As
you might have guessed from the title, this is a post about vegetarianism. But
it is also about the way of thinking that allows most people to go from “aww
cute little lambies!” to “mmm, roast lamb” without missing a beat. It’s a way
of thinking I believe I've seen elsewhere and no good comes of it, so it’s
worth a closer look. Vegetarianism is just one example; an important one I
think.
I
became a vegetarian for environmental reasons (global warming, better energy
efficiency of growing arable crops versus grazing animals etc). I didn't think
there was actually anything wrong with killing and eating animals in principle,
and I had no particular emotional reaction to the idea of eating meat; it just
seemed rationally better not to.
I
had always wondered why I wasn't repulsed by the idea of eating meat; why we
all aren't. There must be a moment in childhood when you find out what meat is,
and it seems like that should be pretty traumatic and put you off for life. Yet
I remember no such moment, and other people I have talked to mostly don’t
either. I wondered whether, when I stopped eating meat, I would develop an
emotional disgust-response to the idea of it. And I did. It’s why I think that
happened that’s interesting, so enough of the autobiographical wittering, and
let’s look at that.
When
we are doing something that isn't really right, I think the subconscious
reasoning goes something like “I do this, and I'm not a bad/stupid/thoughtless
person, so it can’t be a bad/stupid/thoughtless thing to do”. Sometimes you
hear people say things like this out loud. I've met people who think “well I've always eaten meat” is a
justification of some sort, and I'm sure you have too. Once you stop doing the
thing (eating meat in this case), that line of thought is cut off. Then you can
think about the thing itself, without your self-image getting in the way. If
there’s one thing that clouds all of our judgement, it’s self-image.
I
said this applies to things other than vegetarianism, so what do I have in
mind? One example is abusive relationships. There’s a tendency to think
something like “I wouldn't get taken advantage of because I'm a strong and
smart person, so given that I'm in this relationship, it can’t be one in which
I'm being taken advantage of”. And then you don’t leave. (Of course I'm not
implying that strong and smart people don’t get into abusive relationships.
Learning that they do sometimes can be the way to get out without destroying your
self-image).
I
have seen the same reasoning applied to drunk driving. An acquaintance off her
face on chardonnay was giving a group of people a lift home. Someone suggested
she was in no fit state, but she told us that she doesn't drink much because of
her religion. Presumably the thinking was “I don’t drink much because I'm not
that sort of person, so I can’t be drunk”. Again, self-image (and admittedly
booze too in this case) gets in the way of seeing what is actually going wrong.
This
thought pattern is a kind of what George Orwell called doublethink. You can learn to live with the tension between
believing something to be wrong (or at least having a nagging half-conscious
sense that it is) and explicitly denying it. In this case, the trick is pulled
off because of the way self-image gets in the way. We don’t even need an
Orwellian oppressive regime to tell us what to think; we can do doublethink all
by ourselves. It seems possible that learning to think in this way could leave
us open to manipulation by a regime that relies on such contradictions, à la
1984, but I’ll leave that thought as a vague suggestion here. The examples of
self-manipulation in the cases of abusive relationships and drink driving
should be enough to show that this way of thinking can be dangerous.
Is
there a way to stop ourselves thinking this way? Probably not entirely, since
it seems to be something we take to so naturally. But being aware of that fact
by itself arms us against it to some extent. Knowledge is power (over yourself,
as much as over others).
To
close, I want to bring this back to vegetarianism. What I have said would make
sense of the idea of initiatives that challenge people to go veggie for a month
just to try it. You don’t just learn what other options you have to eat, you
erode that image of yourself as a meat-eater, making it harder to think “I eat
meat, so it can’t be bad”. Why not push yourself further? Try reflecting on the
fact that you are munching on dead stuff – “mmm, tasty corpses!” – and see if
your emotions towards meat change. And if they are changed so easily, why
should your new thoughts be any less valid than the old? If you eat meat just
because it doesn't feel like a bad thing to do, or because you've always done
it, I dare you to try it and see what happens.
Then
you can enjoy watching those spring lambs playing in the fields without getting
hungry. If you look at them in the right way, they just aren't food!
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