Don Boudreaux notes:
Reading this morning these opening words in a report at Yahoo Sports -- "Wimbledon came under fire from animal activists on Tuesday for using marksmen to shoot down dive-bombing pigeons" -- reminds me yet again that our society is extraordinarily wealthy. That ordinary people are sufficiently and securely fed, clothed, shod, and sheltered to enable some of them to devote substantial stores of their emotional energies to the care of pigeons is a sure sign of deep and widespread prosperity.
This sort of observation is presented as a would-be gotcha against me in my comments on veganism. I don't understand why. I am sure there are some animal-welfare types who do not understand that their concerns are an artifact of wealth, but I am not among them. Of course my affluence enables me to be concerned more about animal welfare than about obtaining sufficient calories. Isn't it fantastic that I am affluent enough to care? If it were a choice between feeding my kids and letting a cow live--well, steak's on! This is one of the many, many reasons I am happy to live in a prosperous and successful society.
I think Robert Nozick is useful here (he so often is . . . and where the heck is my copy of Anarchy, State and Utopia, anyway?):
We can illuminate the status and implications of moral side constraints by considering living beings for whom such stringent side constraints (or any at all) usually are not considered appropriate: namely, nonhuman animals. Are there any limits to what we may do to animals? Have animals the moral status of mere objects? Do some purposes fail to entitle us to impose great costs on animals? What entitles us to use them at all?Animals count for something. Some higher animals, at least, ought to be given some weight in people's deliberations about what to do. It is difficult to prove this. (It is also difficult to prove that people count for something!) We first shall adduce particular examples, and then arguments. If you felt like snapping your fingers, perhaps to the beat of some music, and you knew that by some strange causal connection your snapping your fingers would cause 10,000 contented, unowned cows to die after great pain and suffering, or even painlessly and instantaneously, would it be perfectly all right to snap your fingers? Is there some reason why it would be morally wrong to do so?
Some say people should not do so because such acts brutalize them and make them more likely to take the lives of persons, solely for pleasure. These acts that are morally unobjectionable in themselves, they say, have an undesirable moral spillover. (Things then would be different if there were no possibility of such spillover— for example, for the person who knows himself to be the last person on earth.) But why should there be such a spillover? If it is, in itself, perfectly all right to do anything at all to animals for any reason whatsoever, then provided a person realizes the clear line between animals and persons and keeps it in mind as he acts, why should killing animals tend to brutalize him and make him more likely to harm or kill persons? Do butchers commit more murders? (Than other persons who have knives around?) If I enjoy hitting a baseball squarely with a bat, does this significantly increase the danger of my doing the same to someone's head? Am I not capable of understanding that people differ from baseballs, and doesn't this understanding stop the spillover? Why should things be different in the case of animals? To be sure, it is an empirical question whether spillover does take place or not; but there is a puzzle as to why it should, at least among readers of this essay, sophisticated people who are capable of drawing distinctions and differentially acting upon them.
If some animals count for something, which animals count, how much do they count, and how can this be determined? Suppose (as I believe the evidence supports) that eating animals is not necessary for health and is not less expensive than alternate equally healthy diets available to people in the United States. The gain, then, from the eating of animals is pleasures of the palate, gustatory delights, varied tastes. I would not claim that these are not truly pleasant, delightful, and interesting. The question is: do they, or rather does the marginal addition in them gained by eating animals rather than only nonanimals, outweigh the moral weight to be given to animals' lives and pain? Given that animals are to count for something, is the extra gain obtained by eating them rather than nonanimal products greater than the moral cost? How might these questions be decided?
