RECENTLY, | interviewed a
quiet, unassuming American
named Jim Mason whose lat-
est book, Amt Unnatural Order,
Uncovering The Roats Of Our
Understanding Of Nature And
Each Other, is anything but
quiet and unassuming,

Mason is somewhat famous for
an earlier book, Animal Factories,
co-authored with Peter Singer,
which was so powerful it convinced
me to stop cating meal, nol because
it told me anything about the cruelty
of slaughterhouses, bul because of
the descriptions of the conditions
animals must cadare during their
lifetimes in modern factory farms,

Killing an aiimal to eat was
something | had previously accepted
as an inescapable necessity. But
keeping it alive under the conditions
that Mason and Singer described
becomes a horror of a whole other
dimension.

Um not sure what { expected Jim
Mason to be fike, but obviously I
had some sort of preconceived
notion that he would be a righteous
animal freak.

Instead, here was a guy who
looked so normal and spoke so soft-
ly, with something of a southern
drawl, that he would be the last per-
son you'd notice in a crowd.

Yet his books, particularly the
latest, are thoroughly revolutionary.

In An Unnatural Order, just pub-
lished by Simon & Schuster, he
takes a giant step beyond describing
the way we treat domestic animals to
attempting to explain why we do it.
And therein hangs a thread that he
traces back to pre-history: finding

STRICTLY PERSONAL

connections with everything from
mile chauvinism to nuclear militan-
cy.

Mason argues that to understand
the Genesis creation stary, the fun-
damentat myth of Western society,
we have to look af the evolving civi-
lizations that eventually gave birth to
the stories.

The writers of Genesis, he points
out, simply set down the stories,
fables, myths and legends that had
been handed down by word of
mouth from generation to genera
tion. He traces these oral traditions
back to the period roughly 10,000
years ago, when our ancestors took
up agriculture, and here is where he
makes an intellectua) U-turn that
scems to have cluded previous
thinkers on the subject.

During the 45,000 or so years
prior to that time, when Horo sapi-
ens roamed the carth in our modern

physical form, we werent the
“hunter-gatheters” so persistently
referred to by antinopalogints,
Mason insists.

Rather, we were “patherer-
hunters,” and mainly gatherers by a
wide margin, During this stage, 80%
af out food was plucked hirwely by
warmer sind children, and it cansist-
ed af plants,

Mason's thesis is that men tok
up hunting, in part to enhance their
own status in the group, becuse
they licked the apparent “matural
powers” af women to beat chiklren.

And the extent of theit huntinss
prowess was wildly cxaggenied:
“They probably found one man-
moth ina lifetime and never pot
over tdking about it.”

The hunt, in other words, wasn't
so much about nutrition is it was
about acquiring power. As bands
grew’ into tribes, hunter cults and rit}
uals grew into warrior cults and ritue
ils. As the practice of agriculture
took hold, large herding cultures
grew up inand asound the Middle
Eastern agricultural centres and
“herder” values became the domi-
nant value system in the cradle of
Western Civilization,

Herders domesticated large ani-
mals, and became the first capital-
ists. At the root of our language, we
find that the Latin word for things
pertaining to money is pece, mean-
ing cattle.

In the old Aryan language, the
word for warfare translated literally
into “a desire for more cattle.”

This, in Mason’s view, is the
point where things began to get mas-
sively wrong for women, who, up
until that point, were venerated for
their knowledge of plant cycles as

After 55 years of
working in the yard,

al hatre

well as their absiows connectedness
to patties mysteries, expressed
through Worship af the gigat teatle
spirit power or mother guddess,

Thinks to feminist writers, we
hive heard plenty ia the fast few
decades about misogyny, Uie hatred
af. wotnen, bit Mason coined a new
word, aisothery, meaning hatred
and contempt directed at animals, in
order to dbiw attention to an even
deeper poisonous mind-set.

And since aninials are so repre.
sentative of nature in general, italso
means hatred and coatempt for
nature, With the coming of domesti-
sition of animals came an awful
turning point in our history. fn the
new worldview, women, like ani-
mils, were now to be controlled,
bred, owned and dominated,

Sociely became “de-natured.”
and women,as the embodiment of

mitre, Were pushed down la the
second ring on ladder of power (just
about “heathens” with men at dhe
lop, next toa ser of superman-God,
Does this have a familiar ring to
i! [Ldoes to me.
Stay wuned.

& SON

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