The Soulful Eye

Richard Beck, in a series on Christians and Torture, recently posted some thoughts about the cognitive conditions necessary for or at least correlated with killing and or torturing other human beings.  In it, he noted that “Violence requires dehumanization.”   I agree completely.  However, I suggest that with a broader focus we begin to see that there is a larger mechanism at work and that mechanism can be seen to control not only our violent behavior towards other humans but our behavior towards other species as well.  ”It is not difference per se, but rather the denigration of difference” is the significant point that Andrew Linzey makes at the beginning of this article, ‘The Powers That Be’: Mechanisms that Prevent us Recognising Animal Sentience“.  Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

I propose to identify and illustrate what might be described as ‘the powers that be’ – four mechanisms that prevent us from recognising sentience in animals, and to indicate the challenges that should follow for future work in this field.

I. The first is what Denys Turner has recently called ‘that most powerful of human tools, the power of misdescription’. In a paper, provocatively titled ‘How to Kill People’, he argues:

“Let me tell you how to kill people efficiently; or rather, here’s how to get yourself, and, if you are in the business of doing so, here’s how to get others to kill people. First you have got to call your proposed victims names … if we propose to kill a fellow human being and justify it, we have to redescribe him in such a way that he no longer belongs to us, becomes an alien being … and in that way the inhibition against killing is effectively weakened.”

He provides the examples of how some newspapers, in the time of the Falklands/Malvinas war, described the Argentinians as ‘Argies’ or ‘wops’, and how, in the Vietnamese war, US soldiers called the North Vietnamese ‘Gooks’. Apparently, General Westmoreland once commented that they [the Vietcong] could be killed with less scruple because they had an ‘Eastern’ attitude to death and the value of human life. These examples are not intended to pass moral judgements on either war, but to illustrate that we cannot easily kill human beings without degrading them at first verbally. In order to kill or abuse we need to create an artificial distance from the one who is to be killed or abused.

Similarly, we have created an artificial distance between ourselves and other animals. There are differences, sometimes important ones, both between and among species. It is not difference per se, but rather the denigration of difference that is significant morally. It is how we use differences to justify unjust treatment, and, specifically, how these are embodied in our language.

Carol Adams points to the same mechanism, highlighting one particular aspect of that denigration, the denial of individual identity.  In her article The War On Compassion, in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, she points out how the perpetrators of genocide linguistically move humans into the category of “animal”, and better yet something closer to vermin, or insects.  Interestingly, the OT can be seen in some places to be trying to make this same kind of distinction … animals that swarm (mass term) are categorized differently than other animals.

The broader term “animal” though automatically triggers enough of the notion of  doing something to a large number, a mass, a something.   The application of “mass terms” which even though it may refer to animate life,  functions as a linguistic way to justify those actions as if they were being performed on inanimate objects.  The idea being that animals are somehow more like inanimate objects, specifically they inherently lack individuality because there are lots of them and within their kinds they all kind of look the same (out-group homogeneity bias).  You can see how easily we do that with humans that don’t look like us.

(On a side note, there was a recent quip in a Newsweek article about the increasing rate of multiples (births of 3,4,5 + children at a time) and how it was changing our ideas of “individual identity”, because multiple births are something we have traditionally thought of as part of defining us as distinct from animals.   Animals have litters, humans give birth to individuals, etc.  The point was that multiples are giving their parents and the rest of us a chance to recognize how we’ve transposed the ideas of giving birth to multiple offspring with the idea that those offspring somehow don’t have individual identities.)

**update**

here’s the quote

“Yet being a multiple also means giving up individuality others take for granted, taking turns at a mother’s breast and dividing every birthday cake.   Single births, after all, set humans apart from many other mammals.  Multiples are a departure from that natural order and, even before the rise of fertility drugs, many cultures viewed them as abnormal, even animal. … “They disturb the idea that same and different are in completely separate categories,” says Juliana de Nooy, author of Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture.  Sarah Kliff, “Five of a Kind,” Newsweek 6/22/09: 60.

**

Anyway, back to the function of mass terms, the linguistic moves of deindividuation, or as Adams also calls it, “massification”.  The primary function is to divide our sphere of concern into us/them, deserving/undeserving, now/later.  Adams calls it “inattention with an alibi”.(23)   I think one of the ways Jesus death can be understood to enable a cosmic reconciliation is that he reverses the momentum on the philosophical underpinnings of the great chain of being in which the lower are seen to exist for the purpose of serving the higher.  Jesus changes the equation.  The higher exist to serve the lower.  We barely get that within our own species but it’s happening.  The idea that humans exists to be served by all the rest of creation will eventually be recognized as a pathetic selfish distortion of God’s love for the world.  We don’t exist to be served, we exist to serve.

In practical terms, I think one of the things Jesus is doing in the world is reversing the trend towards massification … he’s opening up our hearts to see that creatures of other colors are still individuals, loved by God, to see that creatures of other shapes are still individuals, loved by God.  Not one sparrow is forgotten by God.  God knows each sparrow as an individual. It’s not all about and for me and my kind.  It’s not all about and for us and our kind.  It’s all about and for God and his entire creation.

“Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”  ~  Theodor Adorno