A Thinking Reed

Category: Social and ethical issues

  • Simplicity and Lent

    I’ve recently started reading a book called Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth by Jim Merkel. Merkel worked for years as an engineer designing weapons systems for arms dealers(!) until, one day, sitting in a bar in Sweden he watched the tv coverage of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Struck by his (and everyone’s) complicity in the lifestyle that made such a disaster possible, he went back to California and went from being “a jet-set military salesman who voted for Regan” to “a bleeding-heart pacifist, eco-veggie-head-hooligan”: he quit his job, and began to use his engineer’s brain to calculate how he could live in a way that reduced his ecological footprint to sustainable levels. The first part of the book describes his research into the theoretical underpinnings of more sustainable ways of living, while the second part offers tips for putting it into practice.

    I’m not an ecological catastrophist, but I’m also not not an ecological catastrophist. I think global warming is real, but I also think it’s possible that we may develop some kind of technological fix. But it’s hard to escape the sense that we’re living on borrowed time and that we won’t be able to dodge the bullet forever, whatever form it comes in (peak oil? avian flu? mad cow disease?). So, there’s certainly a case to be made that it behooves all of us to reduce our footprint, even if most of us aren’t going to go as far as Jim Merkel (though I’m open to arguments that we should).

    But given that it is Lent, I think there’s also a spiritual dimension to the practice of simplicity that’s worth thinking about. Even if living more simply isn’t necessarty to stave off ecological disaster, it’s hard to overlook the fact that a modest lifestyle has been commended by sages of all traditions. Plato and Aristotle along with the Church fathers and doctors, were pretty much of one voice in commending simplicity, moderation, and frugality (and parallels in other traditions are easily spotted). As C.S. Lewis once observed, our society is unique not in the pursuit of wealth, but in upholding it as one of the highest goods, in opposition to the virtually unanimous counsel of our tradition.

    I tend to think of the fasting of Lent as intended in part to create a “space” in our lives where God can be present. There’s a traditional line of thought which says that, since God is by definition present everywhere, the barrier to our awareness of that presence lies in us. And one way of building that barrier is by filling up our lives with distractions. Blaise Pascal (the inspiration for this blog’s title) said with typical hyperbole that “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” I take this to mean that our penchant for distraction makes us unable to perceive reality as it really is.

    Simplicity as a spiritual discipline (which needn’t, it seems to me, be sharply distinguished from doing it for other reasons) might then be understood as an attempt to “cleanse the doors of perception.” Part of our problem is that we tend not to see reality as it really is, but instead as something for us. Instead of affirming reality with Augustine’s “being qua being is good” we ask “what’s in it for me?” This is arguably the root of our mistreatment of nature; we see it primarily as a resource for our use rather than as a gift and something that has intrinsic value. Perhaps the practice of simplicity can be a way of “letting things be” and seeing them as the handiwork of a loving Creator.

    On a more practical level, giving up something – a food, an activity, etc. – can allow us to spend more time doing the things we are always struggling to make time for, like prayer or helping others. I know I could certainly stand to spend more time doing both of those things. Lent seems like a good time to reflect on how I could live more simply, and hopefully this book will be of some help.

  • More on giving teeth to JWT

    In a comment to the previous post, Michael Westmoreland-White asks a fair question of Just War theory:

    Has JWT EVER led to massive civil disobedience and refusal to fight on the part of a church’s members? Pacifists have often been arrested or executed for refusing to fight. When has this been true of JWTers? CAN the doctrine be given “teeth” or will it always just be a sop to the consciences of nationalistic warriors?

    The reason this is an important question is that, if the only effect of JWT is to bless whatever wars the government undertakes, then it’s not functioning as a theory of the morality of warfare. And I think it’s fair to say that many American Christians have gone along with the state’s war plans while using the rhetoric of just war more as a fig leaf than as a critical tool. Both the mainline and evangelical churches have been guilty of buying into forms of nationalism that serve to blunt criticism of the government’s actions, especially during wartime. It’s also worth pointing out that the vast majority of Christians aren’t taking to the street to engage in civil disobedience in protest of any of the other great evils our society is complicit in, whether that be abortion, poverty, ecological degradation, or what have you.

    Still, it has to be pointed out that many Christians, both clergy and laypeople, who have protested war have done so for broadly Just War reasons. Unless we’re going to assume, for instance, that everyone who protested the Vietnam war was a committed pacifist, there must’ve been at least some cases where opposition was motivated by people concluding that the war didn’t meet the standards of a just war. And I think it’s safe to say that this has been the case in more recent years as well. The mainline churches, none of which are officially pacifist, have been very critical of the Iraq war and many of their members took part in demonstrations protesting it. Granting all that, though, it’s safe to say, I think, that JWT doesn’t provide the controlling template for how most American Christians think about war.

