Lost, baby!

Just sayin’.

UPDATE: Lost and Political Philosophy (via)

What’s right with America

Interesting piece by Michael Lind, who I always find thought-provoking. Despite a lot of pessimistic talk, Lind says that long-term trends–with respect to ethnic and racial integration, religious fundamentalism, and the solvency of our entitlement programs–are actually quite positive:

Barring catastrophes, the US in 2050 will be much more racially integrated; will remain culturally and linguistically quite homogeneous; and will be much richer, easily able to afford to pay for social security and decent healthcare. And partly as a result of this unity and prosperity, the US will continue to be a major power, though not a solitary hegemon.

The chief challenges Lind does see are rising healthcare costs and decreasing social mobility. He also doesn’t mention anything about environmental or resource issues, which seem to me to loom just as large as potential big problems. I’m also far more ambivalent (to say the least) about increasing secularization, though Lind does make an interesting argument that the Religious Right is essentially an ethno-political movement of white southerners that has less to do with religion per se than is commonly supposed.

Crunchy cons, Pollan, Scully and meat-eating

Rod Dreher of Crunchy Cons fame reflects on the morality of meat-eating, prompted by a discussion with a Christian friend about The Omnivore’s Dilemma (permalinks don’t seem to be working - scroll down to “Re-thinking the meat guzzler”). He also refers to Matthew Scully’s Dominion, an indictment of the factory farming system (and other practices of animal exploitation) written from an explicitly conservative point of view (Scully is a former speechwriter for President Bush). He also links to this interesting article by Mark Bittman.

A vegan critique of Pollan

Erik Marcus, vegan and animal rights activist, has a review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma that is appreciative, but critical in key places. Key quote:

Pollan’s book convincingly shows that animal agriculture can, in fact, operate in a way that respects the environment. For a reader who’s acquainted with the staggering wastefulness of animal agriculture, it’s hard not to get caught up in Pollan’s account of the Polyface [Farms] alternative.

What Polyface has accomplished is a genuine achievement. However, Pollan never points out that there’s a reason why Polyface is plunked down in rural Virginia-hardly the heart of cattle country. This model of farming could simply never be transplanted to the arid, near-dessert landscape of America’s western states-the region that produces nearly all American beef. It’s one thing to practice boutique farming and to raise 50 grass-fed cattle a year on lush, rain-soaked land in rural Virginia. It’s quite another to imply that Polyface could be anything like a model for transforming America’s beef industry. You simply can’t scale up what’s happening on a 50-steer farm in Virginia to positively transform the way that more than 20 million cattle are raised in the American West.

I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of animal agriculture to know if this is right or not, but it does support my hunch that a world of humane animal agriculture would necessitate less meat eating, even if it wouldn’t eliminate it.

More on Pollan and vegetarianism: vegetarianism as vocation

I have to admit that I find Pollan’s argument that the domestication of certain animals entails a real gain both for the animals and for us pretty convincing. He points out that animal husbandry may be a necessary part of a sustainable agriculture since relying on animal fertilization is the chief alternative to the chemical variety. In other words, a strictly vegetarian agriculture might end up being more industrialized and centralized than a pastoral and diversified agriculture that includes plants andanimals.

The issue of vegetarianism breaks down into at least two components: the question of suffering and the question of killing. Almost everyone will admit, at least theoretically, that it’s wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering on animals. So, in theory, you could get most people to concede, I think, that the conditions of factory farms are wicked. However, things start getting much murkier when we talk about what evil, if any, is involved in killing animals for food, if, for the sake of argument, we suppose they were raised humanely and killed painlessly. Even Peter Singer allows that painlessly killing animals for food can be ok if it results in greater overall utility.

Pollan argues that there’s no great evil in killing animals as such. He gives two reasons for this. First, the species is more important than the individual. Animal rightists are wrong, he says, to focus so much on individual animals. For instance, if we took it upon ourselves to protect animals in the wild from predators we would end up condemning the predators to starvation and, ultimately, the prey to overpopulation and eventual starvation. What’s more important, Pollan says, is to preserve the natural balance of species.

