"a powerful, popular, and well-funded lobby"

Via Vegan.com, an article in the Washington Times features a rather peculiar sentence:

"The agriculture industry is under attack from a powerful, popular and well-funded lobby - animal rights groups, which want to see it die completely, said two speakers at the Animal Agriculture Alliance 9th Anual Stakeholders Summit in Arlington, Va., Wednesday."

The idea that anything resembling an animal rights position is "powerful, popular, and well-funded" in America is laughable at best.

Powerful? According to the speakers themselves, these groups want to do away with animal agriculture altogether. Abolitionist animal activists are so far away from achieving this goal--so far from even convincing any meaningful number of people that this is a desirable goal--that it is beyond absurd to call them "powerful."

Popular? Vegetarians make up a very small percentage of Americans, vegans an even tinier portion of that. Furthermore, among many Americans, words like "vegetarian," "vegan," "PETA," etc., are treated with open contempt and derision, and consuming meat is either commonplace or celebrated. The claim that animal activists are popular in America is, well, pretty stupid, I think.

Well-funded? Compared to what? Compared to industrial agriculture? Compared to the companies that advertise and sell their food to us? I'd be very surprised.

I don't know if this is paranoia or propaganda, but it doesn't sound even reasonably close to being true.

They know the score: David Henry Hwang

In M. Butterfly:

"The West thinks of itself as masculine--big guns, big industry, big money--so the East is feminine--weak, delicate, poor...but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom--the feminine mystique.

Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes. The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated--because a woman can't think for herself."

I saw Hwang's M. Butterfly at the Guthrie Theater tonight: it was a superb production, and the central actors took to demanding roles with vigor. The play is one of my favorites--it's stylistically and thematically complicated and fascinating. One of the things the play explores is how a sense of (masculine) power and strength in personal affairs gets wrapped up in perception of power and strength at an international, geopolitical level.

Bumper Sticker Discordance

Yesterday I saw a car with a purple "Stop the Violence" ribbon on one side; on the other side was a yellow "Support the Troops" ribbon.

Today I saw a car with a bold "God is Pro-Life" sticker; it was joined with a sticker for the "U.S. Army."

Perhaps you see no inconsistency in these messages (most, I suspect, don't). I think even staunch opponents of war could make a solid argument that the messages are not incompatible. But I see in these messages a divided mind, a failure to see one form of violence as violence, to see one form of killing as killing.

Science and Values

On a topic relevant to an ethic of nonviolence

My first instinct on these matters is to say "Read your Dostoevsky, people." On the question of whether scientific knowledge can lead us to moral truth, start with Notes from the Underground, then try The Brothers Karamazov (along the way, you might find insights in Demons, The Adolescent, Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot). Dostoevsky was on it.

My second thought is to remember why I finally stopped eating animals. My wife forwarded me some articles regarding the mental, emotional, and social lives of animals. These articles were based on scientific research, providing scientific knowledge about animals. It was these facts about animals that finally led me to stop eating meat.

But then I remember that many people are aware of scientific facts about the mental and emotional capacity of animals, but still find little dilemma at all about eating meat. At best, science can inform our moral values (and it certainly can). Over the long movement of history, this informing of moral values might (usually in hindsight) resemble the source of moral values. But on that, I'm skeptical. There are still all sorts of irrational* sources of human values. Even when we are informed by scientific fact, we still use those irrational values to interpret how we are actually supposed to live in light of that fact.

*I don't use the word entirely negatively.

Happily, our age now has a firm grip on all truth, and our values are perfect in every way.

(reposted and revised from August 6, 2009)

In "Anachronistic Arrogance" in Religion Dispatches, Peter Laarman is critical of a tendency to dismiss the positive ideas, accomplishments, or art of historical figures because their social politics are not up to our progressive standards. I think of John Fowles in The French Lieutentant's Woman, speaking to his ages' sense of superiority over the Victorians:

"So much the better for us? Perhaps. But we are not the ones who will finally judge."

Happily, Laarman explicitly addressed the thought I had while reading his article (and often have when considering this problem of "anachronistic arrogance," as Laarman puts it):

"A little generosity and humility are called for here. I predict that the rap on this generation, and on even the most progressive among us, will end up being homo sapiens “species-ism.” And how will we feel when our good works and thoughts are dismissed because we disdained the sensibilities of whales and dolphins and horses and frogs and (yes) even that little piglet who contributed to yesterday’s breakfast?"

A further point is that those who have the greater knowledge, who should know better, have greater moral responsibility. Jonathan Safran Foer writes in Eating Animals:

"We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?"

"The Outer Limits" and Authority

Watching The Outer Limits, one frequently finds themes of fear and distrust of the government, as well as the corruption and insidiousness of authority (and those in authority). But these themes often focus on the negative power of the military, the dangers of an oppressive security state, and the potential tyranny of a secretive government.

But today's conservatives that rail against big government and government takeovers don't seem to have concerns about these issues. There is also a trend among many conservatives to trust government officials implicitly on all sorts of matters. They trust the government to know who should be tortured. They trust the government to know who should be detained indefinitely. On matters such as this, they certainly trust the government to keep them safe, and are happy to give government officials power. And do some of these same conservatives that distrust the government continue to support the government's military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan? Where was the distrust of the government when the Bush administration was selling the Iraq war?

This is not to exempt a Democratic administration from criticism on these issues: see this, this, remember this, of course we still have this, and there's this, and this. But what is striking me (while watching The Outer Limits) is the ideological disconnect in a conservative distrust of government in general with a conservative faith in the government on military and security matters.

The moral challenge of normalized violence

David Brooks refers to

"the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade."

For Brooks, a massive debt is "the greatest moral challenge of our day." Not two wars/military occupations (that Brooks supported and supports) that have led to thousands of deaths and continue to lead to violent deaths for innocent civilians. Not government officials that tortured with impunity and continue to prance around the media bragging about and defending torture with no punishment. Not even climate change. Not even millions of Americans without health insurance. And of course not the gap between the richest and the poorest.

A giant debt is a serious policy problem, one that must be dealt with. But in a nation with a gigantic military budget and hundreds of military bases around the world and military occupations of two nations, a nation that continues military efforts that violently kill innocent people, a nation that has tortured people and because the torturers have not been punished, a nation that will torture again, it is obscene to call debt our "greatest moral challenge." To do so normalizes violence: such violence is so acceptable, so "necessary," so taken-for-granted-that-it-need-not-be-considered, that it is policy on debt that is our greatest "moral" issue.

And that is our true greatest moral challenge: the normalization of violence that allows people like Brooks to consider the problem of debt a more pressing ethical concern.