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solitude, boredom … and spiritual exercises

   

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” ― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

This is an all-too-brisk and cursory introduction to a profound subject that depends on presuppositions, assumptions and premises having to do with human nature, metaphysics (and philosophy more broadly), psychology (individuation and self-realization), and spirituality. And it unavoidably involves matters that broach socio-economic, sociological, and political topics and questions (e.g., New Age nonsense, the commodification of mindfulness or ‘McMinduflness,’ and The Happiness Industry). The “suggested reading” that follows might whet your appetite for further exploration. See too the titles in these compilations: (i) Buddhism and Psychoanalysis; (ii) Human Nature and Personal Identity; and (iii) Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization.

   

For some folks, at least those of us who have our basic life-sustaining needs satisfied, down-time, alone time, or solitude can be—perhaps unintentionally or as a by-product effect—psychologically, morally and spiritually beneficial (these benefits are not necessarily immediate or obvious). Those familiar with the notion of “spiritual exercises” (found, for instance, in Stoicism, classical Yoga praxis, Buddhism, monastic or contemplative traditions, and other ‘therapies of desire’*) can avail themselves of this newfound discretionary time for such mental activity; there is of course a “bodily” dimension to such spiritual exercises, but it is by way of helping quiet the mind so as to incarnate or enhance the technique of prosoche (in short, ‘attention’) and self-examination generally, a fact often forgotten or ignored in contemporary forms of yoga practice which tend to emphasize its purely physiological or gymnastic benefits. There is nothing intrinsic to such spiritual praxis that renders it “quietist” in the sense that necessitates or implies abstinence or withdrawal from political involvement and action. On the contrary, some practitioners, be they Catholics, Buddhists, or agnostics, for example, will testify to its various virtues and values for persistent, principled, and courageous political action. Moreover, even episodic or sustained feelings of boredom (which can occur in conjunction with the aforementioned ‘exercises’) may likewise have unintended or surprisingly beneficial psychological and creative effects, as broached in this post from last year.

* A nice introduction to the notion of “spiritual exercises” is found in the first chapter of John Cottingham’s The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (see below).

   

Suggested Reading:

• Bloch, Ernst (Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, trans.) The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
• Capps, Walter. The Monastic Impulse. New York: Crossroad, 1983.
• Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2013.
• Desikachar, T.K.V. and Hellfried Krusche (Anne Marie Hodges, trans.) Freud and Yoga: Two Philosophies of Mind Compared. New York: North Point Press, 2014.
• Fiordalis, David V., ed. Buddhist Spiritual Practices: Thinking with Pierre Hadot on Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path. Berkeley, CA: Mangalam Press, 2018.
• Ganeri, Jonardon and Clare Carlisle, eds. Philosophy as Therapeia (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 66). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Gardiner, Michael E. and Julian Jason Haladyn, eds. Boredom Studies Reader: Frameworks and Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2016.
• Goodin, Robert E., et al. Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Haldane, John. “On the very idea of spiritual values,” in Anthony O’Hear, ed. Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000: 53-71.
• Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Hoffer, Axel, ed. Freud and the Buddha: The Couch and the Cushion. London: Karnac Books, 2015.
• Horney, Karen. Self-Analysis. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1942.
• Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline. Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.
• Kakar, Sudhir. Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2008.
• McGhee, Michael. Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Nussbaum, Martha. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
• O’Brien, Wendell. Boredom: A History of Western Philosophical Perspectives, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Phillips, Adam. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Pieper, Josef. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2009 (London: Faber & Faber, 1952).
• Rojek, Chris. Capitalism and Leisure Theory. New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985.
• Rojek, Chris. The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2010.
• Rose, Julie L. Free Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
• Russell, Bertrand. “In Praise of Idleness,” in Russell’s In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2004 (1935).
• Schor, Juliet B. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
• Shippen, Nichole Marie. Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
• Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
• Storr, Anthony. Solitude: A Return to the Self. New York: Free Press, 1988.
• Svendsen, Lars (John Irons trans.) A Philosophy of Boredom. London: Reaktion Books, 2005.
• Toohey, Peter. Boredom: A Lively History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
• Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

   

