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Ok, hello.
Thank you for coming.
This is really a special honor and a great privilege. It’s my first time to Portugal.
I’ve been all over the world many times, but never to Portugal.
And so it's time to correct that oversight.
It’s great to be here and I’m really proud to speak to you and to the Party for Animals.
I just came from Lisbon and spoke up there, and this is a really great thing, very progressive.
It’s part of the revolution that’s happening that we need to have happen,
so it’s exciting to be part of these times, revolutionary times.
And the crisis that we’re in today, cause we’re in very severe crisis.
So what I’m going to talk about tonight is the revolutionary shifts in consciousness
that have unfolded philosophically for the last few centuries
and the implications for this relating to human identity.
So I’m going to talk about human identity tonight.
Who are we, who do we think we are and the politics of human identity.
Of who gets to be called human and what this means and why human identity is an error.
That’s why I’ve provocatively entitled my talk
“Everything you know about human identity or human nature is an error”.
Because we don’t know yet still who we are and I’m going to explore that paradox now.
So I’ll be speaking in English and if I speak slowly everything’s ok, huh?
Ok. You don’t want to hear my Portuguese. Or my Italian, or my French.
If I ask you the question "who are you?", you’ll think about that in your mind. "Who am I?"
You might say "I’m a mother", "I’m a sister", "I’m a brother", "I’m a parent".
I’m a "Christian", "I’m Muslim". You might say "I’m a worker", "I’m a manager",
You might say "I’m male", "I’m female". You might say "I’m white", "I’m black", "I’m brown".
You might say "I’m heterosexual", "I’m gay", "I’m lesbian", "***".
You might say any number of things relating to your nationality, your ethnicity, your gender,
your occupation, your profession.
We tend to identify ourselves as many roles and think of ourselves in many different ways.
But I bet that you wouldn’t answer the question "who are you?" by saying "I’m a human being".
"I’m a member of *** sapiens". Because we take that for granted.
We don’t think about the fact that we are an animal,
a species that came out of an evolutionary flow of life,
that has existed on this planet for a very short period of time. Very short.
Maybe one or two hundred thousand years at the most, there’s no consensus on the dates.
We came out of Africa, we migrated throughout the world, and we have colonized this planet.
We don’t have the Brazilian empire, we don’t have the Portuguese empire, the Spanish empire,
we don’t have the American or English empire, we don’t have the Egyptian, Roman or Greek
or Ottoman empire, we have the human empire.
One species has colonized this planet. And everything has been a mistake.
The whole way we have thought about ourselves and the world has been an error.
And this error people still internalize,
people are still educated into this illusion, this falsehood, this fallacy.
And so this error started to be corrected. So what I want to speak about tonight
is the genesis of this error, the dismantling of this error
and really how stubborn two hierarchical forms of consciousness
I’m going to call anthropocentrism and speciesism are.
This latter term speciesism of course means that... it’s meant to be analogous to racism and sexism.
It’s meant to suggest that just as racism puts one race over another race, hierarchically,
in the form of power relationships and says “this is the superior race, this is the inferior race”,
so speciesism does the same thing: one species, the human species,
all other species are non-human species, non-human animals, specifically,
then we are superior to them.
That means we have the right to use them for any purpose that we want.
That means they have no moral value or very little moral value, we are not equal.
Funny thing about human behavior is we don’t tend to see differences.
and respect them for what they are.
We always take differences and arrange them as a hierarchy, don’t we?
So in every way that we can relate to one another or to the Earth or to other species,
we arrange this hierarchically in every way.
Ageism, ableism, you name it.
So speciesism is the hierarchy of the human animal over all other animals.
Really it is a form of anthropocentrism, which means exactly what it says:
that we are at the center of the earth, that the Earth exists for our purposes.
In other words, the Earth and the animals are means to an end, to our end,
their purpose is to satisfy our purposes, and that’s it.
Aristotle said… Aristotle was the first philosopher of slavery and the first philosopher of hierarchy.
Actually, western Philosophy got off to a great start with Pythagoras.
Pythagoras was what today we would call vegan, and an animal rights activist.
He abstained from meat for ethical reasons, not just dietary reasons,
he criticized hunting for ethical reasons.
And then Aristotle comes along in the middle of Greek antiquity
and he says that lower forms of reason exist to serve the purposes of higher forms of reason.
So just as plants exist for the sake of animals, so animals exist for the sake of people.
That’s how we started to think, and now that thinking is internalized deeply inside of us.
And anybody who eats meat obviously has internalized that form of consciousness,
because what is on your plate, you think, is a means to your end.
Really there’s no justification for that.
And that’s why if you’re in animal rights you really have to be vegan
to live without inconsistency, because otherwise
you are living a life based upon exploitation, based upon speciesism an anthropocentrism,
and these are the very ideologies that have been constructed throughout western civilization.
