Firebrands and double-edged flaming (s)words: the wheeler centre gala 2018 review

Wednesday 28 February 2018

Monday’s eighth annual Wheeler Centre Gala saw eleven intellectual incendiaries light up Melbourne’s Athenaeum theatre with variations on the likely theme—for an institution dedicated to the holy trinity of books, writing and ideas—of ‘words on fire.’ The characteristically malleable topic incited diverse interpretations from an estimable ensemble of writers, performers and activists, ranging from personal parables to political polemic, performance and poetry.

And diversity truly was the word of the night. Excepting the transitory appearance of Centre director Michael Williams, who seized the stage long enough only to make his obligatory thanks, gracious self-deprecation and inevitable lefty in-jokes about African gangs and the definition of ‘partner,’ the lineup was a veritable straight white male–free zone. Indeed, holding forth as the speakers did on such progressive subjects du jour as environmentalism, disability rights, Indigenous oppression, the trans experience, class politics and even a content warning or two, the roster could well have emerged wholesale from the very nightmares of Miranda Devine.

Any outnumbered conservatives in the crowd might have snatched hungrily at Aunty Carolyn Briggs’ portents of overzealous offence-taking and language-policing as a slippery slope toward censorship, but the Boon Wurrung Elder’s discussion of privilege and disadvantage in language use revealed a position far removed from the typical PC-bashing proponents of Brandis’ ‘right to be bigots.’

Briggs’ extended Welcome to Country offered a sedate start to the evening, with reflections on the history of words as weapons used both by and against Indigenous Australians, pointing to the subversive meanings said to hide in Aboriginal names such as Coonabarabran (putatively ‘white man’s shit’) and the Moomba festival (folk-etymologised not as ‘let’s get together and have fun’ but rather ‘up your bum’). 

Briggs concluded by inviting the audience to use the language of the land—wominjika for ‘welcome’—and to fulfill the obligations traditionally attendant on that welcome: ‘not to harm the lands and waters and not to harm the children.’ It was an exhortation later taken up by Indigenous author Tony Birch in his address, an admiring paean to Wangan and Jagalingou spokesperson Murrawah Johnson and her incendiary words to author–activist Naomi Klein on Adani’s proposed Carmichael coal mine: ‘We have seen the end of the world and we refuse to accept it.’ Birch traced the violence enacted upon Johnson’s ‘personal and genealogical history’ through the language of Terra Nullius and the Acts of Parliament that have governed Indigenous lives to illustrate the heroism, the injustice, and the irony of her leadership in the fight against the mine.

My view of the stage through the perfectly curled wave of another spectator’s hair.

Before thirteen asymmetrical bars of light flaring and fading between performances like the still-glowing trunks of bushfire-blackened trees, each speaker took to the stage in succession, without the intrusive inelegance of any master of ceremonies offering aggrandising introductions. This lent the night the dreamlike intimacy of yarns around a transfixing campfire, each one free to roll into the next and build upon it without any break in the spell.

Commencing the official program was writer, actor and director Leah Purcell’s lively autobiographical narrative, a touching and comic recount of the words and phrases that marked her lifetime journey from poor rural daughter and young caretaker of an alcoholic single mother to the acting career she had always dreamed of. Replete with a reenactment of the dance she performed impromptu down the main street of Bergen after a compliment from a stranger, the tale at moments challenged even Purcell’s polished performance skills with tears. Malaysian-Australian poet and rapper Omar Musa likewise gave a stirring personal account of his lived experience, counterbalancing the poetic drama of the oration to come with a casual ‘’S’goin’ on?’ as he arrived onstage. He spoke of his lifelong battles with a father fervently devoted to the Word of God, and the secret words of inspiration imparted by his mother in stolen eight-minute car rides on the way to school. And in the night’s penultimate speech, blogger and activist Carly Findlay drew on her (ever-political) personal experiences to question whether social justice movements actually live up to the buzzwords of inclusivity, diversity and intersectionality when it comes to disability.

A persistent motif, of course, was the power of words. The power of a politician’s well-crafted speech to inspire a lifetime of loyalty in the case of writer and anthropologist Sally Warhaft’s Republican niece, or Warhaft’s own affection for the rhetoric of Paul Keating, which preceded a writer’s lament for the declining communicative power of today’s politicians at home and abroad. Or the power of writing to give a child control and escape from an unstable upbringing that a garlanded and needlessly bashful Rosie Waterland—she of the famed Bachelor recaps—conveyed. Veteran of the Melbourne Workers Theatre Patricia Cornelius too demonstrated the potency of words forcefully in the opening of her crowd-pleasing ode to profanity, with a rapidfire fuck-and-cunt-laden tract from her play SHIT (a linguistic challenge to which the Auslan interpreter rose admirably). In the comedic highlight of the evening, Cornelius delivered an insightful interrogation of the class politics of snobbery about swearing, railing against the bourgeois insistence that the theatre remain a polite, expletive-free middle-class space and the notion that the underclasses should never express legitimate rage through swearing. 

