Second-Person Theology
In chapter 8, I described the concept of second persons. We become persons through our dependence upon other persons from whom we “acquire the essential arts of personhood.”41 Lives begin in communality and interdependence; thus in our acquisition of knowledge, “persons are essentially second persons”42 and our knowledge is never atomistically individualistic or “self-made.” In chapter 9, I described my own metaphysical shift in relationship to animals that resulted from a second-person relationship with an animal. Second-person theologies are needed to upend patriarchal beastly theologies. Like second-person thinking in which “knowledge claims are forms of address, speech acts, moments in a dialogue that assume and rely on the participation of (an)other subject(s),”43 second-person theology derives from encountering the other animals as subjects. As Vicki Hearne suggests, our knowledge claims are inadequate if in discussing animals we have not included them within the dialogue.
God unfolds in relationships. Most animals are excluded from experiencing this notion of “God-in-relationship” because we use them precisely in ways that sever relationships. Many forms of animal exploitation involve caging and confining them, restricting their ability—no, their need—to enjoy social relationships, and bestow upon animals an expectation that they can exist inanimately even while alive. Does the creation of some beings solely for the purpose of being objects make sense in the face of an intrinsically and radically relational divinity? If God is process, being, and revealed through relationship should we not situate all beings within that divine relationship, seeing with loving eyes?
It is said that talking about whether animals suffer pain is like talking about the existence of God. But, let’s push this further. What if trying to have a conversation with an animal is like trying to have a conversation with God? Would we then bring a discipline of attending to our relationships with animals? Vicki Hearne refers to Martin Heidegger’s suggestion of “listening to the dog’s being.”44 Sally Carrighar in Home to the Wilderness: A Personal Journey offers an example of such listening to an animal’s beingness: “I talked to the birds and animals and I talked sense, in a normal voice. . . . [I would say] to a very shy grouse, ‘Have you thought of taking a dustbath? Look here where the earth is so fine and dry.’ I knew they did not understand the words, but to such sensitive creatures a tone may convey more than we realize. . . . It seemed that they had to feel a true sense of warmth, not sentimentality but concern.45 Need it be observed that such conversations are impossible with one’s “steak” dinner or leather coat?
Second-person theology incorporates animals both directly through acknowledging them as subjects rather than objects, and also in its care to create knowledge claims that assume and rely on the participation of these other subjects. The result would be not only the destabilizing of flesh and leather and other forms of animal exploitation, but the retiring of the word beast, recognizing that its function is restricted to a vertically organized world.
Liberating animals from the appellation of beast, we would also be liberated from the need to label humans as “not beasts.” Beast would appear in dictionaries with the label archaic appended to it.
From Beastly Theologies to Second-Person Theologies
I do think that one’s fellow animals of other species are aware of the change in one’s own attitude when one becomes vegetarian. . . . I do think that the psychological act of deciding to be a vegetarian frees one from a lot of guilt towards animals and I think they are aware of this. My impression is that one’s relationship to them becomes very much less ambiguous and ambivalent and one is freer to think of them as equals. I think it’s this property that they respond to. I definitely have the impression that I have a different relationship with animals since I became a vegetarian.46
—Brigid Brophy
With second-person theologies, animals would no longer be absent referents in theological discourse—metaphors for human beings—nor absent referents in theological praxis, objects whom we do not know anything about, or whom we assume to know categorically and universally. Second-person theologies are inimical to the structure of the absent referent. When animals are absent conceptually, we have eliminated the space in which our embodied knowing could encounter relationship, there is nothing for our loving eye to engage with. Whatever limits there are to knowing the viewpoints of the other animals, we can know that what matters to them is that we stop defining them and using them. We can never be in relation with all animals nor need we be, but we can work to release all animals from being ontologized as usable.
In dismantling the structure of the absent referent, second-person theologies resituate animals, resubjectifying them, acknowledging that each animal is a subjective presence in the world. As Barbara Noske argues, we need to move to a descriptive rather than definitional discourse about animals, recognizing a species boundary that is horizontal rather than vertical and hierarchical.
Second-person theologies offer alternatives to the dualistic reduction of human versus animal claims. By challenging the dualism, we refuse to accept the oppositional nature of the definitions of humans and animals. In this we are not making “animals” like “humans,” only less so. We are, however, releasing both humans and animals from this reductive dualism. We may discover that our concepts of ourselves will change as our concepts of animals change. In fact, feminist challenges to the notion of the autonomous human subject will benefit from the liberating of the other animals from the category of “animal.” As Barbara Noske explains:
Nature had to be devaluated to a state where it could be useful economically and technically, though harmless ideologically. But nature could only be devaluated if and when humanity detached itself from nature and ceased to feel part of it. The Dutch philosopher/anthropologist Ton Lemaire makes clear that the two developments, namely, the objectification of nature and the autonomization of the human subject, go hand in hand, “reality could only fully become an object after humanity had collected its personality out of the unconscious intertwinement with external nature.”47
In recognizing that we can be second persons to animals, we reinsert our personality within creation. We are not separated, autonomous “knowers” in a dominating culture but second persons with the rest of nature. The process of reengaging with creation, and particularly with the other animals, will produce a different subjectivity and a different theology.
In a culture that ontologizes animals as exploitable we must address current behavior that is predicated on this ontology. A few centuries from now people might have to do something actively to cause the harm of animals, now they must actively do something to impede the harm of animals (i.e., bag vegetarian lunches instead of buying school cafeteria lunches, inquire into the contents of soap, shampoo, etc.). As long as “meat” or “fur” or “leather” are available in stores, people have to intervene actively against the consumerism of producing, procuring, or purchasing these “products.” We must resist doing something we have been taught to do.
What remains for all of us is a task of personal and mythic archaeology, the reinspection of old terrain. We ourselves are buried under layers of categories that construct species difference as a meaningful ethical determinant. We can no longer allow the bishop and other patriarchal knowers to determine our knowledge. Those issues identified by feminist theology as central to patriarchal religion—issues such as the subordination of experience to authority, the rigid conceptualization of “God” as Father and monarch, the notion of the separate, atomistic self—are also central to the idea that animals can be objects or instruments, and that our relationship with the divine trumps their inviolability. Catherine Keller proposes that “the pull toward connection, when coordinated with feminist sensibility, can and does generate a new meaning of what it is to be a self.”48 Would this pull toward connection, this new meaning of being a self, and its relationship to the ultimate in life, would this deep affinity with all beings condone using animals instrumen
tally, experimenting on their live bodies, and consuming their dead bodies? Given the nature of the interlocking system of oppression, can we continue to ignore this question?
Figure 19 Carol J. Adams from Warriors series, 2017, Kyle Tafoya, illustrator.
Artist’s Statement
This project started with an idea, in collaboration with my dear friend and mentor Patricia Denys, to show animal activists and their fight to end suffering. I chose Carol, Paul Watson, Sue Coe, and Jane Goodall. I wanted the animals to shine through the subject’s face and become a visible part of who they are and what they fight to protect.
Kyle Tafoya
Coda
The day after the 1990 March for Animals in Washington, the Washington Post carried an article about it in its local edition. The article described the march, and quoted one animal defender who said, “We’re no longer just little old ladies in tennis shoes.”
I am hoping to live long enough to qualify to be a little old lady. Since, unlike the person who made the comment, this category is something I actively aspire to, I wondered about this backhanded compliment.
After all, one thing that was being said was “before the rest of us discovered the legitimate and important issues about humans’ oppression of animals, little old ladies had.” Perhaps when they started agitating on behalf of animals they were not little old ladies. But people’s refusal to face the facts about what we do to animals made them old in the process.
We know that the British antivivisection movement of the nineteenth century would have collapsed without women. We know that an estimated 75 percent of animal rights activists today are women.
This is what I know about little old ladies:
As women age they often become more radical. As men age, they are likely to become more conservative.
Apparently, according to Dr. Gideon Seaman and Barbara Seaman, as women age they leave flesh out of their diet. They have learned to listen to their bodies.1 Listening to our bodies is something our culture actively works against. In a sense we have an ethic of disembodied domination: an ethic that disregards the effects on our bodies and the earth’s body of consuming animals, and an ethic that disdains to consider animals and their bodies as legitimate concerns.
Other cultures respect the older generation and especially women: women were known as wise women. But Western culture hurls numerous epithets at old women: calling them for instance crones, “an ugly, withered old woman,” or “hag.” Crone can also mean “a cantankerous or mischievous woman.” What feminist does not quarrel and disagree with the dominant culture as it now exists? Mary Daly suggests that crones are the long-lasting ones.2 That’s what feminists will have to be to defeat animal exploitation.
Another meaning of the term crone is “a withered, witchlike old woman.” Just a few hundred years ago, hundreds of thousands of women were accused of being witches during a massive antiwoman campaign:3 many of them were little old ladies,4 or single women who were herbal healers and midwives. Many were said to have “witches’ familiars,” i.e., companion animals who were said to be equally bewitched. As Keith Thomas describes it:
But whether these domestic pets or uninvited animal companions were seen as magical is another matter. These creatures may have been the only friend these lonely old women possessed, and the names they gave them suggest an affectionate relationship. Matthew Hopkin’s victims in Essex included Mary Hockett, who was accused of entertaining “three evil spirits each in the likeness of a mouse, called ‘Littleman,’ ‘Prettyman’ and ‘Daynty,’ ” and Bridget Mayers, who entertained “an evil spirit in the likeness of a mouse called ‘Prickeares.’ ” More recently the novelist J. R. Ackerley has written of his mother that: “One of her last friends, when she was losing her faculties, was a fly, which I never saw but which she talked about a good deal and also talked to. With large melancholy yellow eyes and long lashes it inhabited the bathroom; she made a little joke of it but was serious enough to take in crumbs of bread every morning to feed it, scattering them along the wooden rim of the bath as she lay in it.”5
When flies and mice are invested with the qualities of personhood—given names, seen as individuals, interacted with—we have the basis for an ethic that would challenge their oppression.
