Taxonomical abolitionism

“Jane, the last of the zoos’ chimpanzees, was released today into the International Chimpanzee Sanctuary, the only remaining captive habitat for Great Apes”. This could well be the headline of a news podsite –because there will be no newspapers or websites anymore then– sometime in the future, if the GAP (Great Apes Project) ends up been successful and brought to its final consequence. “Outside the zoo, a group of Gibbon Rights protesters gave their farewell to Jane in their usual fashion”. That could be the subtitle.

You know, from all the animal rights’ goals constantly labelled as idealistic by pessimistic observers –and as utopian by patronising cynics– giving to Great Apes equal rights to humans is the goal that could most likely generate an official and deserved “eat your words” reply from someone still alive today. After all, we share over 98% of our genes with Chimpanzees; we already know that mirrors trigger their vanity in the same way they trigger it to us; we know that they can love and mourn from fame and misfortune as we do; and if we give to them an equivalent of our talking throat –in the form of sign language or special computers– we know that they can be as boring as us at small talking. They look like us, they see the world like us, they metabolise the universe like us, and yes, they are capable to become thugs and murderers, exactly like us. Why not, then, treat them, legally speaking, like us.

I don’t mean treating them “exactly” like us. We don’t give the exactly same rights to all of us, do we? We give children of different ages different rights (sometime fewer than adults, such as the voting or the intoxicating rights, sometimes more than adults, such as “women and children first!” rights); different genders don’t have equal rights yet (not only from a feminist point of view, but from a pro-choice and custody point of view as well), neither have couples of different types (consummated, consecrated, cohabitated, etc.); the same occurs with “sane” people relative to people with a different sense of reality, good citizens relative to off-the-fringe revels, mainstream believers relative to sidestream infidels, guilty people relative to “with-reasonable-doubt” guilty people, etc, etc.

It wouldn’t be really such a bigger jump. Great Apes wouldn’t be able to be used in vivisection anymore (but they are already banned in this regard in a few countries), it would not be allowed to hunt them anymore (some people still do) or trade parts of them internationally (which is already banned), entering the forest where they live would be equivalent of trespassing (and destroying their homes would be criminal damage), and, of course, they couldn’t be kept in zoos anymore (or at least in captive environments where people would pay to see them “without their consent”). Economically speaking, the abolition of Great Ape legal discrimination would have a very little effect compared with the abolition of slavery, and philosophically speaking, we would find the same little effect compared with what “The Enlightenment” did to us. So, since we already have the scientific, economic and philosophical arguments firmly placed on very solid ground, it does seem that campaigning for the recognition of rights of Great Apes is certainly a “winner” objective achievable at relatively short term.

Why then, some people oppose to it? I’m not talking about the usual suspects –zoo keepers or vivisectionists– but just “people”. Is it such a bigger deal that one should always oppose “by default” to increasing our rights system with just a couple of species more? Jared Diamon and his “The Third Chimpanzee” bestseller, in which he postulates that humans are just the third kind of chimpanzee (after Bonobos and actual Chimpanzees), has proven that the idea is not that revolutionary –he even got away by not calling the book “The three humans”. We haven’t hesitated either to describe as “humans” the very short “hobbits” –or Flores Men– the fossils of which were recently discovered in the Indonesian island of Flores, and turned out to belong to a different species of human (Homo florensis) who was still living not that long ago. Oh well, perhaps is not that simple.

The fortuities of evolution have played an interesting trick to humanity by somehow fixing the way we look at ourselves making us very reluctant to increase the size of our “us”. We like to keep the “us” concept very small indeed. Everyone else is an “alien”, a “foreigner”, an “outsider”. If you are not with us, by definition you are “against us” –sounds familiar? We do seem to have some sort of inbuilt xenophobia that goes far beyond the “mistrust the unknown”, which is what all sentient beings with the capacity to judge quite sensibly have, and far beyond the Hamiltonian “only help your relative”, which every living thing in this planet quite primordially also has. Oh no, we go further. We are quite happy to mistrust the “very well known” and the “very much related” too.