Other presenters built on Briggs’ earlier meditation on the nature of words as double-edged (flaming) swords – their ability, in Williams’ terms, to burn and to heal. From honey, darling and sweetheart to dude, bro, mate and man, queer nonbinary activist and writer Nevo Zisin reflected on the usefulness and limitations of words and labels in defining and limiting their identity pre- and post-transition, while actor Rachael Maza powerfully contrasted narratives of her grandfather from biased official records against family memory and empathetic deduction, lingering over the difference between the concept of history and the past itself.

The crescendo of the pyrotechnic spell which the speakers had been steadily constructing over the course of the night came in the final empyreal performance by Moira Finucane, who fully earned her description as a ‘writer, director, performer and creator of volcanic and magic realist worlds … and intimate theatrical spectacles, internationally renowned for her arresting mix of provocation and entertainment.’ Bedecked in a shimmering black gown and headdress somewhere between the Statue of Liberty’s aureolic diadem and Westeros’ Iron Throne, she emerged onstage swaying and arm-waving in time to cosmic strains. ‘Kingdom Animalia,’ she intoned in the commanding resonant boom of an elven queen. ‘Phylum Chordata, just like us. Not like us, Class Aves,’ she continued as if reciting words of power. ‘Family Alcidae, Genus Pinguinnis, Species Impennis.’ This scientific classification of the now-extinct great auk launched an abstracted traipse through humanity’s relationship with the planet as viewed through writings both dramatic and innocuous, from Proverbs 26:11, to the cruel 1794 words of sailor Aaron Thomas on the ill-fated penguins, to Charles William Beebe on extinction in 1906, to Rachel Carson in 1962, to 2018 personal correspondence from another Indigenous environmental firebrand, Eleanor Dixon (‘a genius with 60,000 years of understanding of her land’) to Stan Grant in 2016 and Desmond Tutu in 1999.

Though her declamatory style courted the absurd and at times dipped into the ridiculous, Finucane performed with such ardor and conviction that a possibly skeptical audience stayed with her, tittering only, perhaps, as intended, when the monologue descended abruptly from the grand themes of environmental destruction to supplying the tangible details of how to contact the Northern Territory Chief Minister’s Office to express concern over the impact of fracking on the tourism industry, all while maintaining its grandiose delivery.

Paraphrasing Tutu as she slowly departed (perhaps significantly to stage left), she encouraged her viewers to keep ‘trending, trending, trending towards the good,’ and left the audience in the lingering strings and darkness to awaken with the lights as if from a dream.

‘We’ll go together into the darkness. Holding hands, calling out … and trending, trending, trending towards the good.’ @moirafinucane closed the night with a curling, haunting mist of poetic and direct language. pic.twitter.com/5Kjxq1EgOW

— The Wheeler Centre (@wheelercentre) February 26, 2018

If the gala is a sign of what we are to expect from the Wheeler Centre in 2018, it will be an impassioned, diverse, provocative, progressive year indeed.

Thanks for reading

LPL

Sexism in tennis

Monday 20 January 2013

When it comes to sport, it seems that, rather than inheriting the athleticism of my father, a personal trainer, in playing it, I have acquired (along with bad skin and bad knees) his signature brand of cynicism and his propensity for abrupt moments of abstraction while watching it.

'Son, I was always proud … that you weren't a short man.'

Dad enjoys spectatorship as much as the next bloke, but he appears simultaneously to hold the whole enterprise in contempt: teams and clubs branding themselves with the names of cities while buying and selling players from all over the world who don't have any real connection to those communities. It's too much like supporting a corporation. I find this sentiment echoed in myself.

How does one pick a team, anyway? If it's not the team of the region where you live, and not a team you grew up supporting, what determines your choice? Is it who's winning the most? Who has the prettiest colours? The best mascot? Your favourite player? My girlfriend's dad supported the Cronulla Sharks for years until he converted to the North Queensland 'Toyota' (!) Cowboys, and then to the 'iSelect' (!) Gold Coast Titans, and now has no problem using the pronouns 'we' and 'us' to refer to 'his' team, despite residing in the Illawarra. Isn't it all rather arbitrary?