We might try looking at comparable cases, extending whatever judgments we make on those cases to the one before us. For example, we might look at the case of hunting, where I assume that it's not all right to hunt and kill animals merely for the fun of it. Is hunting a special case, because its object and what provides the fun is the chasing and maiming and death of animals? Suppose then that I enjoy swinging a baseball bat. It happens that in front of the only place to swing it stands a cow. Swinging the bat unfortunately would involve smashing the cow's head. But I wouldn't get fun from doing that; the pleasure comes from exercising my muscles, swinging well, and so on. It's unfortunate that as a side effect (not a means) of my doing this, the animal's skull gets smashed. To be sure, I could forego swinging the bat, and instead bend down and touch my toes or do some other exercise. But this wouldn't be as enjoyable as swinging the bat; I won't get as much fun, pleasure, or delight out of it. So the question is: would it be all right for me to swing the bat in order to get the extra pleasure of swinging it as compared to the best available alternative activity that does not involve harming the animal? Suppose that it is not merely a question of foregoing today's special pleasures of bat swinging; suppose that each day the same situation arises with a different animal. Is there some principle that would allow killing and eating animals for the additional pleasure this brings, yet would not allow swinging the bat for the extra pleasure it brings? What could that principle be like? (Is this a better parallel to eating meat? The animal is killed to get a bone out of which to make the best sort of bat to use; bats made out of other material don't give quite the same pleasure. Is it all right to kill the animal to obtain the extra pleasure that using a bat made out of its bone would bring? Would it be morally more permissible if you could hire someone to do the killing for you?)
Such examples and questions might help someone to see what sore of line he wishes to draw, what sort of position he wishes to take. They face, however, the usual limitations of consistency arguments; they do not say, once a conflict is shown, which view to change. After failing to devise a principle to distinguish swinging the bat from killing and eating an animal, you might decide that it's really all right, after all, to swing the bat. Furthermore, such appeal to similar cases does not greatly help us to assign precise moral weight to different sorts of animals. (We further discuss the difficulties in forcing a moral conclusion by appeal to examples in Chapter 9.)
Prosperity allows us to have things that we all now regard as moral requirements. It permits us liberal democracy, a form of social organization that doesn't much work in hunter-gatherer tribes. It enables us to forgo infanticide, a necessary form of population control when Mom has to carry the babies everywhere and an extra unnecessary mouth might doom the whole tribe. It lets us reserve the death penalty for the most heinous violent crimes, because stealing a loaf of bread no longer threatens its owners own nutritional health. We don't have to stone adulterers, because we have enough breathing room that such behavior no longer poses an existential threat to the tribe. Wealth enables charity in the deeper, older sense of the word.
That this is true in no way undermines the decision to be charitable. Morality lies in doing the best you can with what you have. Given that I do have the luxury of finding delicious vegan food and non-leather shoes, I believe I have an obligation to do so. If that should change, I will go back to eating and wearing animal products without moral regret--though with a fair amount of digestive distress.
Your copy of ASU?
Stolen. By. A. Libertarian. Acquaintance.
Oh, the irony. ;)
Yeah, what a great portion of ASU, I find it comes up a fair amount while discussing abortion. I have thought about it a lot but have not come to an unshakable conclusion: probably because rather than ever debating abortion, I spend the time trying to get friends on both sides to come down from the absolutist position. Having everyone first concede that a fetus both deserves more moral consideration than a rock, and deserves less than a fully functioning adult human being, can lead to real discussion.
Morality starts locally with responsibility. But I digress...
Actually, keeping livestock for slaughter itself is a luxury of sorts, which was facilitated by abandoning the hunter-gatherer way of life in favor of agriculture. Meat was a bonus, but it's also something we are biologically built to consume, omnivores and generalists that we are. With some adjustments we can certainly do without meat, as you and others are attempting to prove. All that's just fine with me.
But I disagree that foregoing meat is morally superior. I grew up around people who raised livestock. To my knowledge, none of them maltreated the animals in their care -- cruelty to animals out of sadistic impulses is a wasteful, frivolous luxury, as it turns out. In fact, they took care of their livestock and kept them as healthy and happy as possible. It was all about protecting the creatures they had invested so much time, energy, and resources in raising.
It's a mistake, though, to personify and emotionalize animals. Pigs aren't people too. As long as they're well treated and slaughtered as quickly and painlessly as possible -- which is the accepted norm amongst those who raise livestock -- then our animals themselves are living relatively luxurious lives that animals in the wild could never conceive of.
Animals in the wild have much shorter expected lifetimes than domesticated, husbanded animals if we allow them to die a natural death, like we do with house pets. And if you've ever seen folks hang onto aging house pets, you really have to wonder how moral and ethical that is.