This leads to Pollan’s second argument against animal rights perspectives: they are, he maintains, too sentimental and squeamish about predation in nature. Morality, for Pollan, is a human social construct, not a standard that can be applied to the facts of nature. Deracinated urban vegetarians need to take a better look at the actual workings of nature and recognize that death is part of the cycle of life. Indeed, he contends that a strictly vegetarian world might well result in a greater number of animals killed (because of the necessity of cultivating crops on animal pasture and rangeland to feed all the new vegetarians), and that many existing human habitations would have to be given up since they’re only suited for raising animals.

Pollan is right, I think, to point out the futility of trying to live completely “cruelty-free”; human life and civilization inherently lead to the deaths of animals. We compete for resources, for food, and for habitat. The philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark is perhaps on firmer ground when he writes:

The rights that all self-owners have simply as such cannot include any right of immunity to disease, predation or famine. No such right can be justly defended for all self-owners, since the terrestrial economy is organised around the fact of predation. None of us can be treated absolutely and only as ‘ends-in-themselves’, never to be material for another’s purposes. Of all of us it is literally true that we are food. If blackbirds have no right not to be eaten by foxes (and people, correspondingly, no duty to protect them), since such a general right would deny the right of life to foxes, but blackbirds have all the ‘natural’ rights that all self-owners have, it follows that we too have no right not to be eaten. The only ‘right to life’ that all self-owners might be allowed, just as such, is the right to live as the creature one is, under the same law as all others. Foxes do no wrong in catching what they can: they would be doing wrong if they prevented the creatures whom they prey upon from enjoying their allotted portion in the sun, if they imprisoned, frustrated and denied them justice. Foxes, obviously, are not at fault. (Stephen R. L. Clark, “Animals, Ecosystems and the Liberal Ethic” in Animals and their Moral Standing, p. 83)

However, Clark continues, this perspective:

requires that no one do more than enjoy a due share of the fruits of the earth, that forward-looking agents plan their agricultural economy with a view to allowing the diversity of creatures some share of happiness according to their kind. It does not require that everyone abstain from killing and eating animals, if that is how the human creatures their are can live. Some people may so abstain, because they see no need to live off their non-human kindred, but this (on liberal views) must be their choice, not their duty. (pp. 83-4)

I don’t think Pollan would really disagree with this, and it suggests an approach to vegetarianism that’s more vocational than deontological. It can be one way of not taking more than our “due share of the fruits of the earth” and of allowing other creatures their “allotted portion of the sun.” But humane and sustainable farming can also be a way of doing this. In fact, if, as seems likely, a sustainable and humane animal husbandry might result in considerably less meat being produced, there would seem to be a need for people who forgo flesh-food altogether, or at least most of the time.

Pollan on the ethics of meat eating

In general I find Michael Pollan’s indictment of our current industrial food system, which floats on a sea of subsidized corn, fossil fuels, and chemical fertilizers, entirely persuasive. And his account of a week spent at self-described “libertarian Christian environmentalist” Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, where the natural ecosystem of a functioning farm is respected and animals are pasture-fed and humanely slaughtered, is compelling in making the case for a more humane and sustainable agriculture.

In the last part of the book Pollan, who is tracing the origins of four distinct kinds of meals (industrial, big-organic, “beyond organic,” and self-produced), decides to examine the shortest food chain of all: a meal made entirely from ingredients that he hunted, gathered, and grew himself. Pollan, a hunting novice, goes in search of wild boar in northern California to form the centerpiece of his meal.

This leads Pollan to an intellectual excursus on the ethics of meat eating. Pollan concedes much of the case made by animal rights proponents like Peter Singer and Tom Regan: in modern factory farms we inflict a degree and amount of suffering on sentient animals that is impossible to justify merely in order to satisfy our own gustatory pleasures. The industrial forms of agriculture that are, in Pollan’s view, undermining human health, pleasure, and well-being, rob literally billions of animals of any kind of dignified existence.

But Pollan isn’t prepared to go all the way with animal rights-ers who oppose all killing of animals for food. One of his more compelling arguments, I think, is that animal domestication isn’t analogous to slavery, as some of the more overheated animal liberation rhetoric might have it. It’s more like symbiosis: certain animal species realized that they had a better shot at survival by entering into a kind of bargain with us where we feed them, shelter them, and protect them from predators in exchange for them providing us with eggs, milk, and eventually meat. “From the animals’ point of view the bargain with humanity turned out to be a tremendous success, at least until our own time” (p. 320).