I can go much further back to civilization itself, which began 10,000 years ago,
what we call agricultural society. That was when we began to domesticate the wild,
and once we domesticated the wild through farming and through herding animals and trapping animals,
and exploiting them for food, clothing, labor, transportation...
This way of life is only 10,000 years old.
That’s when hierarchy emerged in society, that’s when slavery emerged in society,
that’s when patriarchy emerged in society. Only 10,000 years ago.
Much of this began just 10,000 years ago.
So as soon as we started reflecting, philosophizing upon the basis of our lives, domesticating nature,
of course we would think like exploiters, because we already were exploiters.
We have the exploiter mentality today still within us and this needs to be extirpated.
It is the last prejudice to go, the last form of ignorance to go,
that can no longer be tolerated,
because the destructive consequences of this error cannot be underestimated.
Now, I said we came out of Africa 100, 200 thousand years ago, we migrated throughout the planet.
We began to speak, we began to form languages, symbolic cultures.
Only 45,000 years ago. Language is only 45,000 years old.
And that’s when you find the paintings in the French caves of Lascaux and elsewhere.
Around this period of History people started to symbolize their thoughts.
Now Nietzsche said something very profound.
We’re talking about 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche quite a bit tonight.
Nietzsche said that as soon as humans began to think, they invented errors.
Because we think very crudely, right? Gods, the Sun god, the Moon god, pantheism,
a plurality of gods, all kinds of superstitions, all kinds and forms of ignorance and errors,
a lot of which would get corrected over time but some of which stayed in our thinking.
Some of which remains with us today. Errors, delusions, illusions, fallacies.
And Nietzsche says that errors that stick, the ones that don’t get corrected,
are the ones that have utility to life.
In other words, we tell ourselves certain lies, like for instance, if you will, God.
Not to impugn faith, but Nietzsche would use this example.
We like to invent a god, the story of a soul, of an afterlife,
because it suits our purposes, it flatters us.
We are vain creatures, and we want to believe that this is all for us.
We want to believe that there’s some afterlife. We want to believe that this will go on forever.
It’s hard to not believe. We want to believe in a rainbow bridge, right?
That after our animals die we’ll see them again. Death is not forever, this is only temporary.
All kinds of things we still believe and Nietzsche would say these are errors.
And we keep them because they serve our proposes of flattering our egos, our vanity,
and as existentialists would generally say, humans cannot accept the fact
that we exist, as Heidegger would put it, thrown into the world.
We just exit and that’s all we know. We exist.
We don’t know for what purpose, for what reason or what really lies beyond the human mind,
except what we can imagine or what we can dream. That’s all we know, and if you’re honest...
Nietzsche extolled the virtue of intellectual honesty.
If you’re honest, you will admit, that’s all we could know, that we are just here.
And that any meaning that exists in the world is humanly constructed. Ok?
So let me begin with a paradox. The paradox is that after 45,000 years of thinking,
of culture, of symbolic expression, of communication, of philosophizing,
after 45,000 years, *** sapiens… Isn’t that a nice name, *** sapiens, wise man?
So wise we’re destroying the planet. So wise we can’t get along with one another,
we kill each other in wars.
So wise that we’re at war with everything on this planet?
We’re at war with the animals, with the Earth and with ourselves?
So wise, *** sapiens.
For 45,000 years *** sapiens has been thinking about who we are, trying to define who we are
and never getting it right. We still don’t know who we are.
We come up with this fantastic, simplistic child-like answers, to simplify Aristotle,
rational men, featherless biped. These don’t help. And they’re not true.
As I’ll show, they’re not true.
But we hold on to these illusions of who we are, what *** sapiens is,
because they flatter our vanity, they serve our purposes.
They allow us to exploit the planet and feel like we’re good people,
and that we have the right to be exploiters. This is a God-given right, according to religion.
I would be so bold as to suggest that religion really cannot address this debate,
although there are revolutions happening in religion, it's the greening of religion,
animal rights is now an important part of Christianity,
and of course it goes back to ancient Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist,
ancient Indian thought begins with biocentrism,
or the idea that we all are interconnected together equally in life.
But I think to answer this question "who are we?", who is the human,
we have to look to Philosophy and the sciences.
Specifically science is what I’m going to be looking at tonight.
What does science say, because science is fact-based.
So, with no attempt to offend any religious sensibilities,
I’m going to suggest that this is a question that has to be answered scientifically,
and really there’s no other way to answer this question.
Who are we? Who is *** sapiens?
We'll begin with what I call the revolutions of modernity.
We’ll begin with this paradox that we don’t know who we are yet
and these revolutions would correct this.
And there’s also, in addition to a paradox, an irony.
Just as we’re starting to learn who we are through these cognitive revolutions,
we have become so sophisticated we’re changing who we are.
