The Animal Invitation--
Science, Ethics, Religion and Law
in a More-than-Human World

This book will be published in 2026 by Brill

​What follows are (1) four basic questions addressed in the book, and (2) Additional Materials cited in the book's footnotes which supplement various discussions in the book. ​

Four Basic Questions

This book poses a quartet of questions, each of which is described as having more power than its current answer.
 
[From Chapter 5, Science and the Invitation to Their Realities]
     How much better would our scientific exploration be if, as we go about each of our many different science fields that in some way explore nonhuman animals, we already knew a great deal about (i) what our ethical systems have suggested about other animals, (ii) what our religious traditions have claimed, and (iii) what our legal systems have in the past done and now might attempt because they play such a prominent role in every modern nation state?
  
[From Chapter 6, "Ethics and the Invitations to Care"]
     What might we learn about ethics if, for the purpose of seeing this human capacity as well as possible, we search our human legal systems, our religious and wisdom traditions, and our many sciences in order to fathom what humans can know of our nonhuman neighbors and our own animal features?
 
[From Chapter 7, "Religion and More-than-Human Animals"]
     Can we better fathom our religious and wisdom/spirituality traditions if we have also noticed, taken seriously, and then dispassionately explored the animal features evident in the ways humans have pursued and now are doing science, ethics and law?
 
[from Chapter 8, "Law and Other Animals"]
     How much better will our species understand what different human communities have attempted through the law if, as we attempt such an understanding, we have already explored seriously our own animal features as they connect us to what is claimed about nonhuman animals in our sciences, ethics, and religions?

​Additional Materials for Introduction
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​0.1 More on dating. CE dates, formerly signaled by A.D. (“anno Domini”), originated in 17th Germany—for a discussion of the term, see Mark, Joshua J., “The Origin and History of the BCE/CE Dating System” published on 27 March 2017 and available at https://www.ancient.eu/article/1041/the-origin-and-history-of-the-bcece-dating-system/, accessed 2018.2.10).
 
0.2 More on observing elephants. Close observation reveals that elephants’ temples vibrate when they make subsonic sounds. More indirectly, it is possible to deduce that the communication exists from the fact that a group of elephants will often pause at the same time as if listening for such sounds, or from observations of coordinated action between elephant groups even when the groups are separated by enough distance to make visual signals between the two groups impossible. Careful observers who notice these clues can imagine that communication is occurring even though humans do not hear what is being “said.”
 
0.3 Difficulties in assessing other animals’ realities. Because of our own finitudes, we struggle to know the places and worlds of such different creatures. To describe their(cetaceans’) realities as well as one can requires not only long-term study by many humans, but also careful work to detect and then avoid distortion of the perceived realities that often plague human evaluators who have extremely limited evidence to assess our present, obviously incomplete social constructions about the animals in question.
 
0.4 How difficulties vary with context. What counts as evidence in a legal court (addressed in Chapter 7) will be different than what counts as evidence in one’s daily life in a human community, or when trying to answer the question of what really happens in the lives of unfamiliar life forms in unfamiliar places.

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​                                Additional Materials for
                   ​Chapter One “Animals’ Invitations"
 
1.1 Excluding some senses of “invitation.” Those common meanings of “invitation” that should be excluded are those special senses of “invitation” that signal human-to-human social realities—examples are the English language phrases “an invitation to dine” or “a wedding invitation.” The notion of “invitation” used in this book may share a few features with such human-to-human invitations, but many of these unique, human-centered notions of “invite” would mislead and even harm if used regarding nonhuman animals.
 
1.2  More details from Louv. Louv’s focus is a suite of developments that include growing addiction to electronic media, loss of green spaces to development, parents’ exaggerated fears of nonhuman and human predators, and even the threats of lawsuits and vandalism that have prompted some local governments to limit children’s access to publicly owned land. These problems may arise even in rural areas, but exacerbated forms of this problem can easily appear in heavily urbanized and suburbanized areas.
 
1.3 An example. “Trillions of neutrinos, most of them emitted by the sun, are streaming through your face as you read this. Every second, 100 billion neutrinos pass through each of your eyeballs.” [Munroe, Randall 2020. “Could You Make a Snowball of Neutrinos?”, The New York Times, July 7, 2020. Accessed 2021.12.18 at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/science/neutrinos-snowball-randallmunroe.html.] 
 
1.4 Affirming of the meaning of Indigenous. Given that “indigenous” has a range of meanings, the following explains what the United Nations and other international forums mean by “indigenous.”
 
Who are “indigenous” peoples? In a straightforward manner indigenous means anything produced, growing, or living naturally in a particular region or environment. Yet, there are semantic and political difficulties involved in determining who is “indigenous.” … The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, prepared for approval by the separate nation-states during the Decade of Indigenous Peoples (1994-2004), has posed this question largely within international law and human rights contexts. In these international forums, “indigenous” refers to ethnic groups with clear cultural, linguistic, and kinship bonds who have been so marginalized by modern nation-states that their inherent dignity and coherence societies are in danger of being lost. [Grim, John, ed., 2001. Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard. Page xxxvii-xxxviii of Introduction.]
 
As noted in Part II, the description “indigenous” can be applied to various scientific traditions, ethical traditions, religious traditions and legal traditions. When used in this book as a reference to humans, “indigenous” refers to groups that live in small-scale societies and foreground ancestral memories, local and specialized mythologies, special commitments to their own kinship systems, distinct languages, and deep commitments to place or homelands. “Indigenous,” then, will work as a specialized term with uses that are not identical with one important literal sense of “indigenous,” namely, “originating where it is found” (in other words, some of the groups mentioned as belonging in the category “indigenous” were historically displaced and thus did not originate where they are now found). John Grim provides a summary of this way of using “indigenous.”
 
The term “Indigenous” is a generalized reference to the thousands of small-scale societies who have distinct languages, kinship systems, mythologies, ancestral memories, and homelands. These different societies comprise more than 500 million people throughout the planet today. Since these societies are extremely diverse, any general remarks are suspect of imposing ideas and concepts on them. Indigenous religions do not constitute a “world religion” in the same way as, for example, Buddhism or Christianity. [Grim, John n.d. “Indigenous Traditions and Ecology,” Forum on Religion and Ecology, accessed 2021.12.5 at https://fore.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/JG%20Indigenous%20Lifeways%20and%20Ecology%20.pdf.]
 
1.5 Walking mindfully and a sense of gift. One way to foster a sense of gift is to walk mindfully, that is, attentively and slowly in a manner that does not disturb and disperse the local wildlife, for this allows a sense of gift to arrive. When this happens the invitational nature of the claim that “the land is the real teacher” is readily discerned. If one encounters an otter along a river, or a group of birds, or a frog or toad crossing one’s path, or a half-dozen turtles warming themselves on a log along a river’s edge, the gift image helps one recognize how intriguing the experience can be. Through an effort to be intentional in this way, any human allows much of the local world to be noticed and thereby some of its nonhuman citizens revealed. Such an encounter often lasts only moments, for it typically comes not in the center of one’s path but rather at the edge of one’s sensory awareness. If one should later return to the place of this encounter, it may again be experienced as suffused with possibility, for experiencing a place as gift can leave for one’s later self a lingering invitation. The claim “the world is a gift” prompts us to recognize that we live on a constantly processing planet which features countless local places alive with distinctive neighbors who may, or may not, choose to remain visible when we approach.
 
1.6 More on the Fragility of Our Observations. The existence of key limits on both our individual human animal abilities and those of our species as a collective must always be kept in the foreground, for the existence of these limits suggests forcefully that these same limits have often played out in human-on-human discrimination, which on countless occasions has merged with disdain for those living beings who happen not to be members of our own species. This book contains many relevant examples—the maxims that Shapin mentions, Pascal’s three degree observations, Plato’s cranes, and our penchant for meaning-following discussed in Chapter 3.
         Each human in particular experiences regularly the undeniable fact that our personal awareness of even the most intimate past experiences fades with time and thus can become distorted—what we recall immediately, and certainly what we recall long after an event, is but a fraction of the actual constellation of events that memory attempts to keep within reach. 
         As to the inevitable question “what do we really know?”, consider with humility a question about what any human might confidently know about the realities of dolphins—for example, what might we know of the actual realities of a young, free-ranging dolphin who meets a human swimmer or captives held in a research facility? The captivity of Akeakamai and Phoenix, though morally fraught, led to a publicly available report about observable actions that clearly invite our wonder about these nonhuman animals’ remarkable conceptual and communication abilities. By implication, we assume similar abilities exist as well for these individuals’ fellow species members. Such capabilities mark these big-brained creatures as completely unlike stereotypes of unthinking, unreasoning, “dumb animals.” Importantly, while “dumb” in this phrase is a translation of the Latin mutus, which is related to the English word “mute,” it is telling that so many of us now take “dumb animals” to mean “stupid, unintelligent animals” when in fact the phrase more correctly means “mute animals, that is, animals that do not speak human language.” Yet even though intriguing information was gleaned from holding Akeakamai and Phoenix captive, we still face an uncountable number of humbling questions—just what is it that we really know about these animals’ actual realities? What in fact are they communicating? And what do they do with such abilities in their natural communities that have thrived for millions of years in ocean environments that are completely alien to us? No matter how one purports to answer such basic questions, the findings have implications that invite all humans to engage the more-than-human world on its terms, not solely on ours. The actual realities of these dolphins beg from each of us a further series of questions, including “why have we inherited one-dimensional, dismissive ideas about such creatures?” and “which other nonhuman animals are, like humans, members of a group that communicates often and richly, and have their own communities and special places?” Chapter 5 explains that comparable stories about many different kinds of nonhuman animals are today readily available for those who care to inquire. 
         As humans openly discuss possible answers to such questions, we do well to avoid a facile way of speaking that is a quagmire—humans sometimes have spoken in terms of wanting to know another human individual’s “inner” realities, and deducing such inner realities on the basis of observed “outer realities,” that is, realities discernible by human observers. The conclusion that Akeakamai and Phoenix were communicating is, one could argue, a kind of a principled extrapolation that functions as a guess about each of these individuals’ inaccessible interiority. This guess is principled and “responsible” in the sense that it is built up from observed, recurring behavior through a series of trials. But questions about “inner” versus “outer” realities, though familiar to so many, are haunted by the specter of the traditional mind/body dualism. Upon examination, an “inner versus outer” scheme is not a crisp, easily used distinction. It calls out the obvious fact that some matters are observable and some are not, but so-called inner, “mental” realities can be manifested very subtly in the body—some animals are masters of reading body language and thereby being alerted to some feature of an observed being’s state of mind. Notoriously, horses, chimpanzees and dogs can read a human’s awareness and decisions even when the human is not consciously able to articulate such awareness or decision—a classic example from the early 20th century is known as the Clever Hans phenomenon is discussed in the text.
As discussed in Chapter 2, humans are among the many animals whose cognition is embodied, that is, by no means exclusively “inner” (as “solely within a mind”), but, rather, body-based and thus possibly disclosed in our muscles or posture and thereby discernible to the talented observer of our “outer” selves.
         In daily life, the common experience in everyday human life of having to guess about even familiar beings’ actual thoughts and feelings supports the recurring observation made by our human philosophers for millennia—certainty about how to answer questions about what is really going on inside another living being is elusive at best and, often, an impossibly vague guess. Said most simply, if such uncertainty plagues a human claiming to have certainty of even familiar fellow humans’ interior realities, the difficulties of the enterprise are greatly multiplied when any one of us seeks to know the actual daily and communal realities of a single member of another species, let alone what most members of that other species “know” or “experience.” Even if we guess rightly about how a particular animal feels or thinks, we say nothing definite at all about the extraordinarily diverse group of beings we lump together as “animals” (meaning here, of course, “any and all nonhumananimals”). Thus, even if we had certain knowledge of, say, one dog, or all dogs, which we clearly do not, such “certainty” would have no traction whatsoever as a generalization about the countless non-dog animals who abound on our shared planet.
         Human exceptionalism simply assumes away the difficulty with its presupposition that our kind of animal is so paradigmatically intelligent and perceptive that members of our species can grasp any nonhuman animal’s actual realities. Many humans have now long unreflectively assumed human intelligence to be the paradigmatic example of intelligence. This position is characteristically taken by those who either have failed to inquire carefully or simply made the facile assumption that other animals do not think or have interior complexities that are worthy of note. 
         Nonetheless, the idea that other animals have actual realities independent of whether we observe and/or measure them is an intuitively appealing idea, for we know from our own animal bodies that each of us has our own, distinctive experiences that can be distinguished from other humans’ experiences. We naturally extrapolate this general conclusion about our own individual self to more than other humans—we assume that at least some other living beings are, like us, individuals with rich, even baffling lives comprised of at least some interiorities like feelings, thoughts, and interests. We are often comfortable extending such notions to other mammals such as our fellow great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas), or individuals in the almost one hundred cetacean species, or different elephant species. Many people find such an extrapolation reasonable even though the limits already discussed prevent us from knowing other animals’ “realities” with absolute certainty.
 
1.7 The Question of Personal Heritage. Gift or Quagmire? Answers to questions we ask when doing a personal archeology reveal that human-to-human connections impact dramatically what each human comes to think about our larger community and our inevitable human-to-nonhuman relationships. Any human can dig into their own personal history, much as archeologists working on an ancient city dig into the past layer by layer. When each of us reflects on this layering in our past experiences, we go on a personal journey of uncovering the multiple, diverse ways in which we learned about animals. Such a “dig” into one’s past first encounters the most recent experiences, but as we gradually move deeper into the past, we travel further back into our own personal history. Eventually we may encounter the earliest experiences we can recall as our younger self discovered other-than-human animals as fellow travelers in this life. Many humans can identify individual animals other than the humans who in some way graced their first decades of life. At this level, the questions at first are straightforward—which individual nonhumans did you meet early in your life?  Who taught you about them? Were you taught to observe them carefully or to dismiss them? To eat them? To protect them? 
        Additional questions become more complicated—what did your teachers really know when they taught you about the living beings outside our species? Were your teachers passing along good information or bad? Were you taught to respect what others related to you as absolute truth, or as your teachers’ careful guess about the realities of other animals? How often did you learn on your own about other animals? And when you did learn on your own, how was it that you knew how to learn about other animals?
         As any human reflects on such diverse issues, that individual can notice the different layers of experience upon which one’s present understanding is built. Some of these experiences will be actual encounters with nonhumans. Some of these experiences will be a personal reaction to the claims made about other-than-human animals by authority figures encountered in early life. Some of these experiences may be an individual’s earliest recollection of someone challenging ideas inherited by way of family and birth community. Some who pursue such a personal archeology also notice how wide is the range of learning modes that any human goes through when he or she discovers the diversity of living beings. 
         These complex, diverse processes of learning reveal another startlingly personal feature—each human has had a truly unique set of experiences when learning about nonhuman animals. This is so because each of us has in our life met a group of nonhuman animals that only partly overlaps the group that anyone else has met. Each adult has met a unique subset of the world’s dogs, and, similarly, a unique subset of the world’s cats, the world’s horses, and so on. Some of us will have had positive experiences, and others will have been marked by experiences of fear or dislike. Some easily recall learning about the living presence of other animals through encountering that other being’s breath or vocalizations, or felt a nonhuman animal react on the basis of fear or pain in ways that are instantly recognizable as sharing features with how humans also experience fear or pain from time to time.
         Pursuing personal archeology may also lead one to recognize when and how one learned that humans share far more than fundamental sensory abilities such as vision, smell, hearing, touch and taste with many other animals. Traits like curiosity, intelligence, learning, fear, friendship, and so much more exhibited by many nonhuman animals will seem to young humans to share much with similar abilities clearly present in their own lives. Children, in other words, notice easily that we humans are, and will always be, animals as fully as are the nearby nonhumans. Other animals’ invitations will, to be sure, often be partial and mysterious, thus offering no assurance that we can fairly claim to “know” such neighbors in the ways we can come to know our neighboring human animals. But the invitations are profound nonetheless, and pose the following inevitable question about whether one’s own group can, on the basis of that group’s heritage and present awareness regarding one’s nonhuman neighbors, develop responsible views of more-than-human lives and communities—is what is claimed in one’s own local society about various nonhuman animals a reasonable approximation of the most basic realities that any curious human individual can discern of nonhuman neighbors’ actual lives?
 
1.8 Problems with claims to absolute knowledge. Learning the multiple ways that one is uniquely situated opens up further possibilities of expanding one’s awareness. Given our multifaceted situatedness, some claims we inherit will come to seem less than adequate. For example, any claim to possess an absolute knowledge of the one and only true account of reality or the precise extent of “the larger community” will fall short. Given the facts of our animal lives, such claims to absolute truth reveal, when examined carefully, that they require what amounts to a guess, surmise or leap of faith. Some have made such claims in the name of revealed religion, others when claiming they have a version of science that provides final, absolute, unconditioned knowledge. However, in the early twenty-first century each human easily recognizes that contemporary lives go forward in an era when startlingly diverse claims to absolute truth and knowledge abound.
 
1.9 Challenging inadequate generalizations. The use of both broad and fine-grained generalizations is, of course, a valuable feature of any language that can be employed in a wide range of contexts. But in matters involving the animal invitation, it is to everyone’s advantage if our robust abilities to generalize are used in ways that illuminate rather than obscure. Because of our human social genius to push our language habits to evolve, individuals have often challenged prevailing generalizations—this can be done by considering whether and how our language choices might be improved so that our discussions about nonhuman animals introduce us to their realities rather than obscure those realities. Such uses of the arts of critical thinking to shape generalizations in order to minimize their distortions of other animals can also help us recognize a serious set of intra-human problems, namely, that our human-to-human relations are often exacerbated by negative generalizations applied to yet another set of important animals, namely, disfavored human groups.
 
1.10 Nonhuman animals that mate for life. A list appears at https://bestlifeonline.com/animals-mate-for-life/, accessed 21.12.2. and lists the following—beavers, gray wolves, coyotes, gray foxes, seahorses, gibbons, Titi monkeys, Oldfield mice, prairie voles, the antelope species known as Dik-diks, French angelfish, Shingleback lizards, and many birds (some penguin species, sandhill cranes, bald eagles, Atlantic puffins, albatrosses, barn owls, geese, swans, pigeons, monk parakeets, black vultures, scarlet macaws, and California condors).
 
1.11 The Goal of Insightful Generalizations. Even in the face of impoverishing generalizations about other animals arising out of contemporary human exceptionalism, it remains possible to develop evidence-based, nuanced generalizations about the nonhuman animals in one’s local world that confer exploratory power because they offer an imaginative vision that illuminates features of the local world that have long seemed an imponderable mystery. One important use of such well-framed generalizations is summarized by the philosopher of biology Ernst Mayr.
 
Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by the discovery of new facts, even though the two are not mutually exclusive. [Mayr, Ernst 1982. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), at p. 23.]
 
Further, realist concerns prompt us to notice that the relevant “realities” exist not primarily at the level of species, but rather at the level of individuals, such that careful exploration requires a primary commitment to individual-level inquiries.
 
Working to understand something of the realities of a nonhuman individual is an approach we are used to in one sense—for example, we know when we meet a particular kind of animal that we need to attend to the individual before us, not merely talk in terms of facile generalizations that we have been trained to associate with the species membership of the individual we have just met. An evident weakness of human exceptionalism is that this narrative plays down the uniqueness of individuality outside of the human species. But careful observation regarding macro animals discloses that each individual is, in fact, uniquely situated even though a human may not be able to notice precisely how this is so.
 
There are even greater challenges for the observer who seeks to notice our shared world’s many tiny living beings, for our kind of animal is not well equipped to differentiate the micro individuals who belong to the astonishingly diverse and plentiful species known as social insects whose members seem to human perception overwhelming similar in appearance. With all macro animals in particular, though, the genetic diversity is such that the observant human can often recognize individuals as distinct (see, for example, Howard, Len 1953. Birds as Individuals. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday).
 
1.12 Each human meets a unique subset of nonhuman animals. Humans’ diverse processes of learning reveal another personal feature--each human has had a truly unique set of experiences when learning about nonhuman animals. This is so because each adult human has met a unique subset of the world’s dogs, and, similarly, a unique subset of the world’s cats, the world’s horses, and so on. Some of us will have had positive experiences, and others will have been marked by experiences of fear or dislike. Some easily recall learning about the living presence of other animals through encountering that other being’s breath or vocalizations, or felt a nonhuman animal react on the basis of fear or pain in ways that are instantly recognizable as sharing features with how humans also experience fear or pain.

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​Additional Materials for
Chapter Two "The Situated Braid"​

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​2.1  Bishop Gore’s claim that “details” of his God’s creation were ugly was not without important precedents—Montesquieu in his widely read Spirit of Laws at Book 15, Chapter V, suggested a comparable claim that might be used to subordinate one group of unfamiliar humans: “It is hardly to be believed that God, who is a wise Being, should place a soul, especially a good soul, in such a black ugly body.... It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men.” While Montesquieu’s argument does not explicitly compare dark-skinned humans to other animals, the history of western culture features many such comparisons of marginalized humans, such as women, Jews and other disfavored ethnic groups, darker skinned individuals, homosexuals, and on and on, to “beasts” or “lower forms of life” for the purpose of justifying some form of marginalization.
 
2.2  Genetic Overlap. See, for example, Sibley, C. G., and Ahlquist, J. E. 1984. 'The phylogeny of the hominoid primates, as indicated by DNA-DNA hybridization', Journal of Molecular Evolution, 20, 2-15. Details of the relevant science can be found, along with argument that is extremely human-centered from an ethics standpoint, in Jonathan Marks 2002. What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2.3 Regarding where most of life is found--see, for example, Scales, Helen 2011. The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean and the Looming Threat that Imperils It. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, p.10: “More than 95 percent the earth's biosphere—the volume of habitats available for living organisms to occupy—is made up of the deep sea. Everything else—the forests and grasslands, rivers and lakes, mountains, deserts, and shallow coastal waters—is collectively outstripped in terms of sheer volume by those colossal reaches of the oceans that lie below the blue surface.” This calculation may need to be adjusted because of the information in Onstott 2017 (cited in Chapter 5) regarding the ongoing discovery of astonishing numbers of microorganisms below the surface of the land both above sea level and the solid Earth’s beneath the deepest oceans.

2.4 Blind Spots. One way this problem gets glossed over is that, most of the time, our other eye sees what is happening in the first eye’s blind spot. Another solution is that our brain just fills in the gap. But the problem will be noticed if the brain does not do the extra work of filling in the un-seen area with supposed information. Such a problem can happen if (i) the blind spots in the paired eyes overlap while looking at a certain object, or (ii) only one eye is doing the looking and the brain does not have clues as to what “should” be there (let alone what is really there).
 
2.5 We live in a golden age of discovery about plants—Haskell 2017 has already been cited, and currently there is an astonishing range of other science-based work on plants’ communication with each other that builds on work developed in the last decades. An early example addressed how some damaged plants communicate with both members of their own species and other kinds of plants—Holopainen, J. (2004). Multiple functions of inducible plant volatiles. Trends in Plant Science, 9(11), 529-533. DOI: ScienceDirect, and a recent example is Simard 2012.


2.6  Motions difficult to detect. These are the motions of the Earth beneath our feet—our days and nights arrive because the seemingly immobile land beneath our feet is traveling at 1600+ kilometers/1000+miles per hour as the Earth spins on its axis. We rarely notice this motion in daily life, but with effort and imagination one can recognize that shadows are moving if there is finely drawn matrix of lines on a floor and the sun’s light is coming through a window. With attentiveness and imagination, we can in such circumstances sometimes allow our eyes and mind to discern that such movement is actually our planet rotating on an axis. 
         Even if we are able to discern the Earth turning in this way, at the same time our planet is moving much more quickly in other ways which individuals are not able to discern. We cannot, for example, see in real time the movement of the Earth in its orbit about the sun, which proceeds at the rate of 108,000+/km (60,000+ miles) per hour.
                                             
2.7 Other motions we fail to detect. There are yet far greater speeds at which our body is always moving but which we and almost certainly no other animals ever detect—the sun and solar system as a whole move within our home galaxy at 700,000+km/hour or about 200 km/115 miles each second, and our galaxy moves through the universe at nearly 2.5 million km/hour, which works out to about 7000 km/4000 miles per second. Tyson, N. deGrasse & Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, I., 2014. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Episode 4 @ 20:00-21:00.
 
2.8 Our fallible perceptions. One tendency in particular points to human situatedness, because our type of animal is hardwired to find faces easily. This psychological phenomenon, known as pareidolia, happens when our human brain responds to some stimulus (such as an image) by perceiving a familiar pattern. Researchers report, “Our findings suggest that human face processing has a strong top-down component whereby sensory input with even the slightest suggestion of a face can result in the interpretation of a face.” (Jiang Liu et al. “Seeing Jesus in toast: Neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidolia.” Cortex 53 (April 2014), pp. 60-77. The text is from the abstract.) A familiar example known as the “Rubin face” or “the figure-ground vase” was developed around 1915 by the psychologist Edgar Rubin—the image, which seems to feature both a vase and two faces looking at each other, is explained in many general encyclopedias—see, for example, “Rubin vase”, in New World Encyclopedia,www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/rubin_vase, accessed 2022.11.20.
         Humans are, then, predisposed to pay attention to face-like phenomena even whenwhat triggers this reaction is not a real face, but merely a chance conjunction of elements that triggers us as if we had seen a real face. While this predisposition is helpful for survival, its existence reveals that we often do not perceive the world as it actually is, but, instead, have predispositions to find certain patterns that sometimes may seem present but, upon careful examination, are clearly not present.
Because there are many other circumstances where errors or ambiguities plague the way our sort of animal perceives the world, our interesting but obviously finite and fallible perceptions reveal that humans are, yet again, typical animals in many respects.
 
2.9 Umwelt as a term. Today Umwelt is a widely used term because the underlying concept generates insights about different kinds of animals by calling attention to very particular biological foundations. But as so often happens in human languages, complications arise because this word can be used in a variety of ways—sometimes the term is used for individuals, other times for a single species, and at yet other times for a group of species. Consider an example in which multiple species are talked of as having the same Umwelt—von Uexküll began his seminal 1934 monograph [Uexküll, Jakob von. 1934. “A Stroll Through the Words of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds.” An English version was published in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, translated by Claire H. Schillder (ed.), 5-80, Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1957. A .pdf copy is available at https://monoskop.org/images/1/1d/Uexkuell_Jakob_von_A_Stroll_Through_the_Worlds_of_Animals_and_Men_A_Picture_Book_of_Invisible_Worlds.pdf, accessed 2022.3.21.] with a set of observations about ticks that suggest such living beings can be thought of as sharing virtually the same biological foundation. There is an important nuance and complication here, however, because our own species has identified almost 900 species of ticks so far, with more no doubt to be discovered. One can ask, does each tick species have a unique Umwelt, or can we say that a group of genetically distinguishable but closely related species share the same Umwelt? Von Uexkull’s point is that a large group of living beings can be helpfully conceived as sharing a common biological foundation that situates them for all practical purposes in the same way—this is a valuable point to make in a diverse world with many different kinds of animals, some of which in daily life (for example, the individuals comprising the many tick species) are impossible for human individuals to recognize as different from one another. We often can think better about other groups of animals with certain helpful generalizations—for example, all of the individuals colloquially referred to as “orcas” or “killer whales” are regularly listed under the scientific name Orcinus orca but research more than a decade ago pointed out that genetically speaking, orcas are likely several species. [Reuters, “Orcas are more than one species, gene study shows.” April 22, 2010. Accessed 2021.10.6 at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-whales-orca/orcas-are-more-than-one-species-gene-study-shows-idUSTRE63L46N20100422. Fairly said, then, there appear to be different kinds of orcas (see, for example, http://us.whales.org/wdc-in-action/meet-different-types-of-orca, accessed 2021.10.6).] Still, orcas are similar enough from our vantage point for them to be meaningfully collected together and even said to share an Umwelt that is easily distinguished from the Umwelt of any tick species. 
         The key to this kind of species- or group-level talk is that biological foundations are shared by members of the same species. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “species” is “a group [of] animals, plants, etc., that are able to breed with each other and produce healthy young.” Such biological foundations work as a set of finite channels that admit to each individual’s awareness crucial features of a creature’s local world (like the presence of prey, or sexual or competition signals from a nearby member of the same species). What is being specified is a characteristic set of biological limits that set the range of what each member of a species or group of closely related species canexperience of the world.
         In this vein, de Waal observes about humans that “we inhabit the same Umwelt as other primates.” [De Waal 2016, 10.] The point being proposed is simple enough—humans and other primates have similar biological foundations for ordinary experience. This creates the possibility of an individual human having some inkling of a nonhuman primate’s vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch. This can be seen in the following imaginary situation—if several humans and several chimpanzees are sitting together in a forest opening, and nearby a tree branch suddenly crashes noisily to the ground, all of the primates (humans and chimpanzees) will be similarly startled and immediately turn in the direction of the fallen branch. This is possible because, by virtue of a shared Umwelt, these two closely related species are alike in what they hear and how they respond to such a disturbance. In this matter, the two different kinds of animals are for all practical reasons in the same perceptual universe by virtue of, in de Waal’s words, “inhabiting the same Umwelt.”
         One does not have to read materials about Umwelt very long, however, before encountering another use of the word where the focus is on each animal’s individuality. In his Forward to the 1934 monograph [Uexküll, Jakob von. 1934. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, With a Theory of Meaning. Translated by Joseph D. O’Neill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, at p. 43, which also appears in A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men [Jakob Von Uexkull. “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men.” Semiotica, Vol. 89, Issue 4 (1992), 320.], von Uexkull explains the idea of Umwelt by using the metaphor of a soap bubble, suggesting that there is a “subjective world that surrounds each particular organism.” [Stella, Marco, and Karel Kleisner 2010. “Uexküllian umwelt as science and as ideology: The light and the dark side of a concept.” Theorie in Den Biowissenschaften, Vol 129, Issue 1 (2010), at 12. The italics do not appear in the original.]
 
2.10 Augustine’s commonsense guess. For example, Augustine of Hippo in his influential theological treatise De Trinitate (begun about 400 C.E.) commented that “beasts perceive as living, not only themselves, but also each other, and one another, and us as well.” (This passage appears in Augustine’s De Trinitate, section 8.6.9 of the English translation in the series Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol 3, "Augustin [sic]: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises", First Series, ed. by Philip Schaff (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 1994], page 120. The passage is also discussed in Waldau, Paul 2001. The Specter of Speciesism: Buddhist and Christian Views of Animals. New York: Oxford University Press, at p. 148.) Augustine’s not unreasonable conclusion starts out as a guess, of course, because the actual realities of nonhuman “beasts” are for all the reasons already noted notoriously hard to discern. Yet there are reasons to think some approaches can be at least somewhat productive, for it has long been clear that any particular human’s thinking on such subjects can become better with effort and time. It is also possible that human opinion can move to the level of educated guess, especially if a group of experienced individuals works together toward this goal through sharing with each other a variety of careful, repeated observations of other animals. 

2.11 EQ measurements. Recent measurements indicate, for example, that some small birds have an EQ of 1:12 (the brain is one-twelfth of the body’s weight), while humans have a ratio of 1:40. Mice are also listed at 1:40, while elephants are listed 1:560 and horses at 1:600. [See, for example, http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/kinser/Int3.html (which indicates this website was last updated 2017.11.18), accessed 2018.2.16.] Other sources list “small ants” as having the largest brain-to-body ratio (1:7) [Seid, M. A., Castillo, A., Wcislo, W. T. 2011. “The Allometry of Brain Miniaturization in Ants". Brain, Behavior and Evolution. 77 (1):5-13. Accessed 2022.12.25 at https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/322530.] and other nonhuman species (for example, the “tree shrew”) as featuring a 1:10 ratio. [See the article focusing on Tupaia belangeri at http://genome.wustl.edu/genomes/view/tupaia_belangeri 
by The Genome Institute published by Washington University and archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20100601201841/https://www.genome.wustl.edu/genomes/view/tupaia_belangeri, accessed 2022.12.25.]
 
2.12 Critical thinking about EQ measurements. For example, even if humans measured superior on the EQ scale—or in absolute brain size, or some other metric of our own imagining—such a “fact” would not suggest that humans, as morally able animals, do not need to respect and protect other living beings who feature a lower EQ. Many nonhuman animals have impressive brain features that make them distinctive individuals who relate to each other on the basis of shared social complexities. As Part II suggests repeatedly, human individuals, our local communities and larger nation states can use science, ethics, religious views and legal systems to put in place effective and fundamental protections for a wide range of other-than-human animals and their communities. This possibility has long been evident in the fact that our kind of animal in many cultures and for long periods of time clearly recognized humans as members of a more-than-human community.

2.13 Noticing shared biological features. These Buddhist exhortations also are an acknowledgment that our animal aliveness is a core feature of any realistic form of self-understanding. As discussed in Chapter 7, these three exhortations are followed by two others. The fourth exhortation is focused on the animal reality of living in a community that is constantly changing (“All that I hold dear and everyone I love are of the nature to change”). The fifth and final exhortation is an affirmation of ethics and thereby community—“my actions are my only true belongings.” These additional exhortations thus direct those who meditate in this fashion beyond self-preoccupation to a fuller form of awareness, suggesting a theme discussed most fully in Chapter 9—some forms of self-actualization are possible only through self-transcendence.
         These considerations and others about humans’ core features reveal our stubborn animality which does not, and will not, go away simply because some influential humans choose to repudiate it. It is an essence we carry, playing out richly and with benefits such as self-knowledge whenever we openly acknowledge its extraordinary natural connections to the actual, multispecies world in which each of us necessarily lives.
         Given that we are intelligent animals, it would be surprising if in no parts of the worldwide human community was our evident animality openly acknowledged. Upon exploration, full affirmations of our animality can be found—it is a cornerstone, of course, in environmental and animal protection circles, and science-based communities in very practical ways embrace humans as one kind of animal among many other kinds. Further, acknowledgments that humans are one animal among others is still a powerful feature in many small-scale societies, and as Chapter 7 suggests it is present in various ways in subtraditions of different religions.
 
2.14 More on Voltaire’s observation. The common version of this epigram is somewhat misleading given that the French original is less epigrammatic: “Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste." This translates more literally as “Certainly whoever is entitled to make you absurd is entitled to make you unfair” or “Surely whoever has the right to make you absurd has the right to make you unjust.” More discussion and alternative translations appear at http://izquotes.com/quote/376165, and https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/origins-warning-from-voltaire (both accessed 2026.2.9).
 
2.15 Other impressive work re legal, ethical and political issues regarding nonhuman animals. See the creative suggestions about theoretical issues in, for example, Nussbaum, Martha 2006. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge Mass.: The Belknap Press; Harvard University Press; and Donaldson, Sue and Kymlicka, Will 2011. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. New York: Oxford University Press.
  
2.16 More on mirror neurons and oxytocin.  The name is derived from the fact that these neurons are activated not only when a human or some other animal with this feature performs a particular action but also when that particular action is merely observed—hence such neurons “mirror” the behavior of another living being as if the observer were itself acting. [Kilner, J. M. and Lemon, R. N. “What We Know Currently about Mirror Neurons.” Current Biology 2013 Dec 2; 23(23): R1057–R1062; doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.10.051. The article begins, “Mirror neurons are a class of neuron that modulate their activity both when an individual executes a specific motor act and when they observe the same or similar act performed by another individual.” Accessed 2021.10.9 at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3898692/]Olmert’s interest is based on the fact that mirror neurons were likely were involved as our human ancestors began to pattern themselves after other mammals.
         Oxytocin is, in technical terms, a peptide hormone and neuropeptide, and it has for some time been used as a medication to facilitate childbirth. It is a natural substance found in many animals that plays a role in social bonding, sexual reproduction in both sexes, and during and after childbirth. The biology and chemistry are extraordinarily complex, involving many other key substances such as vasopressin. Contemporary scientists now know that oxytocin affects many animal functions and thereby plays a powerful role in a variety of bonding situations, such as that of mammalian mothers to their own offspring or that which takes place in certain pair bonding.

2.17 Comparable anatomy and shared chemistry and brain architecture. Olmert notes that these features which humans have in common with many other mammals likely were involved as our human ancestors began to pattern themselves after other mammals. As centuries and eventually millennia passed, humans continued to watch and learn patterns of life that improved humans’ self-care, made more efficient our migrations when needed, helped us create a safer world for our lives in local communities that included other animals, and honed our awareness of advanced hunting techniques by other animals that could be emulated by human individuals and groups. Using both our biological inheritance from our ancient mammal ancestors and the inherited wisdom of their own group, our human ancestors could pattern their choices on the observable realities of neighboring animals. Key actors on both the human side and the nonhuman side were likely individuals of each species who experienced high levels of oxytocin.
                                      
2.18 On seeing language well. A key lesson to be drawn from the veneration paid these prior but dramatically inadequate views of language is how our species has failed to recognize that such views were self-serving in the sense of being all too congenial to the exclusions that are embodied in today’s human exceptionalism.
            The complexity of human language is an important topic for many reasons, not the least of which is that our many different human languages are clearly a formidable and formative force in our lives. Understanding human language well matters for everyone, including those solely concerned with humans, for the multiplicity of languages in the human community sometimes divides humans even as it enriches the species as a whole.
         Such complexities make all the more relevant work that identifies the sometimes subtle, sometimes overt ways in which inherited narratives about the nature of language long obscured, and still hide to some extent, some of the most important features of human languages. Through recognition of the living nature of languages, we can assess puzzling patterns in how, when and why human communities acquire or discard language habits. Relevant to the animal invitation, for example, we can ask why is it that some human precincts have come to treat “human and animals” as a realistic phrase rather than as a fundamentally misleading habit of mind.
         Part of the answer about why such an anti-scientific dualism would prevail in even those circles that pride themselves on their scientific sophistication is that we are tradition-bound animals who are reliant on inherited social constructions that anchor narrow-hearted views like human exceptionalism. But a full answer needs to be far more complex.
Lenneberg’s 1967 book was published well into the linguistic turn, and its insight that our language skills are biologically-seated (for example, they emerge inexorably at an early age) helps one make fundamental connections that can foster exploration of how our human languages and our other communication abilities have deep roots that connect us to nonhuman animals’ vocalizations and other forms of communication (also pertinent to this is Chapter 3’s discussion of claims that each human has inner monkey, reptile and fish).Such evidence has important implications because it contrasts greatly with claims that language involves mystical forces as often asserted confidently in the past. Similarly, the biological dimensions of language are today so fully evident that it becomes imperative to engage the number and variety of past claims that our human language had its roots primarily in some intellectual force such as rationality.
  
2.19 On the question of whether other animals also use social constructions. Mildly suggestive of a “yes” answer is the background fact that social construction is one strand in the situated braid. Since other animals also have lives featuring other strands of the situated braid (bodily finitudes, mental limits and frontiers, embodied awareness, communication capabilities, and sometimes culture-like social features), humans today need to stay open to the possibility that “constructed” elements may also play out in some nonhuman animals’ situatedness. A collateral benefit of such openness is that we then may understand better how to explore our own human social constructions. Lenneberg raises the issue of other animals indirectly when stating that “[a] major objective” of his work is “to show that reason, discovery, and intelligence are concepts that are as irrelevant for an explanation of the existence of language as for the existence of bird songs or the dance of the bees.” [Lenneberg 1967, 1.]
         Consider how such issues are implicit or explicit in some discussions—for example, the fact that humans in their local world understand themselves to have deep connections to some of their nonhuman neighbors is a recurrent theme in much anthropological literature. A 1990 collection of essays focuses on “the ‘special’ relationships, some of which have been grouped together under the term ‘totemism’, that may exist between humans and animals.” [Willis, Roy. Signifying Animals : Human Meaning in the Natural World. London; Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990. The description of the volume is from the Forward by the series editor Peter J. Ucko, p. xii.] This collection’s editor cites “Lenneberg's (1967) demonstration of the correspondence between the classificatory ability innate in many nonhuman animals and the classificatory principle characteristic of all known human languages.” [Willis 1997, 11.] Also relevant is the fact that many of the cultures shaped by our ancient forebears assumed that a wide range of nonhuman animals feature their own communication traditions—for example, as discussed in Chapter 7, the Pliny the Elder opened his influential first century discussion of nonhuman animals with the claim that elephants are the “nearest in capacity to men,” and he then referenced long-standing views that elephants not only understand the language of humans, but also hold “in religious reverence the stars” and practice “veneration of the sun and moon.” [The passages quoted are from Book VIII of Pliny’s Natural History in Thirty-Seven Books, translated by Philemon Holland. London: George Barclay. 1847-1848, available in .pdf format at  https://ia801407.us.archive.org/2/items/plinysnaturalhis00plinrich/plinysnaturalhis00plinrich.pdf  accessed 2018.5.3.]
         Claims that human language should be the leading edge of arguments about human uniqueness have in part been premised on the view that our language exchanges are the means by which we learn of other humans’ mental realities and interests. [For discussion of this point and the following claim made by Immanuel Kant, as well as alternatives, see Rollin, Bernard E. 1992. Animal Rights and Human Morality, rev. edn (Buffalo: Prometheus Press), p. 72.] Influential figures in western intellectual history, including the Stoics already noted and Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century, have argued much as Descartes did that humans’ linguistic abilities are integrally involved with, even constitutive of, humans’ rationality. This conclusion is thought to support the Stoics’ claim that the ability to speak one of humans’ many languages is fairly held to be the one and only criterion for moral considerability. While this ancient narrative obviously flatters humans, it flies in the face of the fact that the vast majority of ancient cultures held a diametrically opposed view because they experienced themselves as members of a larger, more-than-human community.   
 
2.20 More on Shepard and Campbell. Paul Shepard observed, “The most revealing source of information about how people conceive of themselves in relation to the nonhuman world is myth. … All myths operate on three levels: one deeply personal, concerning an inner, unconscious life; another the social and ecological milieu; and third, the society of spiritual and eternal things in tales of creation.” [Shepard, Paul 1996. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Washington D.C.: Island Press, p. 6-7. The italics have been added.]
         There are many detailed and wide-ranging analyses of the narrative function of our ancestors’ countless myths. [For an account that is particularly wide-ranging geographically and temporally, see Witzel, M., 2012. The Origins of the World’s Mythologies, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.] With full acknowledgement that no one of these analyses is deemed definitive, consider the wide-ranging scheme developed in the voluminous works of Joseph Campbell, who long ago stated, 
 
We live, today, in a terminal moraine of myths and mythic symbols, fragments large and small of traditions that formerly inspired and gave rise to civilizations. [Joseph Campbell, The Way of Animal Powers, Volume 1, Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Alfred Van Der Marck Editions, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983, p. 8, opening sentence of Prologue entitled “The Mythological Dimension”.]
 
Campbell’s overview, which names four functions of “myth and mythic symbols” as they order our lives, begins on an immersive, deeply invitational note.
 
The first function of a mythology is to waken and maintain in the individual a sense of wonder and participation in the mystery of this finally inscrutable universe, whether understood in Michelangelo’s way as an effect of the will of an anthropomorphic creator, or in the way of our modern physical scientists—and of many of the leading oriental religious and philosophical systems—as the continuously created dynamic display of an absolutely transcendent, yet universally immanent, mysterium tremendens et fascinans, which is the ground at once of the whole spectacle and of oneself. [Ibid.]
 
Narrative that can perform this first function does much more than inventory a world in some manner. Beyond that function, narrative opens a door through which arrive invitations, a feature suggested by Campbell’s choice of “mystery” as what is awakened and maintained. Campbell names a second function for narrative—“fill every particle and quarter of the current cosmological image with its measure of this mystical import….” [Ibid.]Campbell underscores that “in this regard, mythologies differ” just as “the horizons, landscapes, sciences, and technologies of other civilizations differ.” [Ibid.] To nuance why “mythologies differ,” Campbell specifically mentions two examples of place-based, local world differences— “a hunting tribe [such] as the Pawnee of the North American plains, for example, would have known a world very different from that of the mid Pacific Polynesians….” [Ibid.] Narrative, if it is to function well, needs to be a living response to the vibrant features of one’s local world.
         The third function of a mythology identified by Campbell builds on the foundational role that local place and culture have as key determinants playing out in different local worlds.  
 
… a third function, no less important is the sociological one of validating and maintaining whatever moral system and manner of life-customs may be peculiar to the local culture. [Ibid., p. 9.]
 
Campbell’s “fourth, and final, essential function of mythologies,” also intensely local and distinct,
 
is the pedagogical one of conducting individuals in harmony through the passages of human life, from the stage of dependency in childhood to the responsibilities of maturity, and on to old age and the ultimate passage of the dark gate. [Ibid.]
 
