Wednesday, July 13, 2005

What We Owe What We Eat

"If you value your peace of mind, not to mention your breakfast bacon, you should not read Scully's essay 'Fear Factories: The Case for Compassionate Conservatism -- for Animals.'"

Scully overlooks at least two other reasons to deplore the meat industry: its reckless environmental impact, witnessed by rain forests razed to make room for grazing pasture, and mounting evidence that we're spreading toxins and disease by meat consumption.

Meat is murder -- and it's not just the animals who are dying.
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8 comments:

Ken said...

A couple of thoughts:

First, I don't think it's necessarily eating meat that's the problem. In some cultures they hunt for meat, and I don't see a problem with that. The problem I see is that for us meat is a mere commodity with a price tag on it: we are too concerned about quantity, production and the market -- which is why we end up treating livestock in such cruel and fucked up ways. As I see it, the real culprits are our culture and our economic infrastructure.

Secondly, I cannot envisage me or anyone else eating my dog -- but that's partly because I know that my dog is a hell of a lot smarter than a cow, a chicken or a sheep. The latter really are dumb animals, and consequently one feels less bad about eating them. The closer an animal is to being human, the more distasteful the idea becomes (no pun intended).

Third, I think that overall the spread of toxins and diseases via meat consumption is not such a big problem. I mean I agree that the problem exists, but it is still a relatively minor one. I have been eating meat all my life, and I have never been poisoned, I have never contracted a disease. I suppose that what Americans should be focusing on is *what type* of meat they want to consume on a regular basis -- for long term health reasons. Too much red meat is not good for you; conversely, fish and chicken is relatively harmless.

10:51 AM
Ken said...

To go off on a tangent, I think that our meat consumption habits are ugly for the same reasons that the way we wage war is ugly. There is nothing wrong with eating meat in and of itself, just like there is nothing wrong with war in and of itself. It's what we've made of war that makes it ugly. The film "Saving Private Ryan" was very disturbing -- but we might want to ask ourselves WHY this was so. It's my opinion that war can be an art and a means of catharsis -- but once soldiers become mere commodities, and casualties are quantified by how many people we can wipe out at once by dropping bombs -- we have altered the very nature of warfare. Sending countless men out to die with semi-automatic rifles and raising countless cattle in metal crates both owe themselves to the very same mentality -- which, in my view, is an awful blindness and a mistake.

11:24 AM
Ken said...

"ken -- I simply can't agree that the WAY war is fought is what makes it bad. Reading Homer's Iliad, it doesn't strike me that the Trojan War has anything over, say, the Vietnam War or even Iraq despite its supposed celebration of "the hero." (That it does so is actually a false notion anyway.)"

I think the entire tone and tenure of the Iliad is different from how we view and feel about war today. Why would Homer write his epic in such a manner if this were not the typical Greek sentiment on war? Does the Iliad present war as violent, painful, gruesome, and heartbreaking? Yes. Does it depict it as mindless atrocity and horrific waste of life? No. There is an unbridgeable chasm between Homer's Iliad and a novel like "All Quite on the Western Front". Do you disagree?

Even the ancient Chinese had a brighter (that is to say, less gloomy) outlook on war than we do today. Sun Tzu wrote "The Art of War" - which means, war as a type of art.

War is a matter of honor when the combatants are not brainwashed automatons (like our soldiers) but courageous warriors who square off face-to-face in hand-to-hand combat. On the other hand, war becomes merely impersonal, horrific and atrocious when we can hide in a foxhole and blow a guy away who is standing several yards from us. There is no honor in that.

Today war seems so mindless and terrible because of the amount of damage we are able to inflict -- by the use of semi-automatic weapons, grenades, tanks, missles and a-bombs. What leaves us with a feeling of utter horror is not that people get killed but the senseless manner in which they get killed in vast numbers.

The ancients -- that is, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Hebrews, etc. -- looked upon war with a good conscience. Today such a thing is no longer possible.

3:34 PM
Ken said...

"no, the Iliad is not an "anti-war" epic in the modern sense, but it does apply what it still a stunning realism to the spectacle of human beings wading in their own slaughter."

Homer may simply be giving us graphic details of the violence which war entails. That no anti-war value judgments are attached by him to his story - that's my point. The ancient Greeks simply took the violence of war as is; perhaps you are simply interpreting what you are reading as "endless absurd atrocitiy". That value judgment is your own subjective assessment of Homer's graphic descriptions. I would argue that it is not implicit in the descriptions themselves.

I do think that the ancient Greeks looked upon war with a good conscience -- that is, a conscience which was free from gloomy value judgments of "absurdity", "atrocitiy", "immorality", etc. To them violence was just a more chaotic and macabre aspect of reality. Homer even goes so far as to glorify the typical war hero type in his next volume (viz., Oddyseus). Strength and valor were the Greek virtues, not tenderness and squeamishness at the sight of suffering and slaughter.

