But then, in Byron’s Sonnet to Chillon: “Eternal spirit of the chainless mind! / Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art, / For there thy habitation is the heart, / The heart which love of thee alone can bind.”12
When I think of myself wholly in terms of my eating, sleeping, urinating, defecating, cutting toenails (claws), scratching an itch, aging and dying, there can be no question that I am a finite mammal. This exercise, which runs against the grain of a lifetime of “civilizing” and self-idealizing, requires some concentrated effort. But as we define ourselves as rational animals, Homo sapiens, we continue to marvel over our amazing capacity for self-reflection and rational analysis—for viewing ourselves from a vantage point outside the self, for analyzing our own introspection, and for imagining what it would be like to be someone else, including their own imaginings, even a slave or animal. The 100 billion neurons in our brains enable us even to study and understand their own actions.
Much human behavior is driven not by simple desires for food, money, sex, and security, but by our need to respond to this paradoxical nature. According to Niebuhr’s classic analysis, the anxiety generated by this paradoxical condition can lead to a denial of our capacity for rationality and self-transcendence, in the sin of sensuality; or, far worse, to a denial of our animality itself, the sin of pride.13 Animalizing other people is clearly an expression of the sin of pride and was long encouraged, as we will see, by the constant ubiquity and interaction with domesticated animals, as well as by the sharp conceptual division between humans and animals imposed by Western culture.
The psychological mechanism of animalization has been so deeply implanted in white culture, with respect to African Americans, that most white Americans have been unaware of their usually unconscious complicity as well as the significant benefits they have reaped from their “transcendent whiteness.” Especially during the period of racial slavery, the process of animalizing blacks enhanced the whites’ sense of being a rational, self-disciplined, and ambitious people, closely attuned to their long-term best interests. Racism became the systematic way of institutionalizing and justifying the individual white’s projection of an “animal Id” upon blacks. It took the form of an intellectual theory or ideology, cloaked in science, as well as actions and behavior legitimated by laws, customs, and social structure.
As I wrote in a review of Winthrop D. Jordan’s landmark book White Over Black, “The counter-image of the Negro became the living embodiment of what transplanted Europeans must never allow themselves to become.”14 This parasitic relationship gave special force to the whites’ sense of historical mission, the “American Dream” of overcoming the limits and boundaries of past history. But as I briefly explore later, a long succession of African American writers, beginning in the eighteenth century and including even Barack Obama, have conveyed the deeply felt effects of this process on individual and collective black self-esteem.
Yet the animalization of black slaves obviously differed markedly from that of groups in danger of genocide. For one thing, slaves were valuable as chattel property and as investments, and in nineteenth-century America their value soared as they became increasingly important to the economy. Far from being in danger of extermination, the lives of slaves were at least legally protected by state laws and interpretations of common law that ruled that the murder of a slave was a crime punishable by death.15
But if state laws and courts repeatedly recognized the humanity of slaves, Thomas Jefferson was far from being alone in fearing an eventual war between the races, a war that many whites predicted would end in the extermination of all “Negroes.”16 And the related subject of black colonization, which had immense theoretical support among the American antebellum white population, promised an eventual removal of the black population by “peaceful means”—an option that even Hermann Göring and some other Nazi leaders favored for the Jews before World War II and “the final solution.”
Finally, as we have seen, the populist lynching of blacks began to reach epic levels in the 1880s and ’90s. The widespread acceptance of scientific racism, a central prop for Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy, reinforced the traditional fear of sexual contamination, through rape or intermarriage—the invasion of the black Id, a reprisal of all the animalistic traits that had been projected on blacks to achieve white purity. In 1897, Rebecca Latimer Felton, a prominent Georgia feminist, journalist, and eventually the first woman to become a U.S. senator, aroused national attention with a near hysterical speech on the peril of black rapists: “[I]f it takes lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts,” she cried, “then I say lynch a thousand [blacks] a week if it becomes necessary.” Later, emphasizing the “moral retrogression” of blacks since the days of slavery, Felton accused the “promoters of Negro equality” of preparing the way for an imminent “revolutionary uprising” that “will either exterminate the blacks or force the white citizens to leave the country.” Fortunately, such extremists never came close to shaping federal policies, but it is significant that at the turn of the twentieth century the Chief Statistician of the U.S. Census, Professor Walter Francis Willcox, and other prominent statisticians, happily predicted the gradual extinction of the Negro race.17
THE MEANING OF ANIMALIZATION, PART II
It is almost impossible for us today to imagine the ubiquity and variety of animals that would closely surround us if we had lived at any time from the Bronze Age to the early twentieth century. When I hear the word “animal” today, I do not automatically picture horses, oxen, donkeys, mules, cows, goats, pigs, sheep, chicken, ducks, rabbits, and geese. Yet, as we saw in the testimony of former slaves regarding the animalization of blacks, that was the context everyone had in mind. Everyone depended on beasts of burden for every kind of pulling and hauling as well as for transport. The food they ate required the aid of animals in plowing fields as well as the hunting of all sorts of game. Every day most people interacted with animals, especially horses, as much as we do with cars and computers.
