Not in My Name

I was a student at Oxford University and I am now an active supporter of SPEAK. I feel no conflict of allegiances there. Certainly it's the University's job and privilege to provide intellectual leadership, but leaders aren't always right. In this proposed laboratory, Oxford will be leading us straight back into the past, the scientific and ethical past. The University has to be resisted, and SPEAK is doing that for all of us, and especially for those of us who wish to think well of the place.

I believe, in common with almost everyone else who thinks at all, that the time has come to learn to live with the rest of nature, instead of against it – if indeed there still is time to learn, before we destroy it and ourselves with it. And here is Oxford University teaching us to pillage and exploit nature for another century! It might just as well, as to the wisdom of the thing, be doing feasibility studies for oil-drilling in the Antarctic, or researching new chemical weaponry. For all I know, it is in fact doing these things: the attitude is the same, and it was this attitude which made the twentieth century the most destructive in the history of mankind. The collective intelligence of a great university – not just its technical intelligence, but the larger intelligence so richly represented in Oxford by its arts faculties and cultural activities – ought to be teaching the rest of us how to revise this attitude and live a better common life. Oxford University seems to recognise no such obligation. SPEAK is determined that it shall do so, and I hope with all my heart that SPEAK prevails.

The University's scientists and other representatives refer dismissively to their opponents in this matter as "extremists". I'm puzzled to find myself cast in this way by my former university simply because I believe and declare that animals should not be exploited. But that's beside the point. If these people are determined to outlaw such as me, let them listen instead to some of their own greatest predecessors at Oxford, far greater men than they or I. They might then learn something of the University's proper tradition of humane thought, and perhaps discover that SPEAK is not just a voice for the animals, but also an echo of the University's own conscience, formed as that has been by its most aspiring minds over the centuries of its existence.

Let them listen, for instance, to Dr Samuel Johnson, former student at Pembroke College, later a poet, lexicographer, and moralist, one of the greatest men that have ever been at Oxford. The University of the time recognised his greatness, and awarded him three honorary degrees. In 1758, in one of his regular published essays, Johnson described some practices of contemporary vivisectionists, and went on to say this:

It is not without reluctance that I offend the sensibility of the tender mind with images like these. If such cruelties were not practised it were to be desired that they should not be conceived, but since they are published every day with ostentation, let me be allowed once to mention them, since I mention them with abhorrence...
I know not, that by living dissections any discovery has been made by which a single malady is more easily cured. And if the knowledge of physiology has been somewhat increased, he surely buys knowledge dear, who learns the use of the lacteals at the expense of his humanity. It is time that universal resentment should arise against these horrid operations, which tend to harden the heart, extinguish those sensations which give man confidence in man, and make the physician more dreadful than the gout or stone. [The Idler, 5th August, 1758]

You see that Johnson doesn't treat this as a theme for interesting debate. He doesn't consider himself to be dealing with matters of opinion at all. The "resentment" he expects is "universal", something to be felt by all who wish to share in and maintain "humanity". In fact, in a similar denunciation of animal experiments elsewhere, he plainly distinguishes between vivisectors and "human beings" [see Johnson's note to Cymbeline I.v.23, in The Plays of William Shakespeare, 1765]. So when he speaks here of the "tender mind", he doesn't just mean sentimental or abnormally sensitive people. He means human beings.

I can't think of a better or more authoritative summary of the thinking behind the SPEAK campaign than those words of Dr Johnson:

It is time that universal resentment should arise against these horrid operations...

Johnson was notoriously impatient of sentimentality or cant of any sort, a man of great moral and physical courage, ill on and off for all of his life. The vivisection interest has, over the last century or more, characterized its opponents in various unfavourable ways according to the fashions of different periods: from "hysterical old maids" in the late nineteenth century to the tediously familiar "extremists" of today. Perennially there has been the insulting charge that we prefer animals to people. Dr Johnson silences all such foolish disparagements. His life and writings are a permanent and shining record of the part which a comprehensive sympathy ought to have in every honourable mind.

