The worst kind of emergency

Tuesday 3 July 2012

Like most people who want to think of themselves as morally conscientious, I've been acutely aware of my obligation to contribute to charity for some time now. I wrote in March last year in the post 'Further Irish adventures' on my travel blog, Ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted: 

I can’t really explain it, I suspect because it doesn’t make sense, but I feel a kind of guilt being in someone else’s country and being better off than them. Here I am, a visitor, a traveller in London and there’s a homeless man whose country this is, and I’m better off than him.

In retrospect, I now feel I can account for that 'inexplicable', 'irrational' guilt with another passage from the brilliant documentary that everyone should see, Stephanie Black's Life and Debt, and the book upon which it is based, Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place: 

But some natives--most natives in the world--cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go--so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.

The writer has, I think, natives of the third world in mind here, but I think it applies to the homeless of the first world, too. I think I was picking up on this dichotomy between the privileged tourist and the impoverished native, and it made me uncomfortable. I continued in that post to explain how I assuaged both this tourist's guilt and my obligation to give:

I just made a promise to myself that, while travelling, I would give something to everyone who asked it of me – even if it’s just always the smallest coin in my pocket (although I think giving single pennies away is more insulting than anything else). I know it’s irrational, but I don’t think giving can really be a bad thing, so I’m happy to keep doing it. It’s either homeless people, charity workers, or buskers, so the money’s never going somewhere it shouldn’t.

I felt that satisfied my obligation while I was away, but I always intended to, upon my return, do some research and choose a charity or two that I could champion and support regularly. The task, however, proved too large and too difficult. Where do you start? How do you choose between one cause and another? I soon realised that the very dedication I had to the idea of charity (and of finding the right one) was only serving to delay my actual participation in it. So my ultimate solution ended up resembling my European policy more than anything else. Since then, I've been meting out smaller amounts of money more frequently to whichever charitable cause comes my way. $10, say, every time a friend does a charity run. 
 

So far this has led me to make donations to causes as diverse as the Sexy Tales Comedy theatre collective, Cancer Research UK, the Leukaemia Foundation, the lesser known Nepalese Blinknow Foundation and even, controversially, Invisible Children's Kony 2012 campaign. I have also recently begun to donate monthly to the activist group GetUp!, although I would classify that as a third-tier act of charity. It's third-tier because, as strongly as I feel about the issue, its importance is higher-order, more abstract, contentious. I might be wrong about the need for the Australian political discourse to be dragged left, just as it might not be as important to donate to the Atheist Foundation of Australia, or any particular political party, despite my personal feelings on the issue. These are disputable ideological causes whose need to be kept at the third tier is underlined when you consider that many people in the world would not donate to GetUp! or Avaaz, but to right-wing think tanks and the like. I would also place donations to arts organisations, libraries, museums, schools, local children's sports clubs, and other institutions of general good in this category. These are worthy causes, but they would serve only to improve lives, not to save them. The fact that there are two tiers of importance below them should not reflect poorly on their worth, but rather on how very dire the need of other causes is.

We can all agree, for instance, about finding a cure for cancer, or multiple sclerosis, or AIDS, or leukaemia, whatever objections I may have to the shameless corporate exploitation of the breast cancer pink ribbon (most disgustingly in the name of 'breast cancer awareness', as though we could be any more aware of breast cancer), and misgivings I might have about the resulting disproportionate funding of breast cancer research to that of other cancers. These potentially life-saving causes I would name second-tier, once again because of the seriousness of other causes, not because of their own lack of worth.

Because, while the pursuit of cures for disease is undoubtedly a noble cause, no one can say it is morally wrong that diseases exist, that this is an injustice for which we are implicitly to blame and which we can act to stop. That is the nature of the first-tier causes, those which attempt to solve and alleviate poverty.

Now, semantic decay has unfortunately seen to it that we hear talk about poverty mostly as meaningless platitudes. We're all inured to it. 'Starving children in Africa' has become a reproach for parents to get their children to finish their meals and avoid waste, the touchstone invoked rhetorically in every argument, a phrase to be bandied about by comedians in witty contrasts with petty Western concerns.

But try to stop and think about it for a second, as I have recently. Try to undo the work of semantic decay, to resensitise yourself. It's like how we grow up with giraffes and elephants in our books and toyboxes, their long necks and noses pointed out to us as their distinguishing features from the very beginning, so we are robbed of the chance to ever really marvel at them, until one day you're half-watching a documentary when you realise how remarkable they really are.

Think about it. Try to look at it from an objective perspective, that of intelligent alien observers, or our descendents in the future. What would they think when they heard that three quarters of the world's population lived in poverty and the other quarter did nothing. How can we go on with our lives knowing that the rest of the world is suffering in this way? How can we buy an expensive new TV when we know that if we only donated that money to a charity instead, we would literally be saving hundreds of lives? How can we spend billions exploring space when we haven't even solved the problems here on Earth? How is this allowed to go on? If you accept that the boundaries between nations are arbitrary and we are all just human beings on this world, it's hard to believe. It's hard not to think that there should be some kind of limit on the wealth that a nation can possess while its neighbours are dying of easily curable diseases. That each rich country should have to take on a number of poor ones whose welfare it is their responsibility to ensure before they can continue to expand themselves. The poverty of the vast majority of the world is nothing short of an emergency, and it is the worst kind: the kind that we have gotten used to. The kind that can last centuries.

Think about the last time you heard about or saw someone rich, or some possession you wish you were rich enough to own. Now realise that nearly everyone in the rest of the world feels that way about you. The rest of the world would give anything to be in your financial position, however humble you may feel that to be. And not just now, but for all human history. It's mindblowing. This tweet comes to mind:

In light of all this, I've decided to add a new page to this blog, which will track my charitable efforts over this financial year. I'm not doing it to boast. I'm doing it because I want to be able to see the difference I've made, and judge whether I feel it's enough. I'm doing it mindful of what Peter Singer has been urging us to do: change the culture of giving. To make it something that you would expect any normal, decent person to do, something that you could envision bringing up in casual conversation: 'Oh, so who do you donate to?'

I'm urging you to do the same. Pick a charity, a first-tier one, and work out how much you can spare and start giving. Then, if you want, you can give to the second and third tiers too. Or do what I do and give out ten dollars here and there wherever the opportunity arises. As Singer says on the webpage linked to above:

almost a billion people live very comfortable lives, with money to spare for many things that are not at all necessary. (You are not sure if you are in that category? When did you last spend money on something to drink, when drinkable water was available for nothing? If the answer is “within the past week” then you are spending money on luxuries while children die from malnutrition or diseases that we know how to prevent or cure.)

Once you have any amount of expendable income there is no excuse for you not to give. If your savings are in the hundreds, just give ten dollars every now and then at the least. We live in the age of the internet. You can do it with your credit card without ever seeing your money leave your hand. You won't even notice the difference, I promise.

And don't just give, but record it, like I am. Publicly, if possible, but privately otherwise. So you know how much you're giving and can feel good or bad about it accordingly. And talk about it. Take the pledge on Singer's website. Tell people you're looking for a charity to donate to and ask them who they recommend. Act surprised if they say they don't give. Shame them subtly if you must. And every time you give to charity, click the 'share on Facebook' or 'share on Twitter' buttons afterwards. Let everyone see, and let's change the culture of giving.