    Whether or not JWT can become more effective as a genuine restraint on Christians’ willingness to participate in unjust wars depends, I think, on whether it can be effectively taught. My evidence is strictly anecdotal, but my impression is that JWT is rarely taught or discussed in most congregations. No moral framework can be put into practice if it isn’t taught and received. And this is true of any morality. Sexual morality doesn’t require abstinence in all cases, but it does require the practice of restraint and discrimination, as well as the development of virtues necessary for that practice. Likewise, putting JWT into practice means not just learning a theory, but also learning the virtues of restraint, moderation, and justice as well as faith, hope, and charity. That it hasn’t been taught and internalized isn’t necessarily a knock against the theory, but a knock against us. If mainline chruches are serious about JWT, maybe a first step would be to learn from the peace churches how they reinforce and inculcate the practices of peacemaking in their members.

  • William Cavanaugh, localism, and giving Just War theory teeth

    Eric directs our attention to this Godspy interview with Catholic theologian and “Radical Orthodoxy” fellow-traveler William T. Cavanaugh. He’s got some interesting stuff to say about globalization, the church, freedom, and just war theory among other things.

    I don’t agree with everything Cavanaugh says, but here are a couple of things that I thought were noteworthy:

    Globalization is an aesthetic which produces a way of looking at the world. It assumes that we’re a universal subject. We can go anywhere and do anything. But this has damaging effects. A few years ago my friends and I gathered for a dinner party and started discussing what should be done about Kosovo. I remember thinking how incredible it was that most of us had never even heard of Kosovo just a couple of weeks ago. But suddenly we’re all talking as if we know what’s right for this place on the other side of the world. It’s absurd.

    […]

    America in particular has this tendency to think it’s the universal nation, the exceptional nation, which means that we know what the solution is to everyone’s problems.

    I sometimes joke that if I were invited to give a commencement address—which I never will be—I’d never say the usual thing they tell the graduates: “Go out and change the world!” I’d tell them: “Go home! Go back to your little towns and please, dear God, don’t try to change the world!” The world has had enough of American college graduates who know what’s best for the world.

    He also talks about how the churches might give just war theory some bite when it comes to Christian participation in war:

    If we’re going to have a functioning just war theory, then we can’t abdicate this judgment to the leaders of the secular nation state, as if they can decide when a war meets Christian criteria and when it doesn’t. Historically the prince was traditionally responsible for making these kinds of judgments. But the prince in medieval Europe wasn’t outside the Church. This wasn’t a secular role, but a pastoral role within the Church.

    Also, individuals were never absolved of responsibility for deciding when princes’ judgments were just and when they weren’t. It’s always up to the individual to decide and to apply these criteria. And bishops and popes often intervened in these matters, excommunicating looters, imposing truces, interdicting the Eucharist, and so on. The recovery of the Church’s sense that it needs to be the place where these decisions get discerned is absolutely crucial, otherwise we’ve lost any sense of what it means to be Church.

    […]

    The first thing the Church needs to do is stop fighting unjust wars. Take the just war theory seriously. I’m not talking about pacifism. If there’s a war that the Church judges is unjust, then Catholics shouldn’t fight it. That’s the way the just war theory is supposed to work. It’s sometimes supposed to say ‘no’ to acts of violence. What the theory is usually used for, of course, is to justify whatever violence is going on. I can’t think of a single instance where it was used to stop violence. That is the most pressing issue.

    Imagine what would have happened if Catholics in the previous war had said in significant numbers, “No, sorry, this is an unjust war; we’re just going to sit this one out.” The world would have turned upside down.

    Of course, there may be a bit of wishful thinking in the idea that the church, even the Roman Catholic Church, will not only make definitive pronouncements on the justness of particular wars but get its members to go along with those judgments to the point of not participating in them. For instance, John Paul II and Benedict XVI may both have opposed the Iraq war, but neither one, to my knowledge, declared it unjust outright in any official capacity, much less forbade Catholics from participating in it.

    In the case of Protestant churches (which I realize Cavanaugh isn’t speaking about) it gets even muddier. Without a magisterium it’s not at all clear how they would make and enforce this kind of judgment. Or, for that matter, whether they should. Cavanaugh is surely correct in rebutting the charge of theocracy in recommending that Christians put their allegiance to Christ ahead of the nation, but there is a danger of a kind of ecclesiastic authoritarianism if we decide that the church should legislate on such matters for its members.

