the sunrise shines above the drifting sands

and the dew

a blanket shimmering

.

If other animals ever have rights it will only be because human beings decide that they do.

Rights do not exist in and of themselves somehow, as if there is a world beyond the physical reality we all inhabit in which Ideas reside. There is no mystical realm of Platonic Forms, somewhere in the heavens, by which we can know what Rights are. We will have to figure this out on our own.

Rights only exist, when and insofar as they do, when they arise out of the shared conceptions of such conscious minds that are able to think in the abstract. One mind wonders “What do I owe him?” and another supposes that “She may be just like me” and in these thoughts, conscious minds are not thinking about what is, but abstracting about what could be.

Whether rights happen to arise out of a general feeling among persons about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of certain behaviors and actions, or whether rights arise out of a negotiated political and legal process, rights are constructions, made by rational actors, to guide and constrain their own lives. They have no reality beyond that.

Imagine the world before humankind walked the planet. Five million years ago, there were almost certainly no creatures alive who had any capabilities to construct the complex abstract notion of rights. No one alive then would have ever thought of such a thing. At such time, who would have had “rights”? No one would have had them, unless of course  one believes that God grants rights. Without the divine intervention of the Deity, however, there can be no ground for rights absent the existence of the conscious minds who may conceive them.

Therefore, if any living being has rights, it is only because there exists a general agreement that she does. Rights that remain unrecognized and not respected by others are not rights at all.

Perhaps there are good reasons why there ought to be general agreement such that additional or more robust rights ought to be granted to a greater number of living beings. I would argue that that is the case. But such reasons do not, by themselves, create any such rights. Only those capable of understanding and acting on those reasons can create rights.

Other animals do not have rights in the broad sense and they will not have rights unless and until there is a general agreement among human beings that other animals are the sorts of beings who ought to have them. To simply insist that other animals do have rights would be to assume what has yet to be established. Insistence alone will never be a substitute for the difficult negotiation necessary for the development of a general agreement among people about who other animals are and what rights human beings ought to grant them. Since it appears to be the case that there is no general feeling among most people that other animals have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then such rights will arise only after either most people do have that feeling or the political and legal processes can be used to secure those rights. Indeed, it must be the political and legal systems that secure those rights.

Many people will still want to insist that other animals do have rights. I can understand that. However, that approach seems to me ill-suited to the task at hand and the challenges ahead.

My position is that, as I understand them, almost all other animals have experiences in their lives and that those experiences have value to them and for them. Since it is most often the case that I have no good reason to deny them those experiences, then insofar as it is possible for me to do so, I try to do my best to avoid doing those things that would have the effect of denying them. Also, since I believe that I ought to try to make the world a little bit better place whenever and however I can, I will do whatever I can (which is admittedly, not very much) to help bring about conditions in the world such that others can have the experiences they value. So, I will try to do less harm while trying to do some good.

I’d like it to be the case that most people think about other animals and the experiences they have in their lives in the same way that I do. I believe that if many people did think as I do, then there would be the beginnings of a foundation on which we could construct “animal rights”. Henry Salt, an early advocate for animal rights, proposed that, while education, especially of the young, was necessary to help people change the way they think of other animals, political and legal action was also vital. He reckoned that to rely on education alone would be the wrong approach. Salt understood that political and legal reforms are not only valuable in their own rights, for the protections of other animals that they require, but that such reforms are educative as well. Prefiguring Canadian philosopher and ethicist David Sztybel, who argues that a society that enacts laws broadening protections of some interests of other animals is a society that is more conducive to actual rights for other animals, Salt wrote:

“Legislation is the record, the register, of the moral sense of the community; it follows, not precedes, the development of that moral sense, but nevertheless in its turn reacts on it, strengthens it, and secures it against the danger of retrocession. It is well that society should proclaim, formally and decisively it abhorrence of certain practices.”

I reckon that Salt was right when he wrote about that in 1892 and I reckon that what he wrote then holds true 120 years later.

Without a general agreement about who and what other animals are, the building of animal rights will never get off the ground. We can try to teach people to feel as we do, or we can pass laws that change or eliminate the worst abuses of other animals as they currently exist, or we can do both, realizing that legislative and political action is education. But no matter what else, animals won’t have any meaningful rights unless and until human beings decide that they do. Human beings have yet to decide that, so, unfortunate as it is to say, as the world stands now, other animals have no rights.

