THE EXPLOITATION OF ANIMALS FOR PROFIT is enabled by a cold, calculating Trinity of Science, Technology, and the Market that has stripped our public life of empathy. Countering factory farms requires going beyond legal and political strategies: what’s needed is a societal reevaluation that places compassion and morality above the industrial cult of efficiency at any cost.
Pig No. 6707 was meant to be “super”—super fast growing, super big, super meat quality. He was supposed to be a technological breakthrough in animal food production. Researcher Vern Pursel and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture had used taxpayer money to design this pig to be like no other, and to a certain extent they succeeded. Number 6707 was unique, both in his general physiology and in the very core of each and every cell. For this pig was born with a human growth gene engineered into his permanent genetic makeup, one of hundreds of thousands of animals that have now been engineered with foreign genetic material. Pursel’s idea was to permanently insert human growth genes into livestock to create animals many times larger than those currently being bred. Pursel jokes of a pig “as big as a barn.” He is serious, however, about merging human genes with the pig’s genetic makeup to create more meat and more profit for the hog industry.
Pursel’s pig did not turn into a superpig. The human growth genes injected into the animal at the early embryo stage altered its metabolism in unpredictable and tragic ways. By analogy, imagine injecting elephant growth genes into an early human embryo and the physiological changes that might accrue. The human growth genes in No. 6707 caused the creation of a huge muscle mass that overwhelmed the rest of the pig’s physiology. He was crippled and bowlegged and riddled with arthritis. The genes made him impotent and nearly blind. The deformed pig could not stand up and could only be photographed in a standing position with the support of a plywood board. When Pursel was asked about his purpose in creating this suffering, pathetic creature, he responded that he was attempting to make livestock more efficient and more profitable. As for his failure, he said, “Even the Wright brothers did not succeed at first.” Clearly for Pursel, there appeared to be little distinction between a machine (an airplane) and a living animal.
Pursel is not alone in his view of farm animals. The billions of animals that are slaughtered and disassembled each year throughout the factory farm system are viewed as little more than profitable commodities and production units. As most industrial factories use inanimate natural resources to manufacture various products, so animal factories dismember billions of animals annually and turn them into the neatly packaged commodities we purchase at our supermarkets and fast-food restaurants. This mechanistic mindset about farm animals is even encoded in our laws. The important protections against cruelty and mistreatment in our federal Animal Welfare Act apply to pets, exhibition animals, and research animals, but not to our farm animals.
Activists who have spent decades seeking protection for these animals have been repeatedly frustrated and angered by the coldness displayed by our legislators, policy makers, and much of the general public to the plight of these fellow creatures. How can so many blithely tolerate the unspeakable cruelties visited upon these countless sentient creatures? Part of the answer lies in the literal physical distance between the buyer of these animal commodities and the factories that produce them. “Out of sight, out of mind,” is a ubiquitous if unattractive part of all our natures. Particularly when we imagine the horrors of the slaughter-house, it’s easier just to eat the burger and not think of the hidden history and suffering of the animal, made invisible by time and distance from the moment and place of eating.
But even as the nature of factory farming is masked through physical and temporal distancing, there is another, more subtle, more profound distancing that keeps the majority from challenging the realities of factory farming and the other evils of the industrial system. After all, Pursel was not physically distanced from the suffering he was creating. In fact, he was with pig No. 6707 day after day, carefully assessing each deformity and reaction. His distancing was not physical, but psychological and ideological. He and so many others—including most of our leaders—are ensconced in habits of thinking that are extraordinarily effective in making them immune to even the most terrible suffering and in suppressing their humanity and ethical responsibility.