    But, in fairness, maybe this kind of top-down legislation isn’t what’s being recommended. Maybe a better way to think about it is that Christians who are formed, at the parish or congregational level, by worship, prayer, sacraments, study, mutual encouragement and consolation, fasting, almsgiving and other charitable works, and other traditional Christian disciplines will come to see the world differently and this will shape their response to decisions like this. But this also has to allow for the possibility of divergent responses among different Christians. Which is, perhaps, as it should be. In the course of a post on the present difficulties in the Anglican Communion, *Christopher linked to this piece by Fr. William Carroll on subsidiarity in the church. Carroll is writing about the strife over homosexuality, but the principles he outlines seem like they would have wider application:

    True subsidiarity empowers local bodies to incarnate the Gospel in their local context. Much like modern organizational theory, it pushes power and authority as close to the action as possible. This enables the Church to become more flexible and mission-driven. It also brings us closer to Gospel models of authority. … A more adequate notion of subsidiarity, which characterizes historic Anglicanism at its best, emphasizes that decisions should always be made at the most local level possible

    Shaped by the context of their local church, Christians may well come to different conclusions about questions of war and peace. But that’s to be expected; Christians come to different conclusions on virtually all matters of significance. Rather than diktats from above, congregational study of the principles of just war theory, for instance, might be one way in which a responsible deliberation about these matters could be incarnated at the local level.

  • Nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving

    Today’s Daily Office reading from 1 Timothy (4:1-16) gave me pause, verses 1-5 in particular:

    Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, 2 through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron. 3 They forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. 4 For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving; 5 for it is sanctified by God’s word and by prayer.

    As someone who tries to abstain from certain foods, it might be useful to think about what’s going on here. The context doesn’t make it clear, but it seems like Paul may be referring to a kind of gnostic tendency that takes a dim view of the body and material creation. At least that’s the impression I get from someone who would “forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods.” Paul suggests that such abstinence is an affront to God since the goods of this world were “created to be received with thanksgiving.” So, my sense is that Paul is dealing with a type of gnosticism rather than a “Judaizing” tendency that would insist on an observance of the OT dietary laws.

    And Paul elsewhere comes out strongly against the view that any part of God’s creation is unclean in itself; in 1 Corinthians 10 Paul seems to be advising his hearers not to eat meat sacrificed to idols if their eating it will cause offense to others, i.e. they will appear to be eating it as a sacrifice. But he goes on to tell them to eat “whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience. For ‘the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.’ If one of the unbelievers invites you to dinner and you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience.” The idea seems to be that one should avoid meat sacrificed to idols not because there is anything unclean about it in itself, but because it may create the appearance that Christians endorse the sacrifice.

    A similar attitude may be at work in Augustine’s critique of the vegetarianism of the Manicheans. While many of the early Fathers were vegetarians or at least tended to abstain from meat, Augustine sharply criticized what he regarded as the Manicheans’ superstitious practices of not eating meat. There certainly is a strain of vegetarianism that avoids eating flesh in order not to “pollute” the self. And the Christian rejoinder is entirely proper: nothing is bad or “unclean” in itself; all things are created by God and, insofar as they exist, are good.

    However, are there grounds for abstaining from meat (or other foods) for other reasons of conscience? They key here seems to be provided by Paul himself when he says “nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving.” A surface reading of this would suggest that it’s enough literally just to give thanks to God for our food. And this is surely right. But I wonder if there’s more to be gotten out of the notion of receiving with thanksgiving than just that.

    Maybe “receiving with thanksgiving” implies an attitude toward creation which ought to be expressed in our practices of eating (among other things). How can we say we are receiving food with thanksgiving if, for instance, our methods of farming pollute and exhaust the land? Or, indeed, if farm workers are coerced or exploited? To receive with thanksgiving would seem to imply, at the least, respecting the integrity of creation. If someone gives you a gift, you don’t express gratitude by destroying it.

    Likewise with respect to animals. It would be odd, to say the least, if someone used this passage as a proof-text against vegetarianism and to defend current industrial farming practices. Few contemporary vegetarians adopt their diet for fear of being “polluted” by animal flesh, and one hardly shows respect for one’s fellow creatures by torturing them.