Those, like me, who consider themselves part of the Animal Rights Movement, seek to change that. It’s going to be a long, long road.

I walked across the college campus, the soles of my running shoes bouncing, had I been dreaming I would have taken to flight, but no, I was awake, even though the sounds and sights of people around came to my ears and eyes in that disjointed unreal way that things pop up in dreams: the boy on his bicycle, the girl skateboarding by, a man – out of place in his suit and tie like a Monty Python Silly Walker, one boy dressed like a girl, one girl in her stiletto heels pretending to be a movie star; everything was brighter than reality, and stranger still it seems: We are someone else’s aliens.

{Yawn}

….

Suppose that there is a real problem happening right now involving the real lives of individuals who are experiencing real suffering. Would a solution to such a problem that suggests some Utopian future in which all suffering has been abolished be at all credible? Such a solution could be credible, provided that there was an actual workable plan to achieve Utopia. In the absence of a workable plan, however, a solution that posits a Utopian future is as bad as no solution at all. Here’s why.

When people are led to believe that there exists, in the future, some place that we can get to that will be without the problems we are facing now, that belief can have the effect of allowing them to ignore the actual problem and the workable solutions available in the here and now. That is to say, there are messy partial solutions available to us right now. These partial solutions involve compromise, small steps, half-steps, dealings with devil and even steps backwards. But such is the stuff of real world negotiation. There are no final solutions – there are only partial solutions that may right some wrongs, while the problems themselves evolve, mutate and endure. That is the world in which we live.

There are real problems happening right now involving the real lives of individuals who are experiencing real suffering. If we think that, one day, these problems will be gone, and in the meantime we reject the messy partial solutions that are available to us right now, then we will neither achieve our Utopian dreams nor will we ever make a difference in the actual lives of living individuals.

It’s important to be inspired by our dreams, but to make things better, we will have to roll our sleeves up and get our hands dirty.

As I as walking across campus the other day, I overheard one young man ask another, “Why would God allow so much suffering and pain in the world? It makes no sense so I don’t believe in God.” I stopped and asked him, “Without God in the world, would all the suffering and pain make sense then?” He had no answer.

Whether there is God or whether there is not, the suffering and pain in the world will make no sense. Denying God can’t create meaning where there is none.

There’s an article written by Angel Flinn and Dan Cudahy that’s called Opposition Confirms My Purpose and it’s published here at GentleWorld.org. On Facebook, I said of the article that it is “Self-serving, self-righteous, factually incorrect, willfully ignorant, grossly oversimplified, anemic and pathetic” and I thought I ought to explain why I said each of those things. Here goes.

Self-serving: In effect they say “We vegans who write blogs while we live in relative comfort and luxury further from harm and danger than any human beings who have ever lived are just the same as those people who actually risked life and liberty to combat human slavery”. And they say this while they disparage real activists who are alive today actually risking life and liberty fighting injustice. Self-serving doesn’t really describe this outrageous co-opting of a historical tradition in blatant attempt to wrap oneself in the cloak of righteousness while denying the lived struggles of real revolutionaries.

Self-Righteous: They didn’t say it, but they may just as well have said “We are the noble few who can tell all you poor and corrupt others exactly what you are morally required to do”.  They present themselves as the holders of the Truth, as if there is a Truth that one can hold. They deem it their task to educate the rest of the rabble (over decades if necessary!!) until the unenlightened see their light. And this they do while all the while they wield their vacuous invocations of non-violence like a club.

Factually incorrect: When speaking about social change, they write that a “change in our society will only be brought about by a radical moral paradigm shift similar to those which resulted in the abolition of human chattel slavery.” However, the “moral paradigm” did not shift such that, only after that supposed shift, was slavery then abolished. Indeed, to even say that the “moral paradigm” did shift is an affront to ever lived experience of hatred, death and destruction that followed from the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to Emmett Till in 1955 through to Trayvon Martin in 2012. Slavery – as an institution legally sanctioned – ended. That is a fact. But the “moral paradigm” didn’t shift first, if it ever shifted at all. How blinded by ideology does a person have to be to get these glaring facts wrong? (By the way, what is, in the context of the world at large, a moral paradigm supposed to be anyway? Outside the rarefied air of the ivory tower, is there any such thing as theoretical framework of morality to which all people ascribe their views? Is there even one framework which predominates? Do those words even mean anything at all? No, like almost every other word written in this article, of course they do not.)

