){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
Testimony of an Autodidact
I am self-taught from birth. This may seem like a cliche or a joke, but it is actually true. I discussed it in a couple of previous articles, referring to my relationship with my parents and Nana and the things I learned from them in my early years. Now, I want to continue painting the picture of my childhood home by bringing in the other companions of my self-learning process: the animals that always lived in my family.
My parents agreed to welcome all kinds of wildlife into the home. There was never a shortage of dogs and cats, nor the other species that frequented human homes: Australian parakeets. However, my house allowed many other pets: fish, frogs, squirrels, chameleons, owls, iguanas, monkeys, snakes, and all my oldest brother brought back from his trips through jungles and forests. Our zoo did not lack even a boa constrictor, a baby named Martina; it was only two and a half meters long and not a danger to anyone… so we were told.
Perhaps this coexistence instilled in me a certain Franciscanism, helping me grow up with almost unrestricted respect for animals. It also attracted the ridicule of friends and enemies and made me wonder whether my feelings were ridiculous. I was nearly fifty when I moved to the magical town of Malinalco (a place of hippie and new-age traditions) to find a community that advocated for all wildlife. In that town, there was no one who did not admire the baby carriage that circulated with a blanket declaring total war on the killer flip-flop (rubber sandal), a weapon that we know was deadly for countless bugs.
I have listened to people, including some scientists, who loathe hearing about animal ethics. Any comparison that one can make between the mistreatment of animals and the discrimination that has been exercised against some human races seems aberrant to them. The dilemma of which should be saved in the event of a fire, a Van Gogh painting or a cat seems stupid and the answer obvious (if you, dear reader, do not consider it obvious or think that the answer is “the cat,” you do not belong to the group of people I am talking about).
Nevertheless… There is a big nevertheless.
Tragically, almost none of us who think we are sensitive regarding animals are spared from what I would call “the blind spot” of our pro-animal consciousness (a blind spot that is almost total darkness but through which an insignificant vision sneaks in). We protest against the appearance of animals in circuses, in aquatic shows, in the so-called “fiesta brava” (bullfights), and against other forms of cruelty that are visible daily. Yet, many of us have dropped our arms – half impotent, half complicit – before the livestock, poultry, and meat industries. The text by my dear friend Rodolfo Obregón ─teacher and theater director─ is fulminating, in which, after a sharp criticism of bullfighting, he ends up narrating the idea that came to his mind one day when he was walking outside the Plaza de Toros Mexico: “The clock is ticking on this,” he thought. “And soon, there will be a new shopping mall here where packaged meat will be sold.”
I want to offer notice to those readers who are fed up with moralizing or demoralizing speeches and are about to abandon my text: I, too, am about to stop talking about the subject, and for no other reason than to declare myself incompetent. The dimensions of animal abuse are so huge that I prefer not to approach them any further. At the risk of getting bogged down in the catastrophe, if I dared to imagine with any degree of honesty the statistics behind the pain and death of animals “slaughtered” just for my consumption, my heart would be anesthetized enough to undergo open-chest surgery.
*
We cannot say that our indifference to the pain suffered by the animals who become our food is a human trait. No, not at all. The lion is indifferent to the death of the gazelle. We all know that the humane thing would be sensitivity to that suffering and not inflict it in any way. But humanity is the ground where things take time to germinate.
In our culture, the idea that affirms a particular type of superiority of human beings over animals arose, as we know, with Judaism and Greek philosophy. Plato and Aristotle proclaimed that nature was subject to human beings or should be but from different perspectives. Humans fulfilled missions and faced challenges that far exceeded those of the animals, and that justified the treatment we gave them. Such an attitude continued in the Middle Ages, for example, with St. Augustine and St. Thomas, but neither they nor the Greeks seemed insensitive to animals; that is, they did not say that they had no feelings or did not feel pain. They recognized animal suffering but prioritized needs. To arrive at the indifference that we are talking about required the birth of Descartes, who described animals as biological machines without sensitivity, emotions, or understanding. Some deny that the French philosopher said such things. Still, it is a fact that one of his most illustrious followers, Malebranche, claimed that animals were objects only apparently animate, pure assemblies of mechanical actions and reactions (whose complexity, of course, was surprising).