    But: aren’t I contradicting the Apostle here when he advises us against “raising any question on the ground of conscience”? The most accurate way of reading Paul here, it seems to me, is that he’s cautioning against ostentatious displays of one’s own oh-so-refined moral sensibilities. For, while he tells us not to ask questions about where food presented to us by a host comes from, he does say that we should refuse food if we’re informed by our host that it came from a sacrifice. And this is both for our sake and theirs. For, if we were to accept meat which we were explicitly told was sacrificed to idols, our host might take that as an endorsement of the idolatry, which could potentially lead them astray, possibly by reinforcing their own belief in the efficacy of the sacrifices.

    How might this translate in our contemporary world? For one thing, it cautions us against flaunting our scruples in front of others. But at the same time it warns us against setting a bad example or witness for others. In most cases only an insufferable prig would demand of his host whether the food being served was organic, fair trade, shade grown, etc. Surely the right thing to do is to accept the food offered with thanksgiving (both to the host and God). However, on other occassions it might be necessary or at least laudable to witness for a better way of interacting with creation. Just as there were idols in the ancient world, there are idols today: efficiency, profit, wealth, displaying a refined palate, or appearing sophisticated or worldly. There are occassions where it might be better to refuse something becuase not to do so will reinforce, in oneself and others, allegiance to these false idols. Refusing a modest meal from a friend is one thing; refusing foie gras at a fancy cocktail party something else.

  • Blasphemous bloggers?

    My only comment on the John Edwards/bloggers brouhaha is to note how deeply even “conservative” religious groups have drunk from the well of liberal interest-group ideology. For consider: all parties to the argument implicitly agree that the issue is one of bigotry – whether hatred was expressed toward a particular group of people – rather than, say, blasphemy.

    I realize you’re not going to get very far in modern America complaining about bloggers’ blasphemous remarks; it’s just interesting how religion is being assimilated to the category of a personal trait of its adherents, analogous to race or sex, rather than being about, y’know, God.

  • Christian peace bloggers

    I’ve joined a “Christian Peace Bloggers” webring started by Michael Westmoreland-White of the Levellers blog. I think I properly fit into the catergory of “someone who believes war is a very last resort” and “that Christians are commanded to be working for peace so that such a resort doesn’t come.” In other words, I’m not a pacifist, but I definitely hold to a strict version of just war theory and think that war should emphatically not be regarded as a routine policy tool.

    The idea behind the blog ring is for members to post something on war & peace about once a week, so hopefully some useful reflections will come out of that commitment.

  • Eat food

    That’s the takeaway point from this NY Times Magazine article by Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma). Pollan details how an unholy trifecta of scientific experts, sloppy journalism and the food industry have distorted the American diet by pushing the idea of “nutritionism” – the notion that nutrients, rather than actual foods, are the building blocks of a sound diet. This makes us beholden to “experts” who tell us what to eat instead of relying on tradition and common sense. Ironically this has had the effect of making our diet worse because nutritionism tends to focus on individual components of food and whether they’re deemed good or bad rather than how foods as a whole affect us. Consequently we end up eating a lot of processed food with the “right” nutrients as determined by current nutritionist orthodoxy rather than foods that human beings have been eating for ages (a.k.a. real food).

    Pollan makes the telling point that what we might call a “technological” approach to eating has consequences which in turn call for a new technological fix:

    The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating. You would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat. The question is, Are we better off with these new authorities than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted? The answer by now should be clear.

    It might be argued that, at this point in history, we should simply accept that fast food is our food culture. Over time, people will get used to eating this way and our health will improve. But for natural selection to help populations adapt to the Western diet, we’d have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. That’s not what we’re doing. Rather, we’re turning to the health-care industry to help us “adapt.” Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It’s gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it’s working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may be good business for the health-care industry, surely the cost to society — estimated at more than $200 billion a year in diet-related health-care costs — is unsustainable.

    The solution, he argues, is to return to a food culture as an alternative to food science. This includes things like: eating real food (“Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”), avoid “food products,” even those bearing health claims, buy food directly from the producers by, e.g. patronizing farmers’ markets whenever possible, pay more for better quality of food while at the same time eating less, eat mostly plants, borrow ideas from traditional food cultures (e.g. the Frence, Greeks, Italians), take pleasure in eating, cook and grow some of your own food if possible, and diversify your diet, including not only new dishes, but new species whenever possible.

    It’s hard not to be reminded of Christopher Lasch’s point (made in his book The True and Only Heaven and elsewhere) that an obsession with expertise has cultivated the sense that ordinary people are essentially helpless to confront routine tasks like choosing what to eat, rearing children, making educational choices, etc. and must rely on a class of benevolent experts to tell them how to live. Lasch and Pollan see traditional as embodied in communal practices and memories as a more reliable guide to living and are, in that respect, profoundly conservative.

