What Kind of Animal?: Killing, Respect, and the Persistence of the Concrete

The following is essentially a reply to a recent comment by a reader named Paul which regarded my essay “Fragments of an Animalist Politics: Veganism and Liberation.” The essay he commented on has been updated for publication in John Sorenson’s Thinking the Unthinkable, an anthology of texts in critical animal studies, to be published in early 2014 by Canadian Scholars’ Press. (The update does not in any way concern the substance of the comment.)

Paul wrote:

An interesting viewpoint, but one that I think is wrong. Life recycles life and this has been true forever. I don’t think conflating veganism with anti-capitalism is helpful – it just tends to color anti-capitalists as even more out-of-it than they are usually portrayed as being. I’m all for encouraging the “re-animalization” of humans, but doing so means recognizing that life feeds on life. It makes more sense to me to look at how traditional cultures honored the animals they killed for food rather than denying that life feeds on life. Is a deer killed by wolves any less deserving of respect than a deer killed by humans? David Abram and Richard Nelson have some pertinent thoughts on this issue.

Reply:

Gary Snyder, a notable nature writer and poet, is reportedly an enthusiast of hunting. In this respect he is of a kind with Ortega Y Gasset, Paul Shepard, Aldo Leopold, supposedly David Abram, and others interested in re-grounding humanity in the wild and the land. And yet in his essays in The Practice of the Wild, he offers this valuable remark:

We also see that we must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings. We must try not to be stingy, or to exploit others. There will be enough pain in the world as it is (1990:4).

Living is on the whole a bloody, gruesome business. No doubt about it. But clearly, according to Snyder, if killing this or that fragile, living body is not necessary, the thing is not to do it. In a movie devoted to the life of Zen authority D.T. Suzuki, Snyder discusses the staple Zen Buddhist understanding of truth as transcending the opposition of life and death. There’s a possibility of wrongheaded interpretation that he wishes to address head on: one might twist one’s understanding so as to remove the killed from sight and erase the act of killing altogether, and thus relieve oneself of responsibility. Snyder says

No life, no death; no “u”=no “being; no “mu”=no “non-being;” no killing, no “non-killing.” How do we understand that? It would be a mistake… it would be a very deep mistake to think “having understood that, I can kill something” [sic]. Having understood that, you choose not to kill something… unless you have to (2008).

Once more Snyder insists we shouldn’t kill except under circumstances that necessitate it. These, to my understanding include no more than the imperative of immediate survival. Systematic, organized killing is out of the question, as long as substitutes can be found for animal flesh and by-products on which to thrive. Original abundance of a variety of foods was probably common, with some exceptions, under conditions of so-called primitive accumulation. Individual transcendence of animal oppression is, for the most part, possible now–in the sorry context of technicized domination of nature. And it will be more thoroughly practicable in a future where such domination has become a thing of the past–a future of full-blown animality.

Now, there is no straightforward, direct link between killing and animality. The latter is a rich, multifaceted process that can never be reduced to the taking of life. In fact, running diametrically opposed to the hunters’ and other killers’ apparent death fetish, one of the basic dimensions of human re-animalization would consist in feeling more for others: enrichment through body-based fellow-feeling, receptivity, and resonance with other animal bodies and with the ecological locale. There’s many more ways of reconnecting with natural rhythms than through killing. For all of Abram’s philosophical and stylistic sophistication, I find his treatment of interspecies animal relationships lacking. Overwhelmingly, when other animals are given mention, either in The Spell of the Sensuous or Becoming Animal, they’re to be chased after and “bagged for dinner.” Alternatively, they’re to serve as archetypal means for the development of human skill, as in the case of the crow that gets rocks thrown at him in “Sleight of Hand,” a chapter in the latter book. But Abram’s nuanced analysis of human carnality and his phenomenological insights rebel against a reductive, poor take on the nonhuman animal subjectivity.

In an interview with CBC’s How to Think About Science, he recognizes the ethical centrality of letting others, presumably including other animals, be: “Ethics… is the ability to move in this world without unnecessarily violating the ability of other bodies to move in their own way” (2009). Ethics, then, entails a recognition of limits to intrusion into the lives of other beings as bodies, that is, as bodied individuals, the only justification being necessity. Ethical behavior–development of proper relations with others–entails an experiential and objective dimension of gentleness and sensitivity to those others.

Unlike perhaps Snyder and Abram, many other nature writers are overtly masculinist, the fruit of a violent, patriarchal civilization. You don’t have to dig too deep to realize that contemporary advocates of hunting–theoreticians and practitioners alike, a vast majority of them being men–are tacitly, morbidly fascinated by killing and death. They might have a range of justifications, ecological concerns for example, but the trophy photos tell a different, truer story. Perhaps trying to simultaneously approach death and hold it at a distance, killers aim at achieving a semblance of control over it. They thus develop a character orientation that Fromm rightly called necrophiliac. Professing a love of wild life, become dealers of death. But maybe this interpretation is a psychoanalytical stretch. Maybe they just enjoy the catharsis of violence and gore. Or maybe they enjoy the technique that, with increased control, can make killing sterile and “sanitary,” a well carried-out, clean procedure. Or, just maybe, they enjoy killing, period. The tautological metaphysics of “life devours life” comes in later, to play the part of ideological cover-up. The obvious and horrible reality of being killed is sugar-coated in a vocabulary of “free offering.” (This speaks volumes of the creeping guilt that so often seems to accompany killing.) But we know what the truth is. We know it and feel the horror of it, or are at least capable of feeling and knowing it experienced by another, except in cases of serious psychopathology. We cannot, then, plead innocent.

