Tag: corporatism

Red Tories | Front Porch Republic

I haven’t decided yet whether I like The American Conservative enough to renew my subscription, but the June issue is excellent, and I’d recommend that you pick it up before the next issue rolls around.

The feature article of the June issue is “Shattered Society,” an essay by Brittish philosopher and politics wonk Phillip Blond, who styles himself a “Red Tory.” The subhead is “Liberalism, Right and Left,  has made lonely serfs of us all,” and asks “Does the Red Tory tradition offer a remedy?”

The article is powerful. The responses (e.g., Daniel McCarthy, Nicholas Capalidi) are provocative. Like Daniel Larison at Front Porch Republic, I thought Capaldi’s response was badly misguided. I even though it was condescending psychobabble, probably a calculated hatchet-job commissioned by corporate interests. That’s why I blog while Daniel Larison blogs and can actually get a job writing professionally. He insinutes the same sort of thing but does it more nicely.

“White flight? Suburbs lose young whites to cities”

The Daily Astorian – Astoria, Oregon.

The headline is bogus, but lifted right from the linked article. This is not “White flight” as if young whites are fearful of minorities. It is an effort, conscious or not, to achieve a more humane and less car-centered life.

But think of the next step: poorer folks move into the now less desirable suburban homes just in time to experience the ravages of peak oil, making them poorer still (as they fuel their behemoths) and the rich still richer (as they walk to work, restaurants, etc., free of such urgent need to burn fossil fuels in their personal transporters).

Contingent Vegetarianism

“Premiss [sic; I guess the Brits spell “premise” with two esses] one: we don’t need to eat animals; premiss two: eating animals in the way we now eat them causes suffering on an unimaginable scale; premiss three: eating animals in the way we now eat them is environmentally catastrophic. Conclusion: we should not – for both moral and prudential reasons – eat animals in the way we now eat them.”

Thus a reviewer summarizes a recent book, Eating Animals, that argues for (or perhaps just bears testimony to the author’s) “contingent vegetarianism.” Contingent vegetarianism is vegetarianism that the author might reconsider if we raised and slaughtered our food animals differently.

Eating is about as basic an animal activity as there is. For humans – a unity of body and spirit – it is traditionally as basic a social activity as there is, and I admire those who live out that reality still today. I want no reductionist “refueling” metaphors to dominate my view of food and the fellowship that accompanies. How and what we eat is important.

The arguments for vegetarianism of late have focused on the current realities of what we used to call “animal husbandry,” which now frankly has become “factory farming.” That’s this author’s second and third “premiss.”

But there’s at least one other argument, current when I was a young adult, that is based on the inefficiency of turning sun, water and soil into concentrated food through the bellies of beasts. For instance, Diet for a Small Planet.

Going back another generation, one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis, worried a great deal about the ethics of vivisection. When did you last hear anyone worry about that? How many of you need a dictionary right now? Frankly, I need one to remember exactly what that refers to, though I know generally.

It worries me a lot that something of keen concern to a man of Lewis’s stature isn’t even on our radar screen any more. On my radar screen. Dare I suggest that we have a great capacity for tolerating ethically dubious practices that are convenient for us, from vivisection to factory farming, abortion on demand and embryonic stem cell research?

I have a metabolic disorder of longstanding, currently under control with a lot of expensive medicines, whereby a diet of almost pure meat and other animal protein (i.e., a very low carbohydrate diet) is a very attractive convenient option. It’s hard and time-consuming for me to fashion healthy meals without animal products, as we Orthodox do in Lent. I actually tend to gain weight in Lent with my “fasting,” and I frankly don’t want a lipid profile done immediately after Pascha. But I’m convinced that I could do it if I would take the time. An Orthodox friend lost his taste for meat during Lent, and now is essentially vegetarian year-round.

I could. Should I?

Afterthought: Bound up in my discomfort with factory farming is my antipathy to megacorporations generally. Tyson is not just a great producer of chicken waste, but a major political player in Arkansas – at the very least. And as the linked article shows, the factory farmers have stripped terms like “free range” of any real meaning (through the very cozy relationship megacorporations develop with their putative regulators). I’m flirting with distributist economic thought – “not fewer capitalists, but multiple more” – and I am just plain angry at bailouts of “too big to fail” corporations. So I’m not all that interested in questions like Wal-Mart versus Whole Foods; give me CitiFoods, please.