Private morality can become public vanity, and mindfulness of an ethical life can dissolve into obsessive consumerism.
"Some say people should not do so because such acts brutalize them and make them more likely to take the lives of persons, solely for pleasure."
Robert has set himself up a nice little straw man here. There may be people who actually believe this, but they haven't thought it through. There is a perfectly logical reason to simultaneously oppose the unnecessary torture of (non-human) animals while still assigning them zero moral worth. People who enjoy torturing animals are people who are psychopaths, and therefore more likely to be killers (of humans). By ostracizing and criminalizing animal torture we make it easier to identify psychopaths and remove them from society. So it's not that brutalizing animals makes one into a murderer; it's that future murderers are more likely to brutalize animals. He's got the causality backwards.
Oops, rest of post:
What vegans see as the former, their critics see as the latter.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion, of course. And undoubtedly some vegans are like that. But you might consider that vegans like to talk about their diet for the same reason that barbeque freaks do--they like to exchange tips with other vegans. That the mere fact of mentioning that we do not eat animal products is seen as the equivalent of delivering a fist-pounding sermon is taken by vegans as a sign of the accuser's moral discomfort with their own choices, not an indictiment of our daring to speak the V-word. I am not interested in lecturing other people on what they eat, and neither are most vegans; I limit myself to point out that being a vegan is not nearly as awful as you imagine.
Amen, Megan!
That the mere fact of mentioning that we do not eat animal products is seen as the equivalent of delivering a fist-pounding sermon taken by vegans as a sign of the accuser's moral discomfort with their own choices
I think you're coming off as the sensitive one here. The context of the post suggested that not eating meat was a moral improvement afforded by prosperity. The poster then questioned whether that particular choice was truly morally superior & you jumped all over him (stating that his post implies personal moral guilt).
>> That ordinary people are sufficiently and securely fed, clothed, shod, and sheltered to enable some of them to devote substantial stores of their emotional energies to the care of pigeons is a sure sign of deep and widespread prosperity.
Surely the same reasoning can be applied to the people that devote substantial physical energies and monetary expenses to shoot pigeons. Tennis, after all, is just a game ...
*Your* concerns are an artifact of wealth, but keep in mind that wealth also enables and encourages factory farming. More of the world is headed toward that direction than away from it.
Megan, you frame it in a way I agree with - we no longer have to chop the hand off of a bread thief because the crime is not as serious as it once was.
What are some categories of crimes we see now as heinous whose punishments will one day be lessened? Or, conversely, categories of behavior we will one day come to see as crimes which are now necessary "evils"? (Obviously, eating animals etc was mentioned above and therefore doesn't need to be mentioned again.)
"That the mere fact of mentioning that we do not eat animal products is seen as the equivalent of delivering a fist-pounding sermon taken by vegans as a sign of the accuser's moral discomfort with their own choices."
Well, then vegans who think that are flipping wrong.
So lots of people normally go off into torrents of abuse when people announce that, say, they are kosher?
So do I understand that Boudreaux thinks that when protesters object to the organizers of a globally broadcast tennis match hiring riflemen to kill trespassing pigeons it's a sign of our tremendous wealth (and by implication, our moral frivolity), but the organizers of a tennis match hiring riflemen to kill trespassing pigeons is somehow NOT a sign of same? Because I'm thinking our primitive ancestors had to keep pigeons away from their globally broadcast tennis matches with rocks.
Morality actually lies with how to define "the best you can do with what you have", which is why so many questions of morality are so damnably difficult. I become suspicious of moral calculations when they seem to hinge on the actor's aesthetic or sensual preferences. Does a person's capacity for moral behavior depend on what he or she finds pleasurable to the taste buds, resulting in a finicky eater being less morally culpable for how calories are obtained?
