Vegetarianism

[blp]

Fair point, Jozanny, but, to try to take this into the realm of dialectics, I'll respond that

1. I think Nikolai feels it's part of his philosophical outlook on life

2. Possibly the only citation of an author who might (loosely) be described as philosophical was mine, of Karen Armstrong, in response to your only other post in this thread. I do think there's the potential here to have a philosophical discussion about our (humans') fundamentally conflicted relationship to cruelty.

Here's some relevant philosophy to, ah, chew on:

'A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.' - Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World

[Jozanny]

Okay blp. I am not really sure I understand Niko's argument; plants may not have an organ like a brain to serve as a CPU, but they no more like dying than mammals or insects. Mammals are simply more graphic about being extinguished. Again, respect for life itself does not mean all life is equal. Sorry, but primates, in comparison to sheep, are an engineering marvel. We have hands, and the hand is no small evolutionary feat; we are bipedal--and for a crip like me that is miracle enough to gawk at. Now, the sheep has talents, I am sure, and it has an evolutionary niche too, and I am civilized enough to be nice to the sheep even when it stupidly butts my wheelchair and scares me, and I would not torture the creature anymore than necessary if I needed its wool and its meat, but I would so kill it for that if I needed it. I have seen wolves kill coyotes--not particularly nice--I've seen lions murder each other and their cubs, and chimpanzees make you close your eyes and think of how remarkable it is that humans haven't wiped each other out--so I have no problem being an omnivore. I do not like American farming practices, but that is a separate issue, and not eating meat will not change the unhappy fate of force-fed cows. The issue is a balanced diet, and the healthest one possible, but we are not herbivores.

[blp]

I'm not sure I understand Niko's argument either, jozanny. Or, if I do, I think it's something to do with simply trying to live without harming other creatures.

You say the issue is a balanced diet and we are not herbivores. I'm more interested now in your question of whether we can have a philosophical discussion about this, so I'm going to try not to get sucked in by dietary questions except to reiterate: it does seem to be quite possible for humans to live without eating meat and even that there are significant health benefits. But we've kind of been over that.

On the question of cruelty, it was certainly my hope as a vegetarian that a certain amount of cruelty would be decreased by my choice and that might be part of a literally progressive movement, i.e. we would progress to a situation in which less and less people ate meat. I won't go as far as to admit that this was just vanity on my part, but I did come to see that there were, perhaps, more pressing issues as I became older. Still, I can't resist pointing out that many vegetarians, fully aware of how easy it is to get by without meat, also devote themselves to other, more immediate political and social causes. I visited an environmentalist camp last summer, pitched in protest at the building of a third runway at Heathrow. The food was entirely vegan and entirely satisfying and delicious.

The problem here, and the place where we might start to feel philosophy has a role, is in a sort of balance of cruelty. A lot of vegetarians, starting from the basic, simplistic position of being opposed to all cruelty, rapidly discover that, in having given up meat, they are still collusive in animal slaughter, whether because of the shoes they wear, the glue they use, the animal rennet used in the cheese they eat or, most unsettlingly of all, the slaughtered male calves that are a bi-product of milk production. They are faced starkly with a question that may actually be insidiously relevant to all of us: since we apparently can't oppose all cruelty, how much should we allow? And to what extent should we be cruel to ourselves in order to avoid cruelty to others? So far I don't know of any vegetarians who walk along brushing the ground in front of them in order to avoid treading on insects, as some buddhist sages are said to have done or perhaps still do, but there might be one or two who, like certain old English mystics, would rather allow infestations of vermin than participate in any form of killing.

You seem to have your own moral position all worked out and to want to be able to say it's all pretty simple. No need for any conversation, philosophical otherwise. My reference to Armstrong, earlier, was intended to allude to the fact that, for a lot of us, the realisation that cruelty is unavoidable cuts deep. For me, it hit particularly hard when a partner I hadn't been with for very long got pregnant and had an early term abortion, an act which I supported. I'd never imagined something like this would affect me as much as it did. An anti-abortionist would have said we shouldn't have done it. I say, we no more denied this foetus the right to life than if we hadn't conceived it in the first place and it made no difference. But my parental instincts still kicked in and the irrational part of me still felt terrible for this 'kid' of mine that never got a chance.

