An Unnatural Order with Jim Mason

[00:00:06] Mariann Sullivan: It is great to have you on because I read your book a really long time ago, your book An Unnatural Order. It was very formative in my trajectory about how I started caring about animals. I think it first came out in 1993, and I was probably a few years after that, but not that many years after it.

[00:00:22] Jim Mason: There's a new revision, you know, 2021. I don't know if you've seen that.

[00:00:26] Mariann Sullivan: I do know that. Yeah. And I have read the new revision as well. By going back to the 90s, I'm just trying to make the point that it had such a huge impact on me and you go into the history of humanity. I mean, you go pretty deep here into the history of humanity, focusing to some extent on Western thought, but going back much further than that and just unpacking how the hell we ended up where we are, about animals and other things. So when you wrote this, it was a fairly big undertaking, it was like the history of humanity. Why did you decide that we had to go that far back to understand what we were doing to animals?

[00:01:02] Jim Mason: Oh, that's a good one. Well, when I started thinking about it, writing about it was in the early 1980s. Animal Factories, the book with Peter Singer, had just come out. That came out in 1980. And in the aftermath of that, in the months after the book came out, I became really curious about animal domestication.

Even though I was raised on a farm, I never really thought about where do cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, where do they come from? And I realized that their ancestors were wild animals and that they were somehow captured by humans and made into docile creatures for the barnyard and for our tables.

So, I was so curious about that. So I started reading all I could get my hands on about the beginnings of animal domestication and make a long story short it begins about 12 or 13, 000 years ago with sheep and goats on the mountain slopes of what's now southern Turkey and northern Syria. That's where sheep and goats were first brought into human captivity and then not long after that the animal husbandry part of it begins.

Once they had control of the bodies of animals, physically captured in pens and barns, then they began to manipulate the sex lives of the animals. So they'd look at the sheep and the goats and say, Oh, what if we had a thicker coat or longer hair on that goat? And they began to selectively breed to produce the desired results.

So that's when we really took absolute control over every aspect of the lives of the animals. It took me about 12 years to read everything that I could find to try to put it all together and come up with the storyline that's in the book An Unnatural Order, which is really the story of the domestication of animals and the story of the beginnings of human supremacy and how we came to think the way we do about the living world and about ourselves as this supreme being over everything.

[00:03:01] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. Going way, way back, can you just give us a brief description of how you believe life was for humans who were not that much different, you know, at the point where they had evolved sufficiently, so they were not that much different from who we are, what their lives were like before agriculture?

I mean, I guess there's the development of plant agriculture and the development of animal agriculture, which are very different events. But, before any of it, like, how do you picture it?

[00:03:28] Jim Mason: Before agriculture, we were, we used to say hunter gatherers, but the more appropriate word today in anthropology is foragers. That is, we lived out in the world, out in nature, with minimal shelter or minimal clothing and we found food or we knew where to find food. If we lived in a certain ecosystem, say the temperate zones like what's now Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, as the Native Americans did.

They had a really good knowledge of where to find the food and the fruits and nuts and berries and seasonal wild grains and things like that. Native Americans didn't have domestic animals, of course. They had rudimentary plant agriculture, but they didn't have animal domestication, but anyway, so we lived before agriculture, before 12- 13, 000 years ago, we lived as foragers.

We lived out in the natural environment. And it's important to note one of the things I discovered when I was researching the book is how important animals were to the human mind when we lived like that. Think about it. If you can think back 12, 15, 20, 30 thousand years ago when we were living in caves, there was no television, there were no books, there was no entertainment.

We lived mostly outdoors, sometimes in shelters, but we were exposed to the larger environment 24/ 7. So we would see animals, we would hear animals, we would become familiar with their habits. Most importantly, we would see them doing things in their daily lives that reminded us of ourselves.

They were familiar to us with emphasis on familiar as in family. They were seen as kinfolks because they slept, they pooped, they peed, they had sex, they died, they bled, they did all of the things that humans observed in their own world of human life. So, there was a sense of belonging, a sense of relationship with other animals.

And if you know anything about the cosmology or the worldview, or what we call the religion, of so called tribal peoples, that is pre agricultural peoples, animals are very important to them. They draw pictures of them. In fact, the very first art in history or prehistory are the paintings on the walls of the caves in southern France and Spain.

