A Thinking Reed

Category: Social and ethical issues

  • A Christian defense of liberty

    The Christian Century reviews Glenn Tinder’s recent book on liberty. I haven’t read the book, but I’m a big fan of Tinder’s earlier work, The Political Meaning of Christianity, which has been aptly characterized as combining the insights of both Niebuhrs: H. Richard and Reinhold.

    From the review:

    What makes Tinder’s discussion so refreshing and timely is not merely his resistance to simplistic answers, but his willingness to explore these supremely philosophical issues from an explicitly Christian point of view. Tinder believes that arguments about liberty take on new resonance when they are voiced from within the Christian context. While the dignity of the individual can be grounded in humanistic principles, for example, those principles do not provide its best defense. For Christians, the dignity of an individual reflects the creative act of a God who made humanity in God’s own image.

    If Christ is the Logos and humans are given reason by God, then an unreasoning Christianity is a self-contradiction. Christians are by nature not dogmatic but rather “Socratic,” Tinder tells us. They fulfill their religious character through free engagement with and respect for others. “A strong faith would not recoil from dialogue” but would promote it. Thus individual liberty is an essential component of the Christian life. Protecting individual liberties is a Christian value.

    The irony here, Tinder explains, is that the positive goods of the Christian life are perhaps best realized through the Christian’s support of negative liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from constraint—from limitations imposed by the state, society, corporations and, yes, religion. It is the freedom to do what one wishes to do, and this negative liberty is reflected in the political and legal apparatus through which individuals gain license to worship freely as well as to engage in all kinds of “non-Christian” acts: premarital sex, substance abuse, adultery.

    This is timely as there seem to be a lot of Christians afoot these days disparaging “mere” negative freedom as a bourgeois, individualistic, modernist snare. “True” freedom is freedom for, they say–freedom to obey God’s will.

    Undoubtedly, obedience to God’s will can be said to be a “higher” freedom. But two qualifications need to be registered. First, negative freedom, or freedom from constaint, seems to be a necessary condition for the higher form of freedom. Obedience that is compelled isn’t obedience worthy of the gospel. Second, when people talk about true freedom being found in obedience to God, they often elide the thorny issue of how we discern God’s will and who has the authority to interpret it. All too often in the church’s history, the freedom of obedience to God has been the “freedom” to obey some particular group of people who’ve set themselves up as God’s official spokesmen.

  • Sanctuary cities

    There was a nice article in today’s Washington Post about a trip to an animal sanctuary in New York state. Sometimes the question is posed to vegetarians whether farm animals wouldn’t die out if we all abandoned meat-eating, since the reason that so many cows, pigs, chickens, and other farm animals exist in the first place is because we raise them for food. As a defense of factory farming this is incredibly weak; after all, merely bringing a creature into existence hardly licenses treating that creature any way you like. But as a defense of animal agriculture (suitably reformed) it may seem to have more weight since it does seem like the world would lose something if those animals were to become extinct. However, I wonder if something like these farm animal sanctuaries provide an alternative model for how a “post-meat” society might choose to keep them around.

    In his book Animals Like Us the philosopher Mark Rowlands addresses this issue:

    One of the consequences of widespread vegetarianism would be a massive reduction in the numbers of these animals. But what’s wrong with this? If, say, there are only 400 cows in the world instead of, say, 400 million, why should this matter? Answer: it does not. Whether it harms any of these cows depends on the individual interests of each cow, and there is no reason to suppose that the interests of an individual cow in any way involve the numbers of others of its kind, at least not as long as there are enough of these others around to provide it with companionship in a normal social setting. The welfare of each individual cow is completely unaffected by whether there are 400 or 400 million others of its kind. Vain and complex species that we are, we tend to worry about things like “the future of the human race.” So, it might be in our interests to have large numbers of humans around, because we worry about such things, and our (overinflated) view of our role in the universal scheme of things demands our continuation. But cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep certainly do not worry about the size of their species. As long as there are enough of them to form a normal social group, they’re happy.

