Scylla, Charybdis and a Dead Lion

For me, the argument against the consumption of meat in developed countries can be summarised as follows: it is fundamentally wrong to kill for one's own enjoyment.

There has recently been much noise about the killing of a lion in Zimbabwe. I felt the need to convey my irritation at the fact that many of those most upset are meat-eaters. They denounce the killing of a lion whilst killing hundreds of animals over their own lifetime. More than this, they cravenly commission these killings, like some kind of deity above - at least this man shot the lion himself. I will argue that, whilst the killing of a lion is of course immoral, it is not appreciably worse than killing an animal which has spent its life in the dank squalor of a factory-farm. I cannot shake my belief that this cognitive dissonance is a result of our anthropocentric view of the world: farm animals are useful - productive - dead, lions are productive alive. Safari trips tend to be less attractive when all the animals are inanimate.

It is, at most, a difference of magnitude, but not of category. In fact, this magnitude argument, founded on the idea that a lion's life is somehow more sacred than a cow's, crumbles when one considers that millions of cows are killed on an annual basis, compared to - who knows - hundreds of lions. The fact is that there is no difference between the elevated individual enjoyment of destroying a real lion over a target dummy than there is in consuming real meat over meat substitutes.

One rather comedic and I must imagine unintentional logical fallacy committed by the Tartuffe defenders of this lion goes as follows (and rather disentangles their web of equivocation): 'What could possibly be wrong with eating meat? The lion did it all the time!' Having made such a statement, and suggesting the equivalence of human and animal moral duty, one is forced into an impasse. The strange conclusion of such a chain of reasoning is as follows: it was absolutely wrong to kill the lion, unless its corpse was consumed. In which case, the death of the lion would have been moral.

I read something by Baudrillard recently, in which he claimed that a woman in a dress is far more sexual than a woman in the nude. Nudity is is almost too nude, too extreme, too perfect, and for Baudrillard this feeds into the idea of hyperreality, the destruction of meaning by its own mass-production. Yet is this not also true of death? We cannot bear the extremity of sheer deadness, it must be tainted with some purfling of life, whether that be in consumption or nostalgic tributes. Perhaps it is believed that to eat the dead lion is to transfer its energy, to deny its death, but to leave it to bacteria and lower creatures is - to human eyes, which regard those beyond its interest as blots of nothingness - to brazenly display it.

This certainly cannot be a sound argument: the illegality, the immorality of taking life cannot be mitigated by individual teleological concerns. We would never accept the murder of a human, however much we had been assured that their corpse nourished the flowers of their grave.

This is not to say that every human can or should renounce meat (but a great deal - morally - ought to). There are many billions so poverty-stricken, so consumed by exploitation that they must eat meat on pain of death, lest they starve. In such cases, as I will explain in the following paragraph, the elevated human faculties of knowing, sympathising and perhaps suffering ought to be considered. Where no alternative to meat is available, it would cause more suffering to starve oneself than to quickly destroy life. But this is a mere anomaly in the developed world.

As an aside, it is interesting to consider the arguments of many vegetarians and vegans. They often claim that humans are not substantively different to animals, and that animal exploitation therefore constitutes an act of 'speciesism' on the part of humans. I do not necessarily dispute the validity of the term 'speciesism' (there may well be some acts of cruelty which stem not from any rational core but simply the salience of species) but such an argument bears dangerous consequences: if we assume that a human life is equal to that of, say, an elephant, then what about a rhinoceros? A cheetah? An eagle? A flamingo? A Komodo dragon? An adder? A tarantula? A house spider? An earwig? An amoeba? An atom? Nothing? My point is that this rapid dégringolade derogates the individual such that he actually has no rights whatever, which jars with the very concept of society. A human has an awareness, a network of friends and so on which do make a human death substantively more calamitous in terms of incurred suffering. Moreover, it would not be terribly unreasonable to be outraged if one were to be moved down the social housing waiting list by a beleaguered amoeba (it is my understanding that such organisms can produce thousands of benefits-sapping children in but an hour).

At the same time, this argument is similarly unsettling. If we accept that all life is qualitatively different on the basis of intelligence, it appears that a great intellect should take absolute precedence over lesser ones. Such an idea will likely disgust any modern mind, including my own, but it is not rationally indefensible. And indeed, it is as a direct consequence of the application of such ideas that much human life has been extinguished. Seemingly, the only resolution to such a problem is to say: all animals are ranked on capacity to suffer, except individual humans. Which again creates the problem of speciesism. It is tempting to believe that this problem can be tackled in chunks, each species morally ranked by average intelligence, but this is completely inappropriate as death is individual. Indeed, an adult pig has an intelligence surpassing that of a human baby. It appears that a solution is challenging.

This bifurcation, this choice between Scylla and Charybdis, is to me the most challenging problem of moral vegetarianism. Perhaps my reasoning is unsound, perhaps there is a clear solution, but I cannot discern it.

Surrender

It seems that a large portion of these blog posts is devoted to the lamentation of my own ineptitude, and this mass of text is no exception. The only novelty is that I now know the root, the black root, of my inarticulacy. I no longer wish to write, I wish to be a writer. I want solitude, reclusion, the life of a writer. I cannot sincerely tell myself that I want to produce beauty. This is the peculiar tragedy of modernity: we want instantaneous pleasure, shallow competence, a simulacrum of the thing itself. It is a precarious tangle of desire - were we to apprehend the content, the precondition, for that which we desire, the desire would collapse instantly. The very fact that one pines for fame is the surest mark that one does not warrant it (if indeed anything warrants the gross excess of 'celebrity'). Today we want to have fame in the way that we might have a refrigerator. The idea that we cannot touch and trample everything is an inexorcisable woe.

My incarceration at university has mercifully expired, and what follows will undoubtedly take the form of something far worse. My unsuitability to absolutely any job is such that I see nothing ahead but death and decay. This is not hyperbole: I have spent much of the past year reasoning that taking a 'proactive approach' to the problem of employment was unwise because I would simply be dead beyond university. It has therefore come as rather a shock that I am alive, terribly alive.

People - fools - often console me, 'I think it will all turn out fine for you, you will get a good job in the end,' entirely misinterpreting every monad of my constitution. My fear is precisely this life of respectability, mediocrity, banality. That everything should fall beneath a sea of petty feuds, dull competition, the ache of unimportance. What monster can devote his life to tax returns, bureaucracy, accountancy and such without recourse to suicide? It seems to me that this is entirely preferable to a life of slow despair, a life in which one's powers - whate'er they be - are turned on their host. Depleted by one's own life force, set on by the parasite of one's idealism, this is the most painful suicide of all. And the greatest man builds the most exquisite cage.