PASSED OVER: What might Passover offer to the cause of animal liberation
From the distortion of language used to veil the torture and murder of animals, to the quarantining of the sites of violence both through physical remoteness and laws punishing anyone who would seek to share images depicting what actually goes on, there exists a range of technologies designed to ensure most humans do not taste the 'bitter herbs' of the truth of animals’ lives and deaths.
DANIELLE CELERMAJER: Passover is the holiday of liberation, and the Passover seder — the ritual meal that takes place on the first night — is dedicated to presencing the meaning and significance of liberation and calling all those who participate to bring liberation into the world. Historically, the focus of liberation has been humans and humans alone. What, however, might it mean to bring animals into this conversation, to presence animal liberation as a living possibility, an ethical call?
To many, it might seem bizarre, even unwelcome, to bring religion into the “animal liberation” discussion — especially a religion that gave us the narrative of human supremacy and the relegation of animals to use-objects, which became foundational to dominant Western ethics. A religion, moreover, which, as represented in by its current state form, is hardly a beacon of the capacious enactment of liberation. I would simply request that those who feel this way bracket such legitimate objections and come with me to draw out two aspects of the seder practice that I see as helpful in approaching the challenge before us, as we seek to meet the still momentous challenge of animal liberation…
What is it… about the world that most presses upon us when we try to elaborate the meaning of animal liberation today? There is no shortage of violence and injustice against animals, and front of mind remains the persistent but accelerating crisis of the torture and killing of animals in industrial animal agriculture. The issue that presses powerfully upon me, however, is the climate catastrophe and the suite of related forms of extraction and violence associated with it — fossil-fuelled development, habitat destruction, the devastation of the conditions of animal life and flourishing, and the resultant climate disasters…
In the fifty years since Singer’s essay was published, somewhere around 70 per cent of wild animals belonging to all monitored species have been decimated. In the Australian bushfires of 2019–2020, an estimated 3.25 billion animals were killed. And in the coming years, we can anticipate that the combination of the collapse of ecosystems forced by climate change, habitat destruction, and intensified human-wildlife conflicts will result in the extinction of many already critically endangered species…
What this tells us is that the scope or the frame for conceptualising animal liberation needs to radically expand… we need a shift of frame, both at the level of how we understand being and life, and at the level of ethics, such that ecological relationships — including the ecological relationships in which all animal lives are embedded — are primary in decision making, not auxiliary. To do this effectively will require that the more-than-human world, broadly understood, but also in its heterogeneous forms, be represented in decision making and not simply included as — at best — a defeasible side constraint…
The problem, however, is not simply the scope of the frame, but also its logic. Overwhelmingly, in philosophy and in everyday ethics, we remain caught in a logic where ethical attention to systems, or ecological relations, and ethical attention to individuals constitute a zero-sum game. Either we recognise the individual experiencing or sentient subject as the irreducible site of ethical concern, or we attend to ecological flows. This dichotomous logic forces claims like, Humans are obliged to kill introduced species to restore baseline ecological equilibrium, or that Attention to relationships and systems is incompatible with recognising what is ethically salient about individuals and their experiences…
If… we are to know animal liberation, not as well-worked-out ethical philosophy, nor even on the wings of ethical imagination, but as irresistible fidelity, we cannot do without the third element of the seder practice: the bitter herbs (maror). The embodied experience of what the want of liberation feels like. This is why a critical part of the work of animal liberation is embodied, relational work — practices where we humans place ourselves side-by-side with other animals, witnessing the actuality of their lives, including the realities of the myriad forms of violence that degrade and end those lives.
From the distortion of language used to veil the torture and murder of animals, to the quarantining of the sites of violence both through physical remoteness and laws punishing anyone who would seek to share images depicting what actually goes on, there exists a range of technologies designed to ensure most humans do not taste the bitter herbs of the truth of animals’ lives and deaths… The arts of embodied, relational attention to those who suffer injustice and violence may not resemble the grand narratives of redemption and liberation to which, in an age of spectacle, we are ever more accustomed. Yet perhaps it is precisely their refusal of the image of progress and assured success that will liberate us, and also the animals. SOURCE…
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