[That] man should ever be the friend of man;
Should eye with tenderness all living forms,
His brother-emmets, and his sister-worms.
Darwin did not endorse Stewart’s idea that suffering could be carried by particles of inorganic matter from one being to another, and thus he emphatically did not conclude that this moral-material interconnectedness was a reason to refrain from eating animals. It was precisely because all life was united, in Darwin’s view, that the loss of one animal did not impinge on universal happiness. He believed, on the contrary, that the natural processes of death and renewal were perpetually increasing happiness. This emphasis on interconnected natural life cycles was a vigorous counterpoint to the ‘sentimental’ ethic which focused all its concerns on individual suffering.38
This unsentimental ecological view of nature had been developed decades earlier by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in his Histoire Naturelle, and had recently been redacted in Oliver Goldsmith’s A History of the Earth and Animated Nature. Buffon was part of a long tradition going back to the theodicists Leibniz and the Archbishop William King, who argued that the apparent brutality of natural predation and human carnivorism can be reconciled to the idea of universal benevolence. Buffon saw death as the mother of life: the potential for life simply transferred from one form to another. To explain this transfer of life, Buffon proposed that the life capacity of all beings consisted of a special sort of ‘animate atoms’ (a theory similar to Leibniz’s idea that animated ‘monads’ constantly ‘transformed’ into new life forms). Buffon explained that if the living being they were in died or was eaten, they would simply dissolve, circulate and be absorbed into other living beings. ‘These particles pass from body to body,’ said Buffon, creating ‘a perpetual renovation of beings’.
Buffon, too, saw metempsychosis as a fabular rendition of this true Lucretian-Epicurean material life cycle. Among the Hindus, he said, it was known ‘long before the present aera, that all animated beings contained indestructible living particles, which passed from one body into another’. It was this belief, he noted, that made the Hindus conclude that ‘they ought to abstain from every thing endowed with life.’ However, according to Buffon this vegetarian position put far too much emphasis on the preservation of an individual organism and ignored the fact that ‘a succession of beings cannot otherwise be effected than by mutual destruction’.39 Buffon’s dedication to the principle of ‘plenitude’ – valuing the maximum quantity and variety of life – was a forebear of Erasmus Darwin’s ‘greater common good’ principle. It was essentially a laissez-faire attitude to the Hobbesian war in nature. Although Buffon believed that the quantity of animate atoms in the universe was a fixed constant, whereas Darwin believed that life and happiness were on the increase, they both agreed that death was a desirable part of the life cycle, for it facilitated the greatest number and variety of organisms. In this, Buffon and Darwin formed a united front against the unscientific, hyper-sentimental vegetarians who saw only the suffering of individuals rather than the system of which they were a part.
This was the crux between two brands of philosophy whose disputes still rage today between the biocentric ‘tree-huggers’ who focus value on ecosystems, and the animal-welfare ‘bambi-lovers’ who care more for individual organisms’ experience of pain or pleasure. Just as they do today, those who valued ecosystems as a whole, like Darwin and Buffon, claimed that vegetarians blindly concentrated on the loss of individual animals while ignoring the wider benefit of meat-eating and the natural basis for a laissez-faire attitude to carnivorism. However, Stewart’s karmic idea that suffering was retained by matter even after death added a new variable to these calculations: matter incorporated into new life, but it carried with it previous sensations, which could make future life miserable, rather than ‘happy’. Since his aim, like Darwin’s, was to increase universal happiness, the principle of persistent suffering inserted a new integer which made the moral equation – even from the ecosystemic point of view – show that killing animals was wrong. In the Romantic era elements of the modern environmental debate were in full swing, and the conflicts were expressed acutely in the reactions to Stewart, whom many dismissed as a ‘madman’, while others embraced him as the embodiment of universal benevolence.40
* * *
*Europeans; so called for their unwonted headgear.
*The wedge-shaped triangular bone at the base of the vertebral column; Bentham means having a tail or not.
*Pythagoras.
