian
was coined in the 1840s, an abstention from meat and fish was called “the Pythagorean diet.” The Hindus too based their vegetarianism on the doctrine of reincarnation, though cynical anthropologists like Marvin Harris have offered a more prosaic explanation: cattle in India were more precious as plow animals and dispensers of milk and dung (used as fuel and fertilizer) than they would have been as the main ingredient in beef curry.
265
The spiritual rationale of Hindu vegetarianism was carried over into Buddhism and Jainism, though with a more explicit concern for animals rooted in a philosophy of nonviolence. Jain monks sweep the ground in front of them so as not to tread on insects, and some wear masks to avoid killing microbes by inhaling them.
But any intuition that vegetarianism and humanitarianism go together was shattered in the 20th-century by the treatment of animals under Nazism.
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Hitler and many of his henchmen were vegetarians, not so much out of compassion for animals as from an obsession with purity, a pagan desire to reconnect to the soil, and a reaction to the anthropocentrism and meat rituals of Judaism. In an unsurpassed display of the human capacity for moral compartmentalization, the Nazis, despite their unspeakable experiments on living humans, instituted the strongest laws for the protection of animals in research that Europe had ever seen. Their laws also mandated humane treatment of animals in farms, movie sets, and restaurants, where fish had to be anesthetized and lobsters killed swiftly before they were cooked. Ever since that bizarre chapter in the history of animal rights, advocates of vegetarianism have had to retire one of their oldest arguments: that eating meat makes people aggressive, and abstaining from it makes them peaceful.
266
Hitler and many of his henchmen were vegetarians, not so much out of compassion for animals as from an obsession with purity, a pagan desire to reconnect to the soil, and a reaction to the anthropocentrism and meat rituals of Judaism. In an unsurpassed display of the human capacity for moral compartmentalization, the Nazis, despite their unspeakable experiments on living humans, instituted the strongest laws for the protection of animals in research that Europe had ever seen. Their laws also mandated humane treatment of animals in farms, movie sets, and restaurants, where fish had to be anesthetized and lobsters killed swiftly before they were cooked. Ever since that bizarre chapter in the history of animal rights, advocates of vegetarianism have had to retire one of their oldest arguments: that eating meat makes people aggressive, and abstaining from it makes them peaceful.
Some of the early expressions of a genuinely ethical concern for animals took place in the Renaissance. Europeans had become curious about vegetarianism when reports came back from India of entire nations that lived without meat. Several writers, including Erasmus and Montaigne, condemned the mistreatment of animals in hunting and butchery, and one of them, Leonardo da Vinci, became a vegetarian himself.
But it was in the 18th and 19th centuries that arguments for animal rights began to catch on. Part of the impetus was scientific. Descartes’ substance dualism, which considered consciousness a free-floating entity that works separately from the brain, gave way to theories of monism and property dualism that equated, or at least intimately connected, consciousness with brain activity. This early neurobiological thinking had implications for animal welfare. As Voltaire wrote:
There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so prodigiously surpasses man in friendship, and nail him down to a table, and dissect him alive to show you the mezaraic veins. You discover in him all the same organs of feeling as in yourself. Answer me, Machinist, has Nature really arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel? Has he nerves that he may be incapable of suffering?
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