The Soulful Eye

It just doesn’t get any more current than this.  He just had to eat the dog in sacrifice to the belly god …

But, as I’ve learned, logic has its limits. It’s the heart not the head that governs this world under the sway of the dizzy gods.

When I originally posted this a few days ago I thought I could just leave it at that.  But I can’t.  This one commentary highlights a couple of important themes that I need to point out.

First – he’s conflating his stomach, his appetite with “heart”.  I’d say there’s a difference between logic, heart, and stomach.  The author apparently doesn’t differentiate between heart and stomach.   That’s exactly what we’re seeing in our current topic – how both ancient moral philosophers and (we’ll see) Paul critiques the idea that bodily passions for both sex and food can and must be differentiated from, made subservient to logic and “heart”/soul.

Second – part of his argument is that if don’t eat dog you have to accept the notion of pigs as pets.  Logically, this is true because dogs and pigs aren’t intrinsically different enough to warrant our disparate treatment of them. (ok, there are other reasons we might choose a dog over a pig, of course, size, looks, the difference in the feel of touching one over the other, etc. but you get the basic idea – none of these seem to warrant the kinds of moral differentiation we bring to the treatment of one over the other)  If anything pigs can be smarter and are generally as sociable.  My problem is that when he gets to the logical point of having to concede that pigs and dogs are essentially similar his choice is to downgrade them both instead of being willing to lift one up.  Part of the problem with pigs as pets is that if everyone actually got to know pigs then we’d likely be forced to re-evaluate our general conceptions of them.  We need to keep them degraded so that we can treat them the way we do.  It’s easier to think of them in derogatory and objectified ways when you don’t actually ever know them. That mental process is the same for how isolated white people can think of black people, and how isolated straight people can think of gay people, etc.

Second – he completely recognizes that

it seems to me that reason has little or nothing to do with the way we view animals and food.

and

But do pigs have any more or less of a soul than dogs? Are they any more or less sentient? Do they suffer any more or less in death? Are they any more or less part of the mysterious unity of life? I think not.

There is a rational, and for some people a spiritual, case for being a vegetarian: Killing animals is wrong. However I cannot see a rational argument for saying eating dogs or cats is barbaric while eating pork or beef is fine. If you eat meat you cannot logically find it morally or ethically repugnant to eat a particular meat (I’m setting cannibalism aside here.)

So it’s not rational.  Check.

Dog was not easy for me. The memory has proved hard to digest. ….I’m not happy that I ate dog.

It was hard for him to do, and feels bad about doing it.  Check.

The difference between him and me is that we chose different solutions to the dissonance.   I realized what I was doing wasn’t rational and that I felt bad about it.   Not that I felt bad about acting irrationally although that’s part of it, but that I felt bad about participating in killing and brutality and all the horrific things that transpire before this “food” ever gets to my plate … I aligned my behavior towards that which was more rational and more in line with my inner moral compass if you will.  I aligned my behavior upwards rather than degrading my rationality and inner moral compass downwards.  The author of this column and I obviously have very different ideas about the place of rationality and listening to our inner moral compass in terms of the very meaning of being human.  What’s the point in having reason, empathy, altruism, and the ability to act on our sense of right and wrong if we throw it out the window, quite literally for a piece of flesh like he seems to suggest doing?