“And Who is My Neighbor?”

The question and Jesus’ famous answer (the Parable of the Good Samaritan) ring just as poignantly and just as urgently today as they did 2000 years ago. We are often told that the Bible was written at another time and by a civilization very different from our own. The implication is that it has little to teach our sophisticated selves.

This student’s question alone should be enough to debunk such criticism. In fact, there is no more pressing question for us in 2025 than this one!

Let’s go back 3000 years. Asian cultures got there first, then Semitic, then Native American: Animals are sentient beings deserving of respect and care. Yes, they are a source of labor and food, necessary at times to support human life, but minimally we have an ethical duty to give them the best possible life and minimize their suffering in the process.

The industrial revolution and newly popular plant-forward diets have lessened our economic dependence on the Animal Kingdom. Yet today’s factory farms would have been morally repulsive to traditionally observant Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Native Americans, among others.

How did we get from there to here? What happened to extending the 7^th day rest (Sabbath) to livestock, as well as slaves, servants, and citizens? To granting Sabbatical years to farmland, allowing it to lie fallow? To trace the decline of humanity’s ethical intuition (aka Natural Law, Oral Torah, etc.) would require a multi-volume work. 

Perhaps we would find the roots of that decline in Roman Imperialism or in the so-called Humanism of the Renaissance (aka Mercantilism, Colonialism) or in Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. These cultures were economically and sociologically dependent on the enslavement of human beings (de facto and de jure) and on the brutal exploitation of nature, including animals. 

Many factors contributed to the Fall of the Roman Empire and the continent-wide depression that followed (500 – 750); some of those factors were ecological but some were avoidable (e.g. over-farming). As for Humanism, it gave birth to magnificent art, music and literature, perhaps the greatest the world has ever known, but, as the name suggests, it also fostered an extreme form of anthropocentrism. 

The social contract of the Middle Ages (a just wage and a just price) was gradually replaced by market economics: get the most for the least. A 20^th century Fortune 100 company summed up the ethic of this age with its iconic slogan: “Get the Max for the Minimum…” Shrewdness has replaced generosity and compassion atop the pyramid of virtues.

Far from tending to the rights of non-human species, this new ideology denied basic rights to most humans. Other races? Proto-humans! Other nationalities? Barbarians! Other religions? Pagans! Heretics! Other social classes? Pariahs! Other genders? Inferior! Children? Adults-in- training, best neither seen nor heard. It is hard to argue for the rights of endangered species when human cultures are routinely being trampled into the dust of history.

A century ago, even teenagers were considered ‘not fully evolved’, i.e. pre-human. (Hmm…imagine that!) The most prominent proponent of this idea was G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist and educator at Clark University who in 1878 had received, from Harvard, the first doctorate in psychology awarded in the United States. According to Hall, adolescent development was a recapitulation of proto-human evolution. Emphasis on ‘proto’.

Hall’s recapitulation drew on the work of Ernst Haeckel, a German embryologist, who coined the catchy: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” He noted that the embryos of more ‘advanced’ species, e.g. human beings, resembled, at various stages, the embryos of more ‘primitive’, ancestral species — fish, salamanders, chicks, hogs, rabbits. It was as if the developmental growth, or ontogeny, of an organism manifested the evolutionary history, or phylogeny, of the species. 

But this extreme intellectual chauvinism was not the biggest part of the problem. That honor was reserved for its ethical corollary: “ontological ‘inferiors’ (i.e. all of the above) may be treated with unrestrained brutality.” Greco-Roman culture relied heavily on slavery as a source of cheap labor, but Spartacus notwithstanding, it was relatively benign compared with plantation slavery in the ante-bellum South and child labor in industrializing Europe.

No extended period in human history was as anathematic to the welfare of living things, human and otherwise, as the period from 1500 (Machiavelli) to 1900 (Hall, above), and we’re still digging out. If PETA or Greenpeace or Me Too or BLM or AIM sometimes seems to go too far, it’s an effort to overcome centuries of exploitation and abuse.

While aboriginal cultures understood the world as a continuum, embracing physics, biology, and sociology, modern Euro-American society was strictly stratified: Lowells spoke only to Cabots and Cabots spoke only to God. Needless to say, no one ever spoke to ‘inferiors’ (e.g. blacks, workers, women, children, adolescents), except to bark orders, and no one ever listened to them, ever.