    It might be true that the elimination of a species or sub-species is a cause for regret, even if that species has been artificially created by a eugenic selective-breeding regime. But vegetarianism does not require the elimination of species. If we are worried about this, then we can always turn over areas of land — maintained by public funds — for grazing by animals that we currently eat. In a vegetarian world, perhaps we might want to do this anyway, as a living memorial to the morally bankrupt ways of our forbears. (p. 120)

    I’m more concerned than Rowlands appears to be that the extinction of species — even an “aritificial” one — might be a bad in itself, despite not affecting the interests of individual animals beyond their need for a sufficiently large social group. Each species is good in its kind and makes up a valuable part of the whole, which would seem to me to tell against its wanton elimination. I also think it might be possible for humans to have benign relationships with farm animals, as both the Post article, much farm writing (e.g. John Katz’s articles), and countless people’s experiences attest. So, preserving the possibility of those unique kinds of relationships might be another reason for making sure farm animal species don’t go extinct, in the unlikely event of widespread vegetarianism. Which is why the farm sanctuary is an intriguing model for post-animal husbandry arrangements.

  • Handful o’ links

    Britain’s Labour Party needs to reinvent itself as a new liberal party.

    Obama vs. McCain on climate and energy policy – not the same.

    Animals as gentically modified drug machines.

    Is Google re-wiring our brains?

    Obama: what kind of liberal?

  • C.S. Lews on democracy and authority

    I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.

    That I believe to be the true ground of democracy. I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. I believe that if we had not fallen, Filmer would be right, and partiarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government. But since we have learned sin, we have found, as Lord Acton says, that “all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The only remedy has been to take away the powers and substitute a legal fiction of equality. The authority of father and husband has been rightly abolished on the legal plane, not because this authority is in itself bad (on the contrary, it is, I hold, divine in origin), but because fathers and husbands are bad. Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that learned priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us. Even the authority of man over beast has had to be interfered with because it is constantly abused. (C.S. Lewis, “Membership,” from The Weight of Glory, pp. 168-7)

    I agree with Lewis that democracy (by which I think he would have agreed that he meant limited, constitutional democracy) is grounded in the sinfulness of human beings. Because we are not only frail, ignorant, and limited, but because we are sinful, our power over each other has to be circumscribed. However, I disagree that the kinds of authority he mentions are part of God’s original plan for things, at least as we would likely be tempted to understand it. If anything, I’m inclined to say that men’s “authority” over women is the consequence of sin, not God’s intention. Even a “benign,” paternalistic rule, while perhaps preferable to outright tyranny, falls short of the ideal as a description of a relationship between equals.

    Children and animals are different cases for obvious reasons. Though even here there are qualifications. The “rule” of parent over child is generally agreed to be for the sake of the child’s good. The same, I would argue, is the case for animals. What I think a genuinely Christian notion of “lordship” requires is a subversion of any “vulgar Aristotelian” notion that the “lower” exists for the sake of the “higher” (I don’t think Aristotle himself would have given unqualified endorsement to it, but it’s a sentiment that has sometimes creeped into Christian theology under the authority of Aristotle). Andrew Linzey comes closer to the mark when he describes human beings as the “servant species,” with a lordship patterned after the one who came to serve, not to be served. I think this calls into question the idea that animals can simply be used for our good (however “humanely” we do so). If anything, an unfallen world would be more like an anarchy than a monarchy, at least as far as relations among creatures go. It would be characterized by mutual love and service without the need for coercive restraint.

  • Redeeming the time

    LutherPunk has started up a new blog less focused on theology and ministry and more focused on crafting a lifestyle of self-sufficience and reduced consumption in what might seem like a not-too-promising location: modern suburbia.

    Derek weighs in here and points out that resisting consumerism dovetails with classic Christian virtues like “prudence, temperance, moderation, and respect for the creation.”

    Which brings me to one of the, for me, most compelling parts of Michael Northcott’s recent A Moral Climate, which I mentioned briefly here. Although Northcott firmly defends the scientific consensus on climate change, he offers a Pascal’s wager-style argument to the effect that changing our current lifestyle would be a good thing even if global warming wasn’t happening:

    action to stem climate change would be prudent even if certain knowledge that it is happening, or about the severity of its effects, is not available or believed. If global warming is humanely caused, then these actions will turn out to have been essential for human survival and the health of the biosphere. In the unlikely even that it is not, then these good actions promote other goods — ecological responsibility, global justice, care for species — which are also morally right. (p. 274)

    Northcott deepens his argument with a discussion of the Christian conception of time. Humanity, in the Christian understanding, is not called primarily to seize control of historical processes, but to witness to God’s love and mercy:

