 There's
an interesting article
by Elizabeth Kolbert in this week's New Yorker on vegetarianism,
and specifically on the disconnect between our adoration of pets and
our tolerance for the horrific, lifelong suffering of the animals we
eat. It's really about human nature, Kolbert argues, and specifically
that we just don't want to know about atrocities and suffering we don't
feel we have any control over.
This was the subject of JM Coetzee's book Elizabeth Costello,
that I reviewed six years ago. Here's an excerpt from the book:
Seven
o'clock, the sun just rising, and John [animal welfare activist
Elizabeth Costello's son] and
his mother are on the way to the airport.
'I'm sorry about my wife', he says. 'She has been under a lot of
strain. I don't think she is in a position to sympathize. Perhaps one
could say the same for me. It's been such a short visit, and I haven't
had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about this
animal
business.'
She watches the wipers wagging back and forth. 'A better explanation',
she says, is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you. When I
think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken
into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.'
'I don't follow. What is it you can't say?'
'It's that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly
easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is
it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime
of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet
every day I see the evidence. The very people I suspect produce the
evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses
that they have bought for money. It's as if I were to visit friends,and
to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and
they were to say "Yes it's nice isn't it? Human skin it's made of, we
find that's best, the skins of young virgins." And then I go to the
bathroom and the soap wrapper says "100% human stearate". Am I
dreaming, I say to myself. What kind of house is this? Yet I'm not
dreaming. I look into your eyes, into your wife's, into the children's,
and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you
are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else
comes to terms with it, why can't you? Why can't you?'
She turns on him a tearful face. What does she want,
he thinks? Does
she want me to answer her question for her?
In my review of the book, I asked:
Is
there a point in rubbing our faces in it, in forcing people to face up
to the horror of concentration camps, slaughterhouses, factory farms,
chemical weaponry, mental illness, sexual assault and torture,
bullying, spousal and child abuse, animal testing laboratories,
political interrogations, what happens behind prison walls, the agony
of those in continuous pain not allowed to die and without access to
relief, the children whose entire lives are consumed in deprivation and
brutality, the suffering of crack babies?
Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals,
the book that prompted Kolbert's article, draws obvious
parallels between the way we treat farmed animals and the way prisoners
were treated in the second world war by the Axis powers. Kolbert
explains:
Foer’s
position is that all such arguments [those justifying 'humane' eating
of animals put forth by Michael Pollan, Temple Grandin et al.] are,
finally, bogus. We eat meat because we like to, and we devise
justifications afterward. “Almost always, when I told someone
I was writing a book about ‘eating animals,’ they
assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a
case for vegetarianism,” he says. “It’s a
telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry
into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know
that to be the case.”
What we know about eating animals is that we
don’t want to know.
Although he never explicitly equates “concentrated animal
feeding operations” with the Final Solution, the German model
of at once seeing and not seeing clearly informs Foer’s
thinking. The book is framed by tales of his grandmother, a Holocaust
survivor.
Reading the article, I thought about the program of practices I have
designed for myself once I retire in a couple of months, whose purpose
in part is to reconnect me with my instincts, my emotions, my senses
and all-life-on-Earth. When I discuss this with people who don't know
me well, they tend to ask me either "How and why do you think you
became disconnected?"
or "Why would you want to subject yourself to
that anguish?". These are both questions born, I think, out of
subconscious grief
-- the first is a denial that the life most of us live is in any way
emotionally suppressed, tacitly cruel or unnatural, while the second is
dismay that we
could ever hope to handle that much terrible reality.
It intrigues me that the people who sign up for courses and workshops
on emotional reconnection (judging by the research I have done, and on
the Joanna Macy workshop videos I've watched) seem to be overwhelmingly
female and over 30. Why is that adult women are more willing than
males, or young people, to "let their hearts be broken"?
This is important, because one of the tenets of social democracy, and
activism, is that if a majority of people feel strongly about some
facet of the status quo, that this will inevitably produce change. The
ending of slavery, women's rights, and other instances are offered as
justifications for political awareness, discourse and activism being
necessary and sufficient preconditions for bringing about important
change.
But are they? As Foer says, the majority already know that factory
farming is an ugly business. But they don't want to know. They quietly
ignore it, turn away from it, satisfy themselves somehow that it's not
that bad or that nothing can change it anyway -- it's an inevitable
part of civilization. It's "natural". The rationalizations of Pollan
and Grandin are music to their ears.
The same is true for what we're doing to the Earth, and to the
struggling nations of the Earth. We know it's awful, unsustainable,
just not right. But we don't want to know. We rationalize that it's not
really that bad (hence the popularity of the wing-nut Lomborgian
climate change deniers, and corporatists who assert that struggling
nations benefit from globalization and that "a rising tide lifts all
boats"). We tell ourselves we can't do anything anyway, we do what we
can, it's up to the experts and politicians.