The reckless, anti-democratic and pathological rhetoric of President Trump

Given his public symptomatic display of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, we should not be surprised at Trump’s habitual rhetorical reliance in public speeches upon crude, hyperbolic, and often child-like adjectives and metaphors with corresponding homologous and associationist thinking: mistaking bigness for greatness; the quantitative valuation—in monetary or commodity terms—of virtually everything; obsessively tying together competition, size and success; the attraction of novelty (often mistaken for creativity); the thirst for sensationalism; an overweening sense of privilege and superiority (hence the megalomania and related plutocratic and kleptocratic dispositions) rooted in a lifelong fascination with power born of phantasies, illusions, and delusions, the harm of which is exacerbated by mendacious Manichean political propaganda within an overarching ideological framework of racist, xenophobic, and religious (i.e., right-wing evangelical Christian) nationalism. Sycophantic Republican Party politicians act in shameless collaboration with the often rabidly irrational, ill-educated, and authoritarian-minded members of that portion of the electorate that serves to protect and polish the fragile glass-like membrane that constitutes the president’s ego; together they exhibit pathological symptoms of a body politic exemplifying the dark side of the maxim “like attracts like.” As Thomas Singer writes in his contribution to the edited volume by Bandy X. Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2017: 281), “There are ways in which Trump mirrors, even amplifies, our collective attention deficit disorder, our sociopathy, and our narcissism. Therefore, this is less about diagnosing a public figure than about recognizing our own pathology.”*

Below is a sampling of the President’s language from one of the daily briefings (March 26) on the coronavirus pandemic. But first, a collection of stock adjectives and recent phrases from the President:

fantastic; terrific; great; unprecedented; never been seen before; like you’ve never seen; nothing like this; incredible; wonderful; the biggest; the largest; the best; we’re doing what’s never been done before; we inherited a mess; things will be terrific; it’s big and beautiful; it will be greater than ever before; we have the greatest healthcare system in the world; we have the greatest economy in the world; as I keep saying, it’s a hidden enemy….

• ”It’s a great point of leverage; it’s a great negotiating tool”
• “there’s tremendous spirit from people and tremendous spirit with respect to these companies”
• “And they’re all working very hard to produce product—different—all different products. We had very little product when we came. We built it up, and we’ve — we give it away as fast as we can to the different states. We’re also, as you know, building numerous hospitals and medical centers throughout certain areas in New York.”
• “I’m working very hard on New York.”
• “It’s really, by far, our biggest problem. Maybe it will be; maybe it won’t be.”
• “We’re also doing some very large testings throughout the country. [….] [T]hey’ve done a very good job on testing, but we now are doing more testing that anybody, by far.”
• “We do more in eight days than they do in eight weeks. And we go up, on a daily basis, exponentially. So, it’s really good.”
• “But we have a tremendous paid sick leave provision for workers at no cost at all to the employers. And that’s a big thing: no cost to the employers.”
• “But this is certainly, in terms of dollars, by far and away the biggest ever, ever done. And that’s a tremendous thing because a lot of this money goes to jobs, jobs, jobs, and families, families, families.”
• “Nothing like that has ever been done in our country.”
• “It’s a doubling up. $27 billion to build up the Strategic National Stockpile with critical supplies, including masks, respirators, pharmaceuticals, and everything you can imagine—because it was very depleted, like our military was depleted. Now we have a brand-new military. Never had a military like this. We have equipment either coming or it's already come. For the most part, it's already come. But we have a lot of things that will soon be coming—planes, missiles, rockets, lots of things. But the stockpile was very depleted, like everything else.”
• “And I don’t think it’s going to end up being such a rough patch. I think it’s going to, when we open—especially, if we can open it—the sooner, the better—it’s going to open up like a rocket ship. I think it’s going to go very good and very quickly.”
• “But I’ll tell you, the nonprofits have been fantastic; they’ve been great. They’re great people, actually. I know a lot of them.”
• “We have 150 countries—over 150 countries where you have this virus. And nobody would ever believe a thing like that’s possible.”
• “Nobody could have ever seen something like this coming….”
• “It’s been incredible, how we’ve done. Remember this: More tests than anybody, by far.”
• “And the news, the reporters, the media always likes to bring South Korea—they called me and they told me, ‘It’s amazing. Your testing procedures are amazing.’ Plus, we have a test that’s a very high-level test, and it’s a test that’s very accurate.”
• “It’s hard not to be happy with the job we’re doing—that, I can tell you.”
• “So now we will hear from our great Secretary of the Treasury. He has been working rather hard, I will tell you. Steve Mnuchin is a—he’s a fantastic guy and he loves our country, and he’s been dealing with both sides—Republican and Democrat. He, sort of, lived over in that beautiful building. It’s a very beautiful building. To me, one of the most beautiful buildings, actually, in the world. And he’s gotten to know it, Steve, very well.”

