Confessions of a Heretic

by Roger Scruton

  That said, however, we should still make a distinction between the right way and the wrong way to love a dog. Dogs are individuals, in the way that all animals are individuals. But they have, if it can be so expressed, a higher degree of individuality than birds, certainly a higher degree of individuality than insects. By this I mean that their wellbeing is more bound up with their specific nature and circumstances, with their affections and their character, than is the wellbeing of members of other species. A bird relates to its surroundings as a member of its species, but not as one who has created for itself an individual network of expectations and fears. The loving dog is dependent on individual people, and knows that he is so dependent. He responds to his surroundings in ways that distinguish individuals within it, and recognises demands that are addressed specifically to him, and to which he must respond. His emotions, simple though they are, are learned responses, which bear the imprint of a history of mutual dealings.

  In this way it is possible to read into the behaviour of a dog something of the inter-personal responses that we know from human affection. The dog is not a person, but he is like a person in incorporating into himself the distinguishing features of his experience, coming to be the particular dog that he is through being related to the particular others in his surroundings. But why do I say he is not a person? The reason, briefly, is this. Persons are individuals too; but their individuality is situated on another metaphysical plane from that of the animals, even that of the animals who love them, and love them as individuals. Persons identify themselves in the first person, know themselves as ‘I’, and make free choices based on these acts of identification. They are sovereign over their world, and the distinction between self and other, mine and not-mine, deciding and not deciding, penetrates all their thinking and acting.

  The dog who looks into the eyes of his master is not judging, not reminding the master of his responsibilities or putting himself on display as another individual with rights and freedoms of his own. He is simply appealing as he might to a mate or a fellow member of the pack, in the hope that his need will be answered. There is not, in any of this, the ‘I’ to ‘I’ encounter that distinguishes persons among all other things in nature and which, indeed, for Kant, is a sign that they are not really part of nature at all. Although I relate to my dog as an individual, it is from a plane of individuality to which he can never ascend. Ideas of responsibility, duty, right and freedom, which govern my intentions, have no place in his thinking. For him I am another animal – a very special animal, certainly, but nevertheless one that exists on the same plane as himself, and whose motives he will never comprehend, except in terms of the kind of unquestioning unity of being that is the sum of canine affection.

  Now it seems to me that the right way to love a dog is to love him not as a person, but as a creature that has been raised to the edge of personhood, so as to look into a place that is opaque to him but from which emerge signals that he understands in another way than we who send them. If we base our love for our dog on the premise that he, like us, is a person, then we damage both him and ourselves. We damage him by making demands that no animal can fully understand – holding him to account in ways that make no sense to him. We will feel bound to keep him alive, as we keep each other alive, for the sake of a relation that, being personal, is also eternal. It seems to me that a person loves his dog wrongly when he does not have him put down when decay is irreversible. But it is not so much the damage done to the dog that matters: it is the damage done to the person. The love of a dog is in an important sense cost-free. The greatest criminal can enjoy it. No dog demands virtue or honour of his master, and all dogs will leap to their master’s defence, even when it is the forces of good that are coming to arrest him. Dogs do not judge, and their love is unconditional only because it has no conception of conditions. From a dog, therefore, we can enjoy the kind of endorsement that requires no moral labour to earn it. And this is what we see all around us: the dwindling of human affection, which is always conditional and always dependent on moral work, and its replacement by the cost-free love of pets.

  Such a love wants to have it both ways: to preserve the pre-lapsarian innocence of its object, while believing the object capable nevertheless of moral judgement. The dog is a dumb animal, and therefore incapable of wrongdoing; but for that very reason he is seen as right in all his judgements, bestowing his affection on worthy objects, and endorsing his master through his love. This is the root cause of the sentimentalisation of animal life that makes a film like Bambi so poisonous – leading people to ‘dollify’ animals, while believing the animals to be ‘in the right’ and always endowed with the moral advantage. But you cannot have it both ways: either animals are outside the sphere of moral judgement, or they are not. If they are outside it, then their behaviour cannot be taken as proof of their ‘innocence’. If they are inside it, then they may sometimes be guilty and deserving of blame.

  Human love is of many kinds. In its highest form, it comes as a gift, freely bestowed on another person along with the offer of support. But such love does not come without cost. There is a cost to the subject, and a cost to the object. Love can be betrayed by its object, when he shows himself to be unworthy to receive it, and incapable of returning it. And to undergo this experience is one of the greatest of human griefs. But love for that very reason imposes a cost on its object, who must live up to the trust bestowed on him, and do his best to deserve the gift. Love is a moral challenge that we do not always meet, and in the effort to meet it we study to improve ourselves and to live as we should. It is for this reason that we are suspicious of loveless people – people who do not offer love and who therefore, in the normal run of things, do not receive it. It is not simply that they are outside the fold of human affection. It is that they are cut off from the principal spur to human goodness, which is the desire to live up to the demands of a person who matters to them more than they matter themselves.