All the scholars have been arguing ever since about what this meant. Why did they do that? Well, I found the best quote that says it all from a art historian, Lord Kenneth Clark, who's passed now, but he wrote quite a bit about the paintings on the walls of the caves. And he said this about it, that the painters were saying what they thought about animals.

They were telling us they admired them. They admired their strength, their speed, their agility. He said, I wish I could tell you the exact quote. I'm going to have to look it up. He said, this is what we admire in our kin folks. This is what we would like to be like. These animals impress us. We are in awe of them.

It wasn't that they worshipped animals. It's just that they admired them so much and they felt a sense of kinship to the living world because of that relationship that they felt. And I don't know how much thinking was involved because they weren't people to sit down and write books, but they felt it and I think that's something that was lost when we domesticated them.

And that's the most important idea in the book is what was lost in our relationship with primarily animals, but, in effect, the rest of the world. So we alienated ourselves from the life in the world by setting ourselves up as the supreme being. We call it speciesism. I call it human supremacy or dominionism.

There's a lot of words, but basically it means we're not part of the world. We're over everything and it belongs to us.

[00:07:23] Mariann Sullivan: I have a pretty large reproduction of a piece of the cave paintings in Lesko in my living room. I think probably because of your book, and what I read about it. And when I got it, I kind of Googled like what people felt about what these paintings meant, and every article I found was that they were practicing on how to hunt them, on how to kill them.

It was insane. As if they're going into the depths of these caves and what was obviously a very spiritual kind of, I don't know whether spiritual is the right word, but a very deep kind of process, where it was very, very difficult to do this. And this was the one thing they were painting. And they were saying, it was like a diagram for how to hunt! It just seemed so crazy, and it makes me sad sometimes when I look at it, that that's what people think they are when they're clearly like, holy in some way. This has a lot to do, you mentioned that we don't talk about hunter gatherers anymore, we call them foragers, but there's still this, like, myth of man the hunter, that that's, that's who we were and that's why we developed into something more.

Why is that all wrong?

[00:08:30] Jim Mason: You brought up the common belief that the painters were depicting animals that they like to kill and eat. That's been thoroughly disproven. I can't remember the name of the anthropologist, but somebody identified the various species that were shown on the walls. The oryx, which is the European bison, and the other animals, and they found out that actually they didn't hunt those animals.

They depicted those animals because of their power, and their energy, and what they felt about them in the world. They weren't the species that they killed and ate because they know what they killed and ate from the bone piles, the remains that they found in the caves, and it wasn't the animals depicted on the walls.

So yeah, that myth of the painting the hunted prey has been disproven. But anyway, to answer to your question, I'm sorry, what did you ask me again? I rambled and then I forgot what you wanted to talk about.

[00:09:27] Mariann Sullivan: I mean, I guess you've kind of covered it in talking about the paintings, but I think we still very strongly have this idea that hunting was the thing that advanced human culture.

[00:09:37] Jim Mason: That's it.

[00:09:38] Mariann Sullivan: That man the hunter was this crucial step in the development of humankind.

[00:09:44] Jim Mason: Well, that's worthy of lots of discussion and in anthropology, it's a much debated topic, how important hunting was. I think, there's no real resolution to it yet that I know of. It's just that you come up with this. It depends on the environment. If there were people living in Arctic regions where plants don't grow, of course they're killing seals and whales and everything that moves, but that's not the whole of human existence.

The people that live in those climate zones have not been there that long, in evolutionary terms. In fact, I've read that the Arctic peoples and the polar peoples have only been in that area, maybe five or 6, 000 years, and they were forced into the uninhabitable zones, as they were into deserts, because of population pressure.

So if you look back to our origins when we separated from the other apes, what they called divergence, and again, there's a lot of controversy about: when was that? Was it five million years ago? Was it three million years ago? I've looked at all the numbers and it's not settled, but I settle on the number 5 million when we began to be more human than ape.

And how do they know that? Why do they say we became more human and ape? A couple of features. One is we walked on our hind legs and began to use tools. And we began to roam farther away from the homeland. We began to leave Africa and explore the rest of the world. So one feature that doesn't show up in the archaeological remains is what was their thinking?

