Some Scattered Musings on Animal Rights

The Homo sapiens sapiens species is a particular branch of the animal kingdom.  Religious and ethical notions of human superiority in relation to the whole of nature have been problematic throughout history.  The Genesis account in the bible gives Adam and Eve dominion over the animals (Gen 1:26).  The result of this ideology of H. sapiens superiority has resulted in an alienation of humanity from nature.  Murray Bookchin has developed one of the most adequate theories, from the left, regarding such alienation via his writings on Social Ecology.  In Society and Ecology he writes:

...by so radically separating humanity and society from nature or naively reducing them to mere zoological entities, we can no longer see how human nature is !derived! from nonhuman nature and social evolution from natural evolution. Humanity becomes estranged or alienated not only from itself in our "age of alienation," but from the natural world in which it has always been rooted as a complex and thinking life-force.

This paradigm stands in contrast to the notion of speciesism, a liberal ideology, which extrapolates uniquely H. sapiens concepts of ethics, morality and dignity to the whole of the animal kingdom.  Of course, glaringly missing from the concept of "speciesism" is a discussion of the H. sapiens species' relationship to other kingdoms of life such as plants, fungi and single celled organisms, but I will skip over this misstep for the sake of argument.

The purportedly anarchist/socialist/anti-speciesist website Species and Class is one of the forerunners of the left-wing approach to animal rights.  In an article posted on the Species and Class website John Tallent claims that veganism is an obligation for leftists, not an option:

The real question here is this: Why is it wrong to enslave humans that are relatively ‘less intelligent’ than others that are ‘more intelligent’? And if we think about this for a moment, we begin to understand that it is wrong to enslave any human, regardless of intelligence, because humans are sentient beings — that is, we all experience pain and pleasure and we are aware that we, individually, exist. If we did not know that we exist, and we could not experience pain and pleasure, what would it matter what happened to us? We would be senseless, unknowing beings.

Tallent, however, uses a key fallacy as his argument: that intelligence and sentience are guideposts for ethics. A sense of ethical behavior is a uniquely human trait.  According to triune-brain theory, a sense of ethics arises for the capacity for abstract thought resulting from the evolution of the neocortex, evolutionarily the most recent part of mammalian and human brains.  The neocortex is unique to humans and certain other primates.  Below is a description of the evolution of the three brains as well as a pictorial model of the triune brain.

Thus, if we are to take a positivist/materialist approach, "speciesism" has no empirical basis as different species' nervous systems can be radically different.  The neocortex abilities for abstract reasoning and thus ethical behavior that takes dignity into account are unique to the H. sapiens species and a handful of other apes.  To provide a simple analogy, one wouldn't treat a goldfish the same as a lion, would one?

Additionally, isn't it more speciesist to insist that a carnivorous species like lions, who kill other animals for food daily, behave in a similar way as an omnivorous species like humans, or even a herbivorous species like cattle?  So how can one human insist that another human must cease to eat other animals in order to be a proponent of the dignity of all humans?

With the inflated prices of vegan foods and the outrageous adoption fees of pet rescue agencies, it appears that animal rights is fairly certainly a bourgeois issue.  Far from another front for liberation, it is a derailment of the class struggle.  What's more, this assertion is supported by empirical, qualitative data.  According to Business Insider Magazine:

Rich people care more about animal welfare than human rights, and about a dozen other important causes, according to a new report from consultancy Capgemini.
The firm interviewed more than 4,500 high-net-worth individuals from 23 different markets during Q1 of this year to get their take on a number of subjects, including what social issues they care about most.
Besides human rights, the respondents also said they cared more about animal welfare than climate change, poverty alleviation, income inequality and race and gender issues.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/capgemini-wealth-report-2014-6#ixzz3FlcoPoIp

Here is the chart posted on that page:

Additionally, animal rights organizations like PETA have proved themselves to be out of touch with the reality of class struggle.  The worst of these recent stunts was when PETA reported that they would cover the water bills for Detroit families deprived of the human right to water on the condition that they would agree to go vegan for 1 year.