These four functions are entwined as they help humans in community develop a multi-faceted, intensely local approach by which the community shares, further develops, and passes along to future generations survival techniques, such as where to live, what to eat in that place, how to avoid dangers, and much more. The prevalence of narratives for these purposes reveals how vitally important it is for our kind of primate to work together in a local, competitive world full of other living beings. 
         Campbell’s account of narratives embodied in their own “myth and mythic symbols” suggests much about the inadequacy of human exceptionalism as a dominant narrative.With regard to the first function of myth—awakening and maintaining in individuals “a sense of wonder and participation” in a “finally inscrutable universe”— human exceptionalism is a catastrophic failure. It narrows humans’ perspective by nurturing a sense of human entitlement to an array of privileges that result in much destruction in the very world where humans inevitably must live. Beyond harms to other animals and ecosystems, human exceptionalism ignores the evident “multiplicity of intelligences” [seeTucker, Mary Evelyn 2006. “A Communion of Subjects and a Multiplicity of Intelligences” in Waldau and Patton 2006, pp. 645-647.] that our ancestors so regularly and widely detected in their own local world that our ancestors thought of as their larger community. In particular, human exceptionalism fails to foster what is well described as relational knowing in our lives, that is, recognizing that we become who we are in relation to the different living beings and places where we live. In many small-scale societies, the principal thrust of what it means to be a person “flows from being creatively attuned to the surrounding world of animals.” [John Grim, “Knowing and Being Known by Animals: Indigenous Perspectives on Personhood,” in Waldau and Patton, A Communion of Subjects, 373–390, at 388.] Personhood by this understanding of the world is not, then, primarily a separateness from others; it instead it is “a relationality,” that is, a sense that one’s own personhood grows out of both paying attention to, and then remaining in relation to, the diverse living beings in one’s local world. Further, such “work toward relatedness, especially in knowing animals” makes relation-built personhood an “achievement.” [Ibid., p. 380.] Human exceptionalism so constricts humans’ relationship to the world that it denudes each human’s local world, leaving individuals ill equipped to recognize features of the more-than-human world in which we inevitably live. 
         As for Campbell’s second, cosmological function of myth (“fill every particle and quarter of the current cosmological image with its measure of this mystical import”), the human exceptionalism narrative also fails—rather than stimulating a sense of “mystical import,” it produces an account that is wanting in the same manner that racist ideologies or sex/gender-based discriminations are wanting to a human who understands all human animals to be worthy of respect and deserving of fundamental protections. Exceptionalist claims leave out far too much of our surrounding, nourishing world by holding in place the existing domination and privileges of humans. 
         Failure is equally apparent when the measure is the sociological function of myth—reading one’s local world in a way that validates human exceptionalism does more than strip the local world of its more-than-human significance. It also ignores those existentially important features of the more-than-human world that the vast majority of our ancient ancestors wanted to honor and keep a part of their awareness precisely because it was mysterious, powerful and more-than-human for them.
Finally, with regard to the pedagogical function of narratives, myths and symbols, human exceptionalism replaces the astonishment available when one notices the more-than-human invitations of our complex surroundings with a meaningless certainty that one kind of animal—our own—is the definitive measure of all things.
                                       
2.21 More on this key challenge. As pointed out in Chapter 3, the hard work of thinking out how social construction plays a part in creating or dismantling such problems is ongoing, but the trajectory toward an affirmation of non-subordination is unmistakable. An important parallel question is whether rape is a cultural universal or a culture-nurtured phenomenon—the discussion is as fraught as it is important, but suffice it to say that some societies are rape-free (see, for example, Wagner 2001, 66-68, on the lack of rape in North American Indian societies at the time of Europeans 17th century arrival). An important early study of this is Palmer, Craig, “Is Rape a Cultural Universal? A Re-examination of the Ethnographic Data,” Ethnology, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 1-16.


2.22 More on welcoming questions. The ancient lessons of Sumer had, of course, been lost to the European cultures whose descendants enforced the subordination of women in the last millennium—what was remembered was not societies in which women had been treated as equals, but instead a past of domination. Tradition, then, mandated that the nineteenth century suffragists in New York live an attenuated life—they could not vote, were prohibited under the law as to owning property or being granted custody of their own children in the event of a divorce, and were prevented from speaking in public places like churches. How radically subordinated women were less than two hundred years ago in, for example, the United States is well represented by the manner in which legal systems had traditionally defined the crime of rape—if a woman was raped, and she was married at the time, the law deemed that the harm done was a crime against her husband, while if the rape victim was not married, the law deemed the harm to be a crime against the victim’s father. [This history is related in Brownmiller, Susan 1975. Against our will: men, women, and rape. New York: Simon and Schuster.]
         Such a patterned and pervasive subordination was, of course, by no means confined to women—for example, there were pervasive harms permitted against all sorts of non-Europeans during the mid-nineteenth century in the colonized nations of the world. Importantly, those willing to explore history and the daily lives of many who live in narrow-minded societies can often find individual humans who refused to subscribe to socially dominant dismissals imposed on women, ethnic groups, or any and all nonhuman animals. Further, interested explorers such as sociologists, religion-focused comparativists, and others have found correlations that suggest traces of a more favorable attitude toward women in advocates of protection for nonhuman animals. [See, for example, Sorabji 1993, 161, where the discussion is about such a correlation in the writings of Philo and Plutarch.]
 
If one is fortunate enough to be born into a time and place where the prevailing narrative supports a generous notion of caring, one likely recognizes such equality as “natural” and “common sense.” But if one is born into a culture under the sway of a social construction that subordinates whole groups, such claims also may seem “natural” or “common sense” by virtue of humans’ tendency to hold their heritage as if it is the unassailable order of nature.
 
​

Additional Materials for
Chapter Three "Social Construction in the Situated Braid"​

​3.1 Assessing claims about wild animals. It is challenging to assess the relevance of certain traditions about local wild animals. If a tradition is based on views held by people indigenous to the local world in which one lives, such views possibly have the benefit of having been shaped by many generations of practical concerns involving the kind of animal that our modern observer is purporting to describe. If the tradition is based on views held by people who speak disparagingly of the animals involved, or do not have a long history of engaging such living beings, such views may involve distortion of one kind or another. Caution is needed because human sources have often misdescribed other animals—examples can be found, for example, in texts held as sacred, such as Deuteronomy 14:6-8 where rabbits are misdescribed as chewing cuds. 
 
3.2 Other translations. The examples in the main text illuminate how unavoidable social constructions are in the modern world, for each contemporary human each day can be exposed to, literally, hundreds of instances of social construction by simply wandering through a modern city and having a variety of conversations along the way.
         Consider how another English translation of the same Pali words reveals, as does the first translation, that humans’ response to such ignorance involves our “minds” in making, that is, constructing, an account of what is happening.
 
Phenomena are preceded by the heart, 
                  ruled by the heart,
                  made of the heart. [Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff) 2011 (revised translation). Dhammapada: A Translation. Available in .pdf format at https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/dhammapada.pdf.]
 
Finally, the same Pali words are translated yet again differently in a widely available 1973 translation that also conveys the role that the human mind plays in construction of the world.
 
What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, 
and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: 
our life is the creation of our minds. [Mascaró, Juan 1973. The Dhammapada: The Path of Perfection. New York: Penguin, p. 35.]
 
3.3 Mary Wollstonecraft. By virtue of her own situatedness as a woman born in late eighteenth century England, Wollstonecraft noticed key aspects of her era’s social life that Aristotle, who was also deeply concerned about education, seems not to have noticed or cared about, namely, education directed to some humans, but denied to others, in order to construct a society.
 
 … the civilization, which has hitherto taken place in the world, has been very partial.  … I have … patiently observed the conduct of parents and the management of schools; but what has been the result? a profound conviction, that the neglected education of my fellow creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore; and that women in particular, are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes…. One cause … I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect. [The text is from the “Introduction” to Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, an e-text of which is available at no cost at http://www.gutenberg.org.]
 
This last example reveals the importance of humans naming social construction forthrightly. Such frankness clearly allows one to rebut claims that tradition-sanctioned imbalances in social privileges, legal protections or educational opportunities can be justified as the natural order playing out—instead, social constructions are often better seen as forced onto “nature” and thereby the cause of entirely un-natural oppressions. Social constructions can, of course, be congenial to features of the natural world, but at issue are social constructions that masquerade as the natural order when, in fact, they are merely one human group dominating subordinated “others.”
 
3.4 Berger and Luckman’s silence about nonhuman animals’ socio-cultural possibilities. While Berger and Luckmann acknowledge that “[o]n the one hand, man is a body, in the same way that this may be said of every other animal organism”, they immediately add, “[o]n the other hand, man has a body. That is, man experiences himself as an entity that is not identical with ­­his body, but that, on the contrary, has that body at its disposal.” [Berger and Luckmann 1966, 50.] This may be the reasoning that convinced them that only humans feature the kinds of dynamic sharing and social interaction that leads to shared ideas of reality that are socially constructed.
         Berger and Luckmann’s distinction can also be read as reflecting the continuing influence of a mind/body dualism, a notoriously intractable problem in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophical circles dominated by radical human-centeredness. [This problem is outlined in Robinson, Howard, "Dualism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/dualism/; and discussed in MacFarquhar, Larissa 2018. “Mind Expander: Andy Clark believes that your thinking isn’t all in your head.” The New Yorker. April 2, 2018. Pp. 62-73.] The debate has been reframed, however, because an uncritical reliance on a mind-body dualism fails to account for much research that has provided information about some nonhuman animals’ brains, complex social interactions, use of a theory of mind, and complex communications. Consider how overtones of a mind-body dualism dominate the following claim by Berger and Luckmann.
 
Man’s self-production is always, and of necessity, a social enterprise. Men togetherproduce a human environment, with the totality of its socio-cultural and psychological formations. None of these formations may be understood as products of man’s biological constitution, which, as indicated, provides only the outer limits for human productive activity. Just as it is impossible for man to develop as man in isolation, so it is impossible for man in isolation to produce a human environment. Solitary human being is being on the animal level (which, of course, man shares with other animals). As soon as one observes phenomena that are specifically human, one enters the realm of the social. Man’s specific humanity and his sociality are inextricably intertwined. Homo sapiens is always, and in the same measure, homo socius. [Berger and Luckmann 1966, p. 51.]
 
3.5 Berger and Luckmann comment on how social order arises. In the following passage, for example, Berger and Luckmann fail to question human exceptionalism in any way.
 
One may ask in what manner social order itself arises.
The most general answer to this question is that social order is a human product, or, more precisely, an ongoing human production. … Social order exists only as a product of human activity. No other ontological status may be ascribed to it without hopelessly obfuscating its empirical manifestations. Both in its genesis (social order is the result of past human activity) and its existence in any instant of time (social order exists only and insofar as human activity continues to produce it) it is a human product. [Ibid., p. 52]
 
3.6 George Romanes was widely respected because his work was premised on the fundamental integrities of science as explained by Bernard Rollin, one of the late twentieth century’s pioneers on humans’ relationships with nonhuman animals.
 
[T]he conclusion seems inescapable that the manner in which Darwin and Romanes were attempting to study animal mind is hardly the sentimental, mindless, anthropomorphic, romantic, gullible wishful thinking which it has been depicted as by the twentieth-century common sense of science. Their approach was based on a sound, replicable, sceptical, and critical methodology which is consonant with, and indeed follows in part from, the philosophical assumptions of evolutionary theory that dominate biological activity and theorizing today. [Rollin, Bernard E., The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain and Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 50-51.]
 
This pioneering ethicist then asked a trenchant question about why, given that such work honored the integrities of science, Romanes’ work fell out of favor. 
 
If this is the case, we are then faced with a major puzzle: why, by 1930, had the Darwin-Romanes approach to mind virtually vanished from mainstream scientific activity, whereas Darwinian biology has flourished? [Ibid., 51]
 
The answer is that, as has happened in other domains dominated by social constructions favoring our own uniqueness, the late nineteenth century attempts to use science to explore other animals’ complexities were overridden by a new narrative that subordinated any and all nonhumans, thereby separating humans from other animals and our own animality.      
 
3.7 Key genetic insights. In the mid-nineteenth century, Gregor Mendel had done experimental work that afforded insights into hereditary issues, but this work had not been given significant attention. Mendel’s work was, however, rediscovered around the turn of the century. It then afforded key insights that helped stimulate more and more awareness, and eventually became part of the effort that produced the powerful approach variously called the “new synthesis,” “modern evolutionary synthesis,” “the evolutionary synthesis,” and “the neo-Darwinian synthesis.” [See, for example, Mayr, E. & Provine, W.B., 1980. The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. The variety of terms is mentioned in the opening footnote of the Wikipedia article “Modern Synthesis (20th century)” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_synthesis_(20th_century), accessed 2022.3.21.]
 
3.8 1956 M.I.T. conference. One commentator identified a 1956 symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an early manifestation of a shift in exploration that would come to be called “the cognitive revolution” as developments followed in the 1960s. [Gardner 1985, pp. 28 and 32; see also Chapter 3 generally.] 
 
3.9 Additional Challenges. Various challenges called out the behaviorist viewpoint as inflexible and dogmatic, tying it to a philosophical paradigm (positivism) that had been shown to be unnecessarily reductive and values-driven in its prohibition of key questions—for example, behaviorism's explanatory monism violated the long-time commonsense proposition that observation can contribute greatly to exploration of the world around us. 
         In other domains, parsimony is a valued tool that helps avoid contrived explanations used to maintain the dominance of some cherished theory. The use of parsimony had long been advocated in prominent theological and philosophical circles under the name “Ockham's razor,” which promotes the simplest, least assumption-intensive explanations. Applied in biology, this sort of approach helps one see that intelligence and other “higher level” cognitive functions often are more plausible explanations.
 
3.10 Additional ethically charged questions. Given our recent past, we can also today notice that many human circles became so preoccupied with the human exceptionalism narrative and claims of human superiority that accounts in our social sciences—for example, Berger and Luckmann’s 1965 views on social construction—were disfigured by an un-examined human-centeredness.
         It is wise, of course, when stating such fundamental criticism about those who in the past addressed a very difficult subject, to remind ourselves repeatedly that what is said here in the first half of the twenty-first century will almost certainly seem wanting by the measure of claims, ideas, vocabulary and social constructions that prevail at the beginning of the twenty-second century. Given present trends, one could reasonably guess that by the beginning of the next century, our species’ scientific establishment will have discerned that “we are smart enough to figure out how smart some nonhuman animals are.” Perhaps then our species will work to usher in an era dominated by a broad sense of community that goes well beyond our own species membership. 
         From one altogether animal standpoint, wondering about one’s own ability or inability to confirm the existence of an external world is a luxury, for the most relevant issues to an animal individual are, of course, very immediate and have to do with our own survival and that of those living beings we choose to care about on a regular basis. In day-to-day life, members of our human communities obviously retain the ability to notice that, in Berger and Luckman’s phrasing, “we recognize [phenomena] as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot ‘wish them away’)” and thus “define ‘knowledge’ as the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics.” 
         We also easily recognize that each human group lives and communicates through a web of values and ideas that our kind collectively weaves and thus constructs. The stories that each local community generates to help its citizens remember and honor seminal ideas taught by elders have been truly impactful social constructions in countless instances.
         One part of our human genius (all parts of which are eminently animal abilities even for those who hypothesize that we are the only animals that exhibit such genius), then, is to attempt to bring buried assumptions into the foreground of our thinking. Such work, if done honestly, no doubt will challenge the self-privileging so evident in human exceptionalist assumptions. This is an important development because this narrative has resulted in our kind remaining less-than-fully aware of the wider, more-than-human world we inhabit.

​

Additional Materials for
Chapter Four “On Finishing Revolutions--
Ferment, Multiple Invitations and Re-Revolution"

4.1 Humboldt’s many challenges to human exceptionalism. Humboldt’s many different affirmations of a robust awareness of humans’ natural communities challenges the central claims of human exceptionalism. In Part II, a series of European thinkers discussed in connection with the birth and development of the nineteenth century academic fields of sociology and anthropology is used to represent how in the last few centuries, many of humans’ largest cultures have not only failed to embrace, but also wandered further away from acknowledging humans’ animality. This tendency has created, of course, the conditions that set the stage for the recurring animal renaissances mentioned throughout this volume. Through such renaissances humans and their communities can reaffirm the basics of humans’ animal lives—humans are now, and have always been, one animal among others in the Earth community. Without realism of this kind by which individuals pay attention to their actual neighbors and local ecological context, the essentials of healthy ecosystems are hard to discern and thus nurture and sustain in the long term. This lesson about the importance of a frank and fair engagement with this most basic feature of human life was an enabling feature evident in our ancient ancestors’ ways of living. Recognizingthis basic truth is far more likely when humans are evidence-driven rather than in thrall to some cultural or religious hegemony that asserts “the world was created for humans” or “we have risen above animality.” Humboldt’s vision, then, modeled a skill that is alwaysavailable to each and every human animal, namely, using our native abilities to marshal evidence about the living features of our own local world.
         In Part II’s chapter on religion and that on the law, much evidence is presented regarding the failure of colonizers to recognize and respect the religio-spiritual and legal dimensions of either the small-scale indigenous cultures or the larger, empire-oriented indigenous groups whom the colonizers encountered. In retrospect, Humboldt was just one of many who lamented the myopias and greed of the colonizers that created extraordinary harms for both the subjugated humans and the natural places in which they had long been living. In a profound way, the colonizers’ extraordinary failures reflect only short-term greed, myopias and insensitivities of the worst sort that prevented them from recognizing that humans comprise but one species, not a hierarchy of some kind favoring only the more powerful and aggressive segments of the larger human community.  
         Lessons of humility abound even today for those who explore in detail the writings of Humboldt, Darwin and the many individuals who were energized by their ideas in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. For example, even though Humboldt and Darwin in many passages provided readers with a basis for seeing indigenous peoples in a positive sense, such positive views did not prevail widely in these writers’ colonizing nations. But even though a positive evaluation of the newly “discovered” human cultures did not prevail, nonetheless these visionaries’ ideas made a powerful case for the importance of an evidence-driven assessment for any human whose goal is to engage the world without distortions such as human exceptionalism, or racism, or sexism, or religious intolerance. A commitment to be realistic about newly encountered beings whether human or nonhuman pushes one to work hard to ensure that one sees such beings in their context rather than in terms of the cultural myopias of one’s own conquering group. Seeing well and fully the basic realities of a newly discovered realm’s indigenous beings—and this is true whether such living beings are human or nonhuman—requires, thus, both honesty about the beings perceived and one’s own self and culture. 
         More on Evidence in a World Pulsating with Life. Each human’s daily life as an animal is, this Part I has argued, that of a finite but ever-so-social animal in an incompletely known, ever-processing world. These are the circumstances that require each of us to consider the importance of patiently developing and then working humbly with evidence about the world. Doing these tasks as a member of an eminently social species prompts each of us to seek out other humans’ input on such issues. Experience also teaches that while we understandably should respect the claims we have inherited from family and community about other humans and nonhumans alike, such inherited views can mislead because they were drawn prematurely or were in some crucial respect inaccurate or unsupported by evidence that we have vetted carefully in a variety of real-world circumstances.
         Consider in this regard how Humboldt reacted to an inherited assumption in both the science and non-science circles of his local world. When in 1845 Humboldt published the first volume of magnum opus Cosmos, “[w]here others insisted that nature was stripped of its magic as humankind penetrated into its deepest secrets, Humboldt believed exactly the opposite.” [Wulf 2015, p. 245] Humboldt’s fascination with the actual world he had been exploring pushed him to ask “how could this be?” In Cosmos, Humboldt  
 
took his readers on a journey from outer space to earth, and then from the surface of the planet into its inner core. He discussed comets, the Milky Way and the solar system as well as terrestrial magnetism, volcanoes and the snow line of mountains. He wrote about the migration of the human species, about plants and animals and the microscopic organisms that live in stagnant water or on the weathered surface of rocks. [Ibid.]
 
Humboldt’s vision was “of a world that pulsated with life” in which “[e]verything was part of” what Humboldt characterized as our Earth’s community’s “never-ending activity of animated forces.” [Ibid., with the source of Humboldt’s own comment listed at p. 405.] For Humboldt, “Nature was a ‘living whole’ where organisms were bound together in a ‘net-like intricate fabric.’” [Ibid.] This first volume, which inaugurated what was to become Humboldt’s five-volume magnus opus completed shortly before his death in 1859, was composed of three parts, the last of which was focused on “organic life which encompassed plants, animals and humans.” [Ibid.]
         While Chapter 5 addresses how the modern science tradition is centered on evidentiary considerations set out in important, sometimes highly technical rules regarding what counts as evidence, there are other evidence-based considerations that provide important lessons for those who seek clues. These non-science uses of evidence are much more than informal precursors or invitations to scientifically-vetted forms of evidence, for they reveal well how in various places for millennia humans have honed their skills of perception of our ever-so-complex local world rather than merely interpreting that world solely in terms of generalizations we have inherited from others. Thus, an important consideration, although one sometimes fraught with both tension and unacknowledged problems, has been raised in a variety of ways in previous chapters—humans are tradition-bound animals who often rely on ideas and values insisted upon by previous generations and “authorities.” History has repeatedly shown that it is perilous to assume that what one has been told by “authorities” is, in fact, a full and accurate explanation of what each of us can encounter in the local world where we live.
         Relevant here is the possibility of amassing evidence deliberately and communally in ways that Darwin models well in On the Origin of Species. Darwin developed early his central ideas about natural selection, “but the meticulous Darwin was not rushing to publish anything that was not solidly argued and underpinned with facts.” [Ibid., p. 243.] Humboldt in many ways reflected similar meticulousness with details, which in part explains why in Cosmos, which had a “breadth … incomparable to any other publication,”
 
… amazingly, Humboldt had written a book about the universe that never once mentioned the word “God”. … Instead of God, Humboldt spoke of a “wonderful web of organic life”. [Ibid., p. 246, with the source of Humboldt’s own comment listed at p. 405.]
 
In the mid-nineteenth century European societies, references to the intention and action of a monotheistically-conceived creator deity as a form of explanation were the norm. For Humboldt, however, a commitment to evidence of a public kind which others could also experience directly in the natural world was the touchstone that allowed him to use an approach that did not invoke one of the most dominant habits of explanation in his birth culture.
 
4.2 Humboldt’s Influence on Individual Thinkers. Many individuals in reliance on Humboldt’s published works, ideas and insights went on to develop additional insights that further shaped late nineteenth and early twentieth century research and reflection. The most famous of these followers, as the text points out, was Charles Darwin.
         Collectively, the contributions of Humboldt’s famous admirers reveal that each human is born into ongoing traditions of thinking and valuing that can grow in ways that help the human collective both deepen and expand its awareness of the place of our kind of animal in the Earth community. Such expansions help all of us see our shared world better, just as it helps us go forward on the basis of evidence-driven considerations and critical thinking about the plain fact that our animality is shared with many other ancient lineages of life. Darwin in particular deepened Humboldt’s recognition of humans as citizens in a more-than-human world, thereby fostering perhaps the most remarkable animal renaissance since the Axial Age sages.
         Humboldt’s illuminating presentation of wide-ranging personal experience and detailed empirical evidence was such that it helped others notice connections and patterns that can be detected by those who attend carefully and consistently to their natural world surroundings. 
 
Throughout the Beagle's voyage [1836-1841], Darwin was engaged in an inner dialogue with Humboldt—pencil in hand, highlighting sections in Personal Narrative[Humboldt’s most popular book covering his travels from 1799-1804, and published in 1807]. Humboldt's descriptions were almost like a template for Darwin's own experiences. [Ibid., p. 225.]
 
For example, when Darwin wrote in his own journal about his first experience of an earthquake in Valdivia, Chile, the entry “was almost a summary of what Humboldt wrote about his first earthquake in Cumaná in 1799.” [Ibid.]
         Humboldt’s cross-disciplinary insights also prompted many of his readers to recognize other-than-science-based connections. The list of notable “heirs” to Humboldt’s wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary insights also includes William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Perkins Marsh (author of the seminal 1860s volume Man and Nature), Ernst Haeckel (who coined the term ecology), John Muir, Rachel Carson and James Lovelock (author of the modern Gaia hypothesis). [The first nine of these individuals are mentioned extensively in Wulf 2015, and the last two at p.7.]
         Many of Humboldt’s avid followers advocated zealously for his views. Ernst Haeckel, who in 1866 published Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (General Morphology of Organisms) as an aggressive challenge those who refused to accept Darwin's evolutionary theory”, [Ibid., p. 306.] was the first to suggest that what Humboldt had made possible was a “science of the relationships of an organism with its environment”, which Haeckel then named “Oecologie, based on oikos/household, to address Humboldt’s idea of nature as a unified whole made up of complex relationships.” [Ibid., p. 307.] Haeckel went on to publish  “between 1899 and 1904, Art Forms in Nature [which] became hugely influential” and recognized the importance of art for teaching humans about the more-than-human features of the world that surrounds every human on every day of that human’s life.[Ibid., p. 310 and p. 314.]
 
4.3 A Testament to Humans’ Capacity for Awareness. Humboldt modeled how humans’ impressive imagination and curiosity are productive when coupled with a disciplined combination of measurement, imagination and critical thinking—Humboldt in 1799, after he secured permission in Madrid to travel to the Spanish colonies in South America, observed that the purpose of voyage was “to discover how ‘all forces of nature are interlaced and interwoven’—how organic and inorganic nature interacted.” [Ibid., p. 45, quoting Humboldt’s personal correspondence.] Humboldt’s Views of Nature was impressive for many because it “combined lively prose and rich landscape descriptions with scientific observation and a blueprint for much of nature writing today” because it is “a scientific book unembarrassed by lyricism.” [Ibid., p. 132.] Humboldt sought, very much in the spirit of his close friends Goethe and Schelling, to connect with his readers by appealing to, in Humboldt’s words, “our imagination and spirit.” [Ibid., p.128, with the Humboldt sources listed in the note on p.376.] Schelling famously argued in his 1799 Naturphilosophie “that the concept of an ‘Organism’ should be the foundation of how to understand nature” rather than “as a mechanical system.” [Ibid., p. 129 (the original Schelling passages are listed on p.376).] As Humboldt worked to supply relevant science-based details for this claim, he maintained the emphasis on the rational method made paramount by Enlightenment thinkers even as he asserted as well the importance of imagination, beauty and holistic thinking. 
 
Humboldt also developed pioneering ecological insights relevant to (i) climate and (ii) human animals’ immersion as one community among others in the larger ecosystems.
 
Humboldt [was] the first to explain the fundamental functions of the forest for the ecosystem and climate: the trees ability to store water and to enrich the atmosphere with moisture, their protection of the soil, and their cooling effect. He also talked about the impact of trees on the climate through their release of oxygen. [Ibid., pp. 58-59.]
 
Humboldt’s ecological insights about climate disruption were expanded to comparative concerns framed scientifically. These insights are, especially in their early twenty-first century forms, pertinent to humans as but one of the communities that can be seen more fully and clearly by virtue of holistic ecological sensibilities. During Humboldt’s final long trip (which took him into Asian portions of what today is Russia), “comparison not discovery was his guiding theme” as he examined the different ways that the human species was impacting climate, for this approach prompted Humboldt to address
 
deforestation, ruthless irrigation and, perhaps most prophetically, the ‘great masses of steam and gas’ produced in the industrial centres. No one but Humboldt had looked at the relationship between humankind and nature like this before. [Ibid., p. 213.]
 
Humboldt expanded such insights to larger scale studies—for example, in a speech in Saint Petersburg, when he “encouraged climate studies across the vast Russian empire,” this was “the first large scale study to investigate the impact that man had on climatic conditions.”[Ibid., p. 215.]
 
There is yet another intriguing aspect of recognizing the significance of such an ecological framing—it fosters the practice of science as an eminently communal project. In his opening comments at Saint Petersburg, Humboldt stated, “Without a diversity of opinion, the discovery of truth is impossible.” [Ibid., p. 196.]
 
Humboldt was revolutionizing the sciences. In September 1828 he invited hundreds of scientists from across Germany and Europe to attend a conference in Berlin. Unlike previous such meetings at which scientists had endlessly presented papers about their own work, Humboldt put together a very different program. Rather than being talked at, he wanted the scientists to talk with each other. [Ibid.]
 
Humboldt was also attuned to the role that competition plays in the natural world, supplying evidence-based details that challenged the view that nature was “a well-oiled machine in which every animal and plant had a divinely allotted place.” [Ibid., pp. 67-68.] He noted, instead, that animals and plants compete with each other in a “web of life” that featured “a relentless and bloody battle.” [Ibid., p. 67.]
 
… [W]hat Humboldt saw was no Eden. The “golden age has ceased”, he wrote. These animals feared each other and they fought for survival. And it wasn’t just the animals; he also noted how vigorous climbing plants were strangling huge trees in the jungle. Here it was not “the destructive hand of man”, he said, but the plants’ competition for light and nourishment that limited their lives and growth. [Ibid., p. 68.]
 
Humboldt made many other important contributions that helped shape early twenty-first century thinking. For example, he recognized the keystone species concept—“for Humboldt, the Mauritia palm was the ‘tree of life’—the perfect symbol of nature as a living organism.” [Ibid., p. 74.] Further, during his travels in Ecuador, he discovered the magnetic equator. [Ibid., p. 90. Different from the imaginary line centered perfectly as it goes around the Earth, the magnetic equator is comprised of the series of places around the earth where the magnetic needle of a compass will not dip because the lines of force of the earth's magnetic field are parallel with the surface of the Earth.] Additionally, to help humans visualize global climate patterns, Humboldt invented isotherms, “the lines that we see on weather maps today and which connect different geographical points around the globe that are experiencing the same temperatures.” [Ibid., p. 177.]
 
4.4 There are many more contributions by Humboldt worth honoring.
 
Humboldt ... believed that only an agrarian Republic brought happiness and independence. Colonialism, by contrast brought destruction. The Spanish had arrived in South America to obtain gold and timber—'either by violence or exchange’, Humboldt said, and motivated only by ‘insatiable avarice’. The Spanish had annihilated ancient civilizations, native tribes and stately forests. [Ibid., p.103.]
 
Because in Mexico Humboldt observed de facto slavery, 
 
[t]o his mind the politics and economics of a colonial government were based on “immorality”. … All too often Humboldt had seen how the population was starving and how once fertile land had been relentlessly over-exploited and turned barren. [Ibid., p. 104.]
 
4.5 Much else that Darwin read was also steeped in authors impacted by Humboldt’s ideas—for example, Darwin relied heavily on Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-1833), which Humboldt greatly influenced through his carefully thought-out published materials on rock strata across the globe, global climate and vegetation zones, and information about the Andes. [Ibid., p. 223.]
 
4.6 The collected texts of Bentham’s writings on penal law were first published about 1802 in a French translation, but not until 1840 did the collection appear in an English translation. Available online at https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/bowring-the-works-of-jeremy-bentham-vol-1.
 
4.7 A careful search for on-the-ground developments in the preceding decades reveals that the animal invitation was known in many local communities. In 1822, for example, an “Act to prevent the cruel and improper treatment of Cattle” (which came to be referred to as Martin’s Act) was enacted after heated debate—this law authorized fines and even imprisonment up to three months for those convicted of cruelly treating “Horses, Mares, Geldings, Mules, Asses, Cows, Heifers, Steers, Oxen, Sheep and other Cattle.” [Tannenbaum, Jerry 1995. “Animals and the Law: Property, Cruelty, Rights”, in Mack, Arien (ed.), Humans and Other Animals, Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1995, 125-193. At p. 151.] In the following decade (1835), this pioneering modern legislation was extended to all domestic animals. [Ibid.. At p. 188, in Footnote 36, this scholar cites French, R. D. 1975. Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 29, with the comment that “French's book is the most complete historical account of the passage of early English cruelty laws in general and the Act of 1876 in particular.”]
         In 1824 the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) was founded in England, and it quickly became highly influential in passing new laws and spawning local organizations that drew energy from the powerful anti-slavery movement in England and many of the countries in England’s sphere of influence. In 1840, the SPCA became the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, signaling its arrival in the English establishment. Darwin’s publication of his groundbreaking work in 1859 added much momentum to an already powerful movement, the byproduct of which were books such as those cited in Chapter Three about “mind” and “intelligence” in assorted nonhuman animals.
 
4.8 The phrase “widowed land” is cited by Alan Taylor in his 2001 American Colonies discussion of additional demographic issues—Taylor, Alan 2001. American Colonies. Volume 1 of The Penguin History of the United States, History of the United States Series.  New York: Viking, at page 40, citing Francis Jennings’ 1976 The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and Cant of Conquest ,which uses this phrase as the title of Chapter 2.
 
4.9 The casualties of our kind’s many wars pursued in the twentieth century alone are set forth in a 1993 book by a respected analyst of international conflicts in which the opening chapter is entitled “The Century of Megadeath.” 
 
[D]uring the twentieth century, no less than 167,000,000 lives—and quite probably in excess of 175,000,000—were deliberately extinguished through politically motivated carnage. … This is more than the total killed in all previous wars, civil conflicts, and religious persecutions throughout human history. [Brzezinski, Z., 1993. Out of control: global turmoil on the eve of the twenty-first century, New York; Toronto; New York: Scribner ; Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; Maxwell Macmillan International, p.17, italics added.]
 
The twenty-first century has started off in a similarly appalling fashion that challenges facile claims that humans are “the moral animal”—the 2015 United Nations Refugee Agency reported,  
 
By end-2014, 59.5 million individuals were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations. This is 8.3 million persons more than the year before (51.2 million) and the highest annual increase in a single year. [“World at War: UNHCR Global Trends, Forced Displacement in 2014,” opening page. Document available at http://www.unhcr.org/556725e69.pdf, accessed 7/8/2016.]
 
Hidden in this catastrophic number is that half of these displaced humans were children. Only a few years later, numbers above a hundred million were cited regarding how many humans need aid and/or protection from harm in order to survive. [See, for example, “Nearly 132 Million People Will Need Aid, U.N. Says in 2019 Appeal,” By Nick Cumming-Bruce, December 4, 2018 The New York Times. And “60 Million People Fleeing Chaotic Lands, U.N. Says” By Somini Sengupta, The New York TimesInternational, June 18, 2015, http://nyti.ms/1fixgP7 accessed 9/15/19.]
 
On-the-ground facts that document the claim that our species’ violent modern ways have continued at astonishing levels are presented in a 2009 volume that carries the ominous title Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity.[Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. 2009. Worse than war: genocide, eliminationism, and the ongoing assault on humanity. New York: PublicAffairs.] After the volume’s preface opens with “Hundreds of millions of people are at risk of becoming the victims of genocide and related violence,” [Ibid., p. xi.] the next paragraph describes places of extreme risk, and then this explanation of the title. 
 
Our time, dating from the beginning of the twentieth century, has been afflicted by one mass murder after another, so frequently and, in aggregate, of such massive destructiveness, that the problem of genocidal killing is worse than war. [Ibid.]
 
4.10 A total of 203 million deaths is based on 33 million "military casualties" and 170 million killed in "conflicts of a non-international character, internal conflicts and tyrannical regime victimization," including 86 million since the Second World War.
 
4.11 A list of four diverse problems conveys the breadth and depth of human collective’s onslaught on the more-than-human world. 
 
(1) In late 2020, the headline “The World Lost Two-Thirds Of Its Wildlife In 50 Years. We Are to Blame” was used by National Public Radio in the United States.[https://www.npr.org/2020/09/10/911500907/the-world-lost-two-thirds-of-its-wildlife-in-50-years-we-are-to-blame, September 10, 2020; accessed 5/3/21.]
 
(2) Almost two decades earlier, a leading American newspaper headlined a front-page news “Commercial Fleets Reduced Big Fish by 90%, Study Says.” The article began, “In just 50 years, the global spread of industrial-scale commercial fishing has cut by 90 percent the oceans’ population of large predatory fishes, from majestic giants like blue marlin to staples like cod, a new study has found.” [New York Times, A1, May 15, 2003 By Andreew C. Revkin, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/15/world/commercial-fleets-reduced-big-fish-by-90-study-says.html accessed 5/3/21.]
 
(3) In 2019, National Geographic headlined a story “Half of all amphibian species at risk of extinction.” [Bittel, Jason. May 8, 2019. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/more-amphibians-at-extinction-risk-than-thought, accessed 5/3/21.]
 
(4) The status of the almost 10,000 different species of birds around the world was described in 2018 as follows: “there has been a steady and continuing deterioration in the status of the world’s birds since the first comprehensive assessment in 1988. Highly threatened species continue to go extinct, while formerly common and widespread species are in sharp decline. At least 40% of bird species worldwide (3,967) have declining populations, compared with 44% that are stable (4,393), 7% that are increasing (653) and 8% with unknown trends (823).” [BirdLife International 2018. State of the world’s birds: taking the pulse of the planet. Cambridge, UK: BirdLife International, at page 20. Accessed 4/30/2023. https://www.studocu.com/en-au/document/monash-university/bachelor-of-commerce/bl-report-eng-v11-spreads/12485925.]
 
The extent of the imbalance that the human collective has produced for the rest of Earth’s living communities is suggested by an intriguing comment published in 2002 by Vaclav Smil—“The zoomass of domesticated land animals, dominated by cattle, is now at least twenty times larger than the zoomass of all wild vertebrates.” [Smil, Vaclav 2002. The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, at  p. 196, in Figure 7.2. The general issue is addressed in Chapter 7, “The Biosphere’s Mass and Productivity.” The science is complicated because the facts are diverse and not well known, but the concepts are, in a relative sense, easier to grasp. There is an attempt to picture this basic situation in the chart “Earth’s Land Mammals by Weight” at https://www.xkcd.com/1338/ accessed 5/3/2021.]
 
4.12 These include (1) the four other great ape species, [Jane Goodall’s many works and the publications of the Jane Goodall Institute are perhaps best known, and de Waal’s work has already been referenced multiple times. A remarkable collection in both breadth and depth is Wrangham, Richard W., McGrew, W. C., de Waal, Frans B. M., and Heltne, Paul G., eds, 1994. Chimpanzee Cultures. London and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.] (2) the three species of elephants, [publications on elephants are numerous—some of the key historical texts are Douglas-Hamilton, Iain, and Douglas-Hamilton, Oria 1975. Among the Elephants. New York: Viking; Williams, Heathcote 1989. Sacred Elephant. New York: Harmony; Chadwick, Douglas H. 1994. The Fate of the Elephant. San Francisco: Sierra Club; and Payne, Katy 1998. Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants. New York: Simon & Schuster.] and (3) the approximately 100 species of cetaceans (dolphins and whales).[Seminal breakthroughs regarding communication are described in Payne, Roger 1995. Among Whales, New York, London: Scribner. Extraordinary photographs can be found in Skerry, Brian 2021. Secrets of the Whales. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic.]
In addition, other large-brained “neighbors” are also threatened— for example, many of the hundreds of different octopi species who live in a universe of their own off the continents that our kind of animal occupies. [Ehrlich and Reed’s 2020 film “My Octopus Teacher” has already been cited, as has Montgomery 2016 The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness.] Also impressive are the brainy birds known as corvids (crows and about 100 other species) and psittacines (parrots, cockatoos and about 400 other species). The corpus of illuminating research has now been expanding for decades—see, for example, Heinrich, Bernd 1999. Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds, HarperCollins Publishers; Jennifer Ackerman in her 2016 The Genius of Birds (New York: Penguin) at the very beginning cites dozens of astonishing examples to back up this comment on page 1: “In the past two decades or so, from fields and laboratories around the world have flowed examples of bird species capable of mental feats comparable to those found in primates.” For additional questions and observations, see Sibley, David Allen 2020. What It's Like to Be a Bird. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
 
4.13 Structural Violence. Most definitions of structural violence are focused exclusively on human-on-human harms (see, for example, "What is structural violence?", CHER (Center for Health Equity Research) Chicago, accessed 2022.8.1 at http://www.cherchicago.org/about/structuralviolence/; the source is the Center for Health Equity Research Chicago). This human-centered feature is related to the influence of the original analysis using this important concept—Galtung, Johan. 1993. "Kulturelle Gewalt." Der Burger im Staat vol. 43. p. 106, as cited in Ho, Kathleen. 2007. "Structural Violence as a Human Rights Violation." Essex Human Rights Review 4(2).
 
4.14 In very much the same spirit, Shakespeare reminded his contemporaries and all who later read his work, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” [Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act 3. Scene 3. Line 175.] Similarly, the deep ecologist Naess recognized, “Human nature is such that with all-sided maturity we cannot avoid ‘identifying’ ourselves with all living beings, beautiful or ugly, big or small, sentient or not” and thereby we come home to our “ecological self.” [Seed/Council p.21] Berger adds, “With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.” [Berger 1980, p. 4.]For Beston as he lived on a New England beach, choosing a form of life surrounded by other-than-human lives had a sustaining force. 
 
… I lived in midst of an abundance of natural life which manifested itself every hour of the day, and from being thus surrounded, thus enclosed within a great whirl of what one may call the life force, I felt that I drew a secret and sustaining energy. … I think that those who have lived in nature, and tried to open their doors rather than close them on her energies, will understand well enough what I mean. Life is as much a force in the universe as electricity or gravitational pull, and the presence of life sustains life. [Beston 1962, p. 95 in Chapter 5, Winter Visitors.]
 
4.15 One of the preeminent biologists of the twentieth century, after decades of exploring human fascination with our larger community, hypothesized that individuals of our species feature tendencies and interests that merit the name “biophilia.” [The term is widely associated today with E. O. Wilson because of his 1984 book cited in the Introduction, but the term first appears in Erich Fromm’s 1964 book The Heart of Man where he uses it often much as Wilson does in the 1984 book; see also Fromm, E., The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973:365-366.] Today, whenever a human’s awareness crosses the species threshold, that human enters a world where observation-based claims can now be supported by detailed scientific evidence that affirms claims made for millennia that being in the natural world is essential for the health of humans who live in the constructed, demanding social worlds that have characterized humans’ urbanized settlements. A particularly frank statement in this regard is a 2016 observation by Florence Williams: “This is your brain on nature: when we get closer to nature—be it untouched wilderness or a backyard tree—we do our overstressed brains a favor.” [Williams, Florence. National Geographic Jan. 2016, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/call-to-wild, accessed 2023.8.12. Williams cites key figures both old (Cyrus the Great) and more recent (Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Walt Whitman, Frederick Law Olmsted). See also Williams, Florence 2017. The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative. New York, W. W. Norton.]
 
4.16 See Our Children and See Our Better Angels. Although previous chapters have observed that many humans today unreflectively assume human exceptionalism is an undeniable boon for the human community, this assumption prompts many to fail completely in the matter of noticing, let alone examining carefully, different harms tohumans done by modern forms of human exceptionalism. Children in particular suffer from the broad modern failure to notice the importance of the animal invitation. This is evident in the fact that several generations of youth in industrialized societies have now been trained away from, not toward, noticing the natural world and its other-than-human citizens. 
         The cost of such a narrowing of human imagination and awareness is, tragically, high for both individuals and society. It includes, but also goes beyond, a key problem raised by a professor of natural history at Harvard’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department—“The average adult American today knows less about biology than the average ten-year-old living in the Amazon, or than the average American of two hundred years ago.” [Andrew Knoll quoted by Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 22.] Also missing is an abiding sense of the richness of the natural world—for many children, that possibility has not been realized. Such a fact puts those children and their society in great jeopardy, for it does not take much imagination to notice that there is little likelihood that citizens uninformed about the natural world will have effective ideas about how to nurture with joy and responsibility the “larger community” that is their local econiche. Our ignorances willful and otherwise, history has constantly shown, create significant risks for the communities (both nonhuman and human) in and near those industrialized human communities that have become such dominant forces in our multi-cultural world.
 
4.17 Even the Saints—A Cautionary Tale. [This story is from Paul Shepard 1996. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, Washington, D.C., and Covelo, California: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 225-6. Shepard’s Footnote 7 cites Aldous Huxley's essay 'Adonis and the Alphabet', in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Harper, New York, 1952).] An eyewitness account of a thirteenth century saint reveals that remarkable humans in our best-known religious traditions can fail at critical junctures when the animal invitation is front and center in their life. As one considers the bias and ignorance that the principal actor in the following story inherited, one can ask, what drove him on this particular day? Was the primary factor that he had inherited a sweeping dismissal of nonhuman lives?
         The scene is a cathedral in Europe where during the early thirteenth century a revered Catholic saint, Dominic of Osma, the founder of the Dominican Order, is preaching. Another Catholic saint, Cecilia Caesarini, is present, and on the basis of her personal observations she entered the following details in a journal that has been preserved. Dominic is sitting behind a grille or partition, out of sight of the nuns and monks listening to his sermon. Expounding on one of his favorite topics, devils, Dominic notices sparrows flying above inside the cathedral. Annoyed by the interruption, he insists that the attending nuns catch one of the sparrows. One of the nuns, knowing that the sparrows were friendly, holds out her hand so that a sparrow can alight. When a sparrow lands trustingly on her arm, she cups the bird in her hands and gives the now captive bird to Dominic through the grille’s window. 
         Then, as Cecilia tells us, Dominic acts. With great deliberateness in full view of his listeners, he unmercifully plucks out this individual sparrow’s feathers, calling out, “You wretch, you rogue!” The scholar Paul Shepard relates what next transpired. 
 
When he had plucked him clean of all his feathers, amidst much laughter from the Brothers and Sisters, and awful shrieks of the sparrow, he pitched him out saying, “Fly now if you can, enemy of mankind! You can cry out and trouble us, but you cannot hurt us.” [Quoted in Shepard 1996, 225-226. The original passage in Cecilia’s Miracula Beati Dominici can be found in Istituto storico Santa Sabina 1967. Archivum fratrum praedicatorum, volume XXXVII, Rome: Istituto Storico Domenicano, at page 37.]
 
