OUR TREATMENT OF ANIMALS is not simply cruel and inhumane: it reflects a deeply destructive culture in which animals are bred—and genetically engineered—into units of economic and social convenience. In the process, we destroy our own animal spirit, producing a creatureless mechanical society. To create meaningful change we must see animals and nature as our equals, rather than as ingredients for industrial “progress.”
We are all familiar with the evolutionary tableau. It hovers there, visible to our thinking, an idea given graphic form in our minds, as much a part of our sense of self as childhood photographs. On the far left (the side from which we read and write texts), in some primordial sea floats a colony of single-celled creatures, protozoa huddled together as if conspiring about what is to follow. To their immediate right, more complicated but still rudimentary forms appear: a worm, an anemone, a jellyfish, a mollusk. Then, to fill this ocean of progress to the brim, a primitive fish swims into existence. Continuing to the right, poised between sea and land, an ungainly creature with a gaping mouth rears up on elongated fins to breathe its first gulp of air. It is succeeded by a salamander-like amphibian, with all four feet moving tentatively forward on dry ground. After that creeps a reptile, large and arrogant, seemingly aware that for a season it has dominion over the Earth. Farther to the right, however, a craftier animal, covered with fur and ambling on bearlike paws, takes its place: a protomammal. No bird appears at this point, or if it does, it is an insignificant pair of wings flying high above the mammal—an apparent digression from the orderly procession below.
Now the really interesting creatures make their appearance; the ones we have all been waiting for. First, a monkey and an ape, still on all fours but apparently straining to stand upright. That virtue, however, is reserved for the next in line, a primitive hominid, perhaps an australopithecine, still hirsute and a bit stooped. His successor, a Homo erectus, stands straighter and more confident as he lumbers into humanness: only his heavy-browed face gives his backwardness away. After that, a Neanderthal walks, often shown holding a club, perhaps to suggest he hasn’t quite made it yet to the noble estate of civilized existence. And finally, on the far right, front and center, leading this zoomorphic parade of emerging forms is the being toward which this compressed history of life has been converging: taller than the rest and high browed, a fully erect Homo sapiens marches. With his back to the remainder of nature, he faces the blankness at the margin of the graphic, striding off into the invisible unknown with the self-assured gait of one who walks in the evolutionary limelight.
This graphic representation of evolution, which we have all seen in high school textbooks, is of course a crude simplification. It is a heuristic, meant to bring home a basic principle of a scientific theory rather than to capture the complex, subtle lineage of living forms on this planet. Nevertheless, the particular way our culture chooses to present evolutionary theory suggests an ethical and philosophical stance, if not in the makeup of the graphic itself, then at least in how it is used and understood by our culture at large.
Would it not be possible to make a graphic true to evolution theory in which, say, a greyhound occupies the coveted far right position? Dogs emerged more recently than humans. If the graphic is ordered chronologically, as it appears to be, then wouldn’t this be a more perfect representation?
The incongruity of having a greyhound succeed a human in our alternate evolution highlights an important ambiguity in the tableau. Strictly speaking, the graphic represents only human evolution, not evolution in general, as any biologist would have already vehemently pointed out. But this unimpeachable, scientifically accurate objection neglects the way in which the graphic is actually used in our society. For a technological culture transfixed by the presumed supremacy of intellect over nature, human evolution is evolution for all intents and purposes. The emergence of Homo sapiens stands as a symbol for the entire saga of biological adaptation on this planet. Ask people to “draw” evolution and they will probably come up with something akin to our graphic, with a human being at the lead. Hasn’t evolution always been “tending” toward humanity, our culture seems to insist, with a steady development in intellect, creativity, consciousness, or some other ambiguous quality that the struggle for survival has apparently lavished on human beings above all else? Even trained biologists use the term lower life forms.
In this way, a double meaning emerges: the representation has not only a scientific significance but a cultural life in which it embodies and reinforces the idea that the human species is the “goal” of evolution. No reputable biologist would condone such a notion, and yet it is undeniably part of our technological culture.