'The Isotopes are winning? To the bandwagon!'

This is less applicable, I suppose, in international sports, where teams actually comprise nationals of the countries they represent, but even here Dad and I have a shared tendency to experience moments of almost Brechtian alienation, wherein the viewing experience is transcended by a sudden and profound awareness of the insignificance and absurdity of investing ourselves in such a pointless activity, a kind of 'opiate of the masses–style' reluctance to be diverted by an exercise in corporatised nationalism, the outcome of which will ultimately have no impact on our lives.

One such moment occurred for Dad last Friday night as we watched the match between Sam Stosur and Ana Ivanovic in Rod Laver Arena. 'What are we doing here?' he asked at one point, nudging me and laughing, a common effect of the incongruous jerk out of the immediacy of the experience and into comprehension of its ludicrousness. 'Why do we care? Does it pay my mortgage if Stosur wins tonight?'

Although I generally disapprove of any form of slavish utilitarianism ('I AM A CAPITALIST DRONE; EVERY ACTIVITY IN WHICH I ENGAGE MUST PROVIDE ME WITH SOME DIRECT, CONCRETE, PREFERABLY MONETARY BENEFIT'), and I harbour a vague inclination that sport fulfills some subtle but important purpose* in our society, I still find these to be compelling questions. Why do we care so much whether one entity beats another entity in an otherwise entirely useless endeavour?

'Oh my God, Marge. A penalty shot with only four seconds left. It's your child versus mine! The winner will be showered with praise; the loser will be taunted and booed until my throat is sore!'

*I know, I know, it's about an outlet for primal aggression, social rituals and cohesion, blah blah.

In this instance, however, I couldn't fully share in Dad's characteristic momentary bewilderment. For reasons not entirely clear to me, tennis exempts itself from my usual spectatorial reticence, especially once a year for the term of the Australian Open when, time permitting, I become a rabid tennis fan. A were-fan, if you will. I look up rankings, download apps, text friends about matches, and follow every game I can.

I'm aware that, if anything, the 'pointlessness' of sport is exaggerated in tennis, where the match is confined to 260 square metres and the task can essentially be decocted to 'get the ball over the net and within the lines', but perhaps it's that there's something more honest about it as an individual pursuit that allows it to evade my cynicism. These aren't footballers professing some kind of loyalty to their team before scarpering off to the highest bidder the moment their contract is up, particular personalities subsumed into the larger team identity. They're individuals playing for themselves whose characters are on display to earn your support or opposition.

When I examine my list of favourite players and try to determine why I like them, however, it's still decidedly arbitrary, just slightly less so. With hundreds of individuals to choose from, you end up being quite superficial – one bad impression can be enough to turn you off someone. For me it seems to come down to a complex subconscious calibration of a player's skill, grace, manner, sense of humour, eloquence, nationality and, as I'm becoming increasingly aware when it comes to women (to my dismay), appearance. Which is my tortuous, Simpsons-like way of getting to the point that I've been thinking about how we pick which players to support in tennis, and who gets attention for what, and particularly how the criteria differ for men and women. 

Even as perhaps one of the women's sports deemed most 'watchable' by men, the tennis court is a fraught field for gender issues, dominated for years by 'pin-ups' like Kournikova, Sharapova and Ivanovic and throwing up perennial debates over prize money, air time and the comparative quality and entertainment value of the men's and women's games. What brought the issue of player popularity to mind for me, however, was watching the match between Australian Casey Dellacqua and rising Canadian star Eugenie Bouchard last night. 

Whether it's the men's or women's game, one truth universally acknowledged in tennis is the vapidity of the commentary. Tennis commentators seem to struggle to find anything much of value to add. One example from last night's match was Sam Smith's observation that Dellacqua had been eating a bread roll before the match, from which she extrapolated two things: one, that Casey hadn't had much dinner, and two, that she was nervous. Compelling stuff.

Is it any surprise then that we find traces of sexism in the inanities spouted by commentators in their furious verbal attempts to justify their relevance? Not conscious sexism, but the more insidious kind that infects the way even decent people think on a basic level. It's like what I was discussing in my last post (a thousand years ago) regarding Tony Abbott and his 'sex appeal' blunder: when the mind casts around for something to latch onto, something to say, the things it finds can be revealing, a window into a person's way of seeing the world and, therefore, the otherwise invisible ideology that shapes their worldview. It's problematic as it is that female commentators are never assigned a men's match while at least one man is always present in the commentary box for a women's match, but watching last night I became aware that the idle chatter of the commentators differs greatly depending on the gender of the players and the way they look.