I don't know, Megan. I've personally never witnessed that. Then again, I've never witnessed "torrents of abuse" against vegans or vegetarians for their dietary choices either. If anything, it's been the other way around. I've endured more than enough smug, self-righteous lectures from people who don't eat meat that think it makes them special and superior. Honestly, unless you're coming over for dinner and I need to make sure I'm serving food my guests can eat, I don't care one way or another. The fact that you suggest that anyone who takes issue with you mentioning that you are vegan 25 times a day is only doing so because they feel sensitive about their moral inferiority to you says quite a bit. You obviously don't deserve abuse for what you chose not to eat, but don't assume the motives of other people for calling you out for looking down on them for not making the same choices as you.
It strikes me that this says something about pigeon wealth, too. Back in great-grandpappy's day, the pigeons couldn't attend tennis matches, because they had jobs, mostly carrying dispatches from the front.
That would be sooo metal! It would be like the scene in The Two Towers where Sauron explodes, taking out elves and men in a ripple effect. It would also be incredibly nihilistic, but nihilism is also a luxury morality. And since luxury morality impels obligation, we are now obligated to rig a field of 10,000 cows to die in unison at the snap of a finger.
I'll bet Dethklok can afford a field of 10,000 cows. Hmm.
yep what Protestant Bastard said.
I'll also note that the devout Jew who keeps kosher is making a very open acknowledgement of a nonrational, Faith-based, decision to follow what the Jew believs to be a command from God. There is nothing to discuss on a rational basis, unless one wishes to be the type of foolish atheist who endeavors to argue with believers about the existence of God. In contrast, a good many vegans do overtly state or imply that their dietary choice is the result of a reason-based moral calculation.
Of course, people with manners don't inquire as to why other people made their dietary choices, just as a well mannered person would not inquire as to why another person, with whom there was not a great deal of intimate friendship, is a devout Jew. In turn, unless vegans desire a discussion on the ethics of diet, they would be well served by not making any mention of how they came to a decision regarding what they consume.
What are some categories of crimes we see now as heinous whose punishments will one day be lessened?
Apparently, raping a child...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/washington/26scotuscnd.html?hp
I am sure there are some animal-welfare types who do not understand that their concerns are an artifact of wealth, but I am not among them.
I understand that there are many principled vegetarians in India. And always have been.
(To quote a 17th century visitor, Indians were “tenderhearted towards animals of every description, men only excepted”.)
MarkG writes: "It's a mistake, though, to personify and emotionalize animals."
I respectfully disagree. I think it's often a mistake not to "personify and emotionalize" sentient creatures. Failure to recognize that (many) animals are someONES rather than someTHINGS and have emotional lives of their own that merit emotional responses from us, involves distancing oneself from the many unpleasant realities of our treatment of animals. We DISAPPEAR animals as individuals.
Carol J. Adams has a good look at the psychological mechanisms of this distancing action in her essay "'A Very Rare and Difficult Thing': Ecofeminism, Attention to Animal Suffering, and the Disappearance of the Subject" in Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton, eds., A Communion of Subjects (Columbia University Press).
What Jim Henley said above! Boudreaux's post is pretty myopic in ignoring that killing animals for sport tends to reflect wealthy societies or wealthy classes.
I promise only to eat meat in the future that has been thoroughly psychoanalyzed before slaughter, with greater attention to past-life regressions prior to tenderizing.
Seriously, this is where theory is completely oblivious to actual practice. People who raise livestock appreciate that each creature is an individual. This occurs in particular when an individual might cause harm to itself or the rest of the herd or flock, say by communicating disease.
But those individual creatures are still governed by their born-in natures: sheep and chickens don't act entirely like one another.
The PETA, Greenpeace, and other activist groups over-emotionalize animals, suggesting that we somehow keep them from becoming great philosophers and otherwise unfolding through growth in the life of the mind. As if Bessie the Heifer would eagerly retire to knitting in the rocking chair, eager to show visitors photos of her great-grandchildren. Mad cow disease is much more likely in terms of growth in the life of the mind.
In fact, most of our domesticated livestock are so selectively bred for generations now that they could not survive comfortably or at all without our constant attention. Even the aging wild animals we keep in zoos would be snuffed by their fellows for uselessly wasting the flock's scarce resources.
This whole string is interesting to me this week because I have vegetarian (not vegan, thank god) in-laws in town for a visit. And I am completely unable to get tofu to taste decent or have a vaguely acceptable texture in anything. Thank goodness they are very un-preachy, and were just grateful that I was able to take them someplace with really, really good fake duck.