So, what happened that make us like this? As far as we know, we are the only human species alive, but certainly that was not the case not that long ago. Relatively speaking campaigning for human rights in the last few centuries didn’t turn out to be that difficult, and it didn’t take that long to achieve some sort of official universal “agreement” (the “Human Rights Declaration”) despite the fact we have many different sizes, shapes and colours within humanity spread all around the world. That is because once we realised that, when mixing different “types” of humans together and interchanging their cultural upbringing, certainly they all seem to “breed” successfully with each other, and they all can pretty much achieve the same kind of success in the same kind of enterprises –if they wanted to, and we let them try. But that “rights” achievement actually happened by chance, and had we tried a few hundred thousand years earlier, it wouldn’t have worked. We modern humans happen to be genetically very close to each other, because “by chance” we all come from a very small population of humans that came from Africa and survived the last –but not first– humanity holocaust that wiped out the majority of human types. Before that, we had all kind of species of “humanoids” in different states of evolution spread for many places of Africa and Eurasia, each adapted to different climates and lifestyles, and perhaps unable to breed successfully with each other –which is the only real biological property that is part of our definition of “species”.

What would have happened if, instead of disappearing, most of humanoids we have found in the fossil records had somehow survived until today, not just the very few “sons of Eve”? Yes, I’ve said “Eve”, and I’m not taking biblically here. As it happens, if we study the DNA of mitochondria from as many modern humans as possible, we can trace all of us to a single female called by scientist “Eve” –which of course has nothing to do with the first “created” woman– who was the only woman that survived that holocaust who still has descendents today (and therefore there were other women before and after her whose descendents never made it to the DNA testing Era). Well, if all those different humanoids had survived we would pretty much be in a Lord of the Rings type of situation, wouldn’t we? Can you imagine trying to campaign for Middle Earth’s human rights in a world of hobbits, dwarves, elves, trolls, and even talking trees? Tolkien, being himself a human, probably wouldn’t have made his novel so appealing, and wouldn’t have devised his story in such a way that it is clear that most of types of “intelligent” beings who battle with each other in his world would eventually disappear leaving humans alone –because this is how we see ourselves, “triumphantly alone”.

But hold on, have they really disappeared? The Flores man, the Neanderthals, the Cro-Magnons, the Homo erectus people, the “habilines”, the “australopithecines”, the Homo heidelbergensis people, and many more “anthropomorphic” beings in our prehistory are indeed gone, but what about the chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans? How do we know that we cannot really breed successfully with any of them, with the extinct humanoids and with the non-extinct apes (not that we should), so they are all biologically “different species” as anthropologists tell us? How do we know that the extinct ones would behave more like us than the non-extinct ones, so we call the former “hominids” and the latter “apes”? How do we know that the kind of things that make us really “us” are more present in the extinct brothers than in the living cousins? Just because we share more genes with the extinct ones doesn’t mean that we don’t share the “important” genes with the surviving ones. Just because those extinct are closer genetically to us it doesn’t mean that they would share more our believes and approach to life –think about people that have more things in common with their grandparents than with their parents, or with their cousins than with their grandparents, or with their neighbours than with their cousins (I’m a good example. I’m a VAREAL –vegan animal rights environmental atheist lefty, remember? –and I’ve never met another one among my family members). Therefore, for us genetic kinship is not really the most important kind of kinship, is it?

You may say that I have been unfair with the comparison since the extinct creatures I’m talking about were steps around human evolution that appeared one after the other instead living contemporaneously, whilst in the case of apes clearly this is not so. You may say so, but if you do you will be mistaken. Many of the paleontological creatures I mentioned overlapped their existence with others. Habilines with Australopithecines, Homo erectus and modern-like “humans”, Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, etc. And there were as many types of contemporaneous Australopithecines as many types of contemporaneous “Homo” –new species are constantly being discovered or “invented” in Paleoanthropology– not all forming part of our direct ancestry –as in the case of Neanderthals and ancient “Floresians”, clearly from another evolutionary branch distinct from ours. Besides, who is to tell that modern apes are not also in the exact same position than the others, temporarily overlapping with us before becoming extinct? Are they not all endangered species, another reason for giving them better rights?

