One compassion

The links between our society’s treatment of animals and humans have been noticed by many thinkers over time. Our cruelty or indifference to one sort of being generally reflects our treatment of another. Those thinkers see what so many see once they have started to break down the artificial wall between the consciousness of humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. We do not have separate systems in our psyche governing compassion towards different beings, there is only one system. Extending our empathy and compassion for animals, or for humans different to us, doesn’t require acquiring a new mental ability but merely extending an existing one. There is one compassion within us.

Aristotle said, “For man[sic] when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all”. When the majority of people embrace a wider compassion we might transcend our record as the most destructive species to embody our potential as the most constructive. A humanity that thought primarily of how it could help other life rather than use or dominate them would be a heroic species. Our taking the side of the beauty of life would be the evidence that has thus far been inconsistent, that we do not just possess an intricate and cunning consciousness but also a wise and just one.

So long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields

Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy was a deeply religious man, yet his view of our treatment of animals and his vegetarianism was at odds with Christian doctrine that holds humanity up as the only being with any real consequence. Whatever nice things a pope or a saint might have said in the millennia since the Bible was written, Genesis is clear on the status of non-human life "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth". The other major religions are often better than this in how they view non–human life, Islam uses a word more like stewardship than dominion, Hinduism and Buddhism include other beings in their cycle of life, but for all the major religions humanity is the point. This is profoundly at odds with evolutionary reality. Most major religions see the world as a kind of morality play for human beings, with other living beings a largely inconsequential backdrop. Even in our modern world every year millions of sentient beings are slaughtered as offerings to gods who we are told delight in such things. Children generally seem to have a fondness and empathy for animals, but when they are raised with human-centric religious beliefs it is little surprise they come to view other animals as soulless machines.

If you have men who will exclude any of god's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men

St. Francis of Assisi

The rise of secularism however hasn't shaken our belief that humankind is the only source of meaning in our universe. Evolutionary theory refutes the image of humanity as "the meaning of existence", as thoroughly as Copernicus had done for our conception of Earth as the centre of our solar system. Darwin's On the Origin of Species has shown us that we are related to all life, and intimately so to most complex creatures. Despite this, little has changed in our relationship with other animals. The rise of science has not made us reconsider our right to do as we will with other species, instead they huddle in ever-increasing billions in factory farms and laboratories.

Religion has been used to justify many evils within humanity. Racism, sexism, homophobia, inequality and other cruelties were supported and propagated by religious authorities and accepted by their followers. Secularism and science claimed a more rational view of the world but followed along behind religion to justify the continuation of the same evils.

Regardless of whether it was secularism or religion from which we sourced our highest truths, all along it was the very thing which we thought made us superior, our domination of others, that showed how little we had morally evolved. Our moral thinking has been too piecemeal, too selfish, too much a slave to our subconscious desire to feel superior over others.

Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character; and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man

Arthur Schopenhauer

The links between our treatment of non-human animals and each other have been clear to many thinkers over time. They see what so many see once they have broken down the artificial intellectual wall between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. We do not in our psyche have separate systems governing empathy towards one species or another. There is one compassion within us.

Modern science has come to know this. It has been well documented that those who commit violence to humans are highly likely to commit violence towards other species. These links come as no surprise and they have their roots in the abuse of power.

Abusers instinctively feel the relatedness of all sentient creatures, that their emotional suffering has a commonality they wish to exploit. They would find little satisfaction without seeing the same terror in the eyes of an animal as a human, the same cowering from fear, the same powerlessness to escape the situation they are in.

Those who seek to be kind know this commonality too when we befriend animals. We speak in a common language of touch, gesture and emotion with them, something we do because we feel on an instinctive level that the language is understood.

Anyone who has spent time with non-human animals knows as Darwin said, “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties”. Our consciousness is not a difference in kind, but rather a difference of degree.

Until he extends the circle of compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace

Albert Schweitzer

Our intellectual obsession with our superiority to other animals has made us focus on the differences between us rather than the more ethically meaningful commonalities. Where there is a difference we assign a higher value to the things humans are proficient at, and all the ways we are inferior to other animals are deemed irrelevant. These self-aggrandising oversights have limited our understanding of ourselves as whole beings and caused vast suffering across the species divide.

The individual abuse of animals for cruel enjoyment is psychologically distressing, but statistically, it is a small part of the total suffering animals endure at our hands. Every day modern intensive farming sends hundreds of millions of animals, their bodies bred and warped to be efficient production machines, to endure a life of regular brutalities which only ends with their premature death. Many millions are also experimented on or killed in laboratories and classrooms for often dubious scientific reasons. Few of the millions of animals drawn from the oceans each day are given a decent death, with the hook, suffocation, or gutting alive their fate. Few people know the full extent of this suffering, indeed it is clear they don’t want to know.

He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals

Emmanuel Kant

Slaughterhouses are often pushed to the edge of our communities. We want neither the sight nor smell of these animals and their deaths to trouble us. However, farmed animals are not the only ones mistreated in this terrible industry. The often disadvantaged workers in slaughterhouses spend each day confronting endless violence and death. Many if not most suffer emotionally from this terrible work. The regular cruelties to animals documented in such places are as much due to the strange brutal reality these workers are forced to endure as any inherent cruelty in the workers themselves. The brutality we outsource from our plates seeps into the workers’ lives, with higher rates of mental illness, family violence and aggression.