Armstrong cites abortion specifically, along with meat eating, as one of the painful quandaries about killing that may be at the root of religious ritual, specifically blood sacrifice.

[Jozanny]

Well, I think one of the points I was trying to make was, even if you take homo sapiens out of the picture, the drama of life and death is still what it is. Biologists speculate that felines are actually designed to take pleasure in killing, and it seems they've hit on something there. I have actually seen Joey kill a mouse, and eat it too, even though I spend a small fortune keeping him fed, and he seems to see it as his job to make sure the rodent doesn't move anymore, so obviously Hinduism doesn't operate on the trickle down theory--when the mice do get in though, it is my reaction that is interesting. I roll as far away as possible until I have to clean things up, as if it isn't my place to interfere. I don't know many walking pet owners who do either, not when it comes to your regular mouse--but even consumation of plants involves manipulation which is harmful to natural habitat, which is why I think vegan is a bit faux pas--not that I do not respect good dietary choices--for me though, and it might be due to bouts of colitis as a secondary symptom of aging with cerebral palsy--too much fiber makes me sick. I try, however, to eat a decent salad without too much fat, twice a week, and until my power chair died, cut down on beef, not eliminate, but cut down, and try not to eat bacon anymore.

That said, I am stout, pallid, and will either stroke or have an acute heart incident--heart disease runs deep on my full Italian side. As to pregnancy termination--it is a complicated issue, even for me with my anti-exceptionalism views.

[Petronius]

I think the problem with us humans is that we've evolved too fast in the last millenia, and much of the environments we reacted to while doing so were of our own making, artificial constructs, thus distorted. We are so far up on the food chain that we're practically unassailable in our social habitats. Since we had the ability to consolidate our defences against systematic loss of human life, we have come to believe abhoring it is the only possible right way, much like a spoiled child who genuinely feels that his parents must, at all times, provide for him.
There still exist, though, areas such as the Sunderbans, where locals are still in danger of being killed by tigers (about 50-250 deaths per year, according to wiki) - partially because the area is a tiger reserve and people are not allowed to hunt down the animals unless they are positively identified as man-eaters. As shown on television, their reaction is one of respect, reverence, or acceptance towards the big cats, but I wonder... I also wonder if these people feel it's wrong to kill a boar in order to survive.

The culture and media in developed countries aggravates our... lack of realism I'd call it. Think of the principles fed to us as children, and the great lengths parents go through to make us feel the world is a safe and wonderful place where everything is possible if you truly believe. I think I can separate a pattern in a wide number of entertainment media, such as movies or books: a hero descovering something truly valuable to him, reveling to sky-high extremes in the stupefaction of experienced emotions, almost losing that special something (very sad), then from the brink of disaster comes the epiphany of salvation and the gratification of a happy finale. We have become overly sensitized to generic, superficial yet very acute views of love, family, security, life, etc.
This I believe distorts in many cases the priorities and reactions of human beings. Our social web and its symbols are percieved stronger than the gritty truths of an existence we are perilously levitating over. The realisation that we, as a whole, are destructive is becoming more and more evident, but, like the niche animals we also are, we deal with it through the lenses of our own empirical habits... like now, we seek to make it a philosophical matter, or a literary one, since these are the colours the subforum dictates - and of course, Jozanny was right in pointing out we had strayed too far, but Nikolai in his assertions, not so much.

We pitty the animals we kill because we ourselves seek to evade natural balance; to live off of an ecosystem, yet allow nothing back - just get this silly feeding over with and carry on with our artificial lives. It's how we choose to separate ourselves from nature, without exercising any self-restraint, that is wrong, and not the killing. We have grown into parasites who can't destroy their host because there's only one around.



