Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a German theologian, musician, medical doctor, and philosopher (two earned doctorates, many more honorary). He was awarded the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on human ethics under the controlling rubric of "Reverence for Life." He had worked for years to arrive at a controlling theme that would unify humanity's responsibility to itself and the rest of creation, to no avail. He described how, in 1915, "I was wandering about in a thicket, in which no path was to be found. I was leaning against an iron door, which would not give before me . . . ."
In his 1933 (English edition) book Out of My Life and Thought he described how he found a path and how the iron door opened. He was in equatorial Africa, working as a missionary doctor among the natives. That same year—1915—he was required to travel 200 kilometers upriver on a slow steamer from the coast of Africa to attend to a sick missionary. On that slow trip his "Reverence for Life" epiphany took place:
Reading about these two men—Gerson and Schweitzer—made a terrific impact on my thinking. Both amazingly brilliant, they struggled for years to find solutions to practical and philosophical issues that arose in their professional lives. And endured significant (Gerson) and sometimes (Schweitzer) opposition for their efforts.
I was reminded recently of Schweitzer's "Reverence" revelation when reading From My Experience—The Pleasures and Miseries of Life on a Farm, the last (1955) of the 29 books of American novelist and farmer Louis Bromfield, who I profiled in an earlier post. I would put Bromfield's impact in his day in the same category as Gerson and Schweitzer (in whose "day" he lived). Indeed, Louis Bromfield's books on Malabar Farm and natural farming methods were read with great attention by Max Gerson (along with the works of American J. I. Rodale and British Sir Albert Howard) as he struggled to connect human health to the health of the soil—the health of the former being dependent on the health of the latter.
Near the end of his multifaceted life, Bromfield was searching for a purpose. He had lived expansively for decades as a writer and helpfully as a farmer developing natural techniques for reversing the ecologically destructive and unsustainable methods of farmers in his day. Near the end of his life he was, like Schweitzer had been a few years earlier on another continent, searching for a way to summarize his own tireless efforts to elevate plant, animal, and human life in all its dimensions. On a trip to Brazil, Bromfield had taken along Schweitzer's Out of My Life and Thought, having meant to read it previously. And when he came across Schweitzer's "Reverence for Life" revelation the loose ends of his own personal life and philosophy were suddenly tied together. The following excerpts describe Bromfield's own "eureka" moment as he read (picking up with his thoughts after reading the first half of Schweitzer's book):
Modern man's lack of "Reverence for Life" is the point of these various half-century-old threads that I have identified and brought to bear here. The Holocaust that Max Gerson fled, the American dehumanizing of African slaves, the modern aborting of tens of millions of unborn children in America, and the inhumane treatment of non-human animals in our world all point to a radical deficiency in "Reverence for Life."
Though the Bible doesn't say so specifically, I have always thought that this verse in Genesis—"Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence" (6:11)—must be descriptive not only of man's violence toward man but man's violence toward animals as well. God's distaste for that violence led to the Great Flood and the fresh start fathered by Noah and his family. Sadly, we've done little better with our second chance. Few would deny that today's earth is "corrupt and full of violence" against man, beast, and the earth itself.
Which brings me to the point of this post: A movie was made a couple years ago which is only now gaining traction—or at least, I have only now heard about it. (My California son, Stephen, knows the producer/director and says it is well-known among his contemporaries, but I only learned about it recently.) Titled Earthlings, it is a 90-minute overview of man's lack of reverence and respect for the lives of non-human animals. It is at once the most graphic, and the most philosophical, of any films or exposés I've seen on the inhuman treatment of animals. Narrated by actor Joaquin Phoenix, with a soundtrack by Moby, the movie covers five areas in which animals are mistreated: pets, food, clothing, entertainment, and medical/military research.
It's interesting that Earthlings was released in 2005 and Al Gore's Oscar/Nobel-winning movie was released in 2006. Gore made no mention in his lecture of the number one contributor to environmental pollution: factory farming of animals for human consumption. This is a fact that the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and others have documented extensively. So why didn't Gore mention it? Probably because he was picking his battles and didn't want to run the risk of turning off a meat-eating world with a cut-back/abstain message on behalf of the animal kingdom. (My opinion, not the movie's.)