* See too, Lene Auestad, ed. Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (London: Karnac Books, 2014).

Suggested Reading:

• Alford, Ryan. Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).
• Dahl, Robert A. How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (Yale University Press, 2^nd ed., 2003).
• Fontana, Benedetto, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer, eds. Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
• Garsten, Bryan. Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Gilbert, Alan. Democratic Individuality (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
• Goldberg, Michelle. Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006).
• Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Gordon, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton University Press, 2016).
• Greenberg, Karen J. Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown, 2016).
• Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
• Johnston, David Cay. The Making of Donald Trump (Melville House, 2016).
• Klein, Naomi. On The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (Simon & Schuster, 2019).
• Lin, Ken-Hou and Megan Tobias Neely. Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance (Oxford University Press, 2020).
• MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains (Viking, 2017).
• Mayer, Jane. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Anchor Books, 2017).
• Pettigrew, Thomas F. “Social Psychological Perspectives on Trump Supporters,” Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2017): 107-116.
• Piketty, Thomas (Arthur Goldhammer, trans.) Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
• Seidel, Andrew L. The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American (Sterling, 2019).
• Therborn, Göran. The Killing Fields of Inequality (Polity Press, 2013).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Wills, Garry. Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (Penguin Press, 2010).

Donald Trump and Moral Mass Murder

Laurence Tribe tweets that “Trump is ensuring the avoidable death of countless New Yorkers by deliberately sitting on 20,000 urgently needed ventilators so he can blame Cuomo. His moral culpability is that of a murderer even though the law doesn’t call him one.”

It is possible that Trump is withholding the ventilators so that he can blame Cuomo. I think it more likely that he is withholding the ventilators because New York votes Democratic. If New York were a swing state, does anyone doubt that he would have released the ventilators? There is good reason to believe that Trump held off from the beginning because he feared that the stock market would react badly. That was moronic and short-sighted from the perspective of the stock market and in pathological disregard of the public health. Only a thoroughly evil and twisted man would behave in that way. And even if his actions toward New York are not technically murder under the penal code, this form of mass murder shows him to be a sociopath and shows that Republican politicians and voters are willing to be allied with unspeakably horrendous acts.

The Basket of Deplorables is Getting Larger

According to the Time Magazine, Hilary Clinton said during the 2016 election campaign: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” In my view those she spoke of were deplorables for the reasons she gave and reasons that stretched beyond their support for discrimination.

She said the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”

“Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well,” she said. https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/

It was not a politically smart thing to say and she apologized for her quantification of the deplorables since she really did not know the number. But she was right. Trump was relying on and stoking the deplorables to win.

Republicans in the Congress who voted to eliminate the health care of millions and voted to give a massive tax cut to wealthy Americans and corporations are moral lepers. And they have failed to live up to their oath of office by supporting the moral monster in the White House. To some extent they have failed because of the deplorable support of the voters in the Republican Party.

But there is more bad news. The New York Times reports this morning that a Gallup Poll released yesterday showed that 60% of Americans hold generally positive views of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. And his overall approval rating is 49%, the highest of his Presidency. I won’t bother to recite his well-known manipulation, lies, and important failures in dealing with this crisis past and present. I will say this:  If the Gallop poll is correct, the basket of deplorables filled with people of thundering ignorance is shockingly large. A democracy cannot survive with such rampant stupidity.