    A similar point is made by this article in the Christian Century lauding a return to more traditional forms of animal husbandry. The author contrasts the practices of industrial farming which “relies on monocultural crop production, extensive use of fossil fuels and chemicals, massive injections of growth hormones and antibiotics, expensive capital investment, the confinement of animals, standardized production, farming practices that erode soil and deplete groundwater, and a deceptive way of calculating gains and losses” and Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in central Virginia. Salatin, a Christian whose faith informs his farming practices, “sees it as his responsibility to honor the animals as creatures that reflect God’s creative and abiding love.” He does this by allowing the creatures on his farm to follow something closer to their natural patterns of life and interaction:

    This system honors the creatures by enabling them to live the way God intended them to live. The cattle, ruminants created to eat grass, are not fed corn, nor are they stacked up and confined to standing in their own waste. As a result, they do not need the hormones and antibiotics that have become indispensable in industrial beef production. Nor do they produce the deadly strains of E. coli that now regularly surface in our food supply. The chickens, meanwhile, do not peck at each other like their confined and stressed industrial counterparts. They are free to roam.

    The fields, in turn, do not require the synthetic fertilizers and the toxic pesticides that other farmers routinely use. They are fertilized and kept relatively pest-free by the activity of the animals feeding upon them. Conventional farmers who visit Polyface Farm are routinely baffled by the fact that Salatin has no need of costly and toxic inputs.

    […]

    Working with creation rather than against it has made Polyface Farm amazingly productive. It produces annually 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork, 10,000 broiler chickens, 1,200 turkeys, 1,000 rabbits and nearly a half million eggs.

    Chefs throughout Virginia and the Washington, D.C., area cannot get enough of Salatin’s eggs and meat because they simply taste better. With this food you don’t have to worry about poisoning or periodic recalls. As a bonus, the grass-fed beef (because of the protein structure of the grass) is much healthier than the corn-fed variety.

    The author, Norman Wirzba, a philosophy professor, makes a point similar to Pollans, that the techno-fix approach to raising animals creates unforseen problems which in turn cry out for another techno-fix, and so on. This comes from ignoring the natural patterns of creation and seeking to impose a anthropocentric model of efficiency.

    This is all to the good as far as I’m concerned, and I hate to nitpick, but I do want to demur at Wirzba’s suggestion that concern for the fact that animals are killed (in addition to how they live) is a matter of “sentimentality” in the pejorative sense. He writes:

    Salatin is explicit about saying his Christian faith informs the way he raises and slaughters the animals on his 500-acre farm. He sees it as his responsibility to honor the animals as creatures that reflect God’s creative and abiding love.

    Not that there is anything sentimental about his approach. Salatin knows that the animals are not pets. They are raised to be food. But Salatin’s method of food production is designed to honor God’s work.

    There seems to be an emerging orthodoxy of sorts that industrial/factory farming is indeed bad and it’s wrong to subject animals to those kinds of conditions, but killing them for food is, considered in itself, perfectly ok. As much as I think efforts like Polyface Farm are a vast, vast improvement over the status quo, I wouldn’t want to leave that assumption unchallenged. I’m not going to rehash the argument here, but one gets the impression of an attempt to distance oneself from those kooky, extremist, sentimentalist animal rights types, while still being concerned about the treatment of animals (never mind that it was mostly kooky extremist animal rights types who made it an issue in the first place…). But that’s a minor quibble. A world of responsible stewardship instead of rapacious exploitation is obviously far superior. I’d be happy to get to the nearly utopian-seeming point at which all animals we raised for food were being raised in conditions like those of Polyface Farm. Then it might be time to hash out the question of abolition.

    But the noteworthy thing here is that scientism – the view that all of reality can be exhaustively described in the categories offered by natural science and that the world is best understood in strictly material terms – turns out to be not only theoretically inadequate, but to have deleterious practical consequences. And that tradition may in some cases be a more reliable guide to living.

  • The perils of the “virtuous minority”

    Marvin continues his series on vegetarianism wth a post on the eschatological expectation that predation and violence are aspects of creation which will ultimately be done away with. Vegetarianism, then, can be seen as a “living into the kingdom,” a kind of anticipation of what is to come:

    In the present age one cannot dismiss eating meat out of hand, but one good rationale for vegetarianism is as a sign of the kingdom to come. Vegetarianism, like a commitment to non-violence, or a vow of celibacy, may be an appropriate witness to the new heavens and new earth that God will one day create.

