The Tom Regan Week: "The Thee Generation."

[Carolyn Bailey]

Tom Regan on the Thee Generation.

You've been described as “the philosophical leader of the animal rights movement” by the editors of Utne Reader (October, 2010) , who named you, along with the Dali Lama, as “one of fifty visionaries who are changing the world.” What do you say in response to such laudatory words?

Professor Tom Regan:

Well, it certainly was an unexpected honor. Utne prides itself on publishing “the best of the alternative press.” You won’t find Rush Limbaugh gracing its pages. Utne is synonymous with progressive, so that’s the first thing I hear when I consider the words you quoted: Utne sees the Animal Rights Movement as holding its own among other progressive movements. We all can take some encouragement from that.

 

As for my being “the philosophical leader”: I’ve never represented myself as any sort of “leader.” That would be a singularly arrogant thing for anyone to do. I’ve just tried to make a contribution (writing books, delivering talks, making films, encouraging poets and painters, for example, through the Culture and Animals Foundation) now going on forty years. I think you have to be dead for several generations before you can be elevated to the status of “leader,” and the last time I checked I was still breathing.

 

Tom Regan, “visionary?” That’s never been said about me before, to the best of my knowledge. Almost all of my professional writing has been highly analytic. Anyone who has read The Case for Animal Rights knows what I mean. A good friend of mine (good friends can needle one another) often tells me, “Whenever I’m havin’ trouble fallin’ asleep, I start readin’ a page of The Case and, slam!, before I know it, I’m snorin’!”

 

Anyhow, there was one occasion when, along with other philosophers, I was asked to let my imagination run free and to play the unusual role of the “visionary,” including (but not restricted to) the future of philosophy. It’s reprinted in my book, The Thee Generation: Reflections on the Coming Revolution. Chat members who are not interested in learning about “Tom Regan, Visionary” can skip to the next question.

 

 

The Thee Generation

 

I write of a new generation, The Thee Generation. It is a generation of service: of giving not taking, of commitment to principles not material possessions, of communal compassion not conspicuous consumption. If the defining question of the present generation is What can I get for me? the central question of this new generation is What can I do for thee?

 

The "thee" to be served includes the handicapped and the poor, the illiterate and the homeless, the starving and the abused, those newly born and those soon to die. Race makes no differ­ence. Sex makes no difference. Religion and nationality, these too, make no difference. All who stand in need are served, with those least able to help themselves receiving the greater share. In The Thee Generation, absolute vulnerability finds absolute protection.

 

This ethic of service-to-the-other is rooted in a reconceptualization of what the human person is. A shared sense of commu­nity replaces the void of individual estrangement. Only by acting for the other does one come to know one's self, not in isolation from the ties that bind each to all but in affirmation of them. Apart from such relationships the self is seen to be an empty shell, the word "I" the most impersonal of pronouns. The malign logic of Descartes's cogito is dead. In its place a new declaration is alive: Ego vivo in civitate, ergo sum (I live in community, therefore I am).

 

Dissolved are the arrogant boundaries of humanism. Pos­sessed of the breath of life, members of The Thee Generation recognize their membership in the life community. Each thing remains what it is, and not another thing. But what each is, is now seen to be connected to all that is. Whereas previous generations saw a world consisting of discrete, isolated atoms of mat­ter (or of mind), The Thee Generation sees interrelated, molecular communities of life.

 

This change in perspective is more than conceptual. The realization of human embeddedness in nature is a half-truth if limited to some abstract formula, as if all biotic connections could be reduced to the chemical kinship found in the carbon cycle. Human embeddedness is subjectively concrete, affording an immediate, living sense of what it is to be in the world. The landscape remains unaltered, but the perspective is changed. Fundamentally. Radically.

 

Along with an increased awareness of living-in-community with all life, members of The Thee Generation assume increased responsibility for life. In contrast to previous generations, who saw the alienated human as master, members of The Thee Gener­ation see themselves as protector of the natural world. The question What can I do for thee? is asked not only of vulnerable, disempowered humans but also of the other animals.

 

The depraved instrumentality by which previous generations have fixed the value of these animals is replaced by the recogni­tion of their inherent worth. That worth is neither respected nor served by allowing commerce in their flesh as food, for example, or by utilizing them as "models" of human disease. An ethic of domination, one that elevates the human to the status of master species, both accepts and encourages these and many other forms of socially sanctioned barbarity. But not an ethic of service. Such an ethic shakes the very foundations of Western civilization as we know it. In place of the pathological tradition of animal enslavement, The Thee Generation offers a philosophy of libera­tion, one that calls for freeing these animals from the yoke of human tyranny.