None of this is strange to those who know that Descartes conceived of body and soul as two completely different realities, different to such an extent that one could exist without the other, i.e., the body without the soul and the soul without the body (animals would be an example of the former). It is essential to know that these ideas gave the backing to new science, then developing, which demanded that nature be soulless so that it could respond exclusively to reasonable and repeatable, that is, knowable, laws. However, for Descartes, it was still necessary for there to be a human soul (a “mind,” as he called it, this one created by God) capable of immersing itself in reality and unraveling it. It would be a few years before a new scientific turn would also put the soul/mind under the lens, and human beings would begin to search matter for the most intimate secrets of consciousness. It is not surprising that with the advances of this materialism, animals were allowed to recover their pains, feelings, and even certain forms of reasoning, all of which were very viable expressions of organized matter, which reached its highest development in the human being. Thus, science became increasingly focused on the physical world and separated itself from anything that might sound like a soul until it finally got rid of it in the nineteenth century and declared that any transcendent factor (read God) was an unnecessary variable in the world of knowledge.
Perhaps this would have given some hope to animals, who grew in prestige with the theory of evolution, being our ancestors. But materialism ran its course: after a 20th century of uncertainty, in which some thought that God had at least returned to play one last game of dice, the 21st century has dealt animals a new blow. Curiously enough, it comes not due to considering them inferior to humans again but by a much crueler idea, not for them but for ourselves: that all consciousness (of whatever kind, human, animal, anyone) is not only a kind of spectral emanation arising from brain matter but an unimportant emanation; that is, a mirage that has practically no impact on the environment, be it personal (our own lives) or an ecosystem (other human beings and the world).
Such ideas, which emerged in operating rooms and state-of-the-art neuroscience laboratories (see the speculations of Joaquín N. Fuster), affirm that obviously human beings feel, think, and desire, and if we did not (if we were only insensible matter), things would not change much either regarding our body or things around us. From this perspective, we may think that if we still have some respect for other human beings, it is not because of ethical or spiritual considerations (which, as we see, are useless and inapplicable) but simply because the suffering of our fellow human beings awakens in us a painful empathy, if not a mere distaste.
If we feel this way about other humans, what should animals expect? What kind of consideration can they get from us? They indeed suffer, but nothing that a more or less prompt death cannot take away!
*
In the face of this chilling trend, many have wanted to reclaim the old notion of the soul. Its ghost roams the world in forms ranging from cheesy WhatsApp messages to entire pseudoscience courses and serious philosophical questions. It is clear to me that whether we are soul, body, soul-body, or whatever, this resurgence can prove very beneficial, at least for animals. Given that neuroscientific materialism has managed to equate us with these by depriving us all of the slightest relevance (physical, metaphysical, it doesn’t matter anymore), if the soul resurfaces with its former splendor, it will be easy for us to attribute it to all beings with whom we are united by the fact of not being worthy, as being practically nothing.
*
If anyone already senses a whiff of self-righteousness in my words, stay and listen to the following to confirm it.
G.K. Chesterton (the English writer whose intelligence made many think that human beings can understand the world) allowed us to glimpse a possible reconciliation between science and spirituality in a historical figure who, until recently, retained a mystical air but who, in our times has ended up becoming an image of the purest naivety and incompetence. I’m talking about St. Francis of Assisi. According to Chesterton, in the thirteenth century, that man who called himself God’s Fool and considered animals and all beings his brothers inaugurated the notion that in nature, a principle of equality makes it possible for us to understand this and comprehend ourselves. His was not a feeling of passing brotherhood but a deep intuition of the interrelationships among the existent. His method of understanding this “brotherhood” was not to condescendingly lower himself to all beings but to elevate himself to them and contemplate in wonder something that centuries later Kant would bring to earth in reason, translating it into a less overwhelming but more comprehensible truth: that what we call knowing is nothing more than discovering the association between things. This discovery cannot happen without us.
A science averted to miracles denies what tradition affirms: that when he died, St. Francis went to heaven, taking everything and his donkey. That science convinced that anything resembling the flight of an ass is untenable, nevertheless continues to hope that from matter, the finger will emerge that will help it tie the final knot of what exists. Meanwhile, waiting for this emergence, many of us have begun to look distractedly to other places and have found animals gazing fixedly at us. And, to tell the truth, we have been astonished to discover how, from the deep abyss of that gaze, their being interrogates us with analytical eyes.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
){kind=icon}
){kind=icon}
This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
)