Of course, avowed liberal organizations like PETA are not alone in this culture of tone-deafness.  For example, shortly after a Ferguson, MO police officer had described Ferguson residents of African descent as "animals" the Species and Class site posted the following meme on their facebook page:

To close, I did find on article from Species and Class worthy of praise. I post it below in its entirety:

The Animalization of the Proletariat

August 29, 2014

By Percy Gauguin

The animalization of the dispossessed has been the very process by which the dispossessed became dispossessed. To reduce another to a bestial status is the establishment of supremacy over that other.
The condition of animality is essentially the lacking of humanity. The human who is treated as inferior is not fully human, and therefore lies somewhere between humanity and animality. This hierarchical mechanism is a form of predatory relations constituted within society, or the relations of nature transferred into social relations- not the reproduction of nature on social terrain, but the institution of a separate nature within society. This humanized nature, originating from nature but diverging from it, imposed itself upon ‘original’ nature and made it indistinct from it, thereby conflating human social relations with the natural order spontaneously arising between life forms in an idealized form. 

Animalization has been one of its underlying historical processes that has established inferiority and superiority between people, which then condensed the signification ‘animality’ as a distinct concept in opposition to ‘humanity’. This continual reproduction of animality throughout time has perpetuated the divide between humans and other species because humans themselves are divided into ‘social species’, or classes.

And so the species-relations between humanity and its livestock appear as the reflection of inter-human relations, reproduced in a distilled manner. The imperative of capital is to relegate each individual to the status of a meatbag which will generate, or at least not be an impediment to, profit. In the mass concentration of animals into bestial death camps proletarianization is reproduced in a very raw manner: the hyperexploited animal is merely a disposable unit situated in the accumulation of alienation. The hamburger fuels and provides alienated pleasure (e.g. McDonald’s) to those whose labor fuels the accumulation of capital and the even greater alienated pleasures of the capitalist class. The idea that animals suffer greatly under the industrial farm system is still extremely alien to many people, and oftentimes a matter of complete indifference and contempt. How can the proletariat’s proletariat become an object of solidarity when workers have no conception of even themselves? The pivot on which capitalism hinges is the individual ego that disregards all life that is situated beyond its egotistical view. The destruction of the slaughterhouse can never be accomplished within capitalism because capitalism is by nature always a world where the predatory instinct is sanctified. [emphasis mine]


What this double proletarianization points to, moreover, is that the proletariat consumes itself as it embodies the contradictions of capitalism within its own being. Through sanctioning the factory-farming of animals the industrial ontology of capitalism is itself sanctioned. The unquestioning devouring of meat no matter what sort of productive processes begot it belies an indifference to the very web of life. This is not a question that only intellectuals bother about in mindnumbing tomes that no one but other intellectuals read. The social and natural ecosystems which we are ceaselessly in communion with are becoming even more severed from us than they have ever been, and to blind oneself to their reality is to become a passive receptacle of capitalist civilization. Food cultivation- of both animals and plants- is undergoing a rapid transformation that is adhering increasingly to a nauseatingly capitalist logic. Our complacency with any type of diet is a complacency with the capitalist system- it is only because animals are alive that we place so much emphasis upon veganism and animal liberation.

But it is not our desire to replace meat-factories with colossal rice patties, and veganize the proletariat. To ‘veganize’ the proletariat would be almost to undo the ideology and practice of veganism altogether. It is the factory as an industrial category which we seek to destroy- because only meat, whether human or non-human, is herded into the factory, for the sole sake of one class over another. The insurrection against capitalism is an insurrection against classes, and the movement of communism is ultimately the championing of the individual within a free society. As long as class systems pervade humanity, the mass slaughter and subjugation of animals will always be a fundamentally class-based issue. Communization is the process which disentangles humanity from its countlessly false links and separates those who are willing to inflict pain on fellow beings and those who are not. The animalization of others in a revolutionary world can only be the action of individuals and groups, but within capitalism it is a systematic process that degrades and marks us all.

Update: Apparently PETA has an insidious, bourgeois notion that pets are better off dead than to be kept by poor people.

Man claims PETA stole, killed family pet

 

Update II on speciesism: Plants know when you are eating them, and they don't like it

Chapter V - Infantile Disorders - the Id, the Ego and the Slasher-Psychodrama

The slasher genre has fascinated European audiences since 1897 when the Grand Guignol theature entranced and terrified audiences in Paris.  Some of the best of the early silent films were what could be described as fitting into the slasher genre, including Bluebeard (1901) and the perpetually engrossing, the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) with its jagged angles and nonparallel lines.  Of course, the slasher genre did not reach the New World until perhaps 1932's Thirteen Women in which a half-Javanese student enlists a swami to lure her tormenters into committing suicide.  Interestingly enough, Peg Entwhistle, a star in Thirteen Women, is said to have committed suicide beneath the Hollywood sign shortly before the films release, adding an element of life (or death) imitating art.

