Schweitzer and Animal Research
Q: Schweitzer and Animal Research
I am having
difficulty discovering how this philosophy fits in with the use of animals in
medical research. Was Schweitzer, or would Schweitzer be,
opposed to the use of animals in such research?
Answer: Schweitzer was rarely, if ever, dogmatic about the application of Reverence for Life to concrete moral problems. He is often seriously misunderstood. Schweitzer was NOT a strict vegetarian, and he was NOT opposed to all animal research. What he emphasized was RESPONSIBILITY: "To the man who is truly ethical all life is sacred, including that which from the human point of view seems lower. Man makes distinctions...under the pressure of necessity, as for example, when it falls to him to decide which of two lives he must sacrifice in order to preserve the other. But all through this...he...knows that he bears the responsibility for the life that is sacrificed."
And specifically applying this to animal research:
"Those who test operations or drugs on animals, or who inoculate them with
diseases so that they may be able to help human beings by means of the results
thus obtained, ought never to rest satisfied with the general idea that their
[work is...] performed in pursuit of a worthy aim. It is their duty to ponder in
every separate case whether it is really and truly necessary thus to sacrifice
an animal for humanity. They ought to be filled with anxious care to alleviate
as much as possible the pain which they cause..."
There is a wonderful book edited by Ann Cottrell Free titled "Animals, Nature, and Albert Schweitzer" that includes many of Schweitzer's quotations on related subjects.
Lachlan Forrow
Q: On racist and anti-racist-sites I have
found the following text:
This is what he said shortly before his death:
I have given my life to alleviate the sufferings of
Africa. There is something that all white men who have lived here, must learn
and know; that these individuals are a sub-race; they have neither the
intellectual , mental or emotional abilities to equate or share in any of the
functions of our civilisation.
"I have given my life to try to bring unto them the
advantages which our civilisation must offer, but I have become well aware that
we must retain this status; white, the superior, and they the inferior; for
whenever a white man seeks to live among them as their equal, they will either
destroy him or devour him, and they will destroy all his work; and so for any
existing relationship or for any benefit to this people let white men from
anywhere in the world who would come to help Africa remember that you must
continually retain this status; you the master, and they the inferior, like
children that you would help or teach. Never fraternise with them as equals,
never accept them as your social equals ; or they will devour you; they will
destroy you."- Dr. Albert Schweitzer, winner of the
1952 Nobel Prize for peace, in his 1961 book, From My African Notebook.
Answer: This quote is utterly false and is an outrageously inaccurate picture of Dr. Schweitzer’s view of Africans. Dr. Schweitzer never said or wrote anything remotely like this. It does NOT appear in the book African Notebook. On the question of Schweitzer and race, my own comments from the Foreword to the current edition of African Notebook, are below.
--Lachlan Forrow, MD
President, The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship (USA)
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Albert Schweitzer.
Few names from the 20th century
conjure up such mythic images of superhuman achievement and even
saintliness. Renowned in Europe before the age of 30 for his
ground-breaking biblical studies, his book Quest of the Historical
Jesus continues to influence New Testament scholars today, nearly a
century after its original publication. An acclaimed musician, he was
the organist for the Paris Bach Society, and his two volume study of
Johann Sebastian Bach, still in bookstores today, has powerfully shaped
the musical interpretations of contemporary artists such as Yo-Yo Ma.
Despite these extraordinary
achievements, Albert Schweitzer remained uncomfortably unfulfilled. He
ultimately chose to give up the prestige and relative comfort of his
European life to begin studying, at the age of 30, to become a doctor.
In 1913, at the age of 38, he and his new wife Hélène
Bresslau, trained as a nurse, departed for French Equatorial Africa to
create and lead a hospital at the mission station at
Lambaréné.
During their first year of work,
initially providing care in an abandoned chicken coop, they cared for
nearly 2,000 patients. With the outbreak of World War I, however, they
found themselves German citizens in a French colony, and by the end of
the war they were incarcerated as prisoners of war in southern France.
In 1924, Dr. Schweitzer returned to Africa, leaving
Hélène and their 5-year-old daughter Rhena behind in
Europe, because Hélène was suffering from poor health. He
spent most of the next four decades of his life, until his death in
Lambaréné in September of 1965, caring for individual
patients, constructing an ever-expanding array of hospital buildings,
continuing his philosophical and theological writings by kerosene
lantern late at night, and rejuvenating his spirit and the spirits of
those around him by playing his beloved Bach on the piano late into the
African night. Honored with the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, he dedicated
much of the last decade of his life to campaigning for the abolition of
all nuclear weapons, which Schweitzer considered humanity's most
egregious insult to Reverence for Life. When he died, statesmen,
scientists, musicians, and ordinary citizens throughout the world
mourned the passing of one of their great heroes.
Beginning in the 1950's, however, an
alternative and rather darker image of Schweitzer was painted by a
small but significant number of detractors. As African nations and
peoples threw off many of the chains of exploitative colonialism, these
critics saw in Schweitzer a symbol of many of the sins of white
Europeans working in Africa. Others condemned his village hospital as
anachronistic and primitive, because it did not reflect the sparkling
sanitary conditions of Europe and America's modern health care
institutions.
Was Schweitzer a saint? Or a
paternalistic racist? How should a critical thinker today even approach
this question? Schweitzer himself offers us an approach in the preface
to the doctoral dissertation he wrote for his medical degree, The
Psychiatric Study of Jesus. Although he considered himself a disciple
of Jesus, although (as he wrote his soul mate, Hélène
Bresslau) he himself had chosen to go to Africa "to serve Jesus",
Schweitzer did not shy away from asking the most radically probing
questions, even about his Master.