  Clearly, if we conceive human love in that way, we can see that we all have a strong motive to avoid it: we do not benefit by avoiding it, and it is always a mistake to try, as we know from the tragedy of King Lear.4 Nevertheless, life is simpler without inter-personal love, since it can be lived at a lower level, beneath the glare of moral judgement. And that is the bad reason for lavishing too much feeling on a pet. Devoted animals provide an escape-route from human affection, and so make that affection superfluous. Of course, people can find themselves so beaten down by life, so deprived of human love that, through no fault of their own, they devote themselves to the care of an animal, by way of keeping the lamp of affection alive. Such is Flaubert’s Coeur simple, whose devotion to her parrot was in no way a moral failing. But that kind of devotion, which is the residue of genuine moral feeling, is a virtue in the one who displays it, and has little in common with the Bambyism that is now growing all around us, and which seeks to rewrite our relations with other animals in the language of rights.

  I have argued against the idea of animal rights elsewhere.5 My argument stems, not from a disrespect for animals, but from a respect for moral reasoning, and for the concepts – right, duty, obligation, virtue – which it employs and which depend at every point on the distinctive features of self-consciousness. But perhaps the greatest damage done by the idea of animal rights is the damage to animals themselves. Elevated in this way to the plane of moral consciousness, they find themselves unable to respond to the distinctions that morality requires. They do not distinguish right from wrong; they cannot recognise the call of duty or the binding obligations of the moral law. And because of this we judge them purely in terms of their ability to share our domestic ambience, to profit from our affection, and from time to time to reciprocate it in their own mute and dependent way. And it is precisely this that engenders our unscrupulous favouritism – the favouritism that has made it a crime in my country to shoot a cat, however destructive its behaviour, but a praiseworthy action to poison a mouse, and thereby to infect the food-chain o
n which so many animals depend.

  It is not that we should withdraw our love from our favourite animals: to the extent that they depend on that love to that extent we should continue to provide it. But we must recognise that by loving them as individuals we threaten the animals who cannot easily be loved in any such way. Loving our dogs and cats we put a strain upon the natural order that is felt most grievously by the birds and beasts of the field. And even if those creatures have no rights, this does not cancel the fact that we have duties towards them – duties that become everyday more serious and demanding, as we humans expand to take over the habitats that we confiscate without scruple and enjoy without remorse. And our lack of scruple is only amplified by the sentimental attitudes that are nurtured by the love of pets, and which inculcate in us the desire for easy-going, cost-free and self-congratulatory affections, and which thereby undermine the human virtue on which the rest of nature most depends.

  Notes

  1 Michael Woods, Robbie A. McDonald and Stephen Harries, ‘Predation of Wild Animals by Domestic Cats in Great Britain’, report to The Mammal Society, most recent revision 1 March 2003, available online.

  2 Adapting the celebrated remarks on anger in Nicomachean Ethics, Book 4, chapter 5.

  3 Among the many affecting accounts of this relationship in the literature I single out George Pitcher, The Dogs Who Came To Stay, New York, 1995, since I knew the dogs, and know the author.

  4 See the important essay by Stanley Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’, in Must We Mean What We Say?, updated edition, Cambridge, CUP, 2002.

  5 See Animal Rights and Wrongs, London, Continuum, 2002.

  3

  – Governing Rightly –

  In his first Inaugural Address, President Reagan announced that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem’, and his remark struck a chord in the hearts of his conservative supporters. American conservatives, called upon to define their position, reiterate the message that there is ‘too much government’. The seemingly unstoppable expansion of regulations, the increasing control over what happens in the work-place, in the public square and even in the family, the constant manufacture of new crimes and misdemeanours, aimed at controlling how we associate and with whom, the attempts to limit first and second-amendment rights – these developments are viewed by many conservatives with alarm. They seem to be taking America in a new direction, away from the free association of self-governing individuals envisaged by the Founders, towards a society of obedient dependents, who exchange their freedom and their responsibilities for a perpetual lien on the public purse. And you only have to look at Europe to see the result.

