ON THE GENESIS OF SPECIESISM
Towards a Political Approach to the Man-Animal Relationship
The ambiguity of Speciesism
After the publication of Peter Singer’s most famous book – Animal Liberation – the word ‘speciesism’ has become largely acknowledged in the Animal Rights Movement. Even if many animal rights activists never read Animal Liberation, certain general assumptions derived from this book have indeed become the lingua franca of the whole movement.
Animal Liberation defines speciesism as the moral privilege given to one’s own species, i.e. we assume the interests of human animals to be more important than that of not-human animals, just like white racists do with black men (or sexists with women).[1] This is a strict theoretical definition of speciesism. But Singer himself introduces a historical description of the origins of speciesism in his book; his sources are indeed poor but he cunningly manages to quote Aristotle, Augustin, Saint Thomas, Descartes and Kant to unveil the speciesist nature of Western civilization.[2]
Yet, speciesism is a praxis and not only a moral prejudice: it has a material and not only an ideal side. It is not clear whether Singer is here describing how speciesism as a praxis came to existence in history or how different human societies justified a posteriori their concrete attitude towards animals. I assume that the fallacy of Singer’s speciesism is that it doesn’t make such distinction, because it cannot. First of all, because he doesn’t seem to see it. In his ‘Short History of Speciesism’, Singer merely juxtaposes the ideas of philosophers and the material treatment reserved to animals as if the latter was produced by the first.[3] But the real reason for such confusion and inversion of the material and ideal aspects of speciesism is that Singer’s starting point is the abstraction of philosophical ethics rather than the concreteness of history and politics. Singers must suppress the distinction between material and ideal in order to present our modern society and its values as something ‘given’, because abstract moral theory only makes sense in an abstract and static world. Universal principles cannot apply to a world that is conceived in perpetual change. This is evident when we think that Singer is not even preaching new moral values but simply asserting that our society contradicts itself if it doesn’t extend its already existing values to not-human animals.
In a word: the real problem with antispeciesism is that it lacks any historical understanding of human society and it lacks any social understanding of human history.[4] This may seem a wordplay but it is not. Such moral theory is not interested in the historical and social conditionings of man; Singer is of course aware that such conditionings do happen and his own moral theory is possible under certain obvious historical circumstances. If the category of ‘speciesism’ was first elaborated in the 70s and not in Ancient Greece it is only because modern society forged the concepts of ‘universal rights’ and ‘egalitarianism’, while Pythagoras was more concerned about not eating the souls of his dead friends; Singer simply demonstrates how illogical it is not to extend such concepts to not-human animals once Western Civilization has imposed his values – and, indeed, its economic and political hegemony – over the whole world. Consequently, many Animal Rights activists seem not to be worried about such hegemony, they simply accepts it as a fact; the moral values they play with are not questioned, their origins are uninvestigated.
History could tell us when did speciesism begin. A critical look on Society could tell us how. ‘Apolitical’ antispeciesists have good reasons not to answer to these questions: their theory only works when we forget them. These two mistakes can be also expressed synthetically as the lacking of any political understanding of human history and society. It is not surprising that many animal rights activists dismiss political change, preaching animal liberation as a moral and intimate choice that concerns ‘everybody’: it is not important to know who s/he is, where and when s/he lives or even if this ‘everybody’ does factually exist. According to such vision, Polar hunters and New York policemen should both join a vegetarian diet and advocate animal rights, even if this means that the first should try to grow plants on ice or become a New York policeman himself.[5]
