In response to my own feeble attempts at a vegetarian lifestyle, many of you have shared your views on eating. From these conversations, online and off, it occurs to me that there are two primary approaches to consumption:
- Individual morality.
- Consideration of impact.
The two are by no means exclusive, and most people seem to use some combination of the two. The first strikes me as idealistic, and the latter as essentially pragmatic. One is more concerned with the personal act, and the other with the ultimate outcome. Applying these categories to vegetarianism, the former may apply to people who are strict vegans or vegetarians, who see eating meat as their complicity in the needless taking of another life to sustain their own. The latter may include flexitarians who try to minimize meat-eating because they feel it is better for their health and for the environment.
I suspect that the latter will ultimately have the greater impact on the ultimate reduction of animal lives taken, though the pragmatists would probably not have the influence that they could without the leadership of the idealists. And I suspect that this is generally the case in history. I think that Marxism ultimately failed in Europe and North America because corporations gave in to many of the demands of the proletariat: a wide-range of labor laws and protections were enacted, labor unions became new power centers, and a social safety net was established by social-democratic governments. Not the ideal worker’s paradise, but a vast improvement on the unfettered capitalism of the white world in the 1800s. But none of these gains would’ve been possible without the hot-blooded visionaries. This is why I can forgive all the jet fuel Al Gore burned promoting an Inconvenient Truth. The ripple effect of his message compensates thousands of times for any moral transgression caused by his greatly enlarged carbon footprint.
I have strong idealistic and practical tendencies, but as I get older and more cynical, the pragmatist becomes more likely to win out. I mistrust dogmatism of any type, even my own (though I hold stubbornly to my pacifism, in the hope that some small gains will be made as history marches on). What am I afraid of? Getting burned again. Of swinging from one extreme to another. Of unintended consequences that defeat the very aims of my idealistic motives.
It’s funny and disturbing to me that I can’t approach something as simple as going vegetarian without diving deep into myself this way. As much as I’d like to draw the line in the sand that some of my friends and family have done, and say, “I will not consciously and willingly take an animal life to feed my own,” I see far too many exceptions. Sure, I’ve all but eliminated meat from my diet and I let wolf spiders on my desk live and I don’t eat even vegetarian fast food, but: I send my cats after tasty little critters. I eliminate fruit fly and boll weevil infestations in my home without hesitation or remorse. The painful deaths of countless small critters is a horrible price to pay for the huge drop in human infant mortality rate, the near eradication of certain horrible diseases, and progress on everything from heart and organ transplants to fighting cancer, but it’s one that I think I’m willing to pay if it saves the lives of more (human) children and reduces the number of excruciating (human) deaths. I’m willing to look into alternatives to those lab deaths, but if I’m convinced that it’s a zero-sum game, and it’s either a dozen rabbits or, say, my daughter, you can bet that I’m going to choose my child’s life. But fortunately or no, we rarely get to make those kinds of stark decisions.
So, this is the cynic in me. I believe that to some extent, my life is predicated on the deaths of others. Remember, I’m not arguing against vegetarianism–I’m moving in that direction myself. But as I embark on this path, I have to examine my fundamental assumptions and values with starkness and brutal honesty.
And by doing so publicly, I count on you to keep me brutally honest in my endeavors.