Even in towns and cities residents kept a variety of animals in addition to pets. Our “liberation” from this proximity and total dependence must be taken into account if we are to understand the past. The linguistic legacy of labeling some people brutish and beastly arose in the context of human “dominion” over an immense range of species from bees to bulls. Ironically, despite this daily intimacy and proximity with animals, Western culture long posited an almost unbridgeable gap between humans and animals that has now been greatly eroded, thanks to a major cultural transformation regarding cruelty (originally focused on slaves and animals), as well as scientific discoveries from Darwin to DNA.18
The animalization of people first required the “animalization” of animals, beings that can of course be described and understood in an infinite number of ways.19 The Oxford Thesaurus of 1992 equates “animal” with “physical, fleshly, sensual, gross, coarse, unrefined, uncultured, uncultivated, rude, carnal, crude, bestial, beastlike, subhuman.” An older Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms typically states that “When applied figuratively to human beings, animal either throws the emphasis on purely physical qualities or implies the ascendancy of the physical nature over the rational and spiritual nature.…” The Free Online Thesaurus tells us that “animalization” is “an act that makes people cruel or lacking in normal human qualities.”20 As historian Keith Thomas has written, Renaissance Europeans repeated the proverb “as drunk as a dog,” though they had of course never seen a drunken dog:
Men attributed to animals the natural impulses they most feared in themselves—ferocity, gluttony, sexuality—even though it was men, not beasts, who made war on their own species, ate more than was good for them and were sexually active all the year round. It was as a comment on human nature that the concept of “animality” was devised. As S. T. Coleridge would observe, to call human vices “bestial” was to libel the animals.21
Such examples of the animalization of animals are p
art of the wider and deeper phenomenon of “anthropodenial,” a term popularized by philosopher Martha Nussbaum and primatologist Frans de Waal—meaning the opposite of the anthropomorphism we often apply especially to pets: “a blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves.” According to Nussbaum, this insistence on a brick wall separating humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, despite the fact that our DNA is roughly 98 percent like that of chimpanzees, leads not only to appalling cruelties in treating animals but to certain failures of compassion for human suffering.22 While the forms of anthropodenial have changed over the centuries, having been strongly influenced by the ancient Greeks (though Plato famously referred to “the wild beast within us”), this dualism separating man from beast lives at the heart of the Judeo-Christian worldview, beginning with the Bible.
But before turning to the Bible, we should remember that domestication did require the creation of close bonds between humans and animals. And for millennia men and women have loved all kinds of pets, have treated animals as companions, and have even worshipped animals as deities. Though slaves were denied such godhood, they could sometimes be loved or become trusted companions. And the view that slaves were essentially children was often a variant on the animal metaphor. The permanent child would be equivalent in some ways to a dehumanized adult, a human who lacks the capacities of reason and self-introspection and analysis. And, like children, animals are petted, cuddled, and nurtured, or made to perform tricks as well as labor. Indeed, in many cultures small children were referred to and treated as if they were animals: “little deer,” “little bear or wolf,” “little lion”; and in antiquity, partly to avoid starvation, untold thousands of babies and children were sold into slavery or abandoned so that others would bring them up as slaves. However loved or cherished a slave might be, animalization implied the excision or removal of some inner human qualities that helped to protect an adult man or woman from being treated as a mere object—as opposed to a moral “center of consciousness.”
Now to the Bible. On the authority of Genesis, God first creates all the moving, living creatures, the “creeping things,” fowls, whales, cattle, beasts of the earth. He blesses them, tells them to be fruitful and multiply, and sees that “it was good.” Then God says,
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.23
After God has given humans dominion over all animal species, he “brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.” Adam then symbolically exercises human power by giving “names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.” Human dominion then increases substantially after the Fall from the Garden of Eden and after Noah rescues all the surviving animal species from the disastrous flood. Upon leaving the ark, Noah builds an altar to the Lord and sacrifices a member of every “clean” beast and fowl as burnt offerings. God is so pleased by the “sweet savour” of the fumes that he promises “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake … neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.” The biblical language suggests that the ritual of sacrificing animals (like animalizing other people) became a way of purging humans of “animality” and thus of a major source of sin.
In addition to being needed for regular sacrifice, animals will now be wholly subordinate, a source of food for humans:
And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.24
It is important to stress that over the ages these words of Genesis have shaped fundamental assumptions and values in Western culture—even for early church fathers who were more concerned with counteracting pagan views of human-animal interchangeability, and for the countless people who did not literally accept all the details of the story of creation. Moreover, Keith Thomas, in his invaluable account Man and the Natural World, shows that from 1500 to 1800, the biblical sense of human uniqueness and privilege gained considerable new strength in Western Europe. As Europeans entered a wholly new stage of exploration, conquest, and colonization, including the transportation of millions of African slaves to all parts of the New World, there was a skyrocketing confidence in man’s right and ability to exploit the surrounding world of nature.