A truly accurate representation of evolution would have humans, greyhounds, slimeworts, and all other modern organic forms on the right, representing the present, each equally sharing in the unpredictable unfolding of evolution, with their ancestral forms off somewhere in the past, on the left, intermingling promiscuously in a wanton dance of life. But universal kinship is not what comes to mind when the word evolution is used in our culture.
We should ask: Why privilege brain size or bipedalism or any of the other traits of humanity in representing evolution? Couldn’t we give the privileged position according to some other quality we see, rightly or wrongly, as central to understanding the evolutionary process? Thus, if we assumed the ordering principle of evolution is the development of fleetness of foot rather than intellect, a cheetah should be the first in line—running well ahead of the pack. If, instead, longevity is that special quality, then bristlecone pine trees would capture the privileged spot now held by a hominid. The list could be extended indefinitely depending on the characteristic being promoted, in essence giving each species its privileged moment as the capstone of evolution, and thus requiring as many representations as there are species on the planet. It would be Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame played out on an evolutionary canvas.
The theory of evolution maintains that all living things, under the pressure of natural selection and domestication, have developed from past forms and are more or less related genealogically depending on the proximity of a common ancestor. This is to say that there is really no basis for putting any life form at the forefront of evolution: elephants are no more developed than toadstools, salmon are no less advanced than seagulls, cabbages have as much status in the scheme of life as kings. To be sure, we are more closely related genealogically to chimpanzees than to lichen, but that doesn’t mean lichen lag behind either humans or chimpanzees in the history of life. Chimps and humans can make tools, but lichen photosynthesize and we can’t; chimps and humans have high IQs, but lichen dissolve stones. The useless comparisons could continue indefinitely. Although it may bruise our species’ ego to be likened to lichen, from an evolutionary perspective, we cannot produce any biologically aristocratic escutcheon to the contrary.
The popular representation of evolution has become a cultural icon for a purpose altogether at variance with the scientific theory. What it presents is a story, a narrative, with a fictionalized version of humanity: the character of “Man,” or as John Muir called him, “Lord Man.” We have turned evolution into the monologue of “Man.”
The theme of this monologue is that “Man” is a distinct entity among all the other species of this planet. There is “Man” and then there is nature, the realm of “lower” forms, from which “Man” has emerged and separated himself. But this unique creature is not only superior to other life forms; he is their consummation, the goal toward which they have been striving during the past 3.5 billion years of organic history. “Man,” so the story goes, is the aim of evolution, its telos. And therefore, this paragon of animals, this demigod of creation, has a sort of cosmic sanction bestowed upon his activities. “Man” is the principle behind the order of things, as Bacon argued, and his intellect with its devices can rightfully supplant the natural world and its unrefined denizens.
While evolutionary theory stands in exact contradiction to the superiority of humanity (and was vigorously denounced by religious authorities as a result), its representation has very much been captured by this idea. Thus a theory that demoted humanity from semi-divine status into the swelter of biological forms has strangely come to serve the purpose of promoting the biological and moral superiority of humanity. A biological category has become a moral imperative.
Each religion has its own way of dealing with evolutionary theory: rejecting it, accepting it, modifying it, retelling it. My point is to highlight the misuse of the fictionalized version of the theory as a metaphor for human existence, a metaphor many religions themselves embrace in placing humanity above the rest of animal creation. Moreover, the fictional character of “Man” no longer merely dwells in the story of evolution, but rather he has installed himself in all the institutions of our culture, including our religious institutions. “Man,” as the morally superior center of the world, has banished the saintly view of animals, has marginalized the rest of creation, has monopolized the conversation about spirituality in a way early Christianity, Judaism, and Islam would not have understood—or at best deemed an expression of the ultimate sin of pride.
This narrative placing “Man” above and separate from the rest of the biotic community has had devastating impacts on the natural world and is reflected, most tellingly, in our treatment of animals. The most egregious abuse is that of the domesticated animals. As the pinnacle of evolution, we do not hesitate to artificially change the “evolution” of these animals, including the billions of cattle, pigs, and chickens used by humanity each year for food, by breeding them to accentuate the traits that suit our needs, or by genetic engineering. In this way, domesticated animals have become tragic symbols of the worst aspects of civilization. “The pathos of the over-fat pig, white rat stripped of nuance, and dog breeds with their congenital debilitations,” suggests Paul Shepard, “signals to us an aspect of the human condition.” We have projected these animals as inferior to ourselves and then turned them into physical representations of our own worse instincts.