References

Stephanie Black's 2001 documentary Life and Debt, produced by Tuff Gong Pictures.

 

My 2011 blog post 'Further Irish adventures' on my blog Ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted.

Lisa Pryor (@pryorlisa)'s 2012 tweet.

WhatNewsShouldBe's 2011 YouTube video, 'african food joke comic strip', of Dwayne Perkins's 'Not a Part of the Problem' comedy routine.

Cloud atlas and the left

Monday 16 April 2012

I'm quite short of time at the moment (one assessment due tomorrow, one on Thursday, three books to read this week, editing work needed for Wednesday, going to Melbourne for the comedy festival from Thursday to Monday, with a presentation on a book I haven't started reading due two days after I get back), so in lieu of a real post, here's something I've been meaning to put up here for a while that won't eat too much into my time.

A while ago, while Til and I were travelling around Italy and Greece, I read a wonderful book by David Mitchell called Cloud Atlas, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004 and which was recommended to me by one of my lecturers, the excellent Dr Joshua Lobb.

I'm increasingly interested at the moment in tracing back the texts and ideas I encountered that led me to certain conclusions, because sometimes my conclusions (eg socialism, vegetarianism) seem so radical when just looked at bare. But if I could present people with a more manageable sequence of ideas that, once accepted, lead to that conclusion, it might be more understandable.

The book is full of beauty and poignancy, but in particular the passage I want to quote below, the ending of the book, when read after undertaking the journey of the entire novel, was one of the first things I encountered that led me to start thinking about why a progressive, leftist, socialist (look it up if that sounds alarming; it might not mean what you think it means) approach to world governance is a better one than a conservative, capitalist, individualist one. I now see the divide between left and right as largely one of cooperative socialism and competitive individualism. It even had a part to play in the development of my ideas about vegetarianism (note the 'weaselly word' the narrator identifies, and possibly see my post ''Naturalness', semantic decay and veg(etari)anism (part two of three)').


And don't worry, it doesn't have much in the way of spoilers, although being the final passage there are a few references you obviously won't understand if you haven't read the book:

Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.

What precipitates acts? Belief.

Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & beastiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why underminde the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?

Why? Because of this: – one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Is this the entropy written within our nature?

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peacably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth and its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.

A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.

I hear my father-in-law's response. 'Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don't tell me about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the red-necks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell 'em their imperial slaves' rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's! Oh, you'll grow hoarse, poor & grey in caucuses! You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed Hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!'

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops? (527–529)

Incidentally, there's a film adaptation of Cloud Atlas coming out late this year with Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Jim Sturgess, so get your hands on a copy and read it beforehand!

LPL

References

David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas, published in 2003.

Cover image.

Anthropocentrism and the sentience hierarchy (part three of three)

 Wednesday 21 March 2012

This post originally formed part of my other post, ''Naturalness', semantic decay, anthropocentrism, hierarchy and veg(etari)anism (part two of two)'. Upon rereading it shortly after I first posted it, I decided it was really a separate issue and could be excised to make that post more readable. I hadn't gotten around to reposting it yet, so this is it, part three in my series of posts about veg(etari)anism.

In 'Miranda devine: enemy of the heart, the mind and vegetarianism' I argued that one of the central positions of Devine's piece – that we may as well eat meat because even if we only eat plants, we are still causing pain and death – was flawed because, among other things, it assumes that there is not a hierarchy in the capacity for suffering of different forms of life.

Positioning sentience as the sole criterion for valuing life is not without its problems. Viewed from the most objective, abstract perspective practically imaginable – say, that of an omniscient gaseous cloud which gained mass somehow from the dream of a fictional character imagined by a germ on the forehead of an alien* – it's arbitrary, biased, and it doesn't take into account forms of sentience we don't understand. But it's really all we have to go on. Like many things, it's an imperfect starting point, unstable ground upon which we have no choice but to build our more reasonable, moral theories.

*Suggestions for further abstraction welcome. 

Life is intrinsically valuable, but we can discriminate between the relative values of its different forms on the basis of sentience – the capacity of a lifeform to experience pleasure and pain, to have a 'preference', as Peter Singer explains in Animal Liberation, which David Foster Wallace calls 'more or less the bible of the modern animal-rights movement':

     It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a

     stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone 

     does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing 

     that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its

     welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in

     not being kicked along the road, because it will suffer if it is.

Others have argued that all life is irreducibly and equally valuable. The system of reasoning I'm outlining, however, contends, perhaps less radically, that human beings come out on top. Our lives are the most valuable and the most important. But there's a crucial distinction between the reasoning that brought me to this conclusion and the reasoning used by others that privilege human life over animal. If you've read my blog post, 'Positions on political correctness: towards a stratigraphical model of argumentation', which you almost certainly haven't, this situation might sound familiar. We have the base Position containing all those traditional justifications humanity gave itself to do whatever it wanted to animals – man is greater than beast, God gave men mastery over animals – which has been countered by the Position asserting universal equality of life. My Position seeks to occupy a third stratum paradigmatically above the other two, but syntagmatically between them. The 'mastery over animals' Position condones any violence that humans wish to enact upon animals, and the 'irreducible and equal value of life' one allows none, but mine (and many others') justifies the taking of animal life only when there is a direct choice between animal and human life: when, for example, a human must eat an animal to survive, or when an animal attacks a human.

The effective distinction between the three arguments, then, can be found in the points at which they locate the justification for the taking of animal life on a scale of necessity. Under Position 1, it can be almost anything – nourishment, pleasure, entertainment, convenience. Position 3 locates the distinction at a point beyond all of these, making them all violations of its rule, but some more extreme violations than others.

It takes a lot for me to dismiss the death or pain of a fellow human being, considering the importance I place on empathy as a characteristic, and it's usually the kind of thing I cringe at when I hear someone else do. I've found one exception, however, to be when humans kill animals for reasons that constitute more extreme violations of Position 3 and are themselves killed or injured in the process, as, for example, happened earlier this year when a hunter accidentally shot a protected grizzly bear thinking it was a black bear, or as occasionally happens to Spanish bullfighters:

Gustavo Cuevas's World Press Photo award–winning shot of matador Julio Aparicio being gored in the throat.

When a human is injured in this way, I can't help myself thinking good on the animal that did it. And no matter the sympathy I have for victims' families, my reaction is usually at least 'fair enough' when a person is killed in this way. If humans breed animals specifically for the purpose of killing them needlessly, or if they go into the animal's habitat with the same intention, and the animal is able to overcome the significant odds stacked against it, I simply can't help applauding it. It's not unlike the response evoked by the death of a mass murderer: certainly nothing like the mindless, morbid delight of the celebrations that ensued upon the death of Osama Bin Laden, but nevertheless a calm sense that justice has been done (in this light, another justification for killing a sentient being might be added to the argument – punishment for undoubtable, confessed, wilful, unrepentant mass murder of humans or other equivalent beings on the sentience hierarchy, by a human or other equivalent being on the sentience hierarchy).