A Woman President

The withdrawal of Elizabeth Warren from the Presidential race has left many wondering whether a woman will be President in their lifetime. Of course, sexism played a role in undermining her candidacy. Some of it was overt. The Wall Street Journal said on Thursday that her take down of Mayor Bloomberg regarding his vulgar comments directed at women was an exercise in “identity politics.” Since when is it ultra-sensitive to complain that women are singled out by the boss for vulgar comments based on their appearance?  

Many drew the lesson that Hillary Clinton’s defeat showed that the nomination of a woman was risky business. Yet, she won the popular vote by 3 million votes. Of course, there was sexism which helped fuel the dislike that so many millions had for her. 52% of men voted for Trump; 41% for Clinton. 54% of women voted for Clinton; 39% for Trump.

Beyond this Clinton suffered from the intervention of the Russians, the shenanigans of James Comey, the candidacy of Jill Stein, the failure to go to important swing states late in the race, and the large number of voters who stayed home because they were sure that Trump could not win. To conclude from this that a woman cannot win the Presidency is entirely unwarranted.

Indeed, the prospect of a woman President is growing quite large. It is likely that Biden or Sanders both approaching 80 years old will pick a woman Vice President, and the stresses of the Presidency are unlikely to increase life expectancy.

It is also possible that Trump (whose age, waist line, stress level, and his suspicious trip for the “first installment” of his physical suggests that his health is risky) will dispense with Pence and pick a woman Vice Presidential candidate for 2020.

Many doubt that they will see a woman President in their lifetime. But it may be sooner than you think.

Ten Essential Books on Contemporary Democratic Theory & Praxis

   
Apologia

I made this list within the somewhat arbitrary constraint of ten titles, so as to render it manageable, which of course means a number of different works might have made it onto a compilation such as this if composed by someone else familiar with the requisite literature. I imagined myself teaching a two-part graduate level seminar (which has never happened nor will happen), relying on five books for each quarter or semester. The bias here is toward more theoretically informed works, but any theory deserving of the appellation is well informed by historical and sociological knowledge and chock full of philosophical and psychological presuppositions and assumptions. And the emphasis is on contemporary democratic theory and praxis. These titles should be deemed fundamental to anyone concerned about the necessary and possible meanings of the adjective “democratic” in the term “democratic socialism,” even if our authors are not directly speaking to the subject of socialism.

Incidentally, we use the phrases “democratic capitalism” and “democratic socialism” with regard to democracy qualifying respective forms of political economy, which tends to insinuate the relative importance of political economy vis-à-vis democratic organization of our individual, social, and political lives, justified in large measure by its historical and descriptive salience. But it is perhaps more accurate and thus warranted to speak of “capitalist democracy” and “socialist democracy” (the latter of course distinguishable from ‘social democracy’). Consider, for example, the fact that the adjective “capitalist” here better captures the nature and scope of the severe limitations when not contradictions, distortions, and deformations of a would-be democratic polity and civil society attributable to capitalism. Socialist democracy, on the other hand, represents the historical, moral, and political endeavor to systematically and structurally overcome those contradictions, distortions, and disfigurations in a manner in keeping with the ideals, principles, and values, as well as the institutions, methods, and processes we consider intrinsic to democratic theory (sometimes better, ‘philosophy’). In short, socialist democracy is democracy deepened and extended so as to better enable our pursuit of justice, to equalize our essential liberties or freedoms, and enhance the probabilities for the mutual dialectical realization of individuality and community (in the logic and spirit of a gender-neutral fraternité), what the late David L. Norton referred to as eudaimonistic individualism (J.S. Mill preferred the term ‘individuality’ so as to distinguish it from the typically pejorative philosophical and psychological connotations associated with the word ‘individualism’):