Renaissance men could draw on Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient Greek writers to reinforce the biblical view that everything in the natural world existed solely to serve man’s interests—that everything had a human purpose. Since beasts supposedly had no souls and no conception of a future, domesticated animals were said to be much better off than their wild brethren, who had to fend for themselves and were vulnerable to predators and the sufferings of old age.25 Besides, whether wild or tame, most animals were designed to provide food for humans, and Western Europeans were especially carnivorous. Even in the Middle Ages, the more affluent people ate an astonishing variety of meat, increasingly mixed with large quantities of spices from the East. One notable cook in medieval Savoy “instructed his purveyors to set out with forty horses six weeks or even two months before a two-day banquet to acquire deer, hares, partridges, pheasants, small birds … doves, cranes, and herons.”26
Keith Thomas points out that Western Europeans were shocked and expressed “baffled contempt” when they learned of the Buddhists’ and Hindus’ respect for animals, even insects.27 By the 1630s, any such respect was further weakened philosophically by the emerging work of the so-called Father of Modern Philosophy, René Descartes. As a great mathematician, it was perhaps natural for Descartes to conclude that “thinking” was his essence, the only thing about himself that could not be doubted (“I think, therefore I am”). Hence his body was like a machine, a matter of extension and motion that followed the laws of physics and was controlled by his wholly separate mind and soul. Since he became certain that animals lacked both a cognitive mind and soul, they were really automata, like clocks, capable of complex behavior but totally incapable of speech, reasoning, or perhaps even sensation (a conclusion endorsed by some of his disciples). While Thomas writes that Descartes had limited direct influence in Britain, he had “only pushed the European emphasis on the gulf between man and beast to its logical conclusion,” “thus clearing the way for the uninhibited exercise of human rule.” Even in England “the doctrine of human uniqueness was propounded from every pulpit.”28
The widening gulf between man and beast had important implications for what we might term social control and the spread of Christian civilization. Christians had regularly portrayed the devil as a mixture of man and animal, and the Antichrist as a beast. There had always been a tendency to animalize the serfs and peasants, especially those who worked daily with animals and were darkened by manure and soil as well as the sun.29 Thomas points out that bestiality, the ultimate sexual crime, became a capital offense from 1534 to 1861. The chains, bridles, and cages linked with domestication were used at times for beggars and the insane as well as for criminal offenders. Edmund Burke expressed a typical dehumanizing view of social class when contemplating the French Revolution: “Learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of the swinish multitude.”30
Like domestic animals, African slaves transported to the New World were supposed to benefit by being saved from human sacrifice, can
nibalism, and other cruel practices of savages in the uncivilized world; given a “purpose” in life, they would work for the good of society while being guaranteed food and shelter; some, if they had souls, might even be Christianized.
THE SEARCH FOR THE ANIMALIZED SLAVE
It was Western Europe’s unprecedented expansion that extended the animalizing process, usually epitomized by enslavement, to increasing numbers of outsiders, beginning with Slavs, Moors, Canary Islanders, Irish, Native Americans, and numerous peoples of West and East Africa. And the widening of the gap between man and beast, symbolized by Descartes, coincided with much more intense interaction with diverse outsiders, especially sub-Saharan Africans, whose alleged “beastly living” and proximity to apes greatly enhanced the Western Europeans’ rising self-image as the exemplars of global civilization.
In this section we will briefly describe how the search for the ideal animalized slave—a human who, as Aristotle put it, was clearly “born to be a slave”—led to the racist stereotyping of black Africans by the late eighteenth century. In the section on “Domestication and Internalization,” below, I will specifically show how Aristotle’s ideal slave pointed to the model of animal domestication and raised the issue of slaves “internalizing” their masters’ attempts at dehumanization—an issue related to the theme of the blacks’ alleged incapacity for genuine freedom in a democracy, which lies at the heart of the long historical legacy of slavery, especially in America.
From very early times, slaveholders had much preferred outsiders—“barbarians” (barbaroi) in the case of the ancient Greeks. While the Greeks did enslave one another in their wars, they favored foreigners who spoke barbaric languages and were thus “ignorant of the political institutions and cultural characteristics of the city.”31 Even more striking was the way ancient Israelites sought to mitigate the servitude of their own people (mostly debt slaves, with seven years of service) and limit perpetual chattel slavery, which involved more dehumanization, to outsiders and foes, especially Canaanites. As later Christians searched the Old Testament for proslavery sanctions, they found this crucial justification in Leviticus:
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 4