For their part, animals were considered unconscious, insentient automata. Were? In this decade a member of the US House of Representatives contended that ‘birds’ aren’t really birds but animatronic spies! Animals’ expressions of pain were considered instinctive reactions, not accompanied by any real sentience. 

Children, for their part, were thought to have no memory of events before age 7. If they cried out in pain, they were probably faking it: “Speak roughly to your little boy and beat him when he sneezes; he only does it to annoy because he knows it teases.” (Lewis Carroll) Hopefully, few parents implemented the letter of Carroll’s childrearing advice, but it certainly caught the spirit of the times.  

And plants? Forget about it! The sickle was replaced by the gas powered lawn mower…and Agent Orange. 

It suited us to see animals, children, and other races as unconscious automatons. How else could we justify the cruel slaughter of live animals to produce food and other by-products? How else could we justify the routine brutalization of children? How else could we come to terms with slavery?

If the 21^st century is ultimately known for anything, i.e. if there is anyone left to know and anything left to be known, it will for its fresh take on the law student’s question.  It is hard to believe today that just 100 years ago, our culture granted ‘full sentience’ only to semi-affluent adult white males. “Blacks, children, women, and laborers just don’t feel things like we do!”

And lest you become too smug and self-congratulatory, may I remind you that during the collective nightmare known as the Vietnam War (c. 1960 – 1974) we were told that ‘Asians don’t value life the way Americans do’.

Fortunately, the real Dark Ages (1500 - 1900) are finally behind us - more or less. Today we do not debate varying levels of consciousness among different demographic groups. Now we debate how deeply consciousness permeates the biosphere. Most of us, for example, now acknowledge consciousness among bonobos and chimpanzees, dolphins and whales, parrots and corvids, octopus and cuttlefish, etc. 

With the help of AI, scientists have recently found semantic patterns in the sounds and gestures of numerous species: dolphins and whales, marmosets, elephants, cuttlefish and corvids. In some cases, a rudimentary syntax has even been detected.

We have long considered the use of ‘symbolic language’ to be a defining characteristic of human beings and a prerequisite for residence in our tightly gated community, our neighborhood. 

But according to an 8/25/2025 article by Chris Sims in New Scientist, “Humpback whale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are similar to those seen in human language.” An earlier study of Sperm Whales identified an acoustic alphabet of 156 clicks which are combined to form 18 characteristic propositions (codas) but novel combinations are possible and do occur. Evidence of new ideas?

But it would be typically anthropocentric of us to look only for acoustic languages that resemble our own. In fact, there is evidence that structured communication in the animal kingdom takes place across a variety of media: hand signs, gestures, birdsong, pitch modulation, and whistle tones are all used to encode information.

Nor can these phenomena be dismissed as unconscious ‘reactions’ to immediate environmental stimuli. Some species seem to be able to talk about past events as well as present conditions and future dangers. Elephants and dolphins appear to name the individual members of their herds/pods. 

We are unlikely to uncover a ‘Rosetta Stone’ to help us match various animal languages with our own. Instead, we are deploying AI to search for algorithms that will allow us to communicate with other species.

With many species of animals now securely inside consciousness’ Big Tent, the debate now centers on whether to extend the NFL Franchise Tag to trees and/or their forests, to fungi and/or the  Wood Wide Web, to coral and/or their reefs, to sponges, to bacteria, to the eukaryotic cells that make-up our bodies, to the prokaryotic cells which power our guts.  

And that’s just for openers! In the next 75 years we will probably answer the question of whether conscious life exists off Earth and whether organisms composed of silicon rather than carbon can be sentient and intentional. Apparently, 2001: A Space Odyssey is no longer considered probative.  

When I leave this world, I will leave a place vastly different from what I found on entry. Not all the changes have been for the better! But nothing has been more welcome or more significant than this broadening recognition of ‘consciousness’. The recognition of consciousness in various non-human species has put the law student’s fame in a whole new perspective.

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Rembrandt van Rijn. The Good Samaritan. 1633, etching, 25.3 × 20.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rembrandt’s depiction of the Samaritan lifting the wounded man into an inn visualizes the essay’s central claim, that true neighborliness is found not in status or proximity but in the selfless, often inconvenient act of mercy.