Hope this is more to the point... As far as nutrition goes, since blp adressed it earlier, I think it's not so much what we eat, but the connection between our diet and the way in which we use the aquired energy. Carnivores need a lot of it because there's a lot of intense physical activity involved in their lives; they may also have to go on for long periods of time without feeding, so they need some form of caloric energy that can be stored. It's this last part that veggies don't have, their energy gets burened pretty fast - that's why herbivores need to spend a lot of time eating, and why you feel like wolfing your green food.

And I'm from Romania, actually. Very bad eating habits are part of the tradition here.

[NikolaiI]

I don't think Herbivore is the right term, Jozanny, because we eat fruit and dairy products as well. You said you weren't sure about my position -- part of what I was saying was in response to several who said things along the lines of, like you said, that plants don't wish to die either. But these people are saying this to recommend meat-eating. So-- because plants don't wish to die, we ought to eat meat just as well? And I just don't want to be the only one this makes no sense to. Now what you have said about it is fine. You think we ought to eat meat for various reasons such as health or simply that you don't think it's wrong. While I don't agree with you, I respect this.

Blp you are correct there are many cruelties in today's world. But we have to start somewhere. Basically my reason for vegetarianism is that I don't want to partake in killing every time I eat food. I don't want it to be necessary to kill animals for me to eat. I'm aware that the whole system and government and country and everything also causes suffering, but again, we can only do one at a time. Someone said on this forum a while back they thought nothing could be helped, could be improved. This doesn't sway me at all. I think we should try to improve things.

Jozanny, what is philosophical about it? Well it's very philosophical. I don't mean about diet and nutrition, nutrition is sort of a side-issue. It's philosophical becuase it has to do with the value of life. Is it right for us to kill other animals? Very philosophical. Why would we think it is right to kill animals? I can't think of a good reason excpet that it's inertia and we seek to justify it. If you take a full step away from it, it seems quite clear that it's wrong to kill. But then if you enter into our society (and I live in America, actually, Kansas City, Missouri to give you an idea) then you are surrounded by it. 97% of people eat meat. Restaurants serve almost only meat. And so it goes on by inertia, peer pressure (that is, association) all of these things. Nobody questions what everybody does. Then add onto it you get such a wide range of reasons for the action; ranging from rational ones (such as yours) to irrational ones or even angry ones.. (they belong on my plate) and you have a complicated issue. One of the quotes at the beginning, the opening post, by Thomas More was from a book, it was "The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable." When I saw this I thought it was an interesting parallel to what some religious people say. There are four prohibitions for Vaisnavas, no eating meat, no illicit sex, no gambling, and no intoxication. The most important one of these is not eating meat, because it leads to a loss of compassion. So the main reason for not eating meat is compassion for the animals. Yes there are other ways in which we are complicit in the suffering of others. But because they exist does not mean we should not be vegetarian!

I think the only way to overcome the culture of ours (again, speaking of one who lives within an American culture), where meat-eating is accepted, justified, and encouraged, is to escape the influence enough to not be controled by it; and second, to connect the action with what happened to make it possible -- to connect eating meat with the pain and suffering caused when the animal lost its life. And then to realize that it's not necessary at all for this to happen. If one can put oneself in the place of the animal, if one can understand the suffering of the animal (That is, to connect that suffering to oneself; to one's own pain or the feeling of losing one's life, or another's,) then one will not say something like meat tastes too good to give up.

I am not saying we are karma-free after giving up meat; that's a whole other story, but it's an important step...

[girlygirlemc]

I've been a pesco-ovo-lacto vegetarian all my life (I'd give up fish if sushi wasn't my favorite food). I find that vegetarianism makes so much sense, and that the most intelligent and inspiring people support/supported it (Einstein, DaVinci, Gandhi, Pythagoras, Diogenes, Plato, Newton, Edison...the list goes on). That quote you listed by Thoreau, one of my favorite authors, is truly great. How delightfully ironic the whole situation is

By the way, is that quote from Walden?