In the next century, that same sympathy was exemplified in John Ruskin, the great nineteenth-century writer on art and ethics, who passionately opposed all rapes of nature, vivisection among them. For many years he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, a post which he resigned in 1885, when the University formally committed itself to the practice of vivisection in its new physiology laboratory. I can show his mind best by quoting (from a newspaper report of the time) one profound and radical statement which Ruskin made in a public speech:

Without perfect sympathy with the animals around them, no gentleman's education, no Christian education [ie. the sorts of education then aimed at in Oxford] could possibly be of any use. [John Ruskin, Works, ed. Cook and Wedderburn, vol.34, p.32]

Yes, we must be taught to live with nature, not against it: Ruskin already knew this a hundred and more years ago. In Oxford he didn't just teach it; he acted upon it.

Please note that Ruskin was not anti-science. He strongly supported his great friend at Oxford, the anatomist Henry Acland, in the creation of a school of Natural History there, and of a building for it, the University Museum. Ruskin himself supervised the design and construction of the Museum. Moreover, his own paintings and drawings show a devoted attention to the facts of nature which would be a credit to any scientist. There was, and is, nothing about hatred of vivisection which implies opposition to science as a whole.

Why, then, did this very popular professor of art, who had helped to advance science-teaching at Oxford, feel that he had to leave the University altogether just because the one science of physiology was to be taught by a method which he hated? Henry Acland answered that question when he said that Ruskin

refused, as a Member of the University, to be personally responsible for that which his whole temper abhorred. [Acland and Ruskin, The Oxford Museum, 1893, p.xviii]

In other words, Ruskin believed that the University was not just a miscellany of careers and cliques, with some facilities in common: it was one shared project of human improvement. What went on in a physiology laboratory therefore implicated every member of the University, as it does now.

Ruskin didn't go quietly, either. Before resigning, he let his anger be well known. He made the University hear him. He spoke to the Oxford town public. He even prepared to deal with the matter in his professorial lectures, though his colleagues dissuaded him from that. What lectures those would have been! In a letter written at this time, he says

The scientists slink out of my way, as if I was a mad dog. [Works, vol.33, p.liv]

I know that there are members of the University today who share Ruskin's views, though they are strangely quiet at present. If they read this, they needn't feel anxious. I don't ask them heroically to resign their comfortable posts. I only ask them to ponder Ruskin's example, to acknowledge their share of responsibility for the work of the University, and then to play the mad dog as they ought.

Sixty years nearer our time, another of Oxford's greatest professors, C.S.Lewis, saw in vivisection the same moral disaster which both Johnson and Ruskin in their times had seen in it. Lewis, writing in 1947, believed that the horrors of recent history came out of exactly that mentality which had approved this inhuman form of science:

The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements. [C.S.Lewis, First and Second Things, 1985, p.83]

Yes, C.S.Lewis talks of vivisection's "victory". He feared that Johnson's "universal resentment" was actually further off than it had been in Johnson's time. It may well have been so in 1947. But it is not so now, and in fact there had been no "victory". That could never without irony be called a victory which produced the "achievements" which Lewis mentions (and we could now add many more names to that wretched list). Still less can it now be called a victory when vivisection is more than ever purposefully resisted. I have shown something of the tradition of that resistance in Oxford's own past. I have said that it finds a new voice and new activity in the SPEAK campaign, but I know also that it is still there in Oxford University itself, and I invite the University's authorities lastly to listen to someone in their own present faculty of Theology passing judgement on their morals:

...the institutionalization of experimentation presents us with nothing less than the massive subjugation of millions of animal lives which are bred, sold, confined and used on the presupposition that they have only utilitarian value. 'Evil' is the only appropriate moral category I can find which expresses the enormity of the immorality that this involves. [Andrew Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, quoted in The Extended Circle, ed. Jon Wynne-Tyson, Sphere, 1990, p.274: written before the author was appointed to a post in Oxford]

Yet Oxford University is today enlarging its accommodation for just that 'Evil'. Now, what are we to do about this, if not resist it? And for how long are we to resist it, if not until it is permanently finished with and washed off Oxford's conscience? Then I will be proud to have belonged to SPEAK and to have been a student at Oxford.

Written by Matthew Simpson, who was a scholar of University College. He graduated in 1973 with a double first in English.

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