The Longest Struggle: From Pythagoras To PETA

Norm Phelps
Lantern Books (2007)
Reviewed by Steven Best
Reprinted with Permission from the Journal for Critical Animal Studies

 
“All of human history is one long horror story of the imprisonment, enslavement, torture, and murder of animals. Even countries whose cultures have been shaped by religions that are more animal friendly than Christianity, like Hinduism and Buddhism, have a terrible record where animals are concerned. ” Norm Phelps

Norm Phelps book, The Longest Struggle: From Pythagoras To PETA, constructs a broad historical narrative that makes new and important sense of Western history from the perspective of animal advocacy and vegetarianism. By working from the animal and vegetarian standpoints, Phelps uncovers aspects of Western history that are as crucial to understand as they are systematically ignored. These standpoints shed invaluable light on the social and ecological crises of Western societies, the moral character of societies and individuals, and the deeply flawed attempts to a progressivist narrative of history from humanist principles that discount the effects of social development on animals and the earth as a whole.

Phelps lucid account of a complex history leaves the reader with a clear sense of competing tendencies, such as between hierarchical and egalitarian traditions, as well as among welfare, rights, and direct action/liberation approaches. Adroitly, Phelps avoids the dangers of constructing a linear narrative, such as would result from a stage-theory of history that traced an alleged movement of increasing radicalism that unfolds in the transition from welfare to rights and liberation. He shows, for instance, how ancient Eastern cultures and early (pre-Socratic) Western cultures had more progressive views toward animals than subsequent Western societies, and he reveals how the much vaunted modern sciences and technologies, compared to the “Dark Ages” of medievalism, were utterly regressive from the standpoint of animals. Phelps separates what constitutes progress for humans and for animals, and “progress” typically involves a zero-sum game in which humans advance at the expense of the animals they enslave. Indeed, throughout Phelps’s book, there is a stirring emphasis on “human tyranny” rooted in the enslavement of animals. The book is a strong – and much deserved – indictment of the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of Western “civilization.”

Unlike other recent historical accounts of animal advocacy and/or vegetarianism which provide an excellent descriptive history, in The Longest Struggle, Phelps takes off the objectivist gloves to write a narrative that advocates the animal rights agenda. This is certainly a valid move, but unfortunately Phelps advances an arbitrary and circumscribed notion of animal rights that quintessentially embodies the bourgeois, liberal, reformist, single-issue, state-based, legalist politics that dominate the thinking and tactics of the contemporary animal advocacy movement, whether welfarist, “new welfarist,” or rights/abolitionist in theory and tactics.

Phelps critiques direct action by animal advocates yet is not consistent in this critique. He provides a glowing account of Jesus’ sabotage-tactic of overturning the tables of the moneychangers working on behalf of the animal sacrifice market. He extols Jesus as the “first animal liberator” (50) and praises his aggression as “history’s first direct action to liberate animals” (50). Phelps also affirms numerous medieval saints who protected animals from hunters and thus “were the first hunt saboteurs, releasing animals from snares and placing their own bodies between the hunters and their prey” (55). For a fuller social, political, and economic contextualization and interpretation of the history, nature, and significance of animal liberation, one must turn to other works, including those important volumes yet to be written.