  The European countries are governed by a political class that can escape from accountability behind the closed doors of the European institutions. Those institutions deliver an unending flow of laws and regulations covering all aspects of life, from the hours of work to the rights of sexual minorities. Everywhere in the European Union a regime of political correctness makes it difficult either to maintain, or to live by, precepts that violate the state-imposed orthodoxies. Non-discrimination laws force many religious people to go against the teachings of their faith – in the matters of homosexuality, public preaching and the display of religious symbols. Activists in the European Parliament seek to impose on all states of the Union, regardless of culture, faith or sovereignty, an unqualified right to abortion, together with forms of ‘sex education’ calculated to prepare young people as commodities in the sexual market, rather than as responsible adults seeking commitment and love.1

  A kind of hysteria of repudiation rages in European opinion-forming circles, picking one by one on the old and settled customs of a two-thousand-year-old civilisation, and forbidding them or distorting them into some barely recognisable caricature. And all this goes with a gradual transfer of economic life from private enterprise to central government, so that in France and Italy more than half of citizens are net recipients of income from the state while small businesses struggle to comply with a regime of regulations that seems designed on purpose to suppress them.

  Many of those developments are being replicated in America. The welfare state has expanded beyond the limits envisaged in the New Deal, and the Supreme Court is now increasingly used to impose the morality of a liberal elite on the American people, whether they like it or not. These developments add to the sense among conservatives that government is taking over. America, they fear, is rapidly surrendering the rights and freedoms of its citizens in exchange for the false security of an all-controlling state. Those tasks that only governments can perform – defence of the realm, the maintenance of law and order, the repair of infrastructure and the coordination of relief in emergencies – are forced to compete for their budgets with activities that free citizens, left to themselves, might have managed far more efficiently through the associations of volunteers, backed up where necessary by private insurance. Wasn’t it those associations of volunteers that redeemed, for Alexis de Tocqueville, the American experiment, by showing that democracy is not a form of disorder but another kind of order, and one that could reconcile the freedom of the individual with obedience to an overarching law?

  The emasculated society of Europe serves, then, as a warning to conservatives, and reinforces their belief that America must reverse the trend of modern politics, which has involved the increasing assumption by the state of powers and responsibilities that belong to civil society. Such has been the call of the Tea Party movement, and it is this same call that animated the Republican caucus in Congress as it prolonged the fight against Obamacare, to the point where, by jeopardising the fiscal probity of the nation, it antagonised the American people. It is therefore pertinent to consider not only the bad side of government – which Americans can easily recognise – but also the good. For American conservatives are in danger of appearing as though they had no positive idea of government at all, and were in the business simply of opposing all new federal programs, however necessary they may be to the future and security of the nation. Most of all, they seem to be losing sight of the truth that government is not only natural to the human condition, but an expression of those extended loyalties over time, which bind generation to generation in a relation of mutual commitment.

  The truth is that government, of one kind or another, is manifest in all our attempts to live in peace with our fellows. We have rights that shield us from those who are appointed to rule us – many of them ancient common-law rights, like that defined by habeas corpus. But those rights are real personal possessions only because government is there to enforce them – and if necessary to enforce them against itself. Government is not what so many conservatives believe it to be, and what people on the left always believe it to be when it is in other hands than their own – namely a system of power and domination. Government is a search for order, and for power only in so far as power is required by order. It is present in the family, in the village, in the free associations of neighbours, and in the ‘little platoons’ extolled by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution and by Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America. It is there in the first movement of affection and good will, from which the bonds of society grow. For it is simply the other side of freedom, and the thing that makes freedom possible.

  Rousseau told us that we are ‘born free’, arguing that we have only to remove the chains imposed by the social order, in order to enjoy our full natural potential. Although American conservatives have been sceptical of that idea, and indeed stood against its destructive influence during the time of the 60s radicals, they nevertheless also have a sneaking tendency to adhere to it. They are heirs to the pioneer culture. They idolise the solitary entrepreneur, who takes the burden of his projects on his own shoulders and makes space for the rest of us as we timidly advance in his wake. This figure, blown up to mythic proportions in the novels of Ayn Rand, has, in less fraught varieties, a rightful place in the American story. Bu
t the story misleads people into imagining that the free individual exists in the state of nature, and that we become free by removing the shackles of government. That is the opposite of the truth.

  We are not, in the state of nature, free; still less are we individuals, endowed with rights and duties, and able to take charge of our lives. We are free by nature because we become free, in the course of our development. And this development depends at every point upon the networks and relations that bind us to the larger social world. Only certain kinds of social networks encourage people to see themselves as individuals, shielded by their rights and bound together by their duties. Only in certain conditions are people united in society not by organic necessity but by free consent. To put it simply, the human individual is a social construct. And the emergence of the individual in the course of history is part of what distinguishes our civilisation from so many of the other social ventures of mankind.2