Wild animals have also succumbed to the influence of humanity’s “sovereignty.” Wild animals have become spectacles in our culture. Millions of people visit zoos every year to see wild creatures, but the institution is a monument to the impossibility of such an encounter. Framed by the walls and other artificial props, isolated from interactions with other species, alienated from their habitat, zoo animals are mere simulacra of wild beasts, neither domesticated nor feral, but shadow puppets. Doug Peacock, an expert on grizzly bears, defines true wilderness as the place where something bigger than you can eat you. This is not the space of the zoo. We never meet the true gaze of a wild beast, either as predator or prey or mere neighbor, since all their actions have been rendered void. The relationship is one-dimensional: the visitor gawks, and the animals submit to being objects of observation.
Nature films, whose popularity has exploded in recent years just as the animals they depict disappear, produce a more subtle form of marginalization. Natural history documentaries of wild animals purport to show creatures interacting with their environment in a natural manner. We supposedly meet predator, prey, and biological curiosities in all their beauty and freedom. How can the camera lie after all? But the camera always lies when it comes to encountering the wild. As with zoo visitors, film viewers become pure observers of the wilderness spectacle, with nothing at stake except the observation of images moving across the screen. Aspects of an animal’s life that have no interest to us, but which may dominate their existence, get edited out by people who understand that for such films to sell, they must cater to the desires of modern viewers with all their cultural biases. As a result, in the editing process, only images of the more spectacular events—chases, mating displays, mothers defending their young—make it to the screen. The verisimilitude of the representations tempts us to disregard that nature films are merely a patronizing version of the “Monologue of Man,” works that show only certain views of the animals that “Man” finds of interest. As a way to encounter the wild, nature films inevitably fail through the very form they take, and we must not fool ourselves into accepting a human-edited image of a jaguar as a substitute for Jaguar. The former is a cultural artifact, no matter how meticulously accurate; the latter is a wild being filled with potential meaning and a fundamental challenge to the narrative of “Man.”
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault argued that our modern view of humanity as the sovereign of all possible knowledge, ethics, and values is a recent invention, a result of the Enlightenment and the distinct way it arranged and categorized knowledge. What if, he wonders, the way we have come to understand the world were to change, perhaps in the wake of some monumental event, perhaps through the reevaluation of our values? Foucault concludes the book with this premonition:
If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility . . . were to cause them to crumble . . . then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
Could it be that “Man” as we have understood him to be, as the zenith of evolution, as the biological and ethical centerpiece of nature and God, is an extravagant temporary fiction we can no longer afford, not only because he has wreaked havoc on the animal kingdom, but also because he has impoverished our soul? To change the Foucauldian stick figure “Man” has become, we require a new spiritual vision of animals. “In a wonderful and inexpressible way,” wrote medieval philosopher John Scotus Erigena, “God is created in his creatures.” The question we face, in a geography increasingly creatureless and artificial, an environment more and more derivative and mechanical, is, How can we again embody our spirituality in the living organic world of animals? For the power to refresh our spiritual insights as well as our misguided understanding of our biological evolution resides in our bestiaries, both the animals of nature and the animals of the mind. Our own religious history teems with the clamor of significant beasts that tradition, sheer neglect, and the narrative of “Man” have eclipsed from view. Since the rise of science, Western culture has undertaken the discovery and cataloging of the Earth’s remarkable zoological diversity. Perhaps the time has come for us to embark upon a different though related journey of discovery, the rediscovery of the meaningful fauna that leads from the visible to the invisible, from knowledge to virtue—from the narrative of “Man” to our true humanity. Each of us needs to understand that each creature followed its own course oblivious to “me.” And yet together they seem to make up an intelligible whole that concerns me in ways I have not even begun to fathom.