There’s a question on the table here. Do we have a nature?
Is there such a thing as a human nature, or are we entirely plastic?
Are we malleable, are we so flexible that we can be anything society shapes us into being?
It’s like a hunk of clay, whatever society makes us, that’s what we are.
Or do we have a nature? Let me suggest that we do have a nature.
We evolved 5 to 7 million years ago in eastern southern Africa, as a branch of a primate tree.
As a Pacific kind of primate.
Jared Diamond, the contemporary anthropologist and author calls us the third chimpanzee.
The bonobo, the common chimpanzee, the one you’re most familiar with, and humans.
We actually belong in the primate family, we’re closely related to the great apes,
the 4 great apes. Throw in orangutans.
We are primates, ok?
So if you answered the question "who am I?", you said “a primate”,
you’re starting to think along the right lines.
But very few people would answer the question “who am I?" - “I’m a primate”.
Try it. And see how many people say “I am a primate” or “I’m the third chimpanzee”,
or “I’m a part of the great ape combined family”, etc.
So just as we’re starting to learn something about the human nature,
and I suggest that we have a human nature, because we have 5 to 7 million years
of evolutionary baggage. As animals.
Just as we are starting to learn about this, we’re changing this.
Think about the animal within. We forget that we’re animals, right?
Have you had an urge for sexuality lately? Have you had a ***…
How many people had a ***… Never mind that question.
How many people have had a *** thought lately? Probably most of you.
That’s the animal within. How many people have had a violent thought lately?
I’ve had quite a few today. People are annoying me.
That’s the animal within, that’s what Freud called the id.
So anytime you forget you’re an animal, all you have to do is feel the id,
the instincts within us, the animal within us,
and know that we really are not a rational being, we are an animal.
Or try to shake an addiction, try to break up with your boyfriend, girlfriend, go through a divorce.
You realize this is not the captain of the ship.
We don’t control our lives with rationality.
We are animals and our animality is what drives us to war, to aggression, to territorialism.
I’m not saying we can’t change that, but we will never change that
unless we recognize the fact that we are animals.
We are xenophobic, we’re territorial, we’re very, very violent animals.
So as we are beginning to learn who we are, we are beginning to change who we are,
so it’s almost like we will never know who we are, for two reasons.
One, we’re changing who we are, because even though we have this biological nature
there is to some degree a plasticity of the human self.
Pharmacology, ok?
People say... They’ve written books about the impact of Prozac on the human mind.
And some people say that these anti-depression drugs,
they create a different personality, they create a different self.
So we have pharmacology, we have the therapeutic society,
we have all kinds of mind-altering drugs, that can create difference experiences,
different perceptions of reality, different natures, if you will.
We are genetically modifying the world and we are starting to genetically modify ourselves.
We have already created hybrid species in Petri dishes.
You take the DNA of a human, you take the DNA of a calf,
combine them and create a hybrid species.
This day will come, I guarantee you, if we live long enough,
when we’ll be genetically modified, we’ll be genetically altered.
This society will look like Gattaca, the film Gattaca.
Where the new form of discrimination that arrives will be genetic discrimination.
“Oh, you’re only normal? You’re not genetically modified?”
Because this will be the privilege of the rich.
So there’s this paradox that we still don’t know who we are,
there’s this irony that we're starting to change who we are as we’re figuring out who we are,
and there are the revolutions of modernity that I now want to talk about,
to show you how in the last 4 or 5 hundred years our perceptions of ourselves as animals,
as beings on this planet have radically changed.
This is a medieval map of the word. This is medieval cosmology.
It was the center of the word.
God created the world and the middle of the universe was the Earth.
Of course in the middle of the Earth, or the center of all life,
the meaning of all life, the purpose of all life, Man.
Literally man, because this is a patriarchal worldview too.
And women were considered closer to animals or closer to nature
than they were to men, and to culture and to reason.
And of course, the center of Man was reason, our soul, our assets.
Rational essence. *** sapiens, rational man.
This was the picture of the world in medieval times.
This picture is destroyed. This picture is gone forever.
This picture is a lie, an illusion, an error, a fallacy.
And we start... You may know the progression of thought,
you may be somewhat familiar with this outline.
We start in the 16th century and the 17th century with Copernicus and Galileo.
And the two of them together were able to establish that
it is not that the Earth is at the… The geocentric worldview,
that the Earth is at the center of the universe.
The Sun is at the center of our solar system, we should say,
and the Earth orbits around it, along with other planets.
This doesn’t seem like a huge conceptual revolution,
But, look, it means the church was wrong,
it means that the best scientific knowledge available at the time was wrong,
and there’s a psychological impact here, of not being at the center of the universe,
that people found very uncomfortable.
