[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas Winds blowing through breathing trees and strong ozone safe sunshine Good planets are hard to find.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:36] Speaker C: Hello K SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly case Good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz.
Millions of Americans see themselves as conflicted omnivores worrying about the ethical environmental implications of their choice to eat animals.
Yet their attempts to justify their choices only obscure the truth of the matter.
My guest today is Dr. John Sabanmatsu, professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. He holds a PhD from the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. In Sabanmatson's view, killing and eating animals is unethical whether they are free range or factory farmed. His new book, the Omnivore's Deception provides a deeply observed philosophical meditation on the nature of our relationship with animals. Professor John Sabanmatsu, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:01:40] Speaker C: Let me start with a confession. I'm a meat eating omnivore. I read your book with great care and interest. I want to state at the outset that I am in complete sympathy and agreement with the arguments you make in the book.
I don't want to be this to be a self referential conversation, but I still find myself remaining a hypocrite and maybe that will come up later, you know. Okay, so let's start. Why don't you give us a big a broad overview of the omnivore's deception and the arguments you make in it and how you came to be an advocate for total veganism.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: You know, I begin my book by talking about how trivial these issues are seen by most people. The question of the meat economy, what we should eat, animal rights.
It's quite telling that animal rights advocates and vegans are the most despised group in society other than drug addicts, according to empirical studies. And in fact, vegans and animal rights advocates form a group against which social opprobrium and mockery are not merely tolerated, greenlighted, but are positively encouraged in all sectors of society. So that's if you look at like late night comedy hosts or just in daily conversation, vegans get dumped on for a lot. And of course all that vegans are saying is they're saying I don't want to participate in this system of mass violence and degradation and that's enough. To set people off and for them to get defensive. So first thing I do is really try to lay to rest the idea that this, this stuff just is so trivial, it doesn't matter. I mean, look, I'm. I'm a leftist. I've been involved in organizing and activism on a variety of issues my entire adult life. You know, from the anti war movement to tenant organizing to feminism and so forth. And I teach those kinds of issues in my classroom. But when it comes to killing and eating animals, the levels of ideological mystification that have settled into our brains is so those, those layers are so thick you need a chainsaw to cut them. So what I argue in my book in the very beginning is that this is not only not a trivial issue, how we treat other animals, it's the most important issue of our time or of any time. It's existential, it's political, obviously it's cultural, it's behavioral, but an economic right tied to the capitalist system. But ultimately, this attachment we have to dominating and enacting mass violence against our fellow beings is destroying the conditions of life on earth. And I would argue, just as importantly, it's ruining our own souls. That is to say, what it's doing is removing a certain kind of possibility of human being in which we live justly, both with one another and with the wonderful beings on this planet.
[00:04:30] Speaker C: Well, you raise in the, I think in the introduction, but possibly elsewhere, the naturalization of eating meat. And it is something that humans have done for millennia, so people tend to regard it as part of human nature. Historically. Have there been arguments in favor of, well, what we call veganism in the past?
[00:04:52] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, when people think of these issues, they think of PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Right. Which only gets off the ground in the 1980s, really. But the first person that we call a philosopher, philosophia, meaning lover of wisdom, is Pythagoras, from whom we get the Pythagorean theorem. Pythagoras lived almost 3,000 years ago, and he was apparently a vegetarian. And vegetarian cults sprang up in the wake of his death. In fact, up until the 19th century, if you eschewed eating animals, whether for metaphysical or ethical reasons, you were called a Pythagorean.
Shakespeare even refers to that in some of his plays. So yes, it goes back a long way. Buddhists have been ethical vegetarians for almost as long or longer, over 2,000 years. And in addition, there have been vegan cuisines cultivated by Buddhists Monks in cities like KYOTO, you know, 700 years ago or so I believe. So the idea that we should refrain from harming, intentionally harming other beings has been around for a long time. I mean, Leonardo da Vinci, for example, in the Codex, writes about the barbarism of our treatment of animals. And he was an ethical vegetarian. Jane Goodall, who just died, was not only a vegan, but advocated universal veganism. So that's the first thing to lay to rest the idea. This is some trendy hippie, dippy kind of thing. No, Buddhists, Jains, Hindus have taken vegetarianism seriously for, for centuries.
[00:06:20] Speaker C: Well, what are the origins of human domination over other farm forms of life on Earth and particularly animals, domesticated animals for, for various kinds of, of tasks and for eating. I mean, how did that happen?
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Well, it's, it's tough. I mean, it's like where does patriarchy come from? You know, I mean, human societies have been male dominated for a very long time.
