{"id":4520,"date":"2023-10-13T04:00:08","date_gmt":"2023-10-13T08:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/milan-kundera-on-animal-rights-and-what-true-human-goodness-really-means-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2023-10-13T04:00:08","modified_gmt":"2023-10-13T08:00:08","slug":"milan-kundera-on-animal-rights-and-what-true-human-goodness-really-means-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/milan-kundera-on-animal-rights-and-what-true-human-goodness-really-means-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Milan Kundera on Animal Rights and What True Human Goodness Really Means \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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A quarter century before him, on the other side of the world, Whitman instructed in his radiant advice on life<\/a> to \u201clove the earth and sun and the animals,\u201d then went on to celebrate the dignity of nonhuman animals as creatures \u201cso placid and self-contain\u2019d\u201d that they put our human follies to shame:<\/p>\n

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They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These were radical ideas in an age of religious revival, flaming with the dogma that an omnipotent God placed atop his creation the human animal, entitled to owning and using and murdering other creatures \u2014 dogma Descartes had lodged into the body of secular culture two centuries earlier with his coronation of \u201cMan\u201d as the \u201cmaster and proprietor of nature,\u201d anchored in his belief that other animals are non-conscious automatons, which he set out to prove by vivisecting his wife\u2019s beloved dog. <\/p>\n

A century after Dostoyevsky and Whitman, just before the dawn of a new science illuminating the wonders of non-human minds<\/a>, Milan Kundera<\/strong> (April 1, 1929\u2013July 11, 2023) challenged these dogmas in a poignant aside from his classic 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

In the final pages of the novel, reckoning with the meaning of power and of tenderness, Kundera aims his mischievous humor at humanity\u2019s hubris:<\/p>\n

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The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n