Sometimes literature appears to capture the essence of something. Take this poem by Charles Causley (1917-2003):
My mother saw a dancing bear
My mother saw a dancing bear
By the schoolyard, a day in June.
The keeper stood with chain and bar
And whistle-pipe, and played a tune.
And bruin lifted up its head
And lifted up its dusty feet,
And all the children laughed to see
It caper in the summer heat.
They watched as for the Queen it died.
They watched it march.
They watched it halt.
They heard the keeper as he cried,
‘Now, roly-poly!’ ‘Somersault!’
And then, my mother said, there came
The keeper with a begging-cup,
The bear with burning coat of fur,
Shaming the laughter to a stop.
They paid a penny for the dance,
But what they saw was not the show;
Only, in bruin’s aching eyes,Far-distant forests, and the snow.
But essences are notoriously difficult to pin down. In Causley’s poem the bear’s captivity and its subjugation to the keeper’s rule are read through human sentiment. The assumption that the bear may be ‘aching’ to return to its own habitat is a way of pointing up what the speakers feels is somehow ‘inhuman’; or rather that the human actor (the keeper) has corroded the bear’s species being - what it is in itself, rather than what the keeper has made of it, as it dances through his hoops.
The children may have become intimidated by its presence, but what they ‘saw’ is curiously indeterminate: on want basis could they possibly read the bear’s eyes for ‘Far-distant forests, and the snow’? Or are we meant to believe that these kids might somehow empathize with the bear’s plight?
The poem’s speaker has already defined the bear as an ‘it’: genderless, nameless, lacking a history beyond the spectacle being played out for the onlooker’s amusement. What is being taught in the adjoining school? Schoolyards are where kids play, an activity denied to the bear, except on human terms.
The binary opposition seems obvious – freedom : captivity. But teaching and nature are not opposed to each other; the cultivation of knowledge has more than instrumental ends. The ‘natural’ response to the poem (anyone who doesn’t feel for the bear has missed the poem’s basic humane point), raises questions about how to understand the animal other. In short, and precisely because of the poem’s appeal to sentiment as somehow formative of human experience, we are left with questions of knowledge and recognition.
The politics of dealing with other species continues to haunt notions of eco-sustainability. It’s difficult enough to know what others think and feel beyond our own projections from personal experience, but animals? The journal Politics and Animals is concerned with this problem, and related issues. For example, Kathryn Gillespie argued in 2016, that ‘bearing witness’ to animal suffering might undermine ‘grave power imbalances’, thus to generate ‘a new understanding of subjectivity that extends beyond the human experience to multispecies lifeworlds’.(i)
This kind of argument is based on, even while it calls into question, the idea of humanitarianism. Human sympathy for animals assumes either than animals per se are a sub species on planet earth, or that human sympathy is necessarily limited because it cannot adequately empathize with animals, except on human terms.
The outcome of this impasse is inevitably political. Hence Rob White argues that ‘the practice of discriminating against nonhuman animals because they are perceived as inferior to the human species’ correlates with ‘sexism and racism [that] involve prejudice and discrimination against women and people of different colour.’(ii) The argument here is that a progressive eco-politics would unite human and animal worlds to construct some sort of solidarity across existing species divisions.
White’s correlation is distinctly problematic (it rests on a direct equivalence between humans and animals), and it’s not clear if the idea of solidarity is merely theoretical, and may only reiterate the basic dilemma of human superiority. For example, how might I ask ‘my’ dog what ‘it’ thinks ‘solidarity’ would be in the cause of satisfying its own species being? Dogs have become integrated with human societies, but bears have not.
Communicating with a bear in the cause of solidarity leaves us with a seemingly intractable problem, whose solution is in human hands: if we respect the species being of animals what kind of society do we need to create to let them live as themselves, or more accurately as what we take ‘themselves’ to be? They can get on well enough without us; we have invaded their territories for the sake of our own ‘progress’, which is bound up with political questions animals cannot understand, let alone deal with in anything but a reactive sense. If we destroy the sea ice, polar bears will starve:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com › science › article › polar-bears-starve-melting-sea-ice-global-warming-study-beaufort-sea-environment
At this point arguments tend to become circular, or at least theoretical. For example, Dinesh Wadiwel claims that in terms of animal rights (that is, rights given to animals by humans) work must be done at an epistemic level to enable animals to be seen as bona fide victims of violence, and for this violence to be seen as morally and politically problematic. That is, to counter epistemic violence, we need to undermine the prevailing hierarchical anthropocentricism that sees and constructs animals as subjects who cannot be violated because they are imagined as having no interests of their own.(iii)
In other words, animals must in some way be humanized (in which case their violation becomes objectionable according to whatever version of humanity is in force), while at the same time being recognised for their own sakes, rather than ours. The key word here is ‘anthropocentrism’, which in terms of ‘green’ politics equates with the mistake of seeing things only in human terms, and with only human interests in mind. Hence ‘anthropogenic’ climate change - climate change and its knock-on effects, to include its effects on nature - is caused not just by human activities, but by the way we think about and imagine the world.