What changed in our own time, of course, is that we radically revised the terms of the “bargain.” Animals confined to tiny cages, denied sunlight, mutilated, and driven to aberrant behaviors are no longer living lives appropriate to their kind. So, even on the most generous reading of the bargain, we aren’t living up to our end. Pollan concludes that “people who care about animals should be working to ensure that the ones they eat don’t suffer, and that their deaths are swift and painless” (p. 328).

Pollan makes the interesting suggestion that one of the reasons we’re so confused in our attitudes toward animals, veering from sentimentality to extreme brutality, is that the mechanization of animal husbandry has rendered unnecessary the cultural framework that helped pre-modern people negotiate relations with their non-human fellows. “[I]t was the ritual–the cultural rules and norms–that allowed them to look, and then to eat. We no longer have any rituals governing either the slaughter or eating of animals, which perhaps helps explain why we find ourselves in this dilemma, in a place where we feel our only choice is either to look away or give up meat” (pp. 331-2).

A more transparent process of raising and slaughtering food animals, he thinks, would force us to come to terms with what we’re doing in ways analogous to our ancestors’ rituals. Factory farms are invisible and inaccessible to most people, who likely don’t give much thought to the precise process by which that neatly wrapped package of meat ends up in the supermarket. But if we saw what was going on, we would have to make changes.

Obama in SC

I’ve been an Obama skeptic (I don’t much care for his rhetoric about transforming politics in some kind of great transcendent leap forward), but even my stony heart was moved a bit by his victory in South Carolina and the ensuing speech:

Realistically speaking, I think he’s our best bet, which is probably about as close as I’ll come to an endorsement. (I still reserve the right to vote third-party in November.)

Against the globalized food chain

And why should a nation produce its own food when others can produce it more cheaply? A dozen reasons leap to mind, but most of them the Steven Blanks of the world–and they are legion–are quick to dismiss as sentimental. I’m thinking of the sense of security that comes from knowing that your community, or country, can feed itself; the beauty of an agricultural landscape; the outlook and kinds of local knowledge that farmers bring to a community; the satisfaction of buying food from a farmer you know rather than the supermarket; the locally inflected flavor of a raw-milk cheese or honey. All those things–all those pastoral values–globalization proposes to sacrifice in the name of efficiency and economic growth.

Though you do begin to wonder who is truly the realist in this debate, and who the romantic. We live, as [Wendell] Berry has written (in an essay called “The Total Economy”), in an era of “sentimental economics,” since the promise of global capitalism, much like the promise of communism before it, ultimately demands an act of faith: that if we permit the destruction of certain things we value here and now we will achieve a greater happiness and prosperity at some unspecified future time. As Lenin put it, in a sentiment the WTO endorses in its rulings every day, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. — Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, p. 256

I’ve been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma back-to-back with Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food, and hope to have some more to say about them soon.

Friday metal - rap-metal edition

Two great tastes that taste great together. Well, sometimes… This particular cross-hybridization has spawned a lot of junk (Limp Bizkit, anyone?), but also some interesting stuff. Here’s a sampling:

Onyx and Biohazard, “Judgment Night” (from the soundtrack of the movie by the same name; this featured a bunch of metal/rap team ups):

Anthrax, “I’m The Man”:

and “Bring the Noise” with Public Enemy:

Faith No More (pre-Mike Patton), “We Care A Lot”:

and with Patton (Live at Rock in Rio doing “We Care A Lot” and “Epic):

Rage Against the Machine, “Bulls On Parade”:

Beastie Boys, “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” featuring none other than Kerry King from Slayer on guitar!

And, of course, the ur-rock/rap collaboration:

Surprisingly apt search terms

Sometimes bloggers will post lists of the wacky search terms that lead people to their blog. But this selection of mine from the last couple of days shows people…being led here looking for things that are actually discussed on this blog. How boring!

presidential candidate quiz
“skeptical of the skeptical environmentalist
“where did the party go” “jeff taylor”
Presidential Candidate Quiz
Obama left
if god is not a vending machine then why
Atonement reading notes
ST aUGUSTINES HANG UPS ON SEX
there will be neither jew nor gentile
elca non-christians
alienation from God
thinking reed
presidential candidate selector
“skeptical of the skeptical environmentalist
praying the psalms daily
religious predestionation [sic]
lutheran outlook on just war
augustine
“keith ward” “virgin birth”
mutualist localism