Dominic’s actions force some basic questions. The first pushes each of us to face a common problem encountered whenever we engage the world around us and its myriad living beings—do my pre-existing beliefs about “animals” help or hinder me in the seeing the world around me? Second, one can ask, did Dominic’s pre-existing beliefs about which beings really mattered help or hinder him in his understanding of how a good, moral human might treat this one sparrow in his hands? 
Like Dominic, we may only be following a dismissive view of “animals” that we inherited as a member of our culture. But slavishly following one’s heritage in every respect is a clumsy way for a moral animal to take responsibility, for our lives are too uniquely situated to be governed by rules or a heritage that requires absolute conformity in every detail in every act. It is our freedom to act that creates the possibility of acting morally. If we pause, we can see in the specific animals around us, invitations to recognize the world as it actually exists. This kind of calculus is, plainly speaking, what we expect of anyone who claims to be a moral being.
         Dominic’s acts on this occasion suggest he did not take seriously that single bird’s actual realities, its suffering on this occasion, or its life as a whole. His taunt “Fly now if you can, enemy of mankind! You can cry out and trouble us, but you cannot hurt us” has a haunting quality. Because sparrows so rarely harm us, and because sparrows are given a positive image in the scriptures of Dominic’s own tradition (the Gospels suggest, as at Luke 12:6, that “not one of them is forgotten before God”), Dominic’s claims and actions here seem, in a negative sense, out of the ordinary. Giving him the benefit of sanity on this day, his words as related by Cecilia seem to be about Dominic’s belief that this bird and perhaps the others in the cathedral that day had a relationship with the devil, or perhaps he merely sensed in the birds’ movements an intention to disrupt his sermon.
         These questions to some may seem ridiculous—a mere sparrow’s suffering juxtaposed with a revered saint’s theological claim. The questions are, admittedly, easily dismissed if one is governed by a frame of mind that gives complete deference to tradition or to inherited dismissals of all other animals because they are matched up against a revered saint. But questions about Dominic’s actions and harms here stand in a long tradition of asking ethics-related questions openly—such questions flow directly from our individual abilities described throughout this book. They also flow from the different forms of free-thinking described in the following chapters on science, ethics and law. They flow just as freely from Dominic’s own tradition (his contemporary was Francis of Assisi), or from standard educational wisdom about the strengths of a marketplace of ideas that openly permits asking questions as a formative, healthy exercise.
         Finally, these questions flow from the opportunity to speak freely and with common sense about what it means to pluck out a tiny bird’s feathers. One does not need to simulate Dominic’s action to know its effects. Dominic himself was an individual animal, which means that what he actually thought on this occasion is more than hard to discern—it was inaccessible when he acted, and now because of the passage of time is, if possible, even more inaccessible. But his story and that of this tiny bird, as told by Cecilia, do push us to ask about our inherited beliefs and whether we want to follow them as fully as Dominic followed his on this unfortunate occasion.

Additional Materials for
Chapter Five "Science and the Invitation to Their Realities"

5.1 Essays by Daniel Capper
         (i) “On Loving Nonliving Stuff,” book chapter in Reclaiming Space: Progressive and Multicultural Visions of Space Exploration, edited by James S. J. Schwartz, Erika Nesvold, and Linda Billings. Oxford University Press, 2022; 
         (ii) “What Should We Do with Our Moon?: Ethics and Policy for Establishing Multiuse Lunar Land Reserves,” in Space Policy 59 (2022): 101462. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spacepol.2021.101462; 
         (iii) “Intrinsic Value, American Buddhism, and Potential Life on Saturn’s Moon Titan,” book chapter in Astrobiology: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy, pp. 357-372, edited by Ted Peters, Octavio Chon Torres, Richard Gordon, and Joseph Seckbach. Wiley, 2021; 
         (iv) “How Venus Became Cool: Social and Moral Dimensions of Biosignature Science,” in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 56, 3 (2021): 666-677. https://doi.org/10.1111/zygo.12703. An authorized, free, and view-only version of this article can be found at: 
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/UWJFZ3YQWXRS7NA8CPT7?target=10.1111/zygo.12703; and (v) “The Search for Microbial Martian Life and American Buddhist Ethics,” International Journal of Astrobiology 19, 3 (2019): 244-252. 
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1473550419000296.
 
5.2 More on Careful Thinking about Limits. A challenging form of careful thinking is called out by Muzaffar Iqbal on the opening page of his Contemporary Issues in Islam and Science: “The arrival of new tools and techniques in a world unfamiliar with the scientific principles that gave birth to them is a process that has far-reaching consequences….” [Contemporary Issues in Islam and Science, Volume 2, edited by Muzaffar Iqbal 2012. Farnham, England, and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, page xi (opening page of Introduction). What Iqbal suggests is a kind of common sense about how and why people hesitate in the face of new and thus unfamiliar approaches to describing the world. Iqbal provides a basis for understanding this process by citing the words and reasoning of a 1958 observation by the physicist Werner Heisenberg. 
 
"… in those parts of the world in which modern science has been developed, the primary interest has been directed for a long time toward practical activity, industry and engineering combined with a rational analysis of the outer and inner conditions for such activity. Such people will find it rather easy to cope with the new ideas since they have had time for a slow and gradual adjustment to the modem scientific methods of thinking. In other parts of the world these ideas would be confronted with the religious and philosophical foundations of native culture." [Heisenberg, W. 1958. Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. New York: Prometheus Books, p. 28.]
 
Heisenberg here reminds us that those used to a science-saturated world understand their own lives in terms of a narrative or story or social construction that prompts these individuals to accept the latest version of scientific consensus as descriptive of an important feature of reality. The existence of a scientific consensus is not, logically, “proof” of “things as they are,” for the consensus could be (and sometimes has been) wrong. But the consensus is, in effect, the science community’s best guess about a subject that will continue to be explored. 

But those who are not used to a particular science (say, physics, or geology/plate tectonics, or the presence of microscopic life forms on or in our body or below the Earth’s surface or on another planet altogether) are situated by other assumptions which function well in the real world and thus are taken to provide the parameters of what is natural and fitting. Such “other assumptions” may be revered because they are old, widely accepted, and perhaps even psychologically and religiously charged because they were taught by past authorities as being of great importance. 

Iqbal’s observations help one recognize why those unfamiliar with science-based claims often find such claims to be far short of common sense or to be irreverent or profane in the sense of not respecting long-held beliefs. Further, sometimes science-based claims are linked to colonial realities and the imposition of alien, non-commonsense claims—this connection has thereby led some to view science-framed claims as suspect ab initio. In the history of European science developments, something altogether similar happened to Galileo as he, having spent much time with a telescope that he invented, looked through that device to discover aspects of the solar system (Jupiter’s moons) that long-prevalent views of the “heavens” did not address in any way. Looking into a telescope had become a common experience for Galileo, but it would have been for Galileo’s contemporaries an alien activity that had almost no commonsense features. For many who live in one of the Earth’s now science-saturated communities, the telescope is a centuries-old invention easily recognized to extend our primate vision. But for those unfamiliar with telescopes, the significance of what one sees as one peers into the telescope is by no means immediately obvious. This is especially so regarding the magnification of a faraway object that one has never perceived on one’s own. Thus to those not familiar with looking through telescopes, what the telescope reveals shares little with the commonsense expectations each of us, as a social primate, develops in our local world. 

Incorporating new information of this kind is, in one sense, something many contemporary humans have learned to expect. Every human will at some point have successfully negotiated the challenge that our animal finitudes pose for us in the matter of incorporating “information” that we have not witnessed personally—for example, we sometimes need to rely on others’ eyewitness testimony about matters we did not observe. But using and appreciating what a telescope reveals takes practice. Those who have not had that opportunity are, not surprisingly, easily blocked from what seems to those familiar with telescopes the only open-minded response, namely, Jupiter’s moons orbit that planet. This conclusion, in turn, provides evidence that is consistent with Copernicus’ then-controversial heliocentric view that our local sun, not the Earth as church authorities taught, held the honored position of being the center of the universe around which all other bodies revolved. In those times and places in which the telescope was both new and unfamiliar, it is not surprising that those invested in a cherished, religiously significant view of the universe might aggressively assert that this unfamiliar device could in no way undermine religious authorities’ long-standing certainty about how the entire universe was organized.
 
5.3 Truthlikeness. Given these challenges, it is not surprising that some philosophers have imagined that humans can aspire to what has been called “truthlikeness,” a nuanced term that helps us see that the dichotomy “truth versus falsehood” is not rich enough to solve some of the dilemmas we face in our quest for truth. We need something more than mere predictive success (earlier paradigms had that, but eventually failed). We can imagine something in the vicinity of the pole of truth and thus far removed from the pole of obvious falsehood. This means, in effect, we are trying to work with ideas about being close, closer, perhaps even closest to the truth pole—hence “truthlikeness” as a term helps nuance important but terribly difficult issues for us.
 
The dichotomy of the class of propositions into truths and falsehoods needs to be supplemented with a more fine-grained ordering — one which classifies propositions according to their closeness to the truth, their degree of truthlikeness, or their verisimilitude. [Oddie, Graham, "Truthlikeness", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/truthlikeness/>.]
 
5.4 Human Captivity. Such acts by which whole lives are extracted from living communities of intelligent, deeply social mammals can be seen as in great tension with the integrities that sit at the heart of the scientific enterprise. One can ask, for example, if the artificiality of such isolation for solely human purposes conforms with the spirit of the integrities of science, for removal of individuals from their natural situatedness prompts at least one basic question—can one rely on what is observed about animals in a radically deracinated situation as the basis for making claims about their lives in their original, far-more-natural situatedness? The same risk of harms attends historical cases of exhibited humans, a particularly poignant example of which occurred in 1906 when the New York Zoological Society displayed the pygmy Ota Benga along with orangutans. [The story is told in Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume’s 1992 Ota Benga, New York: St. Martin's, a review of which can be found at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.259.5091.108.] In all three of these captive circumstances, the basic facts convey unambiguously that the captives are not as important as the humans allegedly “educated” by the artificial exercise of exhibiting captive animals.
                                             
5.5 Materials on (i) food manipulation, (ii) the complex issue of whether science is “value-free,” and (iii) how our science tradition creates challenges to the ways we understand the local world we inhabit. While it surprises few that contemporary governments on their own (that is, without prompting by business or the academic establishment) use science in narrow-minded ways that hide the truth, many are less familiar with the ways that business and the academic establishment have discouraged open-mindedness and transparency because doing so is conducive to an increase in their already significant power. 

(i) Consider in this vein the science-based work involved in adding salt and sugar to processed food to optimize consumers’ cravings. The questionable aspects of using science to advance such work is captured well in a 2013 newspaper headline—“the extraordinary science of addictive junk food.” [Moss, Michael 2013. "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food." The New York Times, February 20 2013. Accessed  2021.10.22 at https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html] The story was based on the findings of an investigative journalist chronicling the insidious ways in which big food companies, over time, have sneaked more and more of the bad stuff into our diets, to the point where we now consume 22 teaspoons of sugar a day and three times as much cheese as our forebears did in 1970.[ See “How Sweet It Is”, a review in NYT by David Camp, published 2013.3.15, of Moss, Michael 2013. Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us New York: Random House.]
 
Particularly relevant to the integrities of science is that such science-intensive efforts, while certain to harm consumers’ health, were intentionally hidden from the public (and thus consumers) in order to protect private companies’ profits. The science involved was both complex and intentionally manipulative—the author visited with neuroscientists whose M.R.I.’s of test subjects demonstrate how the brain’s so-called pleasure centers light up when the subjects are dosed with solutions of sugar or fat. He then describes how consultants and food scientists calibrate products — ‘optimize’ them, in industry-speak — to maximize cravings. Virtually everything you can buy in a supermarket that’s not an outer-aisle pure food like milk or kohlrabi has been fiddled with to make you shiver with bliss — which will in turn make you buy the product again and again. [Ibid. The italics are not in the original.]
 
Such uses of science to manipulate food and consumers fall squarely within Einstein’s comment that “many others are to be found in the temple [of science] who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes.” That there are abundant cynical, undisclosed manipulations of science by profit-oriented companies that harm consumers, but remain hidden, is not terribly surprising in democratic nations where circles of government and policymaking have long been influenced by corporations—Chapter 5 includes an extended discussion of what happened in the 1950s and 1960s when the trio of government, industry and the academic research establishment attacked Rachel Carson for her views in Silent Spring.
It is especially tragic when such abuses of science compromise public health by limiting access to scientific results. In medical contexts, the charge that some researchers are “on the take” creates fears that profits, not the public good, will guide efforts to market new medical options. Further, that a for-profit food company would fail to disclose that it “calibrates” the food it markets “to optimize cravings” gives every consumer reason to pause.
 
(ii) Values’ Role in Human Thinking. An account from the first decade of the 21st century makes an important point about the role of values in humans’ thinking.
 
As I hope the astute reader has begun to realize, as a human activity, embedded in a context of culture, and addressed to real human problems, science cannot possibly be value-free, or even ethics-free. As soon as scientists affirm that controlled experiments are a better source of knowledge than anecdotes; that double-blind clinical trials provide better proof of hypotheses than asking the Magic 8-Ball; or, for that matter, that science is a better route to knowledge of reality than mysticism, we encounter value judgments as presuppositional to science. To be sure, they are not ethical value judgments, but rather epistemic (“pertaining to knowing”) ones, but they are still enough to show that science does depend on value judgments. So choice of scientific method or approach represents a matter of value. Scientists often forget the obvious point; as one scientist said to me, “We don’t make value judgments in science; all we care about is knowledge.” [Rollin, Bernard 2006. Science and Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 22.]
 
(iii) What Do We Fully Understand? Consider as well how some of today’s most complex theories remain a stunning challenge to humans’ commonsense awareness of the local worlds we inhabit. A theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology began a high-profile journalism article with these observations. 
 
“I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics,” observed the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. That’s not surprising, as far as it goes. Science makes progress by confronting our lack of understanding, and quantum mechanics has a reputation for being especially mysterious. [Sean Carroll, “Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics.” The New York Times (The Sunday Review), September 7, 2019. This article reflects Dr. Carroll’s views in his 2019 Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime.]
 
This theoretical physicist adds that the addition of quantum mechanics has extraordinary predictive power. 
Scientists can use quantum mechanics with perfect confidence. But it’s a black box. We can set up a physical situation, and make predictions about what will happen next that are verified to spectacular accuracy. What we don’t do is claim to understand quantum mechanics. Physicists don’t understand their own theory any better than a typical smartphone user understands what’s going on inside the device. [Ibid.]
 
Pointing out that there are truly fundamental questions still unanswered about the “measurement problem” that addresses the most basic features of quantum mechanics (what really is a “wave function,” and what counts as an “observation”?), the same physicist offers a conclusion that reveals a crucial limit in the science views that prevail in the early 21st century. 
 
Until physicists definitively answer these questions, they can’t really be said to understand quantum mechanics — thus Feynman’s lament. Which is bad, because quantum mechanics is the most fundamental theory we have, sitting squarely at the center of every serious attempt to formulate deep laws of nature. If nobody understands quantum mechanics, nobody understands the universe. [Ibid.]
 
5.6 “Manifest destiny” was a term used to justify the expansion of the United States beyond its boundaries. It first appeared in 1845 in an article by John L. O'Sullivan entitled "Annexation" which appeared in the July/August 1845 issue of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. The term is today a byword for unrestricted greed, nationalism, and racist marginalization and suppression of nonwhite communities that prevailed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in so many European-based colonies that secured their own freedom, only to use that for expansion at the expense of the indigenous cultures and their religion, language and heritage.
 
5.7 More on Twenty-First Century Corrupted Science. The quote by Stiglitz also includes this further observation.
 
Governments around the world were not addressing key economic problems, including that of persistent unemployment; and as universal values of fairness became sacrificed to the greed of a few, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, the feeling of unfairness became a feeling of betrayal.
 
In particular, the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provided paradigmatic examples of astonishing greed. For example, Andrew Carnegie in the 19th century was able to use the corporations he controlled to dominate entire American communities, impoverishing many of the workers paid wages that barely supported life. [Howard Zinn’s account in Chapter 11, “Robber Barons and Rebels” provides abundant details—Zinn, Howard 1980. A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present. New York: Harper Colophon. The pagination cited below for quotations from this volume is from the 2003 Perennial Classics/Harper Collins edition published in New York by HarperCollins.] In the 20th century, Boston-based United Fruit Company was able for a half-century, because of direct assistance of the United States government, to dominate a whole group of Central American countries and their local peoples in ways that held in place denials of the most basic human rights to entire communities. [See, for example, Chapman, Peter 2008. Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World. New York: Canongate US.] The same private property paradigm was a factor in the aggressive tactics toward Carson, as both private and public corporations wished to protect the profits made off of pesticide production and use. 
         Consider a particular example of how the legal paradigm of corporate ownership can be used today to suppress science-based findings needed to assess “the public good.” One common arrangement that makes harm possible was described in 1999. 
 
Corporations that sponsor research frequently require scientists and engineers to sign contracts granting the company control over proprietary information.  These agreements typically allow companies to review all publications or public presentations of results, to delay or suppress publications, or to prevent researchers from sharing equipment or techniques.  The agreements are legally binding and have been upheld by the courts. [Resnik, David B. 1999. “Industry-sponsored research: Secrecy versus corporate responsibility.” Business and Society Review 99:31-34 (1999), at p. 31.]
 
The power of such contractual arrangements were detailed in 2000 under the headline “Company Tried to Block Report That Its H.I.V. Vaccine Failed” after publication of an article that had met the scientific standards of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
 
A California company tried to block the publication of a scientific paper that showed its H.I.V. vaccine was not effective, and it has asked for damages of more than $7 million from the universities and researchers who published the findings.
… The study, paid for by the company, was stopped in May 1999 before it was completed because analysis of the results from more than two years showed that the vaccine was not working. … The chief investigators … then prepared a paper on the disappointing study. … [The company] objected to what the [investigators] intended to publish, … [and] asserted that the data belonged to it and would not give permission for publication. … [The Journal of the American Medical Association published the researchers’ report] because the study was so large and significant and because the journal wanted to support the freedom of investigators to publish their data without the interfering bias of the sponsor. [Philip J. Hilts. “Company Tried to Block Report That Its H.I.V. Vaccine Failed.” The New York Times. A version of this article appeared in print on Wednesday, November 1, 2000, on section A page 26 of the New York edition.]
 
Clearly, the public good is at risk when scientific findings are owned by parties whose interest is served if the findings are buried.
 
Similar problems are described by a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine in a 2005 volume revealingly titled On the Take: How America's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health.
 
Many medical professional organizations have also become much too close to industry, and their coziness with drug companies has influenced some of their professional and lay publications.  Hidden financial conflicts of interest also dog decisions made by government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administrations and the National Institutes of Health, and by panels of experts and professional organizations convened to issue “clinical practice guidelines,” policies that physicians use every day to diagnose and treat diseases. [Kassirer , Jerome P. On the Take: How America's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, xv.]
 
Other prominent voices, such as Harvard University’s former president Derek Bok, have pointed out that there are risks when university administrators are more interested in their institution’s reputation and obtaining grants than in seeking the truth. [Bok, Derek Curtis. Universities in the Marketplace : The Commercialization of Higher Education. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.] Equally corrupting influences on scientific practice are identified in Science in the Private Interest [Krimsky, Sheldon. 2003. Science in the Private Interest: Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research? Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.], the author of which is also the founder of the website “Corrupted Science” [https://sites.tufts.edu/sheldonkrimsky/corrupted-science/ (accessed 2020.6.13)] which provides a wide array of investigative reports that suggest conflicts of interest plague a wide range of medical and scientific circles. Relatedly, the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming [Oreskes, N. & Conway, E.M., 2010. Merchants of doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming, New York: Bloomsbury Press] examines parallels between recent efforts to spread doubt about climate disruption, health problems caused by tobacco smoking, the ecological destruction produced by acid rain and DDT, the hole in the Earth’s protective ozone layer, cost-benefit analyses of pesticides and herbicides, the impact of asbestos on the public, food safety, fast food’s lack of nutrition, a range of pharmaceutical products, the harms generated by energy extraction, and the availability of transportation alternatives to fossil fuel. This list reveals how deep and wide is the reach of powerful corporations that attempt to, in the wording suggested by the 1965 Presidential Committee’s findings, rule national policy with an eye to enhancing their own corporate profits. At issue in each example is a cynical, non-disclosed manipulation of science in pursuit of a self-aggrandizing end.
 
5.8 Extinction Issues. In the current extinction crisis, many segments of our species have at times manifested forms of care and concern that hearken back to our ancient ancestors’ recognition of the animal invitation. But consider a sobering qualification of praise for such efforts. Collectively, our species still remains remarkably apathetic about harms to wild populations of some of the most popular animals—it is not only populations of many obscure animals that are at risk. Many species of whales and dolphins, all the nonhuman great apes, and the several species of elephants teeter on the brink of extinction in certain areas. Reports suggest that one in four bird species is now functionally extinct, and one-fourth of the world’s mammals are threatened. Even worse numbers appear for “lesser” creatures—the World Conservation Union in 2004 reported that one-third of the amphibians, and more than 40% of all turtles and tortoises are threatened with extinction. In June 2003, it was reported that large, oceanic fish had declined by 90% in the last 50 years.
 
Closer to home, our cousin primates are in deep trouble—half of primate species are listed as threatened. Closest to home, it was reported as long ago as 2001 that populations of our closest cousins—chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans—had declined 93% in the twentieth century. Our record in the first decade of the twenty-first century has not improved much, if at all. [Waldau 2011, p. 191.]
 
Apart from recognizing that (i) extinctions are irreparable, (ii) each extinction risks causing more extinctions, and (iii) tearing the complex, species-intensive fabric of the very ecosystems on which humans depend puts at risk our own wellbeing, there is yet another dimension of the harm our kind has done in the last few millennia. Many of the harms our species intentionally causes other communities of life to fall short of the catastrophe of extinction, but still cause, as Mowat observed, “massive diminution of the entire body corporate of animate creation” which includes “those species that still survive as distinct life forms but have suffered horrendous diminishment.”
 
5.9 Book-Length Analyses regarding Harms Caused by Industrialized Uses of Nonhuman Animals. The earliest of these came in the mid-1960s—Harrison, Ruth 1964. Animal Machines; the New Factory Farming Industry. London: V. Stuart—and was followed a decade later by the book commonly touted as starting the modern animal protection movement, Peter Singer’s 1975 Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. 
     In the next decades, many more book-length treatments of this issue followed—see, for example, Eisnitz, Gail, 1997. Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry. Amherst, New York: Prometheus; 
Schlosser, Eric 2001. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton MifflinPollan, Michael 2006. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Press, and Foer, Jonathan Safran 2009. Eating Animals. New York: Little, Brown.   
 
5.10 Agribusiness Issues. Studies have shown that the arrival of agribusiness in a community risks a host of discernible harms to both individual humans and the local community as a whole. A partial list includes greatly increased incidents of terrible physical injuries, severe illnesses due to pathogens created by the realities of industrialized agriculture, air pollution locally and globally, and water pollution of astonishing severity.
 
The communal risks are also serious—they include the possible arrival of severe illnesses linked to antibiotic-resistant pathogens spawned by the heavy use of antibiotics to promote growth and control disease in the crowded conditions that are the essence of industrialized agriculture. Pertinent to each community’s role in the health of the larger ecosystem which that community shares with its neighboring communities is the fact that the agribusiness industry has been named in a government-based report as the source of as much as one-fifth or more the human community’s generation of greenhouse gas emissions. [FAO/Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2006. “Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options”, p.112 summary (the document is available at www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM, accessed 2021.10.22).]This finding suggests that industrialized agriculture as a sector of a nation’s economy is even more problematic on this score than the entire  transportation sector. Water pollution also is more than just a serious local problem—modern agriculture is commonly ranked as the number one pollutant of rivers and lakes, and the number three pollutant of estuaries (after urban runoff and municipal point sources). [There is abundant documentation on agriculture as a source of major pollution at www.epa.gov ; see, for example, https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/infographic-what-nutrient-pollution and https://www.epa.gov/nps/basic-information-about-nonpoint-source-nps-pollution (both accessed 2020.10.22).]
 
5.11 The Pew Report. A 2008 report on industrialized agriculture that was a joint project The Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health supported its assertion that “the costs to rural America have been significant” with descriptions of harms suffered by communities that go beyond the loss of family-owned farms and reduced civic participation rates. Rural communities have often sought industrialized farming as a source of much needed economic development, but the results have often been the opposite—higher levels of unemployment, increased poverty, elevated crime, more teen pregnancy, and increased numbers of itinerant laborers, all of which place substantial demands on public services. [See Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production 2008. “Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America” (A Project of The Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), at 
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/0001/01/01/putting-meat-on-the-table (accessed 2025.4.17).]
 
5.12 Harms to Women in Shelters. The connection between one kind of violence and another is so common that the presence of certain kinds of violence can be used to assess the likelihood of other kinds of violence. A 1997 study of women’s shelters in the United States found that 85% of women in the shelter disclosed that there had also been pet abuse in the home. 63% of children in these shelters talked about animal abuse at home. A 1983 study showed that abused animals were found in 88% of homes of families where child abuse occurred. [See, for example, Ascione, F. R., C. V. Weber, and D. S. Wood 1997. “The abuse of animals and domestic violence: A national survey of shelters for women who are battered.” Society and Animals 5(3):205-18; and DeViney, E., Jeffrey Dickert, and Randall Lockwood 1983. “The Care of Pets within Child Abusing Families.” International Journal for the Study of Animal Problems 4:321-329 (reprinted in Ascione, Frank R., and Arkow, Phil, eds., 1999. Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, and Animal Abuse: Linking the Circles of Compassion for Prevention and Intervention, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 305-313.]
 
5.13 A Revealing Modern Anecdote The ethicist Rollin told another story as he pushed readers of the field’s flagship Journal of Animal Science.
 
One of my animal scientist colleagues related to me that his son-in-law was an employee in a large, total-confinement swine operation. As a young man he had raised and shown pigs. … One day, he detected a disease among the feeder pigs in the confinement facility where he worked, which necessitated killing them with a blow to the head, since this operation did not treat individual animals, their profit margin being allegedly too low. Out of his long-established husbandry ethic, he came in on his own time with his own medicine to treat the animals. He cured them, but management’s response was to fire him on the spot for violating company policy. He kept his job and escaped with a reprimand only when he was able to prove that he had expended his own—not the company’s—resources. [Bernard Rollin 2004. “Annual Meeting Keynote Address: Animal Agriculture and Emerging Social Ethics for Animals,” Journal of Animal Science 82 (2004): 955–964, at 958.]
 
5.14 The Debate over Vivisection. An earlier phenomenon in this historical trend involving cruelties made the word “vivisection” popular because many individuals and organizations pursued anti-vivisection challenges to harmful practices that had become common in the later decades of the nineteenth century. “Vivisection” is still today commonly defined along the lines of “the cutting of or operation on a living animal usually for physiological or pathological investigation broadly: animal experimentation especially if considered to cause distress to the subject.” [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vivisection, accessed 5/19/20] The tenor of the criticism, which from its inception was especially bitter, is well introduced by the opening sentences of an 1890 essay by Robert Ingersoll. 
 
Vivisection is the Inquisition—the Hell—of Science. All
the cruelty which the human—or rather the inhuman--
heart is capable of inflicting, is in this one word. Below
this there is no depth. This word lies like a coiled serpent
at the bottom of the abyss. [The speech is included as Appendix A in Jacoby, Susan. 2013. The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 203-205.]
 
The institutional efforts on behalf of anti-vivisection have produced significant changes, as evidenced by Rollin’s insight that laws enacted in the second half of the twentieth century reflected a changed social consensus regarding laboratory-based uses of nonhuman animals as experimental tools. [Rollin, Bernard E. 1999. An Introduction to Veterinary Medical Ethics: Theory and Cases, Ames: Iowa State University Press, pp. 48-50.] While it is true that the use of nonhuman animals as mere tools has been declining, [The basic issues are discussed in a series of wide-ranging articles published in Scientific American, February 1997 Volume 276 Number 2.] the facts on the ground do not suggest that the science establishment is near repudiating the long-standing practice of using living beings as “hairy test tubes.” [The term was often used in the 1990s by the primatologist Roger Fouts—see, for example, Fouts, R. S., D.H. Fouts & G.S. Waters 2002. “The ethics and efficacy of biomedical research in chimpanzees with special regard to HIV research” in Agustin Fuentes and Linda. D. Wolfe, editors 2002. Primates Face to Face: Conservation implications of human–nonhuman primate interconnections. Cambridge Univ Press 2002, pages 45-60, at p. 46.] Instead, continued use of some nonhuman animals reveals that one can still detect the heartbeat of human exceptionalism in the body of the scientific community. 
 
5.15 Early Comments about Climate Disruption. While speculation about this possibility occurred as early as the ancient Greeks, the physics of humanity burning massive amounts of fossil fuels and thus creating what is now commonly referred to as the greenhouse effect were noted in 1896 by the Swedish scientist Arrhenius. Such effects, although called out by Humboldt and other citizens in the mid-nineteenth century, were not paid much attention until the second half of the twentieth century—in 1960, C. D. Keeling provided “painstaking measurements” that “drove home … that the level of [carbon dioxide] was in fact rising, year by year.” [Ibid.]
 
Scientific consensus on the problem developed in the early 21st century, with a 2019 report stating, “The consensus among research scientists on anthropogenic global warming has grown to 100%, based on a review of 11,602 peer-reviewed articles on ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ published in the first 7 months of 2019.” [ Powell, James (November 20, 2019). "Scientists Reach 100% Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming". Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. 37: 027046761988626. doi:10.1177/0270467619886266 (https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0270467619886266).] The emergence of consensus in a science community is, of course, not a guarantee that humans possess objective truth about the matter on which consensus has been reached. A prevailing consensus is, as the long history of shifts and revolutions in science so fully confirms, a form of community-based principled guessing by our kind of animal that may or may not stand the test of time. 
 
5.16 Exclusions of Women. There is yet a further irony in an age that promotes human exceptionalism—many traditional forms of subordination disadvantage a majority of the human community. Women, who form more than half the human race, [Although the natural ratio of births is slightly higher for male humans, female humans on average live longer and thus comprise slightly more than half of the total population at any one time. See the explanation of this phenomenon in “Gender Ratio,” by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, 2019, available at https://ourworldindata.org/gender-ratio, accessed 2022.6.4.] have historically in most, although not all, human societies been subordinated to male control. This problem illustrates well how the longer-term human story has been complex—some contemporary societies offer important lessons about our present ability to respond constructively by affirming equality, but the roots of this exclusion are deep. The seers of ancient Greece, often hailed as the chrysalis of the western philosophical tradition, featured astonishingly dismissive views of women. In many passages, both Plato and Aristotle deploy an approach that is the animating feature of many exclusions—the use of broad, negative generalizations purporting to define large groups of living beings for the purpose of making a favored group appear superior. Plato’s use of this strategy was meant to apply within the species line, but the pattern of negative generalization regarding any and all nonhuman beings is the heartbeat of human exceptionalism.
 
Whenever attention is turned to crucial contributions by women to modern sciences, what comes into plain view is that exclusion of women relative to men is, always and everywhere, worse than arbitrary—it is in fact harmful to our own species because women are, plainly, at least as central to the social realities of the human species as are males. Excluding women, then, from opportunities and leadership roles deadens humans’ mammalian capabilities.
 
5.17 Barbara McClintock discovered transposition (genes changing their position within a genome) and demonstrated that genes are responsible for turning physical characteristics on and off. Although McClintock developed theories to explain these processes, there was great skepticism about her research and its implications, which led McClintock to stop publishing her data in 1953. By the 1960s and 1970s, the scientific work of others revealed how insightful McClintock’s research in 1940s and 1950s had been regarding the mechanisms of genetic change and expression. In 1983, McClintock’s key role was recognized when she was awarded the annual Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
         McClintock’s story is revelatory about the complexities that attend scientific discovery. Evelyn Keller writes of McClintock,  
 
Her virtuosity resided in her capacity to observe, and to process and interpret what she observed. … The nature of insight in science, as elsewhere, is notoriously elusive. And almost all great scientists—those who learn to cultivate insight—learn also to respect its mysterious workings. It is here that their rationality finds its own limits. In defying rational explanation, the process of creative insight inspires awe in those who experience it. [Keller, Evelyn Fox 1983. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. New York: W. H. Freeman, P. 103.]
 
McClintock’s own explanation reveals the personal, idiosyncratic experiences that the scientific quest can produce.
 
When you suddenly see the problem, something happens that you have the answer—before you are able to put it into words. It is all done subconsciously. This has happened too many times to me, and I know when to take it seriously. I’m so absolutely sure. I don’t talk about it, I don’t have to tell anybody about it. I’m just sure this is it. [Ibid.]
 
Keller puts this explanation into the larger context of scientific theorizing. 
 
If Barbara McClintock’s story illustrates the fallibility of science, it also bears witness to the underlying health of the scientific enterprise. Her eventual vindication demonstrates the capacity of science to overcome its own characteristic kinds of myopia, reminding us that its limitations do not reinforce themselves indefinitely. Their own methodology allows, even obliges, scientists to continually reencounter phenomena even their best theories cannot accommodate. Or—to look at it from the other side—however severely communication between science and nature may be impeded by the preconceptions of a particular time, some channels always remain open; and, through them, nature finds ways of reasserting itself. [Ibid., p. 198.]
 
McClintock’s writing sounds one invitational theme after another as she mentions that patience and persistence provide the possibility that a scientist can “hear what the material has to say to you” and, through a commitment to openness, “let it come to you,” all of which can then nurture in one “a feeling for the organism.” [Ibid.] Again, Keller returns to describing the conceptual features one can discern in McClintock’s approach.
 
What marks her as [a scientist] is her unwavering confidence in the underlying order of living forms, her use of the apparatus of science to gain access to that order, and her commitment to bringing back her insights into the shared language of science—even if doing so might require that language to change. The irregularities or surprises … are not indications of a breakdown of order, but only of the inadequacies of our models in the face of the complexity of nature’s actual order. [Ibid., p200-201.]
 
The profoundly invitational aspects of science-based exploration of life again appear in Keller’s summary of what McClintock achieved.  
 
A deep reverence for nature, a capacity for union with that which is to be known—these reflect a different image of science from that of a purely rational enterprise. Yet the two images have coexisted throughout history. [Ibid., 201.]
 
McClintock’s success confirms that whenever the science establishment features entry barriers to whole groups of humans, that establishment risks depriving the larger science tradition of forms of creativity that enhance our species’ exploration of the larger universe, thereby wounding the invitational, inclusive spirit of the integrities that foster good science. That such risks are real is evident in how yet another woman was discouraged in the late twentieth century as she entered science circles—the basis of exclusion in this next example was not gender per se, but rather an individual’s intuition of the value of insights she inherited from her indigenous forebears. The following story involves what a human might explore when she or he is attuned to connections and “lived reciprocities” [Kimmerer 2013, p.47.] that the science tradition purports to explore.
 
5.18 Robyn Kimmerer’s story. This story addresses issues ranging from the meaning of “rational” and “science” to whether the “question everything” commitment is healthy enough to permit questions about “a science deeper than data.” The story also suggests that science-based work can be pursued in ways that nurture a broader sense of knowing in context, thereby embracing the features of our complex world that are not conveyed when one’s attention is confined solely to an isolated part of that world.
 
When Kimmerer entered a college in which there “were hardly any women … and certainly none who looked like me,” she was asked by her adviser in an initial interview, “So, why do you want to major in botany?” [Ibid., p. 39, as are the rest of quotes in this paragraph by Kimmerer and her advisor.] She answered that she chose botany “because I wanted to learn about why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together.” The adviser replied, “I must tell you that that is not science. That is not at all the sort of thing with which botanists concern themselves.” Kimmerer’s answer was based on the fact that her experience of asters and goldenrod had been central in her life. Because she was born at time of year when these two flowers blossomed, each year she celebrated her birthday in a local world where asters and goldenrod blossomed close to each other. She often had wondered, “What is the source of this pattern?” [Ibid., p. 41.] As her adviser’s blunt reply revealed, however, he did not think this a scientific question. Over time, because Kimmerer’s indigenous heritage had immersed her when young in a deep fascination with her local natural world, she came to hear the “that is not science” reply as “an echo of my grandfather’s first day at school, when he was ordered to leave everything—language, culture, family—behind.” [Ibid.]
 
Kimmerer mastered her undergraduate studies even though the work memorizing the Latin-based names of scientific terminology was radically different from the sensibilities that she acquired early in her life. Her enthusiasm for the natural world continued, as is evident in her comment, “I was mesmerized by plant ecology, evolution, taxonomy, physiology, soils, and fungi. All around me were my good teachers, the plants.” [ Ibid., p. 42, as is the next comment in this paragraph by Kimmerer.] Her emphasis on plants as teachers, which will play out further as this story unfolds, reveals an attentiveness to the inviting realities evident in the nonhuman lives one encounters in any natural place. There is also an echo of her fascination with the relationship of asters and goldenrod as she describes herself—“My natural inclination was to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world, to join instead of divide.” She next reveals how her undergraduate “education” exhibited a different bias about such things. 
 
But science is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer. Why two flowers are beautiful together would violate the division necessary for objectivity. I scarcely doubted the primacy of scientific thought. Following the path of science trained me to separate; to distinguish perception from physical reality, to atomize complexity into its smallest components, to honor the chain of evidence and logic, to discern one thing from another, to savor the pleasure of precision. [Ibid., pp. 42-43.]
 
Kimmerer mastered this form of science education, and then moved to the next level—but notice the peculiar comment in her adviser’s letter of recommendation. 
 
"I was accepted to do graduate work in one of the world’s finest botany programs, no doubt on the strength of the letter of recommendation from my adviser, which read, “She’s done remarkably well for an Indian girl.” [Ibid., p. 43.]
 
She continued to have success at the level of graduate education, along the way continuing to draw life from the dynamic form of learning that was her family heritage. While in graduate school, she by chance saw a newspaper account about an ancient elm that was the largest of its kind. The newspaper account revealed that this extraordinary tree had been planted by, and named after, Louis Vieux, one of Kimmerer’s Potawatomi grandfathers. This serendipitous encounter prompted her to begin “a long, slow journey back to my people, called out to me by the tree that stood above their bones.” [Ibid., p. 44] Kimmerer summarizes where that journey took her.
 
To walk the science path I had stepped off the path of indigenous knowledge. But the world has a way of guiding your steps. Seemingly out of the blue came an invitation to a small gathering of Native elders to talk about traditional knowledge of plants. One I will never forget—a Navajo woman without a day of university botany training in her life—spoke for hours and I hung on every word. One by one, name by name, she told of the plants in her valley. Where each one lived, when it bloomed, who it liked to live near and all its relationships, who ate it, who lined their nests with its fibers, what kind of medicine it offered. She also shared the stories held by those plants, their origin myths, how they got their names, and what they have to tell us. She spoke of beauty. Her words were like smelling salts waking me to what I had known back when I was [young]. I realized how shallow my understanding was. Her knowledge was so much deeper and wider and engaged all the human ways of understanding. She could have explained asters and goldenrod. To a new PhD, this was humbling. It was the beginning of my reclaiming that other way of knowing that I had helplessly let science supplant. I felt like a malnourished refugee invited to a feast, the dishes scented with the herbs of home. [Ibid.]
 
Kimmerer thus returned to the experience of asters and goldenrod that had long ago animated her reply to her undergraduate adviser. Note the profoundly invitational features of her nuanced explanation. 
 
"I circled right back to where I had begun, to the question of beauty. Back to the questions that science does not ask, not because they aren’t important, but because science as a way of knowing is too narrow for the task. Had my adviser been a better scholar, he would have celebrated my questions, not dismissed them. He offered me only the cliché that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and since science separates the observer and the observed, by definition beauty could not be a valid scientific question. I should have been told that my questions were bigger than science could touch." [Ibid., pp.44-45]
 
These remarks reveal that the undergraduate student had surpassed the faculty adviser, and yet they also generously acknowledge that the adviser had made an important point, even if only a partial truth which, whenever it is held to be the whole truth, becomes a misleading claim that does violence to the world as it is. Kimmerer then helps us see our world better by giving a detailed scientific account of why asters and goldenrod together fascinate.
 
"[My advisor] was right about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, especially when it comes to purple and yellow. Color perception in humans relies on banks of specialized receptor cells, the rods and cones in the retina. The job of the cone cells is to absorb light of different wavelengths and pass it on to the brain’s visual cortex, where it can be interpreted. The visible light spectrum, the rainbow of colors, is broad, so the most effective means of discerning color is not one generalized jack-of-all-trades cone cell, but rather an array of specialists, each perfectly tuned to absorb certain wavelengths. The human eye has three kinds. One type excels at detecting red and associated wavelengths. One is tuned to blue. The other optimally perceives light of two colors: purple and yellow. The human eye is superbly equipped to detect these colors and send a signal pulsing to the brain. This doesn’t explain why I perceive them as beautiful, but it does explain why that combination gets my undivided attention. [Purple and yellow] … are complementary colors, as different in nature as could be. In composing a palette, putting them together makes each more vivid; just a touch of one will bring out the other. In an 1890 treatise on color perception, Goethe, who was both a scientist and a poet, wrote that “the colors diametrically opposed to each other . . . are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.” Purple and yellow are a reciprocal pair. Our eyes are so sensitive to these wavelengths that the cones can get oversaturated and the stimulus pours over onto the other cells." [Ibid., p. 45.]
 
Kimmerer further explains how yellow and violet, for our kind of animal and for others, dance with each other. 
 
"[I]f you stare for a long time at a block of yellow and then shift your gaze to a white sheet of paper, you will see it, for a moment, as violet. This phenomenon—the colored afterimage—occurs because there is energetic reciprocity between purple and yellow pigments, which goldenrod and asters knew well before we did." [Ibid., pp. 45-46.]
 
It turns out that asters and goldenrod present profoundly invitational features to many different observers, and in the following Kimmerer reveals why humans and bees share a keen interest in these two colors together.
 
"If my adviser was correct, the visual effect that so delights a human like me may be irrelevant to the flowers. The real beholder whose eye they hope to catch is a bee bent on pollination. Bees perceive many flowers differently than humans do due to their perception of additional spectra such as ultraviolet radiation. As it turns out, though, goldenrod and asters appear very similarly to bee eyes and human eyes. We both think they’re beautiful. Their striking contrast when they grow together makes them the most attractive target in the whole meadow, a beacon for bees. Growing together, both receive more pollinator visits than they would if they were growing alone. It’s a testable hypothesis; it’s a question of science, a question of art, and a question of beauty. Why are they beautiful together? It is a phenomenon simultaneously material and spiritual, for which we need all wavelengths, for which we need depth perception." [Ibid., p. 46.]
 
Kimmerer’s original answer when first talking to her advisor had been based on her deep wonder about whether the relationship of botany and beauty can be scientifically plumbed. Pursuing this interest, as her own experience reveals, can have revelatory answers in a factual sense (the explanation of why our attention is caught by a combination of these flowers), but also in the larger sense of thinking about our own presuppositions. 
 
"When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be purple and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters? We see the world more fully when we use both." [Ibid.]
 
The existence of these two flowers together prompt one to wonder also about the importance of place, and led Kimmerer to recognize not only how obvious the following is, but also how her indigenous heritage had noticed and taken seriously reciprocity with the world beyond the species line. 
 
"The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open hearts." [Ibid., p. 222.]
 
Kimmerer’s phrasing “with open eyes and open hearts” plays to more than the wide-ranging commitments she inherited as an indigenous person. It also recognizes and confirms the importance of relational knowing. Additionally, such openness is consonant with another awareness that we, as vision-dominated primates and emotion-rich persons, can achieve—“with open eyes and open hearts” conveys that each of us needs to be fully present to the specific places we find ourselves. This is the only way an individual animal is able notice the Earth’s infinitely interesting features. Kimmerer soars when relating why and how both forms of knowing dance together.
 
"The question of goldenrod and asters was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know. It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe." [Ibid., p. 46.]

Additional Materials for
Chapter Six “Ethics and Invitations to Care”

6.1 Macintyre’s on rationality. Macintyre worked out in a later volume how the western tradition itself featured many competing traditions that claimed to explain what rationality is and how it works. [Alisdair Macintyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality (London: Duckworth, 1988).]Macintyre’s conclusion was that rationality was not a single, definite notion shared in common by these competing traditions. Rather, what each tradition named rationality was an after-the fact construction whose shape and function were dictated by the underlying assumptions of each competing tradition. The result was that in each instance what was named “rationality” was, in fact and practice, a distinctive form of inquiry that was tradition-constituted.
 
6.2 More on Nineteenth Century Ethics. The nineteenth century German philosopher and logician Rudolf Lotze, who knew biology well and also had a medical degree, opined, “The true beginning of metaphysics lies in ethics.” [Cited in Macquarrie, John. 1963. Twentieth-century Religious Thought: The Frontiers of Philosophy and Theology, 1900-1960. New York: Harper & Row, at page 68.] Darwin also suggested how familiarity with nonhuman animals raises profound philosophical and ethical issues, as is evident in this 1838 comment: “He who understand[s] baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke.” [Cited in Wilson 1984 at page 47.]
 
6.3 A Chilling Nineteenth Century Example. A more recent example of ethics-based reasoning excluding humans comes from a nineteenth century legal ruling in the United States. It is an ugly example of a racism-tinged justification that has had debilitating impacts on tens of millions of people. Handed down in 1857, the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford was eagerly anticipated because it dealt with human slavery, widely considered the most important political and ethical problem of the day. The decision holds that the founders of the United States meant something quite narrow by their use of the word “citizen” in the U.S. Constitution, and thus intended to exclude the descendants of slaves forcibly brought from Africa to the United States.
 
Chief Justice Taney, who authored the court’s official opinion, went out of his way to make statements meant to enshrine forever his and his fellow judges’ view that those humans considered “black” were inferior to those humans that were considered “white.” Taney stated as fact a number of inaccuracies that he understood to justify his opinion—he stated wrongly, for example, “This opinion was [when the U.S. Constitution was drafted] fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race.” Further, one cannot fail to notice that Taney’s reasoning assumes that the standards set by “the white race” and “European nations” alone are the definitive measure of what a reasonable and ethical human might think about the subject of race-based slavery.
 
6.4 Bernard Rolling Comments on Animal Science. The ethicist Bernard Rollin during a keynote address to the 2004 annual meeting of the American Society of Animal Science described the fundamental, rapid changes in modern industrialized societies since the mid-twentieth century.
 
For virtually all of human history, animal agriculture
was based foursquare in animal husbandry. Husbandry,
derived from the old Norse word “hus/band”
or bonded to the household, meant taking great pains
to put one’s animals into the best possible environment
one could find to meet their physical and psychological
natures … and then augmenting their ability to
survive and thrive by providing them with food during
famine, protection from predation, water during
drought, medical attention, help in birthing, and so
on. Thus, traditional agriculture was roughly a fair
contract between humans and animals, with both
sides being better off in virtue of the relationship. [Rollin, Bernard E. 2004. “Animal agriculture and emerging social ethic for animals.” Journal of Animal Science 82:955-964 (2004) Annual Meeting Keynote Address, p. 958.]
 
