Animal Pyrotechnics

Animal Pyrotechnics

Last night I went to see the July 4^th fireworks at the Biltmore hotel with my friend Eddy. As usual, I enjoyed them thoroughly (though they are ethically questionable). Afterwards I said to him, “I just had a religious experience”. Why did I say that? Not because I believe that fireworks are a manifestation of God’s presence and must accordingly be worshipped, but for a more complex (and defensible) reason. My first thought was that consciousness is a great and wondrous gift—in this case visual consciousness. What would life be without it? We don’t give it enough credit. We take it for granted. Who to thank? In the olden days the answer would have been, “God, of course”: God in his wisdom and goodness gave us consciousness, thus making life worth living (not much fun being a rock or even a plant). The Lord be praised! But of course, that answer is not available to me for ontological reasons (no such thing etc.). So, who did make me this precious gift? The answer is obvious: evolution, natural selection—consciousness evolved by means of natural selection and we are the beneficiaries of that process. But that answer, though correct, is too impersonal—or “imanimal”. For the evolutionary process consists of the actions and experiences of a vast array of animals, struggling and striving to survive and reproduce. This requires heroic effort, dedication, and a sturdy work ethic (you can’t just loll around sunbathing). Have you seen what those animal mothers and fathers go through? They could be forgiven for giving up the struggle—just not bothering with all that child-rearing and associated effort (and are they thanked by their offspring? Oh no). It is because of them that we exist blessed with our human consciousness. We are grateful to our parents for giving birth to us, feeding us, taking care of us; and we should be grateful to their parents too for taking care of them so that they could produce and take care of us. And so on back. But this ancestral line soon shifts outside the human species and takes in an enormous sequence of progenitors going back to primitive creatures. It was the joint effort of these animals that led to our existence with our marvelous gift of consciousness. Without them we would be nothing, literally. Our animal ancestors are the source of the consciousness I reveled in while watching the fireworks—animal pyrotechnics. Thank you, dear ancestral animals! You did it, all alone, with no divine assistance. You gave me my life and the consciousness that goes with it. You gave my life meaning, because without consciousness life would be meaningless. And you gave me a specific form of consciousness—incredibly varied, spectacular, astonishing to behold. Where would firework displays be without it?

Thus, I had a religious experience, zoolatristic in nature. Animals are the reason I exist as a conscious being—because of their trials and tribulations. They deserve gratitude, esteem, worship even. I already loved them but now I realized how important they are to me: they made my pyrotechnic experience possible (other experiences too). I felt bound to them, at one with them, in debt to them. I felt their existence within me—the residue of all their exertions condensed and crystallized. It was as if what I was seeing in the sky was the evolutionary history that led up to that moment: a kind of scintillating celebration of animal striving. If only the pyrotechnic patterns had taken the shape of animal bodies! Imagine a vast pyrotechnic dinosaur! Anyway, that was my religious experience on a hot humid night in Miami. Mystical, in its way. I was already a firm believer in zoolatry, but this drove the allegiance home. We should really have a day of thanksgiving for animals—a day of non-human ancestor worship (thanking the turkey for making us possible not eating it). You should honor your father and mother, but you should also honor all those fathers and mothers in your ancestral line; their actions led to you and made you what you are. We could even say they gave you your soul in their struggle to survive and procreate—it didn’t come from anywhere else. We are not self-standing beings, auto-created; we are the result of millions of years of concerted animal effort. Natural selection acts on creatures straining and laboring to survive, dedicated parents, fighting the good fight. It isn’t some abstract biological process with no failures and successes among active sentient creatures. We should be preaching not just animal liberation but animal celebration, animal exaltation.[1]

[1] I have long felt that the rhetoric of animal liberation, admirable though it is, underplays animal agency, animal productivity. We are trying to liberate our makers when we should be thanking them. We owe them everything; they aren’t just objects of our enlightened altruism. They deserve our respect, gratitude, esteem. They literally created us; we are them slightly modified. They merit veneration.