Anyhow, as a former vegetarian myself (on moral grounds, which I'd explain if expressly asked but otherwise wouldn't), I've certainly seen the defensiveness of which Megan speaks. (Fairly typical exchange: At a restaurant, I'd order a salad. Someone asks if I'm dieting. I say "No, I'm a vegatarian." Interlocutor launches into a 15 minute lecture on why not being a vegetarian is an acceptable moral choice and how vegetarians shouldn't think they're better than everyone else. And they're pinko cry-babies, to boot. And did I know Hitler was a vegatarian?)
I've also seen the self-righteousness of which non-vegetarians speak (a lot of it). I have no particular opinion on which is more obnoxious - they're both pretty annoying.
I think it is actually not as easy to be a vegetarian (much less vegan) in modern America as some of the quotes seem to imply. People generally eat way more meat than is good for them, but if you cut it out entirely you really do need to pay careful attention to what you eat to be sure you are getting sufficient proteins of the right kind, and, particularly for those living somewhere where eating out is very common or working long hours makes the planning of regular home-cooked meals difficult if not impossible (e.g.: NYC), it can be really problematic. I had to quit being vegetarian when I started a sport seriously and just couldn't manage the diet without getting horribly anemic and passing out. (Does that make choosing to continue with the sport immoral? Just a thought. Maybe I just didn't have the will power - my vegetarian in-laws are marathon runners.)
Anyhow, all "sides" should recognize that attempts to personalize moral debates backfire. PETA is the reason I now wear fur. I take the (moral? political?) position that damage caused by PETA's (and other animal rights organizations') tactics to the framework of civil discourse on divisive topics is a greater threat to the moral structure of society than killing animals for decoration, much less food. When animal rights activists no longer scream at strangers on the street, I'll hang up the coat. Until then, I feel it is my duty to protest visibly to demonstrate the inefficacy of objectionable tactics. (My fur may be "recycled" second hand, but they don't need to know that.) Any horrified animal rights advocates should direct their outrage at PETA & Co. and get them to stow it.
Dude, even one quote or link supporting this contention would be the awesomest thing appearing on a blog today.
I've been a vegan-plus (also no sugar, alcohol, caffeine or gluten) since June 15 as part of a 21-day cleanse my wife and I are doing. I've found the health effects mostly salutary (have lost 8 pounds, not that I really needed to), and the experience has made me re-evaluate my portion control, but on the whole I'm finding it simply boring and annoying. I'm afraid I'll eagerly return to consuming animals when the three weeks are up. It's perhaps a moral failing of mine, but that's one of the many things I try not to worry too much about.
Jim, here's all the support for my claim you'll ever need, thank you so very much. =)
Bottom line: I don't know what those activist groups actually think would result from liberating all domesticated animals. But I am certain that it would result in much worsened life for the vast majority of them. For the vast majority of the animals, that is, not of the activists...
It is easy to support some limited form of animal welfare and still skirt the argument that this is a luxury possible only for the wealthy. This argument, however, suffices to refute radical rights-based theories like Peter Singer's, or PETA's. Animals presumably felt quite as much pain when people were poor as they do now. If a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy, then the same equation applied to the rat-pig-dog-boy of 1350 that was transmitting bubonic plague. If proponents of animal rights abandoned this line of reasoning, and restricted themselves to arguing, as Megan and Robert Nozick do, that animals count for something and the question is how much, there would be less heat and more light all around.
I hear ya', kathryn. I once seriously considered starting a cirgarette habit just to defy the anti-smoking lecturers. Unfortunately, there are some people for whom second hand smoke is considerably more than an aesthetically unpleasant experience, and I really dislike smoking cigarettes. That, and the emphysema and cancer, of course.
"At a restaurant, I'd order a salad. Someone asks if I'm dieting. I say "No, I'm a vegatarian." Interlocutor launches into a 15 minute lecture on why not being a vegetarian is an acceptable moral choice and how vegetarians shouldn't think they're better than everyone else. And they're pinko cry-babies, to boot. And did I know Hitler was a vegatarian?)"
