“Carnivore”

I sometimes observe people embrace their consumption of meat by asserting, “I am a carnivore.” Sometimes it is even “Sorry, I’m a carnivore.”

What strikes me is that this is a defensive posture that seems to deflect agency or choice from the meat eater. Usually we use the terms carnivore, herbivore, or omnivore to refer to animal behavior. When we say that an animal is a carnivore, we are not talking about choices the creature makes, but rather what its nature requires (usually this is biological, but it is also environmental). So when the meat eater says “I am a carnivore,” there is a suggestion that this state is not the meat eater’s choice, but is rather required by the person’s nature.

By suggesting meat eating is in one’s nature, the conversation is also controlled, and questions of moral choices and ethical lifestyles are deflected. The meat eater suggests that eating animals is fundamental and definitional in one’s nature, not a matter of decision making. If the discussion is on those terms, how do you argue? You cannot tell a carnivorous lion it is wrong to eat other animals—the lion is neither right nor wrong, but behaving instinctively according to its nature.

To say “I am a carnivore” is to suggest one’s moral sense is no more than an animal's, that what we eat is a matter of nature and not choice. It is a dehumanizing form of self defense.

Two Thoughts on the Violence in "No Country for Old Men"

1. In Blood Meridian, violence is something eternal, mythic, and something that saturates America’s history. In metaphysical and historical terms, violence is always. It is strange to me that the author of Blood Meridian would engage in so much “everything is so much worse and more violent now than it used to be and why doesn’t everybody see that?” sort of thing in No Country for Old Men. Sheriff Bell, the moral compass and regular voice of the novel, is defined by his sadness for what he sees as increasing violence and decreasing morals. Of course it is possible McCarthy wants readers to recognize something off in Bell’s thinking: the title points to it, perhaps, some of Bells thinking is muddled and contradictory, and later in the novel even he seems to realize this. But I find the tone of decline (even nostalgia) pretty overwhelming.

 2. In No Country for Old Men, I do not see any clear lines between evil killing and a moral, justified killing. Violence is human-destroying, in crime and murder, in war, in the death penalty. And it is interesting that in this novel so much about killing and so full of its burden, violence against animals comes up again and again as part of this continuum. Moss starts the novel hunting: it is while trying to kill antelope with a gun that he discovers the scene of a terrible gunfight and enters into a conflict where he will shoot at people and be shot. Chigurh uses a cattle stun gun to break locks and occasionally to murder. Bell’s explanation of how cattle are killed at a slaughterhouse horrifies his deputy. And while driving, Chigurh rolls down his window to shoot at a bird for no clear reason.  A novel saturated with violence and the ways violence can creep into the everyday does not turn away from a violence that is ingrained in society.

Pink Slime and Rationality

As I've been reading about the response and counter-response to pink slime (Erik Marcus has been linking to a lot of the good stuff), it strikes me that the meat industry and its defenders don't get people's objections to the stuff. It doesn't matter how emphatically they tell people it is safe. It doesn't matter how many times they say it is just beef. Those are rational arguments, but the negative reaction to pink slime isn't based primarily on reason. It's not all about what people think but about what they feel. People are grossed out. People are disturbed by the imagery. People are being reminded of messy processes that bring them their meat (processes that are mostly hidden, ignored, or deflected in people's daily consumption of it--in other words, people aren't generally required to rationally face the specific, concrete reality of how meat comes to their tables).

And now defenders of meat want to use reason to assuage people about how they eat meat? How people eat meat has virtually nothing to do with reason: it has to do with tradition, culture, sentimentality, emotion, and desire, but not reason (I'm not even talking about arguments defending eating: I'm talking about how people eat which meat they do: turkey at Thanksgiving, pigs but not dogs, ground beef at all). Now the meat industry wants to turn in outraged perplexity to reasoned arguments? Now they are angered that people are responding to meat in ways that aren't entirely responsive to rational thought?

"War has a way of making all kinds of killings possible."

Jon Lee Anderson in "Massacre in Kandahar" in The New Yorker.

