Killing me softly ...

Killing animals for our purposes is what this post is about.  Take off now if you are convinced about this issue either way, or if denial is the way you deal with it.

If you are continuing to read this post, it then means that you are like many of us, who have made an uneasy peace with how we treat animals.

This post is in response to two essays that I read: One is about the way we treat animals for our food, and the other is about lab animals that we use in our search for medical and scientific understanding.

In both, we seem to operate with the same bottom-line:

We tell ourselves that their suffering isn’t the same as ours and that they don’t really care about life the way we do, so why should we care?

Many years ago, when I attempted to minimize my problems by comparing to some bigger ones that many others deal with, my daughter jumped to correct me: "You cannot compare pain. Your pain is your pain."

By the same logic, the cow's pain is the cow's pain, and we cannot compare that to our suffering.  The anxiety and panic that a lab rat experiences is not to be compared with what we humans experience.

Yet, we routinely eat juicy beef burgers and subject lab rats to "humane" experiments!

With the rise of Christianity, which preached that God made animals for humans’ use, attitudes toward animals grew bleak. French philosopher Rene Descartes wrote that responses to painful stimuli in animals are merely reflexes, and that animals are not capable of any internal experience because they don’t have souls. To this vacuous view, Voltaire delivered a devastating response about a century later. “Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously,” Voltaire wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary, in 1764. They “nail it on a table, and dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins,” only to “discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself … Has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel?” Modern science has validated the great thinker’s rhetorical question, providing an overwhelming multitude of evidence that animals, from mice to macaques, robins to ravens, do feel pain and can suffer, physically and emotionally.

Of course, we have come a long way since the bad old years.

That people care about lab animal well-being is heartening, and the fact that the animals have any protections at all is not trivial. It wasn’t always so. Like much of human history, the history of animal experimentation is one of gruesome cruelty. In the pursuit of knowledge, entertainment, or profit, humans have inflicted unimaginable suffering upon billions of animals over centuries.

We have evolved that much.  But, we have a long way to go.

While modern technology has greatly reduced painful experiences of many lab animals, does that allow scientists to use them as we please? “I don’t believe that there’s a philosophical a priori answer to say whether we can do this or not,” Born said. “It’s a value judgment on the part of society. And it’s a discussion that society needs to have with itself.”

While those are about the animals in science labs, what about the animals we raise and kill so that we can eat them?  If you prick them do they not bleed?

Why is the "problem of meat-eating seems to be so intractable?"

We tell ourselves that their suffering isn’t the same as ours and that they don’t really care about life the way we do, so why should we care?

And, 

[Farm animals] share many of the same mental and emotional characteristics that we recognise in ourselves and acknowledge in the animals closest to us – dogs and cats. To continue our self-indulgence, we resist the evidence and reinforce the status of farmed animals as objects, as commodities, as food. Their inner lives have become ‘the forbidden territory’ we dare not enter lest we deprive our palate and shatter our sense of ourselves.

If we stopped to think about all these, it will " shatter our sense of ourselves."

The high road is a red herring

In my personal life, I have ended friendships with people who voted for trump.  I have no space in my life for people who willingly sided with a horrible human being who has not only said and done godawful things but even boasts about them.

But, that is my personal life.

If I were running a business that is open to all, then if any of those trump supporters came into my establishment to buy my goods or services, well, I won't be happy to see their faces but will still serve them.  Not because of my interest in making money of those people.  But because a business transaction has nothing to do with who those fucked up people voted for.

Which is why even though the personal side of me is delighted that a restaurant owner turned away trump's "Baghdad Bob," I don't agree with it as a social practice.

This is not about Michelle Obama's "when they go low, we go high."  Nope. In fact, I believe that this taking the high road made it all the easier for trump and his 63 million voters to gain power.

Taking the high road works only when the other side recognizes the moral high ground.  Which is why Gandhi's moral war won against the British bayonets, and he could drive the bastards back to Britain without firing a single shot.  To their credit, the British bastards recognized their own moral weakness in how they screwed the browns, and also recognized the awesome power of Gandhi's nonviolence and civil disobedience.  Had Gandhi been against hitler, for instance, the maniac would have gassed Gandhi and hundreds of millions without a second thought.

