Morally perfect

I haven't been posting that regularly. The internet's been a bit of a sterile promontory recently, and I haven't found anything to get that worked up about.


In fact, that's sort of the problem. There are a great many social things I probably should be actively involved in, fighting against, agitating for, etc. But I'm not. I have good friends who are very much invested in society and politics and injustice, but I can't even get it up for international news. There's a distinct sense of unworthiness that comes of hanging out with feminist vegans, a kind of realization that my morality perhaps doesn't extend as far as it should.

Guilt and rationalizations after the jump.


Should I stop eating animals?


The more I work with animals, the more I'm forced to consider that, for the most part, the conditions in which mammals are bred, kept, and slaughtered are beyond inhumane. I really can't make myself care about fish or crustaceans, but mammals and birds? I guess my rubric for this is sentience, which seems to mean something different to everyone you ask. An only slightly less unreliable rubric is intelligence. I could never eat anything that had mirror self-recognition, for example. That suggests a sense of self, and a kind of self-other distinction that might well engender a sense of terror at the thought of the self ending. That capacity for existential suffering – I'm definitely going too far here: I don't believe there are any chimps out there undergoing Hamletian angst – is far more than simple physical pain and fear. Dolphins can reference objects without the object being present. Can they anticipate death without it being present? Do gorillas dream of electric machetes? Probably not, but it's something I think about.

Not eating anything endangered or very very smart is trivial, though (unless you're in Japan... more on that later). I still have to work out how I feel about cows and other such beasts. I've never much liked cows as animals. Their eyes are empty, blank, and that dumbness scares me a little. I'm no G.W. Bush, and they're no sinister Russian quasi-dictators, but I look into their eyes and I don't see a soul. To clarify, that's certainly not any religious conception of a soul. What I mean is that there is no sense of “I am different from others, and this is what defines me: I have a core of conceptions and emotions and self-constructs that make me unique”.

I love a rare steak, served still bleeding. I find it difficult to take a meal without meat seriously. I've been tossing the idea around in my head of becoming a vegetarian for a while, holding it at arm's length. It's the only ethical, morally sufficient thing to do, really. I know that. But I can't even begin to contemplate the wretched inconvenience of it. Don't want to. It's hard to counter an innate, convenient love of meatiness with a solemn, logically reasoned argument against such indulgences. Thinking about the “eternal Treblinka” every time I sit down to eat is a terrible prospect. I never wanted to have to think about my food's content and origin. I just wanted to have it.


Even if I did make the switch, what difference would it make? How much would I really reduce my footprint? How many cow lives would I save by not ever eating a steak again? Some other American would only eat my portion for me, the fat bastard. I think the only way that my resistance could be overcome is if the ick factor from the knowledge that I was eating the bodies of torture victims were able to win out over the ick factor at the prospect of not being able to eat whatever I liked. If it's not visceral, if my heart (and other organs) isn't in it, it won't stick, and I'll just relapse and feel guilty. Better not to try.

I've got a long way to go before those ick factors start looking even comparable. I've just got too much on my plate right now (hah). I'm busy, and I have too many other goals to worry about without attempting to be a morally perfect being.



Ain't I a woman?


Feminism is the other problem.

Just to head off the inevitable, I have to make clear that I do have my own, very personal conception of what some might call "feminism". I would call it equality. I believe men and women are worthy of equal treatment - by society, by law, no matter what. The sexes have their differences, physically and mentally, but those are far from universal (it's just another continuum), and the differences are overwhelmed by the similarities. I believe that women are capable of just as many great accomplishments as men. And I know that historically and in the backwards parts of the world today (I'm looking at you, Afghanistan) women have been cowed and pushed down by their physically stronger counterparts for millenia. However, I do not believe that women are somehow more worthy on the whole than men, or that militantly overcompensating for millenia of abuse and repression is useful (or tasteful).

I've been reading Feministing, Jezebel and a few other feminist-oriented blogs, and they really don't appeal to me. I just find them boring. The articles tackle tiny, tiny issues. The comments after each article are dominated by exquisitely thin-skinned people who seem to revel in a feeling of endless and belligerent victimhood.

The same impeccably vegetarian people I know are seriously invested in the feminist movement, but I keep coming back up against my eternal feeling of otherness – I am alien and these things don't apply to me. If I were asked to come up with a list of adjectives describing myself, “female” would probably be the last item I thought of.

I realize I've been lucky so far. I've never come up against any serious problems because of my genital status. Maybe that's why I feel that the distinctions and the lines people on these sites draw between the sexes are so silly. Just overly antagonistic and ultimately counterproductive. To be really arrogant, ignorant, patriarchal and chauvinistic for a second (because I'm just another sad victim of internalized masculine oppression), I'd rather read and talk about human problems. I have a really hard time getting worked up about slut-shaming and gendered language.

Things like abortion, suffrage, and schooling for women in Afghanistan are enormously important. I see abortion as a justifiable right, and voting and a complete education is a ladder out of the pit for oppressed groups that don't have it. Education, I think, is almost on the level of access to clean drinking water as a human right. These are human issues.

Certainly, there are real problems facing women. In business, the glass ceiling is still a reality. It is true that there are very few women who are prominent in the sciences, and that this is at least partially due to a male WASP-dominated culture. But I hate just talking about it, as if an orgy of righteous indignation on someone's blog will get great female professors and researchers (my mom, for instance) promoted. The idea of gender-based affirmative action to correct for the problem always bothers me too. I want the smartest, most creative people putting out papers, not the people the department thinks will make them look good. There are female scientists out there, and I'm guessing that about the same proportion of them are mediocre as are among male scientists. I'm not going to finish that thought, since I sense myself edging towards patriarchy.

But doesn't it seem better to consider yourself as a human being in the context of the universe, rather than as a member of a victimized subset of a limited society? That sort of thinking breeds learned helplessness and inertia. It enslaves us to culture, and it makes us very small.

Scattered concluding thoughts:

• Luminous beings are we. Not this crude matter.
• I guess I'm arguing for transcendence over community.
• Feminists are getting in the way of my feminism. 
  
• I have looked into the silly abyss of adolescent Nietzchean individualism, and it is staring back.
• I am far from a perfect moral being. It might be statistically possible that out of 6 billion of us, someone actually is, but it's extremely unlikely. If he exists, he's probably a self-righteous prick. Oops, gendered language again.
  
• This essay (pdf, or here as a webpage), from a 1980s compendium of feminist and post-modernist works, is as marvelously incoherent as you might expect: some of the non-sequiturs are truly staggering. But it touches on issues of feminism, socialism, community, biopower, war, race, and about 50 other topics. More excitingly, it casts us all as cyborgs! A sample:

“Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs – creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg “sex” restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism).”

I was on board with this paragraph, or at least hanging off the side, until the last sentence. What?

Happy reading!


Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.