    However, in comments to Marvin’s post, Jonathan of the Ivy Bush observes that some theologians, such as Karl Barth, have called vegetarianism a “wanton anticipation” of the eschaton, trying to live, as it were, beyond this present fallen age. But Jonathan, himself a committed pacifist, worries that this could cut against pacifism as well.

    I think that’s a good point. In fact, John Howard Yoder, in his book Nevertheless: Varieties of religious pacifism, discusses how “the pacifism of the virtuous minority” can end up marginalizing the pacifist witness. To relegate pacifism to the status of a special calling for a distinct minority, Yoder worries, can enable the majority to ignore the pacifist’s arguments:

    One normal implication of this minority stance is to approve by implication, for most people, the very position one rejects for oneself. The Catholic understanding of the monastic morality has no trouble with this. Those in this tradition do not identify the freely chosen Rule with everyone’s moral obligation. They tell Christians in the Historic Peace Churches to accept such minority status and be accepted in it. Thus the minority stance can be a special gadfly performance to keep the rest of society from being at peace with its compromises.

    This understanding of a vocational role for the peace churches has been fostered by the relativistic or pluralistic mood of modern denominationalism. The question of objective right and wrong is relativized by the acceptance of a great variety of traditions, each having its own claims to truth arising out of its own history. Each may be recognized as having a portion of the truth, on condition that none impose their view on another. (p. 81)

    Yoder continues:

    Various stances may be recognized as “valid” or “authentic” or “adequate,” but none specifically as true. In this spirit many nonpacifists since the 1930s have been willing to concede to the pacifists a prophetic or vocational role. Nonpacifists grant this recognition on condition that in turn the pacifists accept always being voted down by those who have to do the real (violent) work in the world. (pp. 81-82)

    Likewise, the view of vegetarianism as a special witness or calling to a creation without violence may also fall prey (pardon the expression) to this kind of relativism. And ultimately vegetarians could be similarly marginalized as harmless eccentrics who aren’t trying to make claims on the consciences of others.

    The two issues are somewhat disanalogous though. In one sense vegetarianism is more demanding than pacifism because, while war is a relatively exceptional event in the life of most societies, the use of animals is something that is woven into the very fabric of most societies, especially industrialized ones. On the other hand, the sacrifice of vegetarianism is ultimately less serious. People can live perfectly happy and healthy lives on a plant-based diet, so no one is being asked to sacrifice their life for the sake of animals. Pacifism, by contrast, requires that we be prepared to give up our lives rather than commit violence (though the blow may be softened by noting that war isn’t a very efficient means of getting what you want anyway).

    I would add that most vegetarians ure unlikely to say that meat-eating is always and everywhere wrong. It’s quite likely that there are times and places where killing animals for food is the only way for human beings to survive. In that sense one could devise an ethic of “just meat-eating” that allowed for exceptions for legitimate human need and health. It’s hard to see how that would justify the large-scale industrial production of meat that actually exists, though.

    The point is that vegetarians (and pacifists, and others with unusual moral views) shouldn’t refrain from making arguments to persuade others of the truth of their position. If one takes a moral view seriously, then I think one is committed to its universalizability: that is, that anyone in the relevantly similar circumstances ought to make the same choice.

    That said, I still personally wouldn’t want to try and make vegetarianism a litmus test for Christian discipleship. This is mainly because it’s not obvious that personal vegetarianism is the only, or even the best, way to address issues of animal mistreatment. And secondly because there is no “pure ground” to stand on where one has extricated themselves from involvement with industries and practices that abuse animals. If “ought implies can” it would be foolish to demand an unattainable level of moral purity.

    This is where I think the “Barthian caveat” is helpful. In our fallen world moral choice will always retain an element of ambiguity. And being aware of that will help one avoid pride and self-righteousness. Moreover, trying to live as an example, as proof that it’s possible to live a less violent life, may well end up being the most effective form of argument.

  • Veggie tales

    Marvin has started a series on vegetarianism – first two installments are here and here.

    Kim at Crossroads discusses a New Yorker review of Tristram Stuart’s The Bloodless Revolution. (I blogged on the Nation review here.)

  • My beef with “My Beef with Vegetarianism”

    It’s no secret that vegetarians and animal rights proponents usually don’t get much respect. I recently saw a “60 Minutes” segment featuring Andy Rooney, that embodiment of crusty old conventional wisdom, where he began by saying “Like most people, I think vegetarians are crazy.” And in fairness that stereotype may even be somewhat justified.

