Inadvertent Obfuscation

My friend and erstwhile co-blogger Raffi Magarik has written a post on literary criticism of Beowulf and the Bible. He points out the novelty of J.R.R. Tolkein’s 1936 essay urging scholars to examine the Anglo-Saxon poem on its own literary terms rather than unflatteringly measuring it by contemporary standards or else focusing solely on its historical value. Raffi notes that the parallel to Robert Alter’s biblical criticism is strong–both Tolkein and Alter contend, essentially, that the most fruitful study is the most open-minded.

Surely that perspective is now more commonplace in academia, with the flowering of comparative literature and ethnography and other postmodern disciplines. It’s also apparent in an essay that, as anyone who’s talked with me about it knows, I consider to be the paragon of cultural and literary criticism: Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force“, published just a few years after Tolkein’s Beowulf essay. Of course, unlike Tolkein, Weil doesn’t have to defend the literary value of the historical poem. Instead she reinterprets it as a psychological guide to contemporary politics (specifically, the fall of France). Surely that’s where the greatest value of historical literary criticism lies–not in parsing works as historical artifacts but in scouring them for wisdom (or, in the lovely allegory of Tolkein’s that Raffi quotes, climbing them to see the ocean).

I recently visited the Byzantium and Islam exhibition at the Met, an extensive collection which exists largely because of early 20th-century archaeologists’ zealous fascination with (and consequent desire to uncover) the historical truth of Christianity. I was lucky enough to be guided through the exhibit by its organizer, Dr. Helen Evans. It seemed that she found those archaeologists’ efforts quaint and curious. What Christian insights would a bunch of historians from Yale and the British Museum possibly have thought to gain by mapping the trade routes of Galilee? What they ultimately discovered–countless artifacts and ruins–proved to be of tremendous historical and cultural value. But despite the excavators’ desperate hopes, they revealed no fresh understanding of Christianity or the Bible.

It’s not that literature is independent of historical context. Just the opposite: historical context helps reveal the intelligence of the authors. In her essay, Weil refers to Aeschylus, Pythagoras, and Plato, alongside Priam, Hector, and Achilles. She does so in order to emphasize the universality of literary themes, not their limitations. Historical investigation should create potential for literary insight instead of restricting our imagination.

Which one of these is not like the others?

• Racism
• Sexism
• Speciesism
• Ageism
• Classism
• Anti-Semitism
• Able-bodyism
• Homophobia

Why is sexual orientation the only discriminatory category defined as a phobia? It would have been more consistent to use “homosexualism”, a term which instead typically signifies the condition of being homosexual. Similarly, “transphobia” is in vastly more frequent use than “transism”.

Curious, I looked up the first usages of these terms in the OED, thinking that perhaps the “isms” and “phobias” had emerged at different times, under the sway of different linguistic mores. I was surprised to find how young most of these words are (and that they all emerged more or less with their contemporary meanings):

• Racism, 1936
• Sexism, 1968 (and sexist, 1965)
• Speciesism, 1975
• Ageism, 1969
• Classism, 1842
• Anti-Semitism, 1881
• Homophobia, 1969 (though the original meaning, “fear of men”, dates to 1920)

The last term, homophobia, was only added to the OED within the last few years (my 2004 print copy has no entry).

But this brings us no closer to explaining the etymological difference between “phobias” and “isms”. “Homophobia”, “sexism”, and “ageism” are nearly contemporaneous.

My instinct is to leap to a cultural explanation: that discrimination on the basis of sexuality carries different cultural connotations than discrimination on the basis of age, sex, etc.; that sexuality, as a psychological state, invites a perception of otherness somehow distinct from physical states like race, sex, and age; and that otherness begets fear. My next instinct is to suppose that this distinction reveals some clue about the psychology of the phobias which ought to help progressives combat them.

I haven’t verified either of those instincts, and I’m not entirely sure how to investigate their merit.

This might be of some interest:

Edit: also this.

It’s a problem the Fed has struggled to solve with complex methods like quantitative easing. The rationale is that even if you wanted to drop interest rates lower than zero in order to stimulate economic growth, you couldn’t–people would simply withdraw their money and hold it as cash. That’s why savings accounts always give you a positive rate of return, even if it’s very small.

