chapter nine REDUCTIONIST SCIENCE AND RELIGION

= 제 9 장 환원주의 과학와 종교 == “Estrus control will open the doors of factory hog production. Control of female cycles is the missing link to the assembly-line approach.” - Earl Ainsworth, The Farm Journal, 1976

"발정 조절은 공장형 돼지 생산업에 새 장을 열 것이다. 암컷의 발정 주기 조절은 일관 조립 방식을 적용하는데 있어서 빠진 연결고리이다." - 얼 에인스워드, 농장 저널, 1976

“There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to beasts as well as man it is all a sham.” - Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

“’Tis said that the view of nature held by any people determine all their institutions.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits

Sons of the Herding Culture

Science and religion are fundamental institutions in our culture that embody many of our highest ideals and contribute to our lives and wellbeing in a wide variety of ways. Science derives from scire, “to know,” and religion from religare, “to link back”; the former is a manifestation of our yearning to understand the world and ourselves through systematized knowledge, and the latter of our yearning to reconnect with the spiritual source of our life and live in harmony with each other and with the larger order. 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.

While few would argue that science and religion have not brought benefits to us, many would argue that they have strongly contributed to war, destruction, and misery as well.that they have exacerbated problems as well as solved them. Why is this? More specifically, why haven’t the thousands seeking to improve and heal the world through scientific or spiritual development addressed the obviously violent and predatory mentality required by our food choices? Besides our universal resistance to admitting complicity in the cruelty of our meals, there is another factor operating: the reductionism promoted by many Western scientific and religious institutions that works to keep crucial connections invisible.

The revolution in human consciousness that apparently first began about ten thousand years ago in Iraq with 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.

Besides producing reductive scientific and religious systems, the old herding cultures produced reductive and predatory economic systems that increasingly viewed humans as economic units and led gradually to gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth. By the historic era three thousand years ago, we see in our most ancient writings such as Homer, the Old Testament, and Sumerian cuneiform writings a well-established economic system dominated by rich cattle-owning kings battling over lands for their livestock, with the masses of people reduced to mere resources who fought, produced, and consumed to benefit the wealthy elite. 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. For example, though science and religion could be enormously enriched by the non-reductive feminine principle (Sophia), she is despised by the herding culture, and conventional science and religion typically view her with distrust, to their own disadvantage.

The father and his sons are successful in subjugating Sophia primarily because of the ongoing daily “sacrifice” of millions of animals for our dinner tables: the mass ritual that reduces our intelligence and suppresses our healing wisdom. As wisdom, Sophia is the ultimate goal of both science and religion, but in serving the authoritarian and reductive mentality of the herding culture, they have all but rejected her, with the tragic spiritual consequences we can see all around us.

Science and Slavery

“Converting living systems into machines for capital accumulation wouldn’t be possible without the instrumentality of a reductionist science that achieves two things for you.

“On the one hand it kills your ethics of compassion because reductionism transforms a living system into inert parts that are put together from the outside.and that reductionism then creates the ethical anesthesia that basically says: ‘You don’t have to worry about the ethics of your relationship because this is just a bundle of matter which is in your hands to play around with.’ It’s as if you’re playing with plasticine.

“And it also gives you the actual manipulative power to get more milk out of a cow, to produce more lean meat in the cows, to stock cows in smaller spaces, to slaughter them more quickly.

“These are the systems by which capital uses the reductionism of science for capital accumulation and appropriation of life from beings who have a right to their own life.”

- Vandana Shiva, Ph.D.1

Rooted in the fallacious Cartesian split between mind and matter, 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.

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. It has turned the pathological disconnectedness of masculine domination of nature, animals, and people into a reputable and prestigious art form. Today we can actually go to Dachau and stand in the same concrete buildings where Nazi scientists performed excruciating experiments on their fellow human creatures in the name of science. 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. If we could gain admittance, we could go today to any state university or to thousands of private, military, or governmental research operations and witness cruel atrocities rationalized by the same argument of supremacy. We could also go, for example, to the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, and see how the U.S. military trains military personnel from countries in Central and South America in the latest high-tech methods of torture, surveillance, and repression that help them to effectively dominate their people to further the interests of transnational corporations and the ruling elite.2 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.