I do not like American farming practices, but that is a separate issue, and not eating meat will not change the unhappy fate of force-fed cows.

It has been said that a vegetarian saves the lives of over 100 animals per year. I believe that makes a huge difference. Besides, becoming a vegetarian can't hurt. I think it's foolish to think that one cannot change the fate of another... and buying meat only supports those cruel and inhumane industries.

[Jozanny]

Well, those livestock industries are not sustainable, and that is not really what my objection is about. My objection rests on the fairly proven fact that living things have to die so that other living things have the energy to succeed in procreating and maintaining a viable species. It may be inconvenient to acknowledge this, Niko, but that is the way it works. One cannot remove suffering from the equation; it is impossible, whether that suffering stems from human action or other sources. Watch a colony of army ants kill a huge animal sometime. The ant isn't evil; the colony is performing a necessary function as a super-predator.

I won't get into the debate about humans being quasi-supernatural, or extraordinary. I don't believe it, but in this forum one fights a losing battle against the divine calling thing--but, even with that argument aside, life is a dynamic contest and struggle, and some win that struggle, but all living things eventually lose, and get consumed, regardless of the attractions of non-violence.

When you say, girlygirl, that 100 animals per year are *saved*, saved from what? Domesticated cattle are not returned to the wild. In the US they are force-fed corn; if they were not slaughtered they would die, in agony, from being pressured to eat a grain they were not evolved to eat. In the UK, they are fed ground meal which includes animal by-products, hence mad cow disease. You aren't saving them from pens barely large enough to stand in; 10 billion people put arable land under a great deal of pressure.

Utopian visions may be precious, but they just don't jive with the cost of having modern, industrialized, market-based civilizations. Good luck with that.

[NikolaiI]

Well, those livestock industries are not sustainable, and that is not really what my objection is about. My objection rests on the fairly proven fact that living things have to die so that other living things have the energy to succeed in procreating and maintaining a viable species. It may be inconvenient to acknowledge this, Niko, but that is the way it works. One cannot remove suffering from the equation; it is impossible, whether that suffering stems from human action or other sources. Watch a colony of army ants kill a huge animal sometime. The ant isn't evil; the colony is performing a necessary function as a super-predator.

I won't get into the debate about humans being quasi-supernatural, or extraordinary. I don't believe it, but in this forum one fights a losing battle against the divine calling thing--but, even with that argument aside, life is a dynamic contest and struggle, and some win that struggle, but all living things eventually lose, and get consumed, regardless of the attractions of non-violence.

No, I am aware of this and I have been some time. There is a verse in a scripture I am studying, Srimad Bhagavatam, which states exactly this (1.13.47):

phalgūni tatra mahatāḿ
jīvo jīvasya jīvanam

"The weak are the subsistence of the strong, and the general rule holds that one living being is food for another."

I'm aware you don't believe in a supreme will, and I wasn't planning to speak of it either.

Srila Prabhupada, in his purport of this verse, writes

The living being is the source of subsistence for other, stronger living beings. No one should be very anxious for his subsistence in any circumstances because there are living beings everywhere, and no living being starves for want of food at any place.

An elephant is much larger than we are, but it is provided for... basically, there are suitable foods which can be made from fruits, nuts, beans, vegetables, and milk, and it is not necessary to eat animals.

Prabhupada also writes:

Exploitation of the weaker living being by the stronger is the natural law of existence; there is always an attempt to devour the weak in different kingdoms of living beings. There is no possibility of checking this tendency by any artificial means under material conditions; it can be checked only by awakening the spiritual sense of the human being by practice of spiritual regulations. The spiritual regulative principles, however, do not allow a man to slaughter weaker animals on one side and teach others peaceful coexistence. If man does not allow the animals peaceful coexistence, how can he expect peaceful existence in human society?

I will write more later. I understand you do not put authority in any scriptures, but as you asked for philosophy, there it is, a vegetarian philosophy.

[Jozanny]

How is your believe system going to change the reality of a global market society?

