Frankly I am shocked by some of the responses to my comments about the lawyer in the "pig case" making comparisons to…
Posted by Joe Schwarcz on Monday, 13 March 2017
Dear Joe,
My mother (Zsuzsa Suss/Harnad), who died in 2009, was a great admirer of yours.
She was also a Holocaust survivor, and the one to whom Gary Grill was referring when he reported that she (a Jew hiding under false papers in Rimaszecs in 1944) was threatened and driven off by the gendarmes of Rimaszecs when she (and others) tried to give water to the Rimaszecs Jews that were being loaded onto the cattle trains to Auschwitz for slaughter (“as if they were ‘just’ cattle”).
My mother and father survived, but my aunt, Rozsi (her sister) and their child (Anny) did not; nor did 35 other members of my family. When Rozsi and Anny were inspected at Auschwitz, the inspectors decided Anny was too small and weak to work, so they wanted to send her one way, and her mother another way, but Rozsi clung to her child, so they were both sent to be gassed and incinerated.
That monstrous brutality has been the defining image, for me, of the meaning of life and the meaning of heartless cruelty: anti-life. But I have no illusion that it applies only to my kin, or only to my kind. I recognize, both sides of it, very clearly, very familiarly, in all suffering victims of heartless cruelty and in all dispensers of heartless cruelty. And I find denying the evident, inherent commonality impossible. There are degrees of suffering, to be sure, but both suffering and the battle against those who inflict it are betrayed by exceptionalism.
Substitute for “pig” any innocent, suffering creature, made to suffer, heartlessly, and you have the essence of the evil of the Holocaust. Of course I know what was uniquely particularly heinous about the Holocaust: My kin and kind were being tortured and exterminated because of their race, and on a scale far beyond any genocide before or since.
That is genocide, and racial hatred. Pigs are not being brutalized and massacred because of racial hatred, but because we like to eat them. Not because we need to eat them: because we like to eat them. Not only is eating them (or any other animal) not necessary for our survival or our health (as you know), but the unspeakable amount of brutality with which we make them live and die is not necessary even for getting the taste we like.
Yet likening the fate of my kin to the fate of “pigs” is felt reflexively as an offence. I had the same reflexive reaction initially, until I realized that it is not an insult or a betrayal to recognize the commonality in all gratuitous suffering — as well as in all heartless cruelty. The offence is rather to hold it at arm’s length and say that the horrors imposed on others are somehow less unjustified than the horrors imposed on me and my kin and kind. I realized that that arm’s-length treatment of the suffering of “other kinds” puts me, if ever so slightly, in the camp of the dispensers of the suffering rather than its recipients and resistors. It is, in fact, a direct failure of the Golden Rule that Anita rightly invokes.
And the sense of insult in the analogy comes also in no small part from humanity’s shameful tendency to add insult to injury by vilifying its victims, be they “pigs” or “jews,” by turning their very name into a mocking expletive.
Enough said. I don’t know if I am able to do so, but I hope to inspire you to reflect that we are far more faithful to the memory of the suffering of our kin and kind if we do not claim that the suffering of other kinds is incommensurable with our own.
Many other survivors have had the same realization, not the least of them being Isaac Bashevis Singer who wrote of animals’ “Eternal Treblinka.”
Best wishes, Stevan
“What do they know–all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world–about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Letter Writer”“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them…
“There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.”
― J.M. Coetzee, “The Lives of Animals““I say that that is fiendish cruelty, and nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.”
― Bertrand Russell, “Why I am Not a Christian”“The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
― Jeremy Bentham, “Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation”
On Mar 14, 2017, at 6:02 PM, Joe Schwarcz wrote:
“I think we will agree to disagree on this subject. I do not claim in any way that pigs do not suffer or that they are not sentient animals. I also agree that it is totally unnecessary to eat meat. But that is not the issue here for me. Animals are not the same as people. They do not have hopes, plans for the future, romantic involvements, spiritual beliefs and attachments to relatives the way people have. While a pig may suffer in various ways at human hands, that can in no way be equated to a mother seeing her baby bayonetted or one twin being put into boiling water and another into ice water to see which one would die first. Any comparison between animal suffering and the Holocaust demeans the suffering that was experienced by the victims of the Nazis. A pig does not suffer the same way as a human. Any comparison to the Holocaust is simply inappropriate.”
Joe, if you have the courage to take a cross-species look at a mother who “do[es] not have hopes, plans for the future, romantic involvements, spiritual beliefs and attachments to relatives the way people have,” please look at this.
The point of comparison is not the quality of suffering, but the quality of brutality — and mercy.
And it involves us all.
Best wishes, Stevan
“I am a “beast.” Hath not a beast eyes? Hath not a beast hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a “man” is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?.… If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.” — The quality of mercy…
“The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? — Jeremy Bentham
Anonymous: “I agree with Joe Schwarcz. “Animals are not the same as people.” I am not sure I would use the arguments he uses, however. Obviously there is a conflict between two world views: you assign a large weight to physical suffering and assume that animal suffering and human suffering are similar (this comes from your empathy towards animals, if you allow me to use this word). People who subscribe to human exceptionalism, however, think that human life has an intrinsic worth that is greater than that of animals. Of course you will claim that the latter point of view is a religious one, and I agree with that assessment, but I can also answer that any world view (Weltanschauung) is somewhat religious (even if it does not coincide with the world view of a so-called great religious tradition).
“I know that you will disagree with this statement, but I think that absolute respect for human life (from conception to natural death, independently from the so-called “quality” of that life), as it springs from the judeo-christian tradition (going back to Moses), is a position that is consistent and good for mankind.”
I am not at all arguing about the relative value of human and nonhuman (sentient) life.
I am talking about suffering: human-inflicted suffering. And not about who suffers more or less, but about the infliction of suffering in the absence of vital (life/death/health) necessity, i.e., needless suffering; gratuitous suffering.
In a choice between the welfare of my own kin and others (whether human or nonhuman), when there is a direct conflict of vital needs, I would always favour my kin; so would you; and we would be psychopaths or robots if we said “no, I would toss a coin.” Family, community, sociality would all be gone if we did not favour and help our own in case of vital need.
But to try to set aside the fundamental issue of the infliction of unnecessary suffering (which is absolutely rampant and ubiquitous when it comes to animals, and almost everyone contributes to it, for example, in eating meat) — by focusing instead on the non-issue of who suffers more, who is worth more, or whom we would favor in a conflict of vital interests — is simply begging the (moral) question.
I hope this makes it clearer what I am actually talking about. In the analogy with the holocaust I am not saying that the suffering of pigs is identical to the suffering of Jews. I am saying that pigs, too, like the Holocaust victims, have extreme (human-inflicted) suffering: needless suffering, unjustified, unwarranted, unpardonable suffering; and it is inflicted on them with the same heartless cruelty as it was inflicted on the Holocaust victims (and all other victims of human brutality, human and nonhuman).
I will put it another way: Do you think that humans are so superior and exceptional that it is justified for humans to inflict suffering and death on animals, not out of vital necessity, but simply for the taste, or out of habit, or for profit?
This is not a religious question; it is a moral question. And I know of no higher morality. (It’s also Anita Krajnc’s Golden Rule.)
