A couple months ago, I heard some weekend radio show guest talking about “animal rights extremists” being “anti-human.” He used an example of some of these “extremists” harassing some scientist in California or somewhere for doing testing on rats, supposedly in search of ways to treat and/or cure cancer. He went on to make unconvincing arguments for why humans are superior to animals, such as: animals in the wild do not have the ability for empathy and compassion that humans do; his suggestion being that this makes humans generally much better creatures despite the occasional brutal war here or violent killing there, not to mention the ongoing commitment to killing for food. Oh, but that’s nothing in comparison to wild animals violently killing for their food, right? I mean, humans wouldn’t do anything like that would they? No, humans just do their killing for food on a much grander scale than animals could ever dream of doing, but at least it is done “humanely” right? Well that just makes everything A-OK then. I’m sure that makes animals everywhere feel a lot better about the whole deal.¹

I trust you can sense my not-so-subtle sarcasm. Getting back to the guy on the radio; he was making the case for what he called “human exceptionalism” in order to suggest that pretty much whatever needs to be done to certain animals in the name of science, ostensibly to save human life (or delay death), is justified. In addition to his spoken assumption of human exceptionalism, he was also making several unspoken assumptions one could question; like the assumption that humans simply must conquer disease and/or make never-ending scientific advancement or the assumption that such experimenting is the best way to figure out how to stop cancer, and the hoped-for end justifies the means. But I am mostly interested in the particular way he chose to frame his argument completely around the idea of human superiority. The argument basically went like this,

• humans are exceptional creatures and far superior to animals

• humans get fatal diseases which they need science to find cures for through experimentation

• because humans are special and animals inferior, humans are therefore justified in using certain animals however they see fit in order to fight disease in humans

The way he framed it, assuming “human exceptionalism” from the start, was like saying the potential benefits to humans completely outweigh and nullify whatever is done to a few inferior animals in the process. So, naturally, one would not expect him to continue along this line of reasoning and start arguing that some “inferior” human lives could rightly be harmed as well in order to save “superior” human lives. Of course he didn’t say anything like this, but while listening to him make his points, it struck me that – even if one were to accept his conclusions based on the animal/human dichotomy he presented – it is still particularly problematic that such thinking seems likely to eventually end up there.

Naturally I can’t speak to the radio man’s views beyond what I have already related, but on a broader scale, within society at large, it seems the same kind of thinking emanates and works similarly to justify all manner of military force, ostensibly in order to fight against widely perceived social “ills”, e.g., communism, terrorism, etc. He even used the phrase “human exceptionalism,” which sounds an awful lot like the notion of “American exceptionalism.” It’s no stretch to say that the latter notion, much like the former, encourages an attitude of superiority and importance (only this time between humans) and provides justification for the kind of aggressive action we have taken in Iraq.

In our aggressive striking in Iraq, as in other places, wherein we claim we are fighting to make the world “safer” for (certain) people, there is clearly a casual willingness to sacrifice an unset number of human lives in order to wipe out various “germs” that are seen as incompatible and/or threatening to our power system. In the process, as if we were the well-meaning scientists and they the lab rats, we have essentially said to the people there caught in the fray with little choice in the matter, “we have the superior ways, and, thus, we know what is best and have the right to do what we must for protection (of our interests) and the advancement of our exceptional influence in the world. We are willing to risk many of your lives to achieve this goal, because everyone should realize that we and our ways are exceptional and must be unhindered in efforts to survive and advance.”

The main point of all this is that we are inconsistent across the board with regard to respecting life, and there simply isn’t a clear dividing line between humans and animals either. Just as many people love and cherish the animals they choose as pets but don’t seem to even flinch at the thought of the endless, industrialized slaughter of other animals that feeds the insatiable desire for meat abundance, many of the people who speak so loudly about being “pro-life” and respecting the “sanctity of life” somehow have no problem fully supporting the use of extremely deadly, unprovoked military force on who knows how many people.

Two things that probably help account for that inconsistency are; (1) most of us are so disconnected from those processes we don’t have to actually see the ugly consequences of them, and; (2) we are clearly selective in many ways about which lives and what kind of life are to be cherished and considered sacred. Thus, it is easy to convince ourselves that animals are at least being treated humanely all to some worthy end or that we are fighting people or forces that are so “evil,” whatever collateral damage there is in the process is (a) their fault in the first place and (b) a small price to pay for everyone in the end. However, what I think this Joe Shmoe on the radio unintentionally helped to illuminate is that all of this probably gets going in the first place and persists largely because of such presupposed and dangerously validating notions of superiority and exceptionalism.

Note

1. I’m actually not concerned so much with getting into the human/animal relationship argument here, but to those interested in the polar opposite view of the one in question, one has been pretty well summed up, albeit in fictional form, in Daniel Quinn’s novel Ishmael. [back]