What were their minds like? And I think the only thing we can say is that they were much more curious than the other apes. They were puzzled by things and they were always roaming around looking at new stuff. They were curious and that's one of the things that motivated them to leave Africa and move into Asia and Europe and the rest of the planet.

So in that system, in those days, we probably didn't kill yet. Some say that we didn't start killing animals for about several million years after that. So the first few million years of hominid existence, we lived like the other apes. We were fruitarians, vegetarians, we didn't kill yet. So how do we start eating meat?

They think as they roamed around the world and they found themselves in an uninhabitable ecosystem, they ate whatever they could find. And they might come across the remains of an animal killed by a predator. And they would start sampling, you know, the carcass. And then when they discovered fire, they would learn to cook that.

So they developed a taste, an appetite for meat. And then some say that because of their watching animals so carefully, they learned to hunt from observing animals. Animals taught them how to hunt. And it's a very intriguing theory, and of course it'll be debated to death. But the point is, in some areas, in some climates, hunting became more important than it would have been if we'd have stayed in Africa. But we were always foragers.

[00:12:47] Mariann Sullivan: Clearly, like, the further north you go.

[00:12:50] Jim Mason: Well, Native Americans, even though they're depicted as the great warrior hunters of the plains, killing buffalo and all that, the bulk of their diet was still plant based. And, there's an important study done on the !Kung San people of South Africa, formerly called the Bushmen, which is a disparaging term not used anymore, but a couple of anthropologists named Lee and Devorah studied their diets back in the 1940s.

They lived with these people, and they found that 80 to 90 percent of their food intake was plant based, mostly nuts and berries and shoots that they found in the desert, not animals hunted. But yet I saw a coffee table book that had a beautiful color picture of a nearly naked man with a spear, and it was called The Hunters of the Kalahari Desert.

And these are the same people that were studied to show that most of their diet was not meat. Interesting.

[00:13:44] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, it's interesting. It's really interesting. It's like we constantly have to be defending this and making up stories to say this is what we should be doing.

[00:13:54] Jim Mason: Well, not to add to that, but I point out in the book that most of the anthropology was written by men, and men tend to worship hunting because it's primarily the male pursuit, the male contribution to the food supply. So when they studied so called primal people, primitive people, of course hunting seemed larger to them than gathering plants.

[00:14:18] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, you actually coined a term misothery. I hope I'm pronouncing it the way you want it pronounced, but you related a lot to misogyny. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by misothery and how it relates to misogyny?

[00:14:31] Jim Mason: Good, good question. Thank you. Well, misogyny means hatred of women, taken from two Greek words which mean the same, woman hating, and I couldn't find a word to say the same thing about animals, so I sort of stole from misogyny and came up with misothery, and it's also from Greek words meaning hatred of animals. And what it does, for culture, it demotes a being.

In the case of women, it reduces their status. It takes away their dignity. All of the thoughts that are misogynist about women reduce them in status and power and grace and dignity. They're all insulting labels for women. And I've seen the same thing regarding animals. And the best example I gave in the book is how the mass media refers to a particular heinous crime, like a vicious, brutal rape or murder.

And in the press to this day, they still call them animals. And I think the most recent example was, not too many weeks...

[00:15:33] Mariann Sullivan: You still see it all the time.

[00:15:35] Jim Mason: Yeah, Trump referred to migrants as animals, as if they're just like loathsome, disgusting, wicked, evil beasts. And we needed a word like that because I thought speciesism was too soft.

It didn't convey the hatred and the contempt. So I thought we needed a word, kind of like, well, sexism is a light word for discrimination between the sexes, but misogyny really tells it like it is. It shows that there's an act of hate and contempt and anger towards women. And I thought we needed a word that said the same about animals, attitudes about animals that are hateful.

[00:16:14] Mariann Sullivan: I agree that speciesism, for one thing, people don't really understand what it means. And it sounds foolish to people and yeah, it's just not strong enough. So many of the words that we use are not strong enough to really reach people's true feelings about animals.

All these people are saying, oh, these, these migrants are, well, whoever it is that you hate, these rapists or whatever, but just a bunch of animals. These are actually people who care about animals, who love animals, and yet they can divide it in that way in their head. One of the things you point out that I thought was so interesting is that animals are so basic to human thought processes in ways that we do not appreciate at all, that I think the quote is, we probably would not be able to learn speech or thought without them.

