The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity: Toward a Wider Suffrage

Eleven: Barbarism, Humanism, and Democratic Ecology

Barbarism, Humanism, and Democratic Ecology In the final sentence of his book The New Ecological Order Luc Ferry writes: “Between barbarism and humanism, it is now up to democratic ecology to decide .”1 He means by this that democratic ecology, as that has been described in his book, must decide between barbarism and humanism, and from what has been said in his book it follows, he maintains, that it is for humanism that democratic ecology must opt. Ecology would not be democratic unless it were an ecology centered on the dēmos. By dēmos he means humankind, the third of the three things mentioned in the subtitle of his book, which is L’arbre, l’animal et l’homme, “the tree, the animal, and man.” From what I shall be saying about this book will follow, I hope, some understanding of how, as Liddell and Scott’s lexicon reports, dēmos could have meant first “a country-district, tract of enclosed or cultivated land.” This is a meaning that is overlapped by what according to the lexicon, as noted in chapter 10, was meant at first by the Greek root of the word “ethics,” namely ēthos, connoting not only “the habits of man,” but “habitat” or, in the plural, “the haunts of animals.” This Greek overlap is carried forward by the Latin overlap that licenses us to interpret humanism in terms of the humane. ELEVEN BARBARISM, HUMANISM, AND DEMOCRATIC ECOLOGY | 223 The chief aim of this chapter is to propose what might be called a Blank Ecology, une écologie blanche. That will be the topic of the third and final part of the chapter. In the second part I shall make some comments about the relationship between the ecofeminine and the ecomasculine. In the first part I treat of the relationship between suffering and linguisticality and freedom. Suffering and linguisticality and freedom When the last sections of his book are building to their conclusion Ferry treats utilitarian ecology as humanocentric. But in the earlier pages, when he is dealing with the views of Peter Singer, he is clear that a utilitarian ecology takes into account the sufferings of all sentient creatures, not human beings alone. In Ferry’s scheme of things too nonhuman beings are taken into account, but they are taken into account on account of certain “analogies” between, for instance, animals and humans; nonhuman beings are taken into account because animals are, as we have just found Ortega too saying, “equivocal,” belonging ambiguously to the nonhuman realm and, in some cases, to a quasi-human realm, most saliently through their capacity to suffer. One sometimes wonders whether he would say that animals suffer quasi-pain or an analogy of pain, lest by allowing that animals suffer plain pain, his case for humanocentrism might be weakened. But his case for humanocentrism is based on the contention that animals can have no rights. They can have no rights because they can have no freedom. Freedom is what distinguishes the human from the nonhuman animal. It is on account of this distinction that Ferry maintains, against Singer, that human beings belong to a different species from nonhuman animals. Ferry’s critique of the concept of animal rights begins with a historical survey of some of the cases brought to courts of law in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where animals are literally summoned to appear in order to defend themselves against charges of misdemeanor. We learn that great care was to be taken in the formulation of accusations against the animals arraigned that the accusations were very precisely specified in order to forestall a defense or appeal on grounds of misidentification. The charge was then publicly proclaimed to them, and they were required to appear in court at a certain time and place.2 Suppose, in light of the point made by referring to these cases, a retreat is made to the concession that animals need human advocates —and Ferry does record that a human advocate was appointed when an animal failed to present itself on the due date at court, though provision 224 | TABLE TALK was made for its taking exception to the person appointed. If this provision is thought to entail that the animals have the right to be represented by human advocates, it may be objected that a meta-right is as difficult to attribute to an animal as a right, so that the argument...