Not Alone; Growing Into Humanism, Part Three
We who affirm the humanist heritage of the Enlightenment are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as the heroes of freedom, reason and compassion – which to a significant extent, we are. However, spiritual maturity is not merely a matter of individual growth; it also has a collective aspect. And like all other historical movements, the Enlightenment, despite its name, has a dark side. Just ask the animals.
It is easy to look down with scorn upon a religious authority that for a thousand years of European Christiandom, called it sinful, and made it extremely difficult, for anyone to discover anything useful from the examination of the internal workings of the human body. Real medical science did not pick up where it had left off with the pagan Greeks until the time of the Renaissance, when emerging humanist philosophy suggested that the best way to treat illness was not through prayer, but by a better understanding of material physiological reality. Our own founding Unitarian theologian, Michael Servetus, is more widely recognized for giving the first accurate description of the pulmonary circulation of blood, than for his unorthodox ideas about the unity of god. We may be pardoned for remembering that it was his theology that got him burned at the stake in Geneva, yet it is also worth noting that he recorded his accurate medical observations as part of his defense of god’s elaborate providence, or what might today be called intelligent design. Most Enlightenment era thinkers, particularly the students of natural philosophy, which we would now call science, had no interest in challenging the existence of a self-conscious, personal god. Indeed, they firmly believed that they were advocating a higher reverence for that god by unfolding to human understanding the intricate wonders of his creation. What they were interested in challenging was the intellectual hegemony of the church, which had for centuries given more authority to interpretations of scripture than to the observations of the natural world.
The radical philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries were completely fascinated by the concept of machines. That a device could be created to do some useful task in an ongoing way, without constant human effort, even something as simple as keeping accurate time, like a clock or a watch, sent their minds soaring with a whole new set of analogies about the earth, and life, and the universe, and the meaning of being human. Only a short time before, the essence of a human being was that it was a not-angel, and a not-animal; that’s what human existence was, the space in between divine beings and beasts. Animals were the visible other against which humanity was defined. The interest in mechanical devices suggested a different paradigm; to be human was to be a not-machine. And yet, the body, the manifestation of humanity in the material world, could be looked at as a kind of machine, and perhaps its defects could be repaired, just as a broken clock or pump might be repaired, by someone who grasped how it was constructed in the first place. Diseases and injuries could be understood not as signs of god’s wrath, but rather as defective parts or faulty alignments, that were potentially to be corrected by equally material, mechanical procedures. In order to understand such a mechanism, it was necessary to examine it closely, and if possible take it apart, to see just how the pieces were meant to be assembled, and to operate. Over the objections of church authorities, the dissection of human remains became increasingly common, and powerfully informed an avalanche of medical advancement. Score one for the humanists.
But this new paradigm created a new dilemma; in the dichotomy between human and machine, where did that old other, the animals, belong? The traditional distinction, that what made humans different from, and superior to, the animals, was reason, had not gone away, but were animals to be thought of as machines, or not-machines? Their organicness made them seem more analogous to the human side of the equation, but the old way of thinking lingered, so that if humans were not-animals, and humans were not-machines, then animals must be in some sense equivalent to machines. And everyone knows that machines have no feelings.
Not surprisingly, this was bad news for animals that found themselves in the laboratories of 18th century anatomy students. And it must be recognized that initially it was the philosophers of humanism who took the lead in theorizing that since animals had no souls, no language, and no capacity for reason, they had no meaningful feelings, and no moral standing that human beings were called upon to recognize. These researchers responded to the sounds made by dogs during vivisection by observing that the springs and other parts of machines made noise when taken apart, and they created a social consensus by making fun of observers who were distressed by the creatures’ evident suffering. They argued that the moral duty of the scientist was to overcome their intuitive squeamishness, whether about handling human remains, or about hearing dogs yelp, and they regarded anyone who tried to prevent such practices as representing the same reactionary ignorance that they saw the church trying to enforce. Both Charles Darwin and his self-described agnostic supporter Thomas Huxley advocated unrestricted vivisection. Not, it seems to me, my tradition’s finest hour.
By contrast, there were numerous Christian clergy who spoke out against the various forms of cruelty that were common to British and European society at the time; not only scientific vivisection, but inhumane farming, carting and butchering practices, and blood sports like cock fighting and bear baiting. They argued from several premises; that a god who was merciful to the human beings subject to him, required of human beings to be merciful – not necessarily to each other, but to the animals subject to them; that the animals as part of all creation belonged to god, and were subject to his disposal, not human will; that the Bible mandated to human beings the compassionate stewardship of other creatures; and most interestingly, that humans anticipate an eternal life of happiness, whereas animals have only their brief lives in this world, and therefore should be pitied, and allowed to be as happy as possible. In this aspect, anyway, I would prefer to have been on the side of church.