We started out our lives as mammals, right? The mammals emerge after the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. We started out on the planet as a small tree dwelling mammal with a tail, apparently omnivorous, meaning that we could metabolize plant matter as well as insects. If you look at the earliest cave drawings in Lescaut and other places 40 to 60,000 years ago, not just by Homo sapiens, but other early hominids as well, you find animals already figuring really large in our imagination, both, you know, as totems of, you know, a divine or cosmic significance, and also as both, you know, as prey or as, you know, kind of a threat to ourselves. So it's very complex culturally how this all developed. But certainly initially humans were like other animals until we developed abstract symbol semiotics, like a way to represent the world that's dissociated from immediate context. Right. I mean, if you draw a woolly mammoth, what you have done is in a certain sense reduced these flesh and blood beings, each of one of each one of whom is an individual and has its own thing going on to a kind of symbol.
And that I think in my own mind that's kind of the beginning of a kind of human or, you know, anthropocentric view of other species, where we integrate them into our own mythologies and cosmologies and so on. But really it's the Neolithic period, that 10,000, 11,000 years ago, when animals began to be domesticated, that we find a qualitative change in our relations with other animals. I mean, the hunter gatherer societies were mostly Gatherers, Okay. For tens of thousands of years with what we call animal domestication, which actually was the enslavement and exploitation of other species for their labor and their bodies. Right. Once it. Once humans learn to do that, to control their reproduction, to hobble them, to mutilate their bodies, to keep them captives and then to exploit them for milk and labor and so on, meat, there's a kind of ideology that develops of natural hierarchy, natural dominion, which then becomes the basis for human slavery. I mean, historians now think that that became the model for our enslavement of other beings, you know, a few thousand years later. So that's more or less how that developed. And then this system, which predates capitalism, of course, by thousands of years, gets taken up within the commodity system in early modern Europe, you know, 16th century, 17th century. And with colonialism, you have the extermination of native animals as well as native peoples around the world, and then a further acceleration of that during industrialization and, you know, the Chicago stockyards As chronicled in 1906 in the Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
So, yeah, there's a long cultural history to this. It's bound up with power, status, masculinity, you know, the exercising dominion and violence against animals has largely been a masculinist pursuit. You know, men could.
Had a monopoly on the means both of war and of hunting. And that continues to this day. Right. The warrior ethos that Pete Hegseth is. I don't know what to say. Imposing on the military is in keeping with a certain conception of hypermasculinity, where, you know, hunting is a form of warfare against animals, war is a form of hunting against humans. That's how Aristotle viewed the situation and the politics. And so we see this same thing today. So anyway, it's a long cultural history. Sorry to go on so long about that.
[00:10:16] Speaker C: Oh, no. And I'm struck by your. Your introduction and. And how closely what you're framing is to the abolitionist movement of the. The late 18th and early 19th centuries, which, of course, was a long haul as well, and ultimately in the United States, required a war to. To abolish completely. But, you know, this idea of enslaving animals is a provocative one. Maybe you can elaborate on. On that you started by pointing out how reviled vegans are, especially when they start to raise these questions of violence against animals. Right. And I suspect a lot of it has to do with. With personal guilt or responsibility.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. Yeah. Maybe we come back to that. Cognitive dissonance.
[00:11:07] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: And bad faith, as I Call it in my book. But I mean, part of the naturalization of what we do to animals is to say that, well, it's just the balance of nature, the cycle of life. We're just like other animals and so on and so forth. But in fact, what we have vis a vis other animals is a, it's a, it's a relation, right? Other animals, if you lived with a cat or dog, they, they are in relation with other beings. They form relations with other beings. And that relation between our species and other species, I argue, is a political relation. And I mean political in the sense that Kate Millett talks about sexual politics in her important feminist work 1970 sexual politics. And Millet of course is only using a term, but Max Weber develops the German sociologist the idea of Herrschaft, or domination.
What we do to animals, they don't consent to that. I mean, that's a fact. You can look at animals and other species and see they do not want to be confined. They do not want to be in zoos and aquaria. They do not want to be in a feedlot.
They cry out, they bite, they scratch, they, they escape.
I cron, you know, I chronicle some of this in my book just these, the ingenuity with which some animals will escape their confinement.
So that makes it a political relation because we're dominating other beings and subverting their will in order to exploit them violently for our purposes. Well, that is what slavery was for thousands of years. And you know, and we have to keep in mind that before there was chattel or racial slavery, there was slavery throughout the ancient world. I mean, in most parts of the world, humans had control over the labor of others and enslaved them. So that's the first thing is that we're talking about the domination of other beings as a political relation. And then simply you have techniques. I mentioned hobbling, for example. Well, if you didn't, if you don't want the, the enslaved human to run away, you. You would cut their Achilles tendon. So they have to kind of shuffle around.
