Les Vaches Rouges

Ce matin, je lis dans The Independent en ligne un article consacré à l'optimisme, où plusieurs notables écrivent sur les choses qu'ils trouvent positives dans le monde. J'étais frappée par les paragraphes qui soutiennent l'idée que la violence est en déclin dans le monde, étant donné que la violence, au moins en Auvergne, est toujours publique. Car ce matin on peut lire dans La Montagne le reportage sur la Saint-Cochon. Sous la photo de l'animal après avoir été brulé:

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"Tuaille". Le public est venu nombreux assister à la tuerie du cochon et au travail des "saigneurs".

Sous la photo des cinq Dalton, dont trois en tablier:

Hier, le maire de Besse a notamment reçu le sénateur Michel Charasse: le ministre délégué des Collectivités territoriales, Brice Hortefeux; Bernard Lapasset, le président de la Fédération française de rugby, et le préfet de la Région Auvergne, Dominique Schmitt.

(*) En présence également du président du Conseil général du Puy-de-Dôme, Jean-Yves Gouttebel; et des députés Jean-Paul Bacquet et Jean Michel; et de la sénatrice Michèle André.

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La Montagne n'a pas trouvé de place pour publier le communiqué des Vaches Rouges. Par contre, sur la même page que le reportage du sacrifice rituel du cochon, il y a la rubrique "Du Poil de la Bête", qui parle d'un jeune couple de bénévoles de l'Association Protectrice des Animaux, qui ont "accepté de choyer, dorloter trois chatons à leur domicile...."

Donc, les chatons méritent d'être dorlotés. Les cochons ne méritent qu'une mort honteuse sur la place publique.

Voici, maintenant, l'extrait choisi de l'article de The Independent, qui est bien sûr en anglais:

Steven Pinker

Psychologist, Harvard University; author, 'The Blank Slate'

The decline of violence

In 16th-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, "the spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonised". As horrific as present-day events are, such sadism would be unthinkable today in most of the world. This is just one example of the most important and under-appreciated trend in the history of our species: the decline of violence. Cruelty as popular entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labour-saving device, genocide for convenience, torture and mutilation as routine forms of punishment, execution for trivial crimes and misdemeanors, assassination as a means of political succession, pogroms as an outlet for frustration, and homicide as the major means of conflict resolution - all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. Yet today they are statistically rare in the West, less common elsewhere than they used to be, and widely condemned when they do occur.

Most people, sickened by the headlines and the bloody history of the 20th century, find this claim incredible. Yet as far as I know, every systematic attempt to document the prevalence of violence over centuries and millennia (and, for that matter, the past 50 years), particularly in the West, has shown that the overall trend is downward (though of course with many zigzags). What went right? No one knows, possibly because we have been asking the wrong question - "Why is there war?" instead of "Why is there peace?"

There have been some suggestions, all unproven. Perhaps the gradual perfecting of a democratic Leviathan - "a common power to keep [men] in awe" - has removed the incentive to do it to them before they do it to us. James Payne, author of The History of Force, suggests that it's because, for many people, life has become longer and less awful - when pain, tragedy and early death are expected (omega) features of one's own life, one feels fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. The award-winning science writer Robert Wright points to technologies that enhance networks of reciprocity and trade, which make other people more valuable alive than dead. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer attributes it to the inexorable logic of the golden rule: the more one knows and thinks, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over those of other sentient beings. Perhaps this is amplified by cosmopolitanism, in which history, journalism, memoir and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the contingent nature of one's own station, more palpable - the feeling that "there but for fortune go I..."

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Pour Peter Singer il y a une règle d'or: le plus qu'on sait, le plus qu'on pense, il est plus difficile à privilégier ses propres intérêts devant ceux des autres êtres sentients. Qui va expliquer ça aux sénateurs, aux députés, au préfet, et à tous les autres "penseurs" qui ont participé aux actes barbares sur un être sentient hier à Besse?