First Principles

A friend of mine sent me a rather amusing article in National Review this morning, teasing PETA for their inconsistent and somewhat hypocritical stand on the whole “meat is murder” thing.  The piece cited a study noting that farming vegetable products actually kills far more animals (field mice and such) than raising livestock does, counted the bodies, and concluded that Veganism is a far bloodier way to live.

Of course, the article is clearly Mammal-ist for only counting the field mice and other assorted rodents.  What about all the insects that are surely killed by the combine (not to mention on the farmer’s pickup windshield on the way to the field)?  What about the worms in the ground, and the spiders in the corn stalks?  Are they not harmed directly, or at least deprived of food?

And why stop with Subjects of the Animal Kingdom?  How many individual wheat plants are killed so that a single human might live?  And the crop plants don’t just face a brutal death at the hands of the mechanical scythes – they are born into captivity and enslaved by their masters, denied the choice to procreate how the will, grow as tall or as short as they like…  If hippies think it’s wrong to cut down a big tree, then what is the moral difference between that and digging up a lowly potato?  Does it make you less of a murderer if you have sap on your hands rather than blood?

And why stop there?  If all living things have a right to live, should we ban antibiotics for moral reasons?  Should we cease work immediately on eliminating viral scourges of humanity, because it’s illegitimate to kill so many other fellow organisms for our own species-ist selfish comfort?  Could it be that our immune systems themselves are deeply, irredeemably immoral?

And before we all die off for The Greater Good, do we have a responsibility to send interspecies peacekeeping forces to stop the genocide of the gazelle at the hands of the murderous lion?

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I once made this argument to some poor woman standing on a street corner near Waikiki Beach attempting to convert passers-by to the moral cause of vegetarianism.  With a look that can only be duplicated by a child hearing that Santa may not really exist, she said something about carrots having less well developed nervous systems than chickens.  When I pointed out that our nervous systems are more highly developed than that of a chicken, she muttered that “the Men” would know more than she did, and then she literally ran away as fast as she could go.

At least you have to give her credit for knowing when to quit.  I doubt she started eating hamburgers after that, though.

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Making fun of these people is almost too easy.  And it’s fair to say that people who are vegetarians or vegans for “moral” reasons are for the most part far out on the fringes of the American political scene.  They have little or no influence, except maybe on college campuses and on the menu selection committee of the Democratic National Convention.  But the attitude that underlies it – that individual human beings are just one more object out there, with value that may or may not exceed some other thing, person, or social order – is at the fundamental heart of modern American liberalism.  And as absurd and amusing as some iterations of that central belief can be, like the vegans, the more mainstream strains can be downright dangerous.

Once the fundamental notion that there is something special about human beings as individuals is tossed to the side, then it becomes quite easy to justify some of the worst horrors in history.  After all, it’s just as easy to say that such ridiculous equivalence lowers the worth of humanity rather than raises that of the animal.  Slavery certainly kept the economy of the antebellum South afloat and booming.  Che and Fidel killed thousands of people, but at least they created a worker’s paradise for those who lived.  Stalin always said you needed to break a few eggs if you were going to make an omelet, and look how grandly that all worked itself out!  You can kill the Jews if it brings pride and glory back to the Reich – in the long run, who will miss them as long as the trains still run on time? And how about the disabled and infirm amongst us?  Shouldn’t we cull them as we would pull weeds in a garden?

Even without the eugenics and genocide, the de-humanizing of humans can take its toll.  If people are just another animal, then they can and probably should be trained, told what to do, taken care of, managed, and even owned.  Bureaucracies to manage every aspect of daily life is now easy to justify.  Health care can be doled out by our betters, decisions about our diet and shopping habits can be controlled for our own good, and we can be restricted in what we’re able to read, see, or hear.  Should we be content with being fed twice a day out of a metal dish with a scientifically balanced heap of dry nuggets?

On the other side of that coin is the absence of responsibility.  If you can’t punish a cat for killing a mouse because the cat is simply acting according to her nature, then how can you punish one person from killing another?

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When the sanctity and supremacy of the individual human being is dismissed, the results are inevitably tyranny or anarchy.  If “a rat is a fish is a dog is a boy,” as PETA’s co-founder Ingrid Newkirk has informed us, then does the rat have the same value as the boy, or is it the other way around?

Unworthy is the society that treats its people in the same manner it does its sewer rodents.