Humankind. Timothy Morton

complained that the West seemed more concerned about a lion than about an African human: “In Africa, a human being is more important than an animal. I don’t know about the Western world.”³⁶ The implication is that the reaction is daft. We’d be right to observe that the reaction bypasses the complex and difficult struggles of African people, or that it’s a blip in the society of the spectacle that doesn’t address real concerns, or how racism frequently leapfrogs over human beings toward nonhumans—Hitler loved his dog, Blondi, and the Nazis passed animal rights legislation. Identifying with a lion means not identifying with a human.

      But does it? There is every reason to ignore the identification, for not only does it appear putatively racist, it’s also childish. Cynical reason wants to find aggressive motives hiding within passionate ones, or motives that aren’t aggressive enough. We’d be right to observe that this is a good example of human identification with what are mockingly called “charismatic megafauna” and which make up a tiny fraction of lifeforms. But this sort of talk is often made in the key of individual guilt and shame about how we appear to other humans.

      Dismissing the incident with Cecil is too easy: there was so much more seething under that mob umbrella than just animal rights or sadistic sympathy. Rights have to do with property and property means “you can dispose of it however you like,” which is exactly what the dentist had done, once the lion had been determined (by human fiat, of course) to be something to which he could do what he wanted. Pity is condescending in precisely the way William Blake outlined: “Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody poor.”³⁷ Sympathy is always a power relationship. This was surely in effect. But so was empathy, which has to do with identification.

      One has to wonder whether the “naïve” pre-theoretical upsurge, in all its symptomatic, spectacular-political failure, was an implicit rejection of the idea of, as the Situationists put it, “a holiday in someone else’s misery,” whether or not that someone was a human or a lion. Exactly at its most “stupid,” the reaction was not about bypassing (African) humans; what it bypassed was the nexus between hunting and tourism, and the way the spectacle the nexus generates keeps an oppressive status quo in place.

      Empathy isn’t as expensive as we suppose. Since I’m not a spirit in a bottle, facing the problem of how to get out of that bottle to act on things that aren’t me, since thinking doesn’t exhaust beings anyway, and since thought isn’t a privileged access mode, we’ve been looking for empathy in the wrong place. An anthropocentric place. Maybe it really is easier to identify with a lion than we thought. Wittgensteinian truisms about lion speech (we could never understand one even if one spoke) are, to risk a mixed metaphor, barking up the wrong tree.³⁸ Understanding, or even being-in-the-same-shoes-as, was never quite the point.³⁹ The point is that no effort at all is required; that whenever effort is brought in, solidarity fades. Adam Smith theorized that aesthetic attunement (reading novels) is a training ground for the ability to identify with other people, and that empathy is the basis for ethics.⁴⁰ Identifying with a fictional character raises the specter disavowed by novelistic realism, the specter of telepathy, in which whose thoughts and feelings I am tuning in to becomes moot, in which the boundaries between me and another are far less rigid than Western thought has supposed.⁴¹ But why would such an effort of training in telepathy (passion at a distance) be possible at all, if we weren’t already an energetic field of connectivity, the symbiotic real and its hum of solidarity? Communist affects are lower than empathy, cheaper and less difficult to access, too easy. The point is to rappel “downwards” through the empathetic part of the capitalist superstructure, to find something still more default than empathy.

      In a dialectical twist, people are now so immiserated that their kinship with nonhumans starts to glow through the screen of Nature, a construct that since about 10,000 BCE has been the malleable substance of human projects—or its modern upgrade, the screen-like surface onto which humans project their desires. At least some humans are now prepared to drop Nature concepts, to achieve solidarity with the beings that actually constitute the biosphere.

      The year 2015 was when a very large number of humans figured out that they had more in common with a lion than with a dentist.

      That human–lion solidarity was achieved through misery might incline us not to accept it, though this is exactly how human–human solidarity is achieved. The reason is anthropocentrism. Marx observes how workers are equated with nonhumans, and he describes it as degradation: “As soon as man, instead of working on the object of labour with a tool, becomes merely the motive power of a machine, it is purely accidental that the motive power happens to be clothed in the form of human muscles; wind, water or steam could just as well take man’s place.⁴²”

      One perceived obstacle to accepting nonhumans within Marxism is the way in which Marx describes human production in passages such as this. To encounter the nonhuman within capitalism is to have been stripped of one’s human uniqueness. A human being has been reduced to muscles, and muscles have been reduced to replaceable components, simply extensional movement. Consider the examination of Victorian capitalism’s micromanagement of the precise minimum space required to live and breathe, from which Marx generalizes:

      [Capital] usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It haggles over the meal-times, where possible incorporating them into the production process itself, so that food is added to the worker as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, and grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, renewal and refreshment of the vital forces to the exact amount of torpor essential to the revival of an absolutely exhausted organism … What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.

      [It] not only produces a deterioration of human labour-power … but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour–power itself.⁴³

      The macabre final sentence reinforces the sense that what we are witnessing here is a brutal, very real version of scientistic reductionism. Consider how Marx describes a phase of early capitalist primitive accumulation in one witty sentence that also reduces the nonhuman: “First the workers are driven from the land, and then the sheep arrive.”⁴⁴

      The one nonhuman Marx doesn’t put on a lower level is capital as such. What is disturbing about commodity fetishism is that it doesn’t require (human) belief; it’s fully automated. What is disturbing about the “secret” of capital is not the extent to which it is hidden—even Adam Smith could point out that labor produces value. What disturbs is that its secret is on the surface: it is the secret of social form itself. In their fascination with content, the bourgeois political economists are blinded. Understanding is irrelevant, and this is the worst that could happen because understanding is the top access mode, since Marx inherited the lineage of Kant. As understanding is associated with the human, nonhuman access modes (brushing against, floating through, licking) are devalued. What is disturbing about commodity fetishism is its autonomous power. So, there is something fundamentally wrong with granting power to nonhumans. Is this idea a bug or a feature?

      NEOLIBERALISM AND PLANETARY AWARENESS

      The reduction of the human to the nonhuman and the reduction of the nonhuman to the brutal also suggests a way out. An ontology (a logic of how things exist) that didn’t reduce humans and nonhumans—thus preventing the sour taste that comes from being compared with wind or water—would contravene the implicit logic of capitalism, which makes an ontological noise that exactly resembles materialist reductionism.

      Since the UN’s Earth Summit (Rio, June 3–14, 1992), what has underpinned the fascist right in the USA has been opposition to solidarity with nonhumans. We can draw many conclusions from this. George Bush the First’s announcement of a post-Soviet New World Order is indeed sinister, but so is the fascist interpretation of that announcement. What is fascinating is how explicit the fascists are about it. They combine the Bush administration’s image of the New