Rollin noted about this long tradition, “So powerful is the notion of husbandry, in fact, that when the Psalmist seeks a metaphor for God’s ideal relationship to humans, he seizes upon the shepherd in the 23rd Psalm: ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters; He restoreth my soul.’” [Ibid., using the translation of the King James Version.] Rollin’s theme in this 2004 address, however, was that “this contract” had in the decades following World War II been “broken by humans.”
 
Symbolically, at universities, Departments of Animal Husbandry became Departments of Animal Science, defined not as care, but as “the application of industrial methods to the production of animals” to increase efficiency and productivity. With technological “sanders”—hormones, vaccines, antibiotics, air-handling systems, mechanization—we could force square pegs into round holes and place animals into environments where they suffered in ways irrelevant to productivity. [Ibid.]
 
Rollin’s 2004 theme, then, was that the mid-twentieth century featured the opposite of an animal renaissance in the industrialized sectors of late twentieth century industries—rather than a renewal of connection, these industries engineered a decisive expansion of intentional harms and deprivations to the food and research animals involved in many industries.
 
6.5 Adam Smith on nonhuman animals. The “who are the others?” question, for example, undergirds the opening comment of Adam Smith’s 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments about “the fortune of others.”
 
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.  Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others.... The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it. [The quote opens Chapter I “Of Sympathy” in Part I “Of the Propriety of Action Consisting of Three Sections,” Section I “Of the Sense of Propriety.” Sixth edition 1777, available through Project Gutenberg at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67363/pg67363.txt, accessed 2022.12.26.]
 
Smith lived in a society overwhelmingly focused on humans as the Earth’s raison d’être, and thus nonhuman “others” are not commonly taken to be the reference when Smith speaks of “others” to whom humans typically pay attention—this explains why Smith’s famous work does not use the word “animal” until much later (Section II, “Of justice and beneficence”, Chapter III, “Of the utility of the this constitution of nature,” fifth paragraph). But Smith’s opening lines reveal that the idea he describes can easily attend to living beings beyond the species line. 
 
6.6 Ferment on Ethics. The diversity of forces driving the ferment on the animal invitation explains why our own species’ deeper engagement of the nonhuman world is pursued, and often led, by people completely unrelated to and unfamiliar with the long, often myopic and disappointing history of the academic field known as “Ethics.” In reality, the heartbeat and dynamics of ethics in action, and thus of the present ferment, are humans’ robust abilities to care about others. The result is that “we” (the human collective) again and again re-invigorate our ever-living abilities to care about a wide range of “others.”
 
As ferment on ethics and the animal invitation continues to grow, it
can be recognized as rooted in a variety of human achievements—(i) grass roots concerns for some nonhuman animals, most notably companion animals and favored forms of wildlife; (ii) scientific discoveries and an increasingly interested scientific community; the rapid growth of citizen science [While “citizen science” is, in one sense, a long-standing tradition (given that a wide array of “amateurs” including Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, and many notable astronomers contributed major scientific findings), the term is today taken to designate the modern push to involve a wide range of citizens in gathering scientific data—see, for example, https://scistarter.org accessed 2022.3.22.]; (iii) a deepened awareness that law can offer fundamental protections beyond the species line; (iv) a renewed awareness in religious traditions of the essential role that the more-than-human world and its citizens have long played in human lives; and (v) appreciation of the fact that virtually all human cultures have in their own way and time embraced the animal invitation in some significant manner.
 
6.7 Candidates for the Moral Circle, and the Problem of Risks. Consider the following continuum of candidates that an individual might choose to include in a list of “others” that deserve protection. At the beginning of the continuum is the “individual” who is self-concerned. How far past this starting point can individuals and/or humans in a group extend our abilities to care about “others”?

• individual
• immediate family 
• extended family
• local community group 
• clan 
• tribe
• ethnic group 
• nation
• regional group 
• race
• species (Homo sapiens)

 
Human exceptionalism stops at this level, of course, but the list of candidates clearly goes further.

• genus (while Homo sapiens is the only alive member of the genus Homo, historically there have been as many as nine) [Five additional species are listed in Goldfield, Anna. September 22, 2021. “Five Human Species You May Not Know About” (accessed 2022.12.20 at https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/ancient-human-species/) while eight are listed in Hodzic, Jasna, “Homo sapiens is #9. Who were the eight other human species?” (accessed 2023.4.10 at https://bigthink.com/the-past/other-human-species/).]

• taxonomic family Hominidae (humans and the other four great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans) 
• order (primates) 
• class (mammals)
• phylum (chordates)
• kingdom (animals)
• sentient beings
• all recognizable individual living beings in one's ecosystem
• all forms and groups of life in one's ecosystem or bioregion 
• the earth
• the solar system 
• the galaxy
• all matter nearby and in the furthest reaches of “the macro world” and “the micro world”

 
This continuum contains some profound challenges—some points are not biological “others” that can be perceived on the basis of an individual’s ethical sensibilities as they exist in one’s local world, for some points on this continuum are known only by virtue of our species’ developed communal knowledge of the scientific kind. It is also hard to know what can be made of our mammalian capacities to care about the “furthest reaches” of the “macro world” or “micro world” (these are explored below). As a practical matter, the realms relevant to how any human chooses to be ethical is, of course, a personal matter of perceiving in our own local world other individuals or living communities. This task requires a balancing of self-interest, social/cultural teachings, and our personal capacity for recognizing additional interests beyond those identified by our native culture and nurturers. 
 
Because societies often censor or ostracize in some way those individual members who go beyond socially approved forms of ethics, it takes not only practice and self-awareness, but also the courage to follow convictions that flow from the compassion one feels. Such are the challenges faced by those who explore which beings in which communities beyond our own selves and immediate families can, as a practical matter, receive our attention. For example, much ridicule was experienced by those who first championed anti-racism in the virulently racist society of the United States prior to the Civil War in the first half of the nineteenth century. [These are well described in Mayer, Henry 1998. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.] Similarly, if we ponder the ridicule heaped upon those who championed the equality of women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and those who do so today in societies that continue to subordinate women, we find abundant evidence that some humans are completely unable to shed the biases they were taught when young. Reflection on social movements generally, then, will reveal that those who propose that a society expand the circle of protected beings take risks. Beyond our personal animal finitudes, then, there are other formidable impediments to an individual freely choosing how to answer “who are the others?” Nonetheless, many human lives demonstrate daily that, in the end, each individual carries basic ethical possibilities that can survive virtually any form of social pressure if the individual chooses to have this happen.
 
6.8 The term “carpentered.” Because certain nonhuman animals in an important sense can be thought of “building” some aspect of their environment (for example, bird nests, beaver lodges, or even the far greater shaping that some keystone species perform), the term “carpentered” conveys well what is at issue in the human-built environment—various scholars such as the South African psychologist William Hudson, researcher Richard Langton Gregory, and the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan have since the 1960s and 1970s used the adjective “carpentered” to describe the built environment of industrial societies which is dominated by straight lines and right angles.
 
6.9 Micro-Animal Species. The scientific community is not confident it can estimate the number of species that comprise the many different micro forms of life, let alone the total number of organisms. One can get a sense of how wildly an individual human must guess when estimating the number of living beings by reading a relatively informed science-based estimate about the vast numbers involved in but one unstudied realm. 
 
Some 200 to 600 octillion microbes live beneath our continents, suggests an analysis of data from sites all over the world, and even more live beneath the seafloor. Together they weigh the equivalent of up to 200 million blue whales — and far more than all 7.5 billion humans. Subterranean diversity rivals that of the surface, with most underground organisms yet to be discovered or characterized. [“Deep Beneath Your Feet, They Live in the Octillions.” By JoAnna Klein, The New York Times, December 19, 2018, accessed March 22, 2022 at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/science/subsurface-microbes.html. See, also, Magnabosco C, Lin L-H, Dong H, Bomberg M, Ghiorse W, Stan-Lotter H, Pedersen K, Kieft TL, van Heerden E, Onstott TC (2018) The biomass and biodiversity of the continental subsurface. Nature Geoscience doi: 10.1038/s41561-018-0221-6.]
 
The trajectory of our discoveries about the abundance of life on Earth since the publication in 1666 of Hooke’s Micrographia suggests that the scientific community is only a few hundred steps into an extraordinarily long and arduous journey for which our kind of animal needs more than stamina. We also need practical wisdom of the kind set out in the Buddhist aphorism “He who has a hundred miles to walk should reckon ninety as half the journey.” [Herrigel, Eugen 1953. Zen in the Art of Archery, New York: Vintage, 1953 translation by R. F. C. Hull, p. 61.]
 
Ethicists in the early twenty-first century face the important, eminently practical question regarding what aspects of this profusion of life beyond any individual’s ken is in any way relevant to humans’ ethical abilities? Since caring by any kind of animal is challenged by many finitudes, humans need to be informed as fully as possible by realism and a responsible pursuit of discoverable facts. At the very least, the human individual who learns about the not-readily-apparent profusion of life in every local place learns a key lesson—it is challenging for each of us to recognize how true it is that each of us is (along with our own personal community of uncountable millions of microbes in and on our body) a member of what is aptly described as “our larger community.”
 
6.10 Distances—What are the “Furthest” Reaches? Here attention turns to two sets of realities inaccessible to the human individual in her or hjs daily life—the first set includes those realities beyond the Earth as they stretch away from our planet in every direction (a realm described below as “the furthest reaches of the macro world”), and the second set includes (ii) the “inner” realities of every object we experience, including our body, as that inner world shrinks down to the subatomic world and beyond (described below as “the furthest reaches of the micro world”). Of course, our usual sense of measuring distances would favor the conclusion that the furthest reaches of the macro world are more removed from us, but which realm is more “removed” in the sense of being more alien to our human world? At issue is a different kind of distance, namely, which realm is more psychologically removed from our actual lives and our capacious imaginations.
         We can imagine (although perhaps only feebly) traveling away from the Earth because our bodies can, if we have suitable technology, remain fully functioning as we travel beyond our native planet toward the furthest reaches of the macro world. We struggle, though, when the question turns to the furthest reaches of the micro world. It is a great challenge to imagine entering in a normal embodied way into such a small and alien realm, let alone its furthest reaches. All of the animal awarenesses that undergird our understanding of our local world are situated in our body, thus it baffles us to wonder what it means to imagine awareness at a molecular level or subatomic level.
         Faced with this exploratory question, someone might, because all human intelligence is embodied, conclude that we are more psychologically removed from the subatomic world. Some additional lines of reasoning tend to the same conclusion—for example, the moon is much further from me by one measure than are the subatomic realms of the atoms in and near me. But since I can sense the moon month after month, and since I am heir to humans and communities who recognized key patterns in the moon’s appearance, disappearance, and impact locally (perhaps in a nearby bay’s local tides or other flows within our bodies), the moon does not seem nearly as remote from me as do micro realms generally, let alone the furthest reaches of the micro world.
         A different conclusion follows, however, if we employ the mathematical notion “powers of 10” to measure how removed something is from our day-to-day animal perception. If we use imagination to travel inside our own body or any familiar object, one science-based source supports the conclusion that the smallest dimension we reach is 10-16meters; if, on the other hand, we use our imagination to travel beyond our body as far as possible off this Earth, the distance measures up to 1025 meters. [Philip and Phylis Morrison and the Office of Charles and Ray Eames 1982. Powers of Ten: A Book about the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero. Scientific American Library, Distributed by W.H. Freeman, at, respectively, pp. 102-3 and 144, and pp. 20-21 and 129.] By the “powers of 10” measure, the “greater” distance is to the furthest reaches of the macro world. But as a practical matter, we surely can answer that both the realm deepest within us and that furthest removed from us are startlingly “distant,” such that in one sense each animal stands midway between these edges. Both are distant frontiers of reality as our sciences currently measure such things, and thus arguably a border of the universe beyond our animal being. 
       Such questions have been imaginable for less than a century. As to traveling out into the far reaches of the macro world, it was not until 1924, as pointed out in Chapter 2, that humans had any inkling that other galaxies existed. Edwin Hubble’s confirmations based on a combination of careful observations and measurements with newly invented science-fostered instrumentation opened up an entire series of shifts in our species’ social construction of our universe—today, less than a century after Hubble’s discovery of a second galaxy, estimates regarding the number of galaxies is in the range of multiple trillions of galaxies. [See, for example, Fountain, Henry 2016. “Two Trillion Galaxies, at the Very Least.” New York Times, 2016.10.17. accessed 2021.10.25 at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/science/two-trillion-galaxies-at-the-very-least.html.]
As to our imaginative traveling to the innermost reaches of the micro world, in 1897 J.J. Thomson discovered the electron and suggested a model of the atom called the “plum pudding model.” Thomson’s model turned out not to be an adequate model, however, and it was replaced because of the superior predictive powers of the model proposed in 1911 by the physicist Ernest Rutherford who theorized that electrons orbit each atom’s nucleus.
         It is intriguing that both journeys—that to the furthest reaches of the macro world and that to the furthest reaches of the micro world—are within reach of our imagination even though the realms asked about are bafflingly removed from us, albeit in seemingly different ways. Putting forth an idea of either realm requires, of course, a constructive act by our minds, but our ability to generalize on these topics is weak to the point of being a mere guess. In one sense, then, the question here about which realm is “further from us” is unlike the debate that Copernicus’ work prompted, namely, whether the formerly dominant Earth-centric account of the universe was “true” relative to Copernicus’ revolutionary suggestion that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system.

Additional Materials for
Chapter Seven “Religion and More-than-Human Animals”

7.1 “Ultimate Concern.” As noted by the philosopher William Wainwright (in "Concepts of God", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/concepts-god/, Footnote 1), Tillich used “ultimate concern” in a variety of ways. At times, he means the term to designate “the subject's psychological and existential attitudes toward the object of his or her devotion” (as evident in (see, e.g., Tillich, Paul, 1957. Dynamics of Faith, New York: Harper, at pp.4-5). At other times, Tillich’s means to refer to “what Tillich regards as their appropriate object, namely, Being itself” (see, e.g., Tillich, Paul, 1951. Systematic Theology(Volume 1), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 21; and Tillich 1957, pp. 9-10).
 
7.2 More on the Discovery Doctrine. Further, while the 1452 proclamation and its successors were framed in very specific commercial terms, these papal pronouncements served not only the papacy’s own aspirations to regulate relations among Christian rulers but also much more, including relations between Christians and all “unbelievers” swept up within these pronouncements’ catch-all phrases like “heathens” and “infidels.” This series of papal pronouncements relied on theological precedents and legal doctrines—which is to say, inherited social constructions—put in place during and after the Crusades which defined non-Christians as enemies of the Catholic faith and, tellingly, less than human. These proclamations reveal not only an unexamined assumption of the total propriety of human domination of the natural world, but also other deadening factors—arrogance about some Christians’ claim of superiority relative to other humans, normalization of conquest, and legitimization of death for those who refused conversion.
 
There are multiple ironies in these efforts by various popes to divide the entire world among but two nations led by absolute Catholic monarchs. The adjective “catholic” is based on a Greek word that in some contexts works as a synonym for “universal.” In the religio-political context in which the discovery narrative was advanced, however, the “Catholic” input fell well short of a broad-minded universality—instead, this attempt to divide the world was self-serving in ways that reflect a deadening mentality in the Roman Catholic leadership circles. At play were many factors—arrogance, control of thought and action, and the desire for greater political power that flowed from vanquishing of “enemies of Christ.” The result was nothing short of complete domination of long-standing human communities, theft of their possessions and property, perpetual slavery for individuals in the conquered lands, and an attempt to gain greater power than that held by competitors in the diverse Christian tradition, for in the fifteenth century the Rome-based popes were by no means widely appreciated as universal rulers. The Bishop of Rome was but one of the major Christian bishops in the contested lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, some of which were controlled by different Christian subtraditions and some of which were controlled by Islamic subtraditions. The attempt of the Bishop of Rome to dominate this part of the world resulted in the major 1454 “schism” between the “western” (Roman Catholic) world and the “eastern” Mediterranean’s branch of the expanding Christian subtraditions often generically referred to as the “orthodox” subtraditions.
 
Given the complex political environment in which Bishops of Rome had to exist during this era, it is not surprising that individual popes sought more power for themselves as happened with the series of papal bulls on which the Doctrine of Discovery relies. On the whole, however, it is clear that such assertions of political power and advantage can have negative impacts on the living features of religion, suppressing tolerance of others and thereby harming those who seek to follow their own instincts about a good spiritual life or in ways that honor an inclusivist sense of our larger community that protects “infidels” and even various nonhuman animals. The language in these bulls clearly promoted the capture and enslavement of members of groups that do not acknowledge the papal view of religion. Consider as well the reasoning that such peoples are “enemies of Christ” who deserve “perpetual slavery” while their conquerors are entitled to “all their possessions and property.”
 
7.3 Killing in the Name of Religion. Beyond the deadening of one’s own religious sensibilities caused by attempts to control others’ religious practice and expression is something even more debilitating, namely, the practice of killing other living beings in the name of religion. The papal bulls and political treaties that purported to divide faraway lands were more than deadening for the inhabitants, their cultures and local worlds, for European dominion over the indigenes’ local worlds produced problems and forms of domination that still beset the larger human community today. As explained in Chapter 8, the Doctrine of Discovery is still cited as a precedent in some modern legal systems, thereby normalizing the colonizing society’s past theft of lands.
 
7.4 Passages Similar to “Love Thy Neighbor.” European domination of local peoples became a widespread catastrophe that was a calculated, direct consequence of decisions by entire nations to pursue their own self-interest under a pretense first put forward by the leadership of an institutionalized religion that promotes itself as spiritually aware and ethically attuned. It is ironic, of course, that the religious tradition cited in support of this doctrine regularly asserted in its most sacred documents that each human must foreground care about others. Jesus, for example, is prominently featured as insisting that the principle “love your neighbor as yourself” is, along with loving the Divine Creator, the very heartbeat of the Christian message—“All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” [Matthew 22:40 (New International Version).] Another verse even suggests that, regarding the key virtues of “faith, hope, and love, … the greatest of these is love.” [1 Corinthians 13:13 (English Standard Version).]
 
7.5 A Spanish Voice for Better Treatment of the Indigenes. An example of an influential voice raised on behalf of the indigenes within only a decade after Columbus’ first voyage was Bartolemé de Las Casas, a layman who in 1502 arrived as one of the early Spanish settlers in Hispaniola (the island on which are located Haiti and the Dominican Republic) whose life is often discussed today because he repeatedly sounded themes of “love others as you love yourself” that many Christians have claimed is the heartbeat of a healthy, living spirituality.
Las Casas initially became a slave owner, but soon came to oppose the brutal practices which epitomized Spanish colonial policy toward the indigenes. Later, as chaplain for a Spanish military group seeking to conquer Cuba (very much in the spirit of the discovery doctrine’s licensing of war against non-Christians), he observed, “I saw here cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see.” [Sullivan, Patrick Francis, ed. (1995). Indian Freedom: The Cause of Bartolomé de las Casas, 1484–1566, A Reader. Kansas City, Missouri: Sheed and Ward, at p. 146.] Las Casas tried many approaches, and even advocated for legal changes (succeeding in part with legislation enacted in 1542 that abolished native slavery, but only three years later this reform was overturned). Forced to return to Spain because of the great resistance to his views, Las Casas became an influential advisor to the King of Spain, and wrote a number of works, the most famous of which is his 1542 Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies published in 1552 in Spain.
 
7.6 More on the Ancient Chinese Tradition. Although Confucius is known for his pronounced focus on humans’ duty to humans, with one’s relatives in particular being accorded priority, the later Confucian tradition nurtured a multifaceted engagement with the animal invitation, an example of which can be found in the following passage drawn from Mencius. 
 
The attitude of exemplary persons (junzi) to animals is this: having seen them alive, they cannot endure seeing them die; hearing their cries, they cannot bear eating their meat. It is for this reason that exemplary persons stay out of the kitchen. [Ibid., citing Mencius 1A7.]
 
The foundation on which such views stand is a sense of humans in continuity with the universe, an attitude that is revealed fully in this quote from Mencius.
 
Everything is here in me. There is no joy greater than to discover integrity (cheng) in oneself and nothing easier in striving to be authoritative in one's conduct (ren) than treating others as you would be treated yourself (Mencius 7A4). [Ames 2006, 314-315.]
 
Ames explains, “The meaning of this familiar passage from the Mencius is that ‘all things are in me and I am with, and in, all things.’” [Ibid., p. 315.] There are both helpful general perspective and additional details in these volumes by Roel Sterckx: (i) 2002. The Animal and the Daemon in Early China, Albany: State University of New York Press; (ii) Sterckx, Roel 2019. Ways of Heaven. An Introduction to Chinese Thought. New York: Basic Books; and (iii) Sterckx, Roel, ed., 2020. Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 
7.7 Ancient Observations about Sociological Differences. Sociological exploration had long been a topic discussed by those who had traveled to foreign lands where starkly different forms of culture, religion and social organization were readily observable. Apart from the attention to such differences noted by Herodotus and Pascal, techniques anticipating the empirical approaches of modern sociology were pioneered in different spheres by creative thinkers such as the fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun, an Arab from North Africa, who was fascinated by both cohesion and conflict in different societies. [See, for example, the detailed comments both about Ibn Khaldun and later thinkers who appreciated his work in Alatas, S. H. 2006. “The Autonomous, the Universal and the Future of Sociology.” Current Sociology. 54: 7–23 [15]. doi:10.1177/0011392106058831. S2CID 144226604.]
 
7.8 More on Auguste Comte. The first stage, Comte postulated, was a theological stage, which gave way to what he referred to as a metaphysical stage. This second stage in turn gave way to a “positivist” third stage which today is most easily understood as implying a very generalized entrance into a “scientific” understanding of the world. Importantly, Comte asserted that each of these stages had sub-stages. The early, theological stage featured an elementary phase of “fetishism” focused on phenomena in one’s local world which, even though seemingly inanimate, were thought to be alive (examples include impressive natural processes, objects such as particular stones, sacred trees, and much more). This fetishist or animalistic phase, Comte asserted, gave way to polytheism, which in turn was superseded by a more evolved monotheistic view. 
         The second stage, Comte asserted, grew out of the final, monotheistic subdivision of the theological stage, and focused on impersonal, abstract concepts. In effect, Comte’s scheme ranked religious traditions—simpler versions came in the first stage, more advanced versions in the second stage. Comte’s third and final positivist/science phase is characterized by observation, experiment and classification thru comparison (in effect, a rudimentary scientific method). Here also Comte saw stages, which led him to assert that this positivist stage began with mathematical reasoning and then eventually grew further through astronomy, then more so through physics, chemistry, biology and, in its culminating form, sociology.
 
7.9 The Views of David Hume and Hannah Arendt. Although human exceptionalism was deepening during Comte’s lifetime, in part because of the increasing influence of the startling dismissal of any and all nonhuman animals in the first half of the seventeenth century by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), there were eminent figures in eighteenth century Europe who did not radically dismiss other animals. A key example is the work of David Hume (1711-1776), which reflects a phenomenon noted often in this book—the animal invitation has always touched some humans, beguiling them in ways that keep these humans from automatically dismissing any and all other animals as if nonhuman beings’ existence was a mere afterthought meant to serve human needs. Hume had very prominently and with “care,” in the words of Hannah Arendt, “repeatedly insisted that neither thinking nor reasoning distinguishes man from animal and that the behavior of beasts demonstrates that they are capable of both.” [Hannah Arendt 1958. The Human Condition.Chicago: University of Chicago Press. P. 86, Footnote 14.]
                                                                                 
7.10 August Comte and Evolution. Comte was born into a period that had inherited a range of distinguishable ideas about the diverse phenomena that fit today under the umbrella term “evolution.” These ideas were, like Comte’s scheme, focused on socialevolution as distinguished from the more strictly biological sense of evolution on life forms changing physically across generations foregrounded in the human imagination by Darwin’s publication in 1859 of his astonishingly powerful ideas. 
 
Consider, however, the subtle dance between these two notions of “evolution.” In the centuries before Comte, social evolution was taken for granted, as it was a favorite subject of ancient, inherited narratives that prevailed in many cultures in the eastern Mediterranean-Asia Minor region. Biological evolution, however, was addressed by a separate narrative anchored by powerful denials that promised risks for those who championed biological continuity between humans and other animals. Interestingly, however, the narratives of social evolution often postulated that human cultures had declined rather than surpassed ancient cultures. Stories of decline appear in various creation accounts, with the result that the passage of time produced weaker and weaker human groups.
 
There have been times in western history, however, when “progress” away from humans’ connections with their larger community was not the narrative—instead, a steady, long-term decline was assumed to be the human species lot. A classical meta-narrative was that in earliest times humans were a golden race that then declined—as Hesiod says in Works and Days, “First of all the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus made a golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Cronos when he was reigning in heaven.” After the passing of this original race, “then they who dwell on Olympus made a second generation which was of silver and less noble by far. It was like the golden race neither in body nor in spirit.” Then, after the passing of the less spectacular silver generation, “Zeus the Father made a third generation of mortal men, a brazen race, … and it was in no way equal to the silver age, but was terrible and strong.” [Waldau 2013, 239, citing lines 109-155 of Hugh G. Evelyn White’s translation of the Greek original in Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1974, pp. 10-13.]
 
The Abrahamic traditions are intimately familiar with such narratives, for the founding Jewish tradition features in its Hebrew Bible a creation narrative soon followed by a narrative of the “fall” in the Garden of Eden. That “decline” is followed by yet another decline that explains the flood narrative featuring Noah saving his family and many other animals. In the ancient world, one of the best-known decline narratives is the passage in Plato’s Timaeus that accords a place of profound inferiority to women, as failed men, below whom are ranked any and all nonhuman animals in ever lower ranks. This decline narrative is quite different, then, from the Hebrew Bible’s flood account, where both the women of Noah’s family and a representative pair of many different nonhuman species are granted relief from humans’ deep failure.
 
Consider some related themes of decline or deprivation—the Christian foregrounding of earthly life as a “fall” from a primeval Garden of Eden was reinforced by the view that life on Earth inevitably falls far short of a Heaven-based afterlife. Decline was also the central theme in narratives that dominated Christian cultures throughout the first millennium C. E., for they inherited narratives claiming that the ancient civilizations in Egypt, Greece and Rome had attained achievements that were the high-water mark of human ability in the arts, philosophy and engineering—for many centuries, Europeans would look to the past, emulating these vanished “high civilizations” and eventually claiming a “renaissance.”
 
Biological evolution, on the other hand, was radically denied since ancient times because a powerful consensus had formed about the importance of the notion of fixed species. It was during the period of classical Greek philosophy, particularly with Aristotle, that the notion of fixed species became a dominant, confident ideology, and it would reign for more than two millennia. It is intriguing that various figures from time to time nonetheless speculated about issues of the kind mused about by some pre-Socratic thinkers such as Anaximander, Empedocles and Democritus (see, for example, 7.11 below)
 
On the whole, then, the influence of classical Greek philosophy shut down inquiries about biological evolution as that term is today understood. Further, following the fall of the Roman Empire speculation of this kind was not preserved by Christian authorities because such views were deemed contrary to the biblically based notion of creation and thus heretical. The result was a deep conviction that all species had been eternally fixed at the time of creation—this conviction was so deeply ingrained that challenging it produced the vehemence on full display more than a millennium later in the strong opposition to Darwin’s 1859 views that had a prominent role well into the twentieth century. 
 
Beyond the strange contrast between, on the one hand, a sometimes evolving, sometimes devolving human sphere and, on the other, the allegedly static other-than-human community of all nonhuman animals, there are other reasons that thinking about biological evolution naturally drew attention. There existed in many individuals’ daily, local world a basis for wondering about the possibility of other animals’ biological evolution—important clues could be discerned in the fact that humans had for many centuries bred other animals for human use. Darwin would open his 1859 masterpiece with a detailed discussion that included many on-the-ground facts from different human societies that suggest a long history of humans altering other animals over time. In the midst of human societies, then, were clues that humans had long been intentionally promoting a controlled form of biological evolution.
 
Biological Ferment. Despite the dogma-like status of the fixed-species narrative and the social, political and religious risks of challenging such a long-established view, evolutionary intuitions were to become increasingly common because there were alluring prompts to such thinking in much of ordinary life. But exploring such intuitions was also challenging for practical reasons—perceiving the processes that underlie biological evolution is uncommonly difficult. These processes are thus well beyond what individual human animals can notice without the help of technologically sophisticated equipment. But it is more than the finitudes explored in Part I that limit what an isolated individual can discern of the prevailing patterns—the widespread acceptance of established social constructions also had obscured much of prior humans’ speculation about biological evolution. 
 
It was, however, the impressive series of eighteenth and nineteenth century pioneers in biological thinking whose works reveal that diverse evolutionary ideas of many sorts were not only, as Mayr suggested, “in the air,” but also, so to speak, in the water of mid-nineteenth century thinkers. [ See, for example, Mayr, Ernest 1982. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Chapter 8 ,“Evolution before Darwin” (pp. 343-393) is a detailed discussion of many different views.] Revolutionary thinking in its very nature involves, of course, serious risks illustrated in the longer-term fate of claims made by Herbert Spencer, one of the nineteenth centuries most ardent advocates of evolutionary narratives. Spencer’s spectacular rise and fall (which are discussed below in 7.11) reveal that evolutionary claims, schemes and denials—just like religious or philosophical or ethical or legal schemes—may for a time become popular, even be taken by some as a definitive account of the real world in which we live. But like all human social constructions, those narratives that become dominant for a time may, upon examination or with the mere passage of decades, be found wanting because they impose a false pattern on reality.
 
7.11 The Trouble with Biological Evolution. Darwin’s insights about biological evolution were finally published in 1859 because Darwin had learned that his contemporary Alfred Russell Wallace had intuited some of Darwin’s key ideas and was close to publishing them. Both Darwin’s achievement and Wallace’s insights reveal that careful, decades-long inquiry could yield important clues to humans’ animality, but the underlying processes of biological evolution are, as already noted, so complex that it was not until the 1930s that evolutionary theory was widely accepted, for by then many of the relevant mechanisms, although not all, could be discerned, pieced together, and combined into a coherent explanation. Known as “neo-Darwinism” or “the evolutionary synthesis,” the theory had been complemented by new techniques that “produced a wide-ranging synthesis of [Darwin’s] insights and important discoveries, like population genetics … [that] through a combination of mathematical techniques and genetics-based discoveries, [produced] highly technical and powerful predictions … regarding gene frequencies in populations over generations.” [Waldau 2013, 82, citing E. Mayr and W. B. Provine, The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).]
        There are many different claims that have been made under the name of “evolution.”
         Ernst Mayr on evolutionary thinking among the Pre-Socratics. The pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander very early on speculated that humans came from aquatic animals. The twentieth century philosopher of biology Mayr, however, after providing details of Anaximander’s “quite fanciful cosmogony,” [Mayr 1982, p. 301.] reasoned, “[t]his is not an anticipation of evolution, as has sometimes been claimed, but rather refers to the ontogeny of spontaneous generations” and is, Mayr suggested, possibly why “subsequent generations of [Greek] philosophers … accepted spontaneous generation from slime or moist earth.” [ Ibid., p. 302.] Another pre-Socratic philosopher, Empedocles, asserted the “preposterous theory” [ Ibid.] that humans were composed of a combination of animal parts that developed on their own, and then adapted to each other, thus allowing humans to emerge—Mayr notes this is not a forerunner of Darwin’s theory “since no selection is involved in bringing together complementary parts, nor is the elimination of imperfect pieces a process of selection.” [ Ibid. See, also, Wallace, William 1911. "Empedocles" in Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 9 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. Pp. 344-345, at p 345. Available at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica/Empedocles, accessed 2022.3.22.] More positively, Mayr suggests that the philosopher Democritus, “who apparently admired organic adaptations,” “was thus the first to pose the problem of chance mechanisms versus immanent goal-directed tendencies.” [ Ibid.]
       Herbert Spencer’s views came to the fore in the last decades of nineteenth century, commanding considerable attention in a variety of domains. He is associated with the term “survival of the fittest” which he coined in his 1864 Principles of Biology after reading Darwin’s 1859 volume. [While Darwin did not originate this phrase, he did incorporate it into the 5thedition of On the Origin of Species published in 1869.] This phrase, which mischaracterizes Darwin’s far more nuanced thinking about biological evolution, came to be associated with Spencer’s thinking and many other schemes that attempted to justify harsh practices, including forms of reactionary thinking that supported oppressive political regimes, imperialism, colonialism, and racism.
         Because Spencer’s ideas about evolution were cited by many in different domains, he has been described by two anthropologists as “the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century” [Thomas Eriksen and Finn Nielsen 2001. A History of Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. At p. 37.] and by a popular sociology textbook as “the most famous philosopher of his time.” [ Henry L. Tischler, Henry L. 2010. Introduction to Sociology. Belmont, California: Wadsworth. P. 12, 10th Edition.] 
         But Spencer’s claims about social evolution did not stand test of time. As early as the 1930s, leading intellectuals asked pointedly, “Who now reads Spencer?” [ Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (1937; New York: Free Press, 1968), p. 3; quoting from C. Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: Benn, 1933).] This decline reveals something crucial about evolutionary claims whether biological, social or some combination of these two—such claims must not only be tied to the actual realities of the world we inhabit, but they also must, over time, illuminate specifics of this world as we learn more about new and different situations. This is precisely the greatness of Darwin’s thinking, for it has again and again provided a real-world basis by which our local world surroundings and beyond can be explored, thereby fostering the development of new ideas that have been helpful in elucidating the complex, hard-to-discern phenomena of biological evolution—admittedly, this has taken decades, but the Darwinian synthesis achieved this with spectacular results.
     Denials of Darwin. It is, of course, well known that there are still many human circles where Darwin’s insights are not accepted despite (i) the countless lines of supporting evidence in favor of the general thesis and (ii) the paucity of science-based lines of reasoning that provide a basis for doubting biological evolution as broadly outlined by Darwin. It is, then, important when seeking to understand the power of the human exceptionalism narrative to acknowledge that by no means does everyone today accept claims about biological evolution. Denials of Darwinian evolution still come from a few non-religious communities, but the best-known denials come directly from certain religious subtraditions that make a point of refusing to acknowledge the continuity of humans with other animals. In 2019, a Gallup poll reported that 40% of Americans believe in creationism, that is, a direct creation by a divinity of humans “in their present form within the last 10,000 years.” [Brenan, Megan, “40% of Americans Believe in Creationism” July 26, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx (accessed 1/2/21 9:20 AM)] The predictable result is that in some communities, the denial of evolution has a deadening effect on key elements in a religious life. Such deadening is also evident in language choices (such as the continued dominance of phrases like “humans and animals”), and in educational approaches that insist that teaching about creationism be accorded equal time with teaching about biological evolution. Such deadening is also evident in the prevalence of continued denials of biologically-based overlaps such as humans’ inner fish, reptile and monkey that are demonstrable thru thousands of different lines of evidence. In one sense, a broad, functioning understanding of humans’ membership in the larger community is suppressed in communities that insist on “equal time” being given to religiously-based refusals to acknowledge the evidence-based approach used by Darwin. Another result is that appreciation of the living features of humans’ own animality and membership in the larger animal community are also discouraged. 
     Nonetheless, the living possibilities of religion remain evident in how many other communities do not struggle with the claim that species are interrelated biologically in a great many ways. Equally revealing is that many human communities long ago found ways to nourish their own living features by recognizing humans’ communal connections with some other animals—this applies to not only small-scale societies that have maintained their view of the more-than-human world, but also the openness still evident in various Orthodox subtraditions within the larger Christian tradition that reveal, as do some subtraditions in both Judaism and Islam, deep respect for nonhuman animals similar to that found in religious traditions of, for example, India and China.
 
7.12 More on Marx. In some ways, Marx’s human-centered strategy is understandable—call out explicitly the breadth and depth of human-on-human harms as a way of challenging all humans to do more to protect vulnerable humans. Yet even as this remedy appeals in the short-term, as a long-term measure Marx’s human exceptionalism adds to the progressive deracination of humans through its failure to engage crucial dimensions in our human lives. Marx fails, for example, to honor the far older tradition that reveals so much about our ancient ancestors’ insistence on realism about humans’ obvious membership in a more-than-human animal community. These challenges to Marx’s analysis are in no way meant to deny that Marx’s mid-nineteenth century world was, like Comte’s, beset by horrific human-on-human problems. These challenges are meant, instead, to underscore the importance of fostering full human actualization, which is not possible when human lives go forward on the basis of a rank denial of our animality. Failure to name the animating qualities of our mammalian social skills is, in the long-run, harmful to humans in their local communities and, of course, to their local communities’ nonhuman neighbors. In profound ways, Marx deepens, as did Comte, how our industrializing and industrialized societies’ denial of ancient humans’ insights suggest that attending carefully and respectfully to the more-than-human world helps us respect and protect each other.
         Born into a family of rabbis in the ancient town of Trier on the Moselle River near today’s Germany-Luxembourg border, Marx came to maturity in an era so fully dominated by human exceptionalism that those who aspired to be encompassing thinkers, which Marx undoubtedly was, remained functionally blind to the myriad ways claims of human exceptionalism have provided a fig leaf for those willing to demean other humans. The features of human exceptionalism that permit it to mask much narrower agendas of greed and exclusion of marginalized humans—sometimes referred to as “subaltern” [The term “subaltern” is used in a variety of ways. It is often associated with modern Marxists like Antonio Gramsci, but there is a more nuanced set of meanings evident in the work of the feminist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (see, for example, Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).]—are an obvious risk that any social science creates when it ignores harms to other-than-human animals that have long been integral features of humans’ local worlds. Below it is argued that the same is true of social anthropology, for forms of thinking about whole academic fields that become radically human-centered risk failing to notice the ongoing processes which result in the removal of humans from, and thus ignorance about, the sustaining natural world. 
         Because Marx was born into the oldest of the Abrahamic traditions, he was heir to the complex mix of human-centerednesses and world-affirmation so characteristic of the three main branches of this macro-religious tradition. When he was 17 years old, Marx was further immersed in the confident human exceptionalism that mars modern legal systems as he attended the University of Bonn and later studied law and philosophy at the University of Berlin, graduating at the age of 23. It is not surprising, then, that Marx’s fecund imagination was shaped in ways that caused him to roam this more-than-human world only within human-centric horizons. He submitted his doctoral dissertation to the University of Jena, and in 1841 received the degree of Doctor in Philosophy. Shortly thereafter (1844), Marx met Friedrich Engels, who had already published “The Communist Manifest”, which later was revised jointly to become the human-centered document widely known today as the Communist Manifesto. Decades later in 1867, Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital. After Marx died in 1883, Engels used Marx’s notes to complete the second and third volumes of this long, complicated, evidence-driven work (Volume 2 in 1885, and Volume 3 in 1894) that today is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950. [ Green, Elliott (12 May 2016). “What are the most-cited publications in the social sciences (according to Google Scholar)?” LSE Impact Blog. London School of Economics.]
         While today widely recognized as one of the most influential thinkers in human history, his often-illuminating views carry a poison within, namely, a form of human exceptionalism that continues to be the beating heart of Marxist analyses of humans’ social realities and ethical obligations. This is, in a more-than-human world, one of the most consequential examples of the fallacy of misplaced community.
 
7.13 More on Weber. Through family and elite education, Weber was immersed in a nineteenth century European worldview increasingly invested in the assumptions and forms of reasoning that drive human exceptionalism. Because the validity of exceptionalist forms of thinking was, in Weber’s circles, only rarely questioned, his early life was dominated by the same operative assumptions that drove the myopias of Comte and Marx regarding the more-than-human world. Weber’s work is in many circles today well known because his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism published in 1905, [Weber, Max 1905, translated by Talcott Parsons into English in 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London : George Allen & Unwin; New York: Scribner.] illuminated post-sixteenth century developments that provided subtlety as to how one post-Catholic form of the Christian religion had created motivations and personal habits that influenced the emergence of the capitalist establishment of some European communities.
         Importantly, although Weber’s insights illuminated the ancient observation that religious claims impacted social dynamics, his extremely detailed focus on social structure and religion was not driven by a broad, encompassing engagement with religious diversity. Instead, it was laser specific as to time and place, and focused on the local religion, as it were. Further, while the environment in which Weber worked included some awareness of non-Christian forms of religion, such views were only beginning to grow. The upshot was that Weber and his contemporaries had little in the way of a deep, pluralistic appreciation of many non-Christian viewpoints—there was, for example, no minimally respectable biography of Mohammed, the founder of Islam, until Thomas Carlisle in 1840 published his The Hero as Prophet. Nineteenth century European accounts of the Buddhist tradition revealed a superficial engagement, characteristically portraying this alien religious tradition as idolatrous, nihilistic, and the nadir of the Indian subcontinent’s pessimistic view of life. [See, for example, Bechert, Heinz, 'Buddhist Revival in East and West', pp.273-285, in Bechert, Heinz, and Richard Gombrich (eds), The World of Buddhism: Buddhist Monks and Nuns in Society and Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991).] In the mid-nineteenth century, Schopenhauer’s well-known work provided a constructive view of Buddhism (especially relative to Christianity whose ethical breadth, Schopenhauer opined, was defective because it in no way provided consideration for nonhuman animals). [ Schopenhauer, who died in 1860 (almost a half-century before publication of Protestant Ethics, argued (per Bechert, op. cit, at p. 274) “Buddhism is the best of all religions, because it is preferable to Brahmanism with its caste system, and even more to Christianity with its fallacious ideas about God and its defective code of ethics which has no consideration of animals.”] Yet it was not until the late nineteenth century that a sympathetic account of the historical Buddha’s life gained widespread attention (Sir Edwin Arnold's 1879 book-length poem The Light of Asia). 
         Further, Weber labored in an environment where Comte’s views had discounted traditional and small-scale society religions, replacing a focus on diversity with assertion of a “religion of humanity” theme. In important ways, then, Weber lived in a world only somewhat in touch with humankind’s penchant for extreme religious diversity. Marx’s challenge to religion as one-dimensional raised important questions about established religious traditions, but there was still little in the way of a challenge to the multiple ways that religion in society had in the past functioned as a fig leaf hiding self-interest, rabid nationalism, sexism, racism, or economic greed driven variously by national self-interest or classism. National aggrandizement likely seemed at the time to many Europeans to be a practical, and thus reasonable, response needed for survival in the competitive, insecure world of the European community of nations. Weber was, for all practical purposes, immersed so deeply in the well of human exceptionalist thinking that he missed completelythe important role that recognizing nonhuman individuals and communities can play in understanding intelligence, community, and both the shape and potential breadth of one’s moral awareness.
 
7.14 More on Durkheim. Durkheim’s themes, however, prompt a different series of questions about humans’ religious imagination and the ways Comte, Marx, Weber and others favored a narrative of human exceptionalism—for example, does a humans-only focus when exploring how humans think about themselves as communal living beings set sociology up to fail? Similarly one can ask, does human exceptionalism inevitably impoverish human self-awareness by setting the bar too low, that is, by stating a far too narrow idea of community and society?
         To begin responding to such questions, consider one of Durkheim’s most basic statements at the beginning of his major work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
 
In reality, then, there are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence. [Durkheim, Emile 1912. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, translated by Joseph Swain 1915. New York: The Free Press, 1965., p. 15.]
 
Here, the living features of a religious response to a local place (“given conditions of human existence”) are strongly hinted. They are emphasized in Durkheim’s next sentence as he elaborates how religion is integrally tied to the living features of human lives.
 
All are religion equally, just as all living beings are equally alive, from the most humble plastids up to man. So when we turn to primitive religions it is not with the idea of depreciating religion in general, for these religions are no less respectable than the others. They respond to the same needs, they play the same role, they depend upon the same causes; they can also well serve to show the nature of religious life, and consequently to resolve the problem which we wish to study. [Ibid.]
 
The above passage explains why Durkheim opens his classic volume with a simple sentence describing “the problem” he proposes to study. 
 
In this book we propose to study the most primitive and simple religion which is actually known, to make an analysis of it, and to attempt an explanation of it. [Ibid., p.13]
 
Durkheim helps the reader understand both method and goal in his next sentence, invoking Comte’s notion of “positive”:
 
We shall set ourselves to describe the organization of this system with all the exactness and fidelity that an ethnographer or an historian could give it. … [S]ociology … does not seek to know the passed [sic] forms of civilization … [but] rather, like every positive science, it has as its objective the explanation of some actual reality which is near to us, and consequently which is capable of affecting our ideas and our acts: this reality is man, and more precisely, the man of to-day, for there is nothing which we are more interested in knowing. [Ibid.]
 
Durkheim’s focus is, then, not only human-centered, but also present-centered. This gives Durkheim’s form of human exceptionalism a certain irony, for while his intention is to use the most “primitive” form of religion to speak to “the man of to-day,” humans’ earliest forms of religious awareness appear to us today to have been discernibly diverse (they arose in many different contexts, among diverse living communities, and at different times). Further, if the group of early human spiritualities have any dominant feature, it is that they are not human-centered, but life-centered in ways that go beyond the boundary posts of the local human community and well beyond the concerns of human exceptionalism. 
         But this irony seems unnoticed, for Durkheim has made it plain that he seeks out “the man of to-day” who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had lost or repudiated key features of those human societies that Durkheim’s interesting book attempts to foreground.
 