The interesting and somewhat disturbing corollary of the sentience hierarchy as I have described it is that, if Earth was colonised by a race of aliens more intelligent than us, it would be morally acceptable for them to eat us if it came down to a choice between that or starving. The only defense would be an addition that asserts that the hierarchy plateaus at a certain level of intelligence, and all species beyond that point are equally as important as one another in spite of any differences in intelligence, and it is therefore universally wrong to kill any of them. But it would be fairly convenient to locate this plateau just below humans in the hierarchy. You'd at least have to include the great apes and the higher-order sea mammals, but humanity's actions hardly accord with this inclusion considering the damage we do to the habitats of both.

Which is unsurprising considering humanity's overall hypocritical, anthropocentric attitude to predation. You only have to look at popular culture television shows and films to see that we regard anything that hunts us as evil, but anything we hunt as an acceptable source of food. In Dragon Ball, Goku hunts wolves and giant fish, but dinosaurs and even other humans who hunt other animals are characterised as villains and are consequently attacked by the morally incorrigible protagonist. The same hypocrisy can even be found in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's okay for Buffy to kill vampires and demons because, 'They're evil'. Why are they evil? Because they eat humans and they have no souls. But why discriminate against creatures just because they have no soul? They can't help it. They're just as intelligent as humans, and the show demonstrates they have the capacity to suffer, but killing them is acceptable because they need to prey on humans to survive. In this respect they're more moral than us; we eat animals even though we don't need to, but a vampire can subsist on nothing but blood (although pig's blood is a viable, more conscionable option for the program's re-ensouled undead). But stay your hands, Whedonites. I hasten to add that, to be fair, the show does engage with the Slayer/killer opposition.

'Yeah, I prefer the term 'slayer'. You know, 'killer' just sounds so ... Like I ... paint clowns or something. I'm the good guy, remember?'

References

Gustavo Cuevas's photograph, 21 May 2010.

Marti Noxon's television episode 'Buffy vs. Dracula', from Joss Whedon's television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 5, Episode 1.

Peter Singer's book, Animal Liberation, quoted in David Foster Wallace's essay, 'Consider the Lobster'.

David Foster Wallace's essay, 'Consider the Lobster', in Gourmet Magazine in August 2004.

The hegelian dialectic

Saturday 21 January 2012

     
     Any feedback, suggestions, corrections, criticisms or referrals to 

     existing similar models will be useful in refining the technical 

     terminology, visual metaphor and general conceptualisation of 

     the model, and will be greatly appreciated. 
     ('Positions on political correctness: towards a stratigraphical 
     model of argumentation')

So it turns out my 'stratigraphy of argumentation' model is merely the plain old Hegelian dialectic (although I gather it isn't as 'Hegelian' as that name implies). But yes, it's thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which we covered briefly in one of my Theory for Practising Writers classes, but I didn't remember enough to pick up on the similarities.

It's always a strange mix of pride, relieved excitement and embarrassment when this kind of thing happens. Pride that you came up with the same idea as a renowned philosopher on your own, relieved excitement over the fact that it's already been theorised and discussed and all you have to do is research it and apply it and possibly build upon it, and embarrassment that (in this case, anyway) I publicly and ignorantly put forth an idea that was already in existence as though it was original. 

But as I said, I'm very excited to research the concept, and I'll then be able to see how much of what I came up with on my own is superfluous and how much could still be useful for expounding upon the notion. Once I've determined that I can do another post updating my ideas. The only thing is I'm not sure when I'll get the chance, now. I've landed a massive editing job that'll see me hard at work right until university starts up again. If it stays quiet around here, that's why.

A repudiation of spelling nazism

Tuesday 27 December 2011

There was a time when I probably would've proudly identified as a spelling nazi. I think I first heard the term some time in high school, when you're eager to define yourself and will seize upon any idiosyncratic characteristic that vaguely applies to you and claim it as your own. But when I got to uni, I started seeing other people who called themselves 'spelling nazis', and it wasn't pretty when viewed from the outside, with matured eyes. It was just so clearly about attention. 'Look at me!' they seemed to be saying. 'Aren't I just so quirky? Aren't I so individual? Aren't I so smart? Aren't I just so ob-sessed with all things literary?'

It didn't help that most of these self-proclaimed spelling nazis weren't actually so great with spelling and grammar. Most of them were studying English Literatures or Creative Writing, not English Language and Linguistics.* (Evidently) they hadn't done any outside reading on language. They didn't have any real understanding of grammatical concepts or language philosophy; they just had that innate, approximate proficiency with spelling and grammar that is pretty much the best result that can be achieved by the implicit system of teaching grammar I mentioned in the last post.

*Obviously not to denigrate the worthy disciplines of English Lit or Creative Writing, in which I myself am undertaking studies. It's just that in those two, it would be quite easy to carry on at the same level of grammatical capability as at high school, without any real understanding (until Editing, perhaps, in Creative Writing). While doing English Lit, Creative Writing and Linguistics constitutes probably the most comprehensive study of the English language available at undergraduate level, it's really Linguistics that I credit with forcing me to think about language enough to move beyond the level of the 'spelling nazi'.

Yeah, this is pretty much how it is.

And then that obligatory, awkward class in first year came around, where your tutor hands back the first assessment of your degree and makes a big speech about how many people in the class didn't reference correctly and how many spelling and grammar issues there were. And there would be the nazi, sucking up to the tutor and declaring how they can't stand when they see spelling mistakes, and they think it's such a shame that no one can spell any more. And they'd always finish with a faux-self-conscious laugh and say, 'But then I'm a total spelling nazi, so maybe that's just me.'

To me, then, spelling and grammar nazis are usually just over-compensating. As perhaps is connoted by the name, they're using their often uninformed proficiency with grammar to try to gain power over others. Very often when any contentious grammatical issue arises in class, often at their own instigation, their formerly self-extolled body of knowledge is shown to be built on false precepts. They frequently have an outdated propensity towards prescriptive, rather than descriptive, grammar. They learn what they think are the 'rules' of grammar, largely propagated by misinformed primary school teachers, and apply them unquestioningly, not knowing that many of these rules are wrong. And so they go on through life, arrogantly insisting, for example, the legitimately anglicised plural octopuses become octopi, decrying the ending of sentences with prepositions, and denouncing the starting of sentences with and. Octopus has Greek roots, not Latin and, as such, if we insist on being pedantic, should technically be realised in its plural form as octopodes. The ridiculously popular notion that sentences should not end in prepositions, as Bill Bryson points out in his thoroughly entertaining and insightful book Mother Tongue (which I highly recommend as a humbling device for any spelling nazi clinging obstinately to prescriptivism*) seems to be founded merely on the fact that the word contains the prefix pre-. And as for not starting sentences with and, what possible justification could there be for the imposition of such a rule other than the self-realising argument that 'it's bad grammar'?

*I have a copy if you know me and want to borrow it.

The long-term popularity of these false (or rather, arbitrary and unnecessary) rules has gone some way to giving them the weight of truth, but even this hiccough in linguistic history has enriched language. We now have the option to adhere to these rules if we want to sound formal in, for example, an academic context, but we can remain unconstrained by them in more casual or expressive discourses like everyday speech or fiction. To insist that sentences not end in prepositions in any other context, as Susan May does, is completely absurd, and I defy any prescriptivist to explain to me why it isn't without saying, 'It's just bad writing.' 