That's the kind of mind blowing thought. Can you expand a little bit on what you meant by that?

[00:17:01] Jim Mason: Yeah, that's the most important thing that I got out of all this research, and it's the idea that I'm still trying to get across to the animal rights movement. And I put it like this, animals are more important than we think. It's hard for us to imagine how important animals have been to the development of our mind and our thinking and our speech and our language because of misothery.

Misothery blocks us from really understanding how important animals have been throughout our evolution. Remember what I said earlier back before agriculture, we lived out in the living world among animals. They inspired us. They fascinated us. They taught us how to hunt. They probably taught us how to eat meat.

They taught us a lot of things just by observing their behavior. And there's two books on this that I cite in my own book. One really was a breakthrough for me when I discovered this book written in the late 1970s by Paul Shepard, a biologist. He's gone now, but the book is called Thinking Animals, and I think the subtitle is Animals and the Evolution of Human Intelligence.

And his basic theory is that animals were so fascinating, so puzzling, so tickled our brains, so to speak, that it made us think. And taught us how to think and made us begin to use words and language. And another book that says as much the same is by the late mythologist Joseph Campbell, he wrote a, It's a coffee table book, but the title is The Way of the Animal Powers, and it's about pre agricultural people, so called hunter gatherer foragers.

And it shows, in words and pictures, how important animals were to the minds and the cultures of those people, because they were so familiar with animals. And of course you may be familiar with the word totem. Totemism is where a tribe or an ethnic group would have a special animal that spoke to them that would be like a leader.

And for the Plains Indians, it was probably the wolf or the coyote or the buffalo. Some of the most charismatic animal in their environment would become a totem. And they didn't worship this animal, but they gave it a lot of respect, and it played a central role in the culture that they formed. The dances, the celebration, the rituals, all had to do with featuring this totem animal.

And by the way, sometimes it was a hunted animal, and when they had to go out and hunt, say a prey animal, an antelope or a gazelle or a buffalo, they had to ask permission from the leader of the animal totem to them. They had to have ceremonies and rituals that was kind of like, not like prayer, but just to give permission to hunt and kill this animal that was so important to them.

So that shows that there was a lot of emotional conflict. They wouldn't have had to have ceremonies and rituals and all kinds of, you know, psychological gobbledegook if they wanted to just kill an animal without a thought, without a feeling. So I think it tells us that they had some guilt, some emotional tensions about going out and killing animals for food.

There's a lot there to understand in how important animals were during our evolution from ape to human. And I think that's been lost and I think that's what agriculture and domestication did to us. It basically tried to erase the importance of animals to the human mind.

[00:20:37] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, this is the real kernel of why I found this book so mind blowing. And, as you were saying that, I was thinking that often you see that kind of asking permission, you know, of the animal as kind of an excuse for hunting nowadays, whether it's Native American or not Native American.

I mean, it's just kind of as if there's a real understanding of what people then were going through when they had to do this or they felt that they had to do this and it was a really deep conflict. Whereas now I feel like it's kind of used as a performative excuse for, for a lot of people who just want to go out and kill animals.

There's no necessity to it. There's no really deep feeling and thought to it. It just makes it look better.

[00:21:24] Jim Mason: Well, another thought I expressed in the book and it's kind of far out. I felt a little bit tentative about expressing the idea that the primitive hunter gatherers didn't hunt so much for protein as they hunted for power. This is kind of a out on a limb kind of an idea, but I think it's true.

If they felt that animals had powers that they didn't possess, if they felt that they admired the animal's grace and its agility and its strength, maybe they hunted them to try to capture that power. To ingest that, because that's one of the thoughts behind cannibalism, that you kill your enemy and eat them, not because they taste good, but because they had courage and you want to take that body and eat some of it and get the courage of that creature. And I think they might've done the same with animals.

[00:22:13] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, that's really interesting. Going back to what you were saying, another thing I found really important to think about, when you were talking about pre agriculture and the step to agriculture and how it changed things. You make the point, unlike a lot of people I've heard talk about this, which is, you know, it's not an unusual topic, the development of agriculture and how it shifted humanity, but you really focus on animal agriculture.

Like, you don't seem to think that the shift to plant agriculture really had the same kind of impact. Am I right?