Ideas have consequences, and the bizarre and tragic fate of pig No. 6707 is in reality the result of certain “trickle-down” ideologies that have over many generations become unquestioned habits of thought in modern industrial society. What are these dogmas? Pursel was motivated to genetically engineer pig No. 6707 by his unequivocal belief in objective science, and the requirements of efficiency. He was also driven by the hope of creating a more competitive and profitable pig. Quantitative science, efficiency, competition, and profit are the central dogmas underlying not just Pursel’s experiments but also the entire industrial enterprise. These dogmas have been the underpinning of the industrial system that has spawned much of the wealth and the stunning daily “miracles” of modern technological society. The sufferings of billions in factory farms and other tragic results of applying these industrial ideologies to life have arisen not out of cruelty or passion, but rather from the impassive application of the “laws” of science, efficiency, and the market to living beings. That is why factory farms and other evils of the system are “cold” evils. They are not created by terrorists, religious fanatics, or psychopaths, persons acting out of uncontrolled “hot” violence, anger, or lust. Rather it is the businesspeople, scientists, policy makers, and consumers who are acting “rationally” by comporting themselves with these “laws” of science and economics on which our system is based. Factory farms, like environmental pollution, are representative of numerous systemic industrial evils that only 1 percent of society creates but in which the other 99 percent are complicit.
For many fighting for laws and regulations to help protect animals, a discussion of ideology may seem abstract. But I guarantee that anyone in the struggle against the factory farm system will come up against the wall of one or more of these dogmas consistently. Your view of animals and their suffering will be called “unscientific” by many animal scientists. Your suggestions for giving these animals more space or better treatment will be dismissed as grossly inefficient by economists. Your pleas to have laws passed that protect these animals will be said by legislators and their agribusiness friends to drive up costs, reduce profit, and make us less competitive in the world market. These modern shibboleths have kept the animal movement at bay and effectively marginalized advocates for decades. Unless we expose these ideological frames and find an alternative language, we will continue to flail away at these modern credos without much impact.
In the following exploration of these industrial ideologies, we will see that they date back centuries and involve some of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment and Western philosophy. I am not suggesting that purveyors of factory farms or animal research or industrial development have read up on their Descartes, Bacon, or Adam Smith. Quite the contrary: I believe that certain basic tenets of these philosophers have trickled down from the scientific and academic elite to become habits of thinking and perception for the general public. These ideologies now go virtually unexamined, yet they provide the basic rationale for much of what I have called the “cold evil” of the industrial system.
One of the epochal moments in the history of Western science occurred on June 22, 1633, when Galileo, under extreme pressure from church inquisitors, “abjured” his heresy that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Since that time Galileo has remained an ultimate symbol of modern enlightenment martyred by the forces of superstition and prejudice. Yet if we consider the nature of the cold evil so prevalent today, we can bring charges against Galileo anew. For his real crime was not his understanding of the nature of the heavens, but rather his seminal role in creating what could be called “the cult of objectivity”—resulting in a science and scientific community that have largely been purged of subjectivity and qualitative human thought.
Galileo, a mathematician, was convinced that the natural world could not be understood through participation, relation, or metaphysical or spiritual work; rather, he maintained that the truth could be found only by means of objective, quantitative measurement and rigorous mathematical analysis. All the “warm” aspects of the human—memories, senses, kinship, empathy, relationship—he dismissed as subjective and immeasurable and therefore without value in the scientific search for truth. Galileo wrote that color, taste, and all subjective experiences were “merest opinion,” while “atoms and the void are the truth.” He then carried this argument one incredible step further, positing that what cannot be measured and reduced to numbers is not real. This philosophical “crime” of amputating human qualities from the search for truth is summarized by historian Lewis Mumford:
Galileo committed a crime far greater than any dignitary of the Church accused him of; for his real crime was that of trading the totality of human experience for that minute portion which can be observed and interpreted in terms of mass and motion. . . . In dismissing human subjectivity Galileo had excommunicated history’s central subject, multi-dimensional man. . . . Under the new scientific dispensation . . . all living forms must be brought into harmony with the mechanical world picture by being melted down, so to say, molded anew to conform to a more mechanical model.