I said this movie is graphic—many people will not be able to watch it all the way to the end. But it simply illustrates the fact that "if slaughter houses were made of glass," or "if people had to butcher their own meat" most people would be vegetarians. In other words, animals no longer represent "life" to the average person, they represent "meat." The notion of "Reverence for Meat" seems silly, but that's what "Reverence for Life" has become. Most moderns—moral, well-meaning, intelligent, but woefully uninformed—have no idea how animals are actually treated in the five areas covered by this movie (animals for food being only one of the five, all of which are covered equally). It is brutal, inhumane, and sickening in many instances. Sadly, too many people don't want to know. Many will even be afraid of seeing a movie like Earthlings because of what it reveals. But for lack of grainy World War II footage, the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, Schindler's List, and other affronts to our consciousness, there might have been more than one Holocaust. So bad stories do need to be told—and heard and seen.
Because the movie had a hard-time finding a commercial distributor it is not as well-known as it might have been (in spite of being screened at several prominent film festivals). It was more than any distributor was willing to risk promoting. But it is being seen, slowly but surely, nonetheless. And I encourage you to see it. I can't speak for the producer/director's "anything"—I'm not recommending him or his organization. But after watching the movie, I am going to recommend it for the way it highlights how the modern world has lost its "Reverence for Life."
The movie can be purchased in standard DVD hi-res format, but it can also be viewed in its entirety on the movie's web site. Perhaps because of the length of the streaming, the audio and video get separated in the second half of the movie, but it is still intelligible. To watch the movie, go to this page and scroll down to the bottom and click on "Full Movie."
If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and I hope you'll view the movie. I hope it will encourage you to incorporate and extend "Reverence for Life" to the non-human animals that surround us.
In his 1933 (English edition) book Out of My Life and Thought he described how he found a path and how the iron door opened. He was in equatorial Africa, working as a missionary doctor among the natives. That same year—1915—he was required to travel 200 kilometers upriver on a slow steamer from the coast of Africa to attend to a sick missionary. On that slow trip his "Reverence for Life" epiphany took place:
Slowly we crept upstream, carefully picking our way among the sandbanks—it was the dry season. Lost in thought, I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal notion of ethics, which I had not discovered in any philosophy. Sheet after sheet of paper I covered with unconnected sentences, just in order to keep my mind concentrated on the problem. At sunset on the evening of the third day, as we were passing through a herd of hippopotamuses, there came to me suddenly, unpresaged and unsought, the words "Reverence for Life." The iron door had given way; the path in the thicket had become plain. I had now forced my way to the idea in which world- and life-affirmation and ethics were both contained! Now I knew that ethical world- and life-affirmation, along with its ideals of civilization, was founded on thought. (From pp. 135-136 of Out of My Life and Thought, quoted in The Animal World of Albert Schweitzer—Jungle Insights into Reverence for Life, a collection of Schweitzer's writings, p. 165).I first read this in 2003 and was moved by Schweitzer's idea of "Reverence for Life." It's biblical, practical, and all-encompassing. I was also reading at that time books by and about Dr. Max Gerson (1881-1959), the German medical doctor who discovered plant-based, nutritional healing therapies for cancer and other major diseases. Fleeing Hitler's Germany, Gerson came to the U.S. with his family where his nutritional protocols were shut-down and he was blacklisted by the American Medical Association in the 1940's. In 1949 Albert Schweitzer made his first visit to America to lecture and receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago. On that trip, he quietly visited Dr. Gerson who prescribed a plant-based therapy that cured Schweitzer's Type-II diabetes. (Gerson had already healed Schweitzer's wife of tuberculosis and his daughter of a jungle-acquired skin disease with the same plant-based protocols.) This was when Schweitzer was 75 years old; following Gerson's plant-based diet, he lived until age 90, free of diabetes.
Reading about these two men—Gerson and Schweitzer—made a terrific impact on my thinking. Both amazingly brilliant, they struggled for years to find solutions to practical and philosophical issues that arose in their professional lives. And endured significant (Gerson) and sometimes (Schweitzer) opposition for their efforts.
