environment

I guess I'm a ethikotrogo-flexitarian

I was on the verge of coining a neologism: ethikotroge (or ethikotrogonist) when I discovered that I’m a flexitarian. I still might keep the overall neologism, since there is more than one reason for being a flexitarian. Someone looking at this in a public journal is likely to ask “What’s a flexitarian?”, so I’d better define it. A flexitarian is someone who eats a diet mainly without meat, but uses meat occasionally.

My reasons are ethical overall, and include reasons of good health. I’m a decided latitudinarian when it comes to being flexitarian.

  • Often it’s just a matter of eating a much smaller portion of meat, and more vegetable matter, on the European mode, refusing to make meat the center of the meal. It’s a more balanced approach.
  • Sometimes it’s leaving meat out of some meals altogether, refusing to treat it as less than a meal if it lacks meat. The hegemony of meat is irrational, and is repudiated, along with its basic contribution to the passions.
  • Sometimes, it’s refusing to eat certain kinds of meat (like poultry), or any but free-range eggs. It has to do with ethical treatment of animals.
  • It’s often refusing “meat products” that aren’t whole cuts of meat. No processed lunch meats, hot dogs, etc. Occasionally, though, I’ll do sausage as a cultural concession to Italian food.
  • It includes avoiding establishments that specialize in particularly heinous use of meat, such as restaurants that serve shark fin, dog, lobster, or specialize in high-production poultry farming, or are McDonalds. 🙂
  • It’s refusing meat when there’s a choice between low grade meat and high grade vegetable matter. For instance, Taco Bell is out (as essentially garbage-meat), but I’ll eat a steak on occasion.
  • It’s refusing to eat meat that comes from severe environmental disruption, such as Brazilian beef.
  • It’s refusing to over-complexify food (e.g. with processed food) with too many ingredients at once and, even in gourmet cooking, specializes in a form that uses few ingredients at one time.

It’s an attempt to reduce harmful impact on nature, some of the agony caused to animals, over-use – the gluttony of production, subterfuge – the mythology of ethical animal product production, subordination to passion-bearing foods that captivate and dominate the soul and senses and lead to various social ills as well as personal failings, an attempt to reduce negative health impacts from harmful feed and hormones (including natural feeds and hormones), an attempt to avoid excess and irrationality, and a repudiation of the basic assumptions of the dominant culture (which is always a good and healthy thing – in that regard, I tend to share the opinion of some fathers that even when the culture does good, it’s doing evil). Finally, I believe all death to be the result of my sin, and so to be evil, and want to keep this in mind, and keep an eschatological attitude, looking to the end of death, for which creation groans, and the peace between lion, lamb, and child.

At the same time, I have certain dietary needs tied to my own chemistry and physiology that generally require animal products, especially dairy. And there is a sense in which, unless it’s a fast, I think it can be a conditional good to participate in the feast (e.g. kill the fatted calf). I think, in fact, there’s a general duty to feast (on fish, at least), when it’s a Feast, in the same way it’s a law of the Church to fast during the Fasts. For these reasons, I eat some animal products.

The ultimate reason I’m a flexitarian is to assert, with action, and keep in mind always, that eating is not a n ethically neutral endeavour. Ethics are just as necessary and important there as in driving, investing, etc. So I’ll keep my new word, too, as the overall explanation.

Meanwhile, this also does two things in regard to Great Lent, Little Lent, and the other fasts. It means that it’s not such a horrible impact to “switch”, because it’s not switching, it’s a slightly more severe modification. And it carries the meaning and purposes of the Fasts into the rest of life and time, including the Feasts. So, I think there’s a strong religious benefit.

So that’s it, I’m either a very liberal flexitarian or a strict ethikotrogue. 🙂

References

Note to self: next entry is on ethical shopping (or non-shopping).

The Union of All Creation

How imperfect the union of all men, that we pray for in the litanies.

Death, the fragmentation that sunders body and soul, that divides the soul (setting mind, will, and emotion at odds) also divides us from all men.

The first criminal psychologists were called Alienists, because they believed that behavior which alienates men from each other stems from an inner alienation from the self.

Death at work in my members. Death, the universal foe and inheritance from Adam.

