Blaming the “Brutes”

Social power has always been problematic.  It can be used for good or used for ill.  (That story is as old as Adam and Eve.)  In the West today, many people have become increasingly aware of how social hierarchies have been one avenue through which social power has been misused -- such as slaveholder over slave, and men over women.  There have also been hierarchies that have fostered condescension toward animals (or even worse, their abuse).

Frequently in the U.S. and England, such condescension came in the form of applying the word "brutes" to other mammals, whether wild or domesticated.  And it is no coincidence that definitions of the word "brute" include not only "an animal; a beast," but also "a brutal, crude, or insensitive person." As one of countless examples, the 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley made the following parallel:  "To degrade Humane Kind [humankind] to a level with Brute Beasts."  Even the 19th-century nature-writer Henry David Thoreau, who we today think of as being enlightened for his time wrote:  "None of the brute creation requires more than Food and Shelter.”

This long-standing tendency to condescend to both animals and people lower on the hierarchy continued into the twentieth century, even if it sometimes became less obvious.  I chanced upon an example when I was reading, of all things, Michael Downing's history of the U.S.'s struggles over daylight saving time.  In the early 20th century, after legislation required an annual time-shift, The Nation magazine reported that "the ceremony of putting forward the clack has passed... without friction save for a growl from the farmer who anticipates trouble with his hired hand and his cow."  What caught my attention about that depiction was that the word "growl" -- a word usually used for the sound some non-human animals make --  was applied to a human being.  And, the two kinds of beings lowest in the hierarchy (the "cow" and the "hired hand") are blamed.

But farmers were the main opponents for a reason:  Even if they got up an hour earlier, that did not mean the cow's milk-giving had made any adjustment in its natural rhythms.  Moreover, what that statement by The Nation did not explain was that it was not just those underlings who objected to the time change.  But the underlings get blamed.

Today, our still expanding knowledge from the science of ecology has made it harder to think of our relationships with animals as their being on rungs below us on a vertical ladder. Instead, we -- humans and non-humans -- are related through multiple strands of a web.  Not just in the milk we drink and the food we eat, but also in cycles of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorus. Moreover, we humans are more dependent upon other species of life than most of them are dependent upon us.  We could not live without many of them, whereas most other species could do quite well without us.

As our ecological awareness expands, maybe we can also come to be more aware of our dependence upon people who are lower than us on the social scale.  And more sensitive to their needs as well.

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Which animals or people "beneath you," which you depend upon, come to your mind?

(The Berkeley quote is from Alciphron [1732], I. i. xiii. 48.)

(The Thoreau quote is from Walden [1854], Chap. 1:  "Economy.")

(The  quote from The Nation, April, 1919, is in Spring Forward, by Michael Downing.  © 2005 . p. 22.)