Heidegger

The Animal Holocaust? Why Factory Farming is a Serious Problem by Justin E.
H. Smith www. dissidentvoice. org December 11, 2006

Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of philosophy at Concordia University and
a frequent contributor to various publications. A partial archive of his
writing may be found at: www. jehsmith. com

In his 1954 essay, “The Question concerning Technology,” the philosopher and
unrepentant Nazi Martin Heidegger wrote: “Agriculture is now a mechanized
food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in the gas
chambers and death camps.”

The former rector of Freiburg has by now been (almost) universally denounced
for his equation of Auschwitz and agribusiness, notwithstanding a few
academic disciples who remain convinced that their master could do or say no wrong.
Heidegger, it seems, wanted nothing short of peasants in quaint national
costumes dirtying their hands to bring viands to his austere Black Forest table
(machine-picked cabbage is so inauthentic). Among European philosophers,
Heidegger’s contemptuous idiocy would remain unrivaled until Jean Baudrillard’s
quip about the World Trade Center’s former workers that “the horror for the
4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horrors of
living in them — the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and
steel.”

Yet there is one respect in which the comparison of modern farming methods
to the mass killing of humans cannot but strike one as fair. To wit, 10 billion
cows, pigs, lambs, chickens (and scattered other creatures) are slaughtered
per year in the United States alone, bringing a painful end to their short,
miserable, lives in squalid and stinking crates.

The term “animal holocaust” has been making the rounds, in reference to the
mass slaughter of animals in factory farming. Is this an impious mockery,
worthy of Heidegger, of an event that was without parallel in history? Or is it,
on the contrary, a true and simple description of what is happening? Surely
we may agree with Norman Finkelstein that to insist upon the uniqueness of the
Holocaust to the point of outlawing all comparison would be unscientific,
and irresponsible. Nothing human beings do is completely unlike other things
they do. We might then begin by noting that factory farming is not
carnivorism-as-usual in much the same way that the Holocaust was not war as usual. We
might also note that both systems of mass killing can be traced back to
assembly-line techniques initially developed by Henry Ford and others not for the
destruction of living creatures, but for the production of machines.

But killing humans is to be despised, some will say, while eating the flesh
of animals is just in our nature, like the sting in a scorpion’s tail. It is
true that humans have always and almost everywhere eaten meat. But that is no
compelling defense of the present system, for people have always and
everywhere conducted war, and almost all of us agree that this is a good thing, if
not to eliminate, then at least to minimize. Not only have people always waged
war, they’ve also been, for the most part, either actively involved in
genocide or itching to be so involved, and it is probably no exaggeration to say
that most societies in human history would have relished the opportunity to do
to their neighbors what the fillers of mass graves in the 20th century in
fact did. What they lacked in earlier times was not the evil, just the
equipment.

The Roman soldiers who placed diseased animal corpses upriver from towns
they wished to destroy could no more cognize the moral abhorrence we feel today
at mass killing of humans than they could imagine that someday a small
minority of people would find meat-eating objectionable. Indeed, if these Romans had
read their Greek forebears, they would have learned of a culture that
generally valued martial virtues while often denouncing the consumption of animal
flesh as unholy. The point is that all the moral outrage about war in our
present era, even war against civilians, appears to be something of a historical
anomaly, and thus one can’t but ask the question: by what right can we look
at a practice — the mass slaughter of animals — that is patently similar to
the mass slaughter of humans in numerous ways, and refuse to acknowledge its
moral abhorrence on the grounds that “this is just what people have always
done”?

Many people have good reasons for not being able to get behind the idea of “
animal rights.” Some point out, compellingly, that it is absurd to carry on
about animal rights in a world in which we are doing such a poor job of
ensuring that humans enjoy human rights. But one does not have to go so far as to
affirm that animals have rights to agree that the present system of meat
production is abhorrent. Animals are not things, any more than humans are. They are
creatures, and creatures command a very different sort of treatment than the
sundry inanimate objects that dot our landscape: this not for reasons having
to do with morality, but simply as a matter of fact. To be in a room with a
raccoon is a very different sort of experience than to be in a room with a
toaster. Try it sometime. The raccoon is another; the toaster is an object, and
you do not have to be particularly sentimental about cute and fuzzy things
in order to grant this.

The present system of meat production is perceived as acceptable by most not
due to any widespread consensus that animals are not the sort of creatures
that have rights, and thus that whatever happens to them behind the gates of a
factory farm is morally irrelevant. It is perceived as acceptable only
because it is not, for the most part, perceived. What is perceived is the finished
commodity, wrapped in cellophane, physically and conceptually remote from the
creature that gave it. This system enables people to participate in and
perpetuate a practice that many would not be able to condone, or even stomach,
if they were required to draw a bit closer to the stench of blood and feces, to
the incalculable suffering, that goes into the production of their meals.
This system is capitalism perfected, the same smooth exploitation of false
consumer consciousness that makes sweatshop-produced sporting gear and
fuel-inefficient SUV’s possible, yet, with respect to the suffering involved (if I may
be permitted to make such a comparison), vastly worse.

To insist on waiting until all human problems are taken care of before we
get around to animal suffering is nothing but an evasion. For the sort of
society that can accommodate mass slaughter and torture of animals is one so
skilled at positioning its blinders that these may just as easily be deployed to
block out any inconvenient human suffering as well. In other words, if facing
up to the suffering of animals is put off on the grounds that human suffering
is more important, then it will be put off forever.

Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of philosophy at Concordia University and
a frequent contributor to various publications. A partial archive of his
writing may be found at: www. jehsmith. com

Regards,

Jud Evans.

Personal Website. http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…

Posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
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