As I write I am looking out of my study window at a test case. The farmer who owns the land behind my house rears cattle and sheep (part of his ridge and furrow land is protected by statute). He doesn’t think much of those, such as George Monbiot, who argue that we should all go vegan, thus to eradicate methane from animal farts. He tells me that the land isn’t suitable for crop farming (if it was we’d very likely encounter the problem of pesticides) so his livelihood is at stake. How will he fare in any Government’s green transition? And what do we do about the rights of animals whose very existence is now acknowledged to contribute to global warming? It’s true to say that in many cases the food production business wins out over animal rights (e.g. battery farms) so it seems that the literal existence of sacred cows becomes a metaphor for those who point fingers at first world ‘global’ capitalism, whose neo-liberal excesses are doing so much damage to the planet (not that the old Eastern Bloc, or ‘developing’ nations like India and China, have not been heavy polluters).
There is, though, one aspect of animal rights that can prompt us to have some humility when it comes to our place in the world. The otherness of animals can stand as a corrective to our self-centred definitions of ‘progress’. The German philosopher, musician, and social theorist T. W. Adorno coined the term ‘identity thinking’ to guard against the temptation of believing that human concepts are equivalent to the things they describe. Adorno thought that nature’s suppression on behalf of human interests has developed into social and political systems of domination. (This is one way on understanding White’s point, above.) In Adorno’s view the effort of understanding things is a predicate for controlling and manipulating phenomena, including nature itself.
J. R. R. Tolkien (whose Lord of the Rings is one of the most popular books ever written) makes a similar point in The Fellowship of the Ring. When the free peoples of Middle Earth are gathered at Rivendell for the Council of Elrond debate centres on what to do about the master Ring, forged by Sauron to enslave all those who fall under its sway. This Ring cannot be destroyed by any conventional means. Erestor, one of the Elves, suggests that the Ring be taken to the ageless Tom Bombadil, who seems able to resist its power. But fellow Elf Galdor remarks: ‘Power to defy our Enemy is not in him, unless such power is in the earth itself. And yet we see that Sauron can torture and destroy the very hills.’ This remark can be traced back to Tolkien’s own direct experience of World War 1 - the first industrialized war - and it signifies not just the corruption of power (even Sauron was not evil in the beginning) but identity thinking in operation. The imaginative power of Tolkien’s text lies in reading nature as a fundamental ally in a co-operative existence, not as something to be tamed and exploited at need. It was the eagles of the Misty Mountains that rescued Frodo and Sam from the lava flows of Mount Doom after the Ring is finally destroyed in its fires, thus to bring about the end of the Third Age.
Drafts of unfinished papers reveal that Tolkien seems to have had little faith in the Fourth Age, the age of Men. But his vision of imaginative evolutionary co-operation, on whose behalf the War of the Ring is fought, finds its echo in ideas of animal rights, since animals have also inherited the Earth. Animals, then, can function as a corrective to identity thinking, and as a test case for how we re-imagine our collective place on the planet. Animals are, if you will, our collective unconscious; the remnants of our descent/ascent from our animal natures to where we are now, with all our aspirations for mind controlling matter through technological advances. Animals don’t use mobile ‘phones, send tweets, toxify their social media, or take up political positions. They are our mute ancestry, and as such protest against what we have become as self-centred ‘owners’ of the biosphere. If animals have rights one of them must surely be to encourage us to think beyond our own anthropocentric horizons. The attempt to understand animals is an attempt to understand ourselves and our limitations. Only connect…
Webcam the World
Heather McHugh
Get all of it. set up the shots
at every angle; run them online
24-7. Get beautiful stuff (like
scenery and greenery and style)
and get the ugliness (like cruelty
and quackery and rue). there’s nothing
unastonishing – but get that, too. We have
to save it all, now that we can, and while.
Do close-ups with electron microscopes
and vaster pans with planetcams.
it may be getting close
to our last chance –
how many
millipedes or elephants are left?
How many minutes for mind-blinded men?
Use every lens you can – get Dubliners
in fisticuffs, the last Beijinger with
an abacus, the boy in Addis Abada who feeds
the starving dog. And don’t forget the cows
in neck-irons, when barns begin
to burn. the rollickers at clubs,
the frolickers at forage – take it all,
the space you need: it’s curved. Let
mileage be footage, let year be light. Get
goggles for the hermitage, and shades for whorage.
Don’t be boggled by totality: we’re here to save the world without exception.
it will serve as its own storage.
(i) Quoted in Dinesh Wadiwel, ‘Challenging Epistemic Violence. Parrhesia, Counter-Hegemony and Transformation’, in Politics and Animals, Vol. 10 (2024), p. 1.
(ii) Rob White, https://academic.oup.com › policy-press-scholarship-online › book › 19196 › chapter › 177674054
(iii) Wadiwel, op. cit., p. 11.
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