9 August 2009: "Do animals have rights, or should we just eat them all?"

This post is about ethnocentrism. Not one to monkey around, as it were, with tallying up the greatest good for the greatest number, Carles demonstrates his skepticism of Animal Liberation author and noted utilitarian Peter Singer in this excursus, which looks at problems of nutrition from a decidedly post-scarcity perspective while maintaining a Malthusian wariness about the political abuse of the available food supply.

He begins with the essential anthropological question: what is pure and impure? What is fit for human culture? To put it in Levi-Strauss's terms, what is raw and cooked? What aspects of the natural world should we be forbidden from "cooking"? Or teleologically speaking, should every effort be made to assimilate the natural world to human culture eventually, as a fulfillment of a divine destiny or a realization of the Idea? Or is the desire to "cook" everything a sign of consumerism gone amok? "Sometimes I feel bored with all of the eating options available in America," Carles declares, throwing down the gauntlet, daring us to resolve the radical undecidability of the statement. A great deal hinges on the interpretation of boredom in this context, whether it betokens a justifiable exhaustion with the ready-at-hand, or if it indicates a psychological deficiency. And of course, there is an implicit interrogation of globalization in the implication that American mores should converge with those of other nations. Ethnocentrism and an ethics of animal welfare square off, threatening a contradiction in the common-run progressive's to-do list. This is why, in a classic Carlesian understatement, "It seems weird to think that nonAmerican countries eat dogs and cats."

In parsing an image of a feline barbecue, Carles states,

This picture sorta makes me feel ‘disturbed.’ These things that mean so much to American families can mean so little to AZNs. Wonder if they look at us, and think we are ‘retarded’ 4 pretending that these animals deserve to be treated like ’spoiled humans.’

Though he makes a passing joke about geographical dislocation -- "Can’t believe dogs + cats have been domesticated to the point where I ‘don’t even know where they come from,’" as if this aporia warrants treating them like stateless refugees without rights -- what is actually at stake is the definition of humanity itself, or rather what it means to be human/humane -- if we exclude domestic animals from the category, in its broadest conception, then should we, by the same logic, also bar the mentally disabled? In Carles's usage, too, to be "retarded" is at once a failure to transcend ethnocentrism and also a kind of generalized slowness, a temporal trap that produces "spoiled humans" whose responses to stimuli are always too late to be anything other than ambiguous.

But Carles also suspects that the act of will necessary to disregard strongly embedded taboos stems from frustrated fantasies of immortality: "Sorta just want 2 stay alive 4ever," he remarