String theory describes the physical universe, its particles and forces, as composed of vibrating filaments of energy. Jello’s “Me O’Clock” TV commercial for its Mousse Temptations is a vibrating filament of promotional energy without a particle of lucidity but with a troubling force in its address to and reflection of current cultural values.
The ad features a smartly dressed middle-aged woman languorously reclining on the gigantic hands of a clock, beginning to spoon up some Mousse Temptations. In the background Charissa Nielsen sings—or, rather, engages in a melodious kind of babble, a prelanguage whose only distinguishable words are “It’s My Time.” We’re told that Mousse Temptations is “rich and airy,” a seeming paradox considering that the main ingredient of this enticing confection is water, followed by xylitol, an artificial sweetener. “Airy” for sure; “rich,” well, only by the most ardent linguistic leveraging. Indeed, this mugging of language quickly becomes a felonious assault, for we are then told that Mousse Temptations is the reward for “washing the bills and paying the dishes.” Me O’Clock has arrived and, to reinforce that timeless state of self-gratifying ontological enchantment, the numbers on the clock slip from their position and are kicked by the woman into oblivion. The ad closes with the woman licking the spoon in a manner so erotically charged that it would surely send Freudianism to number one with a bullet on the psychology charts.
We are always at one remove from the food we consume. We really don’t eat food; we eat the idea of food, an idea that ads like Me O’Clock encourage us to adopt as the appropriate interpretation. And what interpretation does Me O’Clock frame for us? Simply this: the only flow experience, the only thoroughgoing focus of motivation, that counts is the experience of and immersive focus on the self. Consider the grammatical gyration of “washing the bills and paying the dishes,” the consummation of which heralds the advent of Me O’Clock, my time. Undoubtedly, this violation of cross-referencing rules it meant to humorously suggest the virtue of delayed gratification. But what does it really suggest? I’d venture this: that such mundane but necessary tasks as paying bills and washing dishes are so tedious and trivial, so impertinent and incidental, that they do not even merit linguistic sanction. They are the unsayable, beyond the pale of grammatical warrant. They are not an accomplishment; they are the absence of accomplishment, and, thus removed, only the business self-gratification remains.
Consider also that Jello has given us Mousse temptations, and that this temptation comes surplused in three flavors: Caramel Crème, Dark Chocolate Decadence, and Chocolate Indulgence. Note the Frenchified spelling of cream, complete with diacritical mark, a grave. Consider the words “temptation,” “decadence,” and “indulgence.” What Jello offers is not food; it offers the exotic, the transgressive, and the forbidden. It offers epicurean poetry to replace the stoic prose of the adult world of responsibility, eroticism to replace wearying and insipid task orientation. It offers abandonment, and with that abandonment a license to never again have to turn one’s gaze from the self-reflecting pool. It offers a redefinition of personal growth that is actually regression, of wholeness that is actually immaturity, and of subjective well-being that is actually a compacted circle of self-absorption. It encourages, finally, the unmediated state of infantilization, a return to early childhood where the expectation is that every desire is on the cusp of immediate fulfillment. Where are the virtues that living in an adult world requires--duty, perseverance, fortitude, commitment, self-command? No time for them when it is always Me O’Clock.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Why Am I a Vegetarian?
When I decided 25 years ago to become a vegetarian, I joined a large tribe with many clans. Of course, vegetarianism renounces eating all animal products; however, vegetarians slip the stringency of that renunciatory gesture. The term “vegetarianism,’ I soon discovered, was a linguistic wormhole opening into multiple universes of practice. Vegans, the prototypical vegetarian clan, will not have their eating be the consequence of any animal’s death; thus, they eat plant foods only. Fruititarians extend vegan doctrine to plants and eat fruits, nuts, and seeds only. Then there are the clans that permit limited indulgence in certain animal foods: Lacto-vegetarians eat dairy products; ovo-vegetarians, eggs; lacto-ovo-vegetarians, diary and eggs—justifying themselves, perhaps, by the fact that the production of eggs and dairy require no sentient creature to suffer the abbatoir. Among the smaller clans, pollo-vegetarians will eat chicken; pescatarians, fish, reasoning that chicken and fish are a healthy, and more convenient, means of obtaining the complete protein that vegans can obtain only through the arduous process of protein complementarity. Finally, flexitarians, attuned to the way of all flesh, periodically trade the salad bowl for the fleshpot, eating the occasional veal cutlet or Big Mac or corn dog. Flexitarians know that the spirit may be willing, but, when faced with a Meat Lover’s pizza, the flesh is weak—and oh so tasty.
The term “vegetarian,” it would seem, is more evocative than referential, more connotative than denotative, more a play of signification than a ligature to a singular reality. We are, as Kant long ago asserted, categorizing beings. We partition and name our experience of the world, including our experience of ourselves and our behaviors, to wrest control from chaos and erect distinguishing boundaries. Vegetarians doubly distinguish themselves, as vegetarians and as particular types of vegetarians. They narrate themselves and, like all narrations, they do so according to different genres. I like that the deep grammar of “vegetarianism” finds utterance in the surface grammars of “vegetarians.” This, I think, is, for those who celebrate diversity, a good thing: from the unum of “vegetarianism” springs the pluribus of “vegetarian.”
As is natural when a group of people conscript themselves under some banner or other, ancillary institutions arise: societies, organizations, and associations devoted to providing services, events, education, and advocacy; books and magazines; online sites; a Museum of Vegetarianism; a vegan prisoner support program; a vegetarian dating service; vegetarian cruises, cycling tours, and cooking vacations; and vegetarian body care products. Essentially, these institutions constitute what Peter Berger calls “mediating structures.” They stand between vegetarians and vegetarianism and empower the concept by fostering its value. Also natural is compiling a list of luminaries to lend both glamour and gravitas to the enterprise. Indeed, the roster of vegetarians, past and present, is impressively large and impressively famous. Jesus was a vegetarian, at least according to Isaiah who, in predicting Christ’s birth, declares that “Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good." Symbolic, undoubtedly, for Luke tells us that, appearing before the apostles after his death, Jesus requests food. They give Jesus “a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them." Seemingly, Jesus was a posthumous pescatarian; however, the passage from Luke is the only biblical verse referring to Jesus eating meat, and there is no evidence that he partook of the fish he miraculously made multiply, on two separate occasions, to feed the thousands in his audience. And he does refer to himself in John as “the bread of life,” Still, Jesus was not a proselytizing vegetarian, for nowhere in the Bible does he advocate it. Buddha, however, was a proselytizing vegetarian, not surprising in a man who sought to relinquish not just meat but the desire for food itself—and ultimately, desire itself--on his austere, Garmin-less journey to nirvana. Other vegetarians include Plato, Pythagorus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, Mohandas Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Dr. Spock (and Leonard Nimoy/Mr. Spock), Clint Eastwood, Cesar Chavez, Coretta Scott King, and Julia Roberts—and, since 1985, me. Heady company, indeed.
There was a time when anyone announcing themselves as a vegetarian was looked upon as some odd ethnological specimen fit only for museum display, or possibly for police surveillance. Thankfully, that time has passed. Still, I am often asked why I became a vegetarian. In response I generally temporize, for the truth is I’m not quite sure. I do, however, know the reasons that did not motivate my turn to vegetarianism. To inquirers, I will sometimes quote Thoreau--“Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal”—but that’s not a perspective I share. I find it difficult to accept its implicit disgust, its shame at a supposed impurity of desire in our creaturely being. It is essentially a moral position, with carnivorous eating not so much an evil as a retardant to humankind’s evolution to a more perfect condition. “It is the destiny of the human race,” Thoreau declares, “in its gradual improvement to leave off eating animals.” This is applied Kant, used to justify vegetarianism. Kant believed in humanity’s innate and inevitable advance toward moral clarity, a belief that nowdays would earn you an askance look or a sympathetic headshake at your Panglossian blockheadedness. One must wonder, though, if Kant would be pleased to find a diminished desire for, say, pork roast a signal of moral refinement. But, as a Transcendentalist, committed to spiritual growth, sieving the world for nuggets of the numinous, the “higher law” that will galvanize humanity’s moral evolution, Thoreau is in haste to leave all brute traces of creaturely being behind. Still, I use the quote, but it’s really a non-answer, no more than using Thoreau as a phaser set on stun—an attempt to daze through a kind of moral elevation and, I may as well admit, dazzle in the process.
For Thoreau, vegetarianism is not about food so much as metaphysics—a way of correlating the nature of the world and the creatures in it with an ethics that inscribes our actions with a meaning that points beyond them. Many have concurred that the fullness of our lived experience is profaned by eating other creatures. Emerson says, “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” Tolstoy says “as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” Einstein, seemingly channeling the spirit of Thoreau, says “It always seemed to me that man was not born to be a carnivore,” and, thus, “I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience,” though I’m not quite sure how a conscience can be somewhat guilty. Relativity, I suppose. The Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham, convinced that spicy food invites lust, concocted the graham cracker, bland and whole-grainedly healthful, as a kind of moral rampart to repel “venereal excess” among the supposedly defenseless middle class and its susceptible offspring—a rampart reinforced by Graham’s fellow traveller John Harvey Kellogg and the Battle Creek birth of breakfast cereal. Today, of course, graham crackers have morphed into the white-floured and sugared confection his course-grained, sugarless, high-fiber crackers were designed to replace. Should Dr. Graham walk the aisles of any Wal-Mart superstore today and see what bears his name, he would no doubt rent his garments in abject distress. Kellogg, too.
While I respect the willingness of these culinary fundamentalists to send their moral yawp over the rooftops of the meat-eating world, I did not turn to vegetarianism from a sense of carnivorous shame, nor a sense of slaughterhouse complicity, nor a guilty conscience—even a somewhat guilty conscience. Nor did I share Graham’s belief that every sexual impulse was only nanoseconds from gratification. Indeed, moral reformers like Graham give me the willies, for their crusading requires them to create, even relish, the very evil they proscribe in order to power their crusade. Morally, that’s a paradox, loved by postmodernists, but, for us ordinary folk, just a little shady.
Nor did I become a vegetarian for the reason that motivated George Bernard Shaw: “Animals are my friends,” Shaw said, “and I do not eat my friends.” Possibly Shaw had Thoreau’s moment of communion with a woodchuck in mind: “We sat looking at one another about half an hour, till we began to feel mesmeric influences.” Or, he may have taken to heart Walt Whitman’s declaration in Song of Myself that he’d like to “live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained” and never “whine about their condition” or “discuss their duty to God” or suffer the “demented. . .mania of owning things.” Still, Whitman’s animal amity extended only to poetry. He was not a vegetarian, so his willingness to eat those among whom he wished to live is disturbing. Poetic license, possibly, though Whitman would surely be viewed by those tranquil animals as a frenemy. Whitman does, however, leave himself an escape hatch at the end of Song of Myself: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. (I am large. I contain multitudes).” Well, Emerson did say that a foolish consistency is the bogeyman of little minds.
I’d guess it more likely that Shaw’s vegetarianism was a morality as metaphysical as Thoreau’s, but based not on purity but, rather, reciprocity and an ethic of care. Certainly, to consider animals friends betrays an anthropomorphism that assigns intentions to, and, thus, personifies them—a fusion of the human self and the creaturely other, since we ourselves have intentions and, in projecting them outward, can feel related to and have an impact on the other. In her The Sacred Depth of Nature, cell biologist Ursula Goodenough posits “our deep genetic homology with all of life” and “our capacity to experience empathy with other creatures and respond to their concerns as our own.”
I’d like to think that Shaw, who. like all true vegans, would not even wear clothing or shoes made from leather, experienced the sense of covenant Goodenough describes. Such a covenant undoubtedly fuels the current debate over animal “personhood,” whose proponents argue that since some animals can be taught to communicate using sign language or abstract symbols, and that others solve problems, display empathy and cooperation, and deploy tools, the dividing line between human and animal is smudged. Indeed, such a line is assigned rather than innate, they contend, a constructed concept, historically contingent upon ethnic or religious affiliations and the vogue for a cognitive style based on analytic thinking. Implicit in Shaw’s friendship with animals is the notion that to see the creatures we consume as oblivious to themselves, driven only by blind instinct, is nothing more than an instrumental justification for killing and eating them. I admire Shaw’s position. It infuses animals’ lives with value and meaning. I like its summons to turn our reverent gaze from the self-reflecting pool, to lower the self-exalting plinth upon which we have placed ourselves. We are, after all, told in Genesis that God’s covenant relations extend well beyond us to include “every living creature of all flesh.” It would seem imprudent to consume creatures with whom we share such a sacramental relationship. Yet, despite the talismanic attractiveness I find in it, such an ethical summons did not lead me to become a vegetarian.
I did not turn to vegetarianism for the reasons Benjamin Franklin did. In his Autobiography, Franklin tells us that at age 16 he “happen’d to meet with a book. . . recommending a Vegetable Diet” and “determined to go into it.” Franklin wanted to rise in the world and vegetarianism provided a ticket to ride. He was able to save half his wages as “an additional Fund for buying Books” and made “greater Progress” in his course of self-study “from that Clearness of Head & quicker Apprehension which usually attend Temperance in Eating & Drinking.” I do not think my decision was so calculatingly utilitarian. I think I was more charmed by the idea than motivated by its maximization of value. Besides, as a graduate student so strapped for cash that I often ate oatmeal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I had no half to save. Indeed, I was a quasi-vegetarian already. Why not just go whole hog, uh, whole textured soy protein? As for clearheadedness, No-Doze worked just fine.
Franklin eventually abandoned vegetarianism. In a cage match between his “Resolution of not eating animal Food” and his great love of fish “hot out of the Frying Pan,” resolution suffered a smackdown. And while he returned “only now & then occasionally to a vegetable Diet, my resolution has never wavered. So, why am I a vegetarian? Maybe because at the time of my decision I was working nights in a health-food store and the nostalgic ethos of the unreconstructed hippie owners rubbed off on me. Or maybe because I was dating a young woman heavily into roach clips, ergonomic chairs, and meatless cuisine and, like young men from the beginning of time, I sought to ingratiate myself with her. However, while such motivations may explain why I became a vegetarian, they do not explain why I remained one.
Certainly health was a factor. Ignoring the preponderance of evidence suggesting that animal food contains a health-pillaging brew of saturated fat, triglycerides, low-density lipoproteins, cholesterol, tranquilizers, antibiotics, and growth hormones would be as logical as trying to capture a neutrino in a mousetrap. But I suspect quality of life was only part of the reason. Some have theorized that the attraction of vegetarianism lies in its restriction of choice. Faced with abundant alternatives, the prospect of making a choice, they say, becomes fraught with doubt, with paralytic second, third, and fourth guessing. Vegetarianism, thus, is a craven retreat from choice to a comforting enclave of limitation. I find that view proof positive that milking the cow of theory too exuberantly splashes only skim into the bucket. It plunders the human capacity for self-scrutiny based on practical reason, to set ourselves at a distance from the buzzing welter and chart a self-chosen direction. I agree that choosing to be a vegetarian involves restriction of choice, but hardly a retreat from it. My restraint was itself a choice; it was willingly undertaken discipline—rather like exercising every morning a dawn. What has kept me at it for 25 years, I think, is the experience of self-command, of a fortitude forged from foregoing, a voluntary surrender to being determined by what I found meaningful. A suspension of agency? A forked-over autonomy? Hardly. I think of it as a self-benediction. By and large, we are swept along by events. They are, as Emerson observed, “in the saddle and ride mankind.” I wanted one small annex, some narrow latitude, some islanded arena, where I could wield the broom, and I found it in vegetarianism. It was a matter of self-esteem, not conferred by others but by me on me. I think Thoreau would understand. I suspect Jesus would approve. Buddha, not so much.
The term “vegetarian,” it would seem, is more evocative than referential, more connotative than denotative, more a play of signification than a ligature to a singular reality. We are, as Kant long ago asserted, categorizing beings. We partition and name our experience of the world, including our experience of ourselves and our behaviors, to wrest control from chaos and erect distinguishing boundaries. Vegetarians doubly distinguish themselves, as vegetarians and as particular types of vegetarians. They narrate themselves and, like all narrations, they do so according to different genres. I like that the deep grammar of “vegetarianism” finds utterance in the surface grammars of “vegetarians.” This, I think, is, for those who celebrate diversity, a good thing: from the unum of “vegetarianism” springs the pluribus of “vegetarian.”
As is natural when a group of people conscript themselves under some banner or other, ancillary institutions arise: societies, organizations, and associations devoted to providing services, events, education, and advocacy; books and magazines; online sites; a Museum of Vegetarianism; a vegan prisoner support program; a vegetarian dating service; vegetarian cruises, cycling tours, and cooking vacations; and vegetarian body care products. Essentially, these institutions constitute what Peter Berger calls “mediating structures.” They stand between vegetarians and vegetarianism and empower the concept by fostering its value. Also natural is compiling a list of luminaries to lend both glamour and gravitas to the enterprise. Indeed, the roster of vegetarians, past and present, is impressively large and impressively famous. Jesus was a vegetarian, at least according to Isaiah who, in predicting Christ’s birth, declares that “Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good." Symbolic, undoubtedly, for Luke tells us that, appearing before the apostles after his death, Jesus requests food. They give Jesus “a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them." Seemingly, Jesus was a posthumous pescatarian; however, the passage from Luke is the only biblical verse referring to Jesus eating meat, and there is no evidence that he partook of the fish he miraculously made multiply, on two separate occasions, to feed the thousands in his audience. And he does refer to himself in John as “the bread of life,” Still, Jesus was not a proselytizing vegetarian, for nowhere in the Bible does he advocate it. Buddha, however, was a proselytizing vegetarian, not surprising in a man who sought to relinquish not just meat but the desire for food itself—and ultimately, desire itself--on his austere, Garmin-less journey to nirvana. Other vegetarians include Plato, Pythagorus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, Mohandas Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Dr. Spock (and Leonard Nimoy/Mr. Spock), Clint Eastwood, Cesar Chavez, Coretta Scott King, and Julia Roberts—and, since 1985, me. Heady company, indeed.
There was a time when anyone announcing themselves as a vegetarian was looked upon as some odd ethnological specimen fit only for museum display, or possibly for police surveillance. Thankfully, that time has passed. Still, I am often asked why I became a vegetarian. In response I generally temporize, for the truth is I’m not quite sure. I do, however, know the reasons that did not motivate my turn to vegetarianism. To inquirers, I will sometimes quote Thoreau--“Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal”—but that’s not a perspective I share. I find it difficult to accept its implicit disgust, its shame at a supposed impurity of desire in our creaturely being. It is essentially a moral position, with carnivorous eating not so much an evil as a retardant to humankind’s evolution to a more perfect condition. “It is the destiny of the human race,” Thoreau declares, “in its gradual improvement to leave off eating animals.” This is applied Kant, used to justify vegetarianism. Kant believed in humanity’s innate and inevitable advance toward moral clarity, a belief that nowdays would earn you an askance look or a sympathetic headshake at your Panglossian blockheadedness. One must wonder, though, if Kant would be pleased to find a diminished desire for, say, pork roast a signal of moral refinement. But, as a Transcendentalist, committed to spiritual growth, sieving the world for nuggets of the numinous, the “higher law” that will galvanize humanity’s moral evolution, Thoreau is in haste to leave all brute traces of creaturely being behind. Still, I use the quote, but it’s really a non-answer, no more than using Thoreau as a phaser set on stun—an attempt to daze through a kind of moral elevation and, I may as well admit, dazzle in the process.
For Thoreau, vegetarianism is not about food so much as metaphysics—a way of correlating the nature of the world and the creatures in it with an ethics that inscribes our actions with a meaning that points beyond them. Many have concurred that the fullness of our lived experience is profaned by eating other creatures. Emerson says, “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” Tolstoy says “as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” Einstein, seemingly channeling the spirit of Thoreau, says “It always seemed to me that man was not born to be a carnivore,” and, thus, “I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience,” though I’m not quite sure how a conscience can be somewhat guilty. Relativity, I suppose. The Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham, convinced that spicy food invites lust, concocted the graham cracker, bland and whole-grainedly healthful, as a kind of moral rampart to repel “venereal excess” among the supposedly defenseless middle class and its susceptible offspring—a rampart reinforced by Graham’s fellow traveller John Harvey Kellogg and the Battle Creek birth of breakfast cereal. Today, of course, graham crackers have morphed into the white-floured and sugared confection his course-grained, sugarless, high-fiber crackers were designed to replace. Should Dr. Graham walk the aisles of any Wal-Mart superstore today and see what bears his name, he would no doubt rent his garments in abject distress. Kellogg, too.
While I respect the willingness of these culinary fundamentalists to send their moral yawp over the rooftops of the meat-eating world, I did not turn to vegetarianism from a sense of carnivorous shame, nor a sense of slaughterhouse complicity, nor a guilty conscience—even a somewhat guilty conscience. Nor did I share Graham’s belief that every sexual impulse was only nanoseconds from gratification. Indeed, moral reformers like Graham give me the willies, for their crusading requires them to create, even relish, the very evil they proscribe in order to power their crusade. Morally, that’s a paradox, loved by postmodernists, but, for us ordinary folk, just a little shady.
Nor did I become a vegetarian for the reason that motivated George Bernard Shaw: “Animals are my friends,” Shaw said, “and I do not eat my friends.” Possibly Shaw had Thoreau’s moment of communion with a woodchuck in mind: “We sat looking at one another about half an hour, till we began to feel mesmeric influences.” Or, he may have taken to heart Walt Whitman’s declaration in Song of Myself that he’d like to “live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained” and never “whine about their condition” or “discuss their duty to God” or suffer the “demented. . .mania of owning things.” Still, Whitman’s animal amity extended only to poetry. He was not a vegetarian, so his willingness to eat those among whom he wished to live is disturbing. Poetic license, possibly, though Whitman would surely be viewed by those tranquil animals as a frenemy. Whitman does, however, leave himself an escape hatch at the end of Song of Myself: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. (I am large. I contain multitudes).” Well, Emerson did say that a foolish consistency is the bogeyman of little minds.
I’d guess it more likely that Shaw’s vegetarianism was a morality as metaphysical as Thoreau’s, but based not on purity but, rather, reciprocity and an ethic of care. Certainly, to consider animals friends betrays an anthropomorphism that assigns intentions to, and, thus, personifies them—a fusion of the human self and the creaturely other, since we ourselves have intentions and, in projecting them outward, can feel related to and have an impact on the other. In her The Sacred Depth of Nature, cell biologist Ursula Goodenough posits “our deep genetic homology with all of life” and “our capacity to experience empathy with other creatures and respond to their concerns as our own.”
I’d like to think that Shaw, who. like all true vegans, would not even wear clothing or shoes made from leather, experienced the sense of covenant Goodenough describes. Such a covenant undoubtedly fuels the current debate over animal “personhood,” whose proponents argue that since some animals can be taught to communicate using sign language or abstract symbols, and that others solve problems, display empathy and cooperation, and deploy tools, the dividing line between human and animal is smudged. Indeed, such a line is assigned rather than innate, they contend, a constructed concept, historically contingent upon ethnic or religious affiliations and the vogue for a cognitive style based on analytic thinking. Implicit in Shaw’s friendship with animals is the notion that to see the creatures we consume as oblivious to themselves, driven only by blind instinct, is nothing more than an instrumental justification for killing and eating them. I admire Shaw’s position. It infuses animals’ lives with value and meaning. I like its summons to turn our reverent gaze from the self-reflecting pool, to lower the self-exalting plinth upon which we have placed ourselves. We are, after all, told in Genesis that God’s covenant relations extend well beyond us to include “every living creature of all flesh.” It would seem imprudent to consume creatures with whom we share such a sacramental relationship. Yet, despite the talismanic attractiveness I find in it, such an ethical summons did not lead me to become a vegetarian.
I did not turn to vegetarianism for the reasons Benjamin Franklin did. In his Autobiography, Franklin tells us that at age 16 he “happen’d to meet with a book. . . recommending a Vegetable Diet” and “determined to go into it.” Franklin wanted to rise in the world and vegetarianism provided a ticket to ride. He was able to save half his wages as “an additional Fund for buying Books” and made “greater Progress” in his course of self-study “from that Clearness of Head & quicker Apprehension which usually attend Temperance in Eating & Drinking.” I do not think my decision was so calculatingly utilitarian. I think I was more charmed by the idea than motivated by its maximization of value. Besides, as a graduate student so strapped for cash that I often ate oatmeal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I had no half to save. Indeed, I was a quasi-vegetarian already. Why not just go whole hog, uh, whole textured soy protein? As for clearheadedness, No-Doze worked just fine.
Franklin eventually abandoned vegetarianism. In a cage match between his “Resolution of not eating animal Food” and his great love of fish “hot out of the Frying Pan,” resolution suffered a smackdown. And while he returned “only now & then occasionally to a vegetable Diet, my resolution has never wavered. So, why am I a vegetarian? Maybe because at the time of my decision I was working nights in a health-food store and the nostalgic ethos of the unreconstructed hippie owners rubbed off on me. Or maybe because I was dating a young woman heavily into roach clips, ergonomic chairs, and meatless cuisine and, like young men from the beginning of time, I sought to ingratiate myself with her. However, while such motivations may explain why I became a vegetarian, they do not explain why I remained one.
Certainly health was a factor. Ignoring the preponderance of evidence suggesting that animal food contains a health-pillaging brew of saturated fat, triglycerides, low-density lipoproteins, cholesterol, tranquilizers, antibiotics, and growth hormones would be as logical as trying to capture a neutrino in a mousetrap. But I suspect quality of life was only part of the reason. Some have theorized that the attraction of vegetarianism lies in its restriction of choice. Faced with abundant alternatives, the prospect of making a choice, they say, becomes fraught with doubt, with paralytic second, third, and fourth guessing. Vegetarianism, thus, is a craven retreat from choice to a comforting enclave of limitation. I find that view proof positive that milking the cow of theory too exuberantly splashes only skim into the bucket. It plunders the human capacity for self-scrutiny based on practical reason, to set ourselves at a distance from the buzzing welter and chart a self-chosen direction. I agree that choosing to be a vegetarian involves restriction of choice, but hardly a retreat from it. My restraint was itself a choice; it was willingly undertaken discipline—rather like exercising every morning a dawn. What has kept me at it for 25 years, I think, is the experience of self-command, of a fortitude forged from foregoing, a voluntary surrender to being determined by what I found meaningful. A suspension of agency? A forked-over autonomy? Hardly. I think of it as a self-benediction. By and large, we are swept along by events. They are, as Emerson observed, “in the saddle and ride mankind.” I wanted one small annex, some narrow latitude, some islanded arena, where I could wield the broom, and I found it in vegetarianism. It was a matter of self-esteem, not conferred by others but by me on me. I think Thoreau would understand. I suspect Jesus would approve. Buddha, not so much.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Monetized Education: "Pays for A's"