 

This same philosophy extends to the sustainers of life: the land, the waters, the air. These, too, are protected—these, too, liberated—from the ravages of individual and collective greed. The human walks gently upon the earth, and what once was plundered is now restored.

 

Familiar problems remain. Members of The Thee Generation are not naked noble savages; they do not abandon human civili­zation in favor of the traditions of ancestral nomads. Within the network of the evolving human lifeway sources of energy must be found, food and building materials secured, means of transportation developed, the needs of the elderly attended, the young educated. Today's moral, social, and political questions endure.

 

But not today's answers. And not today's accepted basis for finding them. In place of the false standards of human material prosperity and personal salvation The Thee Generation calls for community integrity and individual service. In The Thee Generation the rights of one person end not only where those of another human's begin but also where the interests of the life community are threatened. The limits of individual liberty are reassessed. If educational practices encourage and reward ac­ceptance of human isolation and domination, they are changed. When the few seek economic power at the cost of massive destruction to the life community, they are stopped. Since por­nographic depictions of women subordinate women as a group, they are prohibited.

 

Because The Thee Generation is still emerging, it today has little by way of a settled philosophy. Indeed, perhaps more than anything else, the philosophical foundations of this emerging worldview—a worldview that tolerates even as it is not hindered by the latest “postmodern” intellectual fad—must receive the most intense exploration. And it is this exploration, not the franchised menu of ideas currently dominating academic philos­ophy, that define philosophy’s real promise in the decades ahead and its debt to the centuries behind. In the best sense, then, philosophy's mission remains the same, as do those of the several sciences, art, religion, and other human creative endeavors. Again, only the perspective has changed.

 

That perspective already is changing, and the work of philoso­phers already is helping change it. Each of the insistent voices has its own vocabulary, each its particular agenda. Feminism. Deep ecology. Animals rights. The differences are many, but the aspirations are the same: To rediscover who we are, and what we can (and ought to) be. A revolution is under way—a revolution of the human spirit. All around us the weight of dead theories and decaying institutions is being cast off.

 

I have written of The Thee Generation as new. Yet in some ways it is ancient. Like St. Augustine's City of God, which has no particular location, The Thee Generation has no specific tem­poral place. Some members have lived and died. Others live now. Many more are yet to be born. All are united across time by the bonds of shared ideals, communal aspirations, and an unshakable conviction: The day will come when their numbers and influ­ence will be sufficient to cause cultural change, to save not only the whales and the planet but ourselves. Faith demands this. And optimism? Optimism finds cause to celebrate the early signs of restlessness among today's youth, only now beginning to rouse themselves from their parents' dogmatic slumbers: the next generation!

 

One thing is certain. Whatever hope there is for the flourish­ing of life, within and beyond the human family, requires the demise of those ideas that have brought us here. The ethos of avenging angels is past. Ours is an age when benevolent assassins are asked to bury false ideologies. If philosophers have a future, it is this.

 

So, to the extent that I am a “visionary,” this is the vision I have. And, yes, I know: it takesaperson with an enormous amount of optimism to believe that The Thee Generation willcome into being and flourish. In my heart of hearts, I am that optimistic person. I believe inhumanity’s boundless potential for the good. If I didn’t I could never have tried to make the contributions I mentioned earlier. Why spend one’s life on a hopeless quest? I’ll have more to say about this later.

 

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ARZone exists to promote rational discussion about our relations with other animals and about issues within the animal advocacy movement. Please continue the debate after chats by starting a forum discussion or making a point under a transcript.

 

[Brooke Cameron]

This is an excellent start to the Tom Regan presentation this week in ARZone!

I really like Tom's enormous body of work and believe that his contribution to educating others about the justice other animals deserve is unparallelled.

Tom's "Thee Generation" sounds like something I would very much like to explore further, and I thank ARZone for bringing the most up-to-date Tom Regan philosophy to fellow ARAs.

I can't wait for tomorrow's edition!

 

 

 

 

[Erin]

Yes, great answer.

Really looking forward to the rest.

 

[Carolyn Bailey]

I agree that Professor Regan is the Philosophical Leader of the Animal Rights Movement. His work has inspired and enlightened me, and many many others. 

It's a privilege to have had the opportunity to further learn from Tom Regan through this interview. 

 

[Tim Gier]

People might be reluctant in these "modern times" to think and talk about the kind of grand ideas expressed here by Prof. Regan about the Thee Generation. But we ought not to be. Indeed, as Regan says:

"A revolution is under way—a revolution of the human spirit. All around us the weight of dead theories and decaying institutions is being cast off."

So, let us be bold enough to do more than think and talk about it. Let us get to work to make it happen!! Thank you for the inspiration Prof. Regan.