Grossly oversimplified: The gross simplification follows from the authors’ factual errors. As they tell it, it is as if the abolition of slavery (assuming that it’s even meaningful to talk about such a thing) happened as the result of only the efforts of white abolitionists who saved the ‘poor black man’. Is there any mention at all in this useless piece of 6th grade level bullshit writing that acknowledges the lived struggles and real resistance of the enslaved to their enslavement? No, there isn’t. Instead, this article leaves one with the impression that it is as though, in the struggle for freedom from slavery, the enslaved themselves did not exist. The writers did worse than grossly oversimplify the complex lived experiences of millions of people just to serve their ideology, they committed the lie of omission. Little wonder then, that these “abolitionists” can so easily ignore the lived experiences of those other animals who are doomed to live and die within the systems of exploitation. Like the invisible and ignored human slaves absent from this article, the other animals don’t matter. All that matters to these pseudo-abolitionists is their persistence through the struggle, all that matters to these noble warriors is themselves. I’ll use again the word Pathetic in a moment, but it is certainly appropriate now.

Willfully ignorant: I would excuse a 6th grader for not acknowledging the pivotal twin role that the industrial revolution and the expansion of capitalism played in the changes in the conditions of slavery in the Atlantic region of the 1800′s, but there is no excuse for these modern day pretend “abolitionists” to not know their history. Willfully ignorant is perhaps not a strong enough term, perhaps duplicitous would be more apt. And to write a sentence such as this “Indeed, William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator, a weekly anti-slavery newspaper, in 1831, and it wasn’t until after 34 years and the bloodiest war on United States soil that slavery was finally abolished in 1865″ is as if to say that the cause for the abolition of slavery had not been going on in America, for 200 years, since before it was even America. To ignore the role that the fatally flawed debate over slavery played in the very founding of the Union is beyond laughable. It’s negligence of the worst kind. But the actual historical timeline and the facts contained in it don’t fit their narrative. After all, one of their favorite (non)arguments against animal welfare reforms is that those reforms have been going on for 200 years with nothing to show for it. How inconvenient for these revisionists then that the abolitionist movement went on in America for 200 years with nothing to show for it either. How embarrassing for these internet “abolitionist” that the facts don’t agree with them; how much easier for them to oversimplify them instead.

Anemic: Because these “abolitionists” are blind to the facts of history, they propose a solution to today’s problem that is anemic and weak. To misunderstand the role that active resistance – which included not only actual resistance from slaves to slaveholders, but also the threat and use of violence from members of the free society – and then to extrapolate from that misunderstanding to a prescription for change in today’s world is like thinking that yesterday’s vegan cupcake was actually a burrito and then trying to make a soymilk smoothie today with yesterday’s misunderstood recipe. I expect no one will be satisfied with what they’re preparing so the “abolitionists” might as well just sit this one out. All sentient beings would be far better off.

Pathetic: The article is pathetic because the authors have been able to attract somewhat of a following and so their bankrupt ideology is actually being seen as worthwhile. It’s pathetic because in their minds, self-serving, self-righteous moralizing is an adequate substitute for actual activism that works towards changing the conditions in the world for the benefit of the conscious beings who live in it. Make no mistake, this so-called “abolitionist approach” is a useless and dead-ended waste of time.

The world doesn’t change after people wake up to some great moral reckoning, after which they start anew, with love in their hearts and peace on their minds. When the conditions of the world become such that change does come, then people change their ways of thinking. Think about it for a moment. Did the Green Revolution happen because suddenly everyone on the planet decided to love the Earth, or did the destruction of our lakes, rivers and skies become so intolerable that no one could afford  any longer to pay it no attention? The answer is simple to see, or at least it is simple enough to see for anyone not blinded by allegiance to an ideology. People change their most deeply held beliefs when they have no choice but to change them.

Finally, to top off all of their already worthless efforts, the authors of the article resort to banality: “Over time, the irrepressible power of justice will prevail…” Really? It will? I suppose that we ought to tell that to the millions of children who die from preventable poverty and disease every year. I suppose we ought to tell that to the tens of millions of people who are right now living in conditions of slavery and the worst kinds of exploitation. Justice will prevail! What bullshit.