Suffering We Can Recognize

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis posts this image and writes:

"This image from Life Magazine disturbs me. I guess because it looks like the shot is set up like giving a dying solider a last drink of water."

My first thought was perplexity: does Loomis really need to "guess" why this image "disturbs" him (might it be because an animal is quite obviously suffering)? This led me to the sincere speculation that Loomis was being ironic: he can't really have to guess why the image is disturbing, right? But on further thought, I realize that Loomis is onto something: this image is disturbing precisely because it creates a connection between the turtle and a human.

Most people are not remotely disturbed by the idea of a living animal being killed to be eaten. It is commonplace. Most people are not, I suspect, disturbed at seeing images of the animals that will ultimately be killed to be eaten. Do you get disturbed merely by looking at images of farm animals? But in this image, the turtle is in a pose that can be recognized as human: a prone, dying creature opening a mouth wide to receive some desperate succor for its sufferings. That this turtle can remind one of a human means that this turtle can make one empathize.

That may be the source of the disturbing feeling this image evokes. A creature is suffering, but we are made to actually see its suffering, because the pose has made its suffering relatable to a human viewer.

Animals are capable of suffering, even if we choose not to see it. And when we do choose to see it, or are forced to, we may be less inclined to have them end up in our soup.

What war does.

Glenn Greenwald's "The fruits of liberation" at Salon.

Nonviolence at work

There is something moving about watching these people slink away as the crowds shout "Shame on you!" Violence can make your opponents feel just in thwarting you (including thwarting with violence): nonviolence can shame them.

Many Men and Vegetables

Herman Cain, via Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon:

"...'A manly man don’t want [pizza] piled high with vegetables!' [...] Cain then explained that a real man would dismiss any pizza contaminated with vegetables as 'a sissy pizza.'"

This is pretty typical gender policing: "manly" men are supposed to want to eat meat, and it is inappropriately feminine ("sissy") for a man to want vegetables, and for that he should be shamed. One can only speculate how Mr. Cain will react to discovering that pizza is, in fact, itself a vegetable. I hope he doesn't doubt his manhood as much as he evidently doubts mine.

On being a vegetarian guest

Ecorazzi notes that Anthony Bourdain uses the argument that vegetarians/vegans are bad because they are bad guests. Bourdain himself:

“They make for bad travelers and bad guests. [...] you’re unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don’t understand that, and I think it’s rude. You’re at Grandma’s house, you eat what Grandma serves you.”

It's a bit annoying that one even needs to refute the "You're bad if you don't betray your morals for the sake of a host's feelings" argument (after all, shouldn't "hosts" be at least as concerned about their "guests"?). Certainly one could come up with absurd hypothetical examples of behavior no guest would be expected to engage in out of politeness. But it seems that food comes with a whole different set of rules when it comes to discussion of both ethics and hospitality. Food is intimately tied up in hospitality, and behavior around food is central to a host-guest relationship. There are all sorts of social customs, even rules, about it. But we don't have to invent outrageous hypotheticals to show how silly this line of argument still is. In fact, we can turn to another central behavior of hospitality, of the expected relationship between hosts and guests: conversation.

Talking is a regular part of hospitality. Hosts and guests chat, sometimes engaging in small talk, sometimes discussing current events, sometimes catching up on each others' lives, sometimes even just trying to amuse each other. That's common and expected, and there's a certain expectation of politeness surrounding the conversation.

But let us say that you are a guest, and your host begins telling racist jokes. Would it be rude not to laugh? Would it be rude to tell the host that you don't like racist jokes? Furthermore, should you care if it is rude? Would you say "Well, I'm at Grandma's house, so I have to talk about what Grandma decides we'll talk about?" Maybe an otherwise hospitable host telling racist jokes makes for an awkward, uncomfortable moment. Maybe it will be a strain one way or another no matter how you decide to handle it. But would you really say that one is "rude," a "bad guest" if he or she didn't want to engage in racism? And would you really put the burden of rudeness on the guest for this situation?