There were dissenting opinions within the humanist school of thought. Voltaire argued that the anatomical studies of the vivisectionists themselves had revealed the presence of what he called “organs of feeling” analogous to those that created sensation in human bodies; therefore, it should be concluded that animals also feel pain. In an essay published in 1789, the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham maintained that “The question is not Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?” Yet even if it were established that non-human creatures could and did suffer, would that in itself be enough to counter what some thought were the demands of increasing knowledge about the mechanisms of life and the body?
As the Enlightenment thinkers struggled to articulate a basis for human ethics that was not centered on religious scripture or tradition, the experience of pity – today we would be more likely to say compassion – loomed large, and questions about cruelty and scientific detachment became increasingly urgent. The distinction between vivisection and actual surgery, in the era before anaesthesia, had to do with intention, not with much observable difference. What is the function of pain? What is the function of empathy? Of pity? Should these experiences affect our behavior, or are they weaknesses that we should strive to overcome, in order to be more effective doctors, or soldiers, or parents, or business people, or scientists? Thinkers like Adam Smith, David Hume, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed that human sentiment, thoughtfully reflected upon, does provide a guide for moral action, a sort of ‘law written on the heart’ that everyone can be expected to recognized, even if they don’t always follow it. However, it is in this context that the writings of the Marquis de Sade become philosophically interesting. What are we to make of those people who report, or who demonstrate by their actions, that they do not respond with pity to the suffering of others? One way to address this question is to label those who are not moved by the pain of other beings, or who take pleasure in it, as “inhuman”, but this only creates a tautology, and does not solve the problem of finding a secular, or natural, basis for morality.
Kant and future thinkers of the modern era would move away from a sentiment-based moral system, striving to establish some rational basis for ethics, one that can be demonstrated to any reasonable person, that they will then understand themselves as obligated to follow. The trouble is, it doesn’t work that way. The vivisectionists were some of the most rational people of their day, as were many German scientists who carried out inhuman – there’s that word again – experiments on concentration camp victims under the Nazi regime. And there are moments when any of us would probably agree that the morally correct thing to do is to tolerate another being’s pain in order to achieve some longer term good. We make our children submit to dentists and vaccinations and multiplication tables in order to save them suffering in the long term. What is present in those situations, that makes us trust ourselves and each other, is a sense of connection, which is precisely what was missing from those early anatomists, and from the Nazis, and the slave dealers, and the waterboarders at Abu Graib, and anyone else who has ever made themselves indifferent to causing suffering.
In 1751 the engraver William Hogarth published a series of four prints detailing what he called “The four stages of cruelty;” the first two depict a boy and then a grown man abusing animals, in the third he murders a woman, and in the fourth his body is dissected after he is hanged for his crime. In the midst of the debates over these actual practices, the perception existed, even then, that they were in some way related; that a person who was willing to torture a dog, or injure a horse, would also be willing to kill an innocent human being, and that the unregretted and disrespectful dismembering of his body was a part of the same pattern. As our own recent national debates about the use of torture in military interrogations has shown, there will always be people who use reason to advocate that there is something weak, or irrational, or irresponsible, about letting someone else’s pain stop you from getting what you think you need. And I’m not persuaded that, on their own terms, there is any rational counter argument.
I cannot prove that animals have feelings like you or I do; many kinds of evidence suggest to me that this is so, but I have no way to prove that you have feelings that are just like mine, either; or that the blacks, or the huns, or the japs, or the gooks, or the jews do, in spite of Shakespeare’s poignant words, in the person of Shylock:
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes?
Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions;
fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means,
warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
Part of Shylock’s desperation is that there is nothing he can do to prove his equal humanness to the Christians with whom he must live; if they do not attribute feeling and suffering like their own to him, he cannot make them understand that he has it. It is, in the end, a leap of faith for any of us to believe that any other consciousness resembles our own subjective experience; it is a conviction that can only be inferred, never conclusively demonstrated. Yet I want to suggest that some part of our essential humanness, and our moral health as well as our spiritual maturity, depends upon our ability to make that very leap of faith; to suppose that other beings have feelings that are in some meaningful way the same as our own. And I deeply believe that as we grow toward spiritual maturity, the circle of that inclusiveness widens; that the more we recognize the experiences of those who are different from us as reflecting the experiences we ourselves know, the more we are enlarged and fulfilled as human beings, and the more abundant our lives become.