    Time in modernity thus becomes a human project, and ordering time towards human welfare requires economic and political artifice. By contrast, in the Christian account of redemption the future is hopeful because of the Christ events in which bondage to sin and suffering is undone by the definitive redeeming action of God in time. In the Christian era time is no longer a political project as it had been for Plato, and as it has become again in post-Christian modernity. Instead Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection are teh actions of the eternal, transforming the direction and future possibilities of human existence within time from beyond time. (p. 278 )

    In previous chapters Northcott had outlined certain key Christian practices – such as dwelling, pilgirmage and eucharistic feasting – that are in sharp contrast with our technological-industrial world’s obsession with mobility, speed, and utility. These practices aren’t means of engineering history, but ways of dwelling within history, in light of the cross of Jesus:

    In these practices Christians take time to order their lives around the worship of God because they believe that they have been given time by the re-ordering of creation which occurs when the Creator dwells inside time in the Incarnation and so redeems time and creation from futility, and from the curse of original sin. In the shape of this apocalyptic event, Christians understand that they have seen not only the future redemption of creatureliness, but the way, the ‘shape of living’, that they are called to pursue between the present and the future end of time. (pp. 278-9)

    For Christians, living in a way that minimizes our use of limited resources and impact on the planet isn’t simply a means to reducing envionmental despoilation, it’s living “with the grain of the universe,” to use John Howard Yoder’s memorable phrase. Peaceableness, which encompasses our relationships with the human and non-human creation, is ultimately in sync with the deepest and most lasting reality, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

  • John Milbank and “red toryism”

    This short piece from arch-Radical Orthodoxist John Milbank has generated a bit of buzz in the theologican blogosphere. Milbank seems to be calling for a socially conservative/economically leftist (or perhaps agrarian/distributist is a better description) “Red Toryism” to combat the hegemony of what he deems a failed neoliberalism (i.e. social liberalism plus relatively unregulated corporate capitalism or what Europeans call liberalism and Americans know as conservatism):

    Jackie Ashley (This fight really matters, May 19) reveals the bizarre bankruptcy of the current British left. By every traditional radical criterion New Labour has failed: it has presided over a large increase in economic inequality and an entrenchment of poverty, while it has actively promoted the destruction of civil rights, authoritarian interference in education and medicine, and an excessively punitive approach to crime. But never mind all that, says Jackie Ashley and her ilk: on what crucially matters – the extending of supposed biosexual freedom and the licensing of Faustian excesses of science – it is on the side of “progress”.

    Yet it is arguably just this construal of left versus right which is most novel and questionable. Is it really so obvious that permitting children to be born without fathers is progressive, or even liberal and feminist? Behind the media facade, more subtle debates over these sorts of issue do not necessarily follow obvious political or religious versus secular divides. The reality is that, after the sell-out to extreme capitalism, the left seeks ideological alibis in the shape of hostility to religion, to the family, to high culture and to the role of principled elites.

    An older left had more sense of the qualified goods of these things and the way they can work to allow a greater economic equality and the democratisation of excellence. Now many of us are beginning to realise that old socialists should talk with traditionalist Tories. In the face of the secret alliance of cultural with economic liberalism, we need now to invent a new sort of politics which links egalitarianism to the pursuit of objective values and virtues: a “traditionalist socialism” or a “red Toryism”. After all, what counts as radical is not the new, but the good.

    On the one hand, the article Milbank is responding to is virtually a shrill parody of go-go liberalism that allows for absolutely no limits on exploiting human embryos for scientific and medical purposes, and sees the dark specter of theocracy (especially Catholic) in any opposition to unbridled Brave New Worldism. Her article reads like a mirror version of some conservative writing you get over here: forget about war, poverty, the criminal justice system, etc. – it’s all about abortion!

    Still, Milbank’s “new sort of politics” strikes some odd notes. For instance, what is he referring to by “hostility to religion, to the family, to high culture and to the role of principled elites”? Sounds a bit like “traditional values” boilerplate we get a lot of from Bill Bennett types. Moreover, and granting that what I don’t know about British politics could fill a library, who is the constituency supposed to be for this rather odd amalgam of religious traditionalism, culutral elitism, and economic egalitarianism?

    I actually see some kind of social conservatism/economic liberalism combination having more promise here, but that’s partly because our version of social conservatism tends to be much more populist (see: Huckabee, Mike) and thus has a natural constituency. By contrast, an elitist, aristocratic conservatism combined with economic anti-capitalism has usually been the preserve of intellectuals (Coleridge comes to mind) and often seems to involve a rather dreamy picture of sturdy traditionalist yeoman farmers and artisans happily tending their fields and workshops. Appealing as that is in some ways, it’s hard to see it gathering much of a following on either side of the Atlantic.

    For what it’s worth, the one really interesting recent example of genuine Red Toryism that I can think of is the Canadian philosopher George Grant, who was a Christian Platonist, an economic egalitarian, a sometimes-anarchist, a staunch opponent of war and empire, and a Jacques Ellul-style technophobe. But again, not exactly the basis for a mass political movement. The American political thinker Christopher Lasch also has some affinities with this outlook. While I think both can make valuable contributions to a sound political perspective (especially when it comes to criticizing the excesses of liberalism), I’m not convinced they can provide the whole package.

  • Hippie cons?

    Dan McCarthy writes that, along with Ron Paulites, post-industrial localist conservatives are a hopeful sign on the Right, and kindly mentions this blog as a small data point. Whether this adds up to a “movement” is anyone’s guess, but the blogosphere (ironically) has given me the opportunity to be exposed to people who take issues like localism, food, sustainability, and the environment seriously, but from a distinctly conservative point of view (often, but not always, rooted in a religious view of the world).

    I have in mind here folks like Russell Arben Fox, Patrick Deneen, John Schwenkler (who Dan also mentions), Rod Dreher, the Caelum et Terra bloggers, and the now defunct New Pantagruel webzine, among others. It remains to be seen, though, whether a) this impulse is confined to a few blogospheric eccentrics and malcontents (and I mean that with all affection!) and b) whether it’s properly seen as part of “the Right.” On the last point, I’m not terribly hopeful that American conservatism can or particularly wants to address the concerns that these folks are raising.

  • Radical faith and creation

    As my previous post may have suggested, I’ve been dipping into the greatest hits of H. Richard Niebuhr (Reinhold’s younger brother and no mean theologian himself).

    Right now I’m finishing up his Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, which I had read as an undergrad, and I remember it making an impression on me at the time even though I was in a very different place, religiously speaking.

    Faith, for N., has two aspects, the trust aspect and the loyalty aspect. To have faith in something is to trust it as a source of our worth and well-being. But it is also to have loyalty to that thing, to ally ourselves with it and take it up as our cause.

    N. distinguishes “radical” monotheism from polytheism and henotheism. The latter term referred, originally, to the worship of one god, but a god who is recognized as one among several. This god might be a national or tribal deity, but isn’t identified with the universal lord and creator. It’s generally agreed, as far as I’m aware, that the OT scriptures exhibit a mix of henotheism and monotheism.

    But N. wants to use both polytheism and henotheism in a more extended sense to refer to the ways in which we invest our trust and loyalty. For instance, if my loyalties are divided among devotion to work, family, community, leisure, etc. without any unifying or ordering principle, then I am a functional polytheist.

    N. is more interested in modern forms of henotheism, however, both because forms of henotheism are more significant and because they often masquerade as monotheism. A classic case is when our ultimate loyalty is given to our country. Goodness as such is identified with what is good for the nation. And this is often draped in the clothing of civil religion. The cause of god is identified with the cause of our society. Henotheism always involves elevating the penultimate to the place of the ultimate.

    By contrast, radical monotheism identifies the ultimate principle of value with the ultimate principle of being. Giving our loyalty to God as understood by radical monotheism means recognizing God as the bestower of existence and of worth. It also involves making God’s cause our cause:

    For radical monotheism the value-center is neither closed society nor the principle of such a society but the principle of being itself; its reference is to no one reality among the many but to One beyond all the many, whence all the many derive their being, and by participation in which they exist. As faith, it is reliance on the source of all being for the significance of the self and of all that exists. It is the assurance that because I am, I am valued, and because you are, you are beloved, and because whatever is has being,therefore it is worthy of love. It is the confidence that whatever is, is good, because it exists as one thing among the many which all have their origin and their being in the One–the principle of being which is also the principle of value. In Him we live and move and have our being not only as existent but as worthy of existence and worthy in existence. It is not a relation to any finite, natural or supernatural, value-center that confers value on self and some of its companions in being, but it is the value relation to the One to whom all being is related. Monotheism is less than radical if it makes a distinction between the principle of being and the principle of value; so that while all being is acknowledged as absolutely dependent for existence on the One, only some beings are valued as having worth for it; or if, speaking in religious language, the Creator and the God of grace are not identified. (p. 32)

    God’s “cause” or project is nothing less than all being. N. strikes an impeccably Augustinian note when he says that, for the radical monotheist, being qua being is good. God calls all that is into existence and calls it good. And wills its flourishing.

    This is why radical monotheism qualifies all partial loyalties, at least when they threaten to displace the whole. Even putatively monotheistic faiths like Judaism and Christianity aren’t immune from henotheistic tendencies. A Christian tribalism that confines its concern to “the brethren” or an ecclesiasticism that comes close to identifying the church with God is a betrayal of the principle of radical monotheism:

    In church-centered faith the community of those who hold common beliefs, practice common rites, and submit to a common rule becomes the immediate object of trust and the cause of loyalty. The church is so relied upon as source of truth that what the church teaches is believed and to be believed because it is the church’s teaching; it is trusted as the judge of right and wrong and as the guarantor of salvation from meaninglessness and death. To have faith in God and to believe the church become one and the same thing. To be turned toward God and to be converted to the church become almost identical; the way to God is through the church. So the subtle change occurs from radical monotheism to henotheism. The community that pointed to the faithfulness of the One now points to itself as his representative, but God and church have become so identified that often the word “God” seems to mean the collective representation of the church. God is almost defined as the one who is encountered in the church or the one in whom the church believes. (p. 58 )

    The ethical implication of this radical faith, according to N., is to make the cause of all being our cause. Radical monotheism breaks down the barriers between the sacred and profane. Rather than there being “holy” places, objects, and classes of people are “secularized.” “When the principle of being is God–i.e., the object of trust and loyalty–then he alone is holy and ultimate [and] sacredness must be denied to any special being” and a “Puritan iconoclasm has ever accompanied the rise of radical faith” (p. 52). But the flip side of this iconoclasm is “the sanctification of all things”:

    Now every day is the day that the Lord has made; every nation is a holy people called by him into existence in its place and time and to his glory; every person is sacred, made in his image and likeness; every living thing, on earth, in the heavens, and in the waters is his creation and points in its existence toward him; the whole earth is filled with his glory; the infinity of space is his temple where all creation is summoned to silence before him. Here is the basis then not only of a transformed ethics, founded on the recognition that whatever is, is good, but of transformed piety or religion, founded on the realization that every being is holy. (pp. 52-3)

    One thing that struck me is how N. follows his own logic to its rather non-anthropocentric end; non-human creation has its own intrinsic non-utilitarian value:

    How difficult the monotheistic reorganization of the sense of the holy is, the history of Western organized religion makes plain. In it we encounter ever new efforts to draw some new line of division between the holy and profane. A holy church is separated from a secular world; a sacred priesthood from an unhallowed laity; a holy history of salvation from the unsanctified course of human events; the sacredness of human personality, or of life, is maintained along with the acceptance of a purely utilitiarian valuation of animal existence or nonliving being. (p.53)

    N.’s Augustinian outlook provides a foundation for a theocentric worldview. As Christopher has recently blogged, Christianity is still stuck much of the time in an anthropocentric perspective, seeing God’s concern aimed primarily at us. For N. this would just be another form of henotheism; God is being used to prop up the human project.

    However, what N. doesn’t provide (which is perhaps understandable given the brevity of this book) is a criterion for ranking the importance of the needs of different kinds of beings. Are we too embrace a flat egalitarianism where all existents have the same value? That doesn’t seem right. And yet, any hierarchical ordering threatens to bring anthropocentrism in through the back door.

    What I’m inclined to say is that ethics have to be grounded in the nature of different beings and the needs that arise from those natures, along with their relationships with other beings. What’s good for x is what x needs to flourish as the kind of being it is.

    For instance, it’s sometimes absurdly claimed that proponents of animal rights want animals to have the same rights as human beings. But a right to vote or to an education, say, isn’t going to do a pig much good. Rather, what a pig needs arises out of her nature: room to root around, be social, to nest, and nurture offspring. If we are depriving our fellow creatures of the opportunity to express their essential natures, then that’s a good sign that we’ve overstepped the bounds of what we truly need to flourish. To attend to all being, then, doesn’t require us to reduce everything to the same level, but it may require us to curtail our own desires when they threaten the essential needs of other creatures.

    The most appealing version of this vision that I’ve come across is Stephen R. L. Clark’s “cosmic democracy,” where each kind of creature is provided with sufficient space to thrive. But this presupposes a couple of things, first that the world is set up in such a way to permit this (which is, in part, a question about providence) and second, and more pressing, that human beings can learn to see themselves as one species among many.

  • One of these things is not like the others

    Rod Dreher writes:

    I think the most common, and superficially common-sensical, questions that comes up in discussions of this issue is, “How does Jill and Jane’s marriage hurt Jack and Diane’s?” The idea is that unless you can demonstrate that a gay marriage directly harms traditional marriage, there is no rational objection to gay marriage.

    But this is a shallow way to look at it. We all share the same moral ecology. You may as well ask why it should have mattered to the people of Amherst, Mass., if some rich white people in Charleston, SC, owned slaves. Don’t believe in slavery? Don’t buy one. Similarly, why should it matter to the people of Manhattan if the people of Topeka wish to forbid a woman there to have an abortion? Or, conversely, why do the people of Topeka care if women in New York City choose to abort their unborn children? Don’t believe in abortion? Don’t have one.

    Gee, what could possibly be the morally relevant difference between 1. owning another human being as a chattel slave, 2. disposing of an unborn human life and, 3. entering into a lifelong loving partnership with another consenting, adult human being?

    “Moral ecology” arguments, while not something I’d dismiss out of hand, depend on there being something intrinsically wrong with whatever act or phenomenon it is that’s under consideration. If it’s not bad in itself, what reason is there to believe it will “pollute” (i.e. affect in a harmful way) the moral ecology?

    In the case of slavery, and arguably abortion, it’s not at all difficult to see what makes them bad–they harm other human beings, or violate their liberty, etc. However, in the case of gay marriage, its goodness or badness is precisely what’s at issue. For those of us who see same-sex marriages as just as capable, in principle, of manifesting virtue and contributing to human flourishing as opposite sex ones, there’s no particular reason to worry about damaging the moral environment (and, by implication, straight people’s marriages). The moral ecology argument depends on a prior demonstration of the inherent wrongness of gay marriage itself, which hasn’t been forthcoming.

  • The sanctimonious carnivore

    I really don’t want to turn this into the all vegetarianism all the time blog. For one thing, I do have other interests. For another, I can only assume most readers don’t like being hectored about their dietary choices all the time. Plus, I’ve never been the proselityzing type.

    But for whatever reason there seems to be a lot of stuff on the topic lately. Like this from the Post:

    The path to becoming a more conscious carnivore has become a publishing industry trendlet. This spring also saw the release of “The Compassionate Carnivore: Or How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat,” by Catherine Friend (Da Capo, May 1), and “The Shameless Carnivore: A Manifesto for Meat Lovers,” by Scott Gold (Broadway Books, March 18). All three follow on the heels of last year’s critically acclaimed launch of a quarterly magazine, Meatpaper, which aims to assess the American “fleischgeist.”

    The books address a topic that has long been taboo among carnivores. Many of them prefer not to think too much about the moral, ethical and environmental implications of eating meat. But recent exposés about inhumane treatment of food animals have made it harder for thinking meat-eaters to put such thoughts aside. At the same time, artisanal charcuterie, grass-fed beef and, most of all, bacon have become “it” foods for chefs and chowhounds.

    As I’ve said repeatedly that I’m all for people eating less meat and eating more sustainable and humanely-raised meat. For one thing, there is, as I’m fond of quoting Andrew Linzey, no “pure land” on which to stand; I, for one, not being a vegan am responsible in part for the male chicks and male calves who are killed as “byproducts” of the egg and dairy industries (and that’s true even if you stick to cage-free eggs and organic dairy products). And even thoroughgoing vegans compete with animals for resources. So, no one here is in a position to cast stones.

    I can’t help, though, but pick a few nits with some of the claims put forward by the new breed of compassionate carnivores. For instance:

    Gold’s tale is likeably swashbuckling. (Chef and gustatory adventurer Anthony Bourdain clearly is one of his heroes.) But he doesn’t shy away from the meat of the matter. For Gold, being “shameless” means eating meat without shame, not eating it in a way that’s unprincipled or corrupt, the word’s secondary definition. “To be a real carnivore, a true carnivore, you have to be conscientious and discerning,” Gold says. “Eat good meat and source it well. Acknowledge where it comes from. And respect the fact that the animal died for your dinner.”

