They Pity, and Eat the Objects of Their Compassion
This is the second installment from the book “Ethical Vegetarianism“. The editors have given a section to Oliver Goldsmith, British poet and essayist, drawing from his work “The Citizen of the World”. In it Goldsmith “satirically scrutinized the norms of eighteenth-century England through the eyes of Lien Chi Altangi, a fictional Chinese visitor to the West who regales his Pekin correspondents with sometimes bewildered accounts of British customs.” (61) This content epitomizes what my contemporaries generally refer to as the schizophrenia we exhibit towards the rest of the animal kingdom, the fundamental irrationality with which we relate to other creatures. Our hearts rejoice when we see a creature washed clean after an oil spill, or in any other way really, saved from the injustice of our recklessness … while at the same time refusing to see the face of that same creature on our plates. I really believe, deep down, we know something is wrong. We don’t want to see precisely because of the pointedness with which it reminds us of our fundamental error. They have faces too.
The better sort here pretend to the utmost compassion for animals of every kind: to hear them speak, a stranger would be apt to imagine they could hardly hurt the gnat that stung them; they seem so tender and so full of pity, that one would take them for the harmless friends of the whole creation … And yet (would you believe it?) I have seen the very men who have thus boasted of their tenderness, at the same time devouring the flesh of six different animals tossed up in a fricassee. Strange contrariety of conduct! They pity, and eat the objects of their compassion! …. Man was born to live with innocence and simplicity, but he has deviated from nature; he was born to share the bounties of the heavens, but he has monopolized them; he was born to govern the brute creation, but he has become their tyrant. If an epicure now shall happen to surfeit on his last night’s feast, twenty animals the next day are to undergo the most exquisite tortures, in order to provoke his appetite to another guilty meal. (62)
The observations of the fictional Lien Chi Altangi reminds me of the observations of the real Martin Luther. Luther, says of the context of Gen. 6-9 in which animals fear people after the flood, that “The reason is that until now the animals did not have to die in order to provide food for man, but man was a gentle master of the beasts rather than their slayer or consumer”.* Luther was living and theologizing under the assumption that people had to eat meat to live. No one can blame him for what he didn’t know. (again, not that there haven’t been vegetarians doing just fine for thousands of years but Luther may not have known any, or legitimately, perhaps given his time and location you couldn’t get access to enough produce year round … ) We can, however, recognize the extent to which his cultural assumptions about nutrition informed his theology. He may not have known better at the time, but we know better now. I suspect that for anyone reading this blog, that most hideous of “necessary evils” is, in fact, no longer excusable as theoretical necessity any more than it is a practical necessity.
* as quoted in “Luther and Animals: Subject to Adam’s Fall?” by Scott Ickert in Animals on the Agenda, ed. Linzey and Yamamoto (1998), 91.