So what I’m going to show you is that each time this chart got disturbed,
each time we started to get to the truth of who we were as animals,
we had to quickly patch things up, stitch and sew, mend the tear in the fabric,
because we could not allow the truth to come through.
T. S. Elliot, the English poet of the 20th century, said something very profound:
human beings cannot bear very much reality.
We can’t take the truth, we’re not strong enough for the truth.
We feed off of, we thrive on illusions and errors.
So Copernicus and Galileo shifted the cosmological maps
from a geocentric worldview to a heliocentric worldview, right?
From Earth centered to Sun centered.
We know now that there is no center of the universe, that the universe is just infinite space,
that there may be wormholes there may be parallel universes.
The whole idea of a center of the universe is absurd.
But again, back in the 16th and 17th centuries, this was a very earthshaking idea.
Now, how would we begin to repair the damage done by the Copernican-Galilean revolutions?
Well, that wasn’t so hard, because some people said:
“ok we’re not at the center of the universe, that just means we have infinite space to command,
that just means everything is subject to human control”,
and people were able to deal, except for the church, people were able to absorb,
if you will, the blow, the hammer blow of the Copernican and Galilean revolution fairly easily.
Something more challenging happened centuries later,
the next revolution of modernity in science, with Darwin. 1859. 1859.
Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. He sat on this manuscript for a couple of decades.
Did you know this, this story? This was sitting in his drawer.
Only because a fellow thinker wrote him a letter: “Dear Charles, I submit to you my work
for your esteemed professional review, would you please examine this
and give me your considerate opinion of my work?”
Well, Darwin began to look at this and he said: “Oh my God, this is exactly what I've been thinking.
Exactly. It’s the theory of natural selection. This guy… we’re thinking in parallel tracks.”
To his credit, actually, he gave the theory of evolution co-credit to this man,
whose name escapes me because I work for memory and I’m getting old.
So Darwin sat on this. Why? Because the implications of this
were so revolutionary that he was afraid to publish it.
The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Now, what impact did this have?
Well, it told us that we were not at the center of the Earth, ok?
There’s a picture called the great chain of being. It’s similar to this. You’ll find…
I mentioned Aristotle anticipated it.
You have God, angels, men, animals, plants, rocks and minerals. Ok?
This was called the great chain of being. That there is an order of perfection in the universe,
and that the higher you go, the more reason, the more rationality, the more perfection.
Of course God is perfect, and then angels, and right below angels is Man or Humankind,
And below us lie animals. This is called the great chain of being.
This was a prevalent cosmology, it was part of this picture,
it’s another way of putting this picture.
In medieval times. All the way up to medieval times.
What Darwin did was this. He said: Look, there are primordial conditions of life.
Of evolution. Evolution does something called speciation. It creates species.
What’s the purpose of life? Just to create species, that’s all. It speciates, ok?
So instead of this picture in ascending rationality where we’re just one step below angels and God,
Darwin gave us this picture. If you will, a wheel or a tree, or a bush, the spokes of life.
We, here we are, *** sapiens, one of millions of other species.
Think of the cognitive implications of these two metaphors.
This is very flattering, this is not.
We don’t know how many species are on this planet right now,
there are many species we’ve never yet even discovered. Let’s keep it that way.
There might be up to 10 million species on the planet, we are just one.
And yet we think that all of this exits for our purposes.
So Darwin showed us that we are one among millions of other species,
we were not created by God, we were created by the same natural processes,
natural selection, all another animals are shaped by.
We are animals, he emphasized that,
and he said that we are different from animals in degree and not kind.
And that’s really important. We are different from animals in degree and not kind.
He anticipated the last revolution I’m going to discuss, Cognitive Ethology,
in his book The Descent of Man and some of his books that he wrote
after the Origin of Species, some of his most important work for my purposes.
So he said that everything that we have we have from animals.
Our emotions, our pleasures, out joys, our capacity for sadness, our capacity to think.
This all comes from animals. Because we are an animal,
and in time we evolved an advanced forebrain.
Very little was known about evolution at the time.
People weren’t even sure we came out of Africa.
People were still saying that the so-called *** race was a subhuman race,
they weren’t even humans.
We had barely begun to even see gorillas or great apes for the first time.
This is how primitive our knowledge was at this time.
So we’re different in degree not kind, that means that we are animals
and all we have is we’re a little more rational.
We might have some different feelings or experiences from other animals,
but different in degree and not kind. That means we belong to one family.
And we’re not separate from nature, we’re not apart from nature, we’re a part of nature.
And that was very important for Darwin to establish,
and that meant that we were not at the center of the Earth.
There’s no center to this picture.
Now, how would this be repaired? Remember I told you that every time there’s a tear
in the fabric of human supremacism, we have to fix it.
Ups, there’s a tear in the cosmological picture, get up there and fix that.
How do you fix Darwin?
Well, it wasn’t so difficult.