The magnitude of the revolution in science inaugurated by Galileo and his fellow Enlightenment thinkers is difficult to comprehend. Perhaps philosopher Scott Buchanan best encapsulated this transformation when he described Galileo and his generation of thinkers as “world-splitters.” Focusing fully on treating all of life and creation in cold, strictly mathematical and mechanical terms, they created a lasting dualism by separating the quantitative and qualitative, the objective and subjective. Regarding all the warm, individual, empathic, and feeling functions of the human as incapable of quantification and therefore of little or no importance, they elevated one value, the “cold” objective, as the only road to truth. Their dualism resulted in an attempt to completely eliminate human subjectivity from the scientific search for knowledge and truth. This cult of objectivity is thus based on the pathetic notion that somehow the observed can be separated from the observer, a fallacy that has disfigured and deformed most fields of science for centuries.
The cult of objectivity also provides the central underpinning for cold evil, offering a sure ideological defense against any attempt to reduce distancing through the infusion of qualitative human experience, whether it be feeling, relationship, participation, or culture. Its influence results in a just-the-facts, bottom-line conception of truth. Whoever seeks to break the bondage of cold evil, to strike out against it, is inevitably accused of being unscientific or, even worse (as so many animal advocates know), “emotional.” When we protest against the dangers of nuclear technology, the dire effects of global warming, the massive destruction of biodiversity, the cruelties of the factory farms, or the monstrous creations of genetic engineering, we are inevitably warned not to react emotionally but rather to rely on objective “experts” using “sound science.” We are intellectually bludgeoned into abandoning our protest and acquiescing to the objective “laws” and methods of science, the cold facts. As a result, the arts and philosophy are ghettoized as entertainment or academic pursuits, while love of and participation with animals and nature are dismissed as romantic and nostalgic.
Such disconnections result in a kind of social schizophrenia that separates our public lives from our private lives. If we tried to bring such objectivity into our family lives, we would correctly be viewed as insane. If a mother described her child solely in mathematical terms, stating that all the rest is “unreal,” she would be an appropriate candidate for institutionalization. If someone described their beloved Labrador retriever to you solely in terms of its chemistry, you would react with laughter and disbelief. Yet this objectivist view is exactly what determines public policy in science, law, and much of our governmental and educational systems. Woe to the scientist who would speak of feeling communion with a cow, or of scientific truth received through poetry, long meditation on the spirituality of a salmon, or the experience of a Mozart piano concerto; woe to the lawyer who would ask the judge to use intuition in resolving the case, or even to the biology teacher who would teach that all of life has an “inside,” a soul.
The ideological hold of the cult of objectivity is so strong that as a society we have virtually eliminated human culture and subjectivity as part of our scientific pursuit of knowledge and truth. Our policies continue to be guided by the cold values of quantification and measurability; they ignore intuition, emotional understanding, spiritual wisdom, and all the subjective human values so needed for our healing and wholeness. The continued reign of the cult of objectivity among our scientific and policy elites is a fundamental precondition of the acceptance of the industrial model of life and ensures the continuing spread of cold evils such as factory farming.
Just four years after Galileo’s historic confrontation with the church, another mathematician, René Descartes, published his now famous Discourse on Method. Among its many provocative arguments was the revolutionary view that animals are really “beast machines,” nothing more than “soulless automata.” In a memorable passage, Descartes writes: “I wish . . . that you would consider all the functions [of animals] neither more nor less than the movements of a clock or other automaton . . . so that it is not necessary, on their account, to conceive within any animal any sensitive soul.” This mechanistic concept of life quickly became a cause célèbre as theologians and others attacked the bête-machine theory. But the Cartesians were adamant and became active adherents and practitioners of vivisection, performing operations on live animals for the purpose of scientific research. Jean de La Fontaine gives us an account of where Descartes’ theory led his followers:
There was hardly a Cartesian who didn’t talk of automata. . . . They administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they had felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring which had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them to see the circulation of blood, which was a great subject of conversation.
Pursel’s genetic experiments, factory farming, and much of modern-day animal research are the unfortunate offspring of the centuries-old ideology of mechanism. This dogma is summed up by historian Floyd Matson, who notes: “With Descartes all of life has become a machine and nothing but a machine: all purposes and spiritual significance alike have been banished.”