That technique was borrowed from animal domestication, so called similarly with controlling the sexuality of enslaved women. That was, it was. Those practices were first developed and honed over thousands of years on non human animals. And, and then as I have already mentioned, the ideology, the cultural and ideological aspect of this of some beings are just meant to be subordinate to others. Aristotle defends slavery in the politics and he yokes that to other forms of natural hierarchies. The ancient Greeks saw that so men are naturally meant to dominate women just as Parents naturally dominate their children. Masters naturally dominate slaves. Humans naturally dominate other species.
That notion, which is kind of the great chain of being, remains intact. And it's quite extraordinary to me. Like, just as an anachronism, like these myths and ideologies of a metaphysical hierarchy, which is in contravention by the way of the prevailing scientific evidence about cognition, we can get to that. But that. It just astonishes me that grown adults continue to say these things to me when I have debates about animal issues. Well, we're just another predator, and we're, you know, we're at the top of the food chain. And I mean, it's ludicrous when you look at the fine details, or not even the fine details, the gross details. And it's time to let go of these, These. These myths.
[00:14:40] Speaker C: You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is John Sabonmatsu, professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, who recently published the Omnivore's Deception, which I describe as a deeply observed philosophical meditation on the nature of our relationship with, and in particular killing them and. And eating them. John, I was especially taken with your philosophical arguments, and maybe you can clarify the ethical positions on. On meat that you raise in the book.
There's obviously utilitarian, which is largely about minimizing pain, domestic animals, and versus consequentialist, which is how we kill animals humanely.
And then I created a third, which was omnivorous consequentialism, rationalizing hunting, slaughter, and so on as natural versus vegan relationality based on recognition of life in common in the commons. I'd like you to sort of expand on. On this, you know, these ethical arguments.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: Thanks so much.
You know, I take what I would describe as a pluralistic view of moral theory in my book. In other words, I draw upon a variety of different theoretical traditions. You mentioned consequentialism. Utilitarianism is actually a consequentialist theory. So. So we wouldn't oppose utilitarianism versus consequentialism. It is itself a consequentialist position, which is simply the idea that we should act in such a way as to maximize the best outcomes of our actions. And now what we mean by that varies. It can mean, you know, promoting happiness, minimizing suffering. And that's typically the way utilitarianism, you know, views the goods that we get from being deliberate about our choices to maximize goods. You know, so Peter Singer, the most famous utilitarian since John Stuart mill, in the 19th century.
He wrote a book in 1975 called Animal Liberation which, which argued that because other animals are sentient, they're capable of pain and pleasure. We ought to take, were morally obligated, I should say, to take their, their suffering and interests into account. And in my book I actually criticize Singer. I could go into that. But so my book does. You know, there are consequentialist aspects, there are also deontological aspects. And that's a kind of complicated word, simply means that some, that persons or someones, however we think about non human animals are worthy of inviolability. That is to say they have, we should respect their integrity and dignity as conscious beings. So that's different from the consequentialist thing. But I also draw on feminist care ethics somewhat indirectly, but the idea that we ought to build our relations with others, whether human or non human, others, around compassion and empathy and a sense of justice.
So really what you described as, I can't remember the term you used. Vegan.
[00:17:44] Speaker C: Vegan relationality.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I like, I like that. Yeah, I like that idea. But I would, I would frame it a little differently as multi species justice or an interspecies justice. This is, this is a justice movement. You know, animal rights is not about lifestyle. It's not about diet, it's, it's not about being a self hating human.
It's about create. Seriously, it's about creating a different kind of life on this planet that's rooted in compassion and love. And finally, I'll just say in passing, I draw also on Martin Buber's mystical Jewish Hasidic vision of relationality in his book I Am Thou. So there's a lot that goes into the ethics of this book, but what I argue in the beginning is that, you know what, what's keeping us from treating other animals well is not an absence of moral theory, good moral theory, okay, because as I said, Pythagoras was objecting to this 3,000 years ago. So what is it that keeps us killing 80 billion land animals every single year? Mostly birds and mammals, but also, you know, reptiles and amphibians and all sorts of other creatures, trillions of insects and up to 2.7 trillion sea animals, marine animals, every single year? We're emptying the oceans of their conscious life. Why are we doing this when none of it is necessary, none of it, in my view, is morally defensible? So again, it's not because of an absence of moral theory. It's because of these deeply entrenched cultural Patterns and ideologies of domination that keep us in this. This negative feedback loop.
[00:19:24] Speaker C: Power over something. Yeah, well, you mentioned Peter Singer and you also talk about Michael Pollan. So maybe you could in sequence, explain not just who they are, but what your critique of their particular positions might be. Because I imagine Michael Pollan is well known to our listeners and quite popular.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: Peter Singer, first of all, just retired recently as a professor of philosophy at Princeton.
He's often called the father of the modern animal rights movement.