7.15 Early Anthropologists. Another element impacting these newly born social sciences, of course, was that the early forms of these social sciences advanced sometimes covert, at other times overt Eurocentrism, classism, sexism, capitalism, slavery, religious intolerance, and ethnic strife. Further, given the long history of tolerating existing harms to so many humans within their own nation states, the fact that nation states committed serious harms to peoples beyond their own national borders is hardly surprising. In actual fact, greed-driven pursuits were common, which is pertinent to claims about the vision governing nations’ intentional actions. What would have been surprising is the emergence of a modern nation state in which true equality was not only ideologically claimed, but functionally present on the ground in decade after decade. That this has been rare to the point of never having really prevailed for a substantial period of time speaks volumes about humans’ lack of realism about our own history. 
         We in fact fail in multiple ways if we do not honestly describe the actual on-the-ground realities we have created, those we now live amid, and those we threaten to create. We have many reasons, then, to speak plainly and honestly about ourselves and our communities as members of a frail, insecure, violence-prone species. All of these reasons provide an incentive for naming how and why our species’ social and cultural dimensions have so often failed to acknowledge that many humans today have become, as did some of our eighteenth and nineteenth century forebears, so intoxicated with our species’ alleged superiority to all other species. Because of this intoxication, contemporary humans are at risk of failing to detect how this claim often hides the further claim that only our most favored cultural group or class is the full and thus defining measure of what a human can become. 
         Such frankness about many questionable, ignorance-driven claims of human superiority is needed as well to grasp the fundamental challenges faced by the young field of anthropology. Consider an early pioneer of nineteenth anthropology--Edward Burnett Tylor, born in 1832 to a life that would last 85 years, represents well the preference of many nineteenth century social theorists for evolutionary frameworks that postulate a trajectory that begins with early, “primitive” social organizations and moves to increasingly complex and sophisticated cultural achievements. The result is, such theorists claim, the arrival of superior forms of intelligence in the form of rationality, greater elegance evident in many cultural universals, and other multi-faceted sophistications clearly on display in the theorists’ own European nations. In the early 21st century, such claims no longer go unchallenged in scholarly circles, although the human exceptionalism narrative remains a powerful element in one important modern domain after another. Social evolution themes, however, are the decisive backdrop of Tylor’s 1871 volume Primitive Culture, [Tylor, Edward. 1871. Primitive Culture: Research into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (two volumes). London: John Murray.] which has long been deemed a foundational text in the field of Anthropology. The opening chapter entitled “The Science of Culture” is rife with evolutionary themes—this is not surprising given both the sociology story related above and the astonishing success of Darwin’s elegantly simple, insightful surmises about biological evolution. Tylor’s opening paragraph offers this general description.
 
The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action. [Ibid., Volume 1, page 1.] 
 
Tylor’s use of the singular noun “Culture” rather than the plural “cultures” in both the book’s title and his opening paragraph none too subtly announces his agenda, which is elaborated in a series of broad generalizations—the investigation is “on general principles,” which is possible because Tylor asserts that humans’ cultural achievements exhibit patterns that are “a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action.” Two supporting conclusions advance discussion of Tylor’s “Culture”—first, all humans share an important uniformity of “civilization” (nonhuman animals are in no way the intended focus, of course, but due to “the animal invitation,” they will be often mentioned in Tylor’s book). Second, a claimed pattern of change over time (“development or evolution”) among human groups will be the foundation on which the analysis stands.
 
On the one hand, the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes; while on the other hand its various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution…. [Ibid.]
 
Thereby, the claimed uniformity of all human “civilization” (which parallel’s the title’s use of the singular “culture”) is subject to an important qualification, for Tylor will explain a pattern of “evolution” through “especial consideration of the civilization of the lower tribesas related to the civilization of the higher nations.” [Ibid., emphasis added.] The result is, in retrospect, a complex claim that at first asserts all humans’ uniformity but then puts forth its more important agenda, namely, a distinguishing factor by which the writer’s own time and culture (signaled by the none-too-subtle shift evident in “civilization of the higher nations”) are played off against the “civilization of lower tribes.” [Ibid.] 
Human exceptionalism is, in one sense, powerfully present in this account—the initial focus is clearly the entire human species. But a powerful exclusion cleaves Tylor’s organizing concept of the human species. Some humans are, by implication, a better, more telling fulfillment of what it means to be human, and thus in Tylor’s work are taken as the definitive measure of the human species. This is the habit of mind that dominated the social evolution claims to which Comte and so many others subscribed—it is not, then, an accident that this scheme is a driving force throughout Tylor’s impressively extensive works, including his forerunner 1865 volume Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization, [ Tylor, Edward. 1865. Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization. London: John Murray.] all the post-1871 editions of Primitive Culture, and his 1881 Anthropology. Tylor’s predisposition to favor later humans as “higher,” “more advanced,” while “early” humans are “rude” and “lower” causes Tylor to miss key elements evident in the diverse lives, thinking and values of our ancient forebears, many of which are not obviously inferior to the lives, thinking and values of the industrial humans that Tylor knew and the post-industrial humans that citizens of industrialized and industrializing nations in the early twenty-first century encounter. 
         The work of a second popularizer of anthropology also reveals these key aspects of early anthropology, as well as a range of challenges not well recognized until the following century. James Frazer, who lived from 1854 to 1941, was a Scottish comparativist drawn into social anthropology by Tylor’s Primitive Culture. His late nineteenth century work known as The Golden Bough originally carried the subtitle “A Study in Comparative Religion,” [Frazer, James George 1894 (originally 1890). The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. Two Volumes. New York and London, MacMillan and Co. Both volumes of this edition are available through Project Gutenberg, and are referred to below as Frazer/Gutenberg I and II.] but in the second edition the subtitle was changed to “A Study in Magic and Religion.” This extremely popular work first published in 1890 as a two-volume set was expanded to three volumes in 1900, and by 1915 twelve volumes existed, with a thirteenth and last volume added in 1936. It is an understatement to observe that this work by Frazer offers much detail—the abridged version alone exceeded 800 pages. [ Frazer, James George 1960. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Abridged, 1 volume edition. New York: The Macmillan Company, Chapter LIII, page 600 (referred to below as “Frazer/Abridged”).] 
         The popularity of Frazer’s magnum opus is the basis for his reputation as a pioneering social anthropologist and folklorist who influenced the early stages of modern studies of mythology and comparative religion. Frazer’s work also has historical importance because it influenced the expanding work of psychologists and psychiatrists in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as many poets. Further, Frazer’s ability to disseminate information and generate excitement reveals the influence accorded views framed in terms of both human exceptionalism and the even narrower agenda of those who asserted the pre-eminence of European achievements in a wide range of domains. 
         The passage of time has, however, made clear that there are significant problems in Frazer’s work, for while many have ranked The Golden Bough as a classic, Frazer’s claims have withstood neither the test of time nor the emergence of more careful, humble, and critically thought-out claims about human cultures across place and time, for his underlying vision has not been borne out by field studies. This set of problems is not too surprising, given that Frazer’s observations were not enriched by travel to diverse places and cultures—he traveled outside Great Britain to only Italy and Greece. Another noticeable problem is Frazer’s failure to work closely with the underlying documentary evidence, [J. D. Hawkins observed that Frazer was “unfamiliar” with an approach that “sticks closely to the fully quoted documentary evidence.” See Hawkins’ review of Volkert Haas’ 1970 Der Kult von Nerik: ein Beitrag zur hethitischen Religionsgeschichte, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 36.1 (1973:128).] thereby revealing a discussion of our ancient forebears’ altogether diverse lives, views and practices framed in terms of agenda-laden oversimplifications. Frazer often uses singular nouns for encompassing descriptions that carry dismissive implications—he asserts, for example, “the superstitions of the savage cluster thick about the subject of food.” [Frazer/Gutenberg I, p. 80 (also at Frazer/Abridged p. 277). In a similar vein is Frazer’s comment, “For everything new is apt to excite the awe and dread of the savage.” Frazer/Gutenberg I, p. 69.] Derogatory implications also are suggested by Frazer’s frequent resort to the adjectives “primitive” and “rude,” a practice that echoes Tylor’s opening words in his 1865 and 1871 volumes.
         The sources of Frazer’s information were, like Frazer, individuals who were by and large European-trained and thus European-centric. He read histories produced by other scholars, but an important source of information for him was his correspondence with Christian missionaries and British imperial officials around the world. It was common for Frazer to use concepts developed by Christians for their own religious tradition to explain ancient, pre-Christian phenomena. [Larsen, Timothy (2014), "James George Frazer", The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, pp. 37–79, at 47.] Even more telling is a dispute that came late in Frazer’s career involving an Australian scholar who thought considerations of accuracy required use of the indigenes’ terminology when describing Australian aboriginal culture—Frazer, who had not studied the local cultures in person as had the Australian scholar, insisted that his own tradition’s Judeo-Christian terminology should be used because it was a precise equivalent of the indigenes’ own terminology. [Ibid., p. 48.] 
         Even from a cursory review, however, it is evident that there are many passages in both Tylor and Frazer’s writings that plainly reflect the animal invitation. Thus even as these pioneers’ work has dismissive overtones, it nonetheless reflects that the peoples grouped under the term “savage” clearly were aware that some nonhuman animals are, like humans, possessed of various forms of intelligence and feelings. In one sense, then, ancient humans were starkly superior to modern humans in the matter of knowing one’s diverse neighbors.
 
7.16 Lévi-Strauss on ancient humans’ knowledge about nonhuman animals. The anthropologist Lévi-Strauss observed that members of small-scale societies that “are sometimes acutely aware of the ‘concrete’ nature of their science and contrast it sharply with that of the whites.” [Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1966 (originally published in French in 1962 as La Pensée sauvage). The Savage Mind, trans. by (not indicated), Chicago: University of Chicago, at p. 37.] This observation helps each current day analyst of human views raise questions about what “they” (members of other societies, including our ancient ancestors) did in the past, and what “we” (humans trying today to understand these forerunners) can do now with the formidable kind of animal intelligence typical of all human groups. Modern anthropology has developed an astonishingly deep corpus of materials that reflect how past human groups have noticed other animals and characteristically attributed significance to some or all of them. Since the intelligence and sensory awarenesses that allowed ancient humans to notice the significance of their nonhuman neighbors are precisely our endowments as well, we are, as our ancient ancestors were, naturally inclined to pay attention to at least some of the animal invitations in our local world. Additionally, contemporary humans can ask whether, how and why some human animals have been trained (“educated”) to play down completely other animals’ many invitations to our primate curiosity.
         Critical thinking prompts a further observation—ancient humans were in some important ways far more knowledgeable about other animals than we are. They were, for example, in their estimations of their nonhuman neighbors’ intelligences, communities and emotions, far more attuned to such matters than were Descartes, other human-centered philosophers, the leaders of mainline religious traditions, and the nineteenth century founders of the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. Many of humans’ most influential thinkers in the last few centuries were, by virtue of both formal and informal education of the kind described in Part III, trained to not look or inquire or care, but instead to accept caricatures of nonhuman others and, likely, some humans as well.
 
7.17 Shifts in the Christian tradition over time. Consider in this vein the insights from a respected scholar of Christianity regarding how this most populous of religious traditions has changed again and again. 
 
To pass from a reading of the Fathers of the Church to a book such as Caroline Walker Bynum’s study [Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women] of a crucial aspect of the piety of late medieval women, is to realize that the Christianity of the High and Later Middle Ages—to say nothing of the Christianity of our own times—is separated from the Christianity of the Roman world by a chasm almost as vast as that which still appears to separate us from the moral horizons of a Mediterranean Islamic country. [ Brown, Peter Robert Lamont, and American Council of Learned Societies. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, xvii. Brown’s Footnote 2 cite’s Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.] 
 
7.17A Excerpt from Encyclopedia of Islamic Organizations, Groups, Sects, Parties and Movements by Dr. Abdul Moneim Al-Hefny, Madbouly Bookstore, Cairo, 20 February 2020
 
There is no political, social, intellectual, or religious movement that has known so much proliferation and fragmentation as that which claims to represent the “true Islam”, not only in modern times, but throughout Islamic history.
 
The difference over the interpretation of the Qur’anic and prophetic texts — as well as the conflicting interests, predominance of whims, rivalry of understandings, and the accumulation of allegations — led, over the course of fourteen centuries, to the establishment of partisan groups, which emerged in waves of injustice, rejection, and rebellion against the existing powers-that-be, as well as against the mainstream of Islam and/or other minority factions claiming to represent Islam. The disputes over who had the right to speak in the name of Islam were also
squabbles for prestige and influence. 
 
Many of these organizations had a temporary ability to circumvent the authorities and endure in a form capable of engaging in armed fighting, which kept them active on the social scene for some time. But they were usually torn apart or disintegrated, often quite quickly.
 
OVERVIEW
 
Anyone who reads Dr. Abdel Moneim El-Hefny’s “The Encyclopedia of Islamic Organizations, Groups, Sects, Parties and Movements” will be certain that conflict and fragmentation, appearance and disappearance, are key features governing the history of the “Islamic movement”, whether political or dawa (preaching), moderate or radical. This has affected every movement, contemporary or historical, even the Muslim Brotherhood — founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928 in Egypt, and spread by now into more than sixty countries, called by its followers “the largest Islamic movement in the modern era”. The Brotherhood is certainly very large, but it has been afflicted by this phenomenon of disintegration, between its mother branch in Egypt and the foreign branches, and within the Egyptian wing itself. 
 
Al-Hefny attributes this recurring fact of fragmentation within Islamic movements to two main factors:

• The differing views of these groups in interpreting texts, daily matters, and how to deal with “the Other”; and
• The entry of many different nations and races into Islam — during the early conquests —who brought with them different cultures and civilizations, leading to various doctrinal approaches and even innovations that disrupted the unity of Islam.

 
Still, Al-Hefny ignores the most important reason behind the fragmentation of organizations claiming to be the authentic Islam: the struggle over political power and social status — and, relatedly, a sharp disagreement over how to deal with the authorities that have ruled over the Muslim world from the Fitna (great sedition) to the end of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924. Perhaps this is because the book focuses mainly on the intellectual aspects of these groups, trying to move away from the political and historical aspects. The author describes his encyclopedia as “not a book of history, but of thought, piecing this thought together, and then renewing it”.
 
Although the writer did not make the effort he promises on the issue of renewal, by keeping track of the thought of about 800 groups, sects, parties, and organizations, he showed that this issue of renewal is not easy. He finds himself confronted with accumulated, floundering, and conflicting ideas made over the course of more than 1,400 years ago. Some of these ideas did not die and are not only recorded in the history of ideas; they are still live, interactive, and able to influence people who live among us, who can adopt them as “the straight path”.
 
One can reach the aforementioned conclusion by reading this encyclopedia because in its content and structure it serves as a “doctrinal record of all Islamic ideological and political organizations of Sunnis and Shi’ites across Asia, Africa, and various Arab, Islamic, and non-Islamic countries … from the first group to the present time”.
 
What helps in coming to this conclusion, without ignoring the truth or unfairly denigrating these groups, is that the encyclopedia did not arrange them in chronological order. Rather, it arranged them alphabetically, beginning with a group that the author calls Al-Muhammad, apparently in reference to the broad current of believers in the message of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) throughout the social history of Islam and Muslims, followed by a group called Al-Amiriyah, a Shi’a sect affiliated with the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, who claim their right to rule the Muslims because of this lineage. They are followers of Abu al-Qassem Ahmad ibn al-Mustansir (1074-1101), better known as Al-Musta’li, the ninth Fatmid caliph, whose accession to power split the Isma’ili sect, creating the offshoot that called itself the Nizaris (and became known in the West as “The Assassins”). Again, a theological division was at root a power struggle.
 
The encyclopedia ends with another group called Al-Yonisia, a group of fanatics belong to the Murji’ah, named after Younis bin Aoun al-Nimeiri or Al-Shammri. This group believes that faith is merely knowledge of Allah and submission to him, loving him with the heart, the recognition
of his Oneness, the belief in what the prophets have said; and that faith in the heart and tongue, does not increase or decrease, and is not affected by sins; that the believer enters paradise with his sincerity and love not by his works and obedience; that it suffices to know that the prophets have brought of faith, with no need for detailed knowledge of the contents. However, it requires that these qualities be available in one person for his faith to be complete. Thus, anyone who leaves one of them is considered, in its view, to have committed an act of
apostasy.
               
CATEGORIZIING GROUPS
 
The non-linear presentation of the book, time-wise, means that the book moves from older groups to newer ones, then back again, and in so doing allows the reader to see the way the ideas of older groups overlap with those of the present and, perhaps more interestingly, the
way some of the ideas seem to be making progress towards understanding reality, only to strongly regress. This cycle might be the strongest factor that prevented the renewal of Islamic thought and jurisprudence, especially in recent centuries.
 
In being influenced by the old tradition, and even adopting it, these groups were not limited to ideas and perceptions, but to names and terms. The encyclopedia shows that some of these groups took similar names, despite the different times and places, with the following list
showing the repetitions:
 
1. Abrahamism, which has five sub-groups: Imamiyyah Abrahamism, Shia Abrahamism, Ibadi Abrahamism, al-Mushabaha Abrahamism, and al-Ghalya Abrahamism.
 
2. Ahmadiiyya, which has three sub-groups: Bedouin Ahmadiyya, Qadianiyyah Ahmadiyya and Imamiyyah Ahmadiyya.
 
3. Ishaqiiyah, which has five sub-groups: Ishaqiyah al-Ghulah, Turkish Ishaqiyah, Ishaqiyah Al Mujasamah (Anthropomorphic), Ishaqiyah al-Heluliya, and Shia Ishaqiyah.
 
4. Isma’ilism, which has six sub-groups: Aghakhaniyah Isma’ilism, al-Taaliymyyah Isma’ilism, al-Khalisah Isma’ilism, al-Mustailyah Isma’ilism, al-Tatariyah Isma’ilism, and al-waqifa Isma’ilism.
 
5. Ashab (companions), which has 20 sub-groups, such Ashab al-Ijma, Ashab ar-ra’y, Ashab alsuwal, Ashab alrajeat, Ashab altebaaye, Ashab almaeani, Ashab al-hadith, Ashab altafsir, etc.
 
6. Ahi (people), which has 25 divisions, ranging from Ahl Alhaq and Ahl al’ithbat, and from Ahl alsuffa to Ahl al’ahwa and Ahl al’ihmal, Ahl al-Ridda, then Ahl al-hall wal-aqd, Ahl althawq, Ahl al-rajeat, Ahl al-felasafa, Ahl al-kalam … etc.
 
7. Oulu (men of), which has three groups: Oulu al-Albab, Oulu al-Azm, and Oulu al-elem.
 
8. All-Jama’a (group), this name attracted many groups and organizations, reaching 31 groups, the most prominent of them is Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, a local group in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, and Tablighi Jama’at, which was founded in India and spread throughout the Muslim world, and Al-Nahda, in Algeria.
 
9. Gameia (association), which has seven groups such as the World Muslim Youth Association, the Islamic Society of Writers and Sunnis, Ansar al-Sunna Muhammadiyah Association in Egypt, the Association of Islamic Dawa People, the Association of Muslim Scholars in Algeria, the Youth Association Islamic in Morocco, and the Association for the Preservation of the Holy Quran in Tunisia.
 
10. Harakah (movement): there are 15 organizations, most notably: Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Al-Ahbash Movement, the Islamic Tawhid Movement, Amal Movement in Lebanon, the Islamic Youth Movement in Malaysia, the Islamic Resistance Movement
(Hamas) and the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, the Islamic Revolutionary Movement in Morocco, the Justice Movement in Uzbekistan, and the Islamic Society Movement in Algeria.
 
11. Hezb (party): there are 16 organizations, notably Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hizb ut-Tahrir which has branches in several countries, the Islamic Party in Turkestan, the Islamic Party of Alash in Kazakhstan, the Islamic Party and the Islamic Union party in Afghanistan, the Islamic Dawa Party in Iraq, the Islamic Action Party in Yemen, and the Islamic Ennahda Party in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
 
12. Tanziim (organization): there are 6 organizations: The Organization of the Islamic Revolution in the Arabian Peninsula, the Shiite Organization of Dawa, the Organization of Islamic Action, the Faith Brigades Organization, Word of God Organization, and the
Mujahideen Organization in Morocco.
 
13. All-Waqifite (Shia sect), there are 4 groups under this name: Waqifite Al-mutakallimun, Waqifite Kharijites, Imamiyyah Waqifite, and Ibadi Waqifite.
 
Those who look closely at these classifications of Islamic groups and organizations, which claim to represent Islam in its entirety, can deduce ten important observations:
 
First, these groups, whose names are repeated, are either attributed to people, whether they are preachers, religious scholars or political leaders who wear the mantle of religion, or believe that Islam should be a path to political power; or attributed to exclusive qualities: when it is said Ahl or Ashab, they wish to make Islam or faith exclusive preserve to the followers of a certain group.
 
Second, there is a habit of referring to rivals by derogatory names related to their qualities. These groups will call themselves Ahl al-Haq (“people of truth”) and call the others Ahl al-Ahwa (“people of whims”). This is a simple manifestation of a trend that has prevailed and gained
momentum in the history of Islamic groups and Islamdom generally, of ostracism and mutual antagonism that in some cases amounts to an accusation of blasphemy.
 
Third, these groups and organizations are not necessarily in conflict and rivalry with each other all the time. Sometimes even hostile groups will collaborate, albeit unintentionally. For example, groups and associations whose role is limited to producing and promoting traditional
religious knowledge that fills the public sphere with ideas and perceptions, can pave the way for politicized religious groups, or those seeking political power, sparing them the effort and time spent in the process of persuasion and recruitment, under the pretext of continuing to
support religion, while what these groups are putting forward is in fact a political project. Sometimes these politicized groups can infiltrate the ranks of advocacy and educational organizations or schools, and then use them to serve their own goals.
 
Fourth, these groups and organizations are divided among the two main doctrines in the history of Islam, namely Sunnism and Shi’ism. Both doctrines have produced many different groups over the centuries, and the antagonism between them is at various times and in various
places framed more as an intra-family or tribal struggle for leadership, and at other times as a distinct doctrinal and intellectual war.
 
Fifth, throughout the history of the Muslims, a pattern repeats: groups that appear weak will gain strength, ideologically (i.e. in terms of the number of followers) and materially, and once it comes to dominate, it begins to decline, especially after the death of its founder and the circle
around him. This is usually followed by civil war — sometimes several — and once the group is defeated, its followers disperse, and the victorious authorities launch a kind of media blackout on its ideas until its influence fades.
 
Sixth, there has been no age, era, or epoch in the history of the Muslims without fringe groups rising and falling in their attempts to challenge the mainstream of Islam. Most of the time these extremists do not achieve their goals and are a mere nuisance to the rest of the Muslims;
sometimes they prevail.
 
Seventh, the extremist and radical organizations are in conflict with one-another, while they simultaneously wage war against the society and political power-holders they believe to be illegitimate.
 
Eighth, not all these associations and groups were politicized, extremist, or radical. Some of them played their part in advocating spiritual fullness, moral transcendence, and the public interest of society; and some of them opened space for the study of religious sciences. These
entities are often more viable than those which engage in power struggle.
 
Ninth, some of these organizations and groups, politicized or dawa, were not far from the political power in the history of Muslims, and this was true with the Umayyads as it was right down to the end with the Ottomans. The Islamic authorities would manipulate these groups —sponsoring them at various stages in their life-cycle, for example — or simply create such groups, depending on what served their interests. Sometimes groups emerged in response to conflicting claims to authority, or as a result of the conflict between Arabs and Mawlis in the Second Abbasid era, or between Turks and Arabs in Ottoman times.
 
Finally, there is nothing to prevent future dissent and cracks in already established groups, organizations, parties and movements, as well as the emergence of new groups in the Muslim world from Ghana to Fergana. It is not expected that there will come an era or an epoch in the
life of the Muslims without the presence of such religious and political entities and formations. If one were to make a medical analogy, they are like diabetes: there is no cure, but there are means of control to reduce the most serious and negative effects.
 
CONCLUSION
 
In conclusion, reading and examining this encyclopedia will undoubtedly help us understand and analyze the perceptions, objectives, and measures of these groups and organizations, whether political or religious, in our time. Current groups and organizations are not entirely
disconnected from their predecessors and in some cases are simply rebrands of old organisations and ideas that are trying to cultivate themselves in a different social and political contexts.
         
7.18 Sources relevant to religion and nature issues. In addition to materials available at the website of Yale University’s Forum on Religion and Ecology (fore.yale.edu), see, also, Waldau and Patton 2006; Glacken, Clarence J. 1967. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press; Santmire, H. Paul 1985. The Travail of Nature. Minneapolis: Fortress Press; Gottlieb, Roger, ed., 2003. This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature and Environment, 2nd Edition, New York: Routledge; and Armstrong, Karen 2022. Sacred Nature: Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
 
7.19 Intriguing Parallels. Such insights about ancient problems have intriguing parallels to the insights mentioned in Chapter 6 by the philosopher Nussbaum on how women have been ignored in ethics-based discussions of recent centuries and the Chapter 4 reference to the gendercide of 100 million missing girls. Such developments help all humans recognize that while some religious traditions have been hospitable to insights made possible by forms of critical thinking, others have long held in place profoundly impactful oppressions of both disfavored human beings and other animals.
 
7.20 Three early studies helped identify basic issues:
 (1)Adams, Carol J., ed., 1993. Ecofeminism and the Sacred, New York: Continuum.
         (2) Gaard, Greta Claire, ed., 1993. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
         (3) Plant, Judith 1989. Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, Philadelphia, PA and Santa Cruz, CA, New Society Publishers.
 
7.21 In ways that parallel how countless lines of science-based evidence attest to our animality, multi-faceted argument supports the claim that early religious traditions were aware that humans are animals who live in a more-than-human world. The many narratives that ancient peoples memorialized were, like the stories of contemporary indigenous groups, replete with recognition of our membership in the animal community. Further, the tradition of humans portraying other-than-human animals is so longstanding and widespread that, as already noted, nonhuman animals were represented in human art “more often than any other class of things in nature.”
         Another art historian noted that, “Never perhaps in the whole history of animal art, even in China, has the animal appeared so magnified, so sublimated, without ever losing its reality or naturalness, than in Paleolithic art.” [Marcel Brion, Animals in Art (London: George C. Harrap, 1959), 15.] Another art historian interested in hohw frequently nonhuman animals appear in human art adds, “The evidence for these facts is so over whelming that it is recognized across academic boundaries from anthropology to art history to religious studies to the sciences.” [Apostolos-Capadonna, Diane 2006. “On the Dynamis of Animals, or How Animalium Became Anthropos” in Waldau and Patton 2006, 439-457, at 446.]
         Further, the constant stream of new archaeological discoveries about our ancient forebears regularly reflects fascination with religiously-framed awareness of neighboring animals—for example, the hundreds and hundreds of nonhuman animal images (and only 6 human images) found in France at the Chauvet Cave are 30,000+ years old. [Waldau 2013, 129-130; see also Curtis, Gregory 2006. The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists (1st ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 96-97, 102.] There is a similar dominance of nonhuman images in the Lascaux Cave from 17,000 years ago. [An age of 17,300 years is stated at http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/francelascaux.htm. Accessed 2022.3.11.] Thousands of years later, as humans erected structures at gathering points now thought to be among humans’ earliest organized communities, such as Gobekli Tepi in Turkey which appears to have been functioning 10,000+ years ago, [Dietrich, Oliver 2016.6.22. "How old is it? Dating Gobekli Tepe." Tepe Telegrams: From the Gobekli Tepe Research Project, 
https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/2016/06/22/how-old-ist-it-dating-gobekli-tepe/, accessed 2022.3.11.]nonhuman animals images are prominent. Thus, humans’ most ancient sculptured animal figures suggest, as do petroglyphs and other ancient forms of art, a preoccupation with our kind’s embeddedness in a more-than-human community.
 
7.22 A modern example affords the chance to think about the rich dimensions of awareness our ancestors were certain human animals could achieve. In this example, Olmert discusses a science-fostered encounter with a troupe of baboons—her description connects a science-based exploration involving nonhuman animals the Axial Age sages’ insight that humans’ larger community is a more-than-human community. 
 
The baboons’ thorough acceptance of me, combined with my immersion in their daily lives, deeply affected my identity. The shift I experienced is well described by millennia of mystics but rarely acknowledged by scientists. Increasingly, my subjective consciousness seemed to merge with the group-mind of the baboons ... I had never before felt a part of something larger, which is not surprising, since I have never so intensely coordinated my activities with others. With great satisfaction, I relinquished my separate self and slid into the ancient experience of belonging to a mobile community of fellow primates. [Olmert 2009, pp. 117-8.]
 
Because our ancient forebears would have easily understood and been fascinated by Olmert’s claims, it is likely that our ancestors would have been surprised and saddened to learn that their heirs (today’s humans) came to be dominated by religious and secular notions of “community” that not only ignore, but also harm greatly, the more-than-human world. Further, our ancient forebears would likely have recognized that the prevalence of human exceptionalism, through its pretense that only humans really count, risked producing for humans a profound, self-inflicted ignorance about both nonhuman animals as neighbors and the more-than-human world as both our home and “greater self.”
 
7.23 Enriching Comparative Religion. The last century of comparative work on humans’ religious traditions has produced dynamic changes that get beyond the one-dimensional evolutionary schemes of the early sociologists and anthropologists. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who knew that in the past there was no widespread practice of describing the “religious” realm as separate and distinct from the secular realm, commented that the concepts “religion” and “the religions” “are not only unnecessary … but also much less serviceable and legitimate than they once seemed.” [Smith 1962, p. 121.] Smith extended the spirit of his own observations to some the best-known figures in widely recognized religious traditions. 
 
[I]t is hazy thinking to speak of Guru Nanak as the founder of Sikhism, or Lao Tse and Chuang Tse of a Taoist religion; the same applies in some degree to [Confucius], to Gautama the Buddha, to Moses, and to Jesus. It is both theoretically and historically of moment that these men were concerned with communities; yet they did not preach abstract or consolidated systems. [Ibid., p. 106.]
 
While Smith recognized that many religious founders did not intend to create a religious system, he very clearly understood Mohammed, the founder of Islam, to have intended nothing less than a systematic challenge that was “[v]ivid and dynamic—and personal” to Christianity and Judaism, Islam’s older siblings in the Abrahamic family of faiths. Smith subtly stated his view of Mohammed’s intention—“What was proclaimed was a challenge, not a religion” and this challenge was clearly not intended to create a division along the lines of a religious realm that is distinct from, and thus to be contrasted with, a secular realm. [Ibid., p. 113.] Islam is, in practice today, concerned with all of the world in which humans find themselves, namely, the living, moment-by-moment heartbeat of daily religious life that many religiously inclined individuals sense can be, in Smith’s words,  “vivid and dynamic—and personal.”
 
This same living quality comes through in many other discussions of what it means to live a religious life; an impressive example appears in a letter written by the mid-twentieth century theologian Bonhoeffer from a Nazi prison regarding the daily challenges he faced to be in touch with his religious commitment. 
 
I’m still discovering . . . that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. . . By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. [Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. Rev. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1967, p.193. This is from Bonhoeffer’s July 21, 1944 letter to Eberhard Bethge.]
 
Similarly, one finds clues about the living features of a religious orientation in the thinking of the philosopher of religion Hick who provided both philosophical grounds and practical reasons as well for recognizing not orthodoxy but, instead, the importance of pluralism in the worldwide human religious community. [Hick 1989.] The claim that it is important to respect pluralism in the worldwide human religious community features an inherent humility regarding one’s own personal approach. Respecting pluralism nurtures both mental habits (humility about assertions that only one’s own point of view matters) and forms of argument (critical thinking about why multiple points of view exist) that can be extended to many questions about our own lives. Such an approach can, although this was not Hick’s own suggestion, ask questions about neighbors who happen to be nonhuman but who obviously have capabilities that fascinate humans.
 
7.24 Comparative Religion and Our Animal Finitudes. With the insights available when one foregrounds the virtues of  humility, openness and flexibility, those who explore religious traditions can engage the diverse phenomena of our species’ obvious fascination with the intense affirmations of life evident not only in the well-known religious traditions sometimes called “world religions,” but also in profoundly developed contemplative and mystical subtraditions of many different kinds, as well as humans’ innumerable, astoundingly diverse smaller scale traditions that feature truly unique beliefs and stories. For those who care to look, there are impressively vast resources evident in the altogether diverse customs and practices of the hundreds of millions of humans who in the early twenty-first century are still designated by terms like “indigenous people,” “small-scale societies,” and “folk traditions.” Collectively, this group today is composed of thousands of different indigenous groups and several hundred million people in almost 100 countries worldwide whose primary identity remains their birth culture and the local places in which that culture was developed. [A 2021 estimate of current numbers was given by Amnesty International in  “Indigenous Peoples” at https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/indigenous-peoples/, accessed 2021.5.26. The “Key Facts” in this document indicate (i) “370 million people in more than 70 countries identify themselves as Indigenous Peoples”; (ii) “5000 different Indigenous People’s in the world”; (iii) 1/3 of the world’s 900 million extremely poor rural people are Indigenous Peoples”; (iv) “70% of them live in Asia”.] 
         Paying attention to the diversity and breadth uncovered by looking so widely also assists one in exploring the religious and spiritual orientations of the almost four billion adherents of the Abrahamic traditions, the views found in those religious traditions that have long dominated the Indian subcontinent, and the ancient Chinese and other East Asian wisdom and folk traditions often grouped under the umbrella terms “Confucian,” “Taoist” or “Shinto.” The humans in each of these traditions, and those in many other less well-known traditions, make astonishingly varied claims, and feature countless styles of narrative, communal organization, and ritual practice. Humans in these groups also display many different patterns of connection to local places and neighbors, as well as a wide-ranging array of attitudes and social practices regarding authority and healing often associated with the terms “shaman,” “healer,” and “lawgiver.” Relatedly, the worldviews that are such an integral feature of religious traditions exemplify the broad sense of “myth” that animated Paul Shepard’s comments already mentioned regarding how “everyone lives in a mythic world.”
 
7.25 A Perspective on Nonhuman Animals from the two older Abrahamic Traditions. There are many materials that suggest that “from the very soul” of each of the three Abrahamic traditions much can be learned about who and what might be included within humans’ moral circle.
         From the Soul of the Jewish Tradition. In Judaism, the oldest of the Abrahamic traditions, the emphasis found in the Torah on Tzedakah, often translated “charity” but etymologically rooted in the Hebrew word for “justice,” is impressively described as “equal in importance to all other commandments combined.” [Talmud/Baba Batra 9a; see also Jerusalem Talmud, Pe'ah 1:1 which provides that "Tzedakah and acts of kindness are the equivalent of all the mitzvot of the Torah"; and Talmud, Sukkah 49b, “Greater is tzedakah than all the sacrifices.”] When a single virtue is so described, the tradition is fairly said to be hospitable to an expansive view of who and what can be brought within the larger community of beneficiaries. The ancient tradition in which contemporary Judaism is rooted had an animal-friendly stratum evident in multiple ways, an example of which is the tradition’s ancient assertion of a cosmic peace that includes all of God’s creatures. As happens in any living religion that is open-hearted in this way, such an intuition serves to blunt the harsh impacts of human exceptionalist tendencies. In 1992, Robert Murray asserted in The Cosmic Covenant that “com-passion” or “proper feeling for fellow-creatures” in the Jewish tradition is
 
fundamental and is seen as a religious duty, but also that many of the laws are to be understood as determined by a concept of order as ‘holiness’, which requires distinctions to be maintained as a proper way of reverencing the Creator in all his creatures. [Murray, Robert, The Cosmic Covenant: Biblical Themes of Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (London: Sheed and Ward, 1992), p. 114 (italics not in original).]
 
Acknowledging that other views exist in this tradition’s most ancient strata, and that some of those views have been taken by many to be the dominant view, Murray adds, 
 
But in the Hebrew Bible, even if wild animals are called ‘evil’ (Lev 26:6, Ezek 34:25), they follow their natures under God, who feeds them (Ps 104:21 etc) and proudly describes them to Job (Job 38:39 ff.). Animals appear not as examples of disorder but rather as examples of right order, to the discredit of humans.... [Ibid., p. 60.] 
 
Another deeply respected scholar in an influential book entitled The Yahwist Landscapeaddressed how the Jewish tradition recognized humans’ “common lot” with other animals. 
 
The common lot of humans and animals is a conspicuous feature of the Yahwist's creation narrative. A clear line distinguishing the essential nature of one from the other is difficult to detect. Humans and animals are alike called nephesh .haaya, “animate creature” (Genesis 2:7, 19). [Hiebert, Theodore 1996. The Yahwist's Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 63.]
 
This scholar then immediately adds how later translations changed the meaning of the original Hebrew passage—the reference to “J” in the following is a reference to the unknown author(s) of the ancient Yahwist tradition, as distinguished from “E” (the author(s) of the almost equally ancient Elohist tradition).
 
As with the breath of life, nephesh .hayya is used by J for both [humans and nonhuman animals], and this term also attributes to neither a soul or spiritual being separate from physical life. This point has been muddled for centuries in English translations by a succession of translators determined to draw a distinction between human beings and animals where none exists in the Hebrew text. In the King James Version (1611), nephesh .hayya was rendered 'living creature' when used of animals (2:19), but 'living soul' when used of the human being (2:7). [Ibid. Hiebert observes as well (Footnote 95) that while other translations retreat from this misrepresentation of the original Hebrew passage, there remains a subtle difference in NRSV which uses "living creature" for nonhuman animals but "living being" when the reference is human life. Hiebert also adds in Footnote 95 that NRSV, in other passages, uses the "anachronistic and incorrect" English word "soul" for this Hebrew phrase.]
 
In day-to-day life, caring for a wide range of “others” has long manifested in the Jewish tradition’s ancient concern for tsaar baale hayyim, which translates as “suffering” (tsaar) of “owners of life” (baale hayyim), that is, nonhuman animals. Explained as biblically derived, this form of caring for others is based on the Jewish position that the creator of the universe gave other animals life and thus a status that demanded of humans both kindness and benevolence. Because the Abrahamic traditions are also rooted in a vision of a Creator who conferred special status on humans relative to other animals, two advocates of animal protection within their own traditions (Andrew Linzey for Christianity, and Dan Cohn-Sherbok for Judaism), forthrightly state at the beginning of a 1997 volume, “There certainly has been a long-standing and persistently negative tradition about animals within both Judaism and Christianity.” [Linzey, Andrew, and Cohn-Sherbok, Daniel 1997. After Noah: Animals and the Liberation of Theology, London: Mowbray, p. 2.] These advocates’ argument proceeds by pointing out that there are important elements to retrieve in each tradition, all of which reveal that the ancient core values of these traditions promote protection of nonhuman animals’ lives. They add a caution about an emerged tendency that can sap the living qualities of a religious tradition, namely, rationalizations that ignore suffering. 
 
Jews and Christians need to confront honestly what may be called the ‘instrumentalist view’ of animals within Western culture—a view which has undoubtedly been fed by specifically religious ideas and practices. [Ibid., pp. 2-3.]
 
From the Soul of the Christian Tradition. Turning to the much larger, ever-so-internally-diverse Christian tradition, consider the root of the now prominent trend in Euro-American societies toward animal protection as described by Cohn-Sherbok. 
 
[I]t is very doubtful whether the largely Christian movement against cruelty in the nineteenth century could have emerged at all without the many long years of specifically Jewish sensitivity to suffering embodied in the rabbinic principle of tsa'ar ba'alei chayim (pain of living creatures) which prohibits the causing of unnecessary suffering to any living being. [Ibid., p. 11]
 
Christianity in many different ways over its long history manifested the tension between, on the one hand, broad notions of caring, charity and humans’ membership in a more-than-human community, and, on the other hand, a profound dismissiveness that Linzey and Cohn-Sherbok refer to as a “long-standing and persistently negative tradition about animals.” The charitable element is evident in various animal-friendly strata, including the sense of a larger community that underlies the cosmic sense of peace and community shared by God’s creatures that sometimes blunts human privilege. These roots go deep, and they continue to give life to those who recognize the multi-species features of a “cosmic covenant” and “Yahwist landscape” in many contemporary Christian lives and communities. But it cannot be denied that the second, dismissive element remains plainly on display in almost countless theological, ethical, and practical emphases that support claims of human exceptionalism. 
 
Our animal abilities to care about others can also be seen to have an important breadth going beyond the human community that was invoked at the very beginning of the Christian tradition when, as the central trio of virtues “faith, hope and charity” was mentioned, the element of caring for others is foregrounded in the comment “the greatest of these is charity.” [1 Corinthians 13:13, KJV translation.] The issue of caring across the species line has always been, of course, complicated by the fact that every human’s local, more-than-human community is full of astonishingly numerous, diverse, and hard-to-discern lives. But the question “who are the others about whom I will care?” is a daily, living issue, and thus much more than merely a theoretical question. The realistic appraisal by Linzey and Cohn-Sherbok regarding on-the-ground realities as a “persistently negative tradition” was made with these authors’ full knowledge that the Christian tradition offers vast pro-animal resources anchored in many sources—Biblical sayings, early Greek sources that still animate much of the modern Orthodox tradition which has maintained decidedly animal-friendly features rooted in their tradition’s earliest centuries, [See, for example, Chryssavgis, John. Bartholomew: Apostle and Visionary. Nashville, Tennessee: W Publishing, 2016, 198-200.] and innumerable individuals like Francis of Assisi and Albert Schweitzer whose lives were replete with surpassingly sensitive daily conduct and many exhortations that such conduct was the very essence of human fulfillment.
 
Such high-profile examples in the Christian traditions are noteworthy in part because exclusions have clearly been more than prominent—they have in fact been promoted. In this respect, the conditioned ethical blindness involved in co-existing with such harsh, extensive harms has normalized—in the sense of making psychologically acceptable—the human exceptionalism that has now prevailed for many centuries. One reason for the prevalence of conditioned ethical blindness in the Christian mainline institutions is that at a crucial early juncture, the western Christian tradition’s mainline thinking about humans in relation to other animals was decisively turned in the direction of human exceptionalism.
 
[T]he Stoic view of animals, with its stress on their irrationality, became embedded in Western, Latin-speaking Christianity above all through Augustine. Western Christianity concentrated on one-half, the anti-animal half, of the much more evenly balanced ancient debate. [Sorabji, Richard 1993. Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate. London: Duckworth, p. 2.]
 
The early Christian tradition’s great internal diversity ensured that other subtraditions would choose to foreground the living feature already mentioned, namely, the more open-hearted views of nonhuman animals found so often in the writings of the Greek-speaking theologians in what would come to be known as the “Orthodox” tradition of Christianity that dominated the eastern Mediterranean remnants of the declining Roman empire. Somewhat similarly, as the stories of Francis of Assisi and many others testify, the western half of that cultural complex also featured open-hearted notions of other animals which today are represented by diverse approaches evident in the work of many modern Christians who insist on the importance of caring beyond the species lines. Such caring is done variously through notions of charity, duty, creation as thoroughly sacred, and even common sense about our own animality as requiring that humans be in community with the more-than-human world. The Christian predicament, as it were, is that both major institutions and prominent thinkers maintain elements of human superiority while others in their local worlds advance views open to other animals’ lives as important in their own right and thus in no way eclipsed by or subordinate to humans’ obvious abilities and powers. [Some scholars’ comments about animal protection issues readily reveal that the scholar’s personal life is rooted in both their Christian faith and encounters with individual nonhuman animals—twentieth and early twenty-first century examples include, for example, C. S. Lewis and Andrew Linzey.]
 
7.26 A Greco-Roman Example. One author born into a Christian community mourned her native religious tradition’s systematic destruction of Greco-Roman cultural achievements as “the largest destruction of art that human history had ever seen.” [Nixey 2018, xxxiv.] She added, “Attacks against the monuments of the ‘mad,’ ‘damnable’ and ‘insane’ pagans were encouraged and led by men at the very heart of the Catholic Church.” [Nixey 2018, xxix.] But the same author concludes her introduction to this terrible history with observations about how the Christian tradition into which she was born has the power of a living religion. 
 
[M]any, many good people are impelled by their Christian faith to do many, many good things. … But it is undeniable that there have been—that there still are—those who use monotheism and its weapons to terrible ends. Christianity is a greater and a stronger religion when it admits this—and challenges it. [Nixey 2018, xxxv.]
 
7.27 A Modern Example. Echoes of this same dismissal can be detected in how a respected, pioneering twentieth century theologian invoked this same dualism as he challenged long-standing racism in Christian churches—describing any Christian minister who backed racism as “inhuman,” the pioneering liberation theologian James Cone added, 
 
He is an animal.... We need men who refuse to be animals and are resolved to pay the price, so that all men can be something more than animals. [Cone, James H. 1969. Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury Press), 80.]
 
The fact that an animality-denying dualism could be used in the service of human freedom reveals how fully even educated, caring humans in the late twentieth century had lost connection to their own animality. Cone’s use of this problematic dualism is easy to downplay for a number of reasons. First, it is advanced by an eminent figure in service of affirming a group of humans who historically have been greatly harmed by their host societies. Second, the dualism remains invisible to many in the modern world because the division between humans and all other animals is not only the dominant narrative of so many modern societies, but also taken by many modern citizens to be the actual order of nature set up by a creator deity.
 