Sometimes, the snappy salutes TV and the tribunes of consumerism give each other become so noxious that not even a ladle-ful of Estee Lauder could fragrance the relation enough to make it fit for company. Our local NBC affiliate and a suburban mall have teamed up to offer a program called “Pays for A’s.” Students bring their report cards to the mall’s guest services and for every A will receive their choice of a free scoop of ice cream, a pretzel, or a sour rock candy stick—and, they are entered into a drawing for the grand prize: 20 tickets to an IMAX film plus free pop and popcorn for each guest. Now, I understand the principles of stimulus-reward behaviorism; after all, it’s how B. F. Skinner got pigeons to play ping pong. But, putting aside the triviality of the rewards and the fact that “Pays for A’s” is designed to draw children into the mall, that shining citadel of getting and spending, this program is, for me, as healthy as a bucket of Karmelkorn—which, inexplicably, was left off the prize list.
Of course, the steady encroachment of commercial values into noncommercial areas has, by now, a well-established pedigree. The problem is that commercial values do not admit a sense of some purpose beyond the materially transactional. An activity that cannot be monetized lacks substance or significance. There is no sense that activities have value in themselves. There is no good but goods. “Pays for A’s” subordinates learning to materialist ends and assumes that such ends are the essence of human nature. So much for John Dewey’s notion of ends being the means for further ends unfolding in ordered richness. Instead, students are taught to be impatient with activities whose values are deferred in a process that, like education, occurs over time. “Pays for A’s” denies collateral learning, “ah ha!” moments, self-insight, and the self-esteem that comes from accomplishment. Just commit crystallized lumps of data to memory, rehearse them at test time, earn an A, and get a prize. Kind of like Cracker Jacks.
The program also assumes that with pecuniary motivation all students can get A’s, which simply ignores the reality of individual difference. Students who work hard to raise their grades from, say, C’s to B’s go unrewarded. Those already earning A’s are simply encouraged to not slack off. To see the sense of this would require several Long Island Ice Teas. It is wrongheaded and elitist.
Perhaps my view of education, of what it means to become educated, floats on rose-scented air. Still, I can’t help but feel that in gaining a price it has lost its value.
Of course, the steady encroachment of commercial values into noncommercial areas has, by now, a well-established pedigree. The problem is that commercial values do not admit a sense of some purpose beyond the materially transactional. An activity that cannot be monetized lacks substance or significance. There is no sense that activities have value in themselves. There is no good but goods. “Pays for A’s” subordinates learning to materialist ends and assumes that such ends are the essence of human nature. So much for John Dewey’s notion of ends being the means for further ends unfolding in ordered richness. Instead, students are taught to be impatient with activities whose values are deferred in a process that, like education, occurs over time. “Pays for A’s” denies collateral learning, “ah ha!” moments, self-insight, and the self-esteem that comes from accomplishment. Just commit crystallized lumps of data to memory, rehearse them at test time, earn an A, and get a prize. Kind of like Cracker Jacks.
The program also assumes that with pecuniary motivation all students can get A’s, which simply ignores the reality of individual difference. Students who work hard to raise their grades from, say, C’s to B’s go unrewarded. Those already earning A’s are simply encouraged to not slack off. To see the sense of this would require several Long Island Ice Teas. It is wrongheaded and elitist.
Perhaps my view of education, of what it means to become educated, floats on rose-scented air. Still, I can’t help but feel that in gaining a price it has lost its value.
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