The problem is, these rationalizations are just untrue, and like the
nonsense of technophiles in groups like WorldChanging, the religious
loonies who believe in the Rapture, and the "humanist" cults that
preach about a coming "global human consciousness raising" it is
magical thinking, stuff that we tell ourselves because we really, really don't
want to know the truth.
Regular readers are probably tired of me reciting Pollard's Law of
human behaviour, but until it has been effectively refuted I'll keep
saying it: We
do what we must, then we do what's easy, and then we do what's fun.
We have no time or energy left to do what's merely right. It is not in
our nature.
Let's look at slavery. Of course the social movements against slavery
were important. But I would argue they were not enough. The US civil
war was not fought over slavery, it was fought over the right of one
region to declare independence (this is the cause of many wars, which
are almost always about power, money, control, and land). Slavery of
both blacks and whites (called "indentured servitude") was legal for
many years throughout the US because it was the only way to make
passage of workers economically feasible. They did what they had to.
Later as travel costs fell, most people could afford their own passage
to the "new world", and slavery was then only essential to agriculture,
particularly labour-intensive tobacco, cotton and sugar beet farming.
Technology (like the cotton gin) increased manufacturing productivity
and hence actually increased
the need for more slaves on the farms to feed the new post-harvest
automation. Slave owners acknowledged that slavery was (in the
words of Robert E Lee) "a moral evil" but rationalized that the slaves
were "better off here than in Africa". You know, like how Aghanis and
Iraqis are better off now than they were under the Taliban and Saddam.
After the civil war, slavery was abolished, but, after the brief but
disastrous Reconstruction and a severe economic depression, white
supremacy was restored in the former slave states in the Compromise of
1877 as Union forces finally withdrew and left the former slave states
to sort things out for themselves. Slavery was replaced by
sharecropping, blacks were re-disenfranchised, and for most of
the following century suffered under brutal, overtly
racist, repressive white-controlled governments. Slavery was
allowed for prisoners, judicial and police systems treated blacks no
differently than they had during the slave era, and segregation of all
institutions meant that life for most African-Americans was only
marginally better than it had been.
What changed, finally? The decline in the importance of agriculture
overall in the US. Access to cheap foreign labour. The Industrial
Revolution. As a result, social slavery was no longer necessary.
Economic slavery was just as useful, without the blatant "moral evil"
that characterized social slavery. Slavery ended ultimately not
because of social activism (though that was absolutely necessary), but because it was easier
to automate harvesting, import foreign workers (or offshore the whole
process to countries unconcerned with "moral evils"), or use the land
for something more profitable and less labour-intensive.
Has all this social activism brought an end to racism? Not on your
life. Wait until the economic debt crisis hits in the next decade or so
and you'll see that nothing's changed. Has it really brought an end to
slavery? Talk to the Mexican workers in the American fields, or the
children working in the blood diamond mines in Africa, or chained to
machines in the factories in China, and you'll get your answer. But we
don't want to know.
I could make an analogous argument for what has happened with women's
rights, but you get the idea. It was easy and profitable to get women
into the workforce, for low wages, caught in the Two
Income Trap, buying all those
things a two-worker family needs that a one-worker family didn't. And
giving women the right to vote didn't cost anyone anything, nor did it
produce any significant power shifts. It was easy.
Did women have to fight hard for it anyway, and should we salute them
for doing so? Of course. Do women in most of the world still face
horrific prejudice and oppression? Damned right. Will they too, with
enough decades and centuries of struggle, achieve some reasonable
equality in their societies? As long as it's easy, and doesn't cost
anyone anything, sure.
Now apply this to factory farming. Ending it is not easy.
It cannot be made easy. Like combatting the causes of climate change,
or coping with the End of Oil and the End of Water, it is a hugely
complex problem. The necessary change would be staggeringly expensive,
and massively unpopular. Do we need activists to do the "holding
actions" to mitigate some of the damage and to increase public
awareness and affect public opinion on the need for change in these
areas? Absolutely. Will that work, in and of itself, bring about
sufficient change in these hugely difficult areas? Not a chance.
We will change when there is absolutely no choice (we do what we must)
or when it is dead easy to change. Give us compact fluorescent
lightbulbs that cost the same per kilowatt-hour as incandescents and
reduce energy consumption by 2/3, and it's easy -- you can then make
incandescents illegal and no one will care. Same thing happened with
getting rid of the CFCs in refrigerants. No problem.
But reducing CO2
emissions to zero in two decades (necessary to get us down to 350ppm
and avert climate catastrophe) will never be easy. Reducing oil and
petrochemical consumption by 90% in three decades (necessary to avert
The Long Emergency) is unfathomably difficult, if not impossible.
