Five years ago when I wrote the article "La moindre des choses",*in the booklet Nous ne mangeons pas de viande pour ne pas tuer d'animaux1 I did not expect my readers to get the impression that I no longer cared about fighting racism and sexism. The recent letter** sent by the group AIDA2 to the Cahiers antispécistes asks me to return to that article and read it again. This I have done; and I still don't see how I can have been so seriously misunderstood. However, it has also reminded me of a certain mindset that I had at the time, a mindset that may well be close to the way certain members of AIDA feel today and that may explain in part their attitude. This is the starting point from which flow the following reflections.
In that 1989 article, I wrote: "I have spent a large part of my life fighting at their sides against racism and sexism, against the oppression of Kanaks and so on. I should still like to feel motivated to do so today, but I cannot. There is one small point that keeps nagging at my mind (...): how can they demonstrate against a murder when they kill so easily each day? (...)"
This passage, which seems to have been misunderstood by those who criticize us, was intended to express not an indifference towards the struggles against racism, sexism etc., but rather a tension between, on the one hand, my wish to participate in them and, on the other hand, my feelings towards the persons with whom I would be involved. Faced with the enormity of the violence inherent to the oppression of non-humans I find it difficult, as others do, not to be put off, sickened even, by the attitude of those who devote themselves, often generously but so exclusively, to human problems while at the same time deliberately and gratuitously participating in the butchery of non-humans.3
This profound uneasiness easily translates into hostility and even hatred towards meat-eaters. These negative feelings themselves warrant criticism; a point I return to below. This can go even farther. For a long time, when first I became an animal rights activist, I was no longer able to feel any empathy, not only towards meat-eaters campaigning against human suffering, but also towards human suffering itself, towards the suffering with which campaigners of recognized causes are routinely concerned. I felt only annoyance or hostility, or at best indifference, towards children with muscular dystrophy, victims of famine, exploited workers, deported immigrants and raped women, and this not because these humans eat meat like everyone else, but simply because they were, being humans, the objects of the selective sympathy of "right-thinking" persons. Every human being, however unfortunate he or she might be, I saw only as part of the globally privileged category to which the human species belongs.
This is what I felt, but it is not what I thought. I spite of what I felt I never thought that human suffering deserved indifference or hostility; this kind of resentment - as should be immediately obvious to all - is absurd and unjust. An individual may well be part of a globally privileged category without thereby necessarily being privileged him or herself. Even if s/he is, the privilege is of necessity relative and does not render the suffering unimportant. There is always