There have to be some caveats there. A man named Henry Salt, a socialist and feminist, wrote a book called Animals Rights in the late 19th century. So it wasn't as though Singer invented this stuff, but his book Animal Liberation was hugely influential, and it, you know, it remains hugely influential.
Without going into great detail, I fault Singer for his utilitarian conceptions, theories of animal and human and non, both non human animal life and animal life. One problem with utilitarian theory is it utilitarians have a hard time explaining why it's wrong to kill someone, because as long as you're not causing them to suffer, then, you know, maybe it's okay.
This is a little more complicated than making it. But this is a real weakness in Singer's theory vis a vis other animals because he says he gives a pass to quote ethical omnivores, Right. If you can show Singer that you've raised this sheep or cow, you know, and given that animal a good life, so called, and so forth, and then you kill the animal painlessly. And for your purposes, Singer really can't argue against that. This is also the guy, though, who defended the euthanasia, and I think he still does the euthanasia of disabled human infants, both to save them and suffering, future suffering, but also to, you know, save resources of society. So I go into great length about the Nazi T4 euthanasia program and the objectionable nature of this claim that there are just some forms of life that are worthless.
And I think it's important to understand that's how people view other animals ultimately as worthless, because if we didn't see other animals as worthless, we couldn't kill them in the trillions, subject them to extreme violence every year and do that forever. I mean, that's the project, and not see that as even a moral issue. People, as I say, don't even think of this.
Michael Pollan wrote a very important, influential bestseller called the Omnivore's Dilemma, which the title of my book resonates with in 2006. And pollen kind of consolidated an emerging common sense in, you know, the animal industry, organic farming and so forth. Locavorism that was just developing at the same time the idea that the solution to the contradictions of the capitalist industrial animal agriculture system, the solution was smaller scale animal agriculture.
Not even necessarily organic farms, but farms where the farmers were concerned with, you know, sustainability issues and so called welfare of animals.
So a lot of my book is a critique of that idea, both, you know, fine grained detail and also just as, just as an idea that you can actually respect other beings while seeking to destroy them. I mean, it's just prima facie, it's, it's ridiculous. And if you look at it, what you find actually is sadism. There's a lot of sadism in Michael Pollan's book. He goes out of his way to hunt and kill a pig who's foraging in the forest, probably a mother leaving her piglets to starve to death in the woods, just so he can write about it in his book.
He also goes to Joel Salatin's Polyface farm and personally kills chickens so that he can again lend a kind of air of authenticity to his book. So I really take issue with a whole slew of critics, including Temple Grandin, Barbara Kingsolver, who again, they, they maintain this illusion that we can have the bodies of billions of animals put on our plate and have that happen in a way that doesn't harm, seriously harm animal interests. And again, I think it's a ludicrous idea.
[00:23:44] Speaker C: Are you familiar with the Zoe Rosenberg case?
[00:23:47] Speaker B: Yes, a little bit.
[00:23:49] Speaker C: You know, she's on trial for rescuing four ill and mistreated chickens from Petaluma Poultry. She admits to taking the chickens valued at around $24, but claims her actions were lawfully justified to prevent criminal animal abuse. And my question for you is, is she a model for how humans, how people should behave or should act? What do you think?
[00:24:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I, I think, you know, you, you raised the question of the abolitionist movement against slavery earlier in our conversation. And there are animal advocates who explicitly, and theorists who explicitly own that, that term or tried to reappropriate that term for what animal advocates are trying to do.
If, if what we're doing to other animals is radically evil, and I believe it is radically evil, I think it's as bad as slavery. I think it's a kind of genocide. If you accept that notion, then non violent direct action is not only acceptable, maybe in certain circumstances, depending on how it's done and what the consequences of it might be, might be a moral obligation, you know, in the same way that, you know, the sclc, during the civil rights movement, embraced nonviolent mass civil disobedience in order to break the stranglehold of the segregationist south over the lives of black Americans. Now, you know, I can't speak to this specific case, and whether it was wise or not wise, I don't know. But certainly in principle, freeing animals, I don't see any problem with that whatsoever. There's just a case of these monkeys who were being exploited by university, were transported in a truck. Gosh, I can't remember. Was it Tennessee? I no longer remember where that was. And they. There was a truck accident and several of these monkeys escaped. And, you know, there was this kind of panic in the media about how they were infected with disease and. And then they were brutally killed. Well, first of all, they were not infected with anything.
Secondly, they weren't violent creatures. And thirdly, this was their only moment of freedom in their entire lives to feel grass under their feet. So these practices are so beyond the pale of anything that should be considered acceptable by society that when I see an organization like Direct Action Everywhere, based in Oakland, they've been engaged in rescuing discarded pigs in the dead piles of corporations and have gone to trial. In some cases, the jury has found in their favor. Sometimes they've been convicted of felonies. The FBI is all over this. The FBI. The state takes a very strong interest in preserving the animal industry. It's not neutral. Capitalist state is never neutral on these kinds of questions.