In 1960 British director Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho captivated audiences enough to introduce the psychodramatic slasher concept.  It is an intimate portrayal of a serial killer's mental processes, utilizing spacial relations and abnormal deceptions to represent Freudian concepts.  Psycho became perhaps the most influential slasher psychodrama in American film making.  Since then the slasher psychodrama has become an institution in film making exemplified by Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, John Carpenter's Halloween, the Nightmare on Elm Street series and recently the 2012 film Maniac, directed by Franck Khalfoun.

Slasher psychodramas must be distinguished from the "who dunnit" sub-genre of slasher films exemplified by John Carpenter's Scream, Jim Gillespie's I Know What You Did Last Summer, Bob Clark's 1974 holiday classic, Black Christmas and Robert Hiltzik's Sleepaway Camp (1983).  These films owe more to Agatha Christie than Alfred Hitchcock.  Here the victims are slain before the motive is know.

In contrast, the slasher psychodrama examines the inner workings of the serial killer's abnormal mind.  Additionally, the identity of the killer is known even before the first act of violence takes place.   Thus, the audience anticipates the violence, without knowing when or where exactly it will come.  These films rely heavily on Freudian theories regarding abnormal psychology.  Generally, the killer's instincts result for an over emphasis on impulses arising from the Id and the Ego, while ignoring the super Ego.

One of the best examples of such Freudian cinema is the 1983, German film Angst.  It is about a narcissistic and sociopathic serial killer who has just been released from prison and his recidivistic exploits that commence immediately upon his release.  An almost constant narration by the monstrous, anti-heroic subject plays throughout the entirety of the film.  The tone of the narration is something like a patient revealing his darkest impulses on the couch in a psychoanalyst's office until the very end when a psychologist offers his own expert opinion via voiceover.  Strong allusions to an Oedipal complex, persecution complex and compulsive narcissism are consistent motifs.

Another excellent example of a film that centers on the Id and Ego while skipping over the Super Ego is the 1977 French film Baxter.  The infantile, morally-bankrupt protagonist of this film is a dog; the title character.  The film is organized around narration from Baxter's perspective as he reveals the inner workings of the canine psyche.  He is given to an elderly woman whom he deems unfit to cater to his whims and thus concocts a plan to orchestrate her untimely demise.  Baxter's infantile, narcissistic impulses are not kept in check by his super Ego as he is merely and literally a beast.

Unfortunately, the socio-ideological effect of slasher psychodramas is that they normalize sociopathic behavior.  The serial killer ceases to be a monster and thus becomes human.  This can be detrimental for the collective psyche of the greater society in two ways.  First, an individual that is already inclined toward anti-social behavior may view these films as an understanding of their condition and thus provide grounds for justification of these impulses.  This is, of course, somewhat of a conservative understanding of the role of entertainment in society, but valid nonetheless.  Second, the gravitas of the pseudo-psychological character of these films may give the innocent viewer an idea that they now understand the so-called "warning signs" of sociopathic tendencies in an erroneously assumed empirical sense.  The may result in the creating of profiling and straw-men or boogey-men.  It could erode a collective trust in the essential goodness, or at least neutrality of strangers' intentions.  The result of this is alienation, obsessive individualism and  again, paradoxically, a justification of anti-social impulses.

It should be kept in mind that the narcissistic character of the slasher is a cultural motif unique to Europe and the USA.  For example, in both the Japanese slasher film Ichi the Killer, directed by Takashi Miike and the South Korean love-letter to ultra-violence Fallen Angels, by director Wong Kar Wai, the serial murderers do not kill out of egotistic and infantile impulses, but out of a sense of duty, something that arises from the super Ego.

A critical, Marxian interpretation must be added the the Freudian character of the slasher psychodrama genre.  Marx's concept of alienation, a contribution to the dialogues on what Hegel terms the geist, must here be brought into play.  In the young Marx's 1844 philosophical manuscripts he describes the contradiction of alienation thusly:

In both respects, therefore, the worker becomes a servant of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labor, i.e., in that he receives work, and, secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. This enables him to exist, first as a worker; and second, as a physical subject. The height of this servitude is that it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.