7.28 Indigenous and Invitational. A particularly rich set of insights is available to those who study the second-order complexity “religion and animals” through two related but distinguishable forms of indigenous diversity—the variety so evident when indigenous human communities are compared to each other, and also the variety evident in specific places when one pays attention to all the animals, that is, both nonhuman and human animals indigenous to a particular place. 
         Diversity across Indigenous Human Communities. Many of the features mentioned in connection with one or more of the dozens of indigenous groups described in this book reveal how each small-scale indigenous society represents, but in no way exhausts, humans’ fecund creativity for story, community, and a functioning respect for the diversity of life and the health of the natural world in which the group lives. If one searches a wide range of such cultures across time and place, one quickly recognizes that unique accounts of and responses to the animal invitation have long been the norm. In a sense, the “ferment” described in previous chapters as evident in some circles of modern industrialized societies is more than merely reconnection with elements of the more-than-human world—if one looks to the past, one can see that such ferment is a recovery of an important dimension in individuals’ and whole communities’ creative understanding of their local world.
         Particularly worthy of attention in the present era, however, is that astonishing diversity is still evident across the world’s remaining small-scale societies. The several hundred million humans who still live in small-scale societies have been greatly impacted by the multifaceted phenomena of human-on-human harms, the result of which is that these peoples are often vulnerable to the predation of modern nations and corporations—the 2009 assessment of past genocides of unimaginable proportions by powerful colonializing interests concluded that “[m]ore groups of indigenous peoples have likely been destroyed during our age than in any other comparable time period.” [Goldhagen 2009, p. 54.]
         Diversity of Animals Indigenous to Place. Another astonishing diversity is also readily apparent when one pays attention to all the animals, that is, both nonhuman and human animals, indigenous to a particular place. Obviously this sort of diversity plays a key role in how humans in a particular place might describe both the animal invitation and their encounters with other-than-human neighbors. Contrast what people in a local culture might think if they happen to live near one or more of the Earth’s most astonishing nonhumans—for example, one of the three species of elephants, or any of the four nonhuman great ape species, or one or more of the almost 100 cetacean species. It is an historical accident that Europeans developed their cultures, religions, ethics and intellectual traditions  
 
in environments separated from many large-brained, long-lived, socially complex animals. For example, other great apes were absent from the cradles of now-dominant ethical notions, while contacts with nonterrestrial whales and dolphins were minimal, in the sense that they live in a radically different environment which is inaccessible to humans. The elephants that were known were captives, respected for their intelligence but ultimately used only instrumentally. [Waldau 2002, 44.]
 
These circumstances provide grounds for being concerned that the traditional ethical notions and vocabulary developed by well-known ancient thinkers were framed on the basis of impoverished, often misinformed claims about what sorts of animals existed outside the human species.
         From the vantage point of a comparativist informed about both of these place-based diversities, there are good reasons to explore how and why small-scale, indigenous peoples prize their local world as a place whose features and “citizens” the indigenes not only come to know well, but also often consider as a gift because the local geographical niche of a small-scale society is well understood as no less than the intersection of all the nested communities in which each indigenous people senses membership.
 
7.29 Seeing Self-Inflicted Ignorance—Sensitive Buddhists, Insensitive Views. Consider an astonishing mistake about certain animals that was committed by religiously committed humans. The historical Buddha “at the moment of his enlightenment” is reported in an early Buddhist scripture to have spontaneously cried out, “Wonder of wonders! Intrinsically, all living beings are Buddhas, endowed with wisdom and virtue, but because men’s minds have become inverted through delusive thinking they fail to perceive this.” [Kapleau, Philip 1980. Zen: Dawn in the West. Garden City N.Y.: Anchor Books, p. 31. The scripture cited by Kapleau is the “Kegon (Avatamsaka) sutra.”] As summarized in the latter part of the twentieth century by a Buddhist master, “Realization of Buddha-nature is realization of the kinship of all forms of life.” [Ibid, p. 136.]
 
The Buddhists had a startlingly good track record when it came to seeing elephants as important individuals with their own realities. [Details can be found in Waldau 2001, Chapters 6 and 7.] Yet early Buddhists assumed something very peculiar about elephants’ most basic social structure. Every time a story is told about an elephant group, the elephant group is led by a male. This is an error because the leaders of elephant groups are always female. That the early Buddhists always portrayed the elephant groups as being led by a male is especially strange, though. Indian female elephants are easy to differentiate from Indian males because 90% of Indian male elephants have tusks, and 90% of Indian female elephants do not. For those who watch, it is relatively easy to see that the leaders of groups of Indian elephant are tuskless, which means to a high degree of probability they are females. Identifying males and females is not so easy with African elephants because a much higher percentage of African female elephants have tusks. Despite the fact, then, that the early Buddhists noticed Indian elephants and took them seriously, they missed the obvious phenomenon of matriarchy, which is the central feature of elephants’ lives, learning and community. The likely cause of this error was that Buddhist thinking appropriated, either explicitly or implicitly, the Indian subcontinent’s prevailing paradigm of male superiority. [An account of patriarchy in the Buddhist tradition can be found in Gross 1993.]
 
Another possible explanation of this failure is that, in the words of Richard Gombrich, “Buddhism as such is not about this world. Such spheres of human activity as the arts and sciences are not part of its concerns.” [Gombrich, Richard F., “The Buddhist Way”, in Bechert, Heinz, and Richard Gombrich, eds, 1991. The World of Buddhism: Buddhist Monks and Nuns in Society and Culture (London: Thames and Hudson), 9-14, at 10.] The French scholar Lamotte confirms this: “The Word of the Buddha has only one flavour (rasa): that of deliverance.… It is not, properly speaking, an encyclopedia of religious knowledge but a way of deliverance discovered and proposed by the Buddha.” [Lamotte, Etienne, “The Buddhia, His Teachings and His Sangha”, in Bechert and Gombrich 1991, 41-58, at page 46.]
 
7.30 Pliny’s Views of Other Animals.  It is intriguing to notice that while asserting that only humans can be religious is “business as usual” in the education establishment, doing so reveals ignorance of our deeper human past. The assumption that religion is solely a human affair is in tension with now-forgotten claims at the heart of many other religious traditions as well, an example of which is evident in the Buddhist scriptures’ description of many other animals recognizing the historical Buddha as an enlightened being. [See, for example, Waldau 2001, Chapter 6.] Chapter 2 mentioned that Pliny the Elder passed along long-standing views that elephants understand the language of humans and “reverence the stars.” He observed (in Book VIII’s opening chapter), “They are thought also to have an understanding of religion in others….” In making such claims, Pliny was by no means alone—others in his own cultural sphere made similar claims. [A list of other ancients who made similar claims appears in the opening Footnote of Book VIII of Pliny’s Natural History in Thirty-Seven Books.] There are, in fact, many other materials found in key religious texts about a wide range of nonhuman animals as themselves religious that are similar in tenor to Pliny the Elder’s claims about elephants. [See, for example, the diverse instances listed in Patton, Kimberley C. 2000. “‘He Who Sits in the Heavens Laughs’: Recovering Animal Theology in the Abrahamic Traditions”, The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 93, No. 4 (Oct., 2000), pp. 401-434.]
         Some still-remembered forebears in humans’ cultural history made claims about certain nonhuman animals’ abilities in the direction of religious awareness—for example, there are well-known biblical passages about the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the perceptive ass who saw angels on the road that the human Balaam failed to see [Numbers 22:21-33]—that on their face raise the issue of other animals’ awareness of religiously-tinged events. In a similar vein, what follows is a passage from what some have suggested is the second most printed book in the Christian tradition—“And if your heart is straight with Godt, then every creature will be to you a mirror of life and a book of holy doctrine. No creature is so little or so mean as not to show forth and represent the goodness of God.” [Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Bk2,Ch4; A Modern Version based on the English translation made by Richard Whitford around the year 1530, edited by Harold C. Gardiner (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1955). At page 10 is the claim that The Imitation of Christ is “the widest-read and best-loved religious book in the world, with the exception only of the Bible.”]
 
7.31 The term is used in a variety of ways, but it particularly appears in tales told in the Mahayana subtradition of Buddhism as a reference to those humans and other living beings who have vowed to hold off on completing the last step to enlightenment in order to remain available to help all other beings in their effort to attain enlightenment. See, for example, Silk, Jonathan A. "bodhisattva", Encyclopedia Britannica, 26 Sep. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/topic/bodhisattva. Accessed 31 October 2022.
 
7.32 References to religious organizations that have participated in efforts to protect of nonhuman animals can be found at (1) https://animal-interfaith-alliance.com/members/, and (2)
https://www.humaneworld.org/en/blog/hsus-faith-summit-religious-leaders-and (accessed 2026.2.12). In addition, each year there are an increasing number of religion-based websites addressing animal protection issues.

Additional Materials for
Chapter Eight “Law and Other Animals”

8.1 Religious Law. Some features of paradigmatic forms of religious law will be familiar to many—there is an encompassing quality because the legal system prescribes altogether personal details of daily life illustrated well by the following example from the Hebrew text “Shulchan Arukh” (which literally means “Set Table”) compiled in the sixteenth century by Rabbi Joseph Karo and today often known by the English title “Code of Jewish Law” because it is the most widely consulted of the various legal codes in Judaism. The opening four chapters of this text relate to (Chapter I) “Conduct Upon Rising in the Morning,” (Chapter II) “Washing of Hands in the Morning,” (Chapter III) “Dressing and Manner of Walking,” and (Chapter IV) “Decency in the Lavatory.” [Ganzfried, Rabbi Solomon 1927. Code of Jewish Law (Kitzur Schulchan Aruch): A Compilation of Jewish Laws and Customs. Translated by Hyman E. Goldin. New York: Hebrew Publishing, at pp. 1-8.]
         Such rules about ordinary life functions are common in religious law because it is taken for granted that religion applies fully to all aspects of human life (this helps explain why in Chapter 7 a prominent European Muslim voice addressed contemporary ritual slaughter as a “betrayal” of “Islam’s message”). Those raised with detailed awareness of a deeply religious form of law will treat these tradition-bound law codes as divinely inspired, spiritually nourishing and, as one commentator says below, “the absolute cure for all ills.”
 
8.2 How law changes over time. Systems that adequately meet the needs of individuals in a society will, from time to time, adjust to the “ebbs and flows or cycles—fortune’s wheel—in human affairs.” Adjustments to the law in a local place can, of course, be discerned as years pass in those small-scale societies that endured for long periods of time, but such changes are characteristically growth that is subtle and organic. A corollary to these observations is that any legal system that fails to meet a human group’s all-important communal needs will, quite naturally, be subjected to calls for change. Some systems will, because their stewards are responsive and want the system to continue living, grow in ways that allow changes that meet the fundamental needs of their creator animals. But in large, internally complex societies in particular, if an existing legal system fails to meet these baseline needs for a substantial period of time, the legal system will disappoint at least some members and may even fail eventually due to an epochal revolution that results in the legal system being replaced.
 
8.3 An early example of law that governed diverse peoples—an ancient society that faced formidable diversity challenges was the Achaemenid Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in the middle of the sixth century BCE (sometimes referred to as the First Persian Empire) which lasted until 330 BCE—this political entity ruled over such diverse peoples and lands that it was described as a state on which the sun did not set. [Herodotus in Book VII, Paragraph 8, of his Histories cites a speech given by Xerxes before invading Greece that sounded this theme.] Several centuries later Rome came to dominate an even more impressive group of diverse human communities for more than a millennium. 
 
8.4 Estimates of the number of slaves in first century B.C.E. Rome vary—for example, between 1 and 1.5 million in Scheidel, Walter. “Human Mobility in Roman Italy, II: The Slave Population.” The Journal of Roman Studies, vol. 95, [Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, Cambridge University Press], 2005, pp. 64–79, at p. 70, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20066817. Much higher figures (and in some instances 75% of the total population) are set out in  Jason Paul Wickham’s “The Enslavement of War Captives by the Romans to 146 BC” at p. 198, https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/17893/1/WickhamJ_May2014_17893.pdf (accessed 2021.11.19).
 
8.5 Paul of Tarsus. Two decades after the death of Jesus of Nazareth in 30 CE, Paul of Tarsus began writing letters to various communities in the eastern Mediterranean (the best guess of scholars is that the first of these letters was sent to either the Thessalonian or Galatian community between the years 50 and 53 CE). [Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Letters of Paul to the Thessalonians". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Aug. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/letters-of-Paul-to-the-Thessalonians. Accessed 16 April 2023.] Paul’s vision of Jesus as “the Christ” (from the Latin word Christus based on the Greek adjective Khristos meaning “anointed” and thus a fulfillment of the Hebrew claim carried in the word which is the root of the English term “Messiah”) offered a vision of Jesus’ message that each human individual is capable of a one-on-one relationship with a monotheistic creator God.
 
8.6 Siedentop’s Observations. The role of the papal institutions in proposing a new legal system involved some self-interest, for the papacy desired political and financial independence from kings and emperors—“The papal revolution turned the church into a self-governing corporation, a quasi-state.” [Ibid., p. 252.] Such independence was important in church-related matters such as the appointment of new bishops in territories governed by emperors or kings, or the naming of abbots who oversaw monasteries that had become sources of wealth and income. Kings and emperors had prior to the eleventh century gained power to appoint such office holders, and the papacy sought to regain control over both doctrinal and financial matters.
         Siedentop also observes, “Altogether, the appeal of a legal system that was more coherent, predictable and centralized favoured the rapid growth of litigation.” [Ibid.] While the papacy also benefitted financially from gifts that came with the increasing importance of this new legal system, [Ibid.] of great political and institutional significance was that under the newly created legal system “[t]he papacy was becoming not merely the court of final appeal, but even a court of first instance for some types of litigation.” [Ibid., p. 228.]
 
8.7 One risk of claims about historical origins. The historical “religious in origin” claim can create a misleading form of thinking (named variously the genetic fallacy or the fallacy of origins) if someone implies that knowing the source of a phenomenon supplies all that is needed for a robust understanding of that phenomenon. Modern legal systems as they now function in contemporary societies are often only distantly related to any one religion or family of religions.
 
8.8 Accretion issues raise another set of relevant questions about origins—humans’ modern legal systems, while less diverse and wide-ranging than humans’ religious pursuits, feature noteworthy complexity of their own. The law’s long history of accretion is evident in the following passage mentioning the eighteenth century jurist often acclaimed as the preeminent exponent of English common law.
 
According to Blackstone, the following kinds of laws prevailed in England: natural law, divine law, the law of nations, the English common law, local customary law, Roman law, ecclesiastical law, the law merchant, statutory law, and equity. Implicit in this catalogue was a view of history not limited to the nation or to the recent past, but a view of overlapping histories — the history of Christianity and Judaism, the history of Greece, the history of Rome, the history of the church, local history, national history, international history, and more. [Berman 1983, p. vii.]
 
The many religion-related features in Blackstone’s list 
attest to the importance of various claims made originally in religious domains, such that these diverse inputs and “overlapping histories” ensure that at least some religiously connected ideas and values continue to have a presence in the law.
 
8.9 Berman’s use of “meta-law” and “legal science.”  The term “meta-law” is not widely used in modern legal scholarship—it does not, for example, appear in any of the standard legal dictionaries. Berman’s meaning can be gleaned from the grammar of his sentence—“meta-law” functions as an appositive, that is, a noun positioned after another noun in order to help explain the first noun, which is the more common term “legal science” used by Berman to signal that he understands the law to “contain within itself” features whose presence allows the law to “be both analyzed and evaluated.” “Legal science” has been used quite diversely by different people to signal recognition that the law can be systematically structured—thus, in Berman’s Chapter 3, “The Origin of Western Legal Science in the European Universities,” Berman uses ”meta-law” to ask the listener to look below the surface of a legal system. Meta-law in this context does work like that done by similarly constructed English terms such as “meta-message” and “meta-narrative,” or the critical thinking approach known as “meta-cognition” which is sometimes defined as “knowing about knowing.” [This definition appears as the subtitle of Metcalfe, J., & Shimamura, A. P. 1994. Metacognition: Knowing about Knowing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.]
Berman’s second reference is at p. 36 as he discusses the fourth of what he considered the ten basic characteristics of the western legal tradition (“4. Such legal learning still constitutes a meta-law by which the legal institutions and rules are evaluated and explained.”). While there is a third use at p. 38, and a fourth at p. 121, meta-law as used by Berman is clearly a secondary image to the notion of “legal science”, which perhaps explains why “meta-law” is not listed in the volume’s Index—see page 650.
 
8.10 Berman on legal science. Berman also recognizes that “legal science” has only some features of the physical sciences—see pp. 120-121, where he comments, “The actors may ascribe to their own observations of what they themselves are doing the qualities of a systematic, objective, verifiable body of knowledge. That, in fact, is what happened law in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries: the legal rules, concepts, decisions, and procedures remained data, and in that sense just the opposite of a science, but the consciousness of the participants in legal activities came to include a systematic study of them, and the accumulation of a body of knowledge about them, which had some of the qualities of a science.”
 
8.11 Ownership of slaves in the early United States. The founders of this new nation as they attended the Philadelphia convention in 1776 were proposing a political and legal system that would project a particular pattern onto the future that advantaged Jefferson, Washington and the other attendees—the law would, however, continue to hold in place the legal, moral and political subordination on racial grounds of not only existing slaves, but their descendants as well. Thereby Jefferson’s six future children birthed by Sally Hemings, as well as Hemings herself, would remain without any of the benefits of the Declaration of Independence or the subsequent document written in 1787 and ratified in 1788 as the United States Constitution.
 
8.12 More details and context. The Dred Scott court was composed of “seven judges [who] had been appointed by pro-slavery Presidents—five, in fact, came from slave-holding families.” [ Smithsonian, National Museum of African American History & Culture.
March 1, 2015. "The Human Factor of History: Dred Scott and Roger B. Taney", at https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/human-factor-history-dred-scott-and-roger-b-taney, accessed 2022.7.11.] The language of the court’s decision is direct and explicit, revealing the full force and effect of the law as a mechanism for holding very detailed and deadening oppressions in place:
 
The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement [individuals of African ancestry] compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them. [Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856), at 404-405.]
                
8.13 Plessy v. Ferguson details. The majority opinion, which is at Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 559, explains in its second paragraph that Homer Plessy was “of mixed descent, in the proportion of seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood” and “that the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him….” The background social values that mandated the subordination of those with any trace of “colored blood” are described in Louis Menand’s “In the Eye of the Law: How white supremacy enlisted the American legal system,” The New Yorker, February 4, 2019, pp.18-22.
 
8.14 Disparities in Funding. The disadvantages masked by this claim are evident in the funding disparities in those states that purported to offer “separate but equal” education in the decades following 1896. 
 
The disparities between white and black schooling were profound throughout the South. Whites received ten times as much per-pupil spending in South Carolina, five times as much in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, and twice as much in North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Texas, and Oklahoma. [Faigman, David 2004. Laboratory of Justice: The Supreme Court's 200-Year Struggle to Integrate Science and the Law. New York: Times Books/Henry Holt. p. 170.]
 
8.15 Example of Resistance. One American author relates her Virginia town’s harsh reaction to the decision—rather than integrate existing education, her town eliminated all public schools. In a chapter entitled “The Segregation Academy” describing how white residents founded a whites-only private school to avoid the integration mandate of the 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Green notes how the founders of the new private school resorted to theft in their search for supplies.
 
School officials also raided public school resources, which had essentially been abandoned. They helped themselves to whatever they needed from the locked public schools— books, desks, even goalposts for a new football field … they were building for the school. [Green, Kristen 2015. Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle. New York, HarperCollins. p. 96.]
 
8.16 Continuing Struggles in the Twentieth Century. Secular law alone still struggles with eliminating racism in educational institutions, for race-based problems in the United States have not only continued in the first decades of the 21st century—by some key measures, following the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, segregation worsened. As pointed out by Jonathan Kozol, during the 1990's, the proportion of black students in majority white schools were reported to have decreased to a level lower than any year since 1968. [Kozol, Jonathan 2005. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. 1st ed. New York: Crown Publishers, at p. 19.]
 
8.17 In her 2010 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander observes,
 
What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race explicitly as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. … As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in American: we have merely redesigned it. [Alexander, Michelle 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness New York: The New Press, p. 2.]
 
The problem of continued racism in the United States and other modern nation states, of course, goes beyond incarceration, as evidenced by the emergence of the movement known as “Black Lives Matter” since 2013 and the many allegations of continuing efforts to use the legal system in the United States to create racially motivated voter suppression. [See, for example, Goldstone, Lawrence 2020. On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights. Berkeley, California: Counterpoint.]
 
8.18 An Even Deeper Search for the Foundations of Secular Law. The meta-law concept can help one identify and assess the values that animate not only modern secular law systems, but also those that animate religious law and indigenous law in small-scale societies. Four examples mentioned in earlier chapters offer different patterns of inclusion and exclusion by which a legal system can develop living or deadening features for members of the governed human community. The postulate of inequality that Siedentop identified as dominating both the Greek and Roman cultural universe was rooted in inherited views. These long-standing cultures had, in effect, assumed the propriety of the existing social hierarchy favoring extraordinary privileges for some citizens that were built on profound subordination and even slavery for others. Thereby, these societies were governed by, and bequeathed to future generations, a meta-law that fell far short of valuing all humans.
Thrasymachus’ even narrower notion of justice, where the meta-law shaping the law is merely a Machiavellian-like “interest of the stronger,” also reveals that many societies have been, and some still are, dominated by a tyrant’s interests rather than a broader notion of justice distributed throughout a community (however one might choose to define “community”). Thereby, the legal system in question deadened many human individuals’ opportunities to choose a meaningful form of life in a healthy human community.
         The insistence on patriarchy is another example of how an inherited axiom of inclusion and exclusion deadens the lives of some governed citizens. The primary victims are women, but in a very real way all members of a human society suffer when women are subordinated in ways that preclude their full participation in not only governance of a society but also the cultural, religious and scientific spheres that can so enrich human life.
         Finally, religion-based exclusions of dissenters or theological nonconformists of the kind mentioned in Chapter 7, as well as ethnicity-based exclusions of the kind so common in human history, impoverish far more than the group formally excluded. Also impacted are a wide range of individuals who want to be free to choose their own form of life simply because they recognize that the emergence and coexistence of diverse religious views and cultural backgrounds is a valued norm that can be protected by a society and its legal system. When the opposite occurs because the law is the means by which domination of religious dissenters or those not members of the favored ethnic or cultural group is enforced, the guiding meta-law is obviously both narrow-minded and far-hearted in the sense described in earlier chapters.
         These observations suggest yet another troubling conclusion about the use of masking language like Jefferson’s claim that it was a “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.” Such uses of language model for others that it is possible to use “law and order” arguments to cement subordination of disfavored living beings. The result is that succeeding generations inherit an established legal system that can entrench one group’s political advantage even as it continues to deaden the lives of those whom the legal system intentionally subordinates.
 
8.19 The limits of what secular law can do. It is not hard to recognize major limits to what secular law can accomplish, not least because on-the-ground complexities and discrimination in diverse modern societies are by no means solely religious in nature. Racial tensions, ethnic rivalries, historical grudges and long-standing inequalities have created not only complex problems, but also lingering resentment and misunderstanding. Thereby, using individual rights championed by modern secular law to foreground freedom of religion solves only some of the many questions that arise as modern, altogether diverse human groups explore the question “how can we live together?” Thus, when a specific group now incorporated into a diverse, modern nation state celebrates a past in which this specific group enjoyed a long tradition of freedom from any outside constraints, a legal system may in some way be perceived, even when it is imposed uniformly across a complex society with an eye to fairness, to demean or otherwise disadvantage some group(s) who interpret their treatment within the governed society to be unfair in some way.
 
8.20 Religious Law. When ancient legal issues are raised regarding the Indian subcontinent, Hindu social codes and rules known as the Dharmasastras are invariably mentioned—this term is a composite of sastra (treatise) and dharma, one of the richest concepts in the tradition which is sometimes translated as “the law.” A summary of what dharma includes, however, makes it clear how much broader this term is than the modern notion of “the law”: 
 
accepted norms of behavior, procedures within a ritual, moral actions, righteousness and ethical attitudes, civil and criminal law, legal procedures and penance or punishment, and guidelines for proper and productive living. [Olivelle, Patrick. 1999. Dharmasūtras: The Law Codes of Āpastamba, Gautama, Baudhāyana, and Vāsiṣṭha. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. xxxviii–xxxix.]
 
The Dharmasastras are numerous and diverse—a commonly cited version of these ancient texts under the title History of Dharmasastra: Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law in India is well over 6000 pages. [History of the Dharmasastra: Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law in India (Poona, India: Bhandarkar Institute Press) is a five-volume work by the indologist Pandurang Vaman Kane. The first volume of the work was published in 1930 and the last volume in 1962.] The law in contemporary India, however, while still drawing upon values and principles in these and other ancient sources, has a very different form dominated by a structure, vocabulary and practices heavily reliant on colonial sources imposed by foreigners. It was “not until the arrival of the colonial powers” in the late eighteenth century that “the concept of law was used on the [Indian] subcontinent, by Europeans and through the medium of the European languages.” [Rocher, Ludo 1978. “Hindu Conceptions of Law.” 29 Hastings Law Journal 1283-1305 (July 1978), p. 1283.] These foreign influences had, long before they arrived in India, become proficient at using the law as a means by which human-on-human domination was held in place, but Indian cultural and religious realities were such that ancient social codes had on their own long ago cemented in place the subcontinent’s social inequalities. The arrival of colonial law, then, apart from advantaging the conquerors, reshaped lawmaking and courts, to be sure, but did little at first to flatten the existing, on-the-ground social hierarchy that both traditional Indian religion and law had established.
 
Ancient forms of Jewish law also feature depths and breadth relevant to living possibilities. Halakha, a Hebrew word often translated as “Jewish law,” is rife with meanings that reflect both the word’s etymological roots and features of communal, daily life as evidenced by alternative translations of Halakha as “the way to behave” or “the way of walking.” [See, for example, "Halacha: The Laws of Jewish Life" at www.myjewishlearning.com/article/halakhah-the-laws-of-jewish-life/, accessed 22.3.13.] Such overtones and nuances in ancient law-like materials are common because the religious realm suffused all aspects of life. Thus, Halakha as a collection is full of practical observations regarding how one in daily life can follow the 613 mitzvot (“commandments”) in the written teachings known as Torah (technically, this term often designates only the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, but the term is also used to designate the entire corpus of ancient Jewish law). The daily, living features of these commandments are evident in the fact that this extensive group of guidelines includes both positive commandments to perform certain routine daily acts and negative commandments to abstain from others.
 
Islamic law (Shariah, also spelled Sharia) is today still a well-known form of religious law because Islam is a powerful, formative force in dozens of African countries, dozens of Asian countries, as well as a factor in at least four European countries (the United Kingdom, Greece, Germany and Bosnia-Herzegovina). Kadri (2013, 188) observed, “There are fifty states in which Muslims are demographically dominant and many others where they make up significant minorities, and they acknowledge the shari’a in correspondingly varied ways.” Helpful maps and updated lists of different countries using at least some elements of Sharia are available at these two sources: (1) World Population Review, "Sharia Law Countries 2022." https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/sharia-law-countries, accessed 2022.11.8; and (2) “Application of Sharia by country”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_of_Sharia_by_country, accessed 2022.11.8.] Like its Abrahamic cousin Judaism, but in significant ways unlike its Christian cousin born in a place and time dominated by the Roman Empire’s powerful conception of the law, the Islamic tradition featured a worldview from its very beginning in which religious life was encompassing, that is, not in any way meaningfully separated from the background daily and cultural life. Although Shariah has for some the reputation of being relentlessly harsh, this is, according to one commentator, a caricature based on the fact that some governments in the last half-century (specifically mentioned are Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and Sudan)have attempted to instill an Islamic identity in the people they govern by imposing strict, literalist interpretations of Shariah that contrast greatly with a millennium-long tradition of moderation and flexibility—the commentator concludes, “Islamic jurisprudence has not spent the past 1,400 years opposed to change; it has been defined by it.” [Kadri, Sadakat 2012. Heaven on Earth: A Journey through Shari'a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World. New York: Farrar, Stauas and Giroux. p. 286.]
 
Another commentator expands on why he asserts that the history of Islamic law has not been one dominated by claims that this legal system is immutable and thus inflexible.  
 
…Shariah itself integrates adaptability and change in its principles and methodologies. Ijtihad (lit. striving - independent reasoning and interpretation) is the main vehicle of adaptation and change of the Shariah rules, pertaining especially to civil transactions, mu’amalat, in tandem with the changing conditions of society. … In sum, there is a core part of the Shariah in the area of specific rules and those pertaining to ritual performances that may be seen as immutable, but the larger part of … Shariah, in the sphere especially of civil transactions, and the parts that are open to interpretation and development are, on the whole, capable of adaptation and change. … What is immutable is the wording of the Qur'an, as God’s words, but since they too are to be understood by the human intellect and in rational ways, interpretation and analysis become inevitable. [Kamali, Mohammad Hashim 2017. Sharia Law: Questions and Answers. London: OneWorld Publications, pp. 9 and 11.]
 
8.21 The Rule of Law Impacting Other Animals. The importance of the law protecting a wide range of both human-to-human and human-to-other-than-human connections prompts one to contrast secular law’s human-centered goals with the far broader connections noticed and respected in not only many past human cultures, but also by significant numbers of people in the contemporary world. Such concern for other animals is, importantly, honored in various ways by religiously saturated legal systems such as the Dharmasastras, Jewish Law and Islamic Law, as well as the indigenous legal systems already described, thereby affirming our capacious human abilities to live as responsible members and plain citizens of the Earth’s mixed communities of life. There is, then, a significant sense of living that applies to these other, non-secular forms of law because they go beyond what the secular law of modern complex communities today aspires to accomplish for only the human community. 
         What is currently named “the rule of law” in secular legal systems, however, has in significant ways failed to blunt harms in both the human realm and the larger, more-than-human world. The malleability of secular law has allowed various powerful individuals or groups to shape legal protections in ways that mask privileges for one human group even as they disadvantage others.
         Another dimension of “the rule of law” was a factor early in the career of Howard Zinn, one of the most influential twentieth century historians. Describing his own quandary when his employment was terminated because he dared to advocate that a university administration should take seriously a list of student grievances that involved an obvious curtailment of the students’ right to express political ideas, this historian spoke plainly of his personal impression of law’s relation to justice. 
 
I wanted to fight the dismissal and was sure I was on good legal ground. I was the chair of the department, a full professor with tenure…. But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation. I could sue, but the suit would take several years and money I didn’t have.… “The rule of law” in such cases usually means that whoever can afford to pay lawyers and can afford to wait is the winner, and “justice” does not matter much. [Zinn, Howard 2002. You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train : A Personal History of Our Times. Boston: Beacon Press, p. 43.]
 
The key phrase “the rule of law” can merely mean what Zinn here describes—a form of the law anchored not in justice and fairness as its primary goals, but rather in an interpretation or series of practices that curtail, for some subset of the citizens nominally protected, the availability of effective protection. The upshot is that some members of the governed society are denied important protections that fall squarely within the plain meaning of legal language long understood to grant what modern politics refers to with phrases such as “basic rights” and “equal protection.” Such complex, often dishonest uses of “the rule of law” are important historically, for again and again there have been unambiguous instances in which those who asserted the “rule of law” in fact were praising policies and actions that deadened parts of the human community.

• The Why of Rebellion—A Case Study. The focus here turns to the earliest period of a modern nation state often cited as foregrounding “the rule of law” in its most positive sense. Soon after its inception, the United States worked to put in place a new legal system for governing that entailed subordination of a large majority of the humans over which it presided—women, disfavored races and ethnic groups, infants born of an individual belonging to a disfavored race or ethnic group, and non-property-owning males of even the favored race.

 
Historically, then, the legal system was intentionally designed to ensure that a large majority of those governed by the new system would receive far fewer protections than did the wealthiest, property-owning males of the favored race. This imbalance is why the historian Zinn in 1980 argued that the American elites had substituted their own hegemony for that of the British. Noting that “by 1760, there had been eighteen uprisings aimed at overthrowing colonial governments” and “also six black rebellions from South Carolina to New York, and forty riots of various origins,” Zinn concluded, “the Founding Fathers … created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.” [Zinn 2003, 59.]
 
Some challenges to these and other exclusions within the United States’ political and legal systems have succeeded in the centuries since that nation’s founding. After a civil war over the right of the southern states to secede in the middle of nineteenth century, those previously enslaved were accorded key protections through amendments to the national government’s Constitution that brought the vast majority of males of a certain age the right to vote as well as citizenship. In addition, key due process protections were nominally provided to all former slaves. At the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, women were also enfranchised after more than 60 years of campaigning. 
 
These successes notwithstanding, there continued to be many ways in which the different state-based governments used their parallel legal systems to curtail the protections nominally offered through the federal legal system (these developments are broadly known as the Jim Crow era that prevailed widely into the mid-twentieth century). Just as segregation persisted even after it was declared illegal in 1954 by a unanimous United States Supreme Court, so too attempts to suppress the voting rights of formerly disenfranchised American citizens continue to be a widespread political reality. [There are many books addressing this topic—an accessible, wide-ranging account by a law professor regarding this recurring phenomenon in the United States is Wehle, Kim 2020. What you Need to Know about Voting—and Why. New York: Harper Collins.] In addition, race- and sex-based job discrimination, access to housing, and disproportionate punishment in the criminal justice system beset one disfavored group after another, [See, for example, Alexander 2010, and Hedges, C. & Sacco, J., 2012. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, New York: Nation Books.] with the result being that many allegedly full citizens have had far fewer legal protections and much less political power than members of the preferred race(s) and ethnic groups. 
 
There are ironies when a system which on its face is committed to notions such as “all men are created equal” is beset by denials of equal rights, procedural regularities and justice-based outcomes. A particularly significant result of such marginalization and impoverishment has been the U.S. legal system’s repeated refusal in practice and theory to respect indigenous peoples’ laws, religions, and long-standing association with particular places. [Hedges and Sacco 2012, xiv, has information on how the descendants of the indigenous inhabitants of North America are impoverished and politically disadvantaged relative to the rest of the world.] The United States government fostered these harms through a recurring disingenuousness, for as described by Zinn, “[t]he United States government had signed more than 400 treaties with American Indians and violated every single one.” [Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 1999 ed.,.526.  Zinn’s chapter “Tyranny is Tyranny” reflects that the elite of the American colonial society in the 1760s and 1770s used law and order-like arguments to maintain their own privilege, even though they mixed in with their political goals some concerns for the poor – but Zinn’s thesis is that the elites were substituting their own hegemony/tyranny for that of the British.] It is also noteworthy that the refusal of the indigenes to cooperate in their own removal from their traditional, inherited, local places was the standard human reaction to injustice by a free people—in fact, that refusal parallels much that the Euro-Americans in both North and South America asserted in their own rebellions from European monarchs.
 
8.23 Re Indigenous Law and Lore. A straightforward statement of this claim is made by Richard Trudgen, the long-time director of Aboriginal Resource & Development Services Inc who resigned in 2010, in “Aboriginal culture, is it ‘Law’ or “Lore”?” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrzhYEffDvE, accessed 2021.6.7. Supporting observations about how the social norms of the Yolngu peoples of Australia were derided (“no law,” “no education,” “no political systems”) by those who colonized Australia are made in Trudgen, Richard. 2000. Djambatj Mala: Why Warriors Lie Down & Die: towards an understanding of why the Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land face the greatest crisis in health and education since European contact. Darwin, Australia: Aboriginal Resource and Development Services.
 
8.24 An Overview of Critical Thinking and the Law. The peculiarities found in modern evidence codes are not random inadequacies—some are relics of tradition, as is the overabundance of what seems to non-lawyers an antiquated vocabulary. Unfamiliar words such as tort and mortgage reveal, as do the dominance of Latin phrases such as res ipsa loquitur and stare decisis, how the law projects an imagined future onto a human community through basic features anchored in now-vanished traditions and obscure terms from an ancient language.
         Collectively, such peculiarities reveal that the approach to discernment of the truth in a legal setting can be, relative to more robust inquiries into the complex issue of “what is truth?”, inadequate as a general method to be applied throughout human lives. Here, then, is one reason to recognize that the unique qualities of evidence-based trial results in modern legal systems can be meaningfully distinguished from other evidence-based inquiries, such as those pursued in common sense, quantification-based inquiries in various science fields, or the research-based conclusions reached in the humanities where commentators over centuries have applied a much wider range of critical thinking skills, such as the non-numerical elements in what is often referred to as “qualitative research” seeking a discerning understanding of the truth. [Qualitative research, which is used widely in the fields of political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, education and social work, is an umbrella term—see, for example, Creswell, J. (2015). Educational Research: Planning, Conducting, and Evaluating Quantitative and Qualitative Research. New York: Pearson.] 
         The peculiarities of a justice-oriented institution being burdened by a less-than-robust search for the truth are called out graphically by any number of authors. Consider this diatribe by the anthropologist Stanley Diamond.
 
... We live in a law-ridden society; law has cannibalized the institutions which it presumably reinforces or with which it interacts.... [W]e are encouraged to assume that legal behavior is the measure of moral behavior.... Efforts to legislate conscience by an external political power are the antithesis of custom: customary behavior comprises precisely those aspects of social behavior which are traditional, moral and religious—in short, conventional and nonlegal. Put another way, custom is social morality. The relation between custom and law is basically one of contradiction, not continuity. [Diamond, Stanley, in “The Rule of Law versus the Order of Custom,” in In Search of the Primitive; A Critique of Civilization, ed. by Stanley Diamond. Originally published by Transaction Publishers, 1974; the quote is from the Routledge 2018 edition, at p. 191 (the essay is at pp. 189-208).]
 
Diamond’s conclusion is revealing as it contrasts the law in the contemporary world’s complex, internally diverse, economically driven industrial world with the law in small-scale societies (signaled by Diamond’s use in the following of the traditional description “primitive” so common in nineteenth century descriptions of pre-modern cultures).
 
Thus, law is symptomatic of the emergence of the state. ... Custom—spontaneous, traditional, personal, commonly known, corporate, relatively unchanging—is the modality of primitive society; law is the instrument of civilization, of political society sanctioned by organized force, presumably above society at large and buttressing a new set of social interests. Law and custom both involve the regulation of behavior but their characters are entirely distinct.... [Ibid. pp. 192-3.]
 
Even more caustic comments are not hard to find.
 
Law reflects, but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society.... The better the society, the less law there will be. In Heaven, there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb.... The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell, there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed. [Gilmore, Grant 1977. The Ages of American Law. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 110-111.]
 
Putting such hyperbolic generalizations about the law aside, the peculiarities found in the law in no way mean that critical thinking features are absent from the technicalities that limit what counts as admissible evidence in a courtroom. Thus, while it is a fair observation about legal evidence to note that much counted as “evidence” in non-legal contexts cannot be mentioned in many modern courts of law, there exist important policy reasons that what seems obviously relevant evidence in the realm of common sense can be defeated by legal bars that control what counts as admissible evidence within, for example, a criminal trial. These policy decisions clearly reflect careful thinking about competing policies such as (1) the importance of legal participants being free to present what they think is relevant to their case, (2) the need of defendants for a chance to challenge hostile sources of information, (3) the need to avoid biasing the jury as decision makers, and (4) the listing of many exceptions to the rule that excludes hearsay. A balancing of these many competing policies is how, for example, many modern secular legal systems attempt to foster the desired result of a fair outcome. 
 
The jury system can work well, not least because it relies on the assumption that any one person’s views are limited, while a group in consultation can overcome any single individual’s limitations and foibles. The critical thinking insight underlying a group approach is that while individuals can certainly be fallible, a larger group can, by working in good faith, communicate in ways that help each member of the group reach conclusions that respect evidence-based considerations even as they are mindful of justice considerations. The jury system is built on the reasonable assumption that ordinary citizens in a group can, through sustained discussion with each other, produce justice-oriented decisions better than can an isolated individual.
 
8.25 The Concept of Instrumental Rationality. Consider a peculiar use of “rationality” and “reason” connected to the two-word phrase “instrumental rationality.” While this phrase has historically been used in a variety of ways, a prominent use of “instrumental rationality” currently appears as the lead theme in an influential research source in philosophy—“Someone displays instrumental rationality insofar as she adopts suitable means to her ends.” [Kolodny, Niko and John Brunero, "Instrumental Rationality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/rationality-instrumental/, accessed 3/20/21.] Often used in economics-related or business activities to refer to thinking focused solely on finding the most efficient means of achieving a specific goal, such uses may ignore that economics-framed goals have been, when not subject to limits other than the adoption of “efficient means,” astonishingly destructive of human communities, nonhuman communities, and even the ecosystems on which life depends. Using the important ideas of “reason” and “rationality” based solely on a one-dimensional understanding of instrumental rationality has at times produced results that are unreasonable by ordinary standards of conduct—for example, if a culture bases its life on exclusivist axioms (such as racism or sexism), advocates of such exclusions in a legal system could claim to be “rational” because they support the legal system’s use of “suitable means to such ends.” This form of instrumental rationality would, of course, produce brutal harms to the disfavored living beings. 
 
8.26 “Under the color of law.” Another revealing example of how the law can be abused is well represented in a 2017 volume entitled The Color of Law. [Rothstein, Richard 2017. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright/W. W. Norton.]The phrase “under color of law” is a standard reference to acts by an individual that are claimed to be fully legal but which have only “the appearance or semblance, without the substance, of legal right.” [Black’s Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, 1990. St Paul, Minnesota: West Publishing, at p. 265. An recent online version of Black’s dictionary (accessed 3/21/21 10:58 AM https://thelawdictionary.org/under-color-of-law/) conveys the same idea in slightly different phrasing: “This phrase means with the apparent authority of the law but it actually conflicts with the law.”] The 2017 volume, however, uses the phrase more expansively as is evident from the volume’s subtitle, A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Consider the irony involved in this use—the perpetrator of acts having “the appearance or semblance, without the substance, of legal right” is not just the current United States government, but also the law-making establishment over centuries. 
 
Until the last quarter of the 20th century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today’s residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of an unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States. The policy was so systematic and forceful that its effects endure to the present time. [Ibid., vii-viii.]
 
The author’s thesis is far more definite than the usual meaning of “under color of law,” that is, a mere semblance or appearance of law that lacks, upon examination, the true characteristics of a legal right. Instead, the author documents that those who created the law and public policy at issue were intentionally projecting a segregated world on an entire nation. At issue is the recurring historical fact that those with political power can have varied motives for shaping legal protections in ways that deaden the law for those out of favor. 
 
8.27 Continuing Harms in the Late Twentieth Century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, harms were still a problem called out in a 2005 analysis that begins with a quote by a professor at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University.
 
“During the 1990's, the proportion of black students in majority white schools has decreased....to a level lower than any year since 1968.... Almost three fourths of black and Latino students attend schools that are predominantly minority,” and [the author summarizes] more than 2 million, including more than a quarter of black students in the Northeast and Midwest, [still] “attend schools which we call ‘apartheid schools’ in which 90-100% of students are non-white.” [Kozol, Jonathan 2005. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. 1st ed. New York: Crown Publishers, at p. 19.]
 
8.28 Plentiful Exclusions as “the Ordinance of Interested Men.” Such realities beg the question of how and when the law has been the paradigmatic tool by which oppressions are held in place. Clay’s mid-nineteenth century claim about slavery—“that is property which the law declares to be property”—provides more than a poignant example of a positivist view of the law that ignores entirely justice considerations. William Channing, one of the powerful voices of nineteenth century American Christianity, responded to Clay’s assertion, 
 
[t]hus, human law is made supreme, decisive, in a grave question of morals. Thus, the idea of an eternal, immutable justice, is set at nought. Thus, the great rule of human life is made to be the ordinance of interested men. [Channing, William E. 1847. The Works of William E. Channing. Seventh Complete Edition, Volume 5, “Remarks on the Slavery Question” pp. 5-106, at p. 49.]
 
Nineteenth century challenges to legally mandated inferiority addressed also the profound subordination of women. [See Wagner 2001, pp. 30-31, for a comparison of social, economic, spiritual, political differences between nineteenth century American practices and those of the Haudenosaunee (native to the state of New York and neighbors to the American women who started and led the women’s suffrage movement).] Matilda Jocelyn Gage in 1871 observed,
 
Blackstone, the chief exponent of common law, says: “a mother has no legal right or authority over her children….” The United States, governing itself by English law, inherited this with other oppressions, and it to this day holds force in most of the 37 states of the union. … [M]en, calling themselves Christian men, have dared to defy God’s law, and to give to the father alone the sole right to the child; have dared make laws which permit the dying father of an unborn child to will it away, and to give any person he pleases to select the right to wait the advent of that child, and when the mother, at the hazard of her own life, has brought it forth, to rob her of it and to do by it as the dead father directed. [Matilda Jocelyn Gage, “The Mother of His Children,” (San Francisco) Pioneer, 9 November 1871. Scrapbook of Gage’s Published Newspaper Articles, Matilda Jocelyn Gage Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass. (cited in Wagner 2001, pp. 68-9).]
 
That many earnest moralists, although not all, [Anna Kingsford stands out, as does Salt, Henry S. 1894. Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress, Macmillan & Co.] failed to notice at all how human exceptionalist values had long permitted great harms to the rest of the Earth community’s animals offers this lesson—conditioned ethical blindnesses have often plagued humans. In effect, when such a blindness prevails widely, it risks offering ideas, at times even a rehearsal of means, regarding what powerful living beings can do to those whom they disfavor. Humans’ intentional harms within and beyond the species linecollectively force the same question—what is it about the law that leads people to praise this important dimension of our communal life in the face of the obvious harms done by the law? 
 
Such questions can also be framed in a positive, hope-conferring manner—can our human societies nurture living forms of the law? Answering affirmatively requires recognition that humans’ legal systems have long held in place social constructions that marginalize large numbers of humans and, more generally, the entirety of the other-than-human communities that abound in our more-than-human world. 
 
8.29 A question about legal precedents. The doctrine of discovery could claim a legal pedigree that was, at best, fanciful, premised as it was on the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between the absolute ruler of the Portuguese Empire and the absolute ruler of the Spanish Empire, and done in conjunction with the Catholic Pope Alexander VI and later ratified by his successor Pope Julius II in 1506. This treaty, which could claim only the thinnest veneer of being multi-national in scope, was in fact a crass rationalization of European monarchies’ greed-driven claims to control newly explored (“discovered”) lands.
 