Of course not. But this is the sort of logic that happens around eating animals, because people often have such wildly different ideas of what it means, or whether it matters at all, to be eating animals. Because food is necessary, everyday, social, and personal, we have whole different rules of logic about it. And for some who focus a great deal of attention on the eating of food but who have no regard for an animal as a creature deserving of ethical treatment, it will of course be a greater sin to offend a host (even if you politely decline!) than to eat an animal for your own pleasure. But those same people wouldn't expect their logic about food to be applied to similar situations.

Animal Research: Emotion and Vantage Point

At NPR, Neal Conan talks to David Martin Davies about using chimpanzees for medical research. There are many things in Davies' framing and word choice to show his function is to defend animal research and convince listeners to support animal research, but I don't want to spend too much time dissecting his language. Instead, I will focus on Davies' framework of rational scientists versus emotional animal rights activists. Davies says:

"The entire scientific community is nervous about this. They're concerned that they are losing a national debate about this topic, which is based mainly on emotional issues. And, yeah, Neal, of course, it's an emotional issue. No one wants to mistreat our great apes, our great cousins, but they realize that there is a need for this and it could benefit humanity."

I would argue that support for animal research relies more on emotion than opposition to animal research, due to the vantage point of who benefits.

Personally, emotion plays no role in my opposition to animal research. I know there is a great deal of suffering in the world, and I have little meaningful emotional reaction to a few specific chimpanzees suffering more. I am, however, a human with people I love and whom I wish to protect. From an emotional standpoint, I would actually prefer that absolutely anything be done to potentially save those that I love. That's not reason: that's emotion.

My individual personal reaction doesn't matter much, of course. But it does connect to what does matter: the human vantage point. When humans discuss animal research, it is always in the context of humans benefiting. Us. We benefit. It is difficult, then, not to have an emotional stake. One group (humans) discusses an activity that benefits itself, even if it exploits another group (animals). There are all sorts of logically framed arguments supporting animal research, but there is always a personal, emotional appeal. We benefit. We get helped. People we love get helped.

Davies' framing of opponents of animal research as dealing with emotion (in opposition to scientists dealing with reason) is particularly bothersome as Davies in fact uses an emotional argument to support animal research:

"the person you got to bring into the conversation is if you are about to undergo an experimental treatment or if you have a condition, do you - you would want to know that everything is possibly been done on this drug before it reached a human person. The first person who takes that drug is going to be the experiment now instead of a chimpanzee."

Here Davies is not asking listeners to examine the situation from an objective position. He is not asking listeners to dispassionately use reason to assess the ethics of a particular practice. He is asking listeners to imagine themselves in a position of need for medical treatment that might require animal research. He is asking listeners not to reason, but to take on a particular emotional state. What would you do if... The attempt of this appeal is to put the listener in a particular vantage point where he or she would benefit from this research. This is a bit superfluous, because as I said, when we discuss animal research we already have the vantage point of the group that benefits. But we can also use this imaginary situation to put ourselves in a different vantage point.

In "Human Morality and Animal Research: Confessions and Quandaries," Harold Herzog discusses The E.T. Dilemma. Herzog says the logic of animal research is that a superior species has the right to use an inferior species for the superior species' benefit. What if, Herzog asks, an advanced alien species, obviously superior to humans, were to use human beings for medical research to help itself? Could this advanced alien species kidnap, imprison, and perform invasive tests on people? If, in terms of superiority, we are to the aliens as great apes are to us? If you assess this hypothetical logically, there really is no getting around it: if we are allowed to use inferior species for our benefit, a superior species would be allowed to use us for its benefit. If you feel otherwise, you are using emotion: you now have the vantage point of the victim of somebody else's benefit.

Opposition to animal research is, I am sure, often based on emotion. But it is also based on a quite logical, quite reasonable question, one that can be asked in a spirit of dispassionate objectivity. How do we justify using animals for research? By what right may we do what we will with animals if it benefits us?

You don't even have to look for the hypocrisy of our treatment of animals; it just reveals itself

Paging through a Sports Illustrated magazine from a few weeks ago, I came across a praising profile of a bullfighter. Sports Illustrated is the same magazine that did much to vilify Michael Vick. I can't help but wonder, why is torturing dogs to death for sport evil, but torturing bulls to death for sport worthy of a lengthy profile piece in a respected sports magazine?