I was reminded recently of Schweitzer's "Reverence" revelation when reading From My Experience—The Pleasures and Miseries of Life on a Farm, the last (1955) of the 29 books of American novelist and farmer Louis Bromfield, who I profiled in an earlier post. I would put Bromfield's impact in his day in the same category as Gerson and Schweitzer (in whose "day" he lived). Indeed, Louis Bromfield's books on Malabar Farm and natural farming methods were read with great attention by Max Gerson (along with the works of American J. I. Rodale and British Sir Albert Howard) as he struggled to connect human health to the health of the soil—the health of the former being dependent on the health of the latter.
Near the end of his multifaceted life, Bromfield was searching for a purpose. He had lived expansively for decades as a writer and helpfully as a farmer developing natural techniques for reversing the ecologically destructive and unsustainable methods of farmers in his day. Near the end of his life he was, like Schweitzer had been a few years earlier on another continent, searching for a way to summarize his own tireless efforts to elevate plant, animal, and human life in all its dimensions. On a trip to Brazil, Bromfield had taken along Schweitzer's Out of My Life and Thought, having meant to read it previously. And when he came across Schweitzer's "Reverence for Life" revelation the loose ends of his own personal life and philosophy were suddenly tied together. The following excerpts describe Bromfield's own "eureka" moment as he read (picking up with his thoughts after reading the first half of Schweitzer's book):
It was only when Schweitzer, trained as a theologian and preacher, arrived at the point where he felt that he must do more than merely preach and teach within the orbit of Christian doctrine, that the book took fire. Here was something I could understand . . . a Christian who felt that he must do something tangible about being a Christian and decided that he could do most good and best satisfy his spirit by studying medicine and going into the work of actively and materially helping the more unfortunate members of the human race [in Africa]. It was at this point that for me the book began to have a real and significant meaning of great importance. . . .Without realizing it, Louis Bromfield (and French historian Jules Michelet) was describing (in part) what the apostle Paul describes in Romans 1-2—how every person has the law of God written on the heart, but when that law is repudiated over and over there is a "steady progression deeper and deeper" into depravity. God's judgment on such rejection of His ways is evident in how He allows man to suffer by his own doing now and by His ultimate, consummating settling of accounts at the end of the age. Surely many of mankind's modern afflictions are the result of our own "steady progression" away from God's design.
As I read on in the pages Schweitzer had written often painfully, and frequently when he was ill and exhausted from the labors of his day's work, the book grew more exciting and impressive. It seemed to me that here I found a man who had not only realized the talents and potentialities with which most men are endowed to some degree, but also a man whose philosophy was needed bitterly in this Age of Irritation and Frustration.
And then I came upon that passage which for me illuminated a whole new world of philosophy and religion and brought to me the clarification and the formalization of all the chaos which had been troubling me for years.
I will simply quote the passage in which Schweitzer created a phrase which provided me with the long-sough illumination. The scene is a barge on a river in the midst of Africa. [Bromfield then quotes the passage from Schweitzer's book I quoted above.]
In this very great phrase, "Reverence for Life," I too found what I had sought for so long. It explained not only my thoughts but the emotions and instincts which I had long experienced as a man. It is one of those phrases which, stimulating thought to an almost unbearable degree, illuminates the darkness like the switching on of a powerful light bulb—a phrase which is fecund and keeps breeding thought upon thought, conception upon conception upon conception. It was like the bursting of a rocket high in the darkness of the night air.
The phrase "Reverence for Life" brought the elements of the mechanistic and the material together with the ethical and even the spiritual, something that the church, in all its forms [as Bromfield knew it in his day], has long since been unable to do and the attempt at which it has apparently abandoned. It asserted the principle of affirmation rather than denial; it restored dignity to man. In a sense it defined God for the first time, for if God is not Life, He is merely a vaporous figment of the imagination and the delusion of the weak and the frightened and of those very weak and fearful and ignorant who are so profoundly in need of help not from God so much as from their fellow men who are stronger, more intelligent, perhaps even more favored. . . .
And still one more quotation [from Schweitzer] which touched me very closely: "A Man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help."
I began to understand what it was that had taken increasing possession of me for fifteen years, indeed for nearly a generation, why I had committed what some of my fellow men regarded as follies but which were not follies at all, why I had poured out time and energy and money in very large amounts for things on which there could not possibly be any material return. It explained to me why I have rarely said no to life and to experience, and why my sense of sin is notably deficient by the standards of most church dogma; why I have always enjoyed to the full the five senses which are a part of the glory of life, why there were certain shabby things, certain cheating and short-cutting, I was never able to practice without a sense of degradation and the violation of principles which I until now have never fully understood or put into words.