[blp]

A quick note on diet, jozanny. I'll risk telling you something you already know, just because you mentioned a salad without too much fat: there's a diametric difference between meat/dairy derived fat, which is harmful to humans because it raises cholesterol, and the kind of fats you'd generally eat in a salad: vegetable oil such a sunflower oil or olive oil. Your body needs these and they help maintain a healthy heart. Other sources include nuts and fish. It's still fat and so, in theory, can make you fat if you eat enough, but you actually really have to eat quite a lot of it for that to happen, whereas meat fat, butter and cheese are comparatively quick routes to obesity and heart disease - with no real upside since the nutrients you get from eating these things can all be got from other sources.

I take your point about fiber making you, in particular, sick though. Can't really argue with that.

To try, try to keep this on a philosophical bent, still in answer to you, jozanny, it's one thing to say, roughly rightly as you do, that

life is a dynamic contest and struggle, and some win that struggle, but all living things eventually lose, and get consumed, regardless of the attractions of non-violence

But it's not a simple matter to extrapolate from that that we should eat meat or that it is ethical to do so or even that it doesn't matter if we do so. For one thing, I don't think you have to have an exaggeratedly rosey view of things, let alone a religious one (I'm an atheist), to see that the struggle and selfishness you talk about frequently coexist with kindness and selflessness, that, for instance, as the philosopher Slavoj Zizek puts it, human beings are, frequently, spontaneously moral. (That said, Zizek himself, in the documentary Zizek!, when he finds out his interviewers and film crew are all vegetarian responds, only partially with his tongue in his cheek, 'Degenerates! You will turn into monkeys.')

To elevate the decidedly quasi-Darwinian observation of a struggle for existence to a principle is to run the very serious risk of putting the ethical cart before the horse, doing harm for the sake of a principle and not, in fact, out of the expediency from which the principle is derived. ****, there's got to be a simpler way of saying that. What I mean is, yes, it seems to be almost impossible to avoid doing some harm, but that it's a serious (moral) error to turn that into an argument for doing harm when it's not necessary. An error, I would add as an aside, that I think a lot of parents make all the time in the raising of their children. Yes, the world is a harsh place. That should be an argument for avoiding harshness when we can, not being harsh all the time. The harshness of life can more than take care of itself without us adding to it gratuitously.

This is what I meant, earlier, about working out our balance of cruelty. A relatively simple way of looking at it is to ask how much harm we can avoid doing to others without doing harm to ourselves. However, the much more interesting angle on this is that, very often, what's good for the goose and gander is good for us too. Meat eating seems to be an example of this. The animals don't want to be eaten and, in the main, human metabolisms seem to be in agreement. A well-balanced veggie meal is a kindness to the animals and a kindness to the consumer of it. (And if you can say that about meat, you can say the same ten-fold about paté. Just ask the goose and the gander.)

OK, so some vegetables had to die for the vegetarian meal and that's cruelty too; but let's be as clear as we can about our taxonomy here. This is necessary. We have to eat something. Even if we eat meat, the nutritionists universally agree, we need our 5, 6, 7, 8 or so portions of fruit and veg each day.

How is your believe system going to change the reality of a global market society?

This is called 'capitulation'. You might as well say the same thing or similar to William Wilberforce or Emmeline Pankhurst. Didn't your mother ever tell you, just because everybody else is doing something doesn't make it right?

However, I would add, that the overwhelming, sublime fact of the global market place does probably change something in our examination of a balance of cruelty - by which I mean, to put it perhaps too simply, some of this stuff, without tying ourselves up in absolute knots of austerity, we're probably stuck with, at least for the moment.

You say you don't want to get into the unsustainability of the meat industry, but then you use the facts of it (corn-feeding etc.) to argue against the notion that animals are 'saved' by vegetarianism. I really don't know if you can separate the industry and its decidedly bad practices from the rest of this topic. As you yourself show, the cruelty of the meat industry is not just in the final slaughter of the animals, it's the inhumane conditions in which they are kept - all of which is only sustained by the enormous global demand for meat. These kinds of things can change, sometimes quite quickly given the right circumstances.