What I think is that this “perception” of humanity as “alone” that secretly justifies both xenophobia and genocide in one extreme, and the hoping for extraterrestrial visits in the other, is in fact a side effect “delusion”, possibly imprinted in humanity’s conscience during the time of the last “holocaust”, when we kind of killed each other out and left the “sons of Eve” really feeling “cornered”. In the same way that, by chance, Eve was left as the only survival maternal “ancestor” of modern humans, there must have been a cultural “meme” of “xenophobia” that also survived and was passed from generation to generation. Perhaps that “meme” was the key of their “survival” during that holocaust, as perhaps loosing hair from the body might have been that “gene” that did the same a few million years earlier. I guess that population “bottle necks” have this evolutionary side effect: you get stuck with things that may not longer be “relevant” from a survival point of view, but as long as don’t affect negatively too much your evolutionary “fitness”, they can stay –which, in the case of human xenophobia, the jury is still in, since from Ruanda to Bosnia, from California to Cambodia, we have plenty of examples of how easy has been for humans to embark in genocidal crusades, which may still drive us to extinction in the future.

Perhaps the term “xenophobia” is not quite accurate. We do something more with “the others” than just fear them, don’t we?. We destroy them, annihilate them, and, if we can, we slave them. As if somehow the “sons of Eve” had a huge inferiority complex, they seem not only reluctant to accept “others” as part of their “family”, but they felt compelled to dominate them. No, the right term is not xenophobia, but “supremacy”. The “sons of Eve” were “human supremacists”, and still are.

But what has all this to do with abolitionism? Well, I said earlier that generally speaking, despite all the kinship evidence, there is an aversion to the idea of giving apes better rights, and as I’ve just explained that may be a natural reaction of human supremacists who acquired this attitude “by chance” in the past when they were “against the ropes”. But not all of us would feel comfortable with the label “supremacist”, would we? We only hear it these days with the adjective “white” before it, and we all know what this means. Yes, we are talking about “racism”, the most politically incorrect universe of one of the most politically common human “feelings”.

Here is where abolitionism kicks in. The most fundamental tenant of the animal rights philosophy is that acting as “human supremacists” is wrong, in the same way that acting as “racial supremacists” is. Racial supremacists are “racists”, so human supremacist must be “speciests”, and from the former we coin “racism”, and from the latter “speciesm”. And what has been historically the strongest army against racism? The slave abolitionists. Therefore, the strongest army against speciesm must be the animalist abolitionists. This is why the philosophy of anti-specism goes hand in hand with abolitionism, and rightly so.

Straight forward, isn’t? That should unify all abolitionists in a nicely framed “group photo”. But it doesn’t. Following this logic, an abolitionist organization that advocates for the rights of apes can also be seen as speciest, since what would be the difference between a “human supremacist” and an “anthropoid supremacist” (Anthropoids are the biological group that cover both humans and apes)? This may sound a bit farfetched, but it isn’t. There are, among animalist, those that publically object to the Great Ape Project, because they call it “speciest”. Others within the animalist movement also object to single-animal organizations that only work for the protection of one species of animal (there are many of this type, such as “Save the Rhino International”, “The Dog Trust”, “Tiger Foundation”, “Cat Protection League”, “The Gorilla Foundation”, “Comité Anti Stiertenvechten International”, the “Donkey Sanctuary”, etc, etc).

Are we again talking here about different “factions” of abolitionism? Are we talking about “speciest abolitionists” and “non-speciest abolitionists” –apologies for the constant induction to spit projecting– all locked against each other because the way they approach the animal problem? I don’t think so. I think we are just seeing the expression of the same “meme” the “sons of Eve” got during the last humanity holocaust, now expressed out of context inside the abolitionist movement itself.