Megan and Kathy who do you dine with? I have many vegetarian friends and I have never heard this in first or second hand or anything remotely like it. Honestly I find it hard to believe.
Fixed!
I must say also that it seems as if I dine with more polite people. I can't recall ever hearing anyone I've dined with asking another person why they ordered what they did, unless it was along the lines of whether the dish ordered was particularly good in that restaurant.
MarkG: Ah, so those claims you made about animal activists were HYPERBOLE. "Exaggeration." "Not meant to be taken literally." I get it now.
Aaron Haspel: Peter Singer doesn't have a rights-based theory. He's a utilitarian and doesn't ascribe moral rights to either animals or humans. True rights-based theories of animal ethics (e.g., that of Tom Regan), can very easily accommodate cases of animals that pose threats to humans. Kill them -- just like you'd kill a human being that was about to exterminate your family. It's called self-defence.
For the typical rights-based theory of animal ethics, the dog or pig has the same right as you do not to be unnecessarily harmed. Intelligence has no more to do with it than it does in the case of humans; a mentally-handicapped person, with an intelligence level less than that of a normal dog, has the same right as a rocket scientist not to be unnecessarily harmed.
Mijnheer: you are perfectly correct about Singer; "rights-based" was a bad choice of words. What I should have said is that both Singer's and Ingrid Newkirk's theories are context-free: if humans shouldn't kill cows now then we shouldn't have killed them six centuries ago either.
You write that "for the typical rights-based theory of animal ethics, the dog or pig has the same right as you do not to be unnecessarily harmed." Surely this turns on the definition of "unnecessarily." Is the standard of unnecessary harm for animals the same as for humans? Does it apply to all species, or only some, or is there a sliding scale? Could harm have been necessary at some time in the past but unnecessary now? I know only a small part of the literature, but I've never seen satisfactory answers to these questions.
Of course you may not hold a rights-based theory yourself, in which case none of this is your problem.
Oh, I agree it was terrifically rude. But it probably happened at least once a month. Had I been an actual vegan, and therefore had to go off menu frequently, or been doctrinaire about it (I was willing to just eat around meat at people's houses and decided life was too short to demand to know if anything was made with chicken stock or gelatin), I'm sure I'd have seen more of it.
I'd say the most common categories of defensive lecturers I encountered were (i) in my student days, other students (not surprising given a generally low level of manners and high level of belief that everything is a classroom debate) and (ii) boomer-aged relatives and parents of friends. I have no particularly good explanation for the second category, but there it is. People older than boomers just tended to look confused and vaguely horrified, like I'd admitted having what they thought, but weren't sure, was an STD.
I was once lectured by a waitress at a diner. You'd think she'd think twice with a tip on the line, but no.
Of course, vegetarianism is both foolish and spiteful (so far as anyone can discover, non-religious, gassy at both ends vegetarians are motivated chiefly by the desire to scorn others as less morally pure than themselves). However, normal people do benefit from vegetarianism in others: since vegetarians do not compete to purchase delicious, nutritious meat, comfortable, durable leather, etc., they make animal products more affordable for everyone else.
People older than boomers just tended to look confused and vaguely horrified
Or, as (I think Rachel's dad) on Friends put it, upon learning that Phoebe didn't eat meat: "I'll never understand you lesbians."
Aaron: Personally, I that think historical context makes a big difference.
http://www.animalperson.net/animal_person/files/animal_rights_ahuman_needs.pdf
"What Jim Henley said above! Boudreaux's post is pretty myopic in ignoring that killing animals for sport tends to reflect wealthy societies or wealthy classes."
Not really. Don could have as easily said, "That killing animals for sport is sign that people are sufficiently and securely fed, clothed, shod, and sheltered to enable some of them to devote substantial time energy, money..."
By the way, he was referring to killing pigeons that were considered a nuisance. I don't recall he was setting forth a white paper on the subject.
It's not just high value on the life of a pigeon or barnyard animal that is a luxury good.
So is high value on human life. "Life is cheap" is literally true in non-wealthy societies.
