On Veganism and Animal Rights

I am probably not the only person who has noticed that there are a greater than normal amount of critical articles about vegans and animal rights floating around on social media sites lately. Even among vegans and animal rights people, these articles seem to get more clicks and more comments (again, on the highly particular set of people in my social networks) than essays that try to set out a positive program of social/animal justice.

In any case, as it turns out, there are vegans and animal rights activists who harbour attitudes that are consciously or unconsciously racist, sexist, ableist, and/or classist. This does not surprise me, given that we live in a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society.

Before get to what I want to say, there's part of this debate or critique that seems counter-productive, because there are some people who are fighting about who has x,y or z biases or prejudices, when the best critical work focuses, in ways that are necessarily self-reflexive, on systems and institutions and how they produce individuals--in some way here, with more necessary caveats that I assume I need not list, I mean "produce us as us, whoever that may be"--with prejudices and privileges. 

All this to say, here's what I think: the case for animal rights entails a commitment to human rights. If that sounds too liberal or Kantian, I don't mind saying that the case for animal emancipation entails human emancipation. That's much closer to what I believe. But, if you've come to animal rights and you don't see how the two are connected, and that articulating the two together requires formulating demands for animal rights through dialogue with those who struggle as historically marginalized peoples, and that this will make the process of formulating demands and principles both messy but concrete, then you're an asshole.

But if you're not vegan and you care about animal rights, it turns out that I think that the case for human rights and commitment to the struggles of historically marginalized peoples also, somewhere down the line, entails a commitment to animal rights, and more specifically, direct duties to animals. 

So if you are committed to human rights or human emancipation (and what I'm about to say counts even more if you're one of those people who has been revelling in the that-will-show-those-santimonious-vegans schadenfreude), and you've read your Aristotle, and you know that in defining what makes us human rather than animal, 

the dominant trends in our culture have never been toward respect for the species as a whole but rather for what is considered to be quintessentially human--and this privilege and subject position have always been available only to a small subset of the human species (Matthew Calarco, Thinking Through Animals, p. 26),

and that this has made you conscious of how the so-called anthropological criteria for so-called species inclusion is at best politically fraught, tendentious, and contingent, and you don't see how this applies to animal rights, then you're an asshole, too.

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Rights?

As part of my research on Jacques Rancière, I have been reading up on liberal discussions of human rights. What I've read confirms Todd May's characterization, in The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière, of these discussions as problematics of passive equality, as "the creation, preservation, or protection of equality by governmental institutions" (3). The philosophical discourse on passive equality, then, focuses how these institutional guarantees ought to be distributed. 

This discourse of passive equality, of course, is not Rancière's approach, though it should be noted that movements premised on active equality (the equality of intelligences and abilities) can turn the problem of rights into a space of dissensus, when, for instance, Olympe de Gouges publishes her Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizen as a searing critique the Declaration of The Rights of Man. Rather than dismiss rights as an illusion, de Gouges makes them a point of contention by asserting "the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not" (Hatred of Democracy, 61). Rancière also mentions the civil rights struggle in the US in the 1960s. So rights are not excluded as intrinsically liberal, but rather Rancière is careful show--in May's terms--that the politics of equality cannot be reduced to the contours of liberalism, and that where "politics becomes passive is not in the recognition or embrace of rights; it is when rights come to structure the field of politics" (May, 34).

For as much as I might appreciate large parts Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights--especially her claims concerning the extra-juridical/literary origins of a sense of sympathy and empathy--she concludes on just such a note of passive equality: "The human rights framework, with its international bodies, international courts, and international conventions, might be exasperating in slowness to respond or repeated inability to achieve its ultimate goals, but there is no better structure available for confronting these issues" (213). She makes no mention of the possibility of transforming 'available structures' through a radical or revolutionary politics of equality.

In this post, I am going to focus on two rhetorical figures found in Micheline R. Ishay's The History of Human Rights. Overall, the book is textbooky in the sense that the text is often descriptive and written from a so-called objective viewpoint, a voice from nowhere, which gave me a greater appreciation of Patrik Ourednik's Europeana. To Ishay's credit, she dedicates a chapter to showing that workers' and socialists' struggle significantly influenced how we think of human rights. However, along the way she co-opts several important "dialectical images"--as Walter Benjamin would say--of revolutionary struggle.

The first is Benjamin's discussion of Paul Klee's Angelus Novus. "A human rights document," Ishay writes, "may be marred by barbarism, yet, according to Benjamin's observation, it is also a barometer of human rights progress" (2-3). This claim is derived from Benjamin's statement that the storm propelling the angel with his back to the future is called progress--as if this "progress" is the moment of redemption in his On the Concept of History. She does not address the fact that Benjamin's claim is part of a critique of progress. The idea of progress, according to Benjamin, is an assumption of the inevitable improvement of humankind (often thought to take place through technological improvements) which is used to organize the mass of data that fills a "universal history," an empty, homogeneous time (Thesis XVII). To this concept of history, Benjamin opposes a materialist historiography and praxis that seeks to blast events out of the continuum of history. By identifying Benjamin's messianism with the distribution of rights through institutional frameworks, Ishay limits radical politics to what we have already called passive equality.

The same movement of co-optation happens when Ishay makes rights the mantle of anti-colonialist struggle, when she claims to side with "the wretched of the earth." In Chapter Five, Ishay discusses what she takes to be the key problems of "globalization and its impact," one of these being the relation of humanitarian intervention and US imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. While much of her book is descriptive, in this chapter she moves to an argumentative mode. She claims that a "new realism of human rights" should criticize the human rights abuses of imperialism but should nevertheless "seize opportunities to advance its cause whenever Western powers confront repressive governments" (290), or be prepared "to a substantive agenda linking human rights and international security" (289). Through this model, she argues, globalization can be made to advance the cause of "the wretched of the earth" (293).

She never addresses the incongruity of yoking the cause of the wretched of the earth to imperialism. One of the central planks of Frantz Fanon's philosophy was that the self-determination of the oppressed could not be advanced by imperialist intervention. To intervene and implement rights from above repeats the civilizing gesture of the old imperialism. Any reference to rights must take place through local conflict and struggle, from the organization of the masses from below. In addition, when Ishay appeals to presenting a "substantive agenda" of human rights, she does not discuss to whom this agenda addresses: Western powers. The framework of rights-security is already today Western and imperialist, and does not have any accountability to those (the oppressed)  to whom Ishay or NGOs appeal for their moral legitimacy. Not to mention that intervention itself can/does destroy those networks and organizations that would be accountable to  local peoples (q.v. Haiti). Like the aforementioned examples, this argument again reduces politics to passive equality.