As I type I'm watching Smith interview Dominika Cibulkova. Despite having just achieved the considerable feat of vanquishing world number three Maria Sharapova, the Slovak is being quizzed about her relationship status, how long she's been engaged, and her engagement ring. WHAT IS THIS?

It's astounding how much time is spent discussing looks in the women's game, even if it's obliquely, euphemistically. At one point, as I pointed out on Twitter, it was stated that Dellacqua was 'more girl-next-door than the girl next door', which can be translated to mean she is homely and unglamourous. This was underscored by Smith's statement only moments later that Dellacqua's opponent Bouchard is 'the heir to Sharapova in marketing terms', a euphemism for 'she's the hottest, blondest, whitest young player on the circuit.'

Bouchard (left) and Dellacqua (right).

Later Smith's obligatory male 'supervisor' (whose name I'm unsure of) joked that most of Bouchard's supporters, referred to by her as the 'Eugenie Army', seemed to be young men. After Bouchard had won, Renae Stubbs momentarily puzzled her in her post-match interview by saying she was sure her supporters were all about ready to propose to her.

And discussing the match Bouchard's win had set up for her with Ivanovic, the male commentator referred to Ivanovic as one of the 'all time great poster girls', as if she were a model rather than a tennis player, notable for her beauty rather than her skill. In response Smith asked 'How are you going to market it? The beauty of Belgrade versus the princess of Quebec?' and remarked that the pair were two very 'marketable' young girls.

Contrast this with the commentary on a comparable male player, Vasek Pospisil, who defeated Australia's Matt Ebden last Wednesday night. Pospisil and Bouchard are both attractive, white, blonde, young (23 and 19 respectively) Canadians with similar singles rankings (30 and 28) who triumphed over Australians. Yet not once did the appearance of Bouchard's countryman attract any commentary: no mention even of his adoring female fans, no talk of the impending match up between the 'Canadian catch' Pospisil and 'Swiss stud' Wawrinka.

Canadian heartthrob Vasek Pospisil.

Again, it's not that these commentators are bad people, it's that they've been conditioned by the prevailing ideology of the day to automatically view and assess women in terms of their appearance more than they do with men. The only way to wake people out of this ideology is to call it out when we see it, and we see it everywhere.

When the vacuous woman sitting next to me at the Stosur–Ivanovic match breezed into the arena four games into the first set, her first question to her companion was 'Who's that'?

'Ana Ivanovic', he answered.

'Ooh, she's really pretty', she cooed.

Moments later when Stosur appeared on the screen she laughed that the world number 17 looked 'like a man'. Former world number one Amélie Mauresmo was the target of similar criticism. In a habit that I'm sure would chasten her if I brought it up now, my best friend in high school would periodically proclaim with some vehemence her 'hatred' for Mauresmo. The reason? 'She looks like a man!' 

Stosur (left) and Mauresmo (right)

As well as being too muscular or masculine, female tennis players can be too fat. When Dellacqua made her return to the Australian Open in 2009, she drew criticism from, among others, Roger Rasheed for being out of shape, a claim she and her trainers strongly repudiated. But that incident pales in comparison to the disgusting public reaction to Marion Bartoli's 2013 Wimbledon win, best summarised by the tweets collected in an article by Amanda Chatel.

Bartoli (left) and Dellacqua (right)

It's not enough, it seems, for a woman to be among the best tennis players in the world. She must also be born buxom and beautiful and maintain a slim, feminine figure.

It's not even safe in the sidelines. Lleyton Hewitt's wife Bec (nee Cartwright) was recently the target of an article by the ever-atrocious Daily Mail and others asking whether she'd 'overdone it on the tan'.

I'd say she looks completely fine …

On the other hand, 'Aussie Ana' Ivanovic (a Serb) has been claimed for Australia by Todd Woodbridge, and every commentator to have taken up the moniker since 2008 when she won the Australian Open, due to her overwhelming popularity in Australia. In a poll yesterday asking who was expected to win the tournament after Williams' departure that Sam Smith joked could've been rephrased as 'Who is your favourite female player?', popular Chinese player Li Na, number three seed Sharapova and the defending champion Azarenka each received circa 20% of the vote, while Ivanovic was assigned double that at approximately 40%. But what can Ivanovic possibly have done to earn this popularity, other than being young and beautiful? Can anyone honestly contend she has twice the personality of Li Na, twice the skill of Azarenka?