Mere survival here becomes a privilege that results only from subjugation of the worker to the commodity that is fetishized.  Thus, a worker becomes the servant of the product of her/his own work.  This contradiction creates cognitive dissonance that Freud did not necessarily account for.  A resentment forms between the enslaved creator and the master created.  Thus, the Oedipal complex is corroborated, but not validated.  The product of labor (in the case of Oedipus, the labor of child birth) develops a libidinal desire to dominate the creator.  Adam chooses Eve and the snake over God and is cast out of Eden.  However, the resentment of the objectified product (the offspring or the commodity) is less justifiable than the resentment of the creator (the parent, the god, the worker) against the creation.  Therefore, the Oedipus complex exemplified by the serial killers in slasher-psychodrama films is not to be coddled or pitied.  Conversely, the victims are not to be pitied either as they are complacent in their victimization.  The truly liberating cinema is that in which the victim murders the abuser.  That will be the subject of the next chapter.

Trick or Treat? Horror and the Monster Archetype - Chapter IV: The Religious Horror

The religious horror film is often plays upon binary morality stories: the struggle of good against evil, innocence against experience, and aesthetically - light vs. dark.  These films are related to the ghost films in their obsession with the metaphysical realm, but differ in that morality plays a decisive role, generally.

How is a dialectical materialist to approach such films?  William Friedkin, director of the Exorcist and avowed agnostic, offers a relevant answer in an interview with London's Time Out Magazine:

Even those of us who call ourselves atheists, or think that the whole thing is rubbish, are curious about the mystery of faith. Is there anything to this stuff? “The Exorcist” offers one possible position. While I’m not Catholic, I’m overwhelmed by the idea that a 32-year-old man in a very small part of the world, who never left one word written in his own hand, has affected the lives of trillions of people. I look at the Catholic Church and I see these guys in these far-out costumes with all this gold, and I wonder what it has to do with this young man who went among the people, wore a simple robe and sandals, and healed the sick. But I also wonder how millions of people were willing to give their lives for their belief. And because I wonder, I’m curious about something like “The Exorcist”, which attributes that power to a true belief.’

Additionally, a scientific approach to religiosity has often been the subject of anthropological inquiry.  In the 2013 film the Borderlands an a/v technician, known as Gray, assigned to debunk a supposed miracle asks a priest, known only as Deacon, assigned to the same task about paganism vs. Christianity.  The conversation proceeds thusly:

Gray: The people that came before your lot, right...

Deacon: The pagans.

Gray: Yeah, the pagans or Druids or whatever, the Aztecs.  The believed in stuff that was real.  You know, they had the moon, the sea, the stars the sun.  They had stuff, they worshiped stuff.

Deacon: They didn't know any better.  They were just worshiping what was in front of them.

Gray: No they worshiped what was there, physically there. Whereas you are choosing to believe and worship the great 'what if.'

Deacon: And your point is...?

Gray: My point is, if there was going to be a fight between something that was there and something that wasn't there, I know what side I'd bet on.

Many religious horror films play upon the antagonism between the brutal survivalism of nature and the civilized morality of humanity.  The Lars von Trier film Antichrist certainly plays upon these traditional concepts of the vulnerable nature of women, animals and nature to the base amorality of Satan.

Additionally, one can see such themes manifest when Werner Herzog discusses his departure from the philosophy of peace and harmony in nature of his subject, Timothy Treadwell, in Grizzly Man.  There he describes nature as violence and chaos and points to the evidence of grizzlies eating their young for sustenance, out of desperation, as proof of this paradigm.

Anarchist zoologist Peotyr Kropotkin, however, offers an alternative view of the Darwinian concept of "survival of the fittest" in his magnum opus Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.  There he exclaims:

Happily enough, competition is not the rule either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods, and natural selection finds better fields for its activity. Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual Support. In the great struggle for life for the greatest possible fulness and intensity of life with the least waste of energy natural selection continually seeks out the ways precisely for avoiding competition as much as possible.

In order to for a materialist to exclaim a set of universal ethics, the Judeo-Christian dualism of flesh vs. spirit, or to put it non-theisticly, civilization vs. nature, must be rejected.  Additionally, the doctrine of individualism vs. collectivism plays into this binary.

