Rabbie Burns, animal ethics, and the Scottish Enlightenment
This post is less polished than normal—it’s a slightly tidied-up Facebook comment I made in response to a friend’s post about disliking Robert Burns. The context is not particularly important for understanding what I’m arguing, but it helps explain why this post is a bit more compressed than I’d usually write. I tried expanding it out into a more polished blog post, but found that the point kept getting away from me; and so rather than simply scrap it and move on, I thought I’d just upload the comment as-is.
My biggest change, if I were forced to make one, would be to say more precisely why I see the Scottish Enlightenment as a process of secularisation, despite much scholarship pushing back against this characterisation of Enlightenment. But that’s a historiographical rabbit hole that I am wary of falling down!
Readers outside of the UK may be less familiar with Burns. For a sampler of his animal poetry, I might recommend the following: ‘The Twa Dogs’; ‘The Wounded Hare’; ‘To a Louse’; and the very famous ‘To a Mouse’, which I think is most important for my reading. Especially because Burns often wrote in a mixture of standard English, Scottish dialect, and the Scots language, it is probably worthwhile for international readers to look up these poems on YouTube for meter and pronunciation.
I’m a bit of a Burns fan. Any artist who gets turned into nationalistic totem is lessened by it, but rarely can the artist themselves be held responsible for it: what Burns’ Scottish identity meant in the late eighteenth century was, of course, quite radically different to what contemporary Scottish nationalists want to make of it. And while nobody would reasonably claim that Burns’ poetry is on a par with, say, Yeats’ (another poet whose work is ripped from context by nationalists seeking to make a point, although the artist is at least partly responsible for that in Yeats’ case), and the claims made for Burns’ political radicalism are often very ahistorical, nonetheless I think there's something very valuable in his animal poems specifically.
In a secularising age, and specifically in the context of the incredibly important process of secularisation that Scottish thought in particular underwent in the eighteenth century, there are constant instances of people unconsciously struggling to throw off the yoke of Christian ideas, and staking out new ways of thinking and feeling without actually being able to grasp the importance and scope of their undertakings. I think this is how we should think of Burns’ animal poems, which evidence relationships with animals that almost wholly reject the Christian theory of human dominion, while gesturing towards something new.1
A word I’ve often seen used to describe Burns’ animal poems is ‘tender’, but I don't think that's right. We wouldn't say Hugo was ‘tender’ in his treatment of Jean Valjean, and I think it's something like that which comes out in lines like these: ‘I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; / What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!’ It's almost a kind of respect, though ‘respect’ today has become too watered-down removed from cultures of dignity and shame. Specifically, it's a quite radical kind of respect-in-difference, alike to how some liberals have thought about toleration (another word that has become watered-down through overuse).
We call Burns tender because, given the way our treatment of animals has evolved, we struggle to conceive of someone caring much about animals without being overly tender and empathetic: think of the Simpsons episode where Lisa goes vegetarian, and the importance of cuteness to that presentation. Most people today, when they're not operating on some autopilot version of Christian dominion theory, are de facto Cartesians, thinking about animals as if they were automata with no deeper lives, and so think of caring about animals as prompted by tenderness. But while there might seem to be some of that in Burns (e.g. ‘The Wounded Hare’), I think his openness towards animals is very much not rooted in these emotions.
Rather, Burns sees animals as reflecting something back to him as a human, not because their survival-of-the-fittest nature emphasises humanity's own violence (as you sometimes get from e.g., Ted Hughes), but because Burns sees animals sharing in much of human life. It is while staring at a louse that Burns is prompted to say, 'O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!’;2 the louse has prompted reflection on Burns’ own place in the world, precisely because the louse exists in the world as he does, though in a different manner. Animals are other, to be sure (cf. the famous last stanza of ‘To a Mouse’, or indeed the disgust of ‘To a Louse’), but not fundamentally other, which both requires a kind of unique respect and prompts new reflections about humanity.
Of course, Burns is not the only one who writes animal poetry that’s like this; but he really is one of the first in the West to be so negative towards human dominion (which clearly has much to do with his context in eighteenth-century Scotland) without simply turning animal poetry into a subset of ‘nature poetry’. That popular option subsumes animals into this giant, wild, constructed Other called nature, opposing them to humanity, rather than treating them as animals that also have a complex relationship with nature (as anyone who has witnessed the desperation of prey can attest to).
If you squint, you can almost see a Rousseauvian element to some of Burns’ work here. There's a recognition that, as it were, ‘Man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social [or indeed unsocial] union’ (and I think it's important that the word he uses is ‘dominion’, taken directly from Genesis 1:28), and a realisation that some new ways of thinking and feeling must be constructed to escape the dangers.
But of course, we did not construct these new ways of thinking and feeling: we constructed industrial slaughterhouses and factory farms. Animal ethics today has to start from these facts, not from Burns’ addresses to mice and larks. But we can see Burns as a ‘last sign pointing to the other path’, as it were, and one whose context in a moment of secularisation is important for understanding how we've ended up where we are.
To be sure, Burns was no vegan; but at most, this tells us is that people often do not understand the implications of their own ideas. The figures of the Scottish Enlightenment did not (could not?) fully grasp the implications and the importance of their own ideas—none more than Smith, of course, who could never have foreseen the scale of nineteenth-century industrial manufacturing. But we can still draw on them, and indeed some of my favourite works of animal ethics draw on Burns, including Cora Diamond’s ‘Eating Meat and Eating People’.
You can maybe see here elements of John Dunn's famous contrast, between (on the one hand) Locke's irreducibly Christian conceptions of land, labour, and property as derived from the dominion given to man over the earth, and (on the other) the secular reinterpretations of these ideas that can be found in the Scottish Enlightenment. Burns might be thought of as doing for man's relationship with animals what Hume did for property.
If you know Hume or Smith at all, you will see the parallels with Scottish Enlightenment ethics pretty plainly here.