Animal production corporations following economic logic are responsible for immense cruelty. When we look at cheap animal products, we know this must come from increased suffering. This link is simple enough to make, but we must also come to understand this link is present in all of our consumption. Compassion, environmental concerns, worker health, community rights, all of these things usually add costs to production, and if we do not consider them in our purchases, we are feeding an economic race to the bottom.

Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well with others

Cesar Chavez

Clothes, electronics, household items, our industrial systems are able to turn out things that seem impossibly cheap. This cheapness allows them to be bought with little thought and discarded with even less. We don't think about the poor, powerless people around the world who labour making items for us in conditions we would never want for ourselves. We don't think about the environmental damage caused at every stage of the mining, manufacture, packaging and transportation of the things we use. We don’t experience the pollution created by our goods because it stays in the communities that make them. Our rubbish dumps, just like our slaughterhouses and factory farms, are banished far from where we live; out of sight, out of mind.

Just as with animal products, our desires cloud our thinking about the ethics of our consumption. In stores around the world, people purchase luxuries and trivialities which have included slave and child labour in their production. Our consumption funds war and authoritarian regimes, regimes where women, LGBTQI, minorities and other groups are oppressed. A product that is inefficiently shipped halfway around the world and is still cheap usually means we are paying for poor or dangerous working conditions and lax environmental standards.

For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other

Pythagoras

The suffering of humans and animals, along with the destruction of our environment are part of a system of complicity and silence surrounding our consumption. Governments, corporations and the media collude in this silence because they all benefit from people finding status and meaning in selfish, thoughtless consumerism. Consumption creates taxes, jobs, pushes up profits, funds media advertising, and keeps the masses compliant and occupied. The endless treadmill of work and consumption keeps people distracted from their philosophical nihilism. Work and consumption are the simplest routes to status and thus dominate people’s purpose, no matter what the consequences of that work are to other people and the planet. Economic participation however is rarely ethically neutral. To buy something is to affect the world; we are often blind to these effects, but the ecosystem cannot escape the ramifications of our choices.

The intertwined problems of human rights, the environment and animal rights stem in part from our solipsism and lack of meaning beyond our status and our families. If we want to live in a sustainable and compassionate society we need to change our patterns of consumption, because they are based on multiple systems of oppression and pollution.

We are the living graves of murdered beasts, slaughtered to satisfy our appetites. How can we hope in this world to attain the peace we say we are so anxious for?

George Bernard Shaw

To participate in a system of oppression damages the soul of the oppressor at the same time it does that of the oppressed. We lose something of ourselves when we turn away so regularly from suffering we are complicit in. The machines of economic efficiency encourage us to deaden something inside, in order to be a more efficient part of that machine. Aristotle said virtue is a habit that is strengthened by use. If this is true, what part of ourselves are we training when we consciously or subconsciously ignore our part in other’s suffering? What part of our best selves is discarded along with our single-use waste? What better angel of our nature is hardened or atrophied? We want to show our best face to the world, but some part of us lingers in the rubbish heaps, the factory farms and slaughterhouses, the deforested lands, the polluted and denuded seas, the mines full of child slaves, and the other cruel and polluted places in the world we help create but wish never to see.

Why care about animals, is a common question asked of animal activists, when so many humans suffer. Why care about people in other countries, human rights activists are asked, when we have problems in our country. When we try to call people to compassion, we see common threads among the responses. Evidence of one compassion, or lack thereof. The world we envisage of equality amongst peoples is unlikely to come about with the same ethical frame that ignores the oppression of all other beings. Animal liberation seems therefore bound together with human liberation. Unlocking a consistent ethic within ourselves may provide the social underpinning necessary for human happiness and flourishing that has thus far eluded us.

A more expansive view of compassion that considers all sentient beings is the only worldview that can produce the world we yearn to be. One where we collectively struggle to make kindness universal regardless of the artificial lines that have been exaggeratedly drawn between us over history. Focusing only on the differences between classes, races, nations, religions, cultures and species, thinking of our identity in opposition to others leads neither to truth nor beauty. History has shown us that whether we are winners or losers in the competition for status, the ugliness of domination blights our collective soul. It is the beauty of the widest possible connections to others, to all life, that can uplift us.

There is nothing magical or inevitable about compassion as a historical force. The world will continue to be governed for good or bad largely by the agency of humanity. Our collective ethical will is a force that is constantly in flux, a battleground of ideas and stories, that can be pulled in any direction according to the prevailing philosophical ideas and material conditions of a moment. We are an agent in this grand story, voting for its direction to a greater or lesser degree each time we speak or act. As Gandhi said, we should not mistake compassion and non-violence for passivity and non-resistance, but instead, we must be active in our resistance to suffering and evil. Compassion must be a greater force in the world than that which is arrayed against it. It is not up to any individual to take on the suffering of the world, but to live ethically does require finding a place and part in the struggle against suffering. When we measure ourselves and the meaning of our lives, whether we are fulfilling anything of our potential to promote a more compassionate world should be key to our thoughts.

There is only one compassion. Understanding, fostering, embracing and strengthening it; seeing it in all of its depth and complexity; is a guiding light for our individual and collective lives. For the many of us whose happiness and peace cannot be separated from all other sentient beings, active compassion is the path towards healing both the world and ourselves.

Our task must be to free ourselves … by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty

Albert Einstein