Number 1, you just ignore what he said about being different in degree rather than kind.
Number 2, you use the biological sciences to advance the project of vivisection.
By the way, Darwin supported vivisection, he was not anti-vivisection.
And he maybe didn’t have a coherent ethical picture.
But you focus on the biological sciences as a science and use that for vivisection.
Now, Darwin emphasized cooperation in the natural world.
We think of Darwin we think of competition, natural selection is a competition,
the survival of the fittest. He never even used that phrase.
It came from Herbert Spencer, survival of the fittest.
Darwin emphasized the importance of cooperation.
That all species that survived learned how to cooperate with each other.
It wasn’t just about competition.
So how do you take the tear in the cosmological fabric and fix it,
so that we are once again masters of the universe after Darwin?
Well, you turn Darwinism into social Darwinism.
You turn Darwinism into the ideology of capitalism. Par excellence.
Because you take his idea of competition, you forget cooperation,
you say that we are competitive animals,
we clawed our way up to the top of the evolutionary ladder,
therefore we belong here.
The idea of might is right started to appear.
And I’ll return to that concept, might is right.
And you emphasize the importance of competition in society, ok?
I mean, look, this is nature, where competition does play a role
in natural selection, in governing life.
This is society.
Does competition play a role here? Well it does in capitalism, doesn’t it?
Because capitalist society is based upon so-called competition.
Well, Marx put that myth to rest by saying there’s no competition in this society,
this society is based upon monopoly.
Monopoly control, price fixing, domination of markets.
The very thing this society tries to eradicate is competition.
But you see, the capitalist ideology privileges the idea of competition
as an ideology to favor giant corporations,
to ignore or obscure the fact of monopoly control
and because it meant that those people who were rich,
and who are at the top of the social ladder, were almost there by natural design.
Almost selected to be elites, right?
In other words, class society was naturalized.
That’s how you fix the tear in the fabric after Darwin,
you turn Darwin into a capitalist ideologue.
So it turns out that Man is not at the center of the Earth.
Well, we reworked Darwinism into a capitalist ideology,
into a speciesist ideology, and we fixed the tear in the fabric.
Now Nietzsche and Freud come along in the 19th and 20th century.
Freud wrote the Interpretation of Dreams, that was published in 1900.
Nietzsche died in 1889 and lived for another 11 years, almost in a coma.
One of the greatest minds ever just burned out.
But what Nietzsche and Freud did was to say that reason is not at the center of Man.
Really this was implied by Darwin, so they made this explicit.
We think of ourselves as rational beings, as I’ve said,
that we have an essence and this essence is to be rational.
Well, they emphasized with Darwin, although they didn’t refer to Darwin often,
Nietzsche certainly didn’t, that we are animals governed by instincts
governed by the will, governed by impulses that are not rational, that are sub-rational.
A way that this often is portrayed is, for instance, the iceberg metaphor.
We say, here’s reason, but instead of being all of the self, it’s just a part of the self,
and everything here, the unconscious, the sub-rational forces are much stronger in life.
And that’s what really shapes us, that’s what controls us.
And so Nietzsche and Freud said that Man is not at the center of the Earth,
reason is not at the center of Man, Mankind, Humankind.
We are animals, we are not governed by rationality.
Nietzsche said, in response to Descartes, "I think therefore I am",
Nietzsche said, "no, it thinks, therefore I am". It, the unconscious, the id thinks, therefore I am.
Rationality is just like the byproduct of sub-rational forces in our life.
It’s not the captain of the ship, it is just a sailor, just a crew member, that’s all.
It’s not in control whatsoever.
So how do you repair the tear in the fabric after this?
This seems really damaging, right? Really damaging to...
What are we talking about here, remember?
The human identity, the picture of human beings that we have built
over thousands of years of western thought.
How do you repair this? Because now we’re into the 20h century,
and it’s now established that we are fully… we are full fledged animals,
and Aristotle was wrong, the medieval church was wrong,
catholic theology and science were both wrong,
we are not rational beings.
How do you repair that?
Well, you turn Nietzsche into a Nazi.
His idea of the will to power, that we are animals, we have an urge to power,
to control, to dominate or to overcome ourselves, our limitations,
is partly what he meant by the will to power, the will to overcome yourself,
your own limitations, through will, sheer will.
Well, you turn the will to power into a social force,
and you turn Nietzsche, who was [against antisemitism] into a philosopher
that was prejudiced against Jews.
His sister helped the Nazis edit his writings to make him appear to be a Nazi
and appear to be a German nationalist, when he explicitly wrote that the most slow,
dull culture that exists in western modernity, in western Europe, was German culture.
He hated the Germans, he hated German philosophers, most of all.
So you rewrite Nietzsche and make him into a Nazi.
Now Freud was very interesting because Freud was conflicted about rationality.
