Sons of Herding Culture
Both science and religion are massive institutions, each employing millions of people and spending billions of dollars on projects that are all, in theory, intended to bring increased health, ease, security, understanding, meaning and happiness to our lives. The domestication and herding of large animals for food was a revolution of reductionism. Its distinguishing feature was the inner and outer act of reducing: reducing powerful wild animals to confinement and routinized slaughter, and reducing human respect for animals and nature in the process. Our forebears became predators of reduced prey—herded animals who were commodified and guarded and then stabbed and decapitated. They themselves became reduced and desensitized predators disposed to generating similarly reductionist scientific and religious institutions to validate their attitudes and behaviors.
Early science was used to manipulate livestock bloodlines to maximize flesh, milk, and wool output, and religion was used to justify and even mandate the slaughter of animals for food. These are precisely the institutions we have inherited and that operate today and live in us because we continue to eat foods derived from reduced animals.
It’s helpful to realize that conventional science and religion, while often feuding bitterly with each other, are in actuality strikingly similar in their underlying assumptions. They are two proud sons of the herding culture, and they both tend to reinforce the reductionist mentality required of those who inhabit their father’s culture. This mentality is required to sustain the practice of enslaving and eating large animals, and to support an economic system based on exclusion and exploitation. It’s instructive to see that while rare individuals have been able to transcend and uplift these scientific and religious institutions to a degree, the institutions themselves typically exert pressures that reinforce the reductionism required by the herding milieu.
Conventional reductionist science flatly denies the existence of any reality beyond what can be physically quantified. This materialist mythos ignores spirituality and the mysterious adventure of consciousness, and tends to reduce both animals and humans to mere survival machines propelled by genetic and chemical forces. It intrinsically reinforces the delusion that beings struggle and compete in a universe that is devoid of any innate meaning or purpose. This has made reductionist science a potent tool of the wealthy elite and the military-industrial complex it controls.
Science and Slavery
In stripping away the inherent meaning and worth of animals and nature and reducing life to material processes, genetic programming, and operant conditioning, our own meaning, our worth, and our status are redefined in terms of how efficiently we serve the ends of the economic/political complex. Reductionist science cultivates the cold and calculating eye that validates reducing beings to numbers in the cost/benefit analyses carried out by industrial economists and military strategists. It has helped legitimize the herding culture’s practice of commodifying animals and nature and, by extension, each other and ourselves.
Reductionist science serves the herding mentality faithfully. …Just as ideas of supremacy justified the cruel Nazi experiments, they also justify the cruel experiments we perform by the untold thousands every day on defenseless animals. …Capital, cattle, riches, war, and exploitation of nature, animals, and people stand on the same foundation today as in the old herding cultures. They continue today in high-tech form aided by the reductive mythology of science.
We learn to cast this unsympathetic gaze on those outside our species, our race, our country, class, gender, tribe, religion, or sexual orientation, and particularly on pigs, cows, coyotes and other “food” or “nuisance” animals. We may look with softer eyes on certain species of “pet” animals, of course; it is fascinating and instructive, for example, to go to a science conference and hear from scientists themselves which animals they can vivisect without qualms. Some can work only on rats and mice, others can also work on cats, but not dogs or monkeys, others can “do” rabbits but not cats, and so forth. Where do we draw the line, and why?
By promoting illusions of objectivity, disconnectedness, reductionism, and materialism, and by encouraging researchers and the public to discount the suffering that sensitive creatures experience in its name and at the hands of our culture in general, science has done the herding mentality an enormous service, and the animals a monumental disservice. In this, it has done us human animals a disservice as well.
Reductionist science practically defines our culture and self-image today, and though it has brought undeniable material progress and comfort, it has become a formidable force for our own enslavement as well. Science is not just the source of technological devices that entertain and comfort us, or that distract and addict us, or that pollute and potentially destroy our world. It also invents devices that can directly control us, as it has done with animals.
Microchips have already been tested and developed on animals, and versions of them are being widely implanted in both wild and domestic animals and increasingly in humans. …the microchips now being inserted into people with Alzheimer’s and other medical conditions contain health records and personal data and make people “scannable just like a jar of peanut butter at the supermarket checkout line.” They can make us into objects, easily trackable and controllable like the microchipped breeding sows and dairy cows we use and eat ourselves.
Creating a science that authentically serves us rather than endangering, distracting, and controlling us requires a fundamental shift in our orientation away from the conventional reductive mentality that sees physical matter as primary and consciousness as merely emerging from it. When as a culture we stop seeing beings as things but as the conscious subjects of their lives, we will naturally create a more empowering science based on the primacy of consciousness and the interconnectedness of living beings.
Until we stop reducing animals to food objects, reductionist science will wax stronger and more deadly because it is ultimately a reflection of ourselves. The entire outer world is a reflection of our inner reality, and war and distress in the world will cease as we eliminate war and distress within ourselves, our mental orientation, and our daily lives.
The mental orientation of separation and reduction that underlies the conventional scientific method and that we were all saturated with as children continually blazes forth in our culture’s meals, lives in our cultural attitudes, and manifests in the mirror of our world as the pain and struggle we experience and inflict on others.
Conventional Western religion, like Western science, evolved within the same milieu of reducing and commodifying large animals and tends to be similarly reductionist in its essential orientation. The infinite divine mystery is typically reduced to a judgmental and often anthropomorphized authority figure; humans are reduced to self-centered, discrete temporal entities who may be chosen or saved or condemned to eternities of hell or heaven based on one fleeting lifetime; and animals, trees, ecosystems, and all of nature are reduced to being mere disposable props in this drama.
Like science, the religious establishment has tended to reinforce the domination of animals, women, and nature, and to further the interests of the ruling elite. Like science, it tends toward being hierarchical, patriarchal, and exclusivist, and like science, it tells us to rely not on our own inner wisdom, but on its outside authority. Like reductionist science, which insists on the objectivist split between self and world, conventional Western religion insists on the primary dualism of Creator and creation, God and the world. This belief in a basic disconnection between the divine and all of us reinforces the illusion of separateness that is also propagated by reductionist science.
The reductionist delusion of essential separateness is so ritualized in our daily meals that it inevitably thrusts itself into our religious lives. We are often told as children that we’ll be excluded from heaven unless we subscribe to a set of exclusivist beliefs! Mainstream religious teachings typically tell us we are special if we agree to an exclusivist creed. They rarely question our violent food choices but rather encourage them by declaring that animals have no souls and that God gave us animals to eat.
By interpreting the transcendent divine as masculine, conventional religion deifies the masculine the same way science does, and suppresses the feminine, which nurtures and connects. Even today, when there is virtually no theologian who would dare argue that the infinite Spirit that is referred to by the word God could be said to be more male than female, we still teach our children, as we were taught, that He is the Lord. In the old herding cultures, it was males who warred, herded, and raped, and it is basically the same today. By emphasizing the masculine nature of God, the herding cultures legitimized their ethos of domination, cruelty, and killing.
The Myth of Evil
The basic view promoted by conventional Western religion is of an unending battle between good and evil, with God as a male sky-dwelling deity on one side and Satan as a shadowy, malicious, bestial presence on the other.
We repress our awareness of our cruelty and consequently find ourselves plagued by a dark and sinister presence. This is unavoidable, because the evil we see is our own denied and unadmitted cruelty, from which we can never distance ourselves. It emerges as devils, enemies, wars, and weapons of mass destruction.
Animals and the earth are seen as mere properties and stage for this cosmic battle, at best; at worst, animals and the earth (and women, and minorities) are seen as somehow in league with the dark, shadowy devil and therefore rightfully “subdued.”
This lurking sense that we are basically evil, one of the characteristic traits of our Western culture, is a mainstay belief propagated by the religious establishment. It isn’t necessary, though, and there is plenty in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible to refute it.
In the Eastern religious traditions, which tend to discourage meat eating and animal herding and are somewhat less dualistic than our Western traditions, this fundamentally positive orientation is well established. In Buddhism, for example, it is a core teaching that all sentient beings have “Buddha-nature,” that is, that all beings are expressions of completely enlightened consciousness and can realize this directly through spiritual growth and understanding. This basic goodness is seen as our true nature and is the foundation of our spiritual practice. Many increasingly progressive strands within Western religious traditions similarly recognize that human nature, and all nature, is a reflection of divine love and is essentially good. Our spiritual path consists of contacting this inner light and purifying ourselves to be lambent vessels for its luminous presence.
The idea that we are fundamentally evil goes as completely against this universal idea of our original goodness as our ugly practice of confining and killing animals goes against our innate sense of kindness. The herding culture we were all born into carries an enormous reservoir of hidden guilt for the ferocious savagery it inflicts on animals for food, for the abuse and hardening of its boys, and for the violence it propagates against women and against rival herders and nations. This systematic cruelty and the repressed but healthy sense of compunction that naturally goes with it are the source of our cultural belief that people are inherently evil. The deep-seated sense of guilt, fear, and anxiety arising from this infects all of us unconsciously and causes us many problems, physically, mentally, and spiritually.
The revolution desperately needed today, if we are to survive, is a transformation of the basic orientation of the herding culture into which we were born: from a mythos of death and reductionism to a mythos of life and holism.
A transformation of science and religion and economics, releasing them from obsolete reductionism and orienting them toward furthering and celebrating universal compassion and the interconnectedness of all beings, is possible when we change our daily eating habits and the mentality of disconnectedness they require. Although we are products of the herding culture, we can heal it and ourselves through understanding. This understanding requires a change in our behavior because our behavior strongly conditions our consciousness. The science and religion and economics of holism, kindness, sustainability, and community begin with this.