TWENTY-FIVE
To Kill a Cat: Joseph Ritson’s Politics of Atheism
Among John Stewart’s London acquaintances was the radical vegetarian Joseph Ritson (1752–1803). Ritson was a renowned antiquarian, famous for his valuable collections of folk-ballads about Robin Hood, and for providing Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) with background information for his bestselling historical novels. Despite his public eminence Ritson was a vigorously anti-establishment republican; he visited France in 1791, and looked forward to the revolution spreading to Britain.1 During the government crackdown on republicans in 1792, Ritson feared for his life as he watched his friends being picked off one by one. He cowered behind his desk at the bailiff’s office where he worked, as government agents prowled around collecting information, and he warned his friends that ‘I find it prudent to say as little as possible upon political subjects, in order to keep myself out of Newgate.’2 Anyone convicted of ‘speculating in his closet upon the title of tyrants’, Ritson reflected morosely, would be dragged to the scaffold, hanged, ‘cut down alive, his privy members cut off, and his heart and bowels ripped out, and thrown into the fire before his face; then his head is to be cut off, and his body divided into four quarters, which are to be at the King’s disposal: The execrable tyrant who first devised, ordained and permitted this horrid butchery,’ wrote Ritson, ‘would probably eat them raw.’
Fear of his own horrible demise, however, did not stop Ritson privately indoctrinating his friends and family with republicanism and trying to wean them from the ‘unnatural and diabolical practice of devouring your fellow creatures’. He devised an egalitarian system of universal rights which opposed the hierarchical structure of both human society and natural ecologies. Ritson had shunned meat since reading Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees at the age of nineteen, and after thirty years of being the most famous vegetarian public figure in London, he published An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, As A Moral Duty (1802). The Essay was an anthology of vegetarian writing which his acerbic commentary marshalled into a formidable attack on man’s presumptuous idea of his place in nature. By lacing his material together in a more analytical and aggressive way than his fellow vegetarian anthologist George Nicholson, Ritson’s Essay became a flagship for the emergence of a cohesive tradition, and it showed how vegetarianism ought to be an essential part of the revolutionary agenda.
Ritson was a great admirer of Stewart’s robust individuality, and he warmly dubbed him ‘citizen Bruin’; they obviously shared a great deal – both republican, atheist and vegetarian. They were also bound together by their mutual friend, the architect of anarchy and communism, William Godwin (1756–1836), Percy Shelley’s father-in-law, who endorsed political reasons for limiting the consumption of flesh, though he refused to eat the insipid vegetable food of his many vegetarian friends until chronic piles, constipation and delirium eventually made him all but give up meat.3 Stewart himself saw his own works as the fruition of Godwin’s idealism, and for a while Stewart, Ritson and Godwin enjoyed each other’s company. By 1793, however, Ritson was fed up with Stewart’s arrogant posturing, his sell-out to bourgeois culture, and the blithering karmic mumbo-jumbo he produced to defend their vegetarian principles. Sending one of Stewart’s books to a mutual friend, Ritson declared contemptuously that ‘he does not deserve the name of citizen’, adding with finality that ‘I am so disgusted with his bigotted prejudices and absurd opinions, that the continuation of our acquaintance wi
ll be owing rather to ceremony than to esteem.’4
While Stewart was busy speculating on incredible doctrines of universal sentience, Ritson was intent on nurturing a rationale for vegetarianism that would avoid the flaws of sentimentalism. Defending vegetarianism on the basis of avoiding animal suffering looked shaky in the light of the counter-vegetarian notion of the painless death, and the ecological argument – espoused by Buffon and Darwin – that ecosystems as a whole gained more ‘pleasure’ from an individual animal’s death than the animal lost in dying. Instead of using animal suffering as a basis for vegetarianism, therefore, Ritson constructed an animal rights argument based on the inherent value of life, which gave animals a natural right to their existence. Furthermore, he showed that humanity’s claim to have an inalienable right to kill any animal they chose was built on a baseless religious myth. Thus Ritson provided an important perspective to the emerging debate about animal rights and an answer to the ecological defence of meat-eating.