He said that we are not rational animals, but we can gain control over our bodies,
over ourselves, we can become free through Psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis is a science, it’s a new kind of science.
So Freud elevated science to the top position in society,
he said that although we are not free, we are dominated by our will,
by our unconscious, by forces that we don’t understand and we can’t control,
through Psychoanalysis we can understand them, we can gain control of them rationally,
and Freud also helped to create the therapeutic society, which normalized people
into adjusting to fit social patterns of behavior, expected social patterns of behavior.
So all of these revolutions were incredibly radical.
They just destroyed this whole picture.
But being the kind of animals that we are, being very vain,
not being able to withstand very much truth or very much reality at all,
we took every revolution of modernity and we altered it so it wasn’t so destabilizing,
so we could still play masters of the universe. We could still play God on Earth.
Now other things happened. After the second world war, 1940s, 1950s.
Artificial intelligence and computers, right? I’ll just quickly go over this.
We started to create machines that were more intelligent than us in many ways.
We now have… We see these old World War II movies
with these banks of computers that would fill this room,
that now a laptop is more powerful than these computers.
And computers can think faster than us, they can think more efficiently than us,
they are what we might call our mind children.
We created computers but there is an anxiety in human culture
that these computers will come back to control us, to create us.
And so this anxiety of the domination of machines is represented in science fiction.
Think for instance of the film 2001.
Hal, the computer, disobeys the engineers on the spaceship and Hal refuses orders.
Think of the Terminator.
These machines are coming from another planet to destroy Humanity.
They’re machines, they’re robots, they ultimately were designed by human beings.
Think of The Matrix, where we are being attacked by machines.
This shows an anxiety that we created these things that are more intelligent than us
that could escape our control Frankenstein-like and could destroy us.
Could destroy us, so what do we do? We have to domesticate that threat, right?
Because it only plays out on science fiction.
So 2001, the sequel was 2010,
Hal’s rebellion was really just a badly written computer program.
That’s all, the machine didn’t really rebel.
Terminator 2, you take Arnold Schwarzenegger, this menace,
and he becomes like a household pet.
He’s fully domesticated in Terminator 2, so much for that threat.
The Matrix, of course, we win, we finally destroy the machines in the matrix.
Was I the only person in the room rooting for the machines?
Did you see the film 2012, when humans are about to be destroyed by a tidal wave?
Was I the only one rooting for the tidal wave?
I think I was, because I’m tired of this phony endings.
The anxiety is fully on display in science fiction movies,
we are being overwhelmed by forces we created
and we are finally getting what we deserve on this planet.
Yeah, go tidal waves, go robots, go machines. Yeah!
But you know, I’m rooting for the wrong team.
And of course Hollywood is not going to send us home unhappy, so we always win.
Aliens is another thing that we worry about, that threatens our supremacy.
And this is all played out in science fiction.
I’m going to pass over this, although I’ve written about this extensively,
the threat of aliens and how that poses a challenge to the idea of human supremacy.
And I’m going to move to the final revolution, which is animal rights and Cognitive Ethology.
Now we can’t play games anymore. Science… There’s something unique about science.
Science has been part of the ideologies of the world that have lied to us.
Religion lied to us about who we were and who we are.
Philosophers lied to us about who we were and who we are.
Science has lied to us about who we were and who we are.
But the thing about science is it is a self-correcting enterprise.
If you allow science to do its thing, apart from the corrupting influences of money, maybe,
it will start to tell you the truth eventually.
Well, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s a guy named Donald Griffin
was one of the first writers and he was working straight out of Darwin at first,
and he invented a new science called Cognitive Ethology.
Cognitive Ethology is the scientific study of the complexity of animal behavior,
of animal social life, animal emotions and animal intelligence.
Cognitive Ethology tells us that animals are not simple machines,
like Descartes told us, that animals are machines, they’re simple in their functions.
And they’re mere functions for us.
Cognitive Ethology tells us that every experience we have animals have.
That they’re lonely, that they feel grief, they fell sorrow, they fell joy.
It tells us that their social life is based upon a complex system of rules.
A chimpanzee society is not governed by instinct, it’s a rule-governed society.
There are rules to make and rules to break, and you follow the rules
or the alpha male comes down and restores some order in society
until there’s a new alpha male.
This is a rule-governed society and the animals know what the rules are,
there are expectations to follow them, just like in our society.
And Cognitive Ethology showed us all kinds of interesting experiments,
the only experiments I would ever support.
For instance, of the intelligence of animals, to give you just a couple quick examples.
You put two chimpanzees in a field and you hang a banana from a wire,
it’s too high for them to reach. Then you put around 2 or 3 boxes.
Let’s see what happens. Ok, turn on the tape. Go, chimpanzees.
And the chimpanzees are looking at his banana, "damn, I wish I had that banana, I’m really hungry.