Drastically reducing debts, waste, and consumption (necessary to avert
a ghastly depression that will make the Great Depression look mild) is
unimaginable, even with magical thinking -- the cure might be as bad as
the disease. And likewise an end to factory farming would require the
nationalization and breakup of industrial agriculture, an end to the
$150B annual agriculture subsidies to some mighty powerful oligopoly
lobbies, and a total, mostly involuntary, change to the way we eat,
that would make food much more expensive and its preparation much more
time-consuming. This is the antithesis
of easy.
These are wicked problems because it will never be easy to solve them.
So no politician is going to impose change on the voters, because it
would be political suicide. These problems will be solved politically
or socially only when there is no other choice. And by then, as every
previous civilization has discovered, it will be too late.
Is there a technology fix? The magical thinkers are hard at work.
They're planning on blasting $30B of tiny reflective metal into the
stratosphere to deflect the sun's rays, to combat global warming. It's
called geoengineering.
They have no idea what they're doing, but when things get desperate
enough they'll do it anyway. After all, it's easy. Oh, and they're also
going to put all the carbon dioxide back into the Earth in a way that
it won't leak out again. That's called carbon
sequestration, and the
technology doesn't exist (the engineers I've spoken to say it never
will), but, hey, when you're magical thinking, go for it. Obama's
giving them millions to invent it. Just make it easy for us, please.
Whatever the problems, we just don't want to know.
And the magical thinkers are going to give us high-efficiency wind and
solar and geothermal and biomass and "clean coal" and "safe nuclear" to
get us off our addiction to oil. No matter that even all of these
together barely scratch the surface of what we would need just to keep
consuming at current levels (China's energy use is growing 20%/year and
they're building a new coal-fired power plant every four days). Hey,
what happened to cold fusion? In the meantime, we'll stave off the
problem for 4-5 years by turning an area of Alberta the size of Florida
into a lunar landscape peppered with thousands of massive toxic tailing
ponds. The kids will forgive us, right? We don't want to know.
The magical thinkers haven't even put their minds to dealing with the
coming economic collapse, or the obscenity of factory farming, because
they're not even acknowledged as problems, let alone wicked ones. We
don't want to know.
Well, I
want to know. And apparently
a few others, mostly adult women, want to know too. Even if it means
letting my heart be broken. Even if it means looking at a photo like
the one above, which is offensive. I've been inside a slaughterhouse.
I'm a vegetarian, but still not a vegan, so I'm complicit in what goes
on in factory farms and slaughterhouses. I drive a car and fly too
often, so I'm complicit in the Alberta Tar Sands holocaust. I know
better, or at least I should. What's the matter with me, with us?
What's the matter is that we're human. These things that don't change
don't hit close enough. They're not personal enough. Slaughterhouses
and factory farms and Tar Sands developments are private property, and
they don't want you to know what goes on there. And what would you do,
anyway?
Well, perhaps you'd do whatever it took to shut them down. And perhaps,
if you got together with enough other people with the same intention,
you might come up with some ingenious ways to shut them down. Maybe
even as ingenious as the ideas that got these "innovations" started in
the first place.
Do we really want to know the truth? I don't know. We're a curious
species, we humans. If something can reasonably be done to make
something better, or less awful, a lot of us seem to want to know what
the problem is, and how we might do that.
All I know is that, after a lifetime of turning away, of not wanting to
know, I've now reached the point where I can't help knowing, and I
can't turn away, and I have to do something more than the very worthy
and necessary but insufficient things that activists do so valiantly
and often at great personal risk and sacrifice.
I have to stop these things. How? Don't know yet. Work with me, and
we'll figure it out.
Last words to Ms Kolbert, a much better writer than I:
“Eating
Animals” closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a
holiday, it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. But this is
Foer’s point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what
we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without.
Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable
pleasures. To Foer’s credit, he is not embarrassed to ask
this of us.
But is even veganism really enough? The cost that consumer society
imposes on the planet’s fifteen or so million non-human
species goes way beyond either meat or eggs. Bananas, bluejeans, soy
lattes, the paper used to print this magazine, the computer screen you
may be reading it on—death and destruction are embedded in
them all. It is hard to think at all rigorously about our impact on
other organisms without being sickened.
And if we're sickened, then what?
----------
(For those who
tried my 'Words to the Wise' puzzle yesterday, here are the answers: 1.
stripper, 2. stag, 3. feud, 4. Noah, 5. tithes, 6. insole, 7. antler,
8. EKG, 9. rioted, 10. Emir, 11. URLs, 12. Mac, 13. italic, 14.
baskets, 15. dognap, 16. ethers, 17. den, 18. diet, 19. y'all, 20.
coasts, 21. starboard, 22. tenure, 23. ice rink, 24. pooltable, 25.
triplets, 26. ham radio, 27. tag-team, 28. Magi)
Category:
Animal
Welfare
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