In the centuries since Descartes, we have fully entered the industrial/technological milieu, and as we create our great machines, they in turn re-create our images of ourselves. We speak of our soldiers as “fighting machines”; our leaders ask us to be “mighty engines of change”; and our bedroom partners call on us to be “sex machines.” When we are tired, we say we are “worn out” and “run down,” perhaps near a “breakdown.” Cold evil thrives when all of life is viewed in terms of machinery. What dignity or responsibility inheres in a machine? How can machines love or care or feel? The habit of perceiving life as a machine ultimately distances us fully from our own humanity and from other animals and the entire living community.
The cult of efficiency is perhaps the greatest impact of Cartesian mechanism. Efficiency—maximum output with minimum input in minimum time—is an appropriate goal for the productivity of machines. Under the sway of mechanism, however, efficiency has metastasized over the past century into the principle virtue, not just for machines but for all life forms as well. We have undergone a kind of mechanomorphism, turning all life into machines and then judging and changing life utilizing the mechanistic value of efficiency. As noted, this view of animals as machines is the fundamental ideological underpinning of the animal “factories.” However, humanity itself has not escaped the efficiency mandate. The effort to make humans more efficient began in earnest over a century ago when the eugenics movement became accepted public policy in the United States and led to the sterilization of thousands of the “unfit.” The cult of efficiency was further forced on humans in the years prior to World War I by the pioneering work of American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who began a managerial revolution to make workers more efficient in the newly developed assembly line method of production.
Efficiency has become our number one unquestioned virtue. A large part of our public and personal lives is constructed around this cult. As a society we repeatedly urge efficient government, an efficient and productive workforce, efficient use of natural resources, and efficient use of human resources. We have all become multitaskers, using the best-selling minute-manager manuals for reference (surely The Nanosecond Manager will be a bestseller of the future).
As demonstrated by the creation of pig No. 6707, the cult of efficiency is leading to enormous crimes against life. The great philosopher Owen Barfield in his seminal work Saving the Appearances warned that “those who mistake efficiency for meaning inevitably end by loving compulsion.” Now genetic engineers such as Pursel are literally remaking the genetic code of the world’s animals and other life forms to make them more efficient. Humans are not to be spared, as indicated by the November 2003 report “A Survey of the Use of Biotechnology in U.S. Industry,” with recommendations by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Science Foundation; altering the permanent genetic makeup of humanity to increase the “efficiency of performance” is now a top scientific priority. Even as the doctrine of efficiency is becoming the dictate for biotechnology, nanotechnologists tell us that they will soon be rebuilding all of matter, molecule by molecule, to make it more efficient.
As with the cult of objectivity, if the efficiency principle is applied to private life, it quickly turns into the ludicrous. Such an incongruity should not surprise us, for efficiency is a machine value, not a life value. Is a mother to treat her children efficiently, giving them minimum food, affection, and “quality time” for maximum good behavior or academic performance? Are we to treat our friends according to an efficiency calculation? Do we treat our beloved pets on an efficiency basis? Most pets produce nothing at all (except perhaps spoiled rugs and chewed baseball gloves), but we lavish on them our love and affection. In fact, all these relationships are based not on efficiency but on empathy and love. Yet the cult of efficiency has robbed much of our public life of the language of empathy. Thus the cold evil cruelties of the workplace, the slaughterhouse, and the research laboratory are detached from the values that could reform and heal them.
In 2004, President George W. Bush urged Congress to pass international trade legislation and issued a call for economic competitiveness: “In an economy where competition is global, our only chance is to take the world head on, to compete and win . . . we cannot flinch. Our people are winners . . . we need to compete and win to shape the world of the twenty-first century.” Some critics asked what it really meant to win economically against other countries. Was it right to enthusiastically herald competition and victory that would result in increasing poverty, unemployment, and social unrest in the losing countries? However, most in the world of economics and the media continue to praise the call by a succession of presidents for economic competition. And the competition ethic does not apply only to economics. In No Contest: The Case Against Competition, educator Alfie Kohn observes that competition permeates virtually every aspect of our lives: “From the time the alarm clock rings until sleep overtakes us again, from the time we are toddlers until the day we die, we are busy struggling to outdo others. This is our posture at work and at school, on the playing field and back at home. It is the common denominator of American life.”