Susan May's post actually defeats its own argument. Not only does she state that '[n]obody says, unless you are English gentry perhaps, 'From where is that noise coming?'', but she also keeps ending sentences in prepositions, sentences that sound perfectly natural, and then having to re-word or rearrange them so as to avoid doing so. But what's wrong with ending a sentence with what I'm talking about? Nothing! May seems to think that any sentence ending in a preposition is automatically invalid and sloppy, and needs to be changed, but that this is okay because the alternative is always less clunky. I have less faith. Take, for example, Churchill's famous debunking of the preposition rule (which I actually think is misattributed to him, but nevertheless): 'This is the kind of English up with which I will not put.' In that case, and in many others, it would be much smoother to end the sentence in a preposition, i.e.: 'This is the type of English I will not put up with.' May might contend that another verb phrase besides 'put up' should have been used, but I believe it's silly to disqualify certain phrasings from writing arbitrarily. Nazi discrimination is what it is.

In the old days, grammar and linguistics weren't about observing how language works, but about making up rules for how it should work, about glorifying Latin as an ancient, 'pure' language, and about ensuring any words inherited or imported from other languages continued to be used in the way their original languages used them so that, for example, they retained their original plural forms instead of gaining English ones. They were about Proper Sentences and prer NUN sea ayshun, to borrow from Arundhati Roy. In other words, they were prescriptive. Luckily for us, we've moved away from all that and accepted that language is a fluid entity, and this fluidity is to be celebrated, not castigated. It's what has led English and, indeed, language on the whole to flourish.

'Of course it is, of course it is, of course it is, of course it is. Language is my mother, my father, my husband, my brother, my sister, my whore, my mistress, my checkout girl. Language is a complimentary moist, lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God. Language is the dew on a fresh apple. It's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning light as you pull from an old bookshelf a half-forgotten book of erotic memoirs. Language is the creak on a stair. It's a spluttering match held to a frosted pane. It's a half-remembered childhood birthday party. It's the warm, wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy. The hulk of a charred Panzer. The underside of a granite boulder. The first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterrenean girl. It's cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.'

With their limited understanding of language, though, spelling and grammar nazis tend to default to prescriptivism – the result of caring about language, but not knowing much about it. Nazis and prescriptivists alike, then, refuse to accept or are ignorant of the fluidity of language and seek to pin it down. They regard any change or evolution within language with hostility, as an 'attack', or as 'erosion' or 'perversion'. If their attempts to censor new developments and neologisms in language were always successful, we would be deprived of some of our richest and most useful expressions. Fortunately, they rarely succeed, and the people behind them tend to become history's fools when the grammatical concepts they denounce take hold and become fundamental parts of common vernacular.

Sometimes, of course, language is 'under assault'. Sometimes it's used in a way that will not aid its development, a way that is redundant or banal or that obfuscates meaning. Pontification on language should be reserved for these instances, not organic occurrences which may sound different or silly, but which ultimately enrich language and expression. Those who rail against developments and changes in language should be regarded with automatic suspicion, and their arguments need to be examined. Is the change actually occurring and, if so, is it actually a bad thing, or just a different thing?  Sometimes, however, even changes for the worse end up becoming standardised, and we just need to accept this.

Are you picking up on any resemblances here? Outdated doctrines? Unquestioning belief in unfounded rules? Unreasonable opposition to change? Yep, that's right. Prescriptivist spelling nazis are the linguistic equivalent of sociopolitical conservatives, except with much, much less ground to stand on. Is it any wonder I'm scrambling to dissociate myself from them? 

The prescriptivist–conservative parallel is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the dynamic between French literary legend Marcel Proust and his contemporary Louis Ganderax, as explored by philosopher Alain de Botton. 'For Ganderax', says de Botton, 

     the priority of good writing was to follow precedent, to follow

     examples of the most distinguished authors in history, while

     bad writing began with the arrogant belief that one could avoid

     paying homage to great minds and write to one's own fancy. It

     was fitting that Ganderax had elsewhere awarded himself the 

     title of "defender of the French Language." The language needed

     to be defended against the assaults of decadents who refused to

     follow the rules of expression dictated by tradition, leading 

     Ganderax to complain publicly if he spotted a past participle in

     the wrong place or a word falsely applied in a published text. (93)

Sound familiar? Ganderax is a grammar nazi! What's scary is that you could easily replace a couple of words there and he would sound just like an American Republican politician.

Conversely, Proust had a much more sensible view of language:

     The only way to defend language is to attack it, yes, yes, Madame

     Straus! ... This man who is so sceptical has grammatical

     certainties. Alas, Madame Straus, there are no certainties, even

     grammatical ones ... [O]nly that which bears the imprint of our

     choice, our taste, our certainty, our desire and our weakness can

     be beautiful. (94)

It's troubling that France's attitude to its beautiful language seems currently to be rather more Ganderaxian (?) than Proustian, with the notorious Académie française constantly making its restrictions on the way the language can be used. Perhaps that's only what's needed to protect against the culturally imperialistic incursions of the anglosphere, but isn't the very idea of 'protecting' a language from influences pointless and counter-productive? An interplay of languages can be beneficial. Something like 30% of English words, in fact, came from French, remnants of a time when England was ruled by francophones. Imagining where English would be now, without that influence, is impossible; it has benefited immeasurably. Now the tables have turned and English is the dominant tongue seeking, if you will, to pay off its loan, but French doesn't want it. It's isolating itself from an exchange that could well promote growth. Who knows what effect this stifling will have on French? If French became as beautiful as it is via a process of change, what will ossification do to it? Won't it only make English a more attractive option, and French increasingly out-of-touch and incapable of keeping up with demand?

When we looked at de Botton's essay in WRIT316: Advanced Editing for Practising Writers, my lecturer Dr Chrissy Howe, knowing how zealous an editor I was, expected me to come down on the side of Ganderax, to take issue with Proust's wishy-washy approach to language. When she said so, I launched off on a massive tirade basically comprised of everything I've said so far. Just because you love language doesn't mean you have to be a grammar nazi.

The fight with prescriptivism takes place on a million battlefields every day. The latest instance I've come across was in the debate between YouTube atheist Cristina Rad, or 'ZOMGitsCriss' (who appeared in the episode of Q&A Til and I went to see) and another atheist named Kate Fahr going by the name of 'BionicDance'.

I think this is really at the heart of what I find so frustrating about spelling nazi prescriptivism. There's nothing more irritating (and cringe-inducing) than watching someone belittle someone else for a reason that you know is totally unjustified. Fahr's video response to Rad, declaratively titled 'You ARE TOO an Agnostic Atheist' was smug and patronising, delivered in an indescribably (but nevertheless infuriatingly) condescending tone. It opened with a melodramatic sigh and the statement, 'Folks, when someone's wrong, they're wrong, and they should be called out on it.' Too right. She then went on to use the phrase you see and kiddo to top and tail every other sentence, and kept on saying, 'I don't know what else to say to you', like an eccentric, longwinded aunt lecturing her niece or something. On top of all of that, she kept making these weird faces at the end of every point, as if to say, 'Oops, you were wrong – how awkward for you.'

Can't you just hear your mum saying this to you?: 'If you want to actually discuss these issues rationally and reasonably, like an adult, well, you're going to have to accept the fact that some of the things you don't like apply to you.'