    “The Compassionate Carnivore” takes a more nuanced approach. Author Friend paints a picture of her life on a sheep farm in Zumbrota, Minn., and provides a guide on how to be both an animal lover and an animal eater. In a chapter titled “Letter to the Lambs,” she writes: “Tomorrow morning, when we load you onto the trailer for your trip to the abattoir, we will be thinking about the life you’ve lived on this farm — running around the pasture at dusk, sleeping in the sun, and grazing enthusiastically for the tenderest bits of grass. We will say out loud, ‘Thank you.’ ”

    This sort of pseudo-mystical talk about “thanking” the animals we kill for food reminds me a little too much of Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. As you may recall, Girard proposes that the myths of many cultures are actually ways of covering up, or forgetting about, the murders of innocent victims. They posthumously turn the unwilling victims into quasi-divine sources of mystical power, power to heal the divisions within a community. This power is real in a sense because the scapegoat mechanism is the means by which conflicts within a community are defused – rivalry threatening to turn into violent conflict is focused on one, arbitrarily chosen victim whose “expulsion” restores, for a time at least, comity and peace.

    Similarly, I can’t help but see the image of the animal who we “thank” for their “sacrifice” as a cover up of what is, if we’re being honest, the killing of an unwilling victim. Obscuring that fact strikes me as dishonest. Maybe it says something about our bad conscience that we feel the need to sanctify it this way.

    Better, I think, is Karl Barth’s perspective:

    If there is a freedom of man to kill animals, this signifies in any case the adoption of a qualified and in some sense enhanced responsibility. If that of his lordship over the living beast is serious enough, it takes on a new gravity when he sees himself compelled to express his lordship by depriving it of its life. He obviously cannot do this except under the pressure of necessity. Far less than all the other things which he dares to do in relation to animals, may this be ventured unthinkingly and as though it were self-evident. He must never treat this need for defensive and offensive action against the animal world as a natural one, nor include it as a normal element in his thinking and conduct. He must always shrink from the possibility even when he makes use of it. It always contains the sharp counter-question: Who are you, man, to claim that you must venture this to maintain, support, enrich and beautify your own life? What is there in your life that you feel compelled to take this aggressive step in its favour? We cannot but be reminded of the perversion from which the whole historical existence of the creature suffers and the guilt of which does not really reside in the beast but ultimately in man himself. (Quoted in Linzey, Animal Theology, p. 130)

    Barth’s point here seems to be that killing shouldn’t be taken lightly or prettified or dressed up with some kind of nature mysticism. Whatever we may feel required to do under the pressure of necessity, it’s important to recognize that killing is not God’s ultimate will for creation, even if it is permitted under some circumstances (the analogy with Barth’s view of war as an ultima ratio is clear).

    Further on, vegetarians are scolded for not playing the compassionate meat game:

    “People who become complete vegetarians for the sake of animals are basically getting up from the table and leaving the room. Although they might work to help better animals’ lives through their words, those words won’t keep a sustainable farmer in business,” she writes in a chapter called “Making a Difference.” “Flexitarians, vegetarians who eat meat occasionally, are remaining at the table. Carnivores who choose to go meatless now and then are remaining at the table.”

    Here’s the thing. While I’m all for supporting sustainable agriculture, veggies who think it’s wrong to kill an animal needlessly for food aren’t in the business of supporting animal agriculture. That doesn’t mean that sustainable farms aren’t preferable – for animals and people – to factory farms, but it’s an odd argument to accuse principled vegetarians of not wanting to make meat eating more palatable (pardon the expression).

    Plus, there’s nothing stopping vegetarians from supporting sustainable agriculture and/or moves toward more humane forms of animal husbandry. Buying vegetables and other non-meat products from local farmers is one very good way. One can also support measures to reform animal agriculture even if one doesn’t consume its products. For instance, I’m happy to support the efforts of groups like the Humane Society, which are reformist rather than abolitionist organizations. I’m not sure that the complete abolition of animal agriculture is either possible or desirable, so I consider the efforts of these groups to ameliorate the worst abuses of factory farming to be good and necessary. Why is that “getting up from the table”?

    OK I’ll try and make that my last shrill vegetarian post for a while. 🙂