Growing Up as Animal Harming Animal Lovers: Sociology and Animal

Use.

A Presentation for NUIM Maynooth Veggie Society.

December 2013Dr. Roger Yates

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Draw a “farmyard scene.”

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Draw a “farmyard scene.”

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Draw a “farmyard scene.”

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Draw a “farmyard scene.”

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sociology

…the study of human society, the study of human behaviour

how human beings learn to be “social actors”

how human beings learn social rules, norms, values and their “culture”

[cultural speciesism]6

social animals

Bauman…

o Human beings “live in the company of other people,” in groups in which we interactively understand that we are greatly dependent on each other (1990: 9)

o To say that to live is to live with others “is obvious to the point of banality”

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Zygmunt Bauman

Bauman says (1990: 7) that sociology is about investigating how humans are “locked together” in society

Locked in “a web of mutual dependency”

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“manifold webs of human interdependency”

common sense (common sense knowledge)

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CSK

common sense knowledge: powerful social mechanisms which can fundamentally shape our attitudes about the world in which we live

common sense understandings are maintained through repetition of the “routine,” and the enactment of the “monotonous nature of everyday life”

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Bauman (1990: 15)

As long as we go through the routine and habitualised motions which fill most of our daily business, we do not need much self-scrutiny and self-analysis

When repeated often enough, things tend to become familiar, and familiar things are self-explanatory; they present no problems and arouse no curiosity. In a way, they remain invisible

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the power of social groups

groups can exert an immense “hold” on the individual

Abiding by - rather than challenging - the norms and values of your group is much the easiest thing to do

“Change would require much more effort, self-sacrifice, determination and endurance than are normally needed for living placidly and obediently in conformity with the upbringing offered by the group into which one was born”

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The contrast between the ease of swimming with the stream and the difficulty of changing sides is the secret of that hold which my natural group has over me; it is the secret of my dependence on my group. If I look closely and try to write down an inventory of all those things I owe to the group to which I - for better or worse - belong, I’ll end up with quite a long list

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Bauman suggests that later socialisation can be regarded as “the dialectics of freedom and dependence” which starts at birth and ends at death

In early socialisation, a child appears to have little opportunity to challenge the content of the social lessons she receives

However, the older one gets, the wider one’s choices may become

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never entirely liberated from our past

free and unfree at the same timewith respect of those cases in which

change is actually possible, “the costs of change are exorbitant and off-putting”

too much to “de-learn”“making a break” becomes more and

more impossible, unlikely and unattractive

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Bauman…

The central question of sociology, one could say, is: in what sense does it matter that in whatever they do or may do people are dependent on other people; in what sense does it matter that they always (and cannot but) live in the company of, in communication with, in an exchange with, in competition with, in cooperation with other humans beings?

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Social thought – sociology – can offer a different way of thinking about society

e.g. it can….

Identify the social in the individual

Identify the general in the particular

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Living amongst others…

living amongst others is to live in what Bauman calls ‘manifold webs of human inter-dependency’, which have important effects on our motivations and our social behaviour (1990: 14).

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Common sense understandings are maintained through repetition of the ‘routine’, and the enactment of the ‘monotonous nature of everyday life’.

familiar things are self-explanatory; they present no problems and arouse no curiosity. In a way, they remain invisible

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the group ‘makes people’

changing the individual which the group has created requires the ‘utmost exertion’

‘Change would require much more effort, self-sacrifice, determination and endurance than are normally needed for living placidly and obediently in conformity with the upbringing offered by the group into which one was born’

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The contrast between the ease of swimming with the stream and the difficulty of changing sides is the secret of that hold which my natural group has over me; it is the secret of my dependence on my group

21‘the costs of change are exorbitant

and off-putting’

othe older one gets, the wider one’s choices may become

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