The lesson of religious horror is that the good are punished, despite doing no wrong.  In this sense, even fundamentalist torture-films like Mel Gibson's evangelical, sycophantic film the Passion of the Christ, can be watched with a subversive, Christian-atheist lens.  That god had forsaken Christ (Matt. 27:46) in his hour of torment is proof either that he does not exist, or that he is not all loving.

The Paranormal Activity series, for example, focuses on the descendants of witches who were tortured by a demon, known only as Toby, which their matriarchal ancestor had promised the first-born male child in their lineage to.  The films do examine the non-nuclear/traditional aspects of the successive generations' families, but it is clear that they are not intentional evil-doers.  Apart from innocent fornication and divorce, they are without sin.  They are middle class and live relatively comfortable lives, until Toby comes into the picture.  Perhaps this too harkens back to Marx and Engle's "spectre of communism", from the Manifesto.  The female descendants are able to enjoy a comfortable middle-class life only at the price of selling their first male progeny to Toby. The prophetic predictions of Marx and Engle's regarding "the spectre of communism" wreaking revenge upon the petite bourgeoisie who had betrayed the proletariat during the French Revolution and thus coming true, one way or another.

Finally, religious horror fascinates us because religiosity is one of the greatest examples of the human imagination at work.  We can invent gods and angels to protect us, but we can also invent demons and witches to betray and torture us.  Freud had this to say about how the demonology of the Puritans served the interests of the moralistic culture in his time and space:

Its insistence on the evil in man’s nature, and in particular on the sexual root of that evil, suited the New England temperament well which had been shaped by a similar Puritan emphasis. In fact, to hear Anna Freud speak of the criminal tendencies of the one and two-year-old is to be reminded inevitably of Calvinistic sermons on infant damnation.

Interestingly enough, Freud was heavily influenced by fellow German writer Goethe, and especially Faust in which the title character makes a pact with the demon Mephistophiles, in order to woo his loved one.  Freud would have insisted that so-called Satanic impulses result from the Id - the infantile aspect of consciousness. He thus explained the infantile nature of what theists know as evil:

This frightful evil is simply the initial, primitive, infantile part of mental life, which we can find in actual operation in children, but which, in part, we overlook in them on account of their small size, and which in part we do not take seriously since we do not expect any high ethical standard from children.

Freud wrote of the ultimate, real-life ghoul, Adolf Hitler:

The dominant trait in Hitler’s personality was infantilism. It explains the most prominent as well as the strangest of his characteristics and actions. The frequently awesome consistency of his thoughts and behaviour must be seen in conjunction with the stupendous force of his rage, which reduced field marshals to trembling nonentities. If at the age of fifty he built the Danube bridge in Linz down to the last detail exactly as he had designed it at the age of fifteen before the eyes of his astonished boyhood friend, this was not a mark of consistency in a mature man, one who has learned and pondered, criticized and been criticized, but the stubbornness of the child who is aware of nothing except himself and his mental image and to whom time means nothing because childishness has not been broken and forced into the sober give-and-take of the adult world. Hitler’s rage was the uncontrollable fury of the child who bangs the chair because the chair refuses to do as it is told; his dreaded harshness, which nonchalantly sent millions of people to their death, was much closer to the rambling imaginings of a boy than to the iron grasp of a man ..

Here Freud explains how the concept of sin resulted in the creation of the super-ego:

Here too is found the explanation of Original Sin ... It is not our concern to discuss the theological conception here, but psychoanalysis has thrown considerable light on what underlies the conception, The sense of sin comes, we have seen, from the personalisation of the Super-ego at the resolution of the Oedipus Complex, by which the wish to destroy the father and possess the mother are mastered in the developing infant. If these wishes had not existed there would have been no need to form the Super-ego and so develop a moral conscience. Thus the precondition of getting a knowledge of good and evil at all is that we have sinned psychologically. A sense of guilt is inherent in our make-up. The original sin is the complex of wishes in the Oedipus Complex which we develop before we have a moral sense, but which remain, in varying degrees of fixation after we have developed that moral sense in dealing with them as dangerous wishes.
  
Certainly, the fear invoked by demonic stories and paradoxically the adrenergic elation from viewing such Satanic horror films can be said to be, in the case of the latter, an activation of the ethical super-ego and in the case of the former, the cognitive dissonance that arises from the activation of our infantile id, which enjoys the macabre, the evil, the sadistic and the taboo.