[This is actually something I wrote for my nephew.]
Harrison –
When I was visiting you over Christmas, you asked why I avoid eating mammals and birds. I tried to explain this, but I think what I gave you was a rather long-winded, rambling, disjointed explanation, and that bothers me. It bothers me because you deserve better when you ask questions, and I should be better at explaining myself.
So, here goes . . . .
First, there is no question but that humans evolved to eat meat. It is part of our natural diet. You have only to look at our teeth to see how this is so.
But DNA and biology are not the same things as Destiny and Fate. Just because we grew up to be what we are, that does not mean that we cannot change what we are. A large part of being a human being – a fully functioning, actual human – is recognizing that we can be different than our biological code. We can choose to be better, if we want to.
So . . . let’s start with the given proposition that, as humans, we evolved to eat and enjoy meat. I know I did. Absolutely loooove bacon. Yum!
But . . . . let’s continue with the idea that, as thinking, rational creatures, evolution and fixed biology do not define us. If so, then the next thing to consider is: is there any reason not to eat meat? And, here, we start getting into issues of morality.
It always has seemed to me that most sins can be traceable to one fatal flaw in thinking: the idea that “the other guy” is not really a person. Think about it. Whenever you violate another person, what you really are doing is violating their “personhood” – their ability to be a free agent.
When you steal from a person, you are taking away their stuff, the stuff that they earned. When you attack a person, you are taking away their sense of personhood itself, violating their ability to be autonomous, thinking vessels. When you rape a person, you are invading their space and rendering them nothing but the object you want. When you enslave a person, you are making them into a thing.
I don’t watch a lot of late-nite TeeVee, but a year or so ago I happened to catch Craig Ferguson’s program and he had on Steven Rea, the British actor, and I caught that. Rea told a story about how much he enjoyed the operatic work of Richard Wagner, and how this left him feeling conflicted because Wagner was, in addition to being a musical genius, a severely horrible anti-Semite.
Anyway, Rea spoke of going to a small town in Austria where one of Wagner’s works is performed in its entirety, and he met an old woman who worked there who was Jewish and who had survived the Nazi concentration camps when she was a young girl. What had saved her was her ability to play the cello. The Camp Commandant would call her into his office and order her to play for him, and this kept her from getting gassed to death.
Rea told Ferguson, “I asked her, when that happened and she had finished playing, whether the Commandant ever said ‘thank you,’ and she said something truly extraordinary. She placed her hand on my cheek and she said, ‘You poor boy, you still don’t understand. Would you thank your telephone for ringing, or your clock for telling the time? I wasn’t a person, any more . . . I was just a thing to those people. If I had broken my arm, and could no longer bow, I would have died just like all the others.’ And then she kissed my cheek.”
Because, of course, this is how all great evil starts: with the ability to believe “the other guy” is not as valid as you are. More than 6 million people were gassed to death by the Nazis because the National Socialist government did not consider them to be “real people.” Hundreds of thousands of African-Americans were sold into bondage and for profit because they, too, were not “real people.”
And I get it. I do. It will always be fun to be an adolescent, and to pretend that we can do whatever we want, to whomever we want, without facing any consequences. It will always be more fun to drop bombs from the safety of the sky and to pretend that we’ve changed things than it will be to get down on the ground and argue with people and try to persuade them that our way of thinking is simply better. ‘Cause, y’know . . . that second option sounds like friggin’ work.
But, ultimately, what most sin boils down to is the sin of pretending that other people are not as equal as we are. It boils down to the sin of pretending that other people are not people at all, but are, instead, things.
You’ve gotta be willing to do the work, the hard work of dealing with other people, if you want to be a moral person.
Which leads us to an interesting question: how do you define “person”? Oh, I know, I know . . . the answer seems to be self-evident. People are people, and we can know that people are people just by looking at them. And, of course, 99.99% of the time this is a correct statement. I suspect your father and my sister think that I am just a Dirty Fucking Hippie (DFH’s, we call ourselves) for even bothering to ask questions like this.
But if we are dealing with morality and logic, we have to be a bit more precise. We have to have answers that apply to all situations if we are constructing a moral framework. Are mentally retarded people “people”? Is there a limit to that? What about people in a persistent vegetative state? Are they “people”? What about people in comas? What about a 4 week old fetus? A 4 hour old embryo? Are these creations “people”?
It is possible to blur the line completely. I (and Carl Sagan before me) am fond of pointing out that basically all the atoms in our bodies – other than a few hydrogen atoms, here and there – were created in the bellies of stars and supernovae, the only places in the universe powerful enough to give rise to things like carbon, or nitrogen, or iron. We are, quite literally, star-stuff, no different in any fundamental sense than the moon or the comets or Saturn’s rings.
There is some power to this idea, there is some truth to it, but I think it goes too far. Certainly there must be something that makes people more significant than a wisp of comet vapor. And my answer to this objection is that, yes, of course there is. And it is consciousness.
In our constituent parts, we do not differ from Saturn’s rings or Halley’s comet. But, in our organization, we have become the building blocks for all of Creation’s self-awareness. We are the Cosmos made conscious, we are all of Existence marveling at itself. We are the means by which the Universe wakes up to its own immensity. Our ability to think and to be aware of ourselves and of Existence itself is miraculous and is sacred. You can keep your Virgin Birth and the three Chinese magicians who gave presents to the star-baby . . . . I’ll take the Real Holiness. I’ll take the mere fact of existence, and the possibility that we might be able to figure out what that existence means. That’s holy enough for me.
Which brings us back, finally, to where we started. If Consciousness is the bedrock upon which morality rests, where do we locate Consciousness? Is it the exclusive purview of humans? Extensive amounts of physiologic and anatomical testing indicates that no, it certainly is not. Truth be told, we don’t have a really good handle on what Consciousness is or where it resides.
But we know enough to be able to say that most mammals and some birds possess it. Even the dumbest of these creatures have the anatomical structures that seem to make consciousness possible. And because I think that consciousness is the founding block of a morality, I simply make the effort to try and not to eat anything that might be, as I am, crawling and struggling to make sense of this place we live in.
At the end of it all, I simply try to refrain from eating mammals and birds out of a . . . professional courtesy; we are all of us, after all, only doing the best we can.
Love,
Uncle Sean