Kirkus Reviews: Omniocracy by Charlotte Laws (starred review)

Charlotte Laws proposes a revolutionary plan for a truly just existence. 

The author opens her rabble-rousing new book at full throttle, describing the current world as “a hell-hole, slaughterhouse, and never-ending Auschwitz from the perspective of nonhumans” filled with “millions of little Hitlers, wantonly splattering blood, asserting unfettered dominance, desperately clinging to the theory that ‘might makes right,’ and deluding themselves into believing humans are the anointed ones.” This is strong stuff—necessarily so, since Laws is here proposing an entirely new set of governing principles deeply rooted in the ethos of the animal rights movement and dedicated to addressing the practical issues of free will, agency, and collective good. She points out that the world’s natural resources are dwindling due to human activities such as deforestation, grazing, and urban sprawl, with the obvious observation that this is a concern to all living beings on the planet, whether they are aware of it or not. The author describes the role of animal “advocates” who act as decision-makers in the “omniocracy” she proposes, humans who “become collectors of interest, seekers, investigators, and scouts, always open to further inquiry and passionate about evidence.” Laws is tremendously passionate and convincing about all of this; she lays out a program that certainly seems workable—in the likely impossible event that the international community would ever adopt it. “All oppression is woven together like a patchwork quilt,” she writes, making an argument that will fall on deaf ears, even though she’s entirely right; the system Laws envisions would benefit humans every bit as much as it would all of humanity’s countless victims. She movingly asks her readers to take down the artificial barriers they’ve erected to this kind of thinking and allow all other living things to “join the human on the elite side of the divide”; one can only pray she changes some minds. 

A heartfelt and richly detailed thought experiment positing a better, fairer world.

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Link to Kirkus - https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/charlotte-laws/omniocracy/

A Short Story About My Very Big Crush on a Very Dead Guy

He was drop-dead gorgeous. Spinoza was a hunk. Unfortunately, he was “temporally unavailable” in the same way that some men are “geographically undesirable.” This is because he had been dead for over three hundred years.

It was 1992. I was thirty-two and unfortunately still single. I was taking classes at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) prepping for a doctoral program at the University of Southern California.    

It was the first day of a CSUN class. I flipped through the course text, The Great Philosophers, perusing pictures of the dead blokes I would be studying that semester. René Descartes looked like a snarky know-it-all. “Got fried” perfectly described Gottfried Leibniz’s waist-length, overly curly wig. It appeared to have been blitzed by high tension wires. But Baruch Spinoza was the handsomest man I’d ever seen (in this particular portrait on page 103). In fact, he looked a little like my first boyfriend (singer Tom Jones), except for the shoulder-length curls.

I knew nothing about these so-called seventeenth-century “rationalists,” who believed that knowledge was independent of sense experience. Plus, I was not versed on the other great thinkers pictured in the book, such as St. Augustine, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. But I knew the professor would be taking us on an enlightening cruise through the waters of Western philosophy.

Two months later, we had not yet studied the hunk on page 103. In fact, I no longer remembered his name when suddenly the teacher outlined a theory on the blackboard, and I became as excited as the “class” that had finally located its “struggle.” I had found my ideological soul mate, and his name was Baruch Spinoza. Like me, this Dutch philosopher argued that the universe was determined and amoral and that humans were arrogant in placing themselves above nonhumans on the Great Chain of Being. It was only a matter of minutes before I reexamined the course book to discover that the hunk and soul mate were one and the same.

“Are you dating anyone?” my gal pal, Lynn, asked that night during our usual “girl talk” phone session.

“No, but I have a crush on a philosopher born in 1632,” I joked.

“Oh, that’s really funny,” she replied. “You have a crush on a guy who died in 1677.”

It felt like I’d been zapped by Leibniz’s electrical wire. I was in shock because Spinoza did, in fact, die in 1677.

“Why did you say that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. 

Lynn had never studied philosophy or heard of Spinoza. I designated this as the first spooky experience of my life.

Before this, I’d considered paranormal experiences to be fraudulent, often the result of an overactive imagination. I’d placed great value on logic and evidence. But Lynn’s comment had changed my perspective. Suddenly I was unsure about it all. 

I vacationed in Europe a year later. I had never really fancied travel, but when I did go out of town, it was to visit someone special, such as a boyfriend or my birth parents or a particular VIP whom I didn’t yet know but hoped to befriend. I had never been one for tourist attractions or group tours. They felt like conformity traps. The error with this vacation was that I had designed it without a person in mind. It was an aimless wander from one foreign city to another. And for me, this was a recipe for boredom and restlessness. 

The good news was that when I hit Holland, I realized that I was visiting someone after all: Spinoza. He was the VIP whom I hoped to befriend. His aura infused every cobblestone street, delightful Dutch structure, and winding waterway. I suddenly believed I knew secrets about him. Somehow I’d inhaled his spirit. I was in sync. I seemed to understand the synapses in his brain. It was as if his essence was my essence. I had additional unexplainable experiences, and every clue suggested I was in the right place, at the right time, visiting the right person. 

It also felt as if I were being led from place to place not by my head, heart, or feet but rather by a mysterious ally called intuition. I came to believe that there is a secret drawer that goes ignored and untapped by most people, yet it holds powerful tools and insights. I came to believe that cause and effect operate on a more unobservable, immeasurable, and far-reaching level than I’d ever imagined. I was certain the tossing universe had secrets to which humans and science would never be privy.