[00:22:44] Jim Mason: Yes, that's exactly right. And I've found only a couple or two or three anthropologists that noticed this. It seemed like all the emphasis, talking about the impacts of the agricultural revolution, focus on the grain fields of Mesopotamia and how they began to trade in grain and they began to develop irrigation systems and it led to the wealth of the early agrarian state which was ancient Sumer and the wealth of the Egyptians was based on the plant agriculture along the riverbeds of the Nile.

It was all focused on how plant agriculture created the wealth from the land, which made those societies big and powerful. And they built temples. And of course we admire all that stuff, but I found very little discussion of how animal agriculture in particular contributed to culture. And one writer, I'll try to give the exact quote, his name is Alfred Crosby, is a reference in the book.

His book is entitled Ecological Imperialism, and he writes about how the human species has taken over the planet as an imperialist. And he had a quote in there, he said that It seems like in the zoological sense, the number of animals domesticated was relatively small compared to all of the animals out there, but he said the impacts are all out of proportion.

Animal domestication is the biggest impact on the formation of western culture because of our taking power over animals. And very few others seem to notice that, that it was animal domestication in particular that caused the greater impacts. And there is a reference in the book to a study of herds people, they call them pastoralists, that's the people that live off of herds of sheep and cattle and goats and yaks and camels and everything else.

And they have peculiar characteristics in anthropology. One is it's pretty much a patriarchal culture, pretty much man centered male supremacist work. And the animals are regarded as property of the men because they own the herds. And that's where patriarchy comes from. And, another feature that they have in common, and there's a reference to the book on this, slavery and warfare.

Because they're always battling each other over animals and breeding animals. And they tend to raid each other for breeding animals. So, there's quite a bit of things that are special about the people who domesticated animals and then began to live off of them as herds people. So that needs to be looked at in anthropology because those are our ancestors.

Don't forget the Bible. The Old Testament was written by the Hebrews, and what was the Hebrew source of wealth? Sheep and goats. They were herds people. And all the references in the Bible and symbolism has to do with lambs and sheep and shepherds. So this is a culture, a shepherd culture, which gives us this idea of human supremacy as we see our supremacy over the flock, controlling its movements, alternately caring for the flock and protecting the flock and at the same time slaughtering and killing it and using it as property. That's our God.

[00:26:01] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, the shepherd, analogy has always really confused me. I mean, don't they know, like, when they thought of this story, that shepherds actually are raising animals to kill them? It's just so mysterious. I'm glad we got to this step, like the religions of the books and particularly Christianity, of course, Judeo Christianity, which, you know, we tend to think of sometimes as the beginning of this whole thought process. And it's actually comes really, really late in development. And it's not really that long ago that these words were put down and it has a lot to do with language and the way language was used.

And you point out, you know, the word dominion has been used by some in animal rights or whatever as a kind of benign, we should be just interpreting the word dominion more benignly, you know, as a caretaking rather than whatever it is, just owning and exploiting.

But you don't like the word at all, do you?

[00:26:57] Jim Mason: No. What is the word they use for the benevolent dictatorship of using animals kindly? Um, it's on the tip of my tongue. I can't think of it. It's in all, the animal agriculture community puts this out a lot that we should be gentle shepherds. The word will come to us because it's very, very common. But, I hasten to add that we can't blame it all on the Bible and the Hebrews and Jewish people. They were not the only inventors of herding. They were one of the many herding pastoral groups all across the Middle East.

And biblical scholars say that the Hebrew writers actually got their ideas from a lot of other people. The whole idea of the Garden of Eden, for example, comes from a myth in Egypt that had nothing to do with the Hebrew people, but they picked it up in their travels. So when a scholar sits down to write the first chapters of the Bible about a thousand B. C., they tell this myth of the creation theory that's expressed in Genesis, but that was a common myth around the Middle East at that time.

It's a typical agricultural myth and some think that it really talks about how there was a memory of a time before agriculture, when paradise was a forager way of life, when people were free to move about the environment and could find food growing on trees, and they didn't have to farm, and didn't have the drudgery of farming, and women didn't have the pain of childbirth, and all the ills of agricultural society.

That's expressed in Genesis. The loss of paradise, some say is a kind of a myth of the memory of what it was like before people were forced to settle down and farm and live in villages and live in one place all the time. Interesting theory.

[00:28:45] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I love that theory. I think it's fascinating and I think it makes so much sense that there was this memory of when life used to be good.

[00:28:53] Jim Mason: Garden of Eden was the forager life. And we lost it. We blew it.

[00:28:58] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I don't mean to pick on Jewish culture. It's just the one that has had the most influence on our religious development, because Christianity grew out of Judaism, but I'm sure this was just the way many, many cultures in that area were developing at the same time. And, can you just go, you went into it a little bit, but the creation myth?

Creation myths are really important in religions and creation myths of indigenous peoples are really different from the Judeo Christian creation myth and others like it. You know, the idea of heaven, the idea that we're in the wrong place and we're going to go to some other place and that wreaks a lot of havoc.

And can you just talk a little bit about the comparison between creation myths that maybe serve people and creation myths that like this one, that are really based on kind of regret?

[00:29:47] Jim Mason: I'm glad you brought up the creation myth because that's another piece of evidence for how important animals were in the evolution of thinking and the mind and language and culture. Because there's a field of anthropology that studies creation myths. And they all say this, they say that that's the single most important myth of any ethnic group.

The creation myth basically sets out the worldview for these people. And of course, the Hebrew creation myth is no different. You know, it says that God created the earth and he furnished the earth with plants and animals and the waters and all the stuff, and then he made us to enjoy it all.

And then he handed it over to us with a license to use everything. That's the creation myth. That establishes the basic relationship of us to the world. And when you look at the creation myths of tribal peoples, non agricultural peoples, the first beings are generally animals. It's striking how creation myths, whether you're looking at the creation myths of Native American Indians, the South American jungle people, or Asian, dwellers, uh, pre-agricultural people, their understanding of how the earth came to be, how the world came to be, the creation story is animals come first.

Animals were here, and then we followed them, and they taught us how to live. They taught us how to build shelter, they taught us how to build fires, they taught us how to live, and that's a very common theme in a lot of creation myths. So what does that tell us? That tells us how important animals were to the minds of those people.

And that's why they feature main actors in creation stories as well as the cave paintings. They were fascinated with animals.

[00:31:33] Mariann Sullivan: Our creation myth, you know, is kind of the opposite. I mean, the animals were created first, but only they were kind of just hanging around for that week, waiting for us to be created to have a license to use them. After those initial, uh, theories and the development of those societies, as Western society has developed, it's gotten even worse, right? I mean, there was this kind of development from we're allowed to exploit them to like, that's what we're here for.

[00:32:00] Jim Mason: Yeah. one thought, we can't just blame the Bible and the Hebrews for this story of human supremacy. It comes from Aristotle. The Greek thinker said the same thing, that everything was created for man's use. If you look at all the roots of our culture, and it's not only the Greeks and the Romans, but the Persians and the Egyptians, all the way back to the roots of Western culture, even the non Jewish, non Christian thinkers wrote the same stuff.

That humans are supreme and separate from the other animals. So, so we can't lay the blame entirely on the Hebrews and the Torah. It was just one of many beliefs of that place and that time that felt human supremacy. And it probably comes from the idea when we began to manipulate plants and animals and take control over forces of nature that we used to be fascinated by, they were thought to be like miraculous to us. And once we are able to control all of that, of course, that gives us a feeling of power over nature. Before we admired nature, we were amazed by the antics of animals and the annual cycle of plants and birth and regrowth.

But once we become farmers, we're controlling the sex lives of animals. We're controlling the growth processes that used to fascinate us. So that gives us a huge sense of power over the living world so that we feel supreme, superior to everything. Human supremacy.

[00:33:35] Mariann Sullivan: So, you also say that like, in how this has developed through Western culture, it's gotten even more so until we're at the point where we are today, which is complete and total insanity, regarding our treatment of animals. And you also say that the animal question is the key to the nature question. So, what would it mean to actually confront the animal question? And why don't people? This seems so important to so few of us, but it seems so unbelievably important. What would it mean to actually confront the animal question? It seems to me it would just make the world a better place.

What's keeping people from realizing that?

[00:34:13] Jim Mason: That is the $64,000 question!

[00:34:17] Mariann Sullivan: I guess that's not a fair question.