Observing that contemporary writers
had raised the question of whether Jesus, with his apocalyptic belief
in the impending end of the world, was delusional, paranoid, or even
"psychopathic", Schweitzer wrote:
Should it really turn out that
Jesus' object world must be considered by the doctor as in some degree
the world of a sick man, still this conclusion, regardless of the
consequences that follow from it and the shock to many that would
result from it, must not remain unuttered, since reverence for truth
must be exalted above everything else. With this conviction I began to
work, suppressing the unpleasant feeling of having to subject a great
personality to psychiatric examination, and pondering the truth that
what is great and profound in the ethical teachings of Jesus would
retain its significance even if the conceptions in his world outlook
and some of his actions had to be called more or less diseased.
As he had argued in Quest of the
Historical Jesus, Schweitzer acknowledged that Jesus expected a
Messianic Kingdom to arrive imminently and that at least in terms of
historical time he was factually wrong. Nonetheless, Schweitzer
concluded that such a mistaken belief was not in any way a matter of
psychopathology, but rather the influence of "contemporary thought of
the time" on Jesus' conceptual view of the world. In fact, Jesus'
belief that historical time was nearing its end was, Schweitzer
believed, directly related to his recognition and preaching of the most
profound moral and spiritual truths: that concern for the Kingdom of
God should guide one's life and that love of God and of one's neighbor
have absolute priority over any material "treasures".
Just as Jesus was in part a product
of his own time and its thinking, so too was Albert Schweitzer. And
just as understanding Jesus' life and teachings requires interpreting
them within the framework of his contemporary world view, so too for
Schweitzer. For example, Schweitzer is often criticized for having
stated, early in his career in Africa, that "the African is my brother,
but he is my younger brother." To many of today's ears, this has an
unmistakable ring of paternalism and even racist condescension. But for
a white European in 1913, leaving fame and adulation behind in Europe
to dedicate his life to service to Africans in desperate need, the
insistence that "the African is my brother" expresses a spirit of
radical solidarity that was far outside the mainstream of contemporary
European culture.
Today's readers of the stories in
this book will find that Schweitzer did often view the life and
personality of Africans in the spirit of an "older" brother. Completed
in 1938, these stories include passages and phrases that clearly
reflect ways in which Schweitzer was a product of his 19th century
European upbringing.
Nonetheless, later in his life
Schweitzer was quoted as saying that "The time for speaking of older
and younger brothers has passed." Far more important than any of
Schweitzer's words are the terms upon which Schweitzer himself insisted
that he be judged. As he repeatedly explained to others, "I went to
Africa to make my life my argument." In numerous conversations I have
had with Africans at and around the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in
Lambaréné, which continues to care for tens of thousands
of patients each year, I have often raised the question of whether, at
least by today's standards, Schweitzer might be considered a
colonialist or perhaps even racist. Although a frequent response that I
have had from my Gabonese friends has been a look of confusion or even
bewilderment at the posing of the question, another common response has
been sheer laughter. For these Africans, the moral core of Schweitzer's
life and work is very simple: he gave up a privileged life in Europe to
work for decades in hardship, offering every ounce of his energy and
every fiber of his body to try to help alleviate the suffering of his
African neighbors. Unlike many other "missionaries", he did not try to
"win over" the souls of Africans for Christianity; he tried to heal
their bodies and strengthen their spirits. Far from imposing European
culture as a superior form of civilization, he instead built a "village
hospital" modeled after local African villages, where patients and
families could feel comfortably at home, supported by their own
traditions.
Albert Schweitzer was not a saint;
Albert Schweitzer was a human being, a man who was shaped by his
historical era but nonetheless transcended it. If more individuals
today were as far ahead of our time, morally and spiritually, as
Schweitzer was of his own, then progress toward a world of true human
solidarity, rooted in an ethic of Reverence for all Life, would
accelerate rapidly.
Lachlan Forrow MD
Note on translation: Some of the
most troubling and even offensive passages in Schweitzer's writings as
they have appeared in English reflect problems or even frank errors in
translation, rather than Schweitzer's own thoughts. Perhaps the most
extreme in this regard are references by Dr. Schweitzer to Africans as
"savages". In fact, although Schweitzer used several different German
words to refer to his African neighbors, none of those would be
translated as "savage" today, but rather as "black" or "native" or
"primitive". The translation by Mrs. C.E.B. Russell of this book into
English was published in 1939, and her use of the word "savage" is as
mistaken and regrettable as it is offensive.
Schweitzers prayer for Animals
The following prayer is said to be from Schweitzer. He didn't write it, but it follows his ethic of "Reverence for Life"
Hear our humble prayer, O God, for our friends the animals,
especially for animals who are suffering;
for animals that are overworked, underfed and cruelly treated;
for all wistful creatures in captivity that beat their wings against bars;
for any that are hunted or lost or deserted or frightened or hungry;
for all that must be put death.
We entreat for them all Thy mercy and pity,
and for those who deal with them we ask a heart of compassion
and gentle hands and kindly words.
Make us, ourselves, to be true friends to animals,
and so to share the blessings of the merciful.
The following little prayer the little Albert used to pray every evening when his mother left his room:
O, heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath;
guard them from all evil,
and let them sleep in peace.
(From: Memories of Childhood and Youth)