On effecting change

At Feministe, Jill endorses Nicolette Hahn Niman's proposals to end farm animal cruelty ("1. State laws should protect farm animal welfare." "2. Congress should prohibit overusing antibiotics in animal farming." "3. Government should better enforce environmental laws." "4. Farm subsidies should foster grass." "5. The United States should launch a domestic Peace Corps for farming. "), and then writes,

"That’s a lot more effective than 'go vegan.'"

That depends on what one means by "effective;" if it means to effect change, I'm not so sure. Surely Jill has considered the great difficulty of effecting even one of Niman's proposals. There are powerful economic interests, structural impediments, and cultural norms that entrench the status quo and make these changes difficult. It requires strengthening a political movement to elect the representatives willing to make such changes, and then the political pressure to make them do so. It takes cultural work of building the political will to make it possible (or necessary) for politicians to take on those entrenched, self-interested opponents, and to change people's attitude that being able to eat lots of cheap meat is a priority over concern for animals.

On the other hand, going vegan simply requires you to stop consuming animal products. As a movement, it also means convincing others to stop consuming animal products.

It's possible the political reform movement can effect change greater than the attempt to convince people to change their personal behavior (obviously people's personal behavior is quite entrenched as well, as you can see by the lengths people go to defend eating animals), but I'm not sure.

Jill's argument also raised a theoretical question: why is an animal worthy of enough moral concern that it should be treated nicely before being killed for your pleasure, but not worthy of enough moral concern to not be killed for your pleasure at all? The position that animals should be treated nicely before being killed assumes that an animal's suffering matters--yet it still assumes that the meat eater's pleasure is more important than that animal's suffering. That's not terribly much moral concern, however much better it makes a meat eater feel.

What the Live-And-Let-Live Argument for Eating Meat is Really About

Sometimes meat eaters make an argument like It’s fine if you don’t want to eat meat, but don’t be preachy about it/push your values on me/tell me what to do. I’ve often taken to parodying this line of argument with something like If you want to abstain from kicking elderly people in the shins, that’s your choice, but don’t bother me if I like to kick elderly people in the shins. I hope this parody shows the flaw of dismissing a moral argument about harm to other beings as if it is a matter of personal preference that you shouldn’t push on others.

But I think we could go further: there is a moral principle underlying the Mind-Your-Own-Business dismissal. That principle is obvious: animals are not beings worthy of moral consideration; their suffering doesn’t matter. If you accept this principle, then eating meat is a matter of personal preference, not an ethical choice. Think about it: very few people would say something like It’s fine if you don’t like child abuse, but don’t tell me not to abuse children. (I am not making a moral equivalence, but using a parallel argument for analogy). That’s because most people accept children as thinking, feeling beings, worthy of moral consideration, who should be protected from cruelty and unnecessary suffering. It’s harder to dismiss ethical consideration about behavior that causes harm with the Mind-Your-Own-Business dismissal. By using the Mind-Your-Own-Business dismissal, the meat eater is implicitly arguing that an animal’s suffering and death is not a matter of ethical concern, because nobody whose suffering matters is being harmed.

But the Mind-Your-Own-Business dismissal is annoying because it refuses to discuss this underlying principle. It refuses to engage in an ethical discussion about behavior that causes harm. It instead turns it into a Live-And-Let-Live argument. It’s not hard to make an argument like If you don’t like Diet Coke, fine, but I’m not hurting anybody else by drinking it, so leave me alone. When people engage in behaviors that don’t hurt anybody, we should live and let live. When people engage in behaviors that don’t hurt anybody but themselves, I think we probably should live and let live. But is an animal a Diet Coke?

I can summarize my (mostly vegan) vegetarian principle concisely: If I choose to eat meat, I am choosing my own pleasure over the death and suffering of an animal; given what we know about animals’ capacity to think, feel, and suffer, I do not think my pleasure is more important than an animal’s suffering and death. Those using the Mind-Your-Own-Business dismissal choose their pleasure over the animal, but refuse to engage in a discussion of what comes after the semicolon. They have a principle, but the dismissal leaves that principle implicit and often unacknowledged.