Whereas Stewart had been content to regard humanity as the world’s principal moral agent, Ritson was determined to kick Homo sapiens from his self-made supernatural pedestal. Religion was responsible for giving humans the idea that they transcended the rest of the universe, and so in his Essay on Abstinence it was on religion that Ritson turned with fury.
Humans, insisted Ritson, were not essentially different from the monkeys to whom they were so manifestly related. Whatever rights humans had to life, animals had them too, and eating them was as good as cannibalism.5 God was an invention designed to flatter humans into believing that they were half divine while the rest of nature was a quagmire of pure dirt. Religion was not so much God-worship as self-worship; and it was time this super-elevated ape was taught where he belonged in the scheme of things.6
Ritson dragged man down to earth, stripped him of his divine soul and shoved him into the zoo with all the other animals. Inviting his readers to re-examine this curious animal, he declared on the strength of all the anatomical evidence that he was clearly formed like a herbivore and ‘in a state of nature, would, at least, be as harmless as an ourang-outang’.7 In any case, whether meat-eating was natural or not it was this carnivorous practice – first introduced by malevolent sacrificial priests8 – that had turned man from a docile herbivore into ‘the most universal destroyer’.9 As things stood, he said in a fit of pessimistic fury, humans and other predators were perpetrating such horrific ‘murder, bloodshed, cruelty, malignance, and mischief’, that it might well ‘be better that such diabolical monsters should cease to exist’.10 If ecosystems required murder to sustain themselves, they had a negative overall value. If nature was a constant war, it could not create the greatest possible happiness; it merely contributed to universal misery.
In order to rectify this dire situation, Ritson proposed that Europeans should emulate the Hindus. He was contemptuous of the Brahmin priesthood and their hypocritical doctrines, but, like Rousseau, Oswald, Stewart and Volney, he nevertheless admired the qualities of their vegetarian philosophy. They demonstrated that the vicious cycle of flesh-eating was the cause and the effect of human cruelty, whereas vegetarianism instilled egalitarian relations between people and ‘the exercise of gentleness and humanity toward the minuteëst objects of creation’.11 Furthermore, meat-eating was the preserve of the rich, so any self-respecting democrat should be vegetarian.12 Atheism was the ground-rock for demolishing the idea of man’s violent supremacy over animals, and thus Ritson redrew the battle lines for the debate over animal rights and ecology.
Ritson quickly converted his widowed sister to vegetarianism: ‘You will certainly find yourself healthier,’ he told her in 1782, ‘and if you have either conscience or humanity, happier, in abstaining from animal food than you could possibly be in depriving, by the indulgence of an unnatural appetite and the adherence to a barbarous custom, hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent creatures of their lives, to the enjoyment of which they have as good a right as yourself.’13 But his first major problems emerged when training her son, Joe Frank, to become an upstanding radical republican vegetarian. In the face of Frank’s boyish knack for revealing inherent paradoxes, Ritson found it difficult to define the reasonable limits of his life-preserving principles. First there was the questionable ethical status of eggs: ‘eggs are henceforward to be considered as animal food,’ wrote Ritson to Frank in 1782, ‘and consequently prohibited to be eaten. You will take notice of this, and act accordingly.’ Frank’s response to this unsavoury deprivation was ‘refractory and obstropulous’ so Ritson agreed to allow that ‘if a pudding stand before you, you are not obliged to refuse it on account of the eggs, I do not myself. But I should never direct a pudding to be made for me with eggs in it.’14 These occasional indulgences were permitted, Ritson explained in 1802, because it ‘deprives no animal of life, though it may prevent some from comeing into the world to be murder’d and devour’d by others’.15
If preventing death was the aim, Frank perceived, surely the first place to start was with the bloodthirsty animal predators. Indeed, Ritson did speak as viciously against ‘sanguinary and ferocious’ feline predators as he did against humans.16 Taking this logic to its extreme, the young lad murdered his neighbour’s cat: ‘I rather think he went a little too far, in putting his friend Mrs Wiseman’s cat to death for killing a mouse, which perhaps nature, certainly education, had taught her to look upon as a duty,’ wrote Ritson apologetically to his sister. But to Frank himself he played another tune: ‘Far from desiring to reprove you for what I learn you actually did, you receive my warmest approbation of your humanity.’17 As all animals had the right to life, this had to apply to those murdered by carnivorous animals as well as by carnivorous humans. It was surely as worthy to interfere on behalf of a cat’s prey as it was on that of a human – a problem with the animal rights basis for vegetarianism that is still posed in academic debates today.18
When the cartoonist James Sayers satirised Ritson in 1803, this was one of the logical implications he ridiculed. The emaciated cat in the top of Sayers’ picture is chained to the wall, allowing the rats to run amok. This alludes to Ritson’s radical politics: chain up those at the top of the hierarchy so that the lower orders can play in liberty. But Sayers’ point is that trying to prevent predation, and by extension political hierarchies, is unnatural. The cat starves and rats perpetuate the cycle of violence by gnawing on a bundle of candles made of whale tallow. Hierarchies, Sayers implied, are a natural part of social harmony, just as they are in natural ecologies. Republicanism and vegetarianism are presented as unnatural ideals misguidedly attempting to eradicate inequality in nature. Ecology could be used to defend political hierarchies; no surprise that in the twentieth century Fascists used ecology to present their ideology as ‘natural’.