In the case of the restaurant owner, I am not advocating any moral high ground.  Just as a baker ought to serve gays and lesbians similar to how he serves straight people, a restaurant ought to serve the fucked up trump voters too.

I was happy to read that one of the senior lawmakers on the good side, and a fierce critic of trump, saying this:

"I think, as far as the restaurant incident, I think the restaurant owner should have served her," said Cummings, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee.

Cummings also added: "But again, I think President [Donald] Trump has created this."

Instead of restaurants turning away the trump people, I would way prefer that people take it upon themselves, like what happened to the baby-snatcher secretary to trump, kirstjen nielsen.

Homeland Security Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen, a fierce defender of the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy toward immigration, heckled by protesters while eating dinner at a Mexican restaurant. https://t.co/porjCrCGbw pic.twitter.com/O1CrH3GW3P

— ABC News (@ABC) June 20, 2018

There is no high road with these trump maniacs.

Love is wise, hatred is foolish

During my formative years, back in the old country, I doubt there was any concept of counselors. For all the trials and tribulations that everyday life dishes out--sometimes more than one can handle--there were no professional counselors.

Obviously, not all of us have the Teflon coating of inner strength and wisdom to fend off those challenges.  Thus, it was not unusual for the elders of the family to be pressed into service.

But, that was mostly for troubleshooting.

During crises, people, in the Hindu faith within which I was raised, went to temples and to their favorite religious leaders.  Of course, no idol in the temple listens and responds, but people submitted their petitions anyway.  Personal meetings with religious leaders were next to impossible, unless one was wealthy or well-connected.  Rarely did such visits relieve the stresses, but perhaps people got used to their miseries as the old joke goes.

When religious leaders did address a gathering, they often spoke in broad philosophical terms.  And they often employed the puranas (mythology) in order to make those philosophical observations relatable to daily life.  To the audience with their varied and unique problems, well, these were like group therapy sessions.

In this Aeon interview, Jules Evans says this about ancient Greeks and Romans and many Indian philosophers--they approached it as a therapeutic way of life:

They developed various practical techniques which they said would help transform suffering, that were part of a comprehensive ‘philosophy of life’. These techniques weren’t simply positive thinking, rather they argued that we need to see the world as it is, in all its instability and adversity, and accept it.

I was curious about this Jules Evans, who is "policy director at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London."  I looked up for additional information on his website:

My practical wisdom approach combines the teaching of evidence-based well-being techniques from ancient philosophies, with open group discussions about ethics and values. I embrace a pluralist and eclectic approach – participants are encouraged to bring in their own opinions and experiences and to explore different ways of thinking about flourishing.

I agree with Evans that the Hindu philosophers (I think he means Hindu when he says "Indian"--I am not sure if he includes there the Sufis, for instance) provided frameworks that comforted us into accepting the world as it is and life as it unfolds.

I like the way he summarizes the following as well:

I approach philosophy as a sort of pragmatism – I have a set of values and an idea of how the world is, and I try it out and see if I can live by it, if it fits reality, if it leads to an expanded sense of flourishing. And reality (including other people) feeds back to me, lets me know if I’m living wisely or foolishly. That two-way process is always changing, you’re always adapting and revisiting assumptions. But no one can be entirely anti-dogmatic – one needs a set of values and opinions to live by. I think you must have one too, no? I’m sure it has changed over time but if you were a complete skeptic, like Pyrrho, you wouldn’t know whether to get out of bed or not.

Even though I am a skeptic, it is not as it I don't have well-defined values.  My philosophy of life, too, is one based on constant iteration with the real world.

The interviewer, who is a "a writer, philosopher and podcaster", quotes Bertand Russell's philosophical values to live by:

He boiled down his philosophical values to two principles. First, try to look solely at the facts on any issue, rather than at what you would like to be true. No easy task, of course. Second, and this is another hard one to live up to: ‘Love is wise, hatred is foolish.’ We have to learn to put up with the fact that people will say things that we don’t like, detest even. To live together, we need to be able to speak freely, and tolerate others who do that too. 