[Jozanny]

Fair enough blp, since you and I are at least having a discussion which is adjusting itself to various parameters. You know, I changed my diet in about 03 to eat healthier, and my ex-fiance insisted that was why I was getting *sick*, and I dismissed this. My power chair died over Thanksgiving, and though I now can make limited excursions in the piece of junk I am sitting in now (getting a new chair takes a process) I have indulged some in rich processed food because I cannot drive to grocery as conveniently, and I seem much more stable, which makes not a lick of sense. I suppose internal medicine will look at their batty cripple askance when I ask them what is going on... (sigh); all I have is the colitis theory, which is difficult to confirm, but associated with cerebral palsy in some instances.

Maybe I should have been a biologist. However, it is not that I do not appreciate nobel sentiments, but I do insist on looking at what is real, even in the aspiration of the possible. Public radio this morning had a mildly alarming segment on species loss due to human activity, and they said it might be too late for X number of species--and I am not sure how putting 10 billion people on a diet of rice, greens, and roots, even if it could be done, changes that our extraordinary success has done almost incalculable harm.

[blp]

Hope this is more to the point... As far as nutrition goes, since blp adressed it earlier, I think it's not so much what we eat, but the connection between our diet and the way in which we use the aquired energy. Carnivores need a lot of it because there's a lot of intense physical activity involved in their lives; they may also have to go on for long periods of time without feeding, so they need some form of caloric energy that can be stored. It's this last part that veggies don't have, their energy gets burened pretty fast - that's why herbivores need to spend a lot of time eating, and why you feel like wolfing your green food.

And I'm from Romania, actually. Very bad eating habits are part of the tradition here.

No time to respond to all your points about unreality and such just now, but perhaps they relate to this question of specific dietary needs dependent on lifestyle. I believe athletes do eat quantities of fat that would be considered deeply unhealthy for ordinary people and, perhaps in former times, a huntsman's diet had a certain neatly symmetrical aptness to his lifestyle (i.e. he needed a lot of slow-burn energy to go after his prey). To keep eating like a huntsman when we're spending most of our day sitting in front of a computer might be said to constitute a certain failure to engage with reality.

[Jozanny]

This is my last post on this topic, but I wanted to clarify: Vegetarians who view lifestyles choices with complacency, are, to my mind, fooling themselves. Civilization has a price, and Western New Age guilt conciousness isn't going to undo the damage that over 200 years of colonial, and the creation of consumer economies, has wrought on global eco-systems. Like any other species, we are a self-interested one, and the only way to undo our damage to the planet is to go against our self-interest, and that is a very difficult thing to do. Even the Indian government, Niko, shoots tigers, these endangered and beautiful beasts, who develop a taste for Indian flesh. It might be nice, before quoting Buddhists teachings as a superior moral stance, if you visited some sites like Greenpeace, and looked up the Japanese whaling industry, and saw how many hundreds of dolphins they slaughter, and consider the magnitude of that over your lettuce. The problem is much larger and more intractable than the new American chic.

[NikolaiI]

This is my last post on this topic, but I wanted to clarify: Vegetarians who view lifestyles choices with complacency, are, to my mind, fooling themselves. Civilization has a price, and Western New Age guilt conciousness isn't going to undo the damage that over 200 years of colonial, and the creation of consumer economies, has wrought on global eco-systems. Like any other species, we are a self-interested one, and the only way to undo our damage to the planet is to go against our self-interest, and that is a very difficult thing to do. Even the Indian government, Niko, shoots tigers, these endangered and beautiful beasts, who develop a taste for Indian flesh. It might be nice, before quoting Buddhists teachings as a superior moral stance, if you visited some sites like Greenpeace, and looked up the Japanese whaling industry, and saw how many hundreds of dolphins they slaughter, and consider the magnitude of that over your lettuce. The problem is much larger and more intractable than the new American chic.

Ok, I'm sorry you feel that way.