I myself am not immune to Ivanovic's charms, nor to subtle sexism. There's no doubt she's attractive; she's actually pretty much exactly my type. But that's separate to her skill as a tennis player. It doesn't have to be her defining attribute. It shouldn't be mentioned by commentators every time she's on court. And players who don't have her looks shouldn't suffer in popularity, or worse, be lambasted for it. A cursory consideration of the list of my other favourite female players doesn't seem to reveal that I favoured them especially for their looks: Elena Dementieva, Justine Henin, Li Na, Ai Sugiyama. In fact, if anything, I hold a strange contempt for the bevy of attractive young interchangeable, quadrisyllabically named female players who've come to my attention over the last couple years: Caroline Wozniacki, Danielá Hantuchova, Vera Zvonareva, Victoria Azarenka.

Female favourites (left to right): Dementieva, Henin, Li, Sugiyama.

Un-favourites (left to right): Wozniacki, Hantuchova, Zvonareva, Azarenka.

But then, on closer consideration, I think sexism might come into it at some level. Is my dismissal of this second group just another form of sexism? Do I think they're too pretty to be good players, to be memorable, to have personality? And even though my favourites aren't women I find especially attractive, they are all undoubtedly beautiful women, slender and graceful. There's no women among my favourites who are unattractive. Why is that?

And what about who's missing from my list? Notably absent is Serena Williams, though I can safely assign her exclusion to other factors than her looks. I do admire her skill in the game, but her ineloquence, her obnoxious, particularly American fervent Christianity, forever thanking God for her wins in her stumbling, graceless acceptance speeches, as though he has specifically chosen her, puts me off. But why not Clijsters? Why not Bartoli? If their slightly rounder features and thicker bodies were swapped for the slight frames of Dementieva and Henin, can I really pretend my preferences would be the same? 

Lately I'm becoming increasingly alarmed about our society's attitudes towards physical appearances. We may try to hide it by using terms like 'marketable', but that only puts the problem at one further remove; what is marketable is determined by what people want, and what people want is to see attractive people and to judge ugly people, people they can safely designate 'uglier than me'. Ugliness now is treated like a fault, like something we have any power over. And deviating from the standard body form long ago became a crime worthy of opprobrium. 

Recently I've had a number of windows into the world of acting and theatre, and have been disappointed to learn that even respectable institutions are primarily concerned with the 'marketability' of their auditionees, that it's 'unheard of' for people of certain looks and body shapes to be given places, regardless of acting talent. Meanwhile, inexperienced eighteen-year-olds who happen to have been born with 'the look' are raised up out of the masses clamouring for a place without any need to distinguish themselves theatrically.

And it's not just women. My sisters recently informed me that all their male friends are on steroids or growth hormones of some form or another. Normal, healthy-looking sixteen-year-olds dosing themselves with drugs to turn themselves into miniature 'Zyzz' effigies in under six months, the better to worship at the altar of the self in the temple of the gym.

I always knew we lived in a superficial world, but somehow I still believed that everyone knew that it was wrong. I thought everyone had learned in their childhood from fairy tales and cartoons that it was what was on the inside that counts, and not to judge a book by its cover and that, even if they still did so, they knew somewhere that it wasn't the right thing to do. But all I've seen lately is unabashed superficiality. It's why reality TV is still so popular – it's cheap hour after hour of unadulterated judgement, and we love to sit in judgement of one another. 'What is she wearing?' 'She's too ugly to be the next top model.' 'Why would he pick that song?' 'He looks gay in that.' 'How can they be so stupid?' 'I hope he gets voted out, he's annoying.'

If there's one cause for hope for me in the tennis world, it's Li Na. I was there for the 2013 women's final when Li faced Azarenka. From my friends who watched at home I've heard it was considered a boring match, but for those in the arena it was electric. Fresh from the controversy of the previous round where it was speculated Azarenka had taken a medical timeout purely to throw her winning opponent Sloane Stephens off rhythm, the crowd was entirely behind Li Na, to the point that Azarenka's winners were met with mere polite applause while her unforced errors, usually awkward to applaud, were met with impassioned cheers, and Li's two on-court collapses elicited immediate heart-wrenching sympathy. The fact that an Asian woman who speaks only broken English can through her charm, sense of humour and fighting spirit win over a public as racist as Australia's gives me hope where little else does.

Thanks for reading,

LPL

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.

'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.