So just a long winded answer to say, yes, I support, or at least I don't find anything objectionable in nonviolent direct action on behalf of animals. And, but again, you know, whether a particular tactic or a particular intervention is useful, that's a case by case question.
[00:26:56] Speaker C: Here, so to speak, is a note added in proof. A couple of days after this interview was recorded, Zoe Rosenberg was found guilty of felony conspiracy and three misdemeanors. Her sentencing, which could be up to five years in prison, will take place in December 2025.
You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Professor John Sabanmatsu from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. We're talking about his new book, the Omnivore's Deception, which is essentially a critique of virtually, I think probably all arguments, ethical, practical, pragmatic, in favor of, of domesticating animals and eating meat. And we've just been talking about the Zoe Rosenberg case. She justifies her actions on the basis of Criminal animal abuse, so that that term abuse is, is still in there. So to extend that particular argument, you don't want to limit, let's say animal liberation just to animals who are abused. I, I gather, you know, free all of the chickens at Petaluma Poultry.
I mean, would you, would you say that, would you go that far?
[00:28:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I have to be careful in how I answer that because this administration is literally criminalizing free speech.
So what, what I will say is that first of all, when, when animal advocates do this sort of thing and they release mink, for example, on a fur rent, quote, fur ranch, a torture camp, into the wild, then the media is like, well, how irresponsible because they're not going to be able to survive in the wild. And but you know, the fact is that the mink and the chickens and cows and so forth would be certain to die within weeks.
So it's actually, it is in the animals interest to be left to their own devices.
I talk about Emily, this cow in here in Massachusetts, a really interesting case of this cow some years ago who escaped a slaughterhouse, jumped over this like 10 foot fence and then was on the loose, as they say, for 40 days and 40 nights before being taken in by some peace activists at the Peace Abbey here in Massachusetts. And they lived with Emily for many years until she died of I think, ovarian cancer.
So now in that case, the cow, Emily, she freed herself, right? She liberated herself. But yeah, I mean, people say, well, what would you do with all these billions of chickens if you just let them out? So it's a serious question, but the first thing we need to do is to stop bringing new, billions of new animals into the world in order to kill them. So I think before I feel comfortable saying, well, what do we do with the existing animals, the cows, the sheep, you know, the turkeys and ducks and so forth that we have in our kind of gulag archipelago. What do we do with them other than to not kill them?
Let's first agree this is a problem, then we shouldn't keep doing it. And secondly, let's stop all of the breeding facilities and egg hatcheries and so forth. Let's just have a moratorium and then talk about what a compassionate solution would be. And by the way, Sue Donaldson and Will Kimlica, Will Kimlica is a famous political theorist in Canada. They've written a book called Zooopolis, won the first prize in the Canadian Philosophical association when it came out where they argued that, you know, they kind of have a scenario where domesticated Animals would be given a kind of dignified life while there's, you know, while we phase out this system. And I think that's something to think.
[00:30:35] Speaker C: About that might raise issues about capitalism.
You indict capitalism in your book.
And of course, you know, one of the.
It's not a wild card. All of these animals are property, and property is sacrosanct in liberal society. Right. And that also raises the question, the issue of the rights of nature, which I want to get to as well. But does capitalism make the problem this, this much worse? I mean, or is it just simply continuation of practices that are millennia old?
[00:31:10] Speaker B: Well, you, you know, you gave a kind of interesting sketch of the possible origins of patriarchy, right.
And the origins of social inequality involved in transfer of wealth and so forth. Well, the word capital comes from Caput Latin and French for head of cattle. And that recognition that, quote, livestock was the basis of initial accumulation, capital accumulation in primitive form, you know, primitive accumulation and so forth.
That's been accepted, I think, by many historians, even Plato in the Repub, when they're thinking of the ideal society. And he's talking with his friends about what? Well, Socrates is talking with his friends in the Republic about what should we have in the ideal world? And they begin talking about that. And then eventually someone objects, I think Glaucon, hey, you know, it's all like all vegetarians, basically.
And Socrates says, well, if you want indigestion, sure, we can have meat, but then you're going to have to have cattle, and then you're going to have to graze the cattle. So that's going to be the origin of war, because you're going to need to have cattle going into the lands of others and so forth. So what I argue in my book is that there are two systems to be. And it is a little reductionistic there because there are all sorts of social systems, as you know, but two systems that are destroying the means of life. I described them as like a double helix encoding the end of terrestrial life. Human supremacism or dominationism, speciesism by another name, which is what some theorists use, and capitalism now, and the two are intertwined today, that it's impossible to separate them. I mean, quite apart from the fact that capitalists are reproducing animals in the billions and emptying the oceans of animals for profit, private accumulation of capital, right. There's the fact that capital accumulation by definition requires nature as a free resource, right? To be able to be turned into a commodity. So anytime you look out at the ocean or Trees or birds, those are proto commodities. That's the raw material. And so when we talk about biodiversity loss, we talk about habitat destruction, we're really talking about capitalist development, whether it's to build a mall or an airport, or to appropriate the land to create a palm oil plantation, to grow a monocrop, which then displaces the orangutans who've been living there for what, hundreds of thousands of years.
