3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Steven Pinker opens his influential bestseller The Better Angels of Our Nature with the claim that “If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one,” going on to argue that the contemporary age is one marked by relatively more peace and less violence than ever before. Drawing on a long tradition of optimist thinkers, he credits this civilizational progress to a combination of the intellectual legacy of Enlightenment humanism, greater faith in scientific rationality and technological progress, a strong system of states and social institutions, and the development of democracy and the liberal market economy. For Pinker, this account holds as much for humans as it does for animals, and he goes so far as to claim the emergence of animal rights as “another rights revolution” akin to civil rights and women’s rights. But does this account of modern society hold up under scrutiny? Or, more specifically, where does it fail? And how exactly does contemporary society relate to different forms of violence (against humans and animals) that it has not done away with? The historical processes described by Pinker have not only drastically changed human society, but they have also impacted how we interact with animals. The United States today produces and consumes more meat than ever, but most Americans live at an increasing geographic and perceptual distance from animals and the humans who work with them, relying on a system of industrial production and a complex division of labor. This course approaches the politics of this distribution of labor, violence, and human-animal relations from a site rarely considered in political analysis: the modern slaughterhouse. It engages with this institution as a historical and cultural object, using the story of its emergence and operation to ask broader questions about the politics of social change. We will draw on an interdisciplinary range of academic and non-academic works to explore a range of questions about the relat