And you still need to account for the difference in the tone and tenure of almost all (if not absolutely all) narratives regarding war which came after the Industrial Revolution. I really do think that our perspectives of war changed after *dehumanization* was introduced into warfare. The sight of us very easily and senselessly perpetrating mass slaughter is the stuff of nightmares -- and this is where the feeling and the concept of "atrocity" has its roots.

"my sense is that the "thing itself" is basically unchanged."

Perhaps, but I am talking about our *moral interpretation* of the "thing in itself".

"it's mostly accidents of fate, in the case of the Trojan War undertaken for a far less "worthy" motive than, say, WWII"

Our "motives" are mere shadows of deeper, more subconscious compulsions. The violence of war has always erupted for superficially trivial reasons (such as over a woman). I think that part of Homer's intent in the Iliad is to illustrate just how easily macabre chaos erupts - but again, without standing over the phenomenon with moral judgments.

That violence is latent in human nature is a given and a fact; the moral significance which we choose to attach to this fact is an entirely different matter -- and the first does not necessarily have to lead to the second. Hence, war in and of itself is not "bad".

What, then, is "bad"? Political mystification, dehumanization, making casualities a matter of *cost* -- that is "bad". Why do I say this? Because they indicate that man has strayed from his more basic instincts of social reciprocity which has been indispensable for his survival as a species since the birth of our race. Political mystification, dehmanization, casualities as a matter of cost -- all harbingers of apocalypse on the horizon. It is this pervasive sense which darkens our view of war significantly, which give rise to stories like "All Quiet on the Western Front", "A Thousand Paper Cranes" and "Saving Private Ryan". It is this intuitive prospect of apocalypse out of which we have created our concept of "atrocity".

9:25 AM
Mac said...

I'm interested in recent progress with vat-grown meat. Erase the cruelty and the energy consumption and hey, pass the ketchup.

1:55 PM
razorsmile said...

Ken, to digress for a split-second, Odysseus was anything but typical. A hell of a lot smarter than everyone around him for a start ...

... as for meat, I'm gonna have to side with Denis Leary on this one.

Well, except for the smoking. And the drinking. And being Irish. And so on. But meatwise, we're on the same page.

12:46 AM
Ken said...

"Ken, to digress for a split-second, Odysseus was anything but typical. A hell of a lot smarter than everyone around him for a start ..."

I think part of Homer's point in creating the character of Odysseus was that strength includes brains as well as brawn. The interesting and noteworthy thing here is that Homer never disparages Odysseus's "dirty tricks"; in fact, he is cast as a man to be admired -- i.e., a "hero". This should tell us something about ancient Greek morality, how it differed from ours, and how (I will say it again) it even colored their sentiments regarding war. OUR morality wants to "erase the cruelty", as Mac put it, but exactly that which we wish now to erase was taken for granted by the ancient Greeks. We, on the other hand, lack what the Greeks admired most - that is, *intestinal fortitude*. We live in an age that has gone soft, one that can no longer abide the sight or even the thought of cruelty. Compound that with dehumanization, weapons of mass destruction and a world in which even our politicans no longer feel in control of where things are headed -- and wallah! We have a complete recipe for the idea of "atrocity". And like I said, raising livestock in cramped metal cages by the thousands -- slaughtering them daily for profit without any sentiments whatsoever (the Native Americans were grateful to the animals they hunted and actually *thanked* their spirits) -- this, too, is atrocity -- not merely because it is cruel but because it is senseless, wasteful cruelty perpetrated exponentially. The a-bomb and the meat section of your local supermarket have their roots in the same sociological phenomenon.

Finally, WMB is right -- Homer does not depict war as an art. That particular perspective belonged to an entirely different culture -- namely, that of the ancient Chinese. Where we perceive atrocity and needless violence, Sun Tzu sees bravado, genius -- even beauty -- on the battlefield. Try writing and publishing a book like that today, and those bleeding hearts with tender entrails out there will mob you. Why? Because our morality is different, our whole outlook on war is different. The way we *interpret* war -- that is, its importance and significance -- is itself a social construct.

War has always been difficult; above all, war means greatly increased suffering. That we should approach the subject with such sensitivity, however, is a relatively recent thing. Moreover, there can be no greater contrast than the American women who are crying for their sons in Iraq, and the Arab women who are encouraging theirs to fight and die for Islam.

What? Have we grown wiser than the ancients? Are we more enlightened than the Arabs? Or could it be that WE are the ones who have degenerated?

7:08 PM
comprar un yate said...

The chap is definitely just, and there is no doubt.

1:03 AM

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