Pity 2.0? Rethinking the human-animal divide in the digital age

The fact that we are political animals should certainly influence the kind of animal politics that are developed in human communities. This means that our social organization as a species is expected to take into consideration that animals are our biological kinship and deserve a more equal treatment than the one historically dispensed to them. Such is at least the reasoning proposed by the majority of those who defend a less anthropocentric animal politics: a human recognition of the moral status of animals that is founded upon the biological continuity between us and them, followed by the social changes needed to honour such kinship. Ideally, such recognition is preceded by an individual realization of our bond to animals –as suggested by Derrida in relation to his cat or by the novelist Safran Froer in connection to food and the animal industry. However, for all the usefulness of this approach, it is far from flawless. Above all, it does not seem to pay enough attention to the kind of animal that we humans are. Because it is true enough that we are just animals, but at the same time we are more than that –more precisely, we are the exceptional animal, one which is differentiated through biological evolution from the others and one which is, unlike them, defined by a relatively open nature. In fact, the technological acceleration experienced by the human species in the last three centuries creates a peculiar contrast between the animal question, or even the animal fact, and the hybrid, technified world in which we humans live. Although the Derridian cat remains a possibility, we cannot be sure that every individual is going to feel that way towards actual animals in a pluralistic sustainable society. It would seem then that an alternative animal politics could be founded upon a more realistic view of both the human animal and human domination over the rest of nature, so that a new way of organizing the social –rather than the individual– relationship to animals is the result of refining and not abolishing human perception and domination of them. Thus human past and present brutalities are to be understood as part of the species quest for survival, an impulse which only now can be moderated and redirected via our greater knowledge of nature’s workings and the possibility of technologically replicating animal stocks in a less harmful way. We can feel pity towards animals, but also to ourselves, all the more since we know that dominion was not a matter of choice. Therefore, if continuity is stressed on the individual level, exceptionality serves as the guideline for a social re-organization of animality. Such is then a modern program, but one that does not discard the possibility that individual realization becomes more common and pushes our animal politics in an altogether different direction.