How did competition become the common denominator of our lives? Once again, it is because an ideology has trickled down to become part of the public consciousness. Anthropology teaches us that competition was never, prior to modernity, the manner in which a society allocated scarce resources. As historian Marcel Mauss writes: “Nowhere in the uninfluenced primitive society do we find labor associated with the idea of competition.” The idea of competition as the means of achieving economic survival and furthering one’s self-interest is relatively recent. The eighteenth-century philosopher Francis Hutcheson was looking for rules of human behavior that would be analogous to the newly discovered laws of physics. He finally determined that the greatest motivator of life is self-interest, asserting that this ethic is to social life what gravity is to the physical universe.
In 1776 Adam Smith, Hutcheson’s most notable pupil, published The Wealth of Nations. This book would become a gospel of the new competitive economics. Smith maintained that each individual freely pursuing his own selfish needs would, without intending to, contribute to the economic and moral good of all. He thus saw the market as an almost divine “invisible hand” that would magically turn selfish competition into unintentional altruism. Smith’s teachings encouraged the growth of the industrial revolution, providing the “moral” basis for the development of the capitalist-industrial state. Today Smith’s theories concerning self-interest, competition, and the market have evolved into a veritable faith in human secular salvation through a self-regulating market.
As with objectivity and efficiency, competition is a “cold” ethic. It is the ethic of isolation and annihilation, separating us one from the other in the blood sport of making a living and leading us to desire the annihilation of the competitive other. As we each relentlessly pursue our self-interest, we become ever more cold hearted and isolated, ever more autistic—the very prescription for a cold evil society. Psychoanalyst Nathan Ackerman gives a telling description of the pathology of competition: “The strife of competition reduces empathetic sympathy, distorts communication, and impairs the mutuality of support and sharing.”
Morton Deutsch, perhaps the most well-known researcher in the psychology of competition, describes the mindset required of those mired in the cult of competition: “In a competitive relationship, one is disposed to . . . have a suspicious, hostile, exploitative attitude towards the other, to be psychologically closed to the other, to be aggressive and defensive towards the other, to seek advantage and superiority for self and disadvantage and inferiority for the other.” The proliferation of this mindset in the competitive market system acts as a powerful disincentive to practicing the empathy and cooperation so essential to fighting factory farming and other cold evil activities.
Additionally, the fear that profits will be lost and that a business or a nation will lose in the global economic competition is used as the single primary justification for not regulating the exploitation of the environment, the workers, and of course the billions of animals in the factory system. The ethic of competition also completely devalues the virtue of cooperation. Anthropologists tell us that the secret to a society’s longevity is the cooperation between its members and the cooperative relationship it has with the elements of nature. Again we experience this in the family circumstance. No parent would throw out a child because he failed to successfully compete in grades with a sibling. We do not eliminate our elders because they can no longer compete with us in strength or in earning power. We do not destroy one pet because it cannot compete in speed or size with another. Quite the contrary, parents teach sharing and cooperation in a family as the secret to happiness and mutual growth.
What unites the dogmas of reductionist science, efficiency, and competition is what can only be described as our collective secular religion. That is, of course, our belief in Progress. More than a half century ago, philosopher Richard M. Weaver, in The Ethics of Rhetoric, noted the central religious position that “Progress” has taken in the modern technological state: “‘Progress’ becomes the salvation man is placed on earth to work out; and just as there can be no achievement more important than salvation, so there can be no activity more justified in enlisting our sympathy and support than ‘progress.’” Our faith in technological progress may be obvious, but I think it is more difficult, and not completely fanciful, to see that it has a governing Trinity. The secular “Cold Trinity” of Progress apes the Christian Holy Trinity in a tragicomic way: Science will let us know everything; Technology will let us do everything; the Market will let us buy everything.
In the new Trinity, Science takes the place of God the Father. Mysterious and unknowable to all but the cognoscenti, Science has its own objective, unemotional laws and rules, which define the universe. To find the Truth it has its own unwavering impersonal process (ritual), known as “the scientific method.” Any statement that begins “Science tells us . . .” has the imprimatur of unquestioned Truth.