The issue of agnosticism vs atheism is a different one which I hope to treat in the future, but for now, Fahr's criticisms of Rad were totally wrong, founded as they were in prescriptivism. Rad asserted that she is not an agnostic, but an atheist. Fahr responded, 'But you see the truth is, that is what you are. You just don't realise it because your definitions are wrong.' I almost can't even imagine a more typically prescriptivist argument. Fahr makes an appeal to what she calls the 'correct, etymological definitions' of the words to prove her point, interrogating what those words' morphemes (a- gnos -tic and a- the -ist) mean in their root language. Her claim is that the former means 'without knowledge' and the latter means 'without belief'. As Rad rightly retorts, though, these etymological definitions actually have little to do with the words' actual meanings today, as is the case with most words due to the process I call semantic decay. Fahr keeps on talking about words being 'etymologically incorrect' and 'technical, etymologically correct definitions'; she wants to prescribe how words should be used according to their etymology, but Rad knows that 'the value of words is given by how people use them'.

At the end of the day, spelling, grammar and punctuation, as Dr Shady Cosgrove taught me, are all about clarity. It only takes a little extrapolation to get from clarity to expression, expression to communication, communication to connection, and connection to empathy. Prescriptivists and spelling nazis, conversely, are about stasis and homogeneity: expressing yourself in a rigid, unchanging, 'correct' manner which then stymies diversity of communication, and thereby affects connection and empathy – just one more reason I feel the need to discredit it. Although it can be difficult, we need to learn not to regard change with automatic revulsion, but to interrogate each new development based on its own merits, not only in language, but in life.

That's all for now, but check the comments below for my model of a spelling nazi's response to this post.

References 

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's television episode, 'A Philosophical Q and A' from its television program Q&A, Season 4, Episode 34.

Alain de Botton's book chapter, 'How to Express Your Emotions' (85–103), in his book, How Proust Can Change Your Life, published by Vintage International in 1998.

Bill Bryson's book, Mother Tongue, published by Penguin in 1991.

Kate Fahr (BionicDance)'s video 'You ARE TOO an Agnostic Atheist' from her YouTube Channel 'Rabid Lesbian Atheist of DOOM!'.

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie's sketch, 'Tricky Linguistics', in their television series, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Season 1, Episode 3.

Susan May's post 'How do you solve a problem like prepositions?' on her blog, An Adventure in Words: Ideas, Information and Inspiration, from Friday 7 October 2011.

Cristina Rad (ZOMGitsCriss)'s video 'I am not an Agnostic Atheist. Seriously' from her YouTube Channel 'k-rina'.

Cristina Rad (ZOMGitsCriss)'s video 'Belief. Knowledge. Agnosticism' from her YouTube Channel 'k-rina'.

Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things, published by Harper Perennial in 2004.

Moleskinoisseurs, markerholics and penophiles

First written Tuesday 29 December 2009

Tweaked and added to Tuesday  29 November 2011

When I go to Miranda Fair on my own, I go into survival mode. My stride lengthens and my pace quickens. If I get in on the quarter-to train, then by god I'm getting out on the quarter-past. But go with a girl, and I can bet at some point I'm going to get forced, by whatever means she finds necessary, into a stationery store. The thing with stationery though, as opposed to clothes or jewellery, is that I might just enjoy myself.

The near-universal appeal of stationery is a curious phenomenon. It's something to which, I suspect, we can all relate in some way – an infatuation that transcends age, race and gender. But why? Why is it that a virgin notepad, or an electric pencil sharpener, or an eraser in the shape of a bunny rabbit that smells like chocolate (I daresay the office-supply addicted amongst you are exhaling lustily just reading that list) is so appealing?

Well, I've taken it upon myself to find the answer. How, you ask? Through rigorous sociological research and countless surveys? Um, no. That would be a lot of work. I thought, instead, I'd harness the extraordinary power of the internet to solve this great mystery – and from the comfort of my own spinny chair, no less.

I wanted to start at the beginning, and it's a well-known fact that the internet begins with Google.* Once I got past the disturbing fact that 'stationary obsession' returns about thirty thousand more results than 'stationery obsession' (I chose not to waste time on the results of the former search – how obsessed with anything can someone really be if they can't even spell it correctly?), I began my descent into the odd and strangely alluring world of the writing-implement enthusiast. 

*As opposed to the way it ends, according to Irish musical comedian David O'Doherty, the only person I know of who alleges to have 'finished' the internet. Apparently, a smiling Bill Gates appears and you get to enter your initials, although this claim is unsubstantiated.

What I discovered was, I have to say, not actually that surprising, considering the types of people that froth over letterheads and liquid paper – a veritable buttload of blogs and websites that act as 'support groups' for the stationerily addicted. I trawled through what must have been a good ... three or four of them looking for answers. 

My first port-of-call, Stationery Fetish, was decidedly unhelpful, if amusing. 'My love of office supplies', writes blogger Cinderberry in her 'Stationery Fetishist's Manifesto', 'is irrational, but it is pure. Don't ask me to explain it, just hand over the multi-coloured index cards.'

The writers of Heymiki's blog and ich Kalliope, however, do suggest causes as the roots of stationery obsession. '[I]sn't this compulsion just another guise of my incessant procrastination?' asks Miki in 'My Stationery Obsession':

     Can there be any justification for this oft[-]repeated ritual: 

     deciding what colour Uniball Signo DX 0.38 would be 

     most fitting to capture the thought currently scuttling 

     through my head?' 

Kalliope seems to prefer stationery for its distraction value, saying in 'I heart New Notebooks' that it takes her 'mind off the actual thought of going "back to school".'

In her post 'Stationery Heaven' on Style Treaty, blogger Marion proposes nostalgia as the force behind statio-mania, writing longingly of the days of 'smelly paper' and 'fancy pens', adding that she 

     used to love those pencils where there were all different

     colours within the same pencil and you would remove

     the colour from the bottom and stick it into the top, 

     and if you wanted one of the colours that was at the

     top you'd have to keep pulling them out from the 

     bottom and stuffing them into the top

Okay, Marion, calm down ...

I wasn't too far into my stationery wanderings (Geddit? Hardee har har) when I came across an interview with Kristina Karlsson, wanky stationery name: Kikki K. I was beginning to think all statio-maniacs had to come up with funky alternative names for themselves. I mean really, if Kikki K translates to Kristina Karlsson, then what the hell are Marion, Miki, Kalliope and Cinderberry? But surely the Kikki K would have some answers! Well, yes. Yes she did. 'There is something about a freshly sharpened pencil or a new clean pencil case and notebook that signals a fresh start to the year', she says. And this was a recurring theme in the blogs of my specimens. Cinderberry, if that is her real name, says 

     spiral notebooks whisper to me about the promise of a

     new term at school, new things to learn, new things to 

     write. With a spiral pad, with a pen clipped inside the 

     coil, I'm ready to take on the world

which, correct me if I'm wrong, is just a little creepy. But so-called Kalliope says she loves 'the promise of staying organised' that comes with new stationery, which I have to say, I totally get.

At this point, I was starting to feel a bit weird stalking all these chicks' blogs, so I decided to turn to my own friends in the real world (through the medium of Facebook), ahem. I like the way my friend Sonja put it: 'new stationery makes me feel like things will be different that year. Productivity will increase, and I'll be so epic at everything I do. Just 'cause of all my flash new stationery ... It's all lies, though.'

