organic rights

A fantasy:

In the near future, the human race will encounter alien beings. These aliens will be radically different not merely to human beings but to all previously encountered lifeforms. They will demonstrate sentience, however, and so virulent do-gooders will demand an extension of human rights to our new alien friends. Indeed, the phrase ‘human rights’ will be replaced with ’sentient lifeform rights’.

Films and pop songs will be commissioned to celebrate our cosmic diversity. Politicians will give impassioned speeches heralding the dawn of a new era of inter-planetary unity. Vive la difference! they will cry. The Government will issue a multitude of pamphlets explaining the great benefits of ’sentient life form rights’ and advising the public on how to behave should they meet a blob of alien slime: “It may look like slime - but it’s got the same Sentient Lifeform Rights as you!” and “Respect the slime!” Impressionable people will write poems about ‘hand holding tentacle’. The Turner Prize will go to a work showing a disabled, offal-encrusted woman being impregnated by a green blob.

The aliens will indeed be sentient. They will, however, also be fond of eating human flesh, if ‘eating’ is the right word for an organism without any obvious mouth or digestive tract. At first, politicians will angrily deny this, accusing critics of ‘racism’; comparisons will also be made to Hitler. Finally, when sufficient people have themselves witnessed a voracious green blob fall upon a tasty human being, and devour said individual with a hearty alien belch, politicians will admit that “there are differences between alien and human culture”, but ascribe the attacks to “an unruly minority.” Journalists will take up the alien cause and argue that human intolerance to our alien friends has pushed “a small, extremist element to eat human flesh”. Again, anyone who expresses so much as discomfort at the presence of so many man-eating green blobs, of inscrutable mind and character, will be accused of ‘racism’.

French academics will argue that in eating human beings the aliens are actually expressing their admiration for the human race, and their desire to truly join with us in an all-encompassing Sentient Lifeform ‘jouissance’. They will exhort the human race to accept their fate as an alien’s supper, since “the post-Foucaultian matrixes interpositioning sub-cortically vis a vis a Lacanian void postulate or rather subrogate multiple super-neural nodular territorialities on a general scale.” Since, after all, there is no meaning, it is legitimate to argue that the aliens are expressing their friendship. Perhaps they are.

Furthermore, politicians will decide that “exclusively humanoid practices are implicitly racist inasmuch as they exclude non-human sentient lifeforms”. Since the aliens don’t walk so much as slither, walking will become Politically Uncorrect, and special ’slither-mobiles’ will be very popular, as a means of Politically Correct mobilisation. In addition, voice sets and ear translation devices will be available to transform human speech into the strange bubbling sounds by which the aliens communicate, and to then interpret it back into a human language of the hearer’s choice. And so on.

Those who persist in walking, talking, eating, drinking, listening to music, reading, etc., will be vigorously denounced as Politically Uncorrect, as racist, and, again, as being the next best thing to Adolf Hitler himself.

This situation will continue until the aliens have eaten the last human being,