8.30 More on Jefferson and Marshall. Despite the obvious problem that the 1823 Johnson v. M'Intosh decision in no way grew out of, or in any way respected, the republican principles associated with the founding of the United States, there existed a kind of psychological but less-than-legal precedent. As early as 1792, Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State for the newly formed United States, declared that this European doctrine extended to the United States. [See, for example, https://truthout.org/articles/the-united-states-is-founded-upon-the-model-of-european-conquest-dispose-of-the-disposable-people/ (accessed 2026.2.13), where it is claimed, “In 1792, not long after the US founding, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claimed that the Doctrine of Discovery developed by European states was international law applicable to the new US government as well.”] Jefferson’s conclusion, which reflected a bias for the European roots of the founders of the United States, is in retrospect a political act by which a new democracy emulated the very monarchies which its founding had purported to repudiate. Jefferson’s reliance on the doctrine of discovery, then, was not a matter of principled thinking about law in its elegant, life-giving role of honoring justice. It was, instead, a rationalization that the elitist leaders of a small, insecure nation used to justify the colonial experiment that brought such obvious harms to the native peoples long in place before Europeans arrived.
         From a critical thinking standpoint, it is also relevant that at the time of Marshall’s decision there existed carefully reasoned arguments that Marshall’s conclusion was wrong—for example, Francisco de Vitoria was but one of a number of Spanish scholars who cited ancient law and well-accepted theological principles to reach the conclusion in his 1532 De Jure belli Hispanorum in barbaros that the indigenous peoples of the “New World” were rightful owners of the lands they occupied. Marshall in his 1823 decision preferred, however, the papal argument even though the bulls he cited are extremely problematic from legal and moral standpoints. For example, the 1452 papal bull Pontifex Maximus promotes the idea that all those deemed by the pope to be “enemies of Christ wheresoever placed” (which clearly means any and all enemies of the Catholic tradition) should be “reduced” to “perpetual slavery.” Marshall could not have been unaware that the conceptuality undergirding the bulls was the view that enemies of the Catholic tradition (which arguably would have included Marshall’s Scottish ancestors who practiced a form of Protestant Christianity) should be subordinated. For the reasons stated in Chapter 7, the papal bulls on which Marshall relied are paradigmatic examples of a deadening approach to religion, for they not only sanctioned Portugal’s trafficking in African slaves, but also expanded the scope of who and what could be conquered and enslaved with impunity.
 
8.31 Historical and Legal Critiques. The initial lawsuit that culminated in the 1823 Johnson v. M'Intosh decision had a collusive underbelly—land speculators worked together to obtain a legal precedent favoring their own interests (it also increased the value of assets owned by the court’s Chief Justice who wrote the unanimous opinion of the court, since he, his family and friends held much real property impacted by his favorable decision). [See, Frichner, Tonya Gonnella. (2010). “Preliminary Study of the Impact on Indigenous Peoples of the International Legal Construct Known as the Doctrine of Discovery.” Accessed 2026.2.13 at https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N10/231/02/PDF/N1023102.pdf?OpenElement), At p.11, Frichner observes, “Chief Justice John Marshall (1755-1835) had large real estate holdings (as did his family and friends) that would have been affected if the case had been decided contrary to those interests.27  Rather than remove himself from the case, however, the Chief Justice wrote the decision for a unanimous United States Supreme Court.”] Thereby, a precedent was established within United States law that remains in place to this day. At odds with the views of the indigenous peoples who had from time immemorial occupied the land at issue, the decision was explained by the Chief Justice in the following language.
 
On the discovery of this immense continent, the great nations of Europe ... as they were all in pursuit of nearly the same object, it was necessary, in order to avoid conflicting settlements, and consequent war with each other, to establish a principle which all should acknowledge as the law by which the right of acquisition, which they all asserted, should be regulated as between themselves. This principle was that discovery gave title to the government by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession. ... The history of America, from its discovery to the present day, proves, we think, the universal recognition of these principles. [Marshall, John. "Johnson v. M'Intosh", 21 U.S. 543, 5 L.Ed. 681, 8 Wheat. 543 (1823)]
 
The court’s decision was unanimous—ownership of land in colonial areas was made legally possible because of the Europeans’ “discovery” of that land. Legally, the United States inherited ownership from Britain, the original “discoverer.” Of course, the fact that “discovery” in this fact situation was a relative concept, meaning only “new to European awareness,” reveals that the decision was an example of the parochial exceptionalism that favored European hegemony. Justice Marshall’s opinion made plain that the decisiveprinciple was what served “the great nations of Europe … in order to avoid conflicting settlements, and consequent war with each other.” (Johnson v. M'Intosh at p. 573 of the decision.]
         It is hard to ignore that when such claims are made, ironies abound. Marshall claimed “universal recognition of these principles,” [The italics are not in Marshall’s original opinion.] citing the papal bulls that purported to authorize, respectively, Portuguese and Spanish claims to lands which, though already heavily populated, were “discovered” by agents of those Catholic nations. The land “discovered” was often referred to as “terra nullius,” which translates as “nobody’s land.” This was, of course, a fiction given that every account of the discovery of the Americas reveals that it was populated by diverse communities of fellow humans. Altogether different ironies arise because Marshall chose to cite a principle from the establishment institutions of European-based nations even though the American revolutionaries had famously asserted that their own European monarch had no right to control their lives. Yet further ironies exist because of the religious origin of the doctrine of discovery, for the American revolutionaries had made a key point in their new social compact to avoid “establishing” any one religion in the new nation. Finally, there are yet further ironies in the fact that Catholic sources were often despised at the time Marshall handed down this decision, as were the very bulls on which the doctrine of discovery was based (recall that these papal pronouncements exhorted the “discoverers” to enslave the native inhabitants in order to save their souls, as well as protect exclusive trade rights). These bulls were, in fact, among the most virulent forms of Christian exceptionalism—they were premised on war, enslavement and commercial exploitation of any and all non-Christian nations. 
         Exploring the Legal Underpinnings. As with the cultural bias that led to the collusive origination of the lawsuit that provided the self-interested Marshall an opportunity in Johnson v M’Intosh to express yet further cultural myopias and biases, so too with the legal concepts that are the decision’s underpinnings. As would again famously be the case three decades later in the notorious 1856 Dred Scott decision where Chief Justice Taney also misstated history to justify his conclusion that black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” [Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1856)], Marshall’s reasoning process is rife with inaccuracies and omissions. Of particular significance, however, is that these inaccuracies and omissions were advanced in service of Marshall’s pivotal but altogether misleading claim that conquest, exploitation and enslavement were universally held to be a morally respectable privilege of the exploring (conquering) nation.
         In addition, there were viewpoints expressed by scholars of other legal traditions that contended with Marshall’s reasoning. In Part 2 of his 1532 work, de Vitoria argued in his “Nineteenth” proposition, 
 
…the conclusion follows that the barbarians in question can not be barred from being true owners, alike in public and in 
private law, by reason of the sin of unbelief or any other mortal sin, nor does such sin entitle Christians to seize their goods and lands…. [Available at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/De_Indis_De_Jure_Belli/Part_2]
 
De Vitoria next explains that Thomas Cajetan, the famous Italian theologian, cardinal and General Superior of the Dominican order of monks, “proves” in his extensive works this same point “at some length and neatly” (in the fashion of the Catholic Scholastic tradition, De Vittoria notes the specific passage containing Cajetan’s reasoning—“Secunda Secundae, qu. 66, art. 8”). At the very center of Catholicism, then, were well-known, altogether substantial arguments contrary to what Marshall asserted was “universal.” [Additional arguments on this issue can be found in Watson, Blake A., “John Marshall and Indian Land Rights: A Historical Rejoinder to the Claim of “Universal Recognition” of the Doctrine of Discovery”, Seton Hall Law Review, Vol.36, 481
(http://law.shu.edu/Students/academics/journals/law-review/Issues/archives/upload/watson.pdf)]
            Other legal transactions also confirmed title in the indigenous peoples—for example, the Dutch West India Company had executed legal documents premised on the validity of the title of property having been taken by a grantee from the local native tribe. [Watson, Blake A. 2006. “John Marshall and Indian Land Rights: A Historical Rejoinder to the Claim of ‘Universal Recognition’ of the Doctrine of Discovery.” Seton Hall Law Review, Vol.36(2), Article 4, 481ff. Available at 
https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1169&context=shlr , accessed 2022.3.12. For the Dutch claim, Blake cites Francis Bazley Lee 1902. New Jersey: As a Colony and As a State, page 107 (Reprint by Wentworth Press, 2019).] The same practice was used by William Penn, who publicly declared that the “Susquehanna People” are the “true Owners” of the lands they occupied in Pennsylvania. [See Blake 2006, p. 529.]
         In the period immediately after the Revolutionary War, “the new federal government of the United States continued European practices of treaty-making with Indian tribes” and a “[d]etailed analysis of treaty language and treaty negotiations illustrates how the United States further confirmed indigenous land rights.” [Wilkins and Lomawaima, pp. 21-22.] Wilkins and Lomawaima provide separate analyses of “Spanish recognition of Indian title,” [Ibid., pp. 27-30.] “French recognition of Indian title,” [Ibid., pp. 30-32.] “British recognition of Indian title,” [ Ibid.,pp. 32-36.] and “American recognition of Indian title.” [Ibid., pp. 36-40.] The confirmation of indigenous land rights in American Indian treaties is then separately analyzed. [Ibid., pp. 40-52.]
Further, such a subordination of justice arguably is radically inconsistent with the oath which each Supreme Court justice takes when sworn into office, namely, to uphold the Constitution of the United States which opens with a sentence that explicitly made the establishment of “Justice” the first goal of the Constitution.
 
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
 
Since the Constitution was, however, premised on clear exclusions of major groups from key legal rights and protections—only a limited range of males could vote, slavery was enshrined in this most basic of American legal documents, and there was perpetuation of the radical subordination of women under the law—it will not surprise many to learn that justice was not extended by the United States Supreme Court to the original inhabitants of North America. 
         There is yet another aspect of Marshall’s decision that similarly suggests how disingenuous Marshall’s reasoning was in his 1823 opinion. This is Marshall’s own frank admission in the decision itself, for he acknowledges the doctrine of discovery as an “extravagant … pretension.” 
 
However extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest may appear, if the principle has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards, sustained; if a country has been acquired and held under it; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it, it becomes the law of the land, and cannot be questioned. [Johnson v M’Intosh, at 591-592.]
 
Marshall’s argument here has some obvious weaknesses—it amounts to claiming that if enough time passes after a theft, then the crime, in Marshall’s own words, “cannot be questioned.” A decade later Marshall himself in another opinion addressing the status of original Europeans’ land claims found in colonial charters (Worcester v. Georgia 1832) would again confirm that claims connected to the doctrine of discovery were based on, again in Marshall’s own words, an “extravagant and absurd idea.” 
 
The first of these charters was made before possession was taken of any part of the country. They purport, generally, to convey the soil from the Atlantic to the South Sea. This soil was occupied by numerous and warlike nations, equally willing and able to defend their possessions. The extravagant and absurd idea, that the feeble settlements made on the seacoast, or the companies under whom they were made, acquired legitimate power by them to govern the people, or occupy the lands from sea to sea, did not enter the mind of any man. [Quoted in Deloria and Wilkins 2011, pp. 139-140; Worcester v. Georgia 31 US 515, 544-545.]
 
While Marshall in this characterization of the very basis of the doctrine of discovery acknowledges the legal fiction for what it truly is, this “extravagant and absurd idea” remains a presence in contemporary United States law. 
          In the last century, Marshall’s 1823 decision has on a number of occasions been cited by newer Supreme Court opinions as a tool relevant to resolution of disputes—perhaps to camouflage either the absurdity or extravagance of the doctrine of discovery, sometimes the Court’s reference does not mention this claim by name, but instead imposes the doctrine’s repudiation of indigenous power over real property by merely giving the technical legal citation for the 1823 Johnson case. This is the approach taken in the 1978 opinion in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe [435 U.S. 191.] and the 1990 opinion in Duro v. Reina. [495 U.S. 676.]
         In 2005, the doctrine of discovery was not only expressly mentioned, however, but cited by the Supreme Court’s in its official opinion in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York (544 U.S. 197), thereby signaling that the doctrine remains a bedrock principle in the United States’ legal system. The following statement opens footnote 1 of the court’s official opinion.
 
Under the “doctrine of discovery,” County of Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation of N. Y., 470 U. S. 226, 234 (1985) (Oneida II), “fee title to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign—first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States,” Oneida Indian Nation of N. Y. v. County of Oneida, 414 U. S. 661, 667 (1974).
 
That this “extravagant and absurd idea” could be not only an important factor in yet another Supreme Court decision written by one of the court’s most respected liberal figures (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), but also be referenced by name without any nuance regarding its questionable origin and continued dominance, reveals much.
It is legally relevant as well that, prior to Marshall’s 1823 decision, there had been numerous law-based transactions in which the natives' ownership of the land where they had long lived was acknowledged by a wide variety sovereigns and treaty partners. In the early period of the American colonies before the outbreak in 1776 of the Revolutionary War, “the actual political and diplomatic relations between native nations and Spain, France, Great Britain, and the United States constitute compelling evidence” that “these political ‘sovereigns’ had to recognize indigenous title to land.” [ David E. Wilkins and Tsianina Lomawaima 2001. Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, p. 21.] For example, Charles II of England had acknowledged the indigenous Americans’ rights to the land in the Royal Charter of Rhode Island. [James Ernst 1932. Roger Williams: New England Firebrand.  New York: AMS, 1969 Reprint. At p. 332. See also Greene v. Rhode Island, 289 F. Supp. 2d 5, 7 (D. R. I. 2003), which observed that “In contrast to other colonies’ charters, the Rhode Island Charter (of 1663) provided that the Indians had title to Indian lands….”] 
 
8.32 Conceptual and Moral Critique of Doctrine of Discovery. Not surprisingly, many people of conscience, scholars, historians and ethicists, as well as many religious communities, have in the last half-century openly challenged the doctrine of discovery as unprincipled and greed-driven. Particularly galling has been the disingenuousness of claiming “discovery” of lands already occupied, since the very text of the papal bulls purporting to establish the doctrine of discovery openly acknowledged that peoples already occupied the lands at issue—the real message of the bulls was the claim that the Roman Pope and his followers have the right to dominate any and all non-Catholic people. Despite its adoption in 1823 by the Supreme Court of the United States and repeated subsequent affirmations, the doctrine was revealed by Marshall’s own words to be, from its inception, self-interested, biased, and reliant on a fiction to dismiss other cultures who had an obvious, often-recognized ownership interest in the particular lands they had long occupied. 
         The doctrine thus today resembles much else in humans’ cultural history that asserts in an arrogant and fundamentalist vein that a powerful aristocracy in a dominant ruling society can with impunity treat its own self-interests as the very measure of moral significance. In law, as in religion and ethics, harms have flowed when such an “extravagant and absurd idea” is made a foundation, given great power, and then left in place. A succinct reminder that great harms extend beyond the humans and communities directly harmed by such dishonesty is called out in an image used in an 1883 speech by the former slave Frederick Douglass—“No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.” [The image is from a speech given by Frederick Douglass at a Civil Rights Mass Meeting on October 22, 1883, at Washington, D. C., available at available at https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd000438 (accessed 2021.10.10)] Dishonesties in legal systems handcuff more than those directly disadvantaged—they also impact those who use such dishonesties for their own gain.
         Attempting to Say Something Positive about a Legal System Premised on the Doctrine of Discovery--Practical Affirmations of the Rule of Law as a Key Human-on-Human Dimension. For those born into legal systems built through dishonesty about historical facts, consider that one’s inherited legal system may nonetheless feature some noteworthy developments. Key features of the law as a potentially positive human communal endeavor can be seen in the human-on-human problems described by a former United States federal prosecutor in his 2019 Doing Justice. [Bharara 2019.] What comes through in Preet Bharara’s account is how one of humans’ internally diverse, complex modern societies has been attempting to answer the question “how should we order our life together?” in ways that attempt to make real the ideals of justice and fairness for a wide range of humans. The result is a hopeful account of the work done in the criminal division of a modern legal system tasked with policing a demographically complex society even as the author is frank that the United States’ legal system in the early twenty-first continues to disadvantage many citizens of the United States in a variety of overt and subtle ways.
         The criminal division of the legal system is the tool by which a government seeks to hold its citizens to basic norms set out by legislation or tradition, the violation of which can involve punishment such as fines or incarceration after a trial. While similar to the related set of problems of the citizen-to-citizen realm of law known as civil litigation in modern legal systems, the criminal law domain of the United States’ overtly secular legal system offers a window through which one can glimpse why the legal system of a modern mega-society has an extraordinarily complicated task when it comes to the goals of “justice” and “the rule of law.”
         These formidable challenges are on display as Bharara describes prospects and problems in the administration of justice. The challenges are particularly severe whenever a society features some segments of the governed population favored by special privileges and other segments that are not only less favored, but often actively discriminated against in both subtle and overt ways. Privileges include ready access to the system, control of resources that ensure access to expert defense counsel, and the prevalence of stereotypes that favor those in a particular class even as they disfavor those in other classes. 
         While such complex challenges are particularly revealing when compared to social cohesion found in smaller-scale societies knit together by a multi-faceted common heritage and the ability to know all of one’s fellow community members, Bharara’s account of criminal law as a discreet domain offers important good news. First, positive outcomes do occur for many individuals because the legal system has many leaders who consistently insist that fairness in the legal system always be kept in the foreground. 
         But problems do occur. One unavoidable problem is that doing justice through the law is always an after-the-fact process. Addressing whether a particular criminal defendant has broken the law can only be attempted in retrospect, which results in challenges because of humans’ eminently animal finitudes—of memory, of perception, of character. Further, not only are the crucial events no longer available to be witnessed, but the fallibilities of even the best-intentioned, honest humans are, as Part I argued, influential in what human animals can, first, notice about our world’s actual realities and, second, recall accurately about what we believe we perceived in the past. Bharara describes the basic challenges faced in any investigation, [Ibid., p. 3.] and then adds this frank avowal of human finitudes.
 
Decisions about what to do (or not do) with the fruits of a good-faith inquiry are made by real people who are not omniscient, who are often flawed or biased, and who are always operating in imperfect systems and bureaucracies. [Ibid., p. 139.]
 
Because such basic problems never abate, the importance of the government’s criminal prosecutor proceeding without preconceptions is crucial. Bharara often expresses this point in terms of human character: “Searches for truth and accountability demand more of people [than professional skill] … [they demand also] integrity, honor, and independence, among other things.” [ Ibid.., p. 7.] 
         As a practical matter, Bharara felt it was his obligation, that of his office, and that of the entire government establishment tasked with criminal prosecution to foreground the key role that healthy skepticism must play as our human animal abilities are deployed in search of fairness and justice. Our animal susceptibility to, for example, problems of negative or positive bias must be recognized and factored into how a case is handled. Bharara comments on confirmation bias as not only an affirmative error—it is a frame of mind anchored in our very finitudes. Of a particular case in which multiple experts had submitted reports that were mistaken on a fingerprint match, Bharara observes, 
 
An innocent man was accused and forever injured because of a failure to sufficiently reconsider. It was not the first error that wrought the injustice. First errors seldom do. It wasn’t the second or third error either. Rather, it was the continuing and lazy persistence in the first blunder … followed by discoveries … quickly accepted as corroboration instead of coincidence that greased a slow-motion miscarriage of justice through a fog of latent bias and stereotype. [Ibid., p. 43.]
 
These realities prompt Bharara to offer the following advice to those tasked with seeking the truth in a legal matter.
 
A case is more likely to be harmed by suppressed questions than by suppressed evidence. This is true in all important endeavors involving truth. … Deep understanding of any subject or set of facts requires active inquiry. That in turn requires asking questions. Every kind of question—searching questions, uncomfortable questions, broad questions, narrow questions, long-shot questions, repetitive questions, hypothetical questions. Many questions should be asked twice, perhaps even a third time, and rephrased each time to make sure the question was really understood and to make sure you understood the answer. [Ibid., p. 60.]
 
Bharara’s judgment is that there are many individuals within the law’s established domains—the police, courts, attorneys—who care to make the system work as well as possible. Even well-intentioned individuals commit mistakes, of course, that lead to severe miscarriages of justice because of pre-judgments about guilt or innocence or a witness’s credibility. These comments reveal that we need a robust commitment to recognizing our animal realities if our legal systems are to meet the goal of investing our societies and their legal traditions with understanding and fairness that minimize long-standing biases that harm individuals.
         The net effect of human limits, then, is a landslide of problems for a legal system tasked with keeping a complex, populous, internally diverse society functioning with a minimum of disruption and lawlessness. In addition, stresses are created by the deep structural problems that exist because power and opportunity in complex societies have long been distributed unevenly—sometimes along racial or ethnic lines, and sometimes based on religious affiliation, economic class, gender identity, or some other trait irrelevant to any human’s worth as an individual. What is needed again and again as a society pursues a principled commitment to “doing justice” is the foregrounding of the simple virtues of humility. This requires that individuals remain flexible in order to maximize the possibility of careful thinking about how to avoid       the distorting features of caricature, mistrust, confirmation bias, and rank prejudice. Even the best of careful human thinking can still be undermined when law enforcement officials are impacted by conditioned ethical blindness. For these reasons, Bharara often reminds the reader that justice is done by humans, not by a legal system alone—“In the end, the law doesn’t do justice. People do. And this of course is true everywhere in work and life, this attention to duty, detail, mission.” [Ibid., p. 58.]
 
8.33 “Forensic Evidence.” Before addressing various technical idiosyncrasies evident in the realm of legal evidence, consider an important overlap in the ways that evidence is a key factor in both the law realm and the science realm. The term “forensic” is commonly used in science-based fields—for example, the obscure but intriguing field of forest forensics. Many other scientific realms feature the word “forensic” as well, and more broadly, the contemporary legal world uses the phrase “forensic evidence” to designate “evidence obtained by scientific methods such as ballistics, blood test, and DNA test and used in court.” [From https://definitions.uslegal.com/f/forensic-evidence/ accessed 2022.3.14.] This explains why a prominent dictionary of English provides two definitions of “forensics.” The first is “the art or study of formal debate” and the second is “the use of science and technology to investigate and establish facts in criminal or civil courts of law.” [American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition, 2016.] The etymology of “forensics” reveals why this is so—the root Latin word forensic meant “of or before the forum” [Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (6thEdition), Oxford University Press, 2017.] because in Roman times, a Roman citizen accused of a criminal violation had the right to present their case before a group of public individuals in the forum, a public domain. Both the accused and the accuser were permitted to advocate their account of the underlying story, and a decision was then rendered. Hence the term today is used for both a category of public presentation and in various legal contexts. This overlap also reveals how both legal systems and a variety of science domains have a public dimension—sciences do so by a commitment to verifiability, and legal systems seek something similar by foregrounding rules as to what evidence will and will not be “admissible” in the public venue where courtroom proceedings play out.
 
8.34 More Legal Evidence Issues. The law has so often been viewed as a revered subdomain of human achievement that claims have been made that disputes resolved in the legal manner set a high standard. For example, Bharara comments, 
 
… the elements that make a criminal trial an effective and fair process for determinations of truth are a model for debate and truth seeking away from the court room as well. [Bharara 2019, 219 (at p. 264 a similar claim appears).]
 
There are, without question, important limits to this kind of reasoning. Over the last few centuries, legal approaches to evidence in trials have regularly excluded information that is, in many realms of our ordinary life, often thought significant. In many non-legal realms, evidence that is regularly excluded from legal trial (for example, the category defined below as hearsay evidence) is often deemed highly relevant to a conversation addressing whether someone is guilty or innocent of a crime. Hearsay is a wide-ranging category broadly defined as “an out-of-court statement offered to prove the truth of whatever it asserts.” [https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/hearsay (accessed 2021.4.11). The Federal rules of Evidence Rule 801(c) specifically state, “(1) the declarant does not make while testifying at the current trial or hearing; and (2) a party offers in evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted in the statement.” There are very important exceptions, to be sure, related to admitting prior statements of a witness how is being cross-examined or an opposing party.] In trial courts, there are important policies (discussed below) that have led to this broad category being excluded, but to the lay person such an exclusion is often viewed as conducive to a miscarriage of justice because it seems to allow someone who likely committed a crime to avoid a conviction. 
 
Pertinent to any discussion of “hearsay” in the law is an important underlying issue that illuminates the policy of excluding certain kinds of evidence—the rule excluding “hearsay” in a broad way is informed by distrust of secondhand testimony that falls into the “he said, she said” category. In actual legal practice, there exist dozens of important exceptions to the hearsay rule, such that it is possible at times for clever attorneys to find ways to speak about such testimony into a courtroom. Overall, however, the hearsay rule reveals that there are substantial reasons to limit what counts as legally admissible evidence even though many ordinary citizens reason, on the basis of common sense and their sense of justice, that all the evidence should be considered by those charged with resolving a disputed matter. 
         Such peculiarities have led many commentators to recognize idiosyncrasies in how the legal system handles evidence. Two authors of a widely used volume on rhetoric “designed primarily for students of exposition, discussion, persuasion, and argument who must buttress their speeches or essays with evidence” [[Robert P., and Newman, Dale R. Evidence.1969. Boston:, Houghton Mifflin, [Robert P., and Newman, Dale R. Evidence.1969. Boston:, Houghton Mifflin,, Preface, p. vii.] observe that “[o]nly as a branch of jurisprudence is the study of evidence recognized as a discipline in its own right.” [Ibid., p. 226.] They then add this revealing observation: 
 
Despite this, the legal theory of evidence is almost totally irrelevant outside the courtroom: it is concerned with procedural rules rather than substantive evaluation. [Ibid., pp. 226-227.]
 
In criminal prosecutions as well, there are many limits on what can be done and said in a courtroom, as well as what can be seen by the jury. 
 
Criminal trials are … suffused with elaborate concealments. We hide a lot from the jury. We hide the defendant’s criminal history; we hide the potential punishment; we suppress certain evidence.  If the defendant is dangerous and incarcerated, we hide that from the jury as well; the defendant is led into the courtroom and unshackled before the jury can see his bondage.
We conceal the lawyers’ personal views about guilt and innocence, about the credibility of witnesses, though this is often obvious. We don’t let the jury hear the legal arguments made at sidebar, don’t tell them how much the lawyers are being paid. [Ibid. 251-2. Bharara mentions further peculiarities connected to what counts, and what cannot be counted, as legal evidence.] 
 
Bharara’s many different stories about actual criminal proceedings reveal that he is fully aware of key shortcomings in the existing legal system—one is the problem of bias forthose individuals perceived to belong to a favored category and another is bias againstthose perceived to fall within a disfavored category. 
 
Terrible as it is to say—and one wishes for it to be otherwise—there is something of a caste system among victims of crimes. … [T]here is truth in the perception that certain kinds of people, namely men with power and prestige, can get away with anything because they can silence and scare their victims with impunity. [Bharara 2019, 219.] 
 
8.35 More on Prediction’s Role in Legal Systems. As mammals who can enjoy a life spanning a century or more, humans from birth forward are immersed as social beings in a number of nested communities (starting with family, local community and a living culture) in which young are raised, learn to communicate, and must share in a great variety of ways. Each of us learns within the chrysalis of these nested communities to venture out into a much wider, obviously processing world that contains both many nonhuman animals and non-animal forms of life that, like our kind, live on the basis of very pronounced finitudes. 
It is not surprising, then, that one can easily detect predictive elements (that is, a broad notion of how the law will in the future work and for whom) in the justice comments that Plato put into the mouth of Thrasymachus, the Kibworth dissenter’s nineteenth century lament, and the 1994 “life comes from it” comment by the Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation about that culture’s legal system. Prediction also undergirds the earlier observation that because the Romans “valued trade and commercial possibilities,” they structured and administered their law “in ways that allowed commercial interests to have sufficient confidence that the law would be applied predictably.” The result was that Roman law remained an important factor for long periods of time in many different places. Note how the same factors are named in a 2001 comment of the Lord Irvine of Lairg:
 
The very first need of the business community is legal predictability. An unpredictable legal climate is unacceptable to business, forcing traders into necessary legal advice and insurance cover to secure against the risk of their deals being defeated. [Lord Irvine of Lairg 2001. “The Law, an Engine for Trade.” Proceedings of the British Academy, 111, 275–96, at p. 276. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.00324]
 
Similar concerns vivify Holmes’ 1897 essay, which opens with a classic statement about the law’s prediction-intensive features.
 
When we study law we are … studying what we shall want in order to appear before judges, or to advise people in such a way as to keep them out of court. The reason why it is a profession, why people will pay lawyers to argue for them or to advise them, is that in societies like ours … [p]eople want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business to find out when this danger is to be feared. The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts. [Holmes 1897, p. 5.]
 
Based on this framing of the law, Holmes says straightforwardly that the common idea of “a legal duty so called” is “nothing but a prediction that if a man does or omits certain things he will be made to suffer in this or that way by judgment of the court; and so of a legal right.” [Ibid., p. 6.] He adds a now-classic description of a legal system as he explains why he composed this influential essay: “I wish, if I can, to lay down some first principles for the study of this body of dogma or systematized prediction which we call the law….” [Ibid.] Holmes then identifies his target audience—“men who want to use it as the instrument of their business to enable them to prophesy in their turn….” [Ibid.] Holmes later adds a telling generalization that reveals how important he thinks the role of prediction is in the legal system with which he was so familiar—“The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.” [Ibid., p. 9.] 
 
Holmes’ goal with such comments is “by a series of hints to throw some light on the narrow path of legal doctrine, and upon two pitfalls which, as it seems to me, lie perilously near to it.” [Ibid., p. 14.]
 
I wish to point out an ideal which as yet our law has not attained. The first thing for a businesslike understanding of the matter is to understand its limits, and therefore I think it desirable at once to point out and dispel a confusion between morality and law. [Ibid., p. 6.]
 
Holmes acknowledges repeatedly in the essay that while the law employs terms, ideas, and popular conceptions clearly associated with morality, it is nonetheless a mistake to equate law and morality.
 
The law is full of phraseology drawn from morals, and by the mere force of language continually invites us to pass from one domain to the other without perceiving it, as we are sure to do unless we have the boundary constantly before our minds. The law talks about rights, and duties, and malice, and intent, and negligence, and so forth, and nothing is easier, or, I may say, more common in legal reasoning, than to take these words in their moral sense, at some state of the argument, and so to drop into fallacy. [Ibid., p. 8.]
 
Thus, despite the law’s morality-related borrowings and associations, Holmes asserts that the law is a different, more practical and more political creature than morality, for as Holmes puts it, “No one will deny that wrong statutes can be and are enforced….” [Ibid., p. 9.]
 
What drives Holmes’ analysis is, in effect, a plea for a living form of law.
 
Far more fundamental questions still await a better answer than that we do as our fathers have done. [Ibid., p. 22.]
 
Observing that “[e]verywhere the basis of principle is tradition, to such an extent that we even are in danger of making the role of history more important than it is”, [Ibid., p. 24.] Holmes recognizes that science’s careful, evidence-based inquiries can have, as discussed throughout this book, prospects of helping society achieve an informed (living) form of the law relevant to current lives. 
 
I trust that no one will understand me to be speaking with disrespect of the law, because I criticise it so freely. I venerate the law, and especially our system of law, as one of the vastest products of the human mind. ... But one may criticise even what one reveres. [Ibid., p. 26.]
 
Holmes desires lawyers in his legal system to advise their clients well about how the legal system will treat those clients’ past or future actions. He adds that each legal system needs to be responsive to its place and time—in other words, to have a living quality. This important challenge is given a practical cast in Holmes’ famous essay, for lawyers advising clients are not, Holmes opines, assisted by much of the broad speculation about the metaphysical basis and nature of “the law.” This is why Holmes observes that “attempts to analyze legal ideas have been confused by striving for a useless quintessence of all systems, instead of an accurate anatomy of one.” [Ibid.]
 
8.36 Xenophobia. Relatedly, early humans were, like our chimpanzee cousins, inclined to xenophobia, which also made learning the social awareness a life-sustaining necessity. Hundreds of thousands of years ago an individual (particularly if male) in a human or chimpanzee group did not have the option of wandering away from the local group in order to join another group because the xenophobic tendencies of each of these primate groups made banishment from one’s local group tantamount to a death sentence. 
 
8.37 More on prediction—Claus 2012. A good example of such nuancing was provided a modern scholar in 2012, [ Claus, Laurence 2012. Law’s Evolution and Human Understanding. New York: Oxford University Press.] thereby providing a good example of how humans over time build on and deepen creative insights. Prediction is, as already noted, related to the communication skills and needs readily evident in a variety of the Earth’s more complex social mammals, but these are especially evident in humans’ many different cultures. 
 
Every human community has evolved its own unique prediction source, its own signaling system for what people in that community are likely to do and to expect. Community comes through communication. We have law anywhere humans have talked to each other enough to form a group identity. [Ibid., at p. 4.]
 
Speaking of the common tendency to associate and even equate law and morality, this scholar discerned an element of irony in that association.
 
Law is not a morality meter. What law signals and what people ought to do … are not the same thing. Historic claims that they are the same thing have often been immoral, manipulative efforts by some humans to control others. [Ibid., p. 5.]
 
Another interesting dimension of Holmes’ oft-cited naming of the law as “systematic prediction” is evident in another comment by this same scholar. 
 
Holmes just threw out those words out in a public speech, revealing only a fraction of their explanatory power. Modern systems theory helps us comprehend the concept more fully. Law’s signals of what people are likely to do and to expect emerge within a system that grows itself. [Ibid., p. 6.]
 
The sources of law in a functioning democracy that “emerge within a system that grows itself” can obviously have features associated in this chapter with a living version of the law. As Claus adds, “in human relations, there is never ‘law’ without an ‘of’ immediately following, and that ‘of’ always turns our gaze to a human community.” [Ibid., p. 7.] Of course, those citizens in a community who have the power to “project an imagined future on reality” may put in place legal rules that help all, or they may be powerbrokers who wish to work only for some groups within a diverse community.
 
8.38 Predicting the Downside of Law and Only Law. Heavy reliance on the law as the primary tool of social change has a potential risk that may at first be hard to see. Jonathan Kozol, whose work has been described above in connection with continuing school segregation in the United States, provides other materials and observations that suggest that legal action as the cutting edge of a social movement can foster a peculiar, sometimes debilitating problem. Addressing “the need for activism outside of the legal process and preceding it”, Kozol quotes the civil rights advocate Theodore Shaw.
 
In the Montgomery bus boycott … litigation didn’t lead the movement. It came afterwards and served it. … When lawyers think that they can lead a movement in their role as lawyers, they are doomed to failure, because courts themselves are socially reactionary institutions…. [Kozol 2005, pp. 257-8 (italics in the original).]
 
After adding that “and [Theodore Shaw] said he meant ‘reactionary’ in both of the common senses of the word”, Kozol quotes Shaw further. 
 
Then, too, because the litigation process is so slow and so complex, it can turn activists into bystanders far too easily. Lawyers like Gandhi and Mandela can awaken and create a movement, but not in their role as lawyers. You need to create a climate of political momentum first. That, then, is the challenge. [Ibid., p. 258.]
 
In these comments one can sense that the advantages that small-scale societies enjoy because their size allows them to have diverse social glues and “enforcement” methods (such as social shaming and even complete shunning of violators) that go well beyond what happens in a large society governed by a shared legal system. The integrated aspects of small-scale societies have often produced real, effective community because small-scale societies have both communication possibilities and diverse resources that allow nuanced responses to specific circumstances and people.
 
8.39 Predicting the Downside of Human Exceptionalism. Both practical and theoretical issues foster one challenge after another to human exceptionalism as detrimental to not only humans’ self-understanding, but also to humans’ legal imagination. In an elementary way, contemporary legal circles’ radical (going to the root) exclusions of not only some other humans, but also any and all nonhuman animals, from the kinds of protections that can be provided by legal systems has impoverished our species’ thinking about what the law has been and can be. This is a result of human exceptionalism being widely assumed to be a morally defensible approach consonant with the order of nature or the will of a creator divinity. The arguments made in this book suggest that such an exclusion is not only discordant with the wisdom of every human’s ancient ancestors, but also with a more visionary and robust sense of our species’ self-interest.
         Consider how the emergence of human exceptionalism as the norm has produced untoward results. It marginalizes key aspect of our science tradition by ignoring the countless lines of evidence confirming that humans are as fully animal as is any nonhuman animal. Human exceptionalism also plays down humans’ ethical abilities fully on display in small-scale societies’ foregrounding of concern for the larger web of life in their local world. It fails to instill in contemporary humans the Axial Age sages’ commendation of “a spirituality of empathy and compassion” that does “not confine … benevolence to your own people” but, rather, recognizes “respect for the sacred rights of all beings—not orthodox belief” as offering humans the fullest form of self-actualization. It is noteworthy that the Axial Age sages’ claims were not the beginning of awareness of other animals, but a late blossoming rooted in human communities’ long-standing fascination with humans as full members of the Earth community comprised of truly diverse forms of life.
         Modern legal systems are, when measured against possible forms of human fulfillment, particularly impoverished, for it is modern secular law where human societies, in both theoretical and practical ways, have given force and effect to the pretense that humans are “above” other living beings and thus no longer should be defined as members of the category “animal.” Legal vocabulary has, in fact, along with religious dogma, become one of the mainstays of the unscientific dualism “humans and animals.” Consider how two Australian states today define “animal” in their current law. The State of Queensland expressly states in the Animal Care and Protection Act 2001 that “a human being or human foetus is not an animal.” [Animal Care and Protection Act 2001 (Queensland), Chapter 1, Division 2, section 11 “What is an animal” includes the phrase  “a mammal, other than a human being”, and then at 11(2) explicitly affirms, “However, a human being or human foetus is not an animal.” Accessed by 4/16/21 at https://www.legislation.qld.gov.au/view/pdf/2016-07-01/act-2001-064.] The State of New South Wales similarly provides in its Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1979 that “animal” under this law includes mammals “other than a human being.” [The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1979, accessed at 
https://www.legislation.nsw.gov.au/view/html/inforce/current/act-1979-200
4/16/21, Part 1, (4) Definitions, (iv) “mammal (other than a human being)”.] The effect is to expand Henry Clay’s notorious 1839 claim “[t]hat is property which the law declares to be property” to the even more questionable claim “that is animal and only that which the law declares to be animal.” 
      Consider as well how the magnitude of humans’ present use of nonhuman animals as mere resources is astonishing even when one is silent about (i) the nature and gravity of the intentional harms that such practices produce and (ii) the mentality of those who, with modern legal systems’ full support, assert that such problems do not raise moral issues. The extent of humans’ use of other animals as mere resources is conveyed by a graphic representation entitled “Earth’s Land Mammals by Weight” that depicts our species’ owned nonhuman animals as outweighing not only all human beings collectively, but also outweighing the combination of humans and all wild nonhuman land mammals living today on the surface of the Earth. [Both the graphic depicting this imbalance and explanatory text and charts are available at https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1338:_Land_Mammals accessed 5/3/21. A caveat is in order, however, since the analysis draws upon mixed materials, some of which are science-based but others of which are more in the form of opinion.]
         Given that it takes great mental acrobatics to ignore humans’ ever-so-vivifying inner and outer animality even in those societies where legal definitions exclude humans from the animal category, it is important to recognize that forthrightness is both a critical thinking skill and a moral virtue. Equally important in our communal life are the robust, unequivocal acknowledgments of science about our animal realities and the relevance of realist intuitions about the actual world in which we are born, live and die. All of these skills are crucial to fostering our own and fellow humans’ sense of humans’ animality, for this is the bedrock reality that can prompt humans’ educational traditions to help us respect the power of frank questions. With such freedom, both the present and future generations can accomplish a crucial task, namely, making real a wide-ranging acceptance of each human’s right to speak freely, including asking questions that have much more power than their answer. Such an uncompromising acknowledgment of human inquiry can increase recognition of the great risks that failing to tell the truth entails for our present communities. The risks of not having a robust tradition of free speech come in many guises, one which was underscored by Bharara’s reference to the implications for the ordinary person of recognizing the key insight of a now-famous experiment by Stanley Milgram conducted in the 1970s. Bharara in his discussion of the law noted this“fundamental lesson” of Milgram’s study of people’s willingness to follow authority figures—“ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.” [Bharara 2019, p. 304, citing Stanley Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience,” Harper’s Magazine (1974), at pp. 75-76.] Said another way we fail not only ourselves, but also future human generations and, of course, our larger community, when we speak and act in ways that promote human exceptionalism as a moral vision.
 
8.40 More Contemporary Examples. Such problems today notoriously exist worldwide—one author who spent four years in a slum of Mumbai, India, described the “profound and juxtaposed inequality” as “the signature fact of so many modern cities.” [Boo, Katherine 2012. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, New York: Random House, p. 248.] Nonetheless, what still came through to the careful observer was “the deep, idiosyncratic intelligences that emerged forcefully over the course of nearly four years.” [Ibid., p. 250.] It is these intelligences that, of course, can solicit change, even make revolution possible. In the United States, public policy effectively permits “sacrifice zones” to exist—a trenchant 2012 description of four major examples of the subordination of whole groups can be found in a book with the ominous title Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. [Hedges and Sacco 2012.] The opening example is the Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Indian reservation that unequivocally reflects a sustained, enforced poverty that incubates cultural dislocation and hopelessness anchored by substance abuse, profound addictions, early deaths, gang life, high rates of imprisonment, rape, and poor education. The second and third examples are, respectively, an East Coast city and a coal mining rural community that reflect the decay-dominated aftermath of the industrial revolution and fossil fuel era. The final example is the quasi-slavery of immigrants brought to the United States to work in agricultural production. 
         Three years later (2015), one of these authors published a book that contained the following summary of how poverty in the United States disproportionately affects not only minorities, but especially children.
 
The poor population in the United States—15 percent of the total population and a disturbing 21.8 percent for children under the age of eighteen—is expanding. The 46.5 million people living in poverty in 2012 was the largest number of poor counted during the fifty-four years in which the decennial census has calculated poverty rates. ... And among those classified as poor, 20.4 million people lived in what was categorized as “deep” poverty, meaning that their incomes were 50 percent below the official poverty line. ... There are 73.7 million children in the United States, and they represent 23.7 percent of the total population. Yet in 2012 they made up 34.6 percent of Americans living in poverty and 35 percent of those living in deep poverty. [Hedges, Chris 2015. Wages of Rebellion. New York: Nation, at p. 8.]
 
8.41 A Range of Related Problems. Heinzerling and Ackerman summarize the problem of using this kind of reasoning— “market values tell us little about the social values at stake,” and thus “[a]gain and again, economic theory gives us opaque and technical reasons to do the obviously wrong thing.” [Ackerman and Heinzerling 2004, p. 9.] Such criticism is no way a denial that it can be beneficial for a human to wonder what costs might be paid for a particular benefit. But when markets are used to putting a value on nonhuman animals’ lives, the practice of “cost-benefit analysis” causes us to lose touch with the realities at issue. Cost-benefit analysis is an important calculus that we pursue in our daily lives—but when we try to balance unknown lives of unknown others against economic benefits for ourselves, the “calculus” relies on impersonal and/or ignorance-driven assumptions, not personal knowledge of those involved. The result is “opaque” and we end up with merely “technical reasons to do the obviously wrong thing.” 
         Such calculations have lost touch with our personal lives, as well as our own species’ deep past of honoring other lives as members of our larger community whose very appearance in our day can be read as a gift. When law is premised solely on utilitarian calculations by financially invested humans claiming to weigh another animal’s suffering and death against the financially interested human’s personal economic gain, the legal system has become, both literally and figuratively, truly deadening for both the living beings killed and consumers.
         With such developments in mind, consider the different ways in which the law when dominated primarily by economics-based reasoning, can be deadening for human awareness. First, the legislative branch of the law has licensed extensive killing of farm animals in factory farming. Second, the courts defer to this because each farmed animal individual has, technically speaking, the status of a “legal thing” owned by an individual human or corporation that possesses the legal right to such ownership. Third, the factory farming features of modern agribusiness are clearly in great tension with much in humans’ cultural heritage that exhorts each individual human to compassion for living beings—recall, for example, the fact that long-standing anti-cruelty traditions have in the last half-century been greatly weakened by statutory amendments that exclude “common practices” in modern food industries from the definition of cruelty. [See Wolfson 1999.]
         While the harms to individual food animals will not at first seem an environmental issue, the overall industry has astonishingly adverse impacts on local environments. In 2006, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow” which concluded that livestock production facilities are “probably the largest sectoral source of water pollution” and are major causes of an array of serious environmental and human health problems, including emergence of antibiotic resistance, erosion, pollution of lakes and rivers, dead zones in coastal areas, and degradation of coral reefs. [FAO 2006, p. xxii.] Two years later in 2008, a report published jointly by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health concluded, “By most measures, confined animal production systems in common use today fall short of current ethical and societal standards.” [Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production 2008, p. 58.] This 2008 report was even more blunt about the economic harms that factory farming causes to human communities. Noting that “the costs to rural America have been significant,” the report describes harms suffered by communities that go beyond the loss of family-owned farms and reduced civic participation rates.
 
Although many rural communities embraced industrial farming as a source of much needed economic development, the results have often been the reverse. Communities with greater concentrations of industrial farming operations have experienced higher levels of unemployment and increased poverty. . . . Associated social concerns—from elevated crime and teen pregnancy rates to increased numbers of itinerant laborers—are problematic in many communities and place greater demands on public services. [Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production 2008, pp. 58-59.]
 
8.42 Cultural Myopias. The legal, political and cultural myopias about the use and abuse of nonhuman animals as mere resources are attested in another way—one of the most discussed books on environmental issues in the last decades is entitled An Inconvenient Truth. [Gore, Albert. An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming. Rev. ed. New York: Viking, 2007.] Ironically, this book, which purports to honor the broad vision of “environment,” found it convenient to ignore entirely the negative environmental consequences of the factory farm industry. This failure helps explain why public policy discussion of “the environment” can be subordinated to powerful interests. This failure also confirms how the “convenience of corporations” called out in the 1965 Presidential Commission report already described was not merely a powerful force in the United States’ public policy discussions. It also provides yet another example of the problem called out in Pollan’s comment that “forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about.”
 