To very clearly see how much more value governments and taxpayers place on human life today in money terms, look at the huge sums the military spends on equipment to reduce combat casualties today ... plus the amounts it spends on rapid full medical care for every casualty possible ... plus amounts spent on rescue missions for even single persons (such as downed flyers) behind enemy lines, etc., etc. All reflecting the public's intolerance of casualties, and high money value on life.
Compare that to say, World War I. At Verdun there were a million casualties, half fatalities, for a result of nothing. From there the war just went on. A few months later at the Somme there were another 1.2 million. From there the war just went on...
Can anyone imagine fighting a war like that with such casualties today?
Today, when a single soldier is killed in combat, it's major media market news complete with the story of how he had enlisted to help his mother pay the mortgage on the family home, literally..
Arguments about the morality of fox hunting, veganism, and value of pigeons' lives asisde, I am very happy to live in an era where the value of my own human life has appreciated so much.
Meagan wrote "This sort of observation is presented as a would-be gotcha against me in my comments on veganism.
A little bit sensitive aren't we?
I think Don Boudreaux's response would be - I was talking about the curtains.
I am always amazed at how we take the time to for the little details (expecting flame for comparing killing doves to a little detail, your choice) and also take the time to complain about the handling of the little details, it is a certain sign that our society is extraordinarily wealthy. The doves are not the issue.
Arnold Mitchell got it right in his Nine American Lifestyles in describing the emerging "Societally Conscious" social group as requiring a break from middle-class values as the entrance fee. Everything from diet to morality has been raked over, in pursuit of higher standards, partly, but also as mere oppositionalism to "traditional" values.
This lifestyle, some 17% of the US population, has however taken a turn toward a mandarin class in which only careers in the arts, law, journalism, government service and other bien pensant niches suffice. God forbid their progeny should be subjected to anything that smacks of vocational education!
Obama is the darling of this lifestyle grouping and his comments ranging from the price of arugula to the poor benighted folk of Appalachia are in sync. But the preening of this group, viewed in full sail over the next few months as here in MM's short piece, will get the middle class to break from them, to McCain's benefit.
Charlie: are the "Socially Conscious" so new? I agree that there seems to be a well-educated, well-to-do, morally fastidious class emerging in this country. I might be in that class; Megan McArdle definitely seems to be, and is astute enough to realize that it's not necessarily a bad thing that wealth permits us the luxury of finer moral distinctions and greater humaneness.
Actually, though, the "Socially Conscious" remind me a lot of the "Reformers" of 1840's and 1850's Boston, the group that Oliver Wendell Holmes' father dubbed "Brahmins." They were highly represented in the arts, law, journalism, and government service, and tended to look down on the ignorant -- there's a lot of that in Walden. They were passionate about fighting the evils of the day, mainly slavery (though also, at times, sexism, consumerism, cruelty to children and animals, social conformity, alcohol, and more: it's an eclectic list.) They boycotted slave-grown sugar just as some today boycott conflict diamonds; they communicated reformist and abolitionist ideas through letters and pamphlets, the blogs of the 19th century. And, like their modern counterparts, they were hated as out-of-touch elites, with some reason.
On the other hand, they galvanized a country against slavery. What might today's arugula-munchers do with their considerable resources and energies? The socially conscious do more than "preen" -- they might actually make progress on contemporary problems like poverty and climate change. And I wouldn't be too sure about a McCain victory. The abolitionists got their president after all.
Mitchell's point was not that, if I may speak for him having read his book some 15 years ago, what he calls the Societally Conscious segment is a de novo phenomenon but that it had "budded" to the point of having sufficient numbers to rival what he calls the Achiever top segment.
And I didn't claim that McCain would win... who knows? Only that the oppositionalist preening of Obama's Societally Conscious backers would make him seem preferable to X number of middle-class voters. How big X gets will depend largely on how overblown and full of itself the rhetoric of Obama's backers gets.
Just compare MM's overwrought vegan vexing with the middle-class bumper sticker, "If God didn't want us to eat meat, why did He make it taste so good?"
Back then, Mitchell seemed to think that the emergence of the Societally Conscious would lead to a national renaissance. Instead, they have become insular, elite, condescending and disparaging of all that does not comport with what they see as their high-mindedness but is in reality a stance arrived at in rejection of the values of others. How do you get people who's values you hold in contempt to vote for you?