So capitalism is absolutely driving the system. But I also take issue with ecological Marxists who say, well, capitalism is like, that's the original sin. It isn't the original sin because we were already doing rotten things to other species for thousands of years. Even the term we were talking about, slavery, some people might take offense to my use of that term, but that was the term used in the 10th century by the brethren of purity. This was a group of Islamic scholars in what's now Basra, Iraq, who wrote a whole book called the Case of the Animals Versus man before the King of the Jinn. So all the animals of the earth send representatives to the head of the genies before the king of the genies and say, look, they treat us as their slaves, they brutalize us, and they list in great detail all of the violence and forms of violation that animals suffered even then over a thousand years ago.
So that precedes capitalism antedates capitalist development right, by millennia nonetheless. And so I think that's the precondition for capital accumulation. First of all, you have to have that idea that humans were put here either by God or providence, to dominate and exploit everybody else. But I think there are better ways of living a human life, as I say, and one of them is one way to live a better life is to abolish the capitalist system, which is not only ruining the conditions of life for other species, but of course, the origin of a great deal of social inequality and suffering among us, among human beings.
I think it's the majority of humans still today don't have access to a clean toilet. Even now, after 500 years of capitalist development, something like half of the people on the Earth live on $2 a day or less. So that's not a big selling point for the capitalist model, not to mention war and genocide and colonialism.
[00:35:37] Speaker C: Well, to get to the rights of nature.
My question is, how do you view that concept, the notion of the rights of nature? Is that is that a credible way to approach these questions of respect for animals? Or is it duplicating not just the system of human rights, but also the system of Property that is inherent in the idea of rights.
[00:36:03] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, yeah, and it's complicated as you know, it's complicated in political theory how we think about rights. And there are people who are critics of, of human rights theory because they think that it's part of the kind of liberal negative conception of rights that is co extensive with colonialism and these other things. I think human rights are really important to defend, even if they've just become talking points for the elites. But I think they're important and I think animal rights is important as a concept as well. But natural rights I'm not so crazy about for a couple reasons. One is, I don't think that you can, I mean, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described natural rights as nonsense upon stilts. That's how he described it. Right. And you, I can't look out there say, oh well, there's a natural right. It's not. It's a human concept. But we can give. Just because it's a human construct, I mean, just because it's human construct doesn't mean we can't give better or worser reasons for ascribing rights to particular beings. There's a, you know, there are reasons why we should not respect the rights of children or grant rights to children, right, which was a modern concept. And there are good reasons for why we should grant rights to non human beings. Now if you're talking about the rights of clouds or the rights of rivers, the rights of mountains, no, I don't support that idea. I don't believe nature, which is a kind of metaphysical notion, should have rights per se. I think that rights matter to beings capable of suffering and, and of having interests. So, you know, the tree doesn't have the same ontological capacities, same capacities for consciousness and subjectivity that the common mouse does. So therefore we have to have rights that are tailored to the interests of the mouse and not to the tree.
[00:37:55] Speaker C: It's an interesting, interesting position. You know, since we've been talking a little bit about capitalism previously, I wanted to, to bring up the point that there's a lot of lip service to animal welfare, especially from big food processors and food companies.
Have they actually changed their business model and do you think consumers pay much attention to these animal welfare claims?
[00:38:20] Speaker B: So, you know, if you're going to have a system of, of, of truly mass violence, truly extreme kind of atrocity, you don't just set it in motion one and done. You have to continually reinforce it. So that's political theorists Talk about something called hegemony. And hegemony requires a kind of consent to systems of power.
So that's where ideology comes in and legitimation practices.
So this system has come undone in a variety of ways. It's undermining the conditions of the ecology of our planet. It's leading to new disease vectors like right now H5N1 avian flu, which if it becomes transmissible between humans could kill 150 million humans, at least according to the WHO.
Bad health outcomes, the animal based diets, et cetera, et cetera. So you have all these contradictions and problems. And then there's the animal welfare thing. People like feel vaguely uneasy a little bit about what we do to them. They've heard about factory farms being bad. They learned about that from the animal rights movement, by the way, about factory farming. But the problem isn't factory farming. It's the underlying relation of domination and violence that I've flagged here. Nonetheless, beginning in the early 2000s or possibly late 1990s, but certainly by the early 2000s you have an effort by corporate industry in the same way with like the cigarette, the tobacco industry trying to cover up studies about lung cancer, or the coal miners association putting to rest concerns about black lung or et cetera, et cetera. All of these powerful, powerful companies. Agribusiness is one of the biggest businesses on this planet.