What are we supposed to believe, that if we believe, and if we believe hard enough, that justice will come? Please, save me the platitudes.

There is no “irrepressible power of justice” in the world. Where would it be if there was? There are only things and conscious beings in the world. Change happens, that’s the nature of reality, nothing is permanent, nothing is static. From the Big Bang up until the present moment, everything has been in a constant state of becoming. But that becoming is simply the matter of being – it is just “stuff” – it has no purpose, it has no end, there are no “irrepressible” powers, of love, of justice, of Truth, or of anything else that will prevail, as if the matter of becoming was on some irrevocable march of progress. The only values in the world are the values created by conscious minds and as Kierkegaard said “no generation has learned to love from another, no generation is able to begin at any point other than at the beginning” – we must create our values. But here’s the rub: There is no way to get inside another’s conscious mind such that we can change their way of thinking. We can ask them to change, but no one will change except on their own. And now we may be able to understand the real problems that are facing the “animal movement” and perhaps find real solutions.

It is not a lack of knowledge: It is not the case that if only most people understood animal rights theory then most people would adopt an animal rights ethic and become vegan. Anyone who believes that it is the case is either mistaken or a hopeless dreamer. Remember, it is not the case that there was a “shift in the moral paradigm” that preceded the end of slavery (and slavery hasn’t ended anyway). Whatever the changes that have occurred with respect to the moral consideration of people who were previously held as slaves, those changes did not cause the end of slavery. In the same way, racism was not the cause of slavery, but slavery was the cause of racism. That is, it was because that some people wanted to exploit other people that other people became subject to racism. Racism justifies the exploitation of others, racism does not cause exploitation. And so it is with speciesism. Speciesism is the social construction of a world view that justifies the unjust exploitation of nonhuman species by humans. Speciesism doesn’t cause exploitation, is the manifestation of it, as the justification for it. We can no more eliminate the exploitation of other animals by eradicating speciesism than we could eliminate lightening by silencing thunder. Causes cannot be eliminated by eliminating their effects.

Since it isn’t the case that, after at least two hundred years of moralizing about human slavery, that human slavery was ended as a legal institution as a result of that moralizing, and since it is the case that it was, in large part, the twin events of the industrial revolution and the expansion of capitalism that brought down slavery, why should anyone hold onto the fantasy that there exists a moral argument that will bring about an end to the exploitation of other animals? No one should hold on to such a fantasy. Whatever the merits of the moral argument against human slavery, slavery ended in large part because the costs (social, political and especially economic costs) of maintaining the system of legalized and institutionalized slavery became too great in relation to the benefits derived from such a system. The history of slavery is irreducibly complex, but it isn’t the case that the moral argument alone would ever have brought about an end to slavery and the moral argument had absolutely nothing to do with the economic realities that were in place at the time. The causes of slavery were almost entirely economic, and the causes of the end of slavery were almost entirely economic as well.

Is there an answer?: The question we must ask and answer, therefore, if we ever hope to achieve a substantial reduction in the use and killing of other animals is: How do we change the conditions of the world such that it becomes too inconvenient or too costly (in economic as well as non-economic terms) for most humans to continue exploiting other animals? Perhaps Steve Best is right and we are already at the point where our current exploitation of everything and everyone in the world is beyond the point of sustainability and we just don’t know it yet. I don’t know, I don’t have that answer, and I don’t know what will change the conditions on the ground such that the exploitation of other animals by humans will come to an end. But this I do know: Those conditions won’t change as the result of any more self-serving, self-righteous, factually incorrect, willfully ignorant, grossly oversimplified, anemic and pathetic 6^th grade level bullshit like that contained in Flinn and Cudahy’s useless article. I do know that.

The problem with thinking too much is that thinking too much requires one to question what one believes. Questioning what one believes is an unpleasant thing to do.

For example, I believe that, all things considered, in normal circumstances it would be better for all concerned that other living conscious beings be left to live their lives free from harmful human interference as far as is possible – and I believe that killing other living conscious beings necessarily involves harming them. However, if I am to truly understand and then fully justify this belief, it would be required that I think about it very carefully. Not only that, I would be required to carefully and thoroughly consider opposing beliefs  and the arguments for them.