This “xenophobic supremacist meme” may explain it all. In the same way that “genes” express themselves by the production of specific proteins that, when activated at the right moment and place, manifest a particular beneficial function or physical attribute, but in the wrong quantity, time or place may actually be causing a disease, so “memes” can produce the equivalent with some basic conceptual “proteins” that in the wrong place and time may cause havoc. One of these “xenophobic supremacist meme” sub-products can be seen in the cereal aisle in our supermarkets.

Have you ever wondered why there are so many types of cornflakes, bran flakes, oats, muesli, rice flakes, etc? We don’t need that many, do we? Surely only a few of them would be “the bests”, and the others are totally superfluous. And yet, enough of us buy the “worst” so the people that make them can make a living from it, and keep producing more new “useless” types. How does this happen? With the “magic” trick that all marketing people have known for years (and would charge you a lot to apply it): the “illusion of choice” makes people think they are in “control”, and this is when you can make them do what you want –in this case, buy the worst cereal, the easiest and cheapest to produce. By having lots of cereal boxes and types to “chose”, people think that they are in control of their lives and naively “fall” into the traps of clever marketers. This idiotic effect of “false choice” is a memetic “conceptual protein” that was very useful when we were living on top of the trees in need to find the right fruit from the right tree in the right state of ripeness, at the right time of the year, but in the supermarket aisle a few million years later is what causes us obesity and teeth decay. And for that memetic protein to work, for the “choosing” effect to numb us successfully, we need a “taxonomical brain”.

A “taxon” –taxa in plural– is a unit of classification. We humans are “taxophiles”. We like to classify everything into different categories. We see the subtle differences on everything, so we can label every entity differently, and then we can classify them, order them, collect them, count them, and untimely “chose” them according to our “discriminative” criteria. This “taxonomic brain” is what has driven our most advanced scientific achievements, but equally our most ridiculous anoraky hobbies. It’s also what makes us see different types of animals as different entities, rather than a variation of the same entity. We only need to find a small variation on angle in a small bone of a humanoid fossil found somewhere underground to create a whole different species from it. We only need to find a small difference in the way we talk to find a completely different species among otherwise quite similar looking creatures. We only need to find a small difference in the way we campaign to find a completely different type of abolitionist.

There is even a whole scientific discipline within Biology that dedicates itself to the “art” of classifying: Taxonomy. I say “art” because, although certainly Taxonomy is a very serious science that uses very serious objective and logic criteria for its modus operandi, it is surprising how often “exceptions” are found that break the rules, and nevertheless are accepted because we still “feel” that the animals in question are somehow different from the one we are reluctant to lump together, even if the data –and especially the golden rule that they can indeed successfully interbreed with one another– suggest us otherwise. Taxonomists not only put different labels to those that look, sound or taste different, but they have joined forces with phylogeneticists that study their genetic kinship, and together they can create groups within groups and sub-groups, each one with a degree of morphological similarity and a degree of genetic kinship (altogether know as “Phylogenetic Systematics”). They call each of these groups a “taxon”, and the smallest one they define is the sub-species, while one of the biggest is the Kingdom. We humans belong to different biological taxa, depending on how far from us we look at ourselves. We belong to the sub-species Homo sapiens sapiens, the species, Homo sapiens, the genus Homo, the family Hominidae, the order Primates, the Class Mammalia, and so on till the Animal Kingdom. All of these are “our” taxa, the taxa we belong to.