Hey, wait a minute, three’s some boxes over here.
What if we stack these boxes on top of each other, we can reach up and get that.
Good idea, Henry, let’s do that.
And they figured this out, and they climbed to the top of the boxes and got the banana.
Or some other example, you could see this on tape. It’s a crow.
Kind of an inverse example. Crows on a wire, food is hanging down.
How can the crow get that food? The crow wants that food.
So the crow starts to think. It turns out birds are very intelligent beings.
They have incredible spacial memories and mapping senses.
They take a piece of the rope, they grab it with their foot,
they take another piece and hold it like that, and they’re pulling it up like this.
They are solving problems. They’re solving a problem.
That means they’re using their mind, that means they’re thinking in logical ways.
Now, if there’s any doubt about this, and I’m telling this very simplistically,
you give chimpanzees a sign... a language that we can share in common.
You know what that is? It’s called American Sign Language.
And if you give them sign language, a common language that they can learn,
they can tell you "I’m lonely". They can tell you "I’m hungry".
They can tell you "that’s a bad man, that’s a bad man".
It may be because one of their trainers was abusive towards them.
They start to tell you stories.
Suddenly behind these furry eyes and these furry brows comes another mind alive,
that speaks to us because now we have a common language, a sign language.
Or a lexigram, it’s a computer with symbols, and they can punch symbols,
and they can create sentences and tell us complex thoughts through a lexigram,
through a symbol making machine.
So we have learned that animals can speak, that they can reason,
that they can think very much like us.
And we only can wonder what whales think, what dolphins think,
because they have these incredible minds, brains, the whale brains certainly are bigger than ours.
Dolphins have signature whistles like names, whales sing these songs,
we’re still trying to figure out what they mean, we know they have meaning,
that there’s some symbolic meaning to those.
There are certain prairie dogs you find in Colorado that they analyzed in detail and they found
that they have a word for every predator, or a sound, and a sound for human.
It’s not a nice word. It’s, you know, bad. Bad animal. Be careful.
So what I’m trying to say is science now began to study animal intelligence
in a serious way, and what we found out was astonishing.
What we found out was that we are the dumb animals, because in our arrogance,
in our discrimination, in our prejudicial mindset, we refused to consider
what was obvious to anyone with a cat or dog: these animals have feelings,
that they are like us, that we are like them, that they have thoughts and emotions,
that they are complex beings, not simple machines.
And you can look at Donald Griffin, who founded this work,
some of you might be familiar to the work of Marc Bekoff,
who is a contemporary and very prolific cognitive ethologist.
So this revolution is happening in science,
science is beginning to correct the mistakes that science itself helped to…
contributed to in our culture. Because science always told us
that we were rational beings, and animals were simple machines
that we could do anything we wanted to.
Now there is almost an emerging consensus,
Cognitive Ethology is not even controversial anymore.
And increasingly growing numbers of the scientific community now accept
the findings of Cognitive Ethology.
What does this mean? Scientists are giving up speciesism.
So now there’s an emerging consensus in science that animals do have complex social lives,
complex thoughts and complex emotions, that they are like us,
we are different in degree and not kind.
Now we’re waiting for scientists to draw the correct conclusions from their theories.
Because, for instance, the great apes, this absolutely means we cannot experiment on great apes.
They are so identical to us. It was only with the human genome project in the 1990s
that that was concluded. That we realized that we are 98.6, the numbers vary,
but around 98.6 degrees genetically similar to chimpanzees.
Chimpanzees are closer to us, genetically, than they are to orangutans.
So we are cousins and we don’t experiment on cousins, our biological cousins.
And if we don’t experiment on great apes, then we shouldn’t experiment on cats,
we shouldn’t experiment on dogs, we shouldn’t experiment on mice.
Vivisection is just a dead ideology.
It’s a dead science, it’s a bad science, it’s a pseudoscience.
So now we start to draw on the implications of what the philosophers and the scientists
have been trying to tell us.
We erase this fallacy, this worldview that has governed out thinking for so long,
that put us at the top of a hierarchy, because we realize that we have no place
on the top of this hierarchy.
We have never had the intelligence and compassion needed to govern this planet.
So now what we need to recognize is that we are a part of this planet, not apart from it,
that we live in a great community, far greater than the human community.
You often hear this cliché, "we belong to one race, the human race".
We belong to one community, the biocommunity. Gaia, in the Greek word, which means Earth.
We belong to the Earth, and we belong to it as a member of a community.
And if you are a member of a community that means you live in that community with respect.
You respect other members of the community as your equal.
If you have rights, you have responsibilities and duties for other beings in that community
and we need to start exercising those.
Because we have not lived on this planet very well, *** sapiens.
We have lived on this planet as destructive predatory animals,
as the most dangerous animal on the planet, as one species that has colonized the planet
for its own purposes and look at what we have brought.