Of course, this is not the first time that I am awed by Russel's words.  I am even more impressed with that simple formulation by the atheist Russell; a formulation that is no different from what the old religions also attempt to teach us: Love is wise, hatred is foolish.

Friedman talks crap. Lee Kuan Yew makes sense.

For once, Thomas Friedman's column is not flooded with metaphors.  And that is just about the only good thing about that column.

His column is all about values lost--that the Greatest Generation had all the right values and then it has been downhill since then. Yes, I, too have met and talked with a few of that generation and they were great. Fantastic people. Even a few days ago I was talking about one of them--Ellery--who grew up in the Ozarks, and said his first real shoes were when he joined the army as WWII unfolded. But, the worst thing to do is to deify them and put them way too high of a pedestal. And that is what Friedman does.

My favorite joke about baby-boomers is that all they did was spend everything that their parents saved :)  But, we can't skip over the fact that it was the new values of the boomers that also helped shake up the black/white divide, the role of the female in the household, ... I am not sure whether the values of the Greatest Generation would have achieved these.  A colleague back in California remarked once that his extended family were pretty much forced to change really rapidly their old negative views of blacks, well, non-whites.

And then Friedman throws in, yet again, the cliche about China and India catching up and soon overtaking America. Yeah, right!  Does he really keep track of the news of the poverty in India?  I mean, that is just for starters.

There is another way to talk about the values of now versus that of the past, which is what the Singaporean grand old man, Lee Kuan Yew, articulates in the Saturday profile in the same paper that Friedman writes. I hope Friedman read that.

Now, I am not a big fan of Lee's political philosophy that severely restricted individual rights. But, to give credit when due, this is what Lee says about the youth of today's Singapore:

Younger people worry him, with their demands for more political openness and a free exchange of ideas, secure in their well-being in modern Singapore. “They have come to believe that this is a natural state of affairs, and they can take liberties with it,” he said. “They think you can put it on auto-pilot. I know that is never so.”

I am with the younger people demanding openness.  But, there is a great deal of truth in Lee's comment that we can't ever sit back and have whatever it is on auto-pilot.

I suppose this is the flip side of the fantastic economic and individual security--that there is a certain kind of hedonism that creeps in, as opposed to a conscious realization that the security can be gone soon if we don't maintain and cultivate it.

The only place where Friedman gets close to this idea is when he quotes at length Robert Samuelson's analysis of what is fundamentally wrong with our schools:

“The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation,” wrote Samuelson. “Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail. Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a ‘good’ college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure. The unstated assumption of much school ‘reform’ is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.” Wrong, he said. “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 29 percent cited ‘student apathy.’ ”

The challenge then is to some extent the same across all the rich countries: how do we instill in children and youth the sense of hunger and fight that is needed for a true democracy?  Tough question.

BTW, as I have noted earlier, Lee did great with his son, Lee Hsien Loong, who is the current prime minister. A brilliant fellow with a wonderful and graceful demeanor.

Are New Yorkers simply detestable?

Steven Chapman on Why it's time to bury the myth of rural virtue:

In 2007, a survey of 8th graders by the Monitoring the Future project at the University of Michigan found that country kids were 26 percent more likely to experiment with drugs than middle-schoolers elsewhere. Overall methamphetamine consumption among adults and teens is more than 50 percent higher in the country.The story with alcohol is worse still. ... Nor is the countryside exempt from social problems often associated with the inner city—such as, if you'll forgive me, out-of-wedlock births. ...The highest rates of births to unwed mothers are in Mississippi and New Mexico, both of which have high rural populations. The most urban states, New Jersey and California, do better than the average in out-of-wedlock births.

Jon Stewart got ticked off for the same big-town-bashing that certain politicians engage in, implying that big towns are nothing but immoral in every possible way. Watch him here: