PETA: An example of extreme rationality

We find in biblical narrative an ordering of the world that resonates with our experience of being human. The animal closest to me is my dog. It is obvious from our relationship that my dog is not my equal in any way that counts. Given a choice between me and my dog my wife would choose me, of that I have no doubt. The aims of PETA and the concerns of Peter Singer do not confirm our experience of the world but lead us into a world deprived of the distinctions we need to have in order to act morally. When all distinctions are leveled we swim in a sea of relativities in which the most appalling acts may be done.

If we take the biblical distinction between humans and animals to be true, what does that do to our debate about the place of human beings in relation to other creatures? We must say first that creatures, even given the ability of primates to sign some kind of language, are not persons. They do not have the ability to transcend their natures but rather are completely determined by them. They may not be placed on a level of equality with human beings. Although it is obvious that they can suffer, it is not so obvious that they understand what death is or what their life is for.

Genesis 1vs 26 includes the command that mankind is to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth”. This verse indicates a hierarchy of being in which mankind bears the responsibility for his fellow creatures. He can never, in the light of their creation being seen to be “good”, treat the creatures of the earth with disrespect. The killing of them is always a thing of much gravity and must be done with all care as befits the taking of the life of a creature called forth by the creative speech of God.

But having said this, mankind obeys the command to kill for his own needs and this fits in with the hierarchy of being delineated in the first creation narrative. But it is not an open invitation to do whatever we wish to animals; animal welfare, care and regard are essential.

Opposition to PETA and groups like it requires an alternative view of our place in the world that is more consistent and deeper than that produced by a rationality that does not have a history, or rather, has a shallow history rooted in the dubious idea of equalitarianism and human rights. The crisis of secular rationalism is that it can generate no alternative view because it rests on the same limited rationality to that which it opposes.

In another time I would have talked about the superior truth of revelation and would do so now, were it not so easily misunderstood as supernatural knowledge. What I really mean is that we inherit a tradition of thought that is superior to the rationality of modernism and that this is obvious from the absurdity of such a notion as animal rights derived from the latter. The scandal of our time is that this tradition has been deemed inadmissible even though the foundations of our society rest on it.

The reason for this, as I have said, is not philosophical, especially now since the ruins of modernism lay all around us. To say that the answer is in the Bible automatically recalls the Scopes trial, rigid and hypocritical morality, theological blackmail involving the afterlife and the general stultification of life by religion. Indeed the Church bears such a burden of awfulness it is no wonder that it struggles to make known the core of its witness. But that is not to say that it is not the bearer also of a truth that is essential for us to become persons and to act as decisive moral agents.