The only other response I got (out of 391 Facebook friends; is that sad?) was actually from a friend, Melanie, who works at kikki.K and, unsurprisingly, hates it. I say unsurprisingly because any reasonable person opposed to conspicuous consumerism of an insane level would hate it – I once got dragged in there by a friend and the only way I could get her to leave was by exclaiming, loudly enough that the cashier could hear, that no A6 notepad was worth $49.95, no matter how Swedish. I shit you not. A6 notepad. $49.95. Anyway, I thought Mel's insights were poignant: 'lots of people now use stationery as a fashion accessory', she said, 'and they like to spend their money on something with the excuse that it is functional.' Agreed.

As for myself, I think I come into contact with more statio-mania than the average person, being an aspiring writer. We are more prone to that sort of thing, and it has been noted by myself and others that an excessive concern with the trappings of being a writer is often the sign of a poor one. It was while I was interning for Hachette Children's Books, I think, that an industry insider told me about a writer whose manuscript wasn't even considered because of the ridiculous letterhead he'd fashioned for his cover letter. 'Anyone who spends that much time on their letterhead isn't spending enough time writing,' they told me. 

So you can imagine my panic in my first Creative Writing class during my exchange semester at the University of East Anglia, eager to meet people and make a good first impression, when I unpacked my bag and realised that sitting in front of me was a Moleskine and a Parker pen. I'd bought the Moleskine ten minutes earlier from the bookshop on campus when I realised on my way to class that I didn't have anything to write in, and the pen, engraved with my writing pseudonym, had been given to me as a twenty-first birthday present by my friends back in Australia just before I left. Luckily I was able to pre-empt any judgement I might've garnered (I think) by declaring when we did the obligatory first-class-of-semester 'go around the room and say one thing about yourself' thing that I was not, despite my try-hard accoutrements, a wanker.

But maybe after that slightly cynical rant, I should end on a nicer, more philosophical note. I do like stationery, after all. I mean, it's not like I'm going to change my name to Lukokobelle and start a new blog about binders whispering to me, but I do like it. I don't think writers, or anyone else for that matter, should be ashamed of their love of leather-bound books and quills and papyrus, they just should be careful not to turn up to their writing classes and announce that they only write using typewriters on brown paper bags (something one of our lecturers told us actually happened once).

A writer's paradise: best friend Gilly and girlfriend Tilly in an Oxford stationery shop.

And don't fool yourself, you like it too. What's not to like? The distraction, the potential for procrastination, the fresh feeling of a new start, the comfort of knowing you're writing on a pad that cost half your week's pay ... In the words of our old friend Miki (Michaela? Maxine? ... Jane?), 

     It has been said that "language is a tool of thought".

     Thus stationery, in enabling us to record and 

     communicate our words, is a conduit of thought! 

     The journey of ideas from the brain to the page is

     no easy task. Thoughts flit and fly. They are 

     ephemeral. Only the best conduit will do. My 

     obsession is not mere indulgence. It is a necessity!

 This article as it originally appeared in Canvas, the 'zine Matilda Grogan, Kaitlyn Carlia (who now has a business crafting greeting cards with Dani Yannoulis) and I put together as an assessment for WRIT216: Introduction to Editing for Practising Writers.

'Naturalness', semantic decay and veg(etari)anism (part two of three)

Tuesday 22 November 2011

Note

In part one I deconstructed the arguments against vegetarianism and vegetarian Michael Kirby made by Miranda Devine in her article 'Everybody hurts but we've all got to eat'; part two responds to this article with my own ideas about eating meat.

I'm a newcomer to the whole veg(etari)an discourse, and the more I read into it, the clearer it becomes that I have little original to add to the discussion. But I made a decision a while ago that whenever I came to a point of indecision between speaking my mind and remaining silent, I would take the path of expressing myself, out of a belief that it is always better to say something than nothing, to act rather than not. That, and it can't hurt to restate sound arguments often made but rarely heard, to add your voice to a growing chorus. And so I persevere in the face of superfluity ...

The problem of 'naturalness'

The most common argument I hear justifying flesh-eating is that it's natural, an argument that I think can be split in two. The first of these holds that we have evolved to need meat, we are designed to eat it, and therefore we must continue to do so if our bodies are to function properly, the same way a lion cannot choose to give up eating meat because its body simply would not support a diet of any other kind. I believe this argument is factually untrue. Perhaps for the first time in our history, our technological and dietary knowledge is at a level where we can quite healthily live without eating meat (and it's looking better for the future, as well; the concept of laboratory-grown meat incites a kneejerk rejection and a shudder from hippie organic-enthusiasts and hearty meat-eaters alike, but I look forward to the guilt-free meal as long as scientists can convince me there's no harmful side-effects). Of course, meat is a very efficient way of gaining certain things that our bodies need, but it is not the only way. Is efficiency really a good enough reason for taking an animal's life? As for our being designed to eat meat, the physical similarities between humans and herbivores, along with the physical differences between humans and carnivores, have been well-documented. The evidence indicates that we were herbivores who opportunistically became omnivores, not carnivores who became omnivores. And our meat consumption today far exceeds anything we would have eaten in our evolutionary past. Meat would've been a rare addition to our diet, nowhere near the staple it is for many people today (Colleen Patrick-Goudreau).

The second argument under the 'naturalness' umbrella is not practical but moral: we evolved to eat meat, therefore it's okay – an irretriveably mixed-up bit of reasoning, to adapt a phrase from Rohinton Mistry. When does 'naturalness' ever guarantee that something is moral? People can and do justify all sorts of ridiculous positions with the argument that 'it's unnatural' (ahem, opposition to gay marriage), but even if not eating meat is unnatural, this is still a thoroughly flawed argument. So is everything we do in contemporary society. Medicine? Birth control? Abstinence? Monogamy? Technology? Supermarkets? Yep, all totally unnatural. I think vegetarian comedian Wil Anderson said it best in his show at Splendour in the Grass this year, when he posed his response to the argument, 'It's unnatural not to eat meat; even animals eat other animals – look at lions'. I paraphrase:

      Do you get all your ethical opinions from lions? What else do you
      do like lions? Do you sleep twenty hours a day like lions? Do you
      have a spiky, barbed penis like a lion? Do you sell Paddle Pops for
      a living like lions? Do you live in a wardrobe with a witch like
      lions?

I'll come back to the issue of naturalness in the next section, but first, if there's any proof that I'm not some closed-minded bastard who has set opinions on every issue and will never change, as I was discussing in ''... So openminded that our brains drop out'', it's my attitude on this issue. I used to be a devoted carnivore and in actions, I still am. I love meat. I absolutely love it. I'm obsessed with food, and meat is one of my favourite kinds. So until very recently, whenever the issue of vegetarianism would come up, I'd scoff. I'd look at my vegetarian friends and family in bemusement. How could they possibly forgo the original carnal pleasure? I thought the idea was absurd. Even animals eat animals, me and my other carnivorous friends would say to one another. We're designed to eat meat. Animals are dumb. Anything to justify my love of meat and dismiss the points raised by vegetarianism. This, my friends, is the working of ideology. If you ask why something is okay and the best answer you can come up with is that it's natural or normal, that's probably a good indicator that ideology is at work. 'Ideologies try to hide the contingent nature of thoughts and activities within a culture' say Tony Schirato and Susan Yell. '[T]hey try to convince their audiences that certain values, ideas and activities are more or less natural, and that things have always been this way, or should remain this way.'