Ritson had implied to his sister that cats were perversely trained to catch mice by their inhumane owners (as John Williamson of Moffat once claimed). Perhaps they could be reformed into peaceful herbivores – a hope strengthened by Ritson’s suspicion that animals were capable of language. Accordingly, in Sayers’ cartoon Ritson has placed a copy of his Essay on Abstinence open in front of the cat, presumably in the hope that it would read and reform its vicious ways.
Republicanism, vegetarianism and atheism formed a three-pronged attempt to level the hierarchies of politics, nature and religion. Naturally, therefore, the Essay on Abstinence evoked more negative press than any previous vegetarian treatise, and Ritson, already a famous literary figure, became the most notorious vegetarian of his time. Unsurprisingly, most people were not so keen on seeing humanity tumbled into the mud, and the reaction to Ritson’s ungodly assault on religion and monarchy was outrage. Robert Southey reviled the Essay, ‘every page and almost every line of which teems with blasphemy’.19 Critics were delighted when, in the following year, Ritson apparently went mad – allegedly in the process of writing a paper claiming Jesus Christ was an impostor. He was discovered in the act of setting fire to his papers, whereupon he ch
ased concerned onlookers away with a knife and started hurling his furniture about and breaking his windows. His apoplexy finally brought on his miserable death. Reviewers already hostile to Ritson did not hesitate to damn him as well. In the British Critic, Robert Nares called the Essay ‘ineffable nonsense’:
Joseph Ritson by James Sayers (1803)
mischievous in its design, detestable in its conduct, impious, and even daringly atheistical, in its principles and avowed deductions … The fool, who, in the pride of his no-knowledge … aspired to pull the Almighty from his throne, sunk, in the twinkling of an eye, beneath the level of the lowest and most contemptible of the beasts that perish! It is said that he was found naked, at midnight, in the court of his inn, with a large clasp-knife in one hand, and a copper kettle in the other, on which he was exercising his impotent fury.
Refusing to relent even in the wake of an adversary’s death was most unusual, and publishing humiliating details of his last hours was seen as distasteful in any circumstances. Sir Walter Scott, ever an advocate of Ritson’s integrity, wrote to Robert Spence that ‘I was very indignant at the insult offered to his memory, in one of the periodical publications … imputing the unfortunate malady with which he was afflicted to providential vengeance and retribution, for which the editor, in exact retributive justice, deserved to be damned for a brutal scoundrel.’20 But the slur stuck: it was rumoured that Ritson’s vegetarian principles had been the product of madness – a common slur on vegetarians with which Crab, Robins, Stewart, Oswald, Holwell, Valady, Graham and Brothers had all been tarred. The original article in the Dictionary of National Biography maintained this position, even though Ritson had been a practising vegetarian for thirty years before he went mad, and even the recent edition suggests that the inchoate format of Ritson’s Essay was the product of ‘incipient insanity’.21
The Bloodless Revolution Page 46