So, I don’t think there are different speciest and non-speciest abolitionists. I think we are just seen the result of a taxonomical brain that makes us see the difference more than the similarity, and the effect of the “xenophobic supremacist meme” that creates a tendency to “talk down” to others just because they do something slightly different. I think we are all abolitionists, and it’s perfectly valid to campaign for the abolition of an abusing practice that affects only one species, as it is to campaign against a practice which abuses more than one. The Great Ape Project is not advocating that Great Apes are superior to the rest of animals, and that they should join us humans, the other “superior” beings. The GAP is just saying that human beings are not as superior as they think, and should start demolishing the barriers that prevent others to join the big “humanitarian family”. If humanity need to be convinced with specific arguments of genetic kinship and morphological similarity (taxonomical arguments in the biological sense of the word) to make the first steps easier, so be it. But these are the first steps, not the only steps. The exact same campaign can use the exact same arguments for the next steps –embracing “Lesser Apes”, then Catarrhine primates, then all primates, then all mammals, and so on– and once you begin to “descent” from the supremacist tower, there is no reason to stop.

Opposing some animalist campaigns on the basis of speciesm will lead to an opposition to abolitionism itself, since why stop with the “species” taxon, and not carry on the criticism with bigger “taxa”? Why don’t criticise the “order-based” campaigning, such as the one the “International Primate Protection League” or the “Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society” do? Why not the “class-based” campaigning, such as the one done by the “Royal Society for the Protection of Birds” or the “Mammal Society”? And why not go even further, and oppose the “Kingdom-based” campaigning, so basically all the animalist movement itself?

It works in the other direction too. Opposing taxonomical abolitionism would lead to opposing the abolition of human slavery, since it only affected one sub-species (Homo sapiens sapiens) , and some may say that only affected, in real terms, just a few human races –which arguably could also be classed as kind of “taxa” hierarchically under “sub-species”, even if taxonomers don’t accept it. It’s not about denying the difference, but making it “irrelevant” from a political point of view. It’s not about denying that different human races exist but making their existence irrelevant in terms of the rights of the individuals belonging to them. It’s not about denying that different species exist but making their differences irrelevant regarding universal “minimum” rights for the individuals belonging to them.

Can we do that? Aren’t we trapped in an idiotic vicious circle dominated by selfish genes and crazy memes? Yes we can. Look at the best example of human genocide. Look at the Christians and Muslims crusades in the Middle East, the wars between Tutsis and Hutus in Africa, the Nazi extermination of Jews in Europe. Yes, there is an inbuilt xenomorphic drive and a taxonomical brain behind all of them, but above all there is a “huge mistake” of interpretation behind each and every of them. The brain did tell them to “look for the difference”, but they all looked for the “wrong” difference. All these terrible genocides were justified by “wrong” interpretations of reality based on superstition, religion and external interfering propagandists with colonial interest and ideological agendas. What transformed the naturally aggressive mistrusting supremacists into mass murderers at genocidal scale was not their natural tendency of attack your neighbour with the minimum excuse of a “distinction”, but the artificial force that kept them going and made them abandon all the other survival instincts that would have stopped them had all not being constantly fuelled with gargantuan “misunderstandings” of reality. We don’t have to “believe” them. We can think, we can rationalise, we can bury superstition and with them our war axes, because now we know what we did not know before. Now we know that we live in a round planet, that we all evolved from mutual ancestors, that we all have genetic “souls” that go to next generations. Because we know we are not aliens, none of us is an alien, none of them are aliens, we can control our supremacist tendencies and compensate for our taxonomical deficiencies. We all can transcend our genetic destiny and demolish the barriers of “racism”, the barriers of speciesm, the barriers of “taxonism”.

It makes no sense to “expulse” from “proper” abolitionism those that, for whatever historical or practical reasons, have restricted the type of “victims” they are trying to help to a particular “taxon”. All these abolitionist groups operate in similar ways and under similar principles, and they all participate in different degrees and not without significance towards the abolition of one of the worse “attributes” that all of us, even the abolitionist, have. They all aim to abolish “taxonomical supremacy”.

We abolitionists are not free of the weaknesses we have inherited by the caprices of evolution, but in the same way that we still have the power to stop buying the worst cereal in the supermarket aisle –or even buying anything in big supermarkets if we want to– we can also use our deficient taxonomical brain to accept all the other species in our biological home, and all other animalists in our abolitionist club.

Nobody is less equal than others, not even the egalitarians.

Jaysee Costa