It takes a lot of thinking to undo ideological indoctrination, to challenge what people not only enjoy doing, but also what they have always been told is normal and natural, and what they see everyone else doing all the time. Perhaps this explains why, if you ask people why they do or don't eat meat, the don'ts seem generally to have more well-thought-out answers, because the only way they became don'ts in the first place is by observing and formulating reasons not to eat meat. The dos, conversely, tend to eat meat because they always have, and their answer is likely to reflect this reason. '[I]t's okay because we're the top of the food chain' is one answer I got when I asked my friends. In other words, it's okay to eat meat because we can. Or because we do. Contrast this with an answer from another friend, Matt Wheeler:

     I don't eat meat because it is a huge contributor to climate change;
     because it makes grain and other staples more expensive for the
     poor; because it takes huge amounts of water for a single serving
     of meat; because there isn't enough farming land to go around
     and meat takes 16 times as much land as vegetables to grow; 
     because factory farming is disgusting; because pigs are one of 
     the top ten most intelligent animals in the world; because 
     vegetarian food is easy and delicious; because vegetarians live 2 
     years longer on average than those on a typical western diet; 
     because I think 'stewardship' means 'look after' not 'take 
     advantage of'; and because I think it is always better to have 
     more empathy than to close one's eyes to the pain of others.

Desensitisation and semantic decay

What started us eating meat was, I assume, need. We haven't always been able to be selective about what we eat, and we couldn't deprive ourselves of such a rich source of nutrients. Nowadays I think it's less to do with desperation and more to do with desensitisation. Eating meat seems acceptable because we eat meat already, because everyone does it. This is what I call 'semantic decay': repetition eventually saps the meaning out of any practice. It's what causes the meanings of words and phrases to drift away completely from their original meanings without our notice as we get used to them. It's what makes religion such a poor conductor of morality. Once-moral instructions can eventually become mere empty rituals, self-enforced upon pain of eternal damnation, devoid of any personal emotion or conviction. Under religion, it is entirely possible for someone to feel guilty about saying 'Oh my God', but not about being complicit in a system that slaughters billions of animals a year, usually after they've led awful lives.

We can observe a kind of trend in semantic decay. The older the religion, the culture, or cultural institution and, therefore, the more repetition that has occurred, the more divorced meaning is from action. Perhaps this explains Miranda Devine's inability to comprehend Michael Kirby's point of view. I can't think of a culture in which there is more evidence of rampant semantic decay in the area of attitudes towards a kind of animal than Japan's, where Devine grew up. 'Fish died in abundance for the Japanese diet', she says in her article, and they had to. Japan's mountainous terrain being unsuitable for agriculture, it had to turn to the sea. If it hadn't, its people would have starved long ago. But it doesn't make it any easier for the non-desensitised to watch.

Everything I am about to say, I fully acknowledge, is a generalisation, but generalisations can be useful. To the Japanese, anything that lives in the ocean is just food. There's the whaling, of course, but then there's also the annual Taiji dolphin drive hunt, where dolphins are driven into a netted cove and slaughtered en masse, literally turning the sea red with blood.

From the documentary The Cove.

I've seen a Japanese vendor chase an octopus in a netted bag across a cement market floor as it tried to escape. I've seen Japanese chefs in a production line tearing out the eyes of live fugu (pufferfish), chopping off their tails and fins, shucking their elastic skin off over their heads like jumpers and tossing the mutilated fish, blind, bloody and gasping, into an industrial-sized bin of their already-expired companions. I've seen a Japanese diner pick a fish out of a fake, in-restaurant pond, then light up with glee when that same fish is brought out on a plate as sashimi, its uncooked flesh flayed out in a fan of wafer-thin slices, its body wrenched at an unnatural angle, its mouth sucking for air and its body twitching as its flesh is torn with chopsticks from its body.

'Give it to us raw, and wriggling.'

Now fish are not highly intelligent creatures, but that right there on your plate is a living organism with the capacity to feel pain, and it is suffering for no good reason. It's just sick. My personal aversion to seafood is mostly mental, a relic from my childhood that I know I could probably rid myself of if I wanted to. And for a while I did. It's socially debilitating to be picky, and it's looked upon as immature, so I planned to make myself get over it, but now I never will. What we're doing to the oceans is too terrible, and the world doesn't need one more fish-eater. Even caught and prepared in the usual way – by trawlers at sea, dead and cooked – a fish has to suffer too much to get to my plate. There's no quick way to kill fish caught en masse.

'As we become increasingly alienated from the sources of our food,' says Devine in her article, 'childish squeamishness is in the ascendancy'. In other words, those of us who don't want to eat meat are squeamish children. Thanks, your bitchiness (how do you like it?).

But aside from deploying Devine's own stunning rhetorical tactics against her, I really think she's got it the wrong way around. It's not that we're gaining childish squeamishness; it's that we're losing our heartless desensitisation. In the past we've needed to be desensitised to animal suffering in order to survive, and today people who make a living in the meat industry still need this desensitisation, but the rest of us, 'alienated from the sources of our food', are beginning to bring our attitudes towards animal welfare into line with our modern moral outlook. Predictably, being the enemy of the heart and mind that she is, the conservative Devine instinctively rejects this impulse, this change in the status quo. But I believe we should embrace it, as difficult as it is.

Returning to the issue of 'naturalness', those who justify their continued consumption of meat with that argument must consider this impulse. If it is natural for us to eat meat, then it is equally natural for us to feel squeamish about doing so, and the evidence is in our actions. Yes, our mouths water at the smell of sizzling bacon or roasting beef, but even Devine admits 'most people feel sadness at the death of animals'; we flinch when we see it actually happen. Just look at the rituals of penance and reverence codified into early cultures, which insisted on prayer after the killing of an animal, thanking it for giving its life – an attempt to absolve guilt if ever there was one. Kirby points to the packaging of meat, which allows us to think of it as the 'impersonal products of sterile, clean supermarkets' and of eating it as 'hygienic and somehow depersonalised. Or de-animalised.' Even the English language and our codes of etiquette enshrine this guilty discomfort: it's considered impolite to discuss the animal you're eating at any given time, or to talk about any graphic part of its preparation. There's something in the way we are so easily put off eating by talk of blood or guts that belies the supposed naturalness of our eating meat. In 'Consider the Lobster', David Foster Wallace points out that 'most mammals seem to require euphemisms like "beef" and "pork" that help us separate the meat from the living creature the meat once was'; we've craftily stolen words from the French to ease our guilt. Who among us can say when they watch a predator of Africa chasing down its prey, that it is not the hunted that they hope for, rather than the hunter? We know, in our logical minds, that it's unfair to favour the gazelle over the lion; the latter has the right to live as much as the former, but we know that if the lion doesn't get its way it will only go hungry; if the gazelle doesn't, it will die a terrifying death. If you can watch a zebra being brought down by a cackle of hyenas who, unlike lions, do not kill their prey before they begin eating it, without desperately wishing they would just end the zebra's suffering, there's something wrong with you.

