Men, Morals, Womenists and Animals

November 3, 2002

by Bruce Walker

Fringes scientists now suggest that dumb animals think critically and feel deeply. Sensible people should view these scientific findings with reservations - much of such “science” is ideology with a research grant - although the conclusions confirm what common sense assumed: grief, love, and fear are part of all life, and not just human life.

Perhaps chimpanzees, octopuses, parrots, whales, elephants and dolphins know more than we have assumed, feel more deeply than we have thought, and even nurse psychic wounds at levels which would have seemed impossible a decade ago.

This model suits Womenism, which embraces homo sapiens as just another animal and rejects the male invention of civilization as proof that our species is different from any other species. Womenists are wrong: self-sacrifice and the awareness of death, which this new research implies smart animals exhibit, is felt only for members of the same species. Coyotes may remember and mourn the death of a pack member, but coyotes they remember a fawn only as lunch. 

Humans, by contrast, have adopted behaviors which run counter to self-preservation for reasons that are wholly ethical. Kosher killing of animals is based, in part, upon reducing pain of the slaughtered animal. Christian analogies to the Good Shepherd make sense only for a human or divine being who cares for his flock.

Primitive homo sapiens has an empathy for the death and suffering of animals which is absent from the nonhuman animal world. Native of the Kalahari apologize to the animals which they kill for sustenance.  Even human sadistic treatment of animals reinforces the proposition that humans, unlike other creatures, have a capacity for compassionate and cruelty that transcends animalism.

Nature does not favor gentle hunting. The efficient kill, not the painless kill, insures survival. The term “humane” may involve subconscious hubris by homo sapiens, but the term is nonetheless descriptive. Life above a certain level exists at the expense of other life. Notions of “fairness” or “mercy” exist only in the mind of man.

The narrow mindedness of one species of animal life toward other species makes Hitler’s anti-Semitism seem tolerant. The Nazi notion of Lebenstrasun is based upon the murderous behavior of animal territoriality. Animal murder is not murder, but simply instinct. Sexual aggression which humans would call rape is likewise simply animal instinct.   

Womenists embrace the natural world of Gaea, though it is filled with rapine and murder of the weak by the strong, because as awfully as animals conduct themselves by our standards, the alternative is to accept the vision of Socrates, Moses and Christ. Civilized behavior, moral standards, objective truth and all those other creations of men must be credited if the savagery of nature is to be rejected. Between the dirt of dull Gaea and the divine inspiration of God lies nothing but the mind of man. 

This mind of man discriminates based upon transcendent moral reality, as God intended. Nobility and depravity are choice and not instinct; man is a creature sui generis in the cosmos. Although “man” means “human” it also specifically means “male.”  We, homo sapiens, find areas of commonality that the parochial view of dolphins and primates cannot perceive. We connect with pets and transform them into “Rover” instead of “a dog.”

As our discriminating minds unravel puzzles of reality we balance that with the knowledge of good and evil. Since Amos and Plato, we have considered whether the might made right. This is a human, and a peculiarly male, question. As Womenists remind us, men can dominate through violence any issue. As God reminds us, we should not. 

Men have proclaimed that the iron sword is not real truth, and men have also proclaimed that the coin of the market is also not moral evidence (light readers of history overlook this major theme in human thought - Adam Smith, for example, is tagged as simply a good economist - this would have surprised and disappointed Smith, whose opus magnus was The Theory of Moral Sentiments and whose academic chair was in Moral Philosophy.) 

Men like Orwell in 1984, Huxley in Brave New World, and Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 have also shown the landscape of Hell in which human beings lived the lives of animals. Conscience in these three dystopian novels dwells outside the group. Conscience is “antisocial.” Conscience is man, the image of God, and not homo sapiens, the precocious primate. This conscience is man, laying down the club that could kill women, children and anything else, kneeling before God.

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Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared in the Oklahoma Bar Journal, Law & Order, Legal Secretary Today, The Single Parent, Enter Stage Right, Citizen's View, The American Partisan, Port of Call, and several other professional and political periodicals.

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