On Animals, Angels and Aliens
Last week, I happened to meet two philosophers who got me thinking—for is that not their job?—about animals.
The first was Gregorio Luri. He agreed to meet the political philosophy reading club of which I am a member to discuss his latest book, En busca del tiempo en que vivimos. Luri (born in 1955) is a conservative and vocational educator gifted with that particular brand of eloquence able to garb one’s opinion in the gravitas of truth.
His book grapples with the present much as a hand would a fistful of sand. To map the contours of our current worldview, he first establishes man’s universal condition as that of a liminal creature somewhere between angel and animal, then explores various permutations of modern thought in light of said condition.
I was particularly interested in his analysis of animal rights movements. Since God is dead and we no longer believe in angels, modern man thinks his position on the ontological hierarchy has collapsed into that of the animals that used to be below him.
Luri detects a misanthropist sentiment at the heart of certain animal rights theorists, as by extending rights to other beings, we are limiting our own and, in certain cases, subsuming our interests to those of other creatures or ecosystems whose interests we can, at best, merely interpret.
The next day I met Joan Burdeus (1989). A columnist and culture critic, he’s very different from Luri both in temperament and thought, much more amenable to the second-guessing self-awareness that plagues the voice of my generation.
Burdeus took my friend Anna and I to a restaurant he vaguely remembered having vegan options available. I’ve been following a vegan diet for three years now, not on moral grounds but, rather, for domestic harmony (I followed my wife into it). And perhaps it’s just as well, because Budeus’ choice of venue was like walking into a slaughterhouse. The gleaming, health-inspection-friendly walls were lined with the hollowed out carcasses of entire cows. It looked for all the world like the cover of a Cannibal Corpse album. Why it even had vegan options on the menu is beyond me.
We used to believe it was our God-given right to exercise sovereignty over animals. But now we don’t believe in angels, we take animal suffering to be comparable to our own, and therefore equally reprehensible.
This has to do with what German biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll called Umwelt, the notion that every organism has a species-specific perception of the world that only they are biologically equipped to experience. In order to experience the world as a cow, you would have to be a cow yourself (for a far better explanation, check out Ed Yong’s An Immense World).
So, since we have shelved the notion of our divine exceptionalism and accepted that our experience of the world is simply the result of biological serendipity, we now ascribe equal value to all Umwelten. Many think this is reason enough to dynamite any remaining notions of ontological hierarchy.
And yet, as far as we know, ours is the only Umwelt able to appreciate and ascribe value to protecting other Umwelten for no material reason.
Because of animal rights theorists, later reinforced by apocalyptic environmentalists, we now think it our responsibility to extend our mantle of dignity to also include the lives of non-human creatures. But by doing so, we are still, in a way, placing ourselves above them; we aren’t levelling the ontological playing field at all, but exercising our sovereignty over nature as we have done since time immemorial, albeit in the guise of a benevolent ruler. Acknowledging our unexceptionalism is the latest expression of what makes us exceptional.
This too can be seen in our modern approach to angels. I said earlier we don’t believe in angels, but this is not quite true. We still believe in what they stand for; we've merely shifted the signifier. In 1985, Carl Sagan gave a speech on natural theology at the University of Glasgow (collected in the book The Varieties of Scientific Experience) in which he posited that our modern belief in extraterrestrial life satiates the same existential thirst as did our ancient belief in angels. In both cases, we turn to the sky, that roof of unfathomable immensity, in the hopes that a messenger will come down with knowledge of the Great Beyond.
This stargazing abeyance reinforces our faith in our smallness.
In the 20th century, aliens were seen as angels insofar as they carried the promise of unlocking greater technological prowess that would help us expand beyond the confines of our world. Today, fearful of our own power and holding fast to our belief in Umwelten, we no longer expect flying saucers, but romanticise the idea of an obscure encounter, lost in translation, one that would pass us by unnoticed or that we’d observe in dumbstruck wonder (a great example is Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, or its film adaptation Arrival). And if we contemplate an alien invasion, we find it easier to picture being in the way of a swarm of microorganisms, like in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, than being the target of a militarised fleet.
In short, flying saucers and galactic invasions are a relic of last century’s gung-ho technological progress. Today, progress is moral; we progress by finding new ways in which to restrict our rights and recognise those of others, generously knighting those we deem worthy with personhood, thus making ourselves smaller.
That is why, despite my half-hearted veganism and overall fondness for animals, it was nice and almost nostalgic to sit in a restaurant that placed man at the centre of the universe rather than making me feel sorry for being alive at all. The previous day’s chinwag with Luri had turned what could have been a faux-pax on Burdeus’ behalf into what felt like an exciting incursion into an ancient ruin, a temple to anthropocentrism, a space that made no excuses for man’s blunt dominion over nature.
To boot, they cooked up the best vegan burger I have ever tried in Barcelona. That’s just downright cocky.