The fact is, though, that almost everything we do, we do in spite of nature and the cruel ferocity of the natural order, not because of it. Evolution, when understood properly, is fascinating; both a beautiful and a terrible system, elegantly simplistic in its mindless, ruthless march onwards, propelled by death at every turn. And while evolution will continue to work in different ways on humanity, we have transcended it in many ways. Society operates to a large extent outside of evolution and against it; in so many ways it is cooperative, not competitive. Babies are not left on hillsides to die if they are deemed weak. The mentally ill, the physically disabled, the sick, the poor, the injured, the different, are not dispatched as they might be if nature took its course. We can, and should, seek to resist evolution, which is everything our morality is not. This doesn't mean we stand up and decry the hyena as immoral, and start going out and killing hyenas to protect zebras. It's true that there is a natural order* but it's also true that we are the only species on Earth capable of making a choice not to adhere to it. As Kirby says:

     If the human brain historically expanded because humans

     became carnivores, consuming cooked meat around the

     camp fire that encouraged social life among our forebears,

     why should we turn our backs on these existential

     developments of our species that made us who and what

     we are? The answer to that perfectly reasonable question

     is this. The ingestion of so much protein and the expansion

     of our human brain has produced a creature with a

     heightened capacity for moral reasoning.

*Incidentally, a hole in the arguments of those who try to marry the existence of a creator God with the process of evolution, who do not here have their usual recourse to 'free will'. As Paula Kirby (no relation of Michael Kirby's) asks in 'Evolution threatens Christianity', how could an omnibenevolent God ever set in motion such a monstrous process?

Concluding remarks

All that's left is to say a little about my own diet. I'm still eating meat, and a lot of it. You might see that as hypocritical, but I don't. This post has been more about convincing people to admit or recognise that eating animals is wrong rather than that they should give up doing so (although the two are obviously connected), and I don't judge anyone who continues eating meat. A lifetime of delicious meat-based meals and indoctrination doesn't vanish in a day. But I think it's important to be able to use moral reasoning independent of your actions, to recognise that you're doing something wrong even if you're still doing it, rather than just rationalising and justifying your current behaviours. In some ways, I've been thoroughly desensitised. When I look at a piece of meat, even a skin-covered chicken wing or a slab of beef with bones in it, I simply do not see an animal, I see food, and this is the biggest problem for me. But I'm making progress. The other night I was eating a bowl of Tilly's mum's caesar salad and I had a breakthrough (which should not reflect poorly on the quality of the salad; it's delicious). Getting to the bottom of the bowl after all the lettuce leaves had gone, I was left with a wet, stringy conglomerate of pale white chicken meat and bright pink bacon, and as I was shovelling it into my mouth, I was acutely aware that it was animal flesh that I was eating. The sensation was replaced immediately once it reached my mouth, of course, but nevertheless, that was a big step for me, and those moments are happening increasingly. I'm on my way to re-sensitisation.

For now, my plan has been to stop eating meat automatically. Usually when I'm out for lunch or whatever, I'll just grab a chicken sandwich or something, because that's just what I eat, not because I really want it. Now, unless I actively want a meat dish, I'll get the vegetarian option. As I've said before, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to give up meat entirely. I have almost no self-control, and I'm convinced those vegetarians who say, 'Oh that's what I used to say, but I was surprised by how easy it was' just never enjoyed meat as much as I do, or else we're different blood types or something. But strategies like making meat my special option rather than my general one, and another thing I'm trying called 'Meatless Monday', will and in the former case already have made a big difference to how much meat I eat, which has to have a gradual effect on how many animals I cause to die for my selfish enjoyment of their flesh.

Often in discussion of vegetarianism and related issues, commentators talk about how our treatment of animals might be looked upon by future generations, an interesting idea to entertain. In his reasoned, ever self-questioning way, Wallace says, in reference to the Maine Lobster Festival (MLF):

     if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters
     can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on
     aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-
     fest. Does that comparison seem a bit much? If so, exactly why?
     Or what about this one: Is it not possible that future generations
     will regard our own present agribusiness and eating practices in
     much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or
     Aztec sacrifices? My own immediate reaction is that such a
     comparison is hysterical, extreme—and yet the reason it seems
     extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less
     important than human beings; and when it comes to defending
     such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I
     have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat
     certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it,
     and (b) I have not succeeded in working out any sort of
     personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible
     instead of just selfishly convenient.

I for one can certainly imagine a more enlightened populace looking back on us as we do our own forebears. It's hard not to see the trend developing over the last hundred years, of extending rights to ever smaller segments of the population, starting with the largest demographic, women, and moving through oppressed races, nations, and ethnic groups; then, in recent years, disabled and gay people. Not to undermine the valiant efforts of today's animal rights activists and campaigners, who are seemingly ahead of their time, but might not we, as a society, turn our full attention to animals when we run out of human minorities? Might not the next mainstream social movement be for animal rights?

Part three looks at anthropocentrism and hierarchising life.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to read this gargantuan post (almost 4000 words) and to my friends for their enthusiastic response to part one, which gave me the motivation to power through and finally finish this. Thanks to Wil Anderson and Lisa Dempster for retweeting it and exposing it to the wider veg(etari)an community, and to everyone else who's retweeted it since. Thanks Sam Glass for directing me to the David Foster Wallace article, and to Alissa for telling me about Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's podcasts. Thanks finally to Matt Wheeler, whose account of why he is a vegetarian was too cogent to resist including; you should all go and check out his amazing, custom, whittled artworks!

References

Wil Anderson's live comedy panel, Wil Does Parky, at Splendour in the Grass, Woodford, Queensland, Australia. Sunday 31 July 2011.

Miranda Devine's opinion piece, 'Everybody hurts, but we've all got to eat', in The Sunday Telegraph, Wednesday 5 October 2011.

Peter Jackson's film, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, by New Line Cinema, 5 December 2002.

Michael Kirby's opinion piece, 'Animals deserve our protection', in The Australian, Saturday 1 October 2011.

Michael Kirby's opinion piece, 'Sense and sensibility about our fellow sentient creatures', in The Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 6 August 2010.

Paula Kirby's blog post, 'Evolution threatens Christianity', on The Washington Post's On Faith forum, 3:26pm 24 August 2011.

Rohinton Mistry's short story, 'Condolence Visit', in his short-story cycle Tales from Firozsha Baag, published by Faber & Faber in 2006.

Colleen Patrick-Godreau's podcast, 'Humans are meant to eat meat. Just look at these incisors in my mouth', from her podcast series Vegetarian Food for Thought: Inspiring a Joyful, Sustainable, Compassionate Diet.

Louis Psihoy's documentary, The Cove.

Charles Rangley-Wilson's documentary, Fish! A Japanese Obsession, by KEO Films, 23 March 2009.

Tony Schirato and Susan Yell's 'Ideology', in Communication and Cultural Literacy: An Introduction, published by Allen & Unwin in 2000.

Taiji dolphin drive photograph.

David Foster Wallace's essay, 'Consider the Lobster', in Gourmet Magazine in August 2004.

Matt Wheeler's private correspondence via Facebook, 10:27pm Tuesday 11 October 2011.