Positing a straightforward link between human animality and organized killing, as if the latter constituted a central element of the former, makes for a fascist-like understanding. It makes for an animality based in bad faith. It also implicitly corresponds with historical fascism’s peculiar fascination with nature as simultaneously a source of power and an object of domination. Nature, it seemed to the fascist mind, could be worshipped even as it was increasingly subjugated by the machine (by way of eugenics, for instance). This reductive infatuation with Thanatos, leaking into justifications of hunting and other forms of domination, is itself a symptom of poverty of instinctual and sensuous life in the modern world.

Much like in modern societies, in pre-industrial, and even in pre-agricultural societies, insofar as they were organized around patriarchal notions of domination, killing has been used preponderantly to justify social position; it has been one of the tools with which to establish standards of manhood as a supreme social value and virtue. Because of the high stakes of power for the powerful, and the accompanying social fragmentation of ever-developing division of labor, which made the social picture increasingly harder to grasp for the powerless, the long term necessity of building a life around killing and animal enslavement have rarely been investigated.

On the one hand, rebellion against established power has been a phenomenon recurring throughout the history of our species, as old as domination itself. On the other, it is largely thanks to the left-originated tradition of critical thinking that our eyes are increasingly opened the devastating socio-ecological consequences of privilege and oppression. Animal liberation is already rooted in radical left thinking, with its demands for equality, freedom, and fraternity. The thing to do is to pick up this heretofore unwanted child and push it into the fray. It has never belonged to liberalism, where it was at most tolerated. Animal liberation help us see more clearly the vestiges of oppression prevalent in our confused and confusing time. Without it, the leftist, painted naive or “utopian” (as if the latter was an insult), wanders in darkness. It is only when the “animal liberationist” and the “leftist” are separated and deprived of their unrecognized commonality that the left each seems “out there.” If both are mired in prejudice about the other, they certainly seem out there to each other, and even more so to the impotent, mediocre liberal mind. But it is liberalism–that historical formula that has outlived its usefulness, and which has always sat comfortably with exploitation and injustice–that they should unite to eradicate.

The persistence of the concrete in left critical theory which, as John Sanbonmatsu (2007) noted, is ultimately a defense of the feeling, thinking subject, allows one also to see through past hypocrisy that returns to haunt our often misguided hopes. After all, there can hardly be doubt that the ritualized lip service of “honoring” did no good to the animal victims. The whole edifice built around thanking the animal for “offering itself to the hunter” may well have been no more than a way to suppress the primal impulse against taking sentient life. In all probability, the hunters didn’t really believe what they were making heart of the ritual. In fact, philosopher Bruce Wilshire writes in his Primal Roots of American Philosophy of a mundane, plain-old common sense infused the lives of tribal communities beneath the pronounced level of spirituality. They may be/have been more pragmatic than seemed to visitors in both cursory encounters and anthropological research. Wilshire maintains that

Every traditional civilization [sic] aims to orient its members within their immediate locality. This is true even when interpretations of local things and events are in terms of a “spirit realm” or “alternate reality”—construals fantastic to contemporary North Atlantic ears. Always a modicum of what we would call common sense is discernible; for example, a tree may be experienced as moving under certain conditions and for certain modes of numinous consciousness, but it is just that tree, the one that is always found in the workaday-world forty paces in front of the chief elder’s house. Without commonsensical rootage in the local environment, elementary evaluations necessary for the orientation and conduct of everyday life are impossible (2000:176, my emphasis).

It is embarrassing to talk of respect toward someone whose fresh blood one is washing off of one’s hands. At most, one could feel regret about being absolutely unable to respect the killed sentient body before one; that would at least have the honesty that real respect invariably requires. The critical question is: was the killing necessary under such and such circumstances? If so, can the procedure be carried out time and time again, ad infinitum, and finally justified as a systematic, organized practice? Wolves, hunting in packs out of survival necessity, couldn’t do otherwise. Nor should they. We, on the other hand, are ill at ease when killing, all empirical evidence to the contrary notwithstanding; hence the myriad established rationalizations. We would do better to strive to regain a more subtle and multidimensional sense of animality than that of the domineering, heavy hand.

While there’s many sources to draw from for our renewed animality, many of them indigenous, primitive, and tribal, there is no more room for lame rationalizations of needless or uninvestigated violence. Numerous pre-agricultural societies abstained from organized killing. The increasingly common contention that their members were primarily foragers–at least as familiar and intimate with the land as any hunter could have been–may give us some hope that another mode of human life in this terrible and fleeting world is indeed possible.

References

Abram, David, 1996. Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books.

Abram, David, 2009. How to Think About Science. Ideas with Paul Kennedy on CBC Radio, prod. by David Cayley, http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2009/01/02/how-to-think-about-science-part-1—24-listen/#episode12, accessed May 12 2013.

Abram, David, 2010. Becoming Animal. An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books.

Sanbonmatsu, John (2007). “Animal Liberation, Critical Theory, and the Left.” An interview on Animal Voices,  http://animalvoices.ca/2007/05/15/animal-liberation-critical-theory-and-the-left-interview-with-john-sanbonmatsu/

Snyder, Gary (1990). The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point Press.

Wilshire, Bruce (2000). The Primal Roots of American Philosophy: Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Native American Thought. University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP.

A Zen Life (2008). Dir. Michael Goldberg. Marty Gross Film Productions, Inc.

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