Dignity Beyond the Human World
coordinated by George Jacobs and Arran Stibbe
This joint project with HumanDHS explores how the concepts of dignity and humiliation can be extended beyond the human world. Many thanks to Evelin Gerda Lindner for inviting the Centre for Language and Ecology to co-operate on this project. Comments and articles of any length are welcome and will be published on this page.
Introductory Article: The limits of dignity...
by Arran Stibbe, 6th December 2004
An elephant is made to stand on one leg in front of hundreds of laughing and applauding circus goers. A dachshund is made to wear a frilly red coat over her over-bred, distorted body. A mother pig is placed in a farrowing crate so she cannot move or interact with her piglets. Do these animals have a sense of dignity? Do they feel humiliated? Undoubtedly there are situations where animals feel emotions similar to humans' feelings of humiliation, but it seems anthropomorphic to assume that other animals experience dignity and its loss in the same way that humans do. Perhaps, in many cases, the animal in question is feeling pain and distress rather than a loss of dignity.
However, looking at the other side, the human side, it is clear that strategic attempts to humiliate another party differ little whether that party is human or not. It is the same cultural script found throughout the human world: words and actions are used to lower the social status of one party systematically in order to feed the other party's desire for superiority. The mastery and control of animals, demonstrated through confining them, distorting their bodies, or making them perform unnatural feats, delivers at best a very fragile sense of self worth. The fragility occurs because the very act of having to humiliate another in order to gain a sense of self-worth simultaneously reveals deep insecurity.
Why consider dignity and humiliation beyond the human world? Not because the same emotional responses to humiliation are necessarily shared by other life-forms, but because the mentality behind denying the dignity of others is the same whoever is being humiliated, and the physical and emotional consequences for the humiliated party are very real. The reason for using the framework of humiliation in exploring relationships between humans and other beings rather than simply one of abuse, is because of the detrimental psychological effects of basing a sense of self worth on the humiliation of other species. The humilator is also in need of a compassionate response. If humilators realise that they could get a far more solid sense of self worth by affirming the lives of others rather than humiliating them, they could find healing, while their victims could find relief.
The elephant in the circus is a highly visible and obvious case, but the psychology of humiliating other species to gain a feeling of self-worth goes far deeper than this, and may be a root cause of human alienation and the destruction of the planet. Why genetically modify organisms, confine animals in high intensity farms, cut down forests, monoculture vast expanses of land? It is all too easy to blame money or the quest for efficiency, but these may not be the only reasons or even the most important ones. The ultimate cause may be deeper - the continuous quest to conquer and humiliate in order to gain a fragile sense of self-worth.
An important question arises as to the scope within which the framework of dignity and humiliation could be usefully applied. Is the concept useful only in considering relationships between humans and other mammals, or between humans and all animals including mosquitoes, or between humans and all life-forms including plants, or even to humans and rivers, or forests? Drawing a neat dividing line between those who it is meaningful to consider as having dignity and those who do not deserve it could be considered arbitrary or presumptuous. It is also unnecessary to draw lines if focus is placed on the humans who are engaged in acts of humiliation rather than on questions of whether the other party feels emotionally humiliated or only physically damaged.
In the end, the framework of dignity and humiliation could be usefully applied to any situation where humans are basing their self-worth on subjugating another, whoever or whatever that other may be. Moving away from humiliation towards affirmation of dignity, in ever wider spheres, may provide a wellspring of healing for the human world and beyond.
Abstract of paper by Suzanne Laba Cataldi
Reference: Suzanne Laba Cataldi (2002) Animals and the Concept of Dignity, Ethics and the Enviornment Volume 7, No. 2
This essay concerns the dignity of nonhuman animals. It is composed of three sections. The first recounts my experience of a Moscow Circus performance and records some of my thought, feelings, and observations of this circus' famous bears.
As is obvious from that account, the performance and presentation of the bears seemed to me to be undignified in a nontrivial, that is morally objectionable sense of the word. The second section of the essay tries to specify that sense, to identify the wrong(s) with these sorts of undignified performances, by developing a moral sense of dignity that might extend, generally, to nonhuman animals.
I believe that the setting of this performance and my own frame of mind-the fact that it took place in Moscow and in the midst of my exposure to sites and stories of communist oppression-helped me to see the oppression of human and nonhuman animals as linked and the performance as a performance of power relations. The third section of the essay explores these power relations from an ecofeminist perspective through the circus' depiction of the 'momma bear.'