Charlie, I couldn't agree more.
I read in a medical journal once an article by a doctor who had given up his vegetarianism after concluding that vegetarianism was a neurosis.
Looking for it (in vain), I found a different article, different doctor, same conclusion:
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/310/6983/880
If Megan wants to fret about whether there's a skerrick of egg in that soy and rice concoction, fine. Her choice. If she devotes the same amount of psychic energy to all of her interactions with human beings, she is to be congratulated. But vegetarianism seems to me to have less to do with morality than with the modern luxuries of cleanliness (inner) and solipsism (self-regard, self-grading, self-congratulation).
The Dalai Lama, for what it's worth, eats meat and reportedly explains to surprised acolytes, "I'm a monk, not a vegetarian."
alisa, that was a reply to you. Did I really type who's for whose?
I wouldn't know about neurosis, erwin, and my basic motto is to each his own.
I did, though, know a technician who studied blood who said that the pervasive problem with the American diet was excess protein. On the other hand, he claimed, the unhealthiest blood was invariably from vegetarians, who had the worse problem of insufficient protein along with heavy bacterial loads and copper toxicity, whatever that is.
I've had a couple of friends relate that after a decade of vegetarianism, they suddenly dove into the biggest, greasiest burger they could find. What does that say?
Thanks for the link.
Kathryn,
Are you perhaps trying to disguise it? I'm the furthest thing from a vegetarian, but I've never found decent tofu presented as tofu to be anything but tasty.
Moral fastidiousness is not the same as narcissistic moral preening.
I know plenty of people who are morally fastidious and do not belong to the "Societally Conscious" class as defined by Mitchell. Among those who do belong, moral preening is the rule and true moral fastidiousness the exception.
Charlie: I couldn't reply right away because I was at work.
I may have come on a bit too strong. You make good points: certainly, there's moral preening, and it isn't pretty. I would argue, though, that some good gets done amid the vanity: say, Bill Gates' malaria foundation.
What's "oppositionalism," though? If it just means "being loudly opposed to someone else's positions," then your anti-vegetarian bumper sticker is "oppositionalist."
erwin: of course it's a luxury to be vegetarian. That's the point. And nobody sane would argue that there aren't good people who eat meat. Isn't it wonderful that we have the choice?
Kirk,
No, having once seen the ludicrous tofurkey, I think disguising tofu or trying to make it pretend to be something else is silly. And futile. (Though that fake duck was really, really impressive.) I just can't manage to get it to stop being sour and mushy. I've tried different brands, different compositions, salting it, spicing it, marinating it, pounding it, draining it, grilling it in all sorts of different sorts of oils, wok-ing it, breading it and baking it into lasagne. Nothing worked for me. Others manage to make it pretty tasty without superpowers, so I assume it's just some personal cooking defect.
Since I'm no longer a vegetarian it's not a hardship, just vexing.
I didn't take you as coming on strong, alisa, and you're welcome to anyway.
Having lived 30 years in ever so Societally Conscious Palo Alto/Menlo Park, California, I enjoyed witnessing the evolution. I think Mitchell's point that a repudiation of all things middle class (especially Jello and primetime TV) is essential to entering the SC tier is key. What I noticed is that the essence of the group's mental outlook is not a reaching toward or embracing of but a repudation of. This is what I meant by "oppositionalism".
As Former Belgian implies above, there is no moral fastidiousness there nor much of any methodological rigor. Instead, moral positions are tried on like fashions, posturings, just as in MM's article above. How many meetings did I sit in with SC colleagues where something disruptive had occurred and the primary group question was "How do we 'hold' this?" ...essentially an invitation not to analysis or moral grounding but to group rationalizing.
With Obama standing as the very apotheosis of the SC cohort's (self-perceived) destiny to take the reins (oh, how galling the Bush years have been), the bolder they will grow and the stronger they will promote their case, and the less likely they will succeed. Their views are antithetical to the majority of the public.
And, yes, the pro-meat bumper sticker is a form of oppositionalism known as "push back".