“[E]udaimonism [a fortuitous conjunction, if you will, of happiness and self-fulfillment] is a variety of moral individualism, unlike some forms of individualism it does not conceive of individuals as ‘atomic,’ that is, as inherently asocial entities. [….] [It] recognizes persons as inherently social beings from the beginning of their lives to the end but contends that the appropriate form of association undergoes transformation. As dependent beings, persons in the beginning of their lives are social products, receiving not merely material necessities but their very identity from the adult community. The principle of association is the essential uniformity of associates, usually expressed in terms of basic needs. Subsequent moral development leads to self-identification and autonomous, self-directed living, but is associative as an interdependence based in a division of labor with respect to realization of values. The principle of this form of association is the complementarity of perfected differences. Accordingly, the meaning of ‘autonomy,’ if the term is to be applicable, must be consistent with interdependence. … [It thus] means, not total self-sufficiency, but determining for oneself what one’s contributions to others should be and what use to make of the values provided by the self-fulfilling lives of others. [In such cases,] [t]o follow the lead of another person in a matter he or she understands better than we is not a lapse from autonomy to heteronomy but a mark of wisdom. [….]

   

[T]he self here is conceived of as a task, a piece of work, namely the work of self-actualization [or what both J.S. Mill and Marx referred to as ‘self-realization’]. And self-actualization is the progressive objectivizing of subjectivity, ex-pressing it into the world. This recognition exposes as a fallacy the modern use of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ as mutually exclusive categories. Every human impulse is subjective in its origin and objective in its intentional outcome, and because its outcome is within it implicitly from its inception, there is nothing in personhood that is ‘merely subjective,’ that is, subjective in the exclusive sense. Narcissism (with which individualism is sometimes charged) is a pathology that tries to amputate from subjectivity its objective issue. It is real enough, and was a propensity of some romantic individualisms that judged experience by the occasions it affords for the refinement of the individual’s sensibilities. But the supposition that individualism is narcissistic subjectivism represents (again) a failure to recognize divergent kinds of individualism [again, Mill would say ‘individuality’]. For eudaimonistic individualism, it is the responsibility of persons to actualize objective value in the world.” And of course the assumption and attribution of such responsibility requires, in the first instance, the necessary “resources,” “primary social goods” (John Rawls), and “capabilities” or “functionings” (Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum), hence the pride of place accorded to democratic government and governance. Please see Norton’s Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue (University of California Press, 1991), for an explanation of “eudaimonistic ethics,” “developmental democracy” (in reference to the individual), and the specification of the notions of “right” tradition and community (as the ‘sociality of true individuals’). The latter topic should be read alongside the discussion of various kinds of “community” in Goodin’s Reflective Democracy (2003).

 

The reader interested in exploring the depth and breadth of the relevant literature should consult the bibliographies on (i) Liberalism, (ii) Democratic Theory, and (iii) Social Security and the Welfare State, available on my Academia page.

• Elster, Jon, ed. Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Gilbert, Alan. Democratic Individuality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Goodin, Robert E. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice after the Deliberative Turn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008
• James, Michael Rabinder. Deliberative Democracy and the Plural Polity. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004.
• Landemore, Hélène. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005 ed.
• Richardson, Henry S. Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Urbinati, Nadia. Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
• Urbinati, Nadia. Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

 

Teaching children about animals: “inconsistency” and “confusion mixed with hypocrisy”

 

Learning to be a Dutiful Carnivore

Dogs and cats and goats and cows,

Ducks and chickens, sheep and sows

Woven into tales for tots,

Pictured on their walls and pots.

Time for dinner! Come and eat

All your lovely, juicy meat.

One day ham from Percy Porker

(In the comics he’s a corker),

Then the breast from Mrs. Cluck

Or the wing from Donald Duck.

Liver next door from Clara Cow

(No, it doesn’t hurt her now).

Yes, that leg’s from Peter Rabbit

Chew it well; make that a habit.

Eat the creatures killed for sale,

But never pull the pussy’s tail.

Eat the flesh from ‘filthy hogs’

But never be unkind to dogs.

Grow up into double-think—

Kiss the hamster; skin the mink.

Never think of slaughter, dear,

That’s why animals are here.

They only come on earth to die,

So eat your meat, and don’t ask why.

—Jane Legge, originally published in British Vegetarian, Jan./Feb. 1969: 59.

   

I came across this delightful poem of moral psychological insight in a no less profound and important essay by Cora Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People,” in Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds. Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford University Press, 2004): 100.

 

A bibliography on animal ethics, rights, and law.