Technology plays the role of the incarnated God, the Son. Science incarnates in our daily lives as Technology. It is an admittedly inhuman, cold, mechanical incarnation, yet it manufactures miracles. Technology saves lives, allows us to fly and to speak to others who are thousands of miles away, and creates so many other everyday wonders. Our belief in the Father (Science) is bolstered by the acts of the Son (Technology), which appear to be devoted to making our lives a “heaven on earth.” Technology also has its impersonal, unquestioned commandments based on its mechanical nature, the aforementioned “laws” of efficiency. Importantly, Technology takes on the mysterious nature of its progenitor, Science. After all, few of us understand how even the most basic technologies (telephone, television) actually work. So Technology is in this world but, at least to our consciousness, not wholly of this world. It is a kind of incarnated magic.
Our adoration of Technology, despite its dominance over our lives, is not with us at all times, nor does it fully motivate our daily lives. Although we do not understand our technologies, we soon tend to take them for granted, so an animating, ever-visiting third member of the Trinity is needed: the Holy Spirit (the Market). We wake every day, go to work, and make money—with a deep desire to buy. Just as in traditional theology the Holy Spirit gives us access to the Son, so too the Market gives us access to (the ability to purchase) Technology and brings it into our lives. It is this spirit of acquisition that brings us fully to the Trinity. The Market also takes on the numinous quality of Science and Technology. As noted, its “laws” of supply and demand and competition are unquestioned dogmas that control public policy in virtually every sphere of our national and global economic lives. They are laws to which almost all of our economists and politicians genuflect on a daily basis.
The Cold Trinity provides a powerful, though mostly unconscious, arsenal for the defense of cold evil. No matter what environmental horror or exploitation of animals or humans occurs, it can be rationalized through the Trinity, whereas complaints against cold evil are routinely condemned as heresies. The Trinity acts as a kind of implicit enclosure of the spirit, a spiritual cocoon, blocking society from any incursion against the cold and binding laws of Science, Technology, and the Market. Questioning any one part of the Trinity leads to immediate suspicion, the potential ouster from serious discussion, or loss of influence. Those “heretics” who would expose the cold evil inherent in this default religion of Progress risk ridicule as well as academic and social excommunication.
To halt practices such as factory farming and the other technologies of industrial production, we must learn to regularly practice heresy against the religion of Progress. It is not enough to attempt to halt industrial practices through legal or market persuasion. We must also address the consciousness that creates, promotes, and provides a rationale for these cold evils. Even as we file lawsuits, demonstrate against factory farms, or work for humane certification, we must also do public outreach and education to halt the spread of these dangerous dogmas of the industrial mind. We must reinfuse science with the qualitative experiences required for any holistic search for truth. Intuition and feeling provide a better handle for many truths about nature, animals, and ourselves than does reductionist, quantitative science. We must also refuse to elevate the mechanistic value of efficiency to the supreme value for life; instead we must value above all the ethic of empathy toward all living things. Similarly we must balance competition with cooperation, not only in our private lives but also in the form and content of our policy and public discourses. We must never allow the word progress to be used except in the context of the question, Progress toward what? Factory farms, the genetic engineering of animals, the destruction of nature, and the alteration of human nature are not progress; they are regressions into a less than human and humane future.
There is, of course, a metaphysical framing involved in this work. In the memorable words of ecotheologian Thomas Berry, our current economic and technological systems have turned all of nature “from a community of subjects into a collection of objects.” To restore relationship and begin healing we must again treat the living kingdom as a community of subjects, each with its own meaning and destiny, its own eidos and telos. Living beings must never be treated as mere objects, commodities, or means of production. Moving toward this new moral community involves nothing less than replacing the infrastructure of cold evil practices such as factory farming with technologies and human systems that are responsive to our physical and spiritual needs along with the needs of the rest of the biotic community. Such a shift requires evolving a means of production and social organization for which we can truly take ethical responsibility. It is a daunting, even overwhelming task, but the alternative is to continue to live in a state of cold evil, complicit in the current system’s crimes and distanced from relationship and healing with our fellow creatures and nature. This we can no longer do.