There is perhaps nothing more terrifying than to be helpless and restrained, and to be looked at by a cold, disconnected eye that does not care about our experience of suffering. This is the eye of the herder toward his property animals, all of whom he will manipulate and kill for his own benefit; it is the eye of the soldier toward his enemies who threaten his rulers’ cattle and capital interests; it is the eye of the scientist or research assistant deliberately subjecting sentient creatures to terribly painful experiments. This hard, unsympathetic eye is a deeply wounded parody of the true human eye that shines with loving-kindness, compassion, and a natural sense of caring and sympathy for all our fellow creatures on this earth. The hard eye is achieved only by rigorous practice.the practice that we are enlisted in practically from birth of disconnecting from the horror on our plates three times a day. 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? For most scientists, like most of us in this herding culture, animals raised for food fall far outside the circle of soft eyes. The more sensitive we become, the broader is our circle of compassion, and we feel qualms about harming a wider range of living beings because we find our eyes softening and caring even for little mice, birds, fish, shellfish, and insects. Scientific training, termed by Henryk Skolimowski “the yoga of objectivity,”3 enforces a way of seeing that often tends to narrow our circle of compassion and to desensitize not only scientists but all of us.

Science has in some ways helped us appreciate “food” animals by demonstrating that, for example, fish have highly developed social awareness, feel pain, and quickly learn to avoid painful stimuli, and that pigs have intelligence that is surprisingly refined, surpassing dogs and approaching chimpanzees. However, its overall effect on animal welfare has been clearly negative. In fact there are still today many influential scientists who, while finally forced to admit that animals feel pain and are capable of suffering, nevertheless discount the pertinence and intensity of their suffering, much as scientists did with black people during the slavery era. Since the early days of the scientific revolution, scientists have used animals in painful experiments and have discounted the moral relevance of their pain. Descartes’ well-known retort to his neighbors’ complaints about the agonized howls of pain from dogs he was vivisecting still reverberates in the halls of science. He declared that animals, not possessing rational souls, were incapable of feeling pain, and the howls they made were merely like the creaking sounds of a turning mill wheel.4 Such an attitude is the complete antithesis of the Golden Rule. 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.

Besides contributing its disconnected reductive mythos to further reinforce our culture’s herding mythos, science has contributed technological devices that have allowed modern animal dominators to abuse and enslave animals in ways never before conceivable. Modern factory farms and slaughter plants are impossible without sophisticated machinery, pesticides, drugs, hormones, confinement systems, electric prods, and a host of other technological devices that inflict a living nightmare onto creatures designed to run, fly, swim, play, and celebrate their lives in the natural world. Unlike modern humans stuck in our computer-adorned cubicles in high-rise office buildings, cows, chickens, fish, and pigs have no way of beginning to make sense of the utterly foreign, frustrating, and terrifying artificiality into which we force them their entire lives to satisfy our self-serving desires.

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. Some examples are hidden surveillance systems, electroshock belts, and computer microchips that can be embedded in our bodies to track us by GPS and, according to some sources, potentially regulate us through stimulating painful muscle cramps, fear, or mental confusion.5 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.6 According to the Los Angeles Times, 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.”7 They can make us into objects, easily trackable and controllable like the microchipped breeding sows8 and dairy cows we use and eat ourselves.

On a deeper level, reductionist science enslaves us by legitimizing only knowledge that is based on logical positivism and a fundamental disconnection between the self and the world. Though there are a few science popularizers who appear to the public to be more progressive, holistic, and even spiritual, these people are typically rejected by the vast scientific enterprise that is founded on the principles of division, reduction, and analysis it inherited wholesale from its parent, the herding culture.9 Its enemy is the enemy of the herding culture, the feminine principle that lives within all of us and manifests as a higher level of knowing than the separatistic rationality on which reductionist science relies. To the degree that science is disconnected from the compassionate, healing, interconnecting wisdom of intuition and the feminine principle, it tends to promote cruelty, destruction, slavery, and death.

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. This is beginning to be seen in the work and writings of researchers and theorists like Rupert Sheldrake with his idea of morphogenetic fields, as well as Robert Jahn, Elizabeth Targ, Amit Goswami, Fred Alan Wolf, Vandana Shiva, Larry Dossey, Herbert Benson, Deepak Chopra, Fritjof Capra, and others who are attempting to reverse the reductionist mentality that pervades science. Some of these are exploring the role of thoughts, intentions, feelings, and prayer in healing, and some work to illuminate systemic interconnectivity and the essential power of consciousness in determining human experience of physical reality.10 It’s not surprising that these researchers, like Schweitzer, Einstein, and others, tend to question our culture’s view and treatment of animals. Empowering approaches to science can also be seen in people working at grassroots levels with the Gandhian idea of appropriate technology: developing and using technologies that are cooperative and sustainable and do not enslave communities financially or politically to large-scale petroleum, agribusiness, chemical, or other interests. For these holistic approaches to science to catch on and become widely accepted, our culture must evolve beyond its current eating habits and the defining herding mentality that inevitably fosters a superficial and exploitive “predict and control” scientific reductionism.

Rational Nazi scientists worked on weapons of mass destruction and mass enslavement, as do armies of scientists today: can’t we see that not only are their projects insane, but the way of thinking that underlies these projects is perverse? It could only be tolerated in a culture like ours, where people actually practice the same sorts of disconnections and cruelty on a daily basis. 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.