After my Spinoza trip, I came to rely upon intuition. As a Realtor, I avoided two vacant houses that simply did not feel right. As a hiker, I abandoned a woodsy trail that felt dangerous. Maybe intuition saved my life. Maybe it didn’t. I will never know. My odd happenings and link to Spinoza also put me on a certain path within academia and led me to devise the unique animal rights philosophy I hold today.

Spinoza has cloaked me with a spiritual veil, forever changing the way I view things. He has shown me that while the forces toss and turn, there may be sneaky little dwarfs who whistle while they work. And he has taught me that I should have no fear, because in the end, the universe is just like Snow White: It always lives happily ever after.

“Spin”—the man I jokingly call “my husband in a future life”—has made a huge impact on this life. He will forever remain a part of my heart.
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This article appeared in Thought Catalog on June 19, 2019.

Trump was right about Charlottesville but NOT for the reason he thinks: A Postmodern Argument

Charlotte Laws and Donald Trump at NATPE conference

The Charlottesville issue is a dragon that cannot be slayed. It is alluded to again and again in the media—a reminder that political correctness trumps truth; a reminder that the public sphere rewards sound bites; and a reminder that logic and common sense are often ignored within the marketplace of ideas.

When I first heard President Trump’s comments on Charlottesville back in 2017, I did not believe them to be controversial. I perceived them as a springboard which would spur a much-needed public debate about what qualifies as a “good person” or an “evil person.” I thought our country would soon be chewing on whether values are objective or whether moral absolutes are fairy tales.

I waited for this discussion. I waited for months, then a year. It never came.

I’d been naïve. I’d failed to realize that the political pundits, reporters, and establishment types rely on sound bites because they fit neatly into a headline, segment, or catchy quote. I had forgotten the importance of political correctness and that deviating from the norm can lead to the damage of a reputation or the loss of a career—risks that most folks are unwilling to take.

Trump had said something unforgiveable, according to critics. Although he’d denounced white supremacy, he’d said that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the Unite the Right rally or the Charlottesville clash. He later clarified that some on the far-right were simply against the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue—a cue that he did not plan to plunge into the philosophical debate that I had hoped for.

But was he right in the first place? Were there “very fine people” on both sides? What does the phrase “very fine people” mean? Are most people “very fine” or is nobody “very fine”? Is the country split 50-50? Are only liberals “very fine”? Or conservatives? Or independents?

Morally judging others is a subjective endeavor. It is no different from evaluating a painting or a song. If one has a positive attitude, one is more likely to see the good in others and deem them “very fine.” On the other hand, if one tends to see the glass as half empty, one is more likely to view other people as half empty as well.

Is a person with a racist attitude automatically evil? If the answer is yes, then our country is filled with a whole lot of evil because research shows that the majority of Americans are racist. There are even studies that reveal the biases of minority groups in relation to other minority groups; and there are first-person accounts and opeds that bolster these findings.    

Of course, measuring a person’s level of racism (and propensity to spew racist rhetoric) could be viewed as a tiny fraction of the task at hand. In order to determine “true reprehensibleness,” wouldn’t we need to examine an individual’s other prejudices, such as his sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, religious intolerance, and speciesism (arrogantly believing humans to be superior to other life forms)? Speciesists, by the way, probably comprise 99 percent of the U.S. population. If Trump’s critics are going to say a racist is a “bad person,” shouldn’t they say the same about a sexist, homophobe, or speciesist? Are they prepared to write off 99 percent of America? 

Lastly, there are what I call “physical crimes” (apart from “thought crimes” and “speech crimes”). If Trump’s critics want to go down the misguided path of claiming some folks are outright “bad,” data would be needed about these folks’ pasts. We’d need to do background checks. We’d need to know if some of the Charlottesville protestors and counter-protestors have committed adultery, sold illegal drugs, raped, destroyed property, bullied, cheated on their taxes, shoplifted, visited prostitutes, posted revenge porn, slapped around a spouse, or committed other “objectionable” acts.  

Perhaps some of the rally-goers are even murderers. Of course, the term “murder” can be defined in different ways. Animal advocates would apply the term to the killing of nonhuman animals (and to eating meat) while anti-abortion activists would apply it to the intentional destruction of fetuses. Anti-war protestors might extend “murder” to include activities on the battlefield while critics of the death penalty might extend it to cover state-sanctioned executions. Do Trump’s critics want to call everyone “evil” who has been a soldier, eaten a hamburger, or had an abortion? 

Individuals and groups are not objectively good or evil. Some of their actions may cause pain to others; and it makes sense to dissuade, denounce, and sometimes outlaw such behavior. But it is a wholly different proposition to condemn individuals or entire swaths of people as “irredeemably bad” or “deplorable” (as Hillary Clinton might say). It is not only irrational to do so. It is arrogant and promotes an I’m-ok-you’re-not-ok mentality. It leads to a toxic chasm in society and a hatred of others.  

Trump’s critics wanted him to play God on the Charlottesville issue. They wanted him to get on his high horse and declare an entire group “evil” without knowing much—or in some cases, anything—about these folks. They wanted him to offer a sound bite, to be politically correct, to sidestep philosophical analysis, and ultimately to ignore truth.

But he wisely ignored them, not only for the aforementioned reasons, but also because he probably realized that he needs votes in the next election. If a politician is being honest, he will admit that he wants votes from everybody, Votes—even from prejudiced constituents—can elect a great leader who can make a country better.