There have been cultures that took this assumption to be far more fundamental than western Christianity did. As a shorthand reference I have borrowed a phrase from the Lakota Sioux tradition: mitakuye oyasin, a prayer that is usually translated “All my relations.” It is an invocation, a summoning, a direct address, and a claim; that each of us as human beings stands in a connection of kinship, not only with our own species, but with every other part of creation as well; that we are accountable to these relatives for what we do with our lives, and their lives, and with the earth that we share; and that their gifts of strength, wisdom, and beauty beyond our own are available to us, because we are all one family. Buddhism also articulates this sense of connection to, and responsibility for, the well being not just of humanity, but of all sentient beings. Such traditions consider it a form of spiritual dysfunction or brokenness, a kind of blindness, for individuals not to be intuitively aware that the experiences of other beings mirror our own. These traditions also understand that relationship to be a source of joy and comfort and satisfaction, as well as a responsibility.
The progress of modern western science has taught us two realities that make a strong case for mitakuye oyasin. First of all, we now know beyond all argument that all the creatures and even all the objects in the universe are composed of the very same basic substances. Whether or not we are made in the image of god, we are assuredly made of the stuff of the stars. All life forms that we know are carbon based; only a handful of elements constitute the building blocks of everything that exists. There is nothing finer, or nobler, or more precious about human beings; we are structured, just like everything else, out of those same ingredients; and in that shared composition, we are related to all that is. Second, we are mutually interdependent, or perhaps even just plain dependent, upon other life forms, in ways we may not yet fully grasp. In fact, it could be that with a few exceptions of domesticated breeds that require our care, most animals would be just fine, or perhaps even better off, without the human race on the planet. We, on the other hand, could not survive for any amount of time without the work of pollinating insects and birds; and without the ministrations of the humble dung beetle, we would all be standing literally knee deep in crap. We need mitakuye oyasin; by ourselves we are helpless, and doomed.
There is a kind of hubris, or unwarranted pride, that has too often characterized both the western religious and humanist understanding of our connection to the natural world. Thinkers and writers have sought to define what it is that makes human beings some kind of exception to the rest of the universe, and how it is that we are different from the other animals. We have desperately wanted to be special, to be separate and superior, either god’s favorites, or somehow in charge of everything. But the truth is, we are merely one species of animal life; clever, adaptive, social, tool-using – got those big brains and opposable thumbs going on – but dependent and mortal and limited and vulnerable in our own ways, just like all the other creatures. And what’s wrong with that? We are special, of course, too, in our own way; we don’t need all our relatives to be less than us in order to keep us puffed up in our own inflated self-esteem. At least, as we gain spiritual maturity, we need that less and less; we learn to understand more deeply our connectedness with all our fellow human beings, no matter what tribe they are from, no matter what languages they speak, or rituals they practice; no matter how different they are, we recognize our common humanity beyond our diversities. And as the circle widens even more, it takes in all those four-legged and six-legged and crawling, flying, swimming relatives who know the pain and pleasures of life in their own ways; ways that are not, after all, so very different from our own.
For the past century, this has been the work of maturing humanism, particularly through the emergence of feminism; the recognition that unchecked hubris will be our doom; that reason alone is not enough to protect us from the potential of our own inhumanity; and that compassion based upon our universal connections must form one aspect of any adequate moral compass. The felt recognition that ascribes to others the capacity for experience, of pain and pleasure, fear and comfort, in some way similar to what we know subjectively in ourselves, is always guess, and yet it is a guess that colors our lives, that leads us to call upon mitakuye oyasin for help and hope and sustenance. It is a leap of faith that we grow into as we make it, for empathy strengthens when it is exercised, and shrivels whenever it is suppressed. The great humanitarian and humanist Albert Schweitzer once called it ‘reverence for life’; I don’t think it’s reverence for life itself, exactly, for there are moments when life becomes sheer suffering, and that’s not something to cling to. But he was pointing to the same thing – mitakuye oyasin; the connection, the kinship, of everything that lives; and reminding us that we can only be spiritually mature, that our true can only be fulfilled, when we embrace our relationship to the life of all that is, and see our larger being mirrored there. And then we know that we have never been, and can never be, and are, at the deepest, most real level, not alone.
Benediction:
To be of the earth is to know:
The struggle toward the light;
The joy of blossoming;
The pain of growth;
The decay of the seasons;
The mystery of death and the miracle of birth.