Alienated

I've been feeling a political despair. How can there be mainstream discussion about significant cuts on spending on the poor and in need, but discussion of cutting a massive military budget is still left to the lefty, antiwar fringes? How is reducing the social safety net a matter of serious discussion, but reducing the world's largest military budget is barely talked about? And whatever I could convince myself in the past, it is now abundantly clear that Democrats in general are barely less interested in military solutions than Republicans, as we now have a Democratic president proposing and maintaining a massive military budget and continuing to use violent military solutions around the world. So who among the politically powerful is actually going to call for reduced military spending?

But this Gallup Poll (via Kevin Drum) reminds me that it is not strictly a political problem, but a cultural problem. Only 14% of Americans think the military has too much power, 53% think its about right, and 28% think it doesn't have enough power. Twice as many people want the military to have more power than want it to have less, and a strong majority of the country thinks the military's power is what it should be. Put another way, 81% of Americans support the military's current power or want it to be greater.

It is not so much that we have elites ignoring the needs of struggling people to maintain military spending and warfare against our own wishes. It is that, evidently, Americans are devoted to militarism.

The Temptation to Justifiable Violence

A conscientious person who wishes to do good in the world faces the temptation for violence. When one looks at the brute evil that causes harm in the world, there is a temptation to use violence to prevent harm or to cause good. The temptation to violence for a good cause is a strong one, and one that requires vigilant, committed resistance. Men like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez certainly had just causes, and they deliberately chose means of nonviolence to strive for their causes.

According to John Howard Yoder in The Politics of Jesus, Jesus was tempted greatly by violent political action, that he "perceived the Zealot alternative, was tempted by it as by no other, and nonetheless rejected it" (52). By "Zealot option," Yoder means "the issue was whether violence is justified in principle for what one considers to be a very righteous political cause" (58). Yoder's thesis is provocative: even Jesus, who taught his followers to love their enemies, who even forgave his murderers and mockers as he suffered painful death, who was willing to sacrifice his own life, was tempted to righteous violence.

Nicholas Kristof devotes his life to traveling the world and exposing suffering and injustice: he is a man who does and desires to do good for the world. He is eloquent and passionate in his efforts to do good and prevent evil. And so he makes a worthy tempter for supporting military action in Libya, as here and here. Kristof's is the liberal case for military action, it is the argument that sometimes, however rarely it may be, a positive impact of military violence can outweigh the negative. Kristof's is a reasoned, realistic rather than idealistic argument, and a tempting one. Why reject it?

There are, of course, practical reasons: the cost of war, the suffering that come with war, the unpredictability of war's outcomes, the tendency of violence of war to spread and cycle over distance and time and to leave long-term problems. There is also the argument that war puts aside creative nonviolent intervention strategies. I find these arguments compelling: the fear of war's unpredictable, lingering effects makes me wary of any argument for war. Yet Kristof's argument is practical too.

This is where the religious grounding of pacifism is important for me: when the practical argument is tempting, I must stand with the theological commitment to peace. This is where I have to rely on Jesus's teachings and example of nonviolence, of loving and forgiving enemies, of what Yoder calls "revolutionary subordination." I have to remember that he too was tempted. This is where I have to remind myself that Martin Luther King Jr., with firm knowledge that his cause was just, with belief that God had called him to this cause, as he faced violent opposition to his cause remained committed to the principle of nonviolence, and his cause was the better for it.

Peace, too, can look scary. Practicing nonviolence, too, means uncertain, unpredictable outcomes, and can mean suffering. But I place my faith in peace rather than war.

Works Cited

Yoder, John Howard. The Politics of Jesus (2nd edition). Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994.

Why be a pacifist?

"All the others. The others who spend their lives believing that we still believe. It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die. This is why we are here. A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse. [...] We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life."