There are things which one does or one does not do, and in his heart even the savage knows what these are, and each time one violates this principle, the individual becomes more brutalized and sinks a little lower, not only in the esteem of others but in the secret knowledge deep in his own heart—a knowledge which in time grows into a face which repels warmth and friendship and respect and makes of any man an outcast on sight from his fellow men, and above all from discerning, intelligent, and good men.
Michelet knew this when he wrote . . . "In damnation the fire is of little importance. The real punishment is the steady progression deeper and deeper into vice and crime, while the spirit grows steadily more calloused and more depraved, lost constantly in the evil of the moment in a geometric progression into eternity."
Modern man's lack of "Reverence for Life" is the point of these various half-century-old threads that I have identified and brought to bear here. The Holocaust that Max Gerson fled, the American dehumanizing of African slaves, the modern aborting of tens of millions of unborn children in America, and the inhumane treatment of non-human animals in our world all point to a radical deficiency in "Reverence for Life."
Though the Bible doesn't say so specifically, I have always thought that this verse in Genesis—"Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence" (6:11)—must be descriptive not only of man's violence toward man but man's violence toward animals as well. God's distaste for that violence led to the Great Flood and the fresh start fathered by Noah and his family. Sadly, we've done little better with our second chance. Few would deny that today's earth is "corrupt and full of violence" against man, beast, and the earth itself.
Which brings me to the point of this post: A movie was made a couple years ago which is only now gaining traction—or at least, I have only now heard about it. (My California son, Stephen, knows the producer/director and says it is well-known among his contemporaries, but I only learned about it recently.) Titled Earthlings, it is a 90-minute overview of man's lack of reverence and respect for the lives of non-human animals. It is at once the most graphic, and the most philosophical, of any films or exposés I've seen on the inhuman treatment of animals. Narrated by actor Joaquin Phoenix, with a soundtrack by Moby, the movie covers five areas in which animals are mistreated: pets, food, clothing, entertainment, and medical/military research.
It's interesting that Earthlings was released in 2005 and Al Gore's Oscar/Nobel-winning movie was released in 2006. Gore made no mention in his lecture of the number one contributor to environmental pollution: factory farming of animals for human consumption. This is a fact that the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and others have documented extensively. So why didn't Gore mention it? Probably because he was picking his battles and didn't want to run the risk of turning off a meat-eating world with a cut-back/abstain message on behalf of the animal kingdom. (My opinion, not the movie's.)
I said this movie is graphic—many people will not be able to watch it all the way to the end. But it simply illustrates the fact that "if slaughter houses were made of glass," or "if people had to butcher their own meat" most people would be vegetarians. In other words, animals no longer represent "life" to the average person, they represent "meat." The notion of "Reverence for Meat" seems silly, but that's what "Reverence for Life" has become. Most moderns—moral, well-meaning, intelligent, but woefully uninformed—have no idea how animals are actually treated in the five areas covered by this movie (animals for food being only one of the five, all of which are covered equally). It is brutal, inhumane, and sickening in many instances. Sadly, too many people don't want to know. Many will even be afraid of seeing a movie like Earthlings because of what it reveals. But for lack of grainy World War II footage, the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, Schindler's List, and other affronts to our consciousness, there might have been more than one Holocaust. So bad stories do need to be told—and heard and seen.
Because the movie had a hard-time finding a commercial distributor it is not as well-known as it might have been (in spite of being screened at several prominent film festivals). It was more than any distributor was willing to risk promoting. But it is being seen, slowly but surely, nonetheless. And I encourage you to see it. I can't speak for the producer/director's "anything"—I'm not recommending him or his organization. But after watching the movie, I am going to recommend it for the way it highlights how the modern world has lost its "Reverence for Life."
The movie can be purchased in standard DVD hi-res format, but it can also be viewed in its entirety on the movie's web site. Perhaps because of the length of the streaming, the audio and video get separated in the second half of the movie, but it is still intelligible. To watch the movie, go to this page and scroll down to the bottom and click on "Full Movie."
If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and I hope you'll view the movie. I hope it will encourage you to incorporate and extend "Reverence for Life" to the non-human animals that surround us.
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