Religious Reductionism

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.

It is fascinating and instructive that while conventional science and religion fight endlessly with each other.bickering brothers sharing a common reductionist mythology.holistic science finds inspiring and helpful guidance and confirmation from progressive and non-Western religious traditions like liberation theology and many indigenous traditions, as well as Eastern traditions such as Taoism, Mahayana Buddhism, Sikhism, and Vedanta. These religious traditions tend to have evolved in cultures and subcultures in which animals were not systematically reduced to commodities.

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.and they sponsor barbecues, pig roasts, fish fries, and turkey dinners in communities across America. It wasn’t so long ago, when the fourth-century emperor Constantine made Christianity the Roman state religion, that its earlier vegetarian emphasis was completely repressed and actually became a heresy, with Constantine reportedly ordering his men to pour molten lead down the throats of any Christians who refused to eat animal flesh.11 The original Christian teachings of mercy had to be repressed and twisted in order to be accepted by the dominant herding culture, and the enlightened teaching that He who lives by the sword must die by the sword became a bitter irony.

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. In fact, as J. R. Hyland points out, the main form of worship in the old herding cultures was the sacrificial killing of animals to please the deity.12 Underlying all this was the fundamental notion that “the Lord is my shepherd”.a terrifying idea when we contemplate the realities of the herding culture that propagated these teachings. The herder enslaved, castrated, and killed his sheep, goats, and cattle without mercy, and these creatures were, as they are today, powerless in his almighty hands.

The anxious preoccupation with being “saved” perhaps derives directly from this. Our ongoing failure to save the animals at our mercy may compel us into nervous concern about our own “salvation.” Salvation from what, exactly? From the consequences of our actions, perhaps? Or more traditionally, from being damned to the fires of hell? Whence comes the power of this image? Could it be related to the untold centuries of herders gazing through flames into the charring bodies of animals they’ve condemned and killed as sacrificial offerings, and which they themselves will eat?

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. This devil is ironically represented as having the horns and hooves of a goat or cow.the very victims we relentlessly confine and attack for food! This evil or devil is certainly, on one level at least, the projection of our own shadow.the guilt, shame, and unexpressed grief we bear for the massive ongoing cruelty we engage in as eaters of animals in the herding culture’s households. 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. We are told we have to side with our shepherd king, who protects us but also controls us in his war with the enemy. 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. Matthew Fox argues, for example, in Original Blessing, that the doctrine of original sin.that we are by nature evil and depraved.is not founded upon either the core teachings of Jesus or the experience and writings of many of the recognized illumined Christian and Jewish sages and mystics.13 These people have discovered the fundamental goodness of life and human nature and the “original blessing” at the heart of creation as an ongoing celebration and evolution of consciousness.

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. Because of this, we find there is today a growing movement that urges freedom from guilt trips and judgment. We recognize that chronic guilt cripples us, depletes our energy, and keeps us trapped in old patterns, and we understandably want to be free of it.but we don’t see that its source is in the ongoing cruelty of our daily meals. Thoughts and behavior produce after their kind.

We can thus see how difficult it is to effectively address and reduce the suffering caused to animals through vivisection, rodeos, circuses, canned hunts, dog fighting rings, and so forth while as a culture we still practice eating them. The desensitization inherent in reducing animals for food naturally expands to animals mistreated in non-food uses as well.but it doesn’t just stop there, at the boundary of animals. This is why “man’s inhumanity to man” is rooted in our inhumanity to animals.

Conventional religion, like science, accurately reflects the psychological trauma of the herding culture that birthed it and that still sustains it. Everything is justified by the culture’s living mythology. As Joseph Campbell points out in The Masks of God, cultures dependent on animal flesh organize themselves around death because “the paramount object of experience is the beast, [k]illed and slaughtered. . . .”14 This is true of our culture today, and the deaths of the millions of animals slaughtered daily ripple through all our religious institutions, which provide the mythos to justify it now as they did in the arid hills of the Mediterranean basin three thousand years ago.

Plant-based cultures, Campbell points out, organize themselves around life. The plant world provides “the food, clothing and shelter of people since time out of mind, but also our model of the wonder of life.in its cycle of growth and decay, blossom and seed, wherein death and life appear as transformations of a single, superordinated, indestructible force.”15 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.

As we cultivate awareness and question the death orientation that stares at us from our plates, we create a field of freedom and compassion, and as we move to plant-based meals, we can become agents of life, breathing a new spirit of protecting and including into our world that, by blessing the animals who are at our mercy, will bless us a hundredfold. This is a radical transformation because it goes, as the word radical implies, to the essential root of our unyielding dilemma, the commodification of animals for food.