Are you able to tie every word, every term, every notion, every idea, every thought … to:
Nonhumanity – Nonhuman Animals, Plant Life, Ecosystems …
Then you might be advancing cultural diversity to extend to think-in more than just “us”.
Antispeciesist Animal Sociology
Every human relates to nonhuman animals, only the most people do it in speciesist ways; they see nonhumans as a means to an end. A specific of speciesism is that as a nonhuman you may be seen as “regular” food. I.e. eating you doesn’t count as a form of cannibalism. The mental divide that human societies draw here is that you may be a generally physically usable source to the degrees where you may be “destroyed” under the utmost imaginable forms of torture and pain.
Gruppe Messel, Tierautonomie / Animal Autonomy
The animal oppression and veganism discrepancy (fragment):
If you look at the way in which meat is marketed and if you see the type of demand for meat [1], you clearly see the roles types of speciesism [2, 3] play.
People who reject veganism act that way due to their speciesist convictions. Meat, dairy, eggs … are manifestations of speciesism, and thus primarily issues of antispeciesism.
Health and lifestyle might be a driver for some people to become vegan. But the injustice towards nonhuman animals (including their intricate relation to the natural environment), which takes place on all levels of societies globally, won’t change because of the person-centered health- and lifestyle reasons of some people.
There is hardly any other system of structural injustice where as little public outcry is expected as in speciesism: health- and lifestyle-vegans mention the animal rights issue in general on a rather superficial level and usually avoid to speak of systemic animal oppression in a way in which they might speak about forms of oppression that affect human beings as victims.
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[1] “Being food” is a specific of speciesism. The demand for “meat” implies an entire speciesist traditional background. To assume though that “meat”-consumption is a natural evolutionary rationale, is to imply a biologist view on human cultures by assuming their predatorship would align with that of (what we’d call) ‘nonhuman predatory cultures’. Also, there may well always been groups of humans, human individuals and human civilizations who have avoided animal oppression. Even if this type of consciousness would only exist without any historical precedence it would still be equally valid.
[2] We assume that there are > many forms of speciesism.
[3] See > forms of animal degradation and animal hatred.
Links:
Fragments that we wrote about specifics of speciesism so far:
“Homo sapiens” – systems of speciesism
What is it in people that makes zoocide and ecocide possible?
The assumption that only the “homo” is “sapient” (knowing) – as in the taxonomical classification of the Homo sapiens as the crown of creation by Carl von Linné / Carolus Linnaeus – expresses that nonhuman animal knowledge and the nonhuman living world is considered to be of lesser or no (relevant) type of knowledge (from a human perspective).
The human is assumed to be knowing, the nonhuman to be not knowing.
This type of thought enabled argumentations for massmurder on the biologistical basis.
How much “animal-machine” (Descartes) is entailed in instinct-based ethological approaches; after all if you differentiate further you come to see that ethology should be rather sociology. Again political and sociological concepts should replace biologist views of animality … .
Gruppe Messel, Tierautonomie / Animal Autonomy
Conscious about speciesism
And yet you study nonhuman animals
Through indirect, abstract, theory-driven lenses
Not through the uniquely and ultimately
emancipated channels
of perception
your antispeciesist views would take.
– Palang LY
See also thought: Defining Nonhumans as ‘INSTINCTUAL’ is species-derogative and biologistic
Do you think anybody can sucessfully sell their speciesism by pretending to be anti-racist? What about people who believe that racism and speciesism are dislocated systemic forms of oppression and who prefer to stay uninformed about oppressive mechanisms/methods?!
@tierlichkeit, gruppe messel
Specifics of speciesism: History, how we see “the past” and how we preserve “what is important”.
Our collectively built historical consciousness, the legacies nonhuman-ignorant communities and collectives value:
If we chose a nonhuman-inclusive mode of perception and developed accesses to nonhuman notions of ‘being-in-time and socio-cultural-contexts’ in their terms (…), we’d be able to phrase nonhuman perspectivity in our words, without referring to biology or other reductive explanatory segments into which animality has continuously been relegated.
Collective memories
Memories of nonhumanity, from their and from nonhuman inclusive perspectivities, are being nullified, consciously conceived as irrelevant and mentally achieved within any of the manifold speciesist categories of human- or rather humanitycentered perceptions.
Specifics of speciesism: Physis and visible presence (fragment)
– The differing, specific physicalness of a nonhuman animal is the criterion upon which humans base their argumentation of proof: that a nonhuman animal cannot physically reason to a more complex content than the limit and quality of capacity the humans ascribe to them.
– The biological markers become an absolute-instance-of-ability in context with quality of existence and existential meaning.
– The state of being a nonhuman animal in itself becomes thus supposedly fully explicable, the constructed explicability is so far never taken our of the human-defined context, not even by their defenders.
– Only in mythological and ancient human folklore we find traces of different ascriptions to nonhuman animal physicality (partly also in childrends literature and modern folklore, but to a more humancentric extent).
– The big religious belief systems built their image of the human and god on an equal plane and set that as a standard criterion for leading a qualified reasonable life separate from the state of nature, nonhumans had been even in ancient philosophies seen as the same as ‘brute nature’ – based on their physical difference and uniqueness/specialness.
– Even today the comparison between “humanness” and “animalness” is being sought in favour of humans as the quality marker for reason and ethics, ethics, morals, reasoning, love, relations, socialness, etc. it is not fundamentally sought in different nonhuman cultures – most prominently language and philosophy as bound to the physis of the human, not the nonhuman, whereas wisdom is sought in “nature” to a huge but yet unclear and unexplained extent in humanity.
– The natural sciences were a tool when they dealt with bodies of animality, to draw separations, thus Galen and later Descartes famously vivisected, while basing on a mixture in their thought between religion and ‘natural sciences’ … Natural sciences only emboldened that certain physics are bound to certain existentual qualities, which the human will define and ‘prove’.
– A seperationist culture is being created in human social life, where humanity and animality and nonhuman life is finely segregated, basically and basically philosophically, so that people don’t even think and see anymore, but solely follow the total norm.
– Sadism, violence to the physis of nonhumanity is the warning shot, the societal execution, the harshest separator that keeps humanity an wanted and unwanted enemy to animality (as operating with fear i.e. ‘speciesist totalitarian structures’).
A nonhuman-inclusive critique of the view on aesthetics and speciesism on the current Animal Rights and Animal Liberation movements (fragment)
The Animal Rights discussion ends here:
Specifics of oppression in speciesism: I am taking aesthetics as this is the most overlooked field of problem within the Animal Rights movement considering the powerfulness aesthetics hold in human societies and the specifics of speciesism and aesthetics as an oppressive tool.