--Don DeLillo, White Noise

Why be a pacifist? When the world dismisses us as naive, ignorant, stupid, immature? Why be a pacifist, when our cry is dismissed, mocked, marginalized, and ignored? Why be a pacifist, when we turn to the liberal writers you've come to read for their insight and find some of them embracing military violence? Why be a pacifist, when there are evil people filling the world with brutality and blood and our beliefs feel utopian and ideals feel sheltered?

Because in this world, there needs to be somebody there to always preach an antiwar message to the others. There needs to be somebody there who will always be skeptical of war's aims, that will always fear war's consequences, that will always remind people of its costs. There needs to be people there to point out the horrors and atrocities of war. Somebody, even a very few, must be there to always reject the rationale for war, no matter how just or humanitarian it seems. There needs to be somebody that will reject war regardless of who calls for it. Somebody must be there to try and find other solutions (for nonviolence is not isolationist, not opposed to intervention but opposed to violent intervention). There must be somebody to claim that violence is always immoral.

If pacifists gain the power of decision making, then you can tell me how hopelessly naive and lost we are, how harmful or wrong-headed our beliefs are. But until then, while you are running things, we need to be here, rejecting violence and demanding peace.

Addendum

See Eric Stoner on "Why war on Libya is wrong" and "Is there no other way in Libya?"

Wars do things you don't want them to do.

Matthew Yglesias on "The Mostly Hypothetical Case for Armed Humanitarianism:"

"I think it’s telling that enthusiasts for this kind of war typically have to make the case with reference to hypothetical success stories about military operations we didn’t undertake. These are useful cases to deploy in arguments, because since the intervention didn’t happen one doesn't need to wrestle with the potentially problematic consequences and downside risks. [...] I think it’s a problem when all your best evidence is drawn from scenarios that didn’t unfold." (emphasis mine)

One reason to oppose war, to avoid war, and to be skeptical of claims calling for war, is that wars almost always have unpredictable, unforeseen consequences. These unexpected consequences, which can be deeper, wider, and go on longer than war proponents' imaginations seem to grasp, are almost always negative. When you unleash a war, that war becomes a thing itself, going places and doing things you didn't know it would do and certainly didn't plan for.

Why Antiwar

Because shit like this happens every goddam time.

A pacifist cannot easily claim that without war, everything will be just fine. Jesus said "He who lives by the sword dies by the sword," shortly before being violently killed (many of his nonviolent followers were also violently killed; it was some time later that his followers quit practicing nonviolence). The world, in addition to beauty and love, is filled with evil and brutality. A pacifist does not look at the violence in Libya with blindness toward its awfulness, and does not suffer the illusion that Libya's problems will go away if left alone. But a pacifist knows not only the moral problem of attempting to use violence to stop violence, but also knows the practical problem of humanity, of atrocity, of blood.

The Pleasure Argument

At Feministe, Jill makes the pleasure argument for eating meat:

"A lot of people also (and this is my personal reason) view food as a fundamental pleasure, and see it as something to be experimented with and shared and tried and tasted in all of its forms. The idea of removing a major source of food from the list of options isn’t going to fly if you believe that food is for something more than just to fill you up. But that pleasure-centered view of food — that it’s not just fuel, but also something that should nourish your body well and should be variable and exciting..." (emphasis mine)

The defense of a behavior based on its pleasure only works if it is a harmless behavior. If your pleasure causes no harm, then it is very easy to defend it. But if the behavior you take pleasure in does cause harm, then it is extremely difficult to defend that behavior on the grounds of pleasure itself. For example, if I were to argue that I view kicking elderly people in the shins as a fundamental pleasure, and see it as something to be experimented with and shared and tried in all of its forms, you would rightly recognize that regardless of how much pleasure I might get from kicking elderly people in the shins, I would be wrong to do it because of the harm it causes.

So to defend eating meat on the grounds that food is supposed to be pleasurable is to implicitly claim that your individual pleasure is more important than the life and suffering of an animal.

Offering Peace

Should a pacifist eat meat? There are of course many sources, and many expressions, of a pacifist ethic. But if one is practicing nonviolence, does it not seem strange to rely on violence against animals for one's daily living?