In order to carefully and thoroughly consider opposing beliefs and the arguments for them, I cannot start off assuming that those opposing beliefs are false and that the arguments that support those beliefs are flawed. Rather, I must assume that those beliefs are true and that the arguments for them are valid and sound. Otherwise, my thoughts about those opposing beliefs and arguments would be unfairly prejudiced against them at the outset. Since one cannot carefully and thoroughly consider things when one’s mind is clouded by unfair prejudices, then if I am to ever hope to understand and justify my own beliefs, I have to be able to suspend not only my judgment about opposing beliefs, but also suspend the convictions and preconceptions of my own beliefs.

Suspending one’s convictions is an unpleasant thing to do, and the more central to one’s identity one’s beliefs are, the more unpleasant the task will be.

So, most of the time I don’t think too much about what I believe. But then that means that most of the time my beliefs are neither well understood nor fully justified. What a sad state of affairs.

More often than not, we don’t believe in things for which we have carefully and well-thought-out reasons. Rather, it is more often the case that we construct reasons to justify the things we already believe in, ignoring the evidence and arguments that stand in opposition to those beliefs.

Why do we very often not investigate that which we already believe in? Why do we not bother to think too much? I suppose that it is because we are afraid that we might just as well be wrong. Who want to think too much about that??

In 2011, there were more than 168000 nonhumans in shelters, rescues and other facilities in the State of Virginia. Of those, more than 63,000 were euthanized. Of those euthanized, only 1965 were euthanized by PeTA (and if others are free to say that PeTA murders dogs and cats, I am free to say that they euthanize them). So that means that PeTA was responsible for only 3.07% of the total number of dogs and cats euthanized last year in the State of Virginia, or 1.17% of the total number in facilities altogether. That doesn’t seem like such a large number of animals when it is put into that context. (Of course, it should go without saying that each individual life is valuable and that not one of them is simply a data point.)

In any case, since in order to believe that few or none of these euthanizations were necessary we would have to also believe that PeTA is lying about why they do what they do (or badly mistaken about the health conditions of these animals, or unaware of the availability of medical care, or unwilling to pay the costs of that care, etc, etc), it seems that, unless we start out believing that PeTA is evil or corrupt, there is nothing in this raw data that can lead us to that conclusion. After all, it isn’t at all unlikely that 1.17% of the total number of dogs and cats in rescues and shelters in Virginia are too sick and are suffering too much to make decent lives possible and that ending those lives is the best thing anyone could do, all things considered. That is, unless, of course, we think that a life of even abject misery and suffering is always preferable to death.

I don’t think that, because I don’t think that life is sacred or that life is always and unequivocally worth living. I certainly think that every person has the right to make their own decisions in that regard, which leads me to the conclusion that when someone isn’t capable of making that decision (or making their decision known) then other people can only do the best that can be done to decide for them. That’s what parents do when severely disabled infants are born, as heart-wrenching as those decisions must be. Far be it from me to judge what those parents decide, me without any actual firsthand knowledge of the situation.

Anyway, maybe it is true that PeTA is staffed by ruthless or uncaring people who either enjoy or are willfully blind to the killing of dogs and cats. That just doesn’t seem likely to me. I accept that some, perhaps even many, of the dogs and cats PeTA euthanizes might be able to be saved, for at least some length of time. But I am not in PeTA’s shoes, and I am not the one facing these hard choices. I would hope that if I were facing those hard choices, that people would believe the best of me, and not assume that, just because they dislike the outcomes, that therefore I am necessarily evil.

I’m am really quite tired of PeTA bashing, and of blaming certain people, organizations and their approaches to advocacy for all the ills in the world. PeTA isn’t the cause of animal exploitation and they aren’t making matters worse and I wish people would stop saying that they are.

clouds

dark in the sky

as winds sweep round

vacuuming the leaves

birds fly – where?

the woman talking to herself, wears tattered clothes, and bangs on the door of the bus that won’t stop, she waits for someone who never arrives, no one hears a word

is she singing? is that a song?

no, not notes

just a patter, beats

of rain cry

the bus moves on and the women doesn’t, is she ever going – anywhere? the dust kicks up and black smoke rises against the grey, there’s no color left in a colorless world

clouds

hiding the sun

as chills wrap round

blanketing the street

we ask – dry?

the woman laughs out loud, shouts at the empty space, swats at no flies that aren’t buzzing her face, waits for the bus that she never gets on, and doesn’t sing, she knows no song.

is she just lost? is she alone?

no, we’re here

the third row seat on

the same ride

home

.