Look at the results of 10,000 years of civilization. It is a disaster.
It is a smoldering, smoking disaster seen from a science fiction movie
what we have done to this planet. So I say we either learn how to live responsibly
and live right on this planet or we don’t live on it at all.
We have no right to even live if we can’t live in harmony with other forms of life.
And so we need all kinds of revolutions.
We needed to go through this revolutionary process to overcome anthropocentrism
and overcome speciesism.
We needed to completely destroy and dismantle this cosmological map,
which is a total fallacy, and to create a decentered world view.
And we need social revolutions.
We need not only cognitive, moral revolutions, we need institutional revolutions.
We live in an economy, capitalist economy, that quite frankly is grow or die.
It’s a growth addicted economy. We keep growing in population numbers
and our levels of consumption, and in the amount of animals that we kill and that we eat.
We keep growing and growing and growing, this is unsustainable.
And so again, the Earth is telling us right now, the Earth is saying to us in its own language,
you are living way out of harmony with what is needed to live on this planet.
And environmental ethics tells us that how do you live on the planet?
Well, look at how other beings live on the planet.
Look at how the planet works, and live in harmony with that.
If we would just take the ecowisdom that had been a part
of the culture of indigenous peoples, that the animals can tell us something about,
that the forests can tell us something about, if we would just take that wisdom,
this ancient wisdom, instead of thinking that our modern knowledges are superior.
Although ironically these new sciences… it’s like we’re closing a circle,
we’re starting to learn what we always knew.
We need to live in harmony with the rest of the planet.
And that is what science is telling us today.
So part of that is animal rights, absolutely, that means that all beings have equal rights,
because they have interests similar to ours, equal to ours.
The interests a cat or a dog or a mouse or a chimpanzee has in not feeling pain
is exactly identical to your interest.
They want to be free from pain and torture, they want to be free to live their lives naturally
in peace, in harmony with their families, with their communities, in their natural settings,
with their natural instincts and their natural drives and their natural live processes, just like we do.
So animal rights is a hugely important part of this revolution.
Environmental ethics, also is a part of this revolution.
And veganism is also a part of this revolution.
Because veganism is taking these ideologies and putting them into practice in our lives.
When we are vegan for ethical reasons, we are showing other people
that we don’t believe that an animal is a resource for us to consume.
And that just because it tastes good is not a rational for killing,
any more than hunting is fun. The hunters say: "it’s fun, it entertainment, I enjoy it".
Same excuse that we use to eat animals. These excuses, they don’t work anymore.
So we have to align our own being, we have to bring harmony
to our ethics and our practices and align ourselves on this planet.
And we have all these revolutions that are unfolding right now, and it’s almost too late.
Almost too late, right? But better late than never.
But it’s almost too late because the damage we have done to this planet is near irreparable.
We now have 7 billion people that live on this planet.
We are consuming annually 50 to 60 billion land animals.
7 billion people consuming 50 billion land animals.
If you add sea animals, whales, dolphins, tuna fish, etc.,
we’re talking scores of billions more, way over 100 billion, 150 billion.
This is the amount of animals that 7 billion people are eating. It’s unsustainable.
We’re destroying the rainforest, we’re turning the oceans into ash.
The number 1 contributor to climate change is agribusiness, agriculture,
but the number 1 source of pollution of the oceans, the structure of the ocean,
is meat consumption.
One of the major reasons why the rainforests are being destroyed,
besides paper use, is for grazing ground for cattle.
So we live in an unsustainable culture, capitalism does not help,
because everything for capitalism is just a resource to be exploited,
and unless these markets keep expanding, this whole empire will come down,
that’s what’s going to happen, this empire is coming down,
the industrial order is falling apart and things are just getting worse.
Frankly, things are just getting worse.
By the year 2050 there will be 10 to 15 billion people on this planet.
Think of the problems now with 7. Ok, go up to 2050, 10 to 15 billion.
You know that we’re going to be eating more meat, meat consumption will double by 2050.
And we have to look at what’s happening in the developing word.
If you’ve ever heard the phrase that "the planet cannot afford another United States",
because the United States is 5% of the world's population, we consume 25% of its resources.
China is 1.3 billion people. The Chinese middle class is 300 million people,
the size of the United States is 300 million people.
So we have two United States on the planet, and we know we can’t afford one.
Now we have two.
India is rapidly growing, rapidly turning into a carnivore society.
Indonesia is set to increase its meat consumption tenfold in the next five years.
So we got a problem here. We got a problem.
And like I say, we need institutional changes, but we need to hear the wisdom,
the collective wisdom of ancient cultures and modern cultures,
of tribal peoples, of contemporary science,
and we need to radically revolutionize every facet of our being on this planet,
or there will be no planet left for us to live on.
Thank you very much.