They, they began to form a kind of loose alliance with activists, community activists and anti corporate people to come to redeem and recuperate animal products, animal agriculture, the animal system.
And so what began as like smaller scale advocates and locavore advocates has been appropriated understandably and predictably by JBS and Tyson Foods and Purdue and all the biggest violators of animal interests and rights. These companies now all claim to be compassionate and humane. These are the biggest factory farming companies.
And partly this has happened because women have been involved in this as well. I have a whole chapter on this. People like Temple Grandin have allowed the meat industry to use discourses and symbols of maternal care and natalism, that was taking care of children to justify the meat economy. We're going to care for our animals and so forth. And so it's a cynical, cynical ploy. And the thing is that consumers, again consumers don't really, they don't appreciate the scale of the harm that we're inflicting. And they don't appreciate in general the complexity, cognitive and emotional complexity of the animals that we've enslaved. And so they don't take the issue that seriously. But it does There have been empirical studies that if you slap a welfare grass fed label or cage free egg, by the way, there's no such thing as a cage free egg. Okay? There are chickens who produce the eggs, right? But you'll see cage free eggs to keep the consumer from thinking about the living conscious being that the eggs came from. That actually does improve market sales, no question, but it does not touch the system. The per capita meat consumption is up. We're already talking about record numbers of animals living in misery.
But then the consumer can pat him or herself on the back and think, oh, well, in my mind I care about animals and I would like the compassionate meat, but the kids are hungry so we're going to stop at McDonald's and get a burger. So the consumer is complicit in this also because consumers don't want to examine the issue and the corporate sector is happy to go along with that and to magnify that bad faith.
[00:42:22] Speaker C: You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Dr. John Sabanmatsu from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. And we're talking about various aspects of his recently published book the Omnivore's Deception.
And we're just addressing the question of big corporations making animal welfare claims.
As you were talking, it struck me for a moment that if we had to see these animals being slaughtered in front of our eyes right at the meat counter, people might think differently. But then I think about, you know, the, the, I guess it's sort of the locavore, I don't know exactly what it's called, but you know, go out and kill your own cow, which doesn't seem to dissuade people from doing it.
And so that sort of gets us to this, this question of what, what do we, what, what is to be done?
[00:43:21] Speaker B: Yeah, well, as, as a way to get around that question really. There, there is indeed this movement of, yeah, locavore locavorism and sustainable, you know, sustainable humane slaughter and so forth.
And what it shows is that the, the contempt for the lives and interests of other animals has run so deep that even sadistic displays like that, where you go out, you go to a butchering course, where you go and shoot an animal, cut them up into slabs when none of that's necessary. I mean, it just shows that this, the way really alienation under capitalist development leads to first of all, a thirst or a quest for authenticity. Right. If you go and get the animal yourself and you kill the animal, you look the animal in the eye while the blood drains out and their life fades away. That's supposed to be better than going into an aseptic supermarket and buying packaged meat where you don't see the animal at all. That's not true. As I say in my book, there are worse things than moral hypocrisy. And intentionally going out of your way to inflict violent harm against defenseless creature is actually worse than hypocrisy.
But nonetheless, there's a kind of end run that's done around ethics, around the critique that I and many others are making to ground our daily lives in this vast injustice and to deny that there's an alternative to it when clearly there is an alternative to it.
[00:44:50] Speaker C: To go back actually to an earlier point you were making about, you know, arguments about empathy and maternal care, and it sort of reminded me of people's relationship with their pets.
Pets are basically people, right? And. And again, I'm reminded of. I think it's Stalin's dictum, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:45:16] Speaker C: And you know, why. Why is that kind of empathy for pets, you know, goes out the window when you're starting to. To think about all of the rest of animal life.
[00:45:32] Speaker B: Wow. Well, I think there's a lot of different things go into that, but one is that when you have a material system of exploitation, domination, then you have a kind of train of ideological and cultural habits and beliefs that come along. So how is it possible that whites could be at a slave auction and see enslaved mothers crying over having their children sold out from under them and being sent down river, and yet didn't have an empathetic response, or at least not a very strong one. Right. And not enough to raise hackles. I think that. I think you're right that, you know, apropos Joseph Stalin, that you, you. It's hard to conceive of the numbers.
It's just. It doesn't mean anything to people. Whereas people can see that their cat or their dog is languishing or is suffering from cancer or. You know, I think the moral imagination is plastic, but it can be limited by tradition, culture, prejudice, all of these things. And it's striking to me, like, for example, that hunters.