Animal suffering is mostly invisible to the average consumer. Flesh departments in supermarkets never show films about animals being imprisoned in intensive farms or butchered, and household products never carry on their label a picture of the animal experimentation that was conducted as part of product testing. What people take for granted about their lives requires the invisibility of animals and of their experience of oppression. We face the challenge of making the invisible—and that which people actively wish to keep invisible—very visible. When we make animals’ experiences visible, we expose traditional ethical, moral, and religious discussions that ignored animals.
Traditionally, concern about animals has been seen as individual and emotional—something equated with little old ladies. Who, remember, like all women, were not allowed to contribute to the original discussions about what is ethical, moral, or religious in the first place. Let’s recall what Spinoza said: “The objection to killing animals was ‘based upon an empty superstition and womanish tenderness, rather than upon sound reason.’ ”6 The mischievous, cantankerous crone inside myself asks, who decided what is “sound reason”? Why is tenderness considered a negative quality, equated with effeminacy? Animal defenders are actively dismantling the dominant philosophies, and that, of necessity, will involve a feminist approach that acknowledges these outlaw emotions as appropriate.
Louise Armstrong, in examining the problem of what freedom meant to nineteenth-century women who proposed what some condescendingly call “protectionism,” argues that “what women were seeking was freedom from what men were free to (and wanted to) do to them: abandon them to poverty and disrepute and take possession of their kids along with everything else; beat them; rape them; thrive on images that reflected and normalized female degradation as justified.” She continues: “And for a class of people (women) to want to be free from institutionalized and legalized abuse and exploitation by another class (men) is not necessarily a lesser or weaker goal than wanting equal power to abuse and exploit.” Then she offers this example of what she means: “(If people feel free to kill and eat chickens, maybe the first thing the chickens want is not their own place setting at the table, but the freedom not to be on the platter.)”7 When factory-farmed animals are consumed, we do not see them directly; they are not sitting next to us. If their dead selves are on our platter, their living selves have been given little place in our conceptual framework. And if they actually occupy a place in our conceptual framework they will probably not appear on our platter.
I was already a v egetarian when I began to learn about factory farming. Yet, it was, and still is, disturbing to spend much time reading about the lives of terminal animals. It is painful to encounter descriptions of imprisoned, bored, hungry, disfigured, diseased animals, at times stressed to the point of cannibalism, in numbers difficult to conceptualize. We soon realize that it is not our own individual vegetarianism that is the solution; though this is necessary. A revolution in how our society conceptualizes itself is required.
I began by reviewing the journal articles that are used as sources in books on factory farming. As I read through these articles, couched in scientific language—and I realized that entire journals are devoted to “Animal Science”—the massive industry that they are writing about became more apparent. The question so many of these articles explore, though in objective language, is, in my paraphrase: “Now that we have completely deprived the animals of everything they instinctively need to live—social organization, the feel of the earth for rooting or dust bathing, the mother’s teat for a newborn calf to suck, how do we manage the responses that occur in these animals?” They are concerned with responses like the “social vice” of cannibalism, a calf licking his or her stal
l, pregnant animals about to deliver, desperately attempting to create a nest on concrete. Everything that requires study seems to scream “look at the results of treating animals like machines and putting them in artificial environments!”8
Just as the animals have no flesh in disembodied, objective writings, so I find that I, the narrator, must not become a disembodied voice, as though I had no flesh. Our feelings matter. Resisting the structure of the absent referent requires learning the facts about animals’ lives and responding to those facts. But to do this requires confronting information we usually ignore and experiencing discomforting feelings. When something repressed is brought to the surface a certain degree of anxiety and much energy is released. This is what happens when the issue of people’s treatment of the other animals is raised.
Reading the journal articles about terminal animals, I realized how painful it is to maintain a critical consciousness about how humans treat other animals. When writing about the thwarting of all the essential aspects of each animal’s self by factory farming, I find that I cannot describe it too closely. I cannot, like Peter Singer detail “the skin [of hens] rubbed bright red and raw” by rubbing against the wire of their cages. This may be why many choose not to give conceptual place to animals. If animals are conceptually disembodied, their bleeding or raw flesh need not be considered.
What happens when a group who is supposed to be invisible tries to make animal issues visible? What happens when little old ladies work to give conceptual place to animals, talking about the bleeding or raw flesh of animals? Sexism will effect the dominant culture’s dismissive judgment of them. But many of us see ourselves following in their tradition, in leather-free tennis shoes, of course.
Neither Man nor Beast Page 27