Wherever there is sickness, it is death. Wherever hurt or want. Wherever frustration or deprivation. Wherever pain and suffering.

All these things in the world come from this one disease, spread even to creation, alienating man from environment, and all creatures from each other – caught as they are now in the struggle of the jungle – killing or being killed or starving, so that all creation groans, waiting for the full revelation of our triumph, the fullness of victory, the taking by persons of what is won by nature. As scripture puts it, “the revelation of the sons of God” to the world.

And then, beloved, the lion will lie down with the lamb, and a little child shall lead them. We shall all be restored to ourselves and each other. We shall be whole, and neither shall there be known any more sickness, or sorrow, or sighing, or hunger, or hatred, and neither shall man make war.

It is coming, my brother, my sister. Until then, how imperfect this union. And yet, we shall persevere until then, by Christ who has redeemed our nature from the grave, and makes possible the union of each person with him. What they could not do at Babel, Christ has done in his own person, through the Theotokos.

Gaia and Animal Rights

It is easy to expose the weak underbelly of the “animal rights” idea. After all, the conception of “rights” is uniquely human, and so depends on humans to conceive of and apply to animals. It means that without humans, animals can have no rights, and so are subordinated to humans, having only the animal rights granted them by their human benefactors according to human interests and human concerns for self-preservation, enjoyment, etc. Ironically, the concept of “animal rights” accomplishes the opposite of what its advocates seem to be seeking. Rather than showing the innate value to ecology, it subordinates ecology (perhaps wholly) to man’s values and choices – ultimately to human utility.

It is then also  ironic and certainly disconcerting that so many who assert a “fundamental right to life” for veal – unborn cattle, reject any fundamental right to life for humans who have not yet emerged from their mothers’ wombs. The inconsistency begs the question: What is the source of rights? The tendency here is that rights derive from power, or might makes right. Some discerning animal rights activists note that from power comes responsibility, but this leaves the question unasked: Why does power demand responsibility rather than simple utilitarianism? From what ultimate power and benevolence does the principle derive?

One answer to this question has been the “Gaia” deity (Mother Earth) theology which (without going into the mythological and purely religious details) asserts that great damage has been done to the terran ecology by man. The earth is somehow suffering, as a result of man, from futility, and is somehow returning the favor. This is an easy theology to adopt when it compliments the widespread faith of nihilism – belief in the futility of absolutely everything. It begs the question though: What are intelligence and volition, and how are they measured? Cause and effect are one thing, but a soul is another. Deifying the earth that one holds as ultimate value is essentially totemism; that’s fine, but it is a far cry from a genuine answer. If, as pantheism suggests, it is creation that is divine, why the persistent futility? The question becomes also: what is divinity? The Gaia myth also, however, identifies key human concerns  which it may be possible to address in other if similar terms.

Debunking “animal rights” and “Gaia” arguments has two pitfalls: 1) that of  a merely reactionary mentality – casual about suffering and uncompassionate, 2) that of rejecting the arguments without getting at the basic problems being identified, however not solved, by these ideologies. Set over against the “animal rights” and “Gaia” thinking is the most powerful force in Western thought, Latin and Protestant Christianity.

So often there has been a failure on the part of this force to at once adequately explore the identity of man with the rest of nature, to posit an adequate basis for the unity of all of creation, and to preserve the unique identity of man with God, man’s singularity among creations in the image and potential likeness of the Creator. This dilemma, as Christian thinker Francis Schaeffer correctly observed, has led to a concentration on the identity of man and God at the expense of the rest of creation, and so to a theoretical ethical vacuum which must necessarily be filled with the ideas of Christianity’s nemesis, Monism and its practical expression in Gnostic Paganism, even if those ideas are not only inadequate but carry attendant faults every bit as dangerous as the Western Christian ideas have proved destructive. Certainly the risk of greater inhumanity results from the blurring of the distinction between man and animal and the alienation of man from the moral perfection of the Creator.

It is possible, also that the best formulation of a morality of ecology is found not  in a dialectical oppsosition to the Christian tradition, but rather within it. Eastern Orthodoxy argues that the Incarnation accomplished not only the deification of man, but  the deification of ecology as well.

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