<
https://theconversation.com/animal-farm-at-80-why-the-animals-really-matter-in-orwells-parable-about-communism-246713>
"George Orwell’s
Animal Farm (1945) turns 80 on August 17 2025. If there’s
one thing every student of history or politics knows, it’s that the novella is
not really about animals. Sure, the principal characters are pigs and horses.
But really, so we are told, it is about the Soviet Union and what happened to
the ideals of communism under the corrupt leadership of Joseph Stalin.
Orwell himself – part of a generation of plain-speaking British authors who had
not yet heard Roland Barthes’s theory of the death of the author (the idea that
words speak for themselves and the author’s intentions are irrelevant) –
proclaimed that this was how the story should be read.
But what if we were to take the animals in this famous tale more seriously?
Orwell wrote this short, shocking novel at a time when it was considered
scientifically inadmissible for animals to be granted thoughts or even
feelings. Charles Darwin’s insight in 1859, that humans are related to all
other animal species, was a lost opportunity to think about how qualities of
the former might be present in the latter. Instead, animal psychologists in
Orwell’s time insisted more strongly than ever on the existence of a cognitive
hiatus between the human “us” and the beastly “them”.
His contemporary experts in the social sciences and humanities played along
with this distinction. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote in
1962 that animals “are good to think with” – in other words, if we interrogate
human beliefs about animals, we can reveal our own deep-seated values and
social patterns.
By today’s standards, and in the context of the sixth mass extinction, this
seems like a regrettable statement. Contemporary multispecies studies reject
the notion that animals are nothing more than a resource for humans, even a
philosophical one."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