Maybe I’m missing something, because it doesn’t add up to me. Cash is a very dangerous medium in which to keep your money, not to mention inconvenient. It’s probably even more dangerous than safe haven commodities (like gold). I would much rather store my money in a bank with a -3% interest rate than keep it in my mattress.

And if banks start charging a negative interest rate on their accounts, then lending at a smaller negative rate should start to look appealing, right? Without having to resort to more chaotic and destructive methods.

So, hypothetically–while inflation is low, banks start “charging” customers a -3% rate, the Fed lowers the prime rate to -2%, et voila, watch the credit flow!

The following is my submission to an essay contest hosted by the Ethicist blog at the Times. The task: Explain, in 600 words, why it’s ethical to eat meat. Entries are judged by an all-star (though all-white, all-male) panel including Peter Singer, Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Andrew Light.

The greatest challenge, I felt, was not so much the judges’ wide-ranging views on ethics and food policy as their diverse writing styles. How to compose an essay that would appeal simultaneously to the analytic philosophical background of Singer, the policy wonkery of Light, the literary flair of Foer, the populism of Pollan, and the journalistic curiosity of Bittman?

My essay, I’m quite sure, failed to satisfy most if not all of those objectives. (Update: Indeed it did. This rather circuitous essay won instead.) It’s also more hastily written and more lightly edited than I’d like. Nevertheless, I hope the core ethical contention is mildly novel and orthogonal to these judges’ typical lines of attack on carnivorism.

Animals feel pain. They may well be conscious, self-aware, or sentient, however we choose to define those terms. Despite our evolutionary instinct to elevate ourselves above other species, as rational beings, we ought to care about creatures who share our sentience. Yet we cage livestock by the billions, condemning them to painful lives that animal rights supporters accurately liken to concentration camps.

There is nothing savory about the malevolent machinery of industrial meat production. More humane alternatives, like free-range pastures, are still morbid outfits organized around slaughter. These enterprises fulfill no human need, only the idle craving of people who seldom witness the mechanism enabling our consumption.

But they do serve one meaningful purpose: to create life. Most of the livestock in factory farms and family farms alike live only because of our consumption. It’s the unspoken inevitability of moral vegetarianism that when we put an end to the suffering of animals by ceasing to eat them, we will also put an end—or a near end—to their bloodlines.

Perhaps that’s for the best. Their lives are so grievous that some might consider them to be worse than never having lived at all.

To be, or not to be? That is the question we unfortunately cannot ask animals. But we can ask ourselves: How awful must a life be to be worse than no life at all?

Children were born to mothers in Nazi concentration camps—children with no hope of survival, who would know nothing but suffering from birth to young death. But who would say it were better for these children never to have been than to have known life, even a brief and painful one?

Of course we would wish greater happiness for such unfortunate creatures. But for religious or secular reasons, we find there to be meaning in the most nasty, brutish, and short of lives.

Millions inhabiting slums can be said to live “like animals”—buried in sewage and filth, packed in dense, noxious compounds, with short life expectancy and little hope of escape. They remain in these slums, in part, because of our inaction—our failure to care enough about their well being. We have a responsibility to help them. We do not have a responsibility to eugenicize their population. The very thought is preposterous. Yet that is precisely what many animal rights supporters suggest we do to the billions of livestock animals who exist only because we demand their meat.

Animals, if they are sentient creatures capable of pleasure and pain, should likewise experience less suffering and more pleasure than they do in cramped pens under the farmer’s electric baton. But if they are sentient then, like humans, are their most truncated and futile lives not also imbued with meaning, however fleeting? Is it not better that they should at least glimpse the world we share?

That is the decision I make when I buy a turkey at the supermarket. The turkey would not have lived had I not wanted to consume it. Do I have a responsibility to make my next turkey’s life less painful and more humane, perhaps by buying it from free-range or family farms, or even by hunting it in the wild? Without a doubt. But can I condemn that turkey’s life, however short, as worthless, morally bad, worse than never having lived at all?

This is the paradox of moral vegetarianism: If livestock animals are not very sentient, we shouldn’t care very much about their suffering. But if they are sentient, we should celebrate their lives—while (and this is the part meat eaters too often overlook) striving to improve them.