"Animal Rights, Human Rights"

(Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation)
-by David Nibert
2002
Do you know what it feels like to hold the most important book you've ever read?
I've now known that feeling. Twice.
This book joins "Sex at Dawn", by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, on a very short list - the only absolutely essential books for anyone wishing to understand humanity.
Stylistically, the two are quite different. Ryan and Jetha's work is as entertaining as it is informative, while Nibert tends toward scholarly dispatch. But before you're even done with Chapter 1, you'll understand the import of what you're reading. More concisely than anything i know, these books pull the veil off humanity, pre- and post- agricultural revolution.
There is also one striking similarity - misleading titles. Expectations of a study of animals (or sex) are quickly superseded. "Sex at Dawn" (http://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2012/02/sex-at-dawn.html) is about human nature, and "Animal Rights, Human Rights" is about how far we've strayed in the past ten to twenty millenia.
Nibert studies exploitation, on a towering scale. He postulates that the oppression of other animals and humans has had far more than a parallel development - that these two realities feed off and reinforce one another. He diverges from many other animal rights advocates by averring that oppression is NOT about individual attitudes. It's institutionalized, embedded in the most basic structures of our society, and has given rise to every major social ill (sexism, racism, classism, speciesism...). To move beyond this barbarism, a reformer's attitude cannot be enough. Revolution is required.
Cruelty and abuse don't come naturally. For the vast majority of our species' history, we lived in harmony with ourselves and others. Thus, the rationalization required to make oppression feel right requires strong socialization. You can see the foundations as early as Socrates, who argued that "...it is undeniably true that [nature] has made all animals for the sake of man", and Plato, who created a hierarchy in which humans were either "gold", "silver", or "iron". Our language is constructed to make exploitation feel natural - why do we call someone a "meat-eater" rather than a "corpse-eater"? Our most basic laws and religious texts would have you believe that humans aren't even animals (or that, not long ago, women and non-whites weren't even human). Nibert replaces "animals" with "other animals", a distinction others have also made (What, you thought the "other animals" section of this website was because i'm needlessly verbose?). He takes a sociological walk through time since the development of hunting, to show how we came to be this way. In the era of corporate capitalism, our old way of thinking has led to incomprehensible suffering, wholesale extinction of uncountable life forms, and unraveling ecological disaster for any creature fond of moderate temperatures and oxygen. He points the way out - starting with getting all advocates for life on the same page, and creating more democracies of proportionate representation.
He also points to a blindness in my own worldview. In my rush to condemn the genocide of native americans, i've always put them on a pedestal, in no small part for their relatively egalitarian and non-oppressive ways. Yet their attitude toward the animals they slaughtered (filled with ritual and spirituality and reverence) is a classic example of how humans legitimize activities they're not entirely comfortable with.
How can i communicate my urgent esteem for this book? In the days since reading it, an image has popped into my mind - my own corpse, post-suicide, following the example of tibetan monks. Cradled in my right and left hand are two books.
I'm a writer. In this epoch of glorified ego, it's a pretty strong testament that neither of those books were written by me.
Sadly, we also live in the ultimate culture of celebrity. My own demise would lack the resonance of, say, a potentate or pop star. So if you know any such, particularly if they've got that lookin'-for-a-very-high-bridge look in their eyes...
Get 'em these two books. Posthaste.