Trencher Trash Talk
One of the things I have been mulling this week arises from a rather under-discussed bit on the Guardian Science podcast. It seems the English government climate tzar, Lord Stern, has announced that it is necessary for humanity to become vegetarians to ’save the planet’. [Link] I almost missed this on the podcast; there was little discussion as if the statement was accepted with all the adulation demanded by a Führer.
I suspect that was part of why I chose to mull the matter a bit rather than rushing home to check the actuality of the statement (did that!) and respond (waited until now!) Not that the pronouncement was any surprise. It has been telegraphed for some time by all the grrr brrr about methane as a greenhouse gas and bovine digestion. That may have escaped the boggish fraction of the Yankee republic inasmuch as the media buried the matter under tons of twelve-year-old-girl hand wringing over the inhumane [1] methods used in the slaughter of meat animals. Not a useless approach, but one of no substantive effect as demonstrated by the proliferation of fast food emporia all of whom make their profits largely on humans purchasing heat treated animal bits. Humans are very good at excluding discomfortable things from their consciousness. It was done by the people living around Auschwitz, it is done by the people who visit McDougals, BurgerAutark, and their ilk.
It happens that I have been reading Richard Wangram’s Catching Fire, a book that presents the idea that we are human – intelligent – because we eat cooked food. If we get past the distractions that the author is an academic at the other shul on the Charles, the one where they train the nation’s secret masters, and it is written for bogs and hence over-dramatic and poorly presented, the thesis has good credibility. The only real sticking point in it is the lack of evidence that modern man is still, in the main, intelligent. Indeed, we may posit that in a more demonstrable positive sense that there is ample evidence that modern man is, in the main, not intelligent. Everyday behavior, especially in automobiles and in association with electronic appliances such as cellular phones, clearly demonstrates this absence. Forget the meek, the stupid have already inherited the planet, which probably prompts the English tyrant’s pronouncement.
I am however reminded that it is almost always when one of the ruling tyrants does something stupid that the English come to rationality and discorporate the individual, or equivalently vacate them from the island. Americans, on the other hand, come to rationality when the English do something stupid to us. Example: 200+ years ago they were escorted out of the country with bayonet, cannon, and a bit of rational glee. It has been a long time since they have provoked us so and hence great wonder that we coped with all manner of other tyrants and autarks.
For myself, courtesy of a heart attack and a properly zealous cardiologist, I am a semitarian (which I am led to understand Lord Stern is as well, this is not a convincing argument) and hence eat meat much less often than my fellow Amerikans. That does not mean I would gladly become a vegetarian, or more properly, given the autark’s pronouncement, a vegan, since all animal products would be curtailed.[2] Much as I enjoy occasionally vegetable protein it is harder to digest and less satisfying than animal. More important, I am not ready to surrender my intelligence, nor should we as a species.
The answer is that we have resorted to repeatedly. Our intelligence must be bent to fixing or at least surviving global climate change, not denying that intelligence.
[1] This raises the intriguing question of whether there is anything wrong with being ‘inhumane’ towards animals that are not humans? Quite apart from the question of how consistently or even frequently humans are humane to other humans, there is question of how one can be expected to be humane to non-humans and even whether such behavior is proper? But then, as my mother has told me all of my life, I read too much science fiction and that has warped me.
[2] One shudders at how the elite of the planet, actual and self-deluded, would be able to haught without leather for clothes or shoes. I would dearly miss my own shoes and belt. Nylon is however, acceptable for a wallet. But having caved in on this, plastics will be next. Can nudity be far behind as a mandate?