YouTube has all these videos, millions of these videos of men, mostly men, sometimes women and girls, but mostly men, go out into nature to murder some defenseless creature.
But there are some videos of hunters who find, like, a hawk or some animal trapped in a fishing line or something like that, and they, they. Or a deer who's fallen into a frozen river. And they will risk their lives to help this animal like they have, they're able to have empathy for this individual who's clearly suffering and in need of solidarity. But then when it comes to the deer or the elk or whatever, they, they shut that off. So what I argue for in the book is simply a kind of moral consistency and a consistency of empathetic insight. And empathy isn't just a feeling, it's, it's a, I think of it as a mode of perception. We, you know, if you've ever had kids, you know that, you know, the parent is able to, through empathy, understand what even this wailing infant might need. Is it because the infant is wet? Is it because the infant is hungry? Is the infant tired? You know what I'm saying? So without empathy, which Edith Stein, the psychoanalytic thinker and philosopher, argued is the glue of society, without empathy, what do you have? You have a society of sociopaths, of psychopaths who are intelligent but unable to make that leap to the other, of being in relation to the other outside of a relation of instrumentality, as say, of using others.
But we all have that capacity for empathy. And as I point out in the book, it isn't just a human capacity. We find it in many, many other species. So that's the muscle that we need to exercise if we're ever going to get a dig our way out of this animal system.
[00:48:18] Speaker C: You know, I can't help but, but asking about the current conjunction, the current political conjunction and your reflections or thoughts about, about what seems to be, you know, moving away from empathy and trying to cultivate greater alienation as well as violence.
[00:48:40] Speaker B: It's so terrifying the moment we're in as, as we all know. Elon Musk, by the way, has described empathy as possibly the greatest threat to Western civilization. I think it's quite telling, right, that you have this administration that is murdering civilians in the Caribbean in the name of the drug war, but in fact, extrajudicial executions, et cetera, et cetera. The way ice is storm trooping its way through our communities, terrorizing people. And the terror is the point.
You can't reduce this to some cold political or economic calculus. The terror is the point. You know, George Orwell, right in the end of 1984, what is this all about? It's about a picture of boot stamping, stomping on a human face forever. That is what fascism is.
And so it's quite telling in this regard that the right wing is all over the animal issue. That meat has become part of the culture wars, interestingly. Right. So Governor DeSantis put out an executive statement a year or so ago where he warned that globalists, global elites, conspirators, were trying to take away, you know, Floridian stakes and trying to make them eat bugs and cellular meat. And you've got, you know, all of these, you know, the Cattlemen's association and Ag Big Ag states who are promulgating terrorism laws for activists who try to expose through undercover video footage the torture of animals.
And in the manosphere, right. There's this huge misogynistic backlash against feminism and sexual equ.
Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan and all these guys, Andrew Tate go on and on about the need for a carnivore diet, as they call it, right? That's part of masculine strength and virility.
And meanwhile, veganism is effeminate and liberals are soy boys. I don't know if you've heard that term, but the right wing maga calls liberals soy boys.
So there's this articulation of this issue with, with a whole range of beliefs about natural domination. Men, you know, the trad wife is part of this too, right? You go back to regressive gender roles. But the bottom floor of all of this, I argue the cellar, really is this primordial relation of political violence against other species that is the guarantor of the whole system of hierarchies that we unfortunately persistent.
[00:51:17] Speaker C: Is there anything else you'd like to.
To mention?
[00:51:21] Speaker B: Well, I'll be in your area of the woods on November 15th at 1:00pm I'll be speaking at Book Passage, the acclaimed bookshop in Corta Madeira in Marin County. So I invite listeners to come hear me speak and raise questions about the book.
[00:51:41] Speaker C: Is that going to be broadcast?
[00:51:44] Speaker B: It is to. It is to be carried on C Span. There's going to be a crew there to.
But. So I don't have the.
The broadcast information yet, but there will be. It will be televised.
[00:51:57] Speaker C: Okay. Well, thank you, John Sabimnatsu, for being my guest on Sustainability now that was a great pleasure.
[00:52:04] Speaker B: Thanks for all the interesting questions. Ron. Me?
[00:52:08] Speaker C: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with Dr. John Sabanmatsu, professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, who recently published the Omnivore's Deception, a deeply observed philosophical meditation on the nature of our relationship with animals, especially those we raise to kill and eat.
If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] Sustainability now, as well as Spotify, YouTube and Pocket Casts, among other podcasts sites. So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K Squid your community radio station and keep it going.
And so, until next every other Sunday, sustainability Now.
[00:52:59] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out.
Temperate zones, tropic climbs and n through currents and thriving seas, Winds blowing through breathing trees, strong ozone, safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find.
[00:53:21] Speaker C: Yeah.