[00:34:19] Jim Mason: No, it's a wonderful question. And it's one I discuss pretty much toward the end of the book when I talk about how is it that all of these intellectuals and these great thinkers of the 20th century all have written about man's alienation from nature, and even today, because of the environmental crisis, we're talking about our spoiled relationship with nature, how we're alienated from the natural world, and this is the nature question.

What is supposed to be our relationship with the living world? And they're still pondering this. I've argued in the book that the reason they won't fully address the question is because they leave out the most important part of that, which is what to do about animals. They simply can't face the animal part of the nature question.

And when I say that animals are nature, more than one scholar, whether they're art historian or anthropologist, talk about how animals, in the human mind, animals are nature. One of the chapters in the book is called Animals, the Most Moving Things in Nature. When we see nature, we tend to express that in forms of animals.

When we want to depict animals and when we want to depict natural processes throughout history, even back to Egyptian hieroglyphics, it's the figures, the shapes of the bodies of animals that we use to say that. When we talk about nature, we actually show animals. They represent nature because they're the most important parts of nature and always have been to us.

So, when we talk about repairing the human relationship with the living world, with nature, and they can't even discuss animals as being the most important part of that, we're not getting anywhere. It's a dead end. So that's what I'm trying to call the shots on the intellectuals in that part of the book where I say, what's with you guys?

You're ranting and raving about how we can't come to terms with nature. It's because you refuse to address the animal question, which is how shall we treat animals? How shall we regard animals? And they can't approach it because their habits are so dependent, primarily eating chicken and pork chops and bacon.

And they know that if they even approach the question of how to deal with animals, it's going to go right into animal agriculture, right into their diet, which they don't want to think about. They don't want to give that up. It's a scary thought to them. The whole business of how do we regard animals? How do we treat them?

What do we do with them? So yeah, it puts them off. The short answer is they just can't deal with it. They're afraid of it.

[00:37:05] Mariann Sullivan: It's getting in the way of so much. I mean, it's certainly like the, the environmental crisis has turned into the climate crisis and it's becoming more and more dire and people are still just not grappling with this fundamental way of looking at this for reasons that just seem so completely inexplicable.

Like, are we really going to give up the planet because people like the way chicken tastes?

[00:37:27] Jim Mason: Well, you know, this is why I rant and rave about the importance of animals and the animal question and the importance of animals in the evolution of the human mind, because I think the animal movement is missing a powerful argument to engage the rest of society and say, look, you have no idea how important animals are to our coming to terms with what we've done to the planet.

I mean, the climate crisis, yes, primarily it has to do with fossil fuels. But then next in line is animal agriculture. And next in line to that is how we think about animals and the living world and how are we going to live here? How are we to live in a world that we're destroying? And so these are the things that need to be discussed if we're going to get out of the climate crisis, there's going to be survival.

I mean, you know, the worst case scenario, there'll be huge die offs in the population because there'll be food crises, there'll be environmental disasters, much of the cropland will be underwater and on and on it goes. And you're talking about the physical damage to the planet from climate change if the glaciers melt and the sea levels rise. There's that.

But on top of that is how we are going to... survivors, the few billion people that actually live through all of that. How are they going to carry on? Are they going to continue with the same worldview of human supremacy? Are they going to continue to think that they're masters of nature? I don't think they can go on thinking that way.

I think they have to realize that we screwed up. It's our mindset, our worldview, human supremacy has created all of this. It's created this exorbitant use of fossil fuels, this waste of land, inefficient food production, all the horrors that we've put to impact this planet is because we think we're so supreme that we have a license to do all of this.

We have to rethink that. And the people that survive this climate crisis, which, well, when will it be? 20 years, 50 years, 100 years from now, when there is a catastrophe, there're gonna be survivors and they're gonna have to reinvent the way we see the planet and our role in it.

Just trying to put that out there now.

[00:39:40] Mariann Sullivan: Well, it speaks to me so completely that everything, no matter how deeply people think about what we're doing to the world, unless you put animals I mean, I think of it sometimes as consciousness, putting conscious, I mean, the unbelievable miracle of life on earth is consciousness.