    Even on the Left, home of unpopular causes on behalf of marginalized and oppressed beings, animal rights folks are often the red-headed stepchildren. Case in point is this review in the Nation of a new book on the history of vegetarianism which repeats several standard anti-vegetarian arguments that fall apart under examination.

    After reviewing the book’s discussion of the history of vegetarianism in Europe, the reviewer, Daniel Lazare, writes:

    Unfortunately for vegetarianism, however, it was also during the Enlightenment that the ideology’s shortcomings grew more obvious. The most difficult had to do with ethics. Vegetarianism is most fundamentally about the importance of not taking life other than under the most extreme circumstances. But cruel as it is to kill an ox or a pig, nature is even crueler. A tiger or wolf does not knock its prey senseless with a single blow to the forehead and then painlessly slit its jugular; rather, it tears it to pieces with its teeth. Freeing an animal so that it could return to its natural habitat meant subjecting it to a life of greater pain rather than less. This was disconcerting because it suggested that animals might be better off on a farm even if they were to be slaughtered in the end. There was also the fact that human agriculture created life that would not otherwise exist. If people stopped eating meat, the population of pigs, cattle and sheep would plummet, which meant that the sum total of happiness, human or otherwise, would diminish. This was enough to persuade the Comte de Buffon, a freethinker and naturalist, to declare in 1753 that man “seems to have acquired a right to sacrifice” animals by breeding and feeding them in the first place.

    Vegetarians were unsure how to respond. Benjamin Franklin turned anti-meat at one point and for a time regarded “the taking of every Fish as a kind of unprovok’d Murder.” But he had a change of heart when he noticed the many small fish inside the stomach of a freshly caught cod: “Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” But Franklin’s contemporary, the radical English vegetarian Joseph Ritson, wrestled with the same problem only to reach the opposite conclusion. He railed against “sanguinary and ferocious” felines, and when his nephew killed a neighbor’s cat on the grounds that it had just murdered a mouse, he sent the boy a note of congratulations: “Far from desiring to reprove you for what I learn you actually did, you receive my warmest approbation of your humanity.” Vegetarians wanted to knock Homo sapiens off their pedestal and bring them down to the level of the other animals. Simultaneously, they wanted to turn human beings into supercops patrolling nature’s furthest recesses in order to rein in predators and impose a more “humane” regime.

    There are several of the standard arguments hinted at in this passage, but let’s try to separate them out:

    1. The nature is crueler than captivity argument (“cruel as it is to kill an ox or a pig, nature is even crueler”).     Undoubtedly some animals raised in captivity may be better off than they would be in the wild. Although, in the case of factory farmed animals, this isn’t as clear as it might seem. But the main point is that no one I’m aware of is proposing that cows, pigs, and chickens be released back into the wild. It’s true that these animals have been bred to the point that they would likely not survive in the wild; but what most animal rights proponents who favor complete abolition of meat-eating envision is a gradual reduction in the number of these animals as the practices of meat-eating are phased out over time. Despite what the connotations of the term “animal liberation” might seem to imply, I’m not aware of anyone who simply wants to empty all the farms and send the animals into the wild.

    2. The “I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it argument” (“man ‘seems to have acquired a right to sacrifice’ animals by breeding and feeding them in the first place”).
    Employed by angry parents everywhere, this argument is so transparently fallacious that I’m surprised people still use it. In having children, you bring into existence life that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Does that give you the right to do whatever you want to them, including killing them if you see a good reason? With respect to animals, it almost certainly doesn’t entail the right to subject them to brief lives of more or less unrelieved suffering.

    Again, regarding the population of farm animals that would would “plummet, which meant that the sum total of happiness, human or otherwise, would diminish” if meat-eating were abandoned, this assumes a) the general validity of a utilitarian ethic and b) that the lives of farmed animals actually contain an excess of happiness over suffering, a dubious claim in the case of factory farmed animals. More to the point, it seems to imply an obligation to bring more farm animals into existence, if by doing that one would increase the sum total of happiness. But this seems like a counterintuitive result (and, I would say, shows up one of the weaknesses of utilitarianism).