8.43 More on Human-Focused Problems. Indifference to human worker welfare goes much further to many other ordinary lives as well—a review of the 2004 volume Pricelessopenly asked, “Is the price of human life going down?” based on the book’s extensive discussion of different economists’ dollar quantifications and a trend from the year 2000 onward to reduce the dollar amount (from $6.1 million in 2000 to $3.7 million in 2002) given in response to the stark question “how much is one human life worth?” [Ackerman and Heinzerling 2004, at pp. 62 and 81.]
         As further elaborated in Part III, such outcomes are possible when there is poor education for, as Ackerman and Heinzerling state, “translating life, health, and nature into dollars is not a fruitful way of deciding how much protection to give to them. A different way of thinking and deciding about them is required.” [Ibid., p. 9.] At issue is much more than the law’s failures or those of formal education—lacking is broad insistence that we owe it to ourselves and countless “others” to live as committed citizens on the Earth we recognize as our larger community. Integral to such a broad vision, of course, is our sense of local place as a living reality to which we are constantly and irrevocably connected.
 
8.44 Details of Kyser’s arguments about the impoverishment of environmental law. The impoverished state of “environmental law” today can also be communicated by means of another insightful connection with which Kysar opens his hopeful discussion. 
 
For the late philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the entire Torah could be found, intricately enfolded, within a simple command—‘Thou shalt not kill’—which issues without words from the face of an other who first animates our consciousness and invites us into subjectivity. His was another way of saying that we do not know what all we might lose, once we cease to view the doing of harm as a personal and irredeemable failing, even if an unavoidable one. For Levinas, we are born into responsibility we can neither shed nor fulfill. [Ibid., opening line of Preface, p. ix.]
 
Here, yet again, is our animal finitude—we are ethical beings, true, but also very clearly immersed in connections to those “others” who animate our consciousness in the places we know. These connections contain dimensions of encounter and responsibility that are often, experience shows, rich beyond our finite abilities to comprehend. Such is our animal awareness, both an opportunity and a humbling finitude--who, indeed, are the others about whom we might  care? And how might each of us use our finite abilities to care and know in our encounters? Finitudes abound as we go about our own personal answer to such possibilities brought by the animal invitation. Here the very heartbeat of meaning and meeting are one and the same.
         Kysar’s thoughtful analysis provides many different reasons that the last decades’ wrestling with the possibilities of environmental law offers hope—Kysar explains in his Preface, for example, why he challenges features of contemporary environmental law.
 
This book was written to oppose a way of thinking that has come to dominate environmental law and that stands in deep tension with these ideas. The book’s central argument is that in order to recognize and consider our most pressing environmental questions, we must inhabit an agent-relative conception of governance—one in which our particular political community is acknowledged as a reflective and responsible subject, imbued with an identity, a history, and a legacy still in formation, and capable of reasoning through its obligations not only to its own citizens but also to those who reside in other communities. So too must those other communities be conceptualized as more than mere empirical givens or rationalist automata: The other and the environment of the other must again become of paramount and searching concern, whether the other we glimpse is removed geographically, temporarily, or biologically. [Ibid.]
 
Kysar’s Introduction then opens with this challenge to the current narrative playing out in those circles that dominate environmental policy in the United States.
 
By now, the story of modern American environmental law has redacted into a familiar script, one in which the excesses of our early attempts to regulate the human impact on the environment came to be disciplined by the insights of sound science and economic reasoning.... The script is now so well rehearsed and broadly endorsed … a major component of the United States’ intellectual export trade. Through multilateral treaty negotiations and within international forums, ... the United States constantly urges the view that efforts to protect the environment and human health must be preceded by an empirical justification derived from scientific risk assessment and tailored to reflect only the level of environmental or human health protection that is acceptable in light of corresponding costs. When regulation is justified, the story goes, it should be devised in a manner that works with the market, rather than against it, deploying taxes, tradeable permits, and other economic instruments that afford maximum flexibility to private actors as they respond to the government’s environmental policy dictates. [Ibid., p. 1.]
 
Kysar challenges this narrative, however, as yet another “forgetting.” 
 
However useful this script may once have been, it now actively impedes efforts to understand and improve our environmental performance. Its logic and conclusions have begun to appear so powerful that we have lost sight of a great deal of practical and moral wisdom that remains alive within our early, “excessive” efforts to conserve natural resources, reduce pollution, save species, and enhance human health and safety. The familiar story has caused, in essence, a forgetting of environmental law, a loss of appreciation for why the subject of environmental law is, after all, urgent. [Ibid., p. 2.]
 
As with the other, diverse “forgettings” mentioned in this volume, such forgetting entails the risk of our becoming cut off from the very world we have inherited from our ancestors and hope to steward for future generations. 
 
Soon enough, the language of instrumentalism that animates our talk of tradeoffs, efficiency, and welfare maximization will become so dominant that we will lose facility altogether with these alternative and once-resonant languages. We will forget that we once talked of environmental rights, rather than optimal tradeoffs; of the grave challenges posed by uncertainty regarding potentially disastrous or irreversible consequences of human action, rather than of risk aversion and the option value of delay; of the stewardship obligations we incur on behalf of future generations, rather than of discounted welfare maximization …. In short, we will forget the richly contoured and sometimes convoluted but always essential moral and political landscape that lends meaning to those aspects of environmental law that appear nonsensical from the perspective of economic theory. [Ibid.]
 
Kysar notes that some of the early accounts of sustainable development and the precautionary principle contain key insights about community and the importance of self-transcendence. 
 
Such notions of decidedly collective responsibility are well demonstrated by the original German articulation of the precautionary principle, Vorsorgeprinzip, which translates literally as the “principle of prior care and worry” and which includes notions of “caring for and looking after, fretting or worrying about and obtaining provisions, or providing for.” Through these relational constructs, the precautionary principle offers a subtle but constant reminder that the relevant political community’s decisions express a collective identity—an identity that the community must in an important and unavoidable sense own. [Ibid., p 64.]
 
In these comments, Kysar underscores that the two-word phrase “precautionary principle” in its origin was other-oriented, that is, oriented to other communities and their individuals, as well as future times. When these features are foregrounded, such a principle can nurture humans’ considerable abilities to act as “plain citizens” in a more-than-human world; such a well-lived version of this principle can make our legal systems a mainstay of efforts to protect and promote what Berry called “the larger community [that] constitutes our greater self.”
 
8.45 Governments as “owners” of unclaimed nonhuman animals. 
Today, it is common for large political entities, such as a state or province, to declare the government as the legal owner of all the “wild” nonhumans within the political entity’s borders. This notion of ownership has, at the level of political entity, some peculiar features, given that “ownership” often is associated with “control.” Political entities such as a state or province hardly control the wildlife within their boundaries in the meaningful sense that an individual might be said to control the nonhumans he or she “owns.” The state or province does, however, control which individuals are granted the legal right to hunt wildlife within its borders. Not dissimilarly, legal systems around the contemporary world enable industries to hide from public view the nightmarish realities of the daily life of the food animals raised and slaughtered for consumption in modern societies, thus holding in place the erasure of these lives that Pollan described as “forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque.”
 
8.46 Modern Law and Wild Animals. The fact that such an approach to other living beings continues to dominate contemporary law explains in part why so many law students in, for example, the United States encounter the fox that was the subject of the dispute in Pierson v. Post [Pierson v. Post, 3 Cai. R. 175 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1805).] as representative of wild animals generally—catch them and they are legally your property.
 
8.47 Animal Law courses in relation to Environment Law courses. As a practical matter, the newly emerged field of animal law is often separated from the older field of environmental law because, to the surprise of non-legal educators, the histories and substantive content of these subfields differ significantly. In many contemporary law schools, for example, each of these topics is taught as a stand-alone subject with no overlap with the other topic. Conceptually, however, environmental law is a broad category that works inclusively regarding the more-than-human world, and thus plainly is relevant to all the key topics for anyone who explores how the law impacts other-than-human animals.
 
8.48 Owned Companion Animals and Limits on Circuses. An example is the emotionally charged issue of better protections for owned companion animals. This area is, to be sure, only a limited “success” because great problems remain in the handling of non-owned companion animals. Literally, millions of dogs and cats, for example, continue to be put to death in over-populated shelters simply for lack of willing members of the public who can give these animals a protected life. This problem strongly hints that what is being respected is human ownership—in an important although subtle sense, then, this subdomain of animal law still reveals a persistent and pervasive human exceptionalism. Additionally, there have also been successes in barring travelling circuses in some countries.

Additional Materials for
Chapter Nine “Education and Other Animals--
Seeing the Pluralism

9.1 Each local econiche which an individual may happen to explore is a kind of gathering room, if we but notice this. In a forest, for example, the connections suggest an astonishingly rich range of communal realities. 
 
Outside the laboratory, the complexity of the relationships among trees and other species increases by many orders. Decisions are made in these networks based on flows of information involving thousands of species. The chickadee’s culture looks simple in comparison. It is therefore not just the balsam fir tree that thinks but the forest. The common life has a mind. To claim that forests “think” is not an anthropomorphism. A forest’s thoughts emerge from a living network of relationships, not from a humanlike brain. These relationships are made from cells inside fir needles, bacteria clustered at root tips, insect antennae sniffing the air for plant chemicals, animals remembering their food caches, and fungi sensing their chemical milieu. [Haskell 2017, pp. 39-40.]
 
9.2 Chrysalides—Specific Cultures, Particular Places, Unique Times. Education in small-scale human societies illustrates a number of specific attitudes and practices that enable humans as they live in one of the countless local places in this more-than-human world. While the examples that follow suggest diverse lessons regarding how self-transcendence is a key to fuller self-actualization, earlier chapters have already included stories of ancient humans watching wolves in order to emulate them in some way—a set of robust abilities to imitate or ape another is, in fact, one of our birthrights as members of the biological group composed of more than twenty-five different ape species that share a common ancestry. [See the list of 26 different ape species and much relevant information at https://outforia.com/types-of-apes/, accessed 26.2.14] Such abilities to copy are, in a minor way, an illustration of how individuals and even groups can enrich their own self-actualization through different sorts of imitation and borrowing. Emulation of this kind raises another important possibility, however, for it calls our attention to a key principle--the more wide-ranging our observations of other animal communities, the broader will be our encountering of new, helpful forms of self-transcendence, and thereby we may also be afforded additional possibilities of self-actualization. A gathering place, then, can in this way be a chrysalis. Thereby, each of us who intentionally spends time in such a gathering place can become the kind of animal that regularly experiences prompts to growth. 
       In previous chapters and their supporting additional materials, discussion has focused on a diverse array of different human cultural and religious traditions—Apache, Potowatomi, a native Swahili-speaking tradition, Cherokee, Japanese indigenes, natives of the Indian subcontinent, Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Thai, Estonian, Finnish, Irish, Haudenosaunee, Arabian peninsula indigenes, Oglala/Teton Sioux, Lakota Sioux, indigenous Chinese groups, Tsitsistas/Cheyenne, early Buddhists and Jains from the South Asia, Rock Cree, Anishinaabe, Ojibwe, Dineh/Navajo, Tiwi, Tswana, and Chickasaw. Below are additional comments about the Chewong of Malaysia, Inuit/Tikigaq groups and Naskapi of Canada, and the Yolngu and Tiwi of the Australian continent.
         While no list of examples can adequately represent the diversity of human cultures on the question of human-nonhuman interactions, engaging a wide range of cultures, places and time periods is one way to affirm how fully human it has long been to engage other-than-human animals. Similarly, no list of specific animals outside the human species can represent the astonishing diversity of all life on Earth. Thus, even after broad exploration of our species’ truly astonishing cultural and individual diversity, and even after addressing dozens of different forms of nonhuman community, our kind of animal needs humility-infused caveats to help us maintain perspective on what it means for us to engage the nonhuman “others” who live in, near or removed from human communities. When the important role of humility is foregrounded, the gifts available through engaging multiple human cultures and a diverse array of human groups’ views about their nonhuman neighbors can arrive. Such gifts help open up minds closed down by the stereotypes, self-inflicted ignorance, and conditioned ethical blindnesses that are the foundation on which human exceptionalism is based. These gifts are what prompt claims such as Derrida’s “thinking perhaps begins there” and Lévi-Strauss’ suggestion that other animals are “good to think,” as well as various forms of “animals make us human” comments considered in Chapter 7.
         Relatedly, experience will reveal again and again that grasping the breadth and depth of the views that prevail in another culture is no easy task even for the most educated and sensitive humans. The history of anthropology has shown that on many occasions even the best-intentioned field researchers, let alone desk-based scholars, often completelymisconstrued the worldviews of humans in other cultures. Beyond humility, however, there are other important keys in keeping an open mind—pursuit, imagination, constant checking with colleagues, and an ability to unlearn. These are, in fact, the same virtues needed to develop the patience necessary for noticing and taking seriously the realities of the nonhuman animals in one’s local world. The overlap in the virtues needed for, on the one hand, cross-cultural learning and, on the other hand, recognizing the diverse manifestations of the animal invitation is no mere coincidence. Unfamiliar “others” demand these virtues. In summary, even when one works hard at acquiring skills in both perception and thinking, and whatever one’s “intelligence quotient” for learning about cultures other than one’s own, difficulties will abound and only sometimes abate. Crucially relevant to such difficulties is that the very act of engaging these challenges teaches one that it is the very attempt to see other cultures that introduces new possibilities, realities, dimensions and valences to humans’ responses to the animal invitation. Correspondingly, when an individual notices and takes seriously the animal invitation as it occurs in that individual’s own local world, such self-awareness can stimulate our own and other humans’ astonishingly powerful animal minds. Such efforts reinforce each other, thereby expanding further an individual’s ability to engage other cultures and, also, explore contexts where the animal invitation is noticed.
         With these hopes and caveats in mind, some additional perspectives found commonly in humans’ seemingly countless cultures are discussed below in order to underscore the imagination and responsive perceptiveness of such achievements. The number of different cultures that have existed is impossible to estimate with precision, but since the number of living languages is often estimated in the range of 6-7000, the total number of cultures that ever existed clearly is at least in the five-figure category but quite possibly in the six-figure category. [On the number of languages, see William J. Sutherland, “Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species,” Nature 423, 276-279 (15 May 2003) refers to “6809 living languages.” For an estimate of living cultures in the range of 1500, see Macmillan Library Reference USA. "The Encyclopedia of World Cultures." 1999. Macmillan Library Reference.] Without question, the fact that the modern field of history developed as a “discipline” by focusing on only some human spheres (the Greeks and Romans of classical antiquity, especially as that story was told by Greek sources, then Roman sources, and then European-based observers) has produced hurdles—for example, accounts of human achievement that were Eurocentric in the sense of either ignoring or distorting greatly the achievements of non-European humans (African, American, Asian, Australian, and more) in the development of human cultures. The upshot is that each human alive today lives in a time of continuing retrieval of our species’ past. 
         When the larger story is explored, we find not only countless discoveries, but also that our received stories about “our” past distort dramatically—one element of the distortion relevant to this book’s exploration is that our inherited historical narratives discount, dismiss and even disdain both the realities of nonhuman living beings and the many human cultures that worked at paying attention to the many different kinds of more-than-human beings who have always been neighbors to our kind of animal. Because the discipline of history became more sophisticated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by virtue of including “history from below” [Described in Waldau 2013, pp. 44-45 and 247-253 with reference the early 20th century historian Marc Bloch.], in the early twenty-first century it is possible to see more clearly our human heritage. We may even begin to glimpse what our history would look like without the distorting lens of human exceptionalism. One can then begin to imagine a broader, more-than-human world—for example, if one had been born into one of the communities in the Hopewell culture of North America during the decade between the birth of Jesus of Nazareth and the death of the Roman emperor Augustus, one would likely have matured into a community that was building large earthen mounds in the shape of many different nonhuman animals. [Henry W. Henshaw’s 1883 publication Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley has much relevant information.]
         In another area of the world entirely, the Chewong people in Malaysia have long lived in ways that suggest a fundamental openness to other animals’ realities. 
 
The Chewong cosmos does not harbor a sense of human superiority. In fact, their language apparently does not even possess a term for that all-inclusive category “nonhuman animals.” [These comments and the additional observations in the next paragraphs are based on the account in Suzuki, David, and Knudtson, Peter 1992. Wisdom of the Elders: Honoring Sacred Native Visions of Nature, New York: Bantam, 107ff., in a section entitled “Each Species Sees the World Through its Own Eyes.”]
 
While the Chewong do categorize similar animals together—they talk of kawaw (birds), kiel (fish), and talòden (snakes)—many Chewong as they go about life within their own traditional communities grant a distinctive identity and name to each animal in the rain forest. Children in the community are not taught to use any all-embracing term comparable to the artificial category “nonhuman animals” because, in the world of the Chewong, human beings are recognized as only one species among many different kinds of animate creatures. In terms of the dualisms that dominate so much of today’s mainline religion, legal systems, scientific practice and anthropocentric ethics, the Chewong reveal that some human cultures are not invested in a dismissive dualism. Their teachers thus do not mislead Chewong children with binaries like “humans and animals.” A Chewong child learns from elders and observation that each creature has its own perspective, its own lifeway, and, they would say, “different eyes” (med mesign). 
         The Chewong, then, by virtue of being born into (or, to use Haraway’s term, situated in) their culture, are introduced early and easily to an idea that today prevails in many philosophical circles—there is a certain relativity in human meaning, notwithstanding the power of our special human perception, that is evident in the way each human, and even more so in the way any human group, perceives the world. The Chewong culture accommodates the corollary insight that there are nonhuman points of view, and thus the Chewong worldview permits a conclusion that accords with the view of modern science that each individual has a limited range of perception based on that individual’s biological realities. [For more on the Chewong, see the Encyclopedia of Peaceful Societies at https://search.uncg.edu/?q=Chewong accessed 2026.2.14.] 
         Moving to another one of our planet’s eco-universes (the higher latitudes of North America and the northeastern edge of Asia), one finds many different Inuit groups that have been studied by academic anthropologists and others who have provided accounts of the manner in which one particular Inuit group or another has engaged their local world and the animal invitation. It is important to acknowledge that such accounts may or may not be accurate, for even when the modern academic establishment asserts that research-based academic writings of anthropologists represent “knowledge,” some native or indigenous peoples, as already noted, have come to view “research” as a dirty word. The conflict between, on the one hand, an account created by a situated academic researcher and, on the other hand, an account created by a differently situated Inuit group can be profound. One way to negotiate this complex debate is to take each of these competing positions as an invitation to learn and unlearn. Tom Lowenstein offers an account of some bare bones features of Tikigaq life in Point Hope, Alaska. [Lowenstein, Tom 1993. Ancient Land: Sacred Whale: The Inuit Hunt and Its Rituals, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.] This account opens the door to a worldview where land, humans, other-than-human animals and life choices are woven together by inherited stories that are as formative for this particular group of Inuit humans as are the human exceptionalism narrative and its companion dualism “humans and animals” for the rulers and educators that dominate today’s industrialized cultures. “Tikigaq” is a place name, which is one reason Lowenstein focuses on a very specific locale—known in western culture’s geographical lexicon as Point Hope, Alaska—and “the myths and rituals that explained the supernatural genesis of the peninsula.” 
 
Tikigaq, said the myth, was once a whale-like creature. Killed by a primal shamanic harpooner, the whale lived on—part body, part spirit—and became the peninsula.[Ibid., p. xi.]
 
In important ways, Lowenstein explains, this particular landscape was clearly experienced as land, but still mythologically seen as an animal. This people’s conception of the past includes a time “when humans were animals and animals were people.” [Ibid., p. 62.] Indeed, for the Tikigaq, the orcas that frequent the area are invitingly understood to be “part human.” [Ibid., p. 73.] One can only imagine how differently education about orcas proceeds in such a culture compared to those cultures where capturing and exhibiting orcas is taken to be humans’ right.
         The Naskapi people of Eastern Canada experience invitational features in their engagements with other-than-human lives that are helpfully understood in terms of these humans’ notion of Mista'peo or “Great Man,” a companion to each individual equivalent to the familiar notion of the soul. The Naskapi teach their children that Mista'peo is driven away from one’s inner realm by dishonesty, “whereas generosity and love of one’s neighbors and of animals attract him and give him life.” [See Jung, Carl G., ed., 1964. Man and his Symbols, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 160-1.]
         On the other side of the world, one can find the ancient Jain culture of the Indian subcontinent that for millennia has modeled that a human group can choose to live in ways that protect as many forms of life as possible and thrive thereby. [Chapple, Christopher Key 1993. Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.] 
         First nations living in the Australian continent comprise a diverse population divided into many hundreds of groups with relatively simple material cultures but profoundly rich views of connection to particular places and a group-identity anchored in complex kinship systems, rituals and religious mythologies.
 
Aboriginal culture is particularly striking in the ways in which it affirms the land as sacred and the ways in which it relates human beings to the land and to other species of living beings…. [T]he land in which they live is alive with meaning. [It is] necessary to know the land to know oneself. [See Kinsley, David 1995. Ecology and Religion: Ecological Spirituality in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, p.23.]
 
Kinship beliefs are clearly not confined to our own species, but, instead, feature a sense of interconnectedness that has affinities with contemporary ecological notions.
 
… every person is related in complicated ways to a variety of other human beings, each of whom is also related in different ways to certain animal and plant species. Every Aborigine defines himself or herself in relation to a particular animal or plant species, and that person’s relationship to other human beings and other animals is guided by this definition. [Ibid., p. 30.]
 
This has extremely important implications for marriage candidates and what one can eat, as one cannot marry within the totemic clan or eat one’s totemic animals with only a few exceptions.
 
… totemic identity tends to break down the distinction between human and animal and plant. It is foreign to Aboriginal thought to think of human beings as absolutely or essentially different from animals and plants. … In effect, Aboriginal totemism asserts that human beings are animals and plants, that all three have identical ancestors, and that humans share an essential identity with other forms of life. [Ibid.]
 
The upshot is that a great many stories told by different aboriginal Australian peoples relate how humans and many other living beings, including insects and plants, descended from the same ancestors. So an individual’s relationship with his or her totem
 
is best understood as social and familial rather than utilitarian. … [T]otemic identity extends one's horizons beyond the human species. According to Australian Aboriginal totemic thinking, one is not only a human being. Having a totemic identity affirms that one is essentially and vitally connected to other species, that a crucial solidarity exists between each human and the wider world of other living beings. [Ibid., pp. 30-31.]
 
Another example drawn from the Australian continent’s native people known as the Yolngu reflects their understanding of humans in relation to other animals.
 
The Yolngu way of being in the world is about paying attention to, speaking with, and understanding animals as a part of regular life…. The experience of language as something that is shared with all beings, not solely amongst humans, is a near universal assertion across communities, historical and contemporary, who recognize ecological sentience and live with/in more-than-human worlds. [Sepie, Amba 2017. “More than Stories, More than Myths: Animal/Human/Nature(s) in Traditional Ecological Worldviews.” Humanities2017, 6(4), 78; http://doi.org/10.3390/h6040078. Accessed 2019.11.3. The quoted sentences are the second and third sentences of the article.]
 
There are other reasons that so many Australian natives notice and take other animals seriously. Learning to hunt leads to “great skill in learning movements that would not scare the animal away.” [Kinsley 1995, p. 31.] It is perhaps counterintuitive for some in modern, urban societies who care about companion animals that hunting can produce connection. But among these native Australians, acquiring “hunting skill involves identification with the animals that are hunted. ... not only practical skill but what we might term mystical awareness.” [Ibid.] Similar comments are made by the pioneering environmentalist Barry Lopez who says in Arctic Dreams, 
 
The focus of a hunter in a hunting society was not killing animals but attending to the myriad relationships he understood bound him into the world he occupied with them. He tended to those duties carefully because he perceived in them everything he understood about survival. [Lopez, Barry Holstun. Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. New York: Scribner, 1986, at page 200.]
 
The Tiwi, an indigenous people on islands that are part of North Australia whose name means “we, the only people,” did not consider outsiders who lived somewhat nearby (Australian aborigines from the mainland, or Malays) real people. [Hart, C. W. M., and Pilling, Arnold R., 1966. The Tiwi of North Australia, New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, at pp. 10, 13.] Many other societies both large and small made such distinctions between themselves and other human beings. The people today popularly known by “Navajo” called themselves Dineh or “the people” in their own language. [Nielsen, Marianne O., and Zion, James W. 2005. Navajo Nation Peacemaking: Living Traditional Justice. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, p. 17.] The ancient Egyptians made “a distinction between ‘men’, on the one hand, and Libyans or Asiatics or Africans, on the other. … In other words, the Egyptians were ‘people’; foreigners were not.” [This point is made by John A. Wilson in his essay “Egypt: The Nature of the Universe” in Frankfort, Henri, et al, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1949) (originally published as The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, 1949, University of Chicago Press), pp. 39-70.]
         Although the views of indigenous peoples were, as noted above, often derided as those of unsophisticated “savages,” one anthropologist after another has observed that indigenous peoples carry worldviews that are as fully complex and rich as are the views of citizens in industrialized societies—Lévi-Strauss includes in The Savage Mind, as notedalready, the observation regarding the Ojibwa Sioux that “the natives themselves are sometimes acutely aware of the ‘concrete’ nature of their science and contrast it sharply with that of the whites.” On the same page, Lévi-Strauss quotes a member of that community.
 
We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better. The white man has only been a short time in this country and knows very little about the animals; we have lived here thousands of years and were taught by the animals themselves. … [O]ur ancestors married the animals, learned all their ways, and passed on the knowledge from one generation to another. [Lévi-Strauss is quoting Jenness 3, p. 540, about Ojibwa Sioux. Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1966 (originally published in French in 1962 as La Pensée sauvage). The Savage Mind, trans. by (not indicated), Chicago: University of Chicago, at 37.]
 
Countless other examples could be used to illustrate that not only is it possible for human cultures to live and thrive on the basis of an inclusivist, more-than-human sense of community, but, further, that such an arrangement has often been deemed the fullest actualization of human potential. It is even possible to argue that most humans have, in fact, lived in cultures that imagined such an inclusivist community.
 
The invention of settled agriculture, which began in western Asia around 10,000 years ago, eventually put an end to most hunting and gathering cultures, terminating a vast epoch of human history. Few people realize that of the estimated 80 billion people who have lived on the earth, only 4% have lived in industrial societies like our own, and a mere 6% have lived in agrarian civilizations. The rest, a full ninety percent, lived as hunters and gatherers in primal horticultural or shamanistic cultures!  Or, put another way, for the 2 million years that men have lived on earth, ninety-nine per cent of the time was spent as hunters and gatherers. [Johnson, Willard L., 1986. Riding the Ox Home: A History of Meditation from Shamanism to Science, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, p.44. For a more recent estimate (2014) in the range of 112 billion, see https://www.quora.com/How-many-human-beings-have-ever-lived?redirected_qid=11581482 (visited 2018.4.16).]
­
Some will insist that modern life is superior to the lives led by our hunter-gatherer forebears described in this and the previous chapter, but no matter how each of us chooses to construe these highly generalized facts, it remains clear from both our species’ own history and our contemporary societies that human individuals and groups can choose forms of living that foster co-existence with nonhuman individuals and communities. 
         From the vantage point of practical ethics as lived on a day-to-day basis, respecting other animals that one deems, either on the basis of one’s own experience or because of an inherited cultural narrative, to have their own worldview creates important possibilities. One such possibility is what an indigenous scholar has referred to as “an implicit environmental ethos,” that is,
 
an ethos that leads one to fundamentally different emotions about how we ought to relate to the environment, apply technology, and generally live with the earth. The worldview attendant to this ethos requires one to speak of a moral sphere that goes beyond merely thinking that morality is about the relationships you and I have as human beings. Morality and politics have to do with a reality that involves relationships we have with other-than-human persons of the biosphere and the ecology we (human beings) are part of. [Wildcat, Daniel, “Indigenizing Politics and Ethics: A Realist Theory” in Power and Place: Indian Education in America by Vine Deloria, Jr., and Daniel R. Wildcat, 2001 Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Resources, 87-99, at 93.]
 
9.3 The Benefits of Addressing Such Failures. Given that, as argued in Part II, the success of our crucial enterprises of science, ethics, religion and law depends on each being suffused with our living, animal qualities, establishment education in its modern guises is a problem because it deadens these living features. The most obvious consequence today is the avalanche of harms our species causes to both nonhuman animal communities and vulnerable human communities. Other consequences for human individuals are subtler—failures to fully self-actualize, an impoverished imagination about human abilities, an over-fascination with material wealth and consumer goods, and a radical, multifaceted failure to recognize that each human necessarily lives in a more-than-human world. It is a challenge to list all of the ironies that exist when formal education is premised on some version or another of human exceptionalism, but the net effect is clear—modern education has not foregrounded humans’ capacities to be responsible citizens in a more-than-human world.
         The benefits of addressing these evident weaknesses of formal education would be profound. Foremost among them is that frankness about such failures would increase the possibility of achieving formal education’s most basic purpose, namely, developing in each human robust senses of awareness and responsibility regarding our place in our more-than-human home. Addressing such weaknesses would also create prospects for growing our sciences, ethics, religion and law into ever deeper achievements. This is why Chapter 5 noted that hallmarks of living science are that it (i) fosters recognition of how our own animality situates us in profound ways, (ii) works on the basis of its integrities to discover the realities that humans and other animals share, and (iii) uses its wide and deep virtues to approach the realities of other animals that are not shared with humans. In a similar vein, Chapter 6 observed that a hallmark of living ethics is that it makes obvious that each human can deploy her or his own animal abilities to inquire and care about other living beings in our local world and beyond. Parallel hallmarks are noted in Chapter 7 regarding living religion’s ability to recognize and work with obvious truths, such as humans’ animality, membership in a more-than-human community, and respect for our species’ astonishingly diverse penchant to pursue a religion of our own choosing. Living religion also enables its adherents to search for and welcome a commitment to explore additional, related facts about both animality and humans’ religious inclinations—in a phrase, the heartbeat of religious life is animality. Finally, Chapter 8 identified a characteristic of all living law—it nurtures the chance for each individual to enjoy a life of connection and relationality rather than suffer exclusions prompted by a self-serving hierarchy or an exceptionalism that results in profound harms and exclusions of the local community of life. 
         In their living forms, these four human domains help us recognize how to answer honestly “Are we smart enough to know how smart other animals are?” Sometimes human cultures have been “smart enough” to work toward producing insightful, evidence-based answers to the question of how intelligent other animals might be. But when the educational establishments of our contemporary cultures are not deeply invested in noticing their own biases, the net effect has been forms of human exceptionalism that exacerbate the problem of failing to teach our children the benefits of an open, humble, inquiring form of inquiry that is the key to all good education.
         Notice also that invitations in a variety of contexts can go beyond the animal invitations already described. This happens because any animal is always in a local place that is more-than-animal in many ways. These more-than-animal features of the world often astonish us when we take the time to notice such features of our local world. So consider how ironic it is that modern formal education marginalizes the crucial role played by fully acknowledging our relation to living beings outside our own species. 
 
9.4 Plant-related awarenesses. Interconnection is also evident in the Chapter 5 references to the 2013 work of the indigenous scientist Kimmerer carrying the subtitle “Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants.” That plants might teach an individual human is not a common theme in formal education, but consider why and how this possibility has impressed a wide range of humans. A modern scientist’s testimony to the astonishing impressions created by some individual trees appears in Steve Sillett’s comment after climbing a 350-foot redwood tree as he studied the environment of the forest canopy—“[it] makes you realize that there’s something much greater than yourself, so much vaster than you.” [Sillett’s comment is made in the last fifteen seconds of the short (2 minutes, 56 seconds) video available at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WMxqrRkFRU. Accessed 2012.11.24.] Many different individual trees have long been held sacred, [See, for example, Haberman, David 2013. People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India. New York: Oxford University Press.] and there are developed discussions about applying important ethical concepts to trees and other plants. [See, for example, Hall, Matthew 2011. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: SUNY Press.] 
There are many other sources cited in earlier chapters—such as the works by Keltner, Macfarlane, Simard and Haskell—that reveal remarkable features of the earth community’s plant life. 
 
9.5 More Forgettings—Animal Exhibitions as Entertainment. Consider public spectacles that make possible proximity to various nonhuman animals by pulling exhibited nonhuman individuals out of their natural context for exclusively human-centered purposes.
These involve both for-profit enterprises and publicly-supported nonprofit organizations that must sustain themselves through admission fees. In one sense, zoos are “the better half” of this phenomenon, but all of the versions of this practice are premised on a radical subordination of the animals exhibited for humans’ viewing pleasure. Even the best accredited zoos either explicitly or implicitly claim that our own species is so important that we can dominate other animals as we exhibit them for our benefit. Few zoo visitors walk away with the sense that any nonhuman animal is as deserving of moral protections as are human animals—one observer noted “the exploitative dynamics of spectatorship” in a zoo, as well as the “tensions between empathy and otherness.” [ Malamud, Randy 2003. “How People and Animals Coexist.” Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan 24, 2003, B7-9, at p. 7.] Others have observed, “The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters” [Berger, John 1977. ‘Why Look at Animals?’, in About Looking, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, pp. 1-26, at p. 19.] and “Zoos collect inconveniently wild specimens from the four corners of the earth and put them in convenient cages, thereby celebrating people’s control over—not, as [a zoo advocate] claims, appreciation of—animals and their world.” [Ibid., p. 8.] What in effect happens through exhibition is that, unless there is full disclosure of these problems, zoos “sanitize” “the processes underlying exhibitions of captive animals.” [Ibid.] Berger asserted the relevance of a comparison of such captivity to certain human-on-human harms. 
 
All spaces of enforced marginalisation—the ghettos, the slums, the asylums and concentration camp—have something in common with the zoo. And the zoo is a reflection of the relationship between man and animals, nothing more. [Ibid., p. 24.]
 
A study published in 2010 concluded, “there remains no compelling evidence for the claims that zoos and aquariums promote attitude change, education, or interest in conservation in visitors….” [Lori Marino, Scott O, Lilienfeld, R. Malamud, N. Nobis, and R. Broglio. “Do Zoos and Aquariums Promote Attitude Change in Visitors? A Critical Evaluation of the American Zoo and Aquarium Study,” Society and Animals 18 (2010): 126-138, opening line of last paragraph.] To be truly educational, zoos must enable children and adults to identify all features of captivity, not merely a few selected “advantages” that exist in isolation but which, when considered holistically, in fact cause serious harms. Our children would be better educated if we frankly named the serious downsides of holding nonhuman animals captive. Similarly, everyone is better educated when a society encourages frank discussion of the slovenliness of the language habits employed by zoos that obscure the obvious downsides of captivity.  Plain talk about humans’ relationship with, and consistent domination of, nonhuman animals is crucial to prompting inquiries about how to address the obvious shortcomings in our current understanding of other animals. Such questions have another advantage—they help each of us see the pronounced problems that modern human cultures produce for nonhuman animals. Education of all kinds, if it is to achieve anything, must alert all of us to the real world. 

Additional Materials for
Chapter Ten “Re-Walking the Shared Earth Community”​

10.1 Orcas threatened. Orcas, for example, are threatened in all of their many habitats through depletion of prey species, pollution and oil spills, habitat disturbance caused by human-generated noise, and collisions with boats. [Reeves, R.; Pitman, R.L.; Ford, J.K.B. (2017). "Killer Whale: Orcinus orca". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2017: e.T15421A50368125. Accessed 2026.2 14 at https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/15421/50368125.] Comparable anthropogenic problems impact all of the species of our fellow great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans), all three species of elephants, and the majority of orcas’ cousin cetaceans (about 100 species). As Chapter 5 mentioned, our species’ dominance has produced conditions framed as the sixth “great extinction” event that rivals the previous catastrophes for life on Earth caused by large extraterrestrial objects devastating our planet’s living communities.
 
10.2 More on Henry Bergh. This charge against Bergh prompted a reply from the rapidly expanding American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals asserting the contrary, namely, that embracing animal protection was “a new form of goodness.” [Freeberg 2020, 5.] While this reply might also have cited much else—our ancient past, on-the-ground realities in still existing indigenous cultures, and animal-protective values and practices in recent centuries—the fact that the negative description of Bergh as a “traitor” to humans was newsworthy reveals how human exceptionalism as a dominant narrative can prompt de-racinating forms of forgetting that deprive us of full awareness of long stretches of our own species’ history.
 
10.3 Children as Guides. Children remind us of who adults once were, but also more. Being in their presence can also help adults connect to who we still are, who we want to be, and, in Mary Oliver’s invitational framing, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Adults may, of course, feel insulted by any suggestion that they should stay connected to their “inner child.” But adults have often mis-understood children—as Melson notes, for example, “children's ties to animals seem to have slipped below the radar screens of almost all scholars of child development” even as “a few pioneering therapists were reporting startling results about the power of animals to affect emotionally troubled children.” [Melson 2001, 12.] Addressing the ferment we exist amid, Melson refers to E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis and observes, “many cultures, including our own, are elaborating a natural attraction children have to animals.” Cognitive psychology, Melson notes, has “uncovered” the fact that each child has “a naïve biology” or 
core domain of knowledge about living things. Its first glimmers are discernible in infancy, and by the preschool years, far earlier than Piaget thought, this knowledge base, particularly about animals, already is well established. [Ibid., 14.]
     This feature of young humans’ lives suggests one reason the animal invitation stays with some people, for as Melson summarized, “every human child begins life situated in what adults call ‘the animal world.’” Some cultures permit children to grow in ways that nurture this feature of life. But one feature after another in today’s industrialized cultures discourages this—consider Freud’s observations in his well-known 1913 volume Totem and Taboo, where he demeans both children and “primitive” humans on the basis of their connection to other-than-human animals.
      The relation of the child to animals has much in common with that of the primitive man. The child does not yet show any trace of the pride which afterwards moves the adult civilized man to set a sharp dividing line between his own nature and that of all other animals. The child unhesitatingly attributes full equality to animals; he probably feels himself more closely related to the animal than to the undoubtedly mysterious adult…. [Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Knopf/Vintage, 1918, 164.]
      Freud was wrong, a victim of his own culture’s virulent brew of myopias, biases, and wishful thinking—there is no sharp dividing line between, on the one hand, humans and, on the other hand, all other living beings. The genetic overlap that comes with our “inner fish, reptile and monkey” produces body architecture that ensures intelligence, emotions, and communal inclinations in both us and our many of our close evolutionary cousins. We live in shared econiches, and we exterminate “them” (other animals) at our own peril. 
     Those who, like Freud, are in the sway of the stilted logics that lead to human exceptionalism might not notice how Freud’s reasoning ignored completely that children are, through and through, animals when they are born, as they grow, and when they are senescing adults. Freud had been misled by his culture’s dominant assumptions into blindly assuming it to be normal that “education” soon enough prompts children to distance themselves from nonhuman others by focusing on humans alone. Such results are accomplished by teaching children that, only if they no longer notice and take other animals seriously, will they be accepted as an adult. If, on the other hand, a child continues to notice and take other animals seriously, and if the child thereby discovers features of some nonhuman animals not noticed or taken seriously by the adults in their world, the exploring child is likely to find their adult nurturers unreceptive, certainly unsympathetic, often critical. Some children react negatively, demurring much as did the Little Prince in Saint Exupery’s classic, “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children always and forever explaining things to them.” [de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine, The Little Prince, New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1971, translated by Katherine Woods, p. 4.] But for most children in today’s industrialized cultures, the die is cast, and soon enough they will feel the ever-increasing pressure to join the ranks of the large majority of adults who pass along the “wisdom” of human-exceptionalism and ecological ignorance. It can be no source of wonder, then, that many children learn to ignore the nonhuman world in order to gain favor in the adult human world. 
     It is, however, intriguing that a significant number of humans in their daily lives today surmount such “education,” for they do not stop noticing the animal invitation when encountering a nonhuman neighbor. Other sources of hope appear as well—for example, Melson wonders openly about the possibility of revising cultural values by beginning with children. [Melson 2001, 21.] Louv, who gives one chapter the subtitle “Education as a Barrier to Nature,” states powerfully the correlative worry that children are being removed further and further from the natural world by a peculiarly insensitive combination of factors—fears, laws, technologies, and, above all, ignorance of the effects of such a removal.
     Honoring Tectonic Forces. The very terrain we walk is constantly manifesting underlying, tectonic forces, for within the human collective’s awareness of this planet there are different continents moving and colliding. Such collisions can also be recognized withincontemporary humans’ lives, where a natural curiosity about other lives pushes up against a great variety of exclusivist narratives. While dominant values can prevail for centuries at a time, a recognizable pattern is that one prevailing worldview after another has been subducted, as it were, with the result being that new terrain then awaits future human awareness. This image of moving, subducting continents changing the face of the Earth can be used capture something else altogether human and modern—the destruction that is the result of the ignorance produced in many cultures by human exceptionalism’s deeply impoverished views about the more-than-human world. Our kind of animal, however, retains its native potential for awareness of the larger community. The image of tectonic forces can also be used to bring home why we sense the ground changing beneath some contemporary attitudes such as racism, sexism, and other radical exclusions of human groups. At the level of individuals, both exclusions—that of other animals and that of disfavored humans—dilute human possibility, for we have deep-seated, eminently animal needs and possibilities in the matter of encountering both human and nonhuman “others” in their local world. 
     An environmentalist estimated in the 1980s that the de-population of rural areas in the United States resulted in “the loss of cultural information” which “is far greater than all the information accumulated by science and technology in the same period.” [Jackson, Wes 1987. Altar of Unhewn Stone: Science and the Earth. San Francisco: North Point Press. At p. 11.] Consider how even greater losses to the human collective were inflicted by the loss of so many unique indigenous cultures during the seventeenth thru twentieth centuries in South America, North America, Australia, Africa, Asia and Europe. The destruction of disfavored human and nonhuman communities may be only dimly sensed in the conquering nation, but as one scholar summarizes such extensive changes wreak damage that is hard to overstate.
      War and dislocation of human communities do more than cut relationships in the present moment. Exodus of people from the land erases the embodied knowledge of a place. Waorani people [an Amazonian tribe] displaced by industry, North American Indians killed and evicted by colonists, Judahites removed to Babylonian exile, Palestinians after the nakba, and even the peacetime depopulations caused by the unprofitability of farming: all these cause the memories embedded in the connections between people and other species to fall out of existence. Exiles can write down and preserve what we carry in our minds, but knowledge created and sustained by ongoing relationship dies when connections are broken. What remains is a network of life that is less intelligent, productive, resilient, and creative. [Haskell 2017, p. 238.]
 
Frankness about the Impacts of Cultural Loss. Such on-the-ground tragedies for whole human communities are not mere abstractions for present-day humans—destructive developments in the past have a continuing life of cascading problems, for “We inherit and live within these dislocations and losses.” [Ibid.] On the ground and in community after community, then, harms that arrived in the recent past can have a continuing life that impoverishes each and every human in foundational ways. The observation that “extinction breeds extinctions” (Chapter 5) reveals that while recovering such deep losses is a formidable challenge, there are often additional negative consequences in the wings. One author, however, sounds a note of hope about humans working together in response to harms done to the networks of life in degraded forests—“In remaking connections, though, we stitch life back together, increasing the network’s beauty and potential.” [ Ibid., pp. 238-239.] The potential for recovery is not, we are reminded by a South American indigene (a member of Shuar people of Ecuador and Peru), sourced in reading about now-gone communities, for “What is written dies; only what you live in relationship survives.” [Ibid., p. 239.] There is reason to hope then, for in local worlds on a daily basis it remains possible through intentional actions to nurture “others” inside and beyond our own species, for relationships are nurtured primarily through the living qualities of each human’s life choices in a particular place and time. 
     In this vein, consider a further dimension of life on Earth that can teach humans how deeply and widely community can be found in the many realms that feature our Earth’s abundant living beings. The following is a description of the prevalence of relationship in a non-animal form of Earth’s living communities, namely, trees—“networks of relationship and conversation through which the conjoined lives of trees and people can be understood, remembered, and tended.” [Haskell 2017, p. 239.] Here, there is an inkling of a wider “we,” and intimations of the power of the pronoun “we” as a reference to all living beings on Earth being integrally connected. Such an idea is a rediscovery of an ancient vision that some modern humans are only beginning to consider. Our ancient forebears were comfortable with “we” as a more-than-human pronoun, as is implied in the omatakwiase invocation alluded to above and the encompassing vision of the Axial Age sages. 

Who Are the Animals that Make Us Human? There remain in humans’ connections to companion animals, without question, great substance that is evident when Melson quotes a pioneering mid-twentieth century thinker on animal issues regarding companion animals as “a glimmer of animal ambience, sacredness, otherness” that is now lost. [Melson 2001, 28, quoting Paul Shepard.] Note the similar theme in a comment about possibilities offered by familiarity with the more-than-human world. 
      
"Nature—the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful—offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot. … Nature presents the young with something so much greater than they are…. Without that experience, … 'we forget the larger fabric on which our lives depend.'" [Louv 2005, at p. 98. The closing quote is from the psychologist Louise Chawla.]
 
For those who have already progressed to human adulthood, it is possible to recognize that, as children, we were educated in ways that impacted both the depth and breadth of our awareness of the animal invitation. Many subjected to such an impoverishing indoctrination have been decisively shaped, thereby becoming the end-product of a number of long-standing, culturally-mediated processes that trained (“educated”) us in ways that narrow the universe of who and what might be included in the human collective.

In each person’s daily acts, however, remains the power of choice, and thereby each of us is afforded countless opportunities to nurture a more-than-human world.