The ranks of the dead
Even among really excellent, self-critical thinkers, there tends to be an assumption either that animals don’t matter at all, or that they are far, far down a priority list so long that it becomes binary, divided into what does and doesn't matter. This binary in turn becomes oppositional: anything that advances humans is good, and animal interests must not be allowed stand in its way; time and energy given to the protection of animals is time and energy taken away from a more worthy cause.
As far as I’m aware, there’s no orderly shopping list of actions to eliminate suffering worldwide. The instrumentation of injustice tends to be systemic, and the effects intersectional*, and in many cases there is no opposition between animal welfare, environmental and humanitarian agendas. Mass livestock farming, for example, tortures and destroys animals on an oceanic scale, but the environmental devastation it causes is likely to get messy for humans in the near future, even here in the loveable west. Looking out for animals is an integral part of global progressive movements, not some kind of Marie Antoinette-ish dilettantism.
But where there actually are competing interests of humans and animals (notably in the case of medical research, until science progresses) - I’d say that it’s bad to the point of evil to categorically dismiss any harm done to animals provided humans benefit. Forms and scales of suffering are comparable between species - pain isn’t an exclusively human property. I don’t deny that victims can be ranked and prioritised, nor do I question (for now) the social contract that compels us to value humans most. I’m just saying that animal concerns shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand - the scale and severity of harm felt should be given due weight, and thought given to whether humanitarian ends can justify cruelties that most of us wouldn't want to imagine.
There are orders of suffering and, as discussed below, some are worthy of privilege. But this principle shouldn't be used in service of the binary outlined above, or in any other way to invalidate entire groups because they’re not top of our list.
“A Private Matter”
If you have the stomach for it, I’ve got some beef with a parallel and related binarization of suffering: that of the concrete over the abstract, the individual over the many, the case study over the graph. As much as I don’t care for “I don’t care” as a comeback, it’s not always better to reduce problems to what we are able to care about.
Some of Cameron’s defenders have claimed, weakly but not implausibly, that he was trying to protect his family from embarrassment. Few have bothered to respond to this: Cameron’s family loyalty obviously cannot trump his accountability as Prime Minister. But I'm sure that Cameron would dogmatically put his family’s wellbeing, and privacy, above anything - and until now he has quite successfully presented this as a virtue, not a moral limitation.
In fact, Cameron and his family have publicly lived through perhaps the most unspeakable of personal tragedies: the loss of a child. It feels and, probably is, incredibly vile to mention this at all, because in the ranks of suffering children have a special status. That kind of loss is untouchable, and it feels unacceptable to bring it into partisan discourse. Privacy serves here as a protection of the child and of the family’s grief - this is not public property
But, uncomfortable as it is to attack him on this, Cameron has repeatedly brought his bereavement into his political statements, and used it to blur the neglectfulness of his government towards families who care for disabled children without the support of massive personal wealth. Cameron cannot be unaware of the way that his programme of austerity has targeted people with disabilities, including children. To pretend that he can relate to parents hit by his policies seems like the height of hypocrisy, but a hypocrisy which it feels like a violation to address. Reverence for individual examples of suffering is a silencer; this can be abused.
Je ne suis pas ...
As a tad bit of a utilitarian, I’ve been thinking occasionally about what makes a child’s suffering worse and more important than an adult's. It’s one of those things that it seems stupid as well as a bit tacky to analyse, but here goes. It’s not just that children are helpless - so are many adults - and innocent, by which I mean a combined lack of understanding and power - which animals have par excellence. And it’s not simply that they have a lot of potential life left, and so their loss is greater when they die - it’s not like we lose sympathy for chronically ill children with shortened life-spans (unless we’re an old-school Nazi, which we aren’t). The privilege of their helplessness and innocence comes from the fact that it’s transitory: they aren’t adults, but they will be adults, and are valued for a positive absence. The special status relies on them being one of us, but not yet.
I would not and could not for a moment dispute the special status of children, in life and in suffering. But in political discourse there’s an extent to which this regard itself has to be ring-fenced. The exploitation of the special status for children can lead to grotesque hypocrisy.
When Alan Kurdi died many of the expressions around his death felt offensively tasteless, none more so than the adults who lay on a beach dressed as him. This was crass and presumptuous because though of course we should identify with refugees, who are dehumanised by distance and anonymity, we cannot ‘je suis’ the death of a little boy - we are not him. We don’t have that innocence. Another eyesore was a mawkish cartoon of his soul floating to heaven on angel wings, a child as cute as he is dead - this published in the Mail, that famous defender of migration rights. Why pity a child, when you can’t pity the adult that the child could have grown into? And why pity one child, when you can’t pity thousands? Why should greater magnitude drive tragedies further down our priorities list?
Relevant, timely or conveniently bite-sized examples of suffering have their uses in forging the emotional responses that allow us to form ideas of justice, and shape our politics. But focusing on the particular can skew perceptions, and lead to woolly, self-indulgent thinking, and hypocrisy. Suffering should be contemplated in broad and utilitarian terms, weighted not according to who or what is suffering but, where possible, by scale and degree. The problem is the harm done, not the victim.
* I feel indebted to Ash Sarkar, who has been very pithy on systems underlying intersectionality
