From: Mikael Johansson (mikael.johansson@wineasy.se)
Date: Sun Jun 03 2001 - 05:14:33 MDT
Chris Ledwith wrote:
<intro about vegetarianism snipped>
> Ive come to realize that eating animal flesh is simply a way of
> giving in to my inner animalistic desire to eat meat. This desire is
> nothing more than an evolutionary holdover -- if we humans truly are
> better, we can overcome this desire, or at least suppress it. We
> have invented technologies that let us sustain ourselves at full
> health without lowering ourselves to eating other creatures.
I find this argument still quite heavily coloured by the value system of the environmentalist movement. The major reason why I find this idea at a fault, and did not immediately drop everything I was doing in order to start as a newly baptised vegetarian is that it starts out with the pretext that /eating meat is wrong/. This meme does not (in my view) follow from the >H creed -- but is a possible addition. It seems to me that youre still (again) a vegetarian out of the very same reasons as before, but with a slightly different wording.
> No, animals do not have rights. Do we say that a zebras rights are
> violated when killed and devoured by a tiger? Of course not. (a
> related question is whether a humans rights are violated when a
> tiger eats them in the wild - can a non-sentient that has no
> understanding of rights violate anothers rights?)
Not necessarily. But on the other hand, can a sentient allow the non-sentient to violate the rights it does not know of? From my POV, this analogy is flawed. When a tiger eats a human in the wild, then a human life -- which I together with a large part of the human population value higher than that of a tiger -- has been spilled; which is a rather bad thing. Possible ways of avoiding this are for instance:
* declaring that that area is dangerous -- dont go there
* killing off the tigers (bad idea. Information destruction is not a good idea, and in this case not really called upon)
(this list is by no standards complete)
OTOH, when it comes to the zebra, our first choice isnt quite availible, and so that zebras are eaten by tigers is nothing we can properly do anything about (until the zebra genome threatens to be eradicated by hungry tigers -- in this case, some information preservation may be in place. Read Zoo or genome databases...)
> Animals are part of the eternal struggle for survival in the natural
> cycle of life and death. Were far removed from the animals; far
> above the struggle. Its a game THEY play. So quite ironically, I find
> that transhumanism has led me to feel like eating animals is
> wrong, that it diminishes ME (again, I dont care about their
> feelings, but my own maturity) and casts all my other convictions
> in doubt, whereas before I felt closer to Nature and her creatures
> yet was okay with eating them.
Environmentalist and romantic memes that are not part /per se/ of the >H meme complex.
"eternal struggle for survival in the natural cycle of life and death"
as well as
"[feel] closer to Nature"
are typical examples of rhetorics that always tag me as suspicious. Almost always, they come from someone toting ludditish environmentalistic values trying to convince me that Im a technofascistic incarnation of evil trying to destroy all good on this earth.
I simply dont buy this meme-set. I find it almost polluting and in crass contrast to my own mindset with more inheritance from the Enlightenment than the Romantic period.
> The way I see it, ordering a McDonalds hamburger is really no
> different than putting a shotgun to a cows head, pulling the trigger,
> and eating the carcass. To think otherwise is hypocritical. And I
> have met very few people who would not hesitate to do the former
> yet could not bring themselves to do the latter.
The way I see it, Id love the second choice -- given that I may use a basic field kitchen with proper herbs; and something to go with the //cooked// meat. Id love that experience!
> So as much as I love meat, Im going to try to abstain. Hopefully I can keep it up.
As much as I love meat, I find that Im still not convinced in any alternative.
> I would be interested to know if other transhumanists/extropians
> have come to the same conclusion and became vegetarians.
Not me.
> Additionally can anyone find fault in my arguments (if you can, then
> I can go back to being a carnivore...yumm).
Ive tried to. And I think that your last comment (yumm) is reason enough to be a carnivore. You find more pleasure in it as well as getting nutrients in a more efficient way (for you that is... Dont start spouting that fifteen acres per cow party line, please...), and given that as well as my critisism of your meme-set, I see no reason whatsoever to stay vegetarian, and enough reasons to go carnivore to motivate it!
> Chris L.
// Mikael Johansson
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