    There is also the point to be made that what matters is the well-being of individual creatures. Philosopher Mark Rowlands puts it this way:

    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 milliion, why should this matter? In particular, how does it harm any one of the 400 cows? 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. […]

    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. (Rowlands, Animals Like Us, p. 120)

    3. Finally, the “nature red in tooth and claw” argument (“if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you”). This is a curious argument in that in almost no other area do we find serious, morally sensitive people arguing that human beings should model their behavior on the animal kingdom. However, if that’s not enough to discredit it, it’s worth pointing out that nearly all, if not all, animal carnivores have to eat meat in order to survive, including Ritson’s “sanguinary and ferocious felines.” Human beings, on the other hand, can do quite well on a plant-based diet. So in our case we don’t even have the excuse of necessity (at least in the prosperous West for the most part; I’m not going to argue that there aren’t times and places where human beings might have to eat meat to survive).

    And the notion that vegetarians want “knock Homo sapiens off their pedestal and bring them down to the level of the other animals. Simultaneously, they wanted to turn human beings into supercops patrolling nature’s furthest recesses in order to rein in predators and impose a more ‘humane’ regime,” while perhaps true of some eccentric thinkers, is a rather unimpressive straw man when applied to the majority of vegetarians. I know of no serious contemporary theorist or animal rights group that wants human beings to patrol nature and force the lion to lie down with the lamb. This would be a very silly thing to do since, as I just pointed out, predators have to prey to survive.

    What separates human beings from other animals, by contrast, is that we can choose not to inflict unnecessary suffering on our fellow creatures simply to enjoy certain pleasures of the palate. This is reinforced by a point that Lazare makes toward the end of his essay:

    The idea is that instead of reigning supreme over nature, humanity should take its place within nature alongside its fellow animals. Instead of domination, this implies sharing, harmony and other New Age virtues. But the trouble with sovereignty is that it cannot be fragmented or reduced; either it’s supreme and indivisible or it’s not, in which case it’s no longer sovereignty. Although vegetarians may think that surrendering human supremacy will reduce the harm that people do to the environment, any such effort is invariably counterproductive. Denying humans their supreme power means denying them their supreme responsibility to improve society, to safeguard the environment on which it depends and even–dare we say it–to improve nature as well.

    This is true as far as it goes. But it only prompts the inevitable question of what kind of sovereignty humans are to exercies. We certainly have a de facto sovereignty in view of our power to affect and alter the environment (though we may come to see that nature has her own ways of limiting our sovereignty which we might not find too pleasant). And Christians have traditionally believed that we have a de jure sovereignty as God’s viceroys in this world. But insofar as that’s true, the model of sovereignty is none other than God himself, especially as revealed in Jesus, who came to serve rather than be served. Our sovereignty doesn’t exist solely for the sake of our own needs, but for the well-being of all creatures.

    Whether this entails strict vegetarianism is, as far as I can tell, an open question. It seems to me that the argument against industrial or factory-type farming is pretty much open and shut. It’s extremely hard to see what moral calculus can justify inflicting that kind and amount of suffering on animals for the sake of cheap meat.

    Lazare seems to concede this point, but I’m not sure if he sees the implications. He writes:

    No sane person favors unsustainably produced meat. But, tellingly, Stuart [the author of the book under review] does not consider the possibility of meat that is sustainably produced in accordance with the strictest environmental standards. Should we eat less of that also? Or more? Perhaps the issue should not be quantity but quality–not whether we should eat more or less but whether we should eat better, which is to say chicken that tastes like something other than cardboard, turkey that tastes like something other than Styrofoam and so on. Maybe the solution is to reject bland industrial products and demand meat with character, the kind that comes from animals that have not spent their lives in industrial feedlots but have had an opportunity to walk around and develop their muscles.

    What this ignores is the distinct possibility that if we were seriously committed to eating only meat raised sustainably, there would be far less of it available. This is because both that it may not be physically possible to raise nearly the same number of animals in a sustainable fashion and that the resulting meat would almost certainly be more expensive. So “better” would probably also mean “less,” at least for most people.

    This is all quite apart from the question of whether it’s all right to kill animals for food even if, for the sake of argument they’re raised humanely (and let’s also leave aside for the moment the fact that even humanely raised animals very often meet grisly ends in slaughterhouses which are a far cry from receiving a “single blow to the forehead and then painlessly [having] its jugular [slit]”). This hinges, at least in part, on whether animals can be said to be harmed by being killed. We certainly think human beings are harmed by being killed (well, most of us think that), so granting that the permissibility of killing animals for food would seem to depend on whether they are so different from humans that killing them cannot be said to be a harm or that the harm is so inconsequential as to be outweighed by the benefits of tasty meat for us. I think this is a genuinely difficult question, but probably one we should take more seriously than we do.