It's like this web of this extraordinary thing that all of these creatures are thinking and experiencing. And if we don't like start to respect, you know, I totally hear you. Like, that's the piece for me that if we don't respect that, if we don't see that, if we don't understand that that's the miracle, that's the miracle that we're living in the middle of, there's just no way to fix it.

And what drives me crazy is that people know this on an emotional level. People love animals. Not everybody. There's a psychopath among us, but, but most people love animals. They really care about them. They would never, ever harm an animal. And so people get it on a visceral sense. They just, it's just inexplicable that, that behavior does not.

All right, I'll, I'll, stop ranting. People people have heard me before.

[00:40:43] Jim Mason: There's a very important book that's part of this that I use a lot in my book. The title of this book is Nature and Madness, and it again is written by this biologist, Paul Shepard, who's no longer with us, but he argues in that book, and I use his ideas a lot in my book, that we really have a kind of madness.

And taking over the living world to be our property, that's a kind of madness in our worldview. That's alienated us from nature and animals. And we're living in a kind of a psychotic state, an unrealistic state, and that's madness. Our Western culture is madness. Madness, as far as our place on the planet, it's madness. Which is another word for insanity or psychosis.

[00:41:32] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, it's madness, also, it's not serving us in any way whatsoever. It's not making our lives on earth more beautiful. I mean, the day I stopped eating animals, my life became more beautiful. I mean, it just makes your life better, like, because you are letting go of that little piece of, of the harm that you're participating in, and that just feels great.

[00:41:51] Jim Mason: Absolutely.

[00:41:52] Mariann Sullivan: But it's hard to convey, isn't it?

Speaking of books and speaking of trying to convey this, you're working on a new book, right?

[00:42:00] Jim Mason: Yes, and the working title is a sort of two words, numbness and madness, and I was thinking of a title, A Kind of Madness, to describe our worldview. We are so alienated from the living world and our place in it. We don't even see ourselves as part of this world. And this is probably the worst aspect of the Judeo Christian ethic, which tells us that we're not even an animal, that we were some special creature that looks like God.

And I remember one, let me tell you an anecdote when I became an atheist because I was a farm boy and my main companion was my dog, Butch. And when I was about 15 or 16 years old, Butch was getting old and he was going to die. And I was so scared to lose Butch. So in Sunday school, and by, by the way, I was brought up in the church.

I mean, every hour the church had something, I was there. So I was thoroughly indoctrinated in the Bible. And I asked the preacher one day, I said, Will I see Butch in heaven? And he had a long face and a long pause, and he said, No, I'm sorry, because there are no animals in heaven. Animals don't have souls.

And I said, Oh my God, This has got to be a crock of shit. I do not believe this anymore. And I became an atheist before church was out, and I have been ever since. Because how can you believe in heaven and not have animals or companions? That's bogus. So anyway, that's a part of the madness.

[00:43:33] Mariann Sullivan: Was it Mark Twain who said, I don't, I forget who said it, but if dogs don't go to heaven, then I want to go where they go.

[00:43:38] Jim Mason: Yeah, sure, a lot have said that. A lot have thought that. So yeah, that was what tipped it over for me.

[00:43:44] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. Well, that was early on and it was really interesting, given where you grew up and your background, and I'd like to explore that a little bit more, maybe on our flock section, but for now, I just want to thank you. This has been, this is one of my favorite interviews ever.

You have so much that's important to say. I really want you to get to work on that book.

[00:44:03] Jim Mason: Thank you. Well, in the book I'm working on, it's going to tell a lot about my life as a kid on a farm and the cruelties that I had to not only see, but participate in, like trapping and shooting animals and killing animals as a farm kid. It's just part of the numbing process to get you to begin to see them as things, as property.

So there's that, but I'm also going to review and, revive some of the central ideas of An Unnatural Order about the history of domestication and how it shaped our view of ourselves in the living world and how it separated us from everything good in the world. So I'm going to have both tracks in the book, my life and my discovery of the evils of agriculture.

[00:44:52] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I am really excited. In the meantime, I encourage everybody to read An Unnatural Order. It's absolutely necessary reading for anybody who cares about animals, and wants to understand more about their role in our lives and their role in the world and our role vis a vis them. So, thank you so much for writing it, Jim, and thank you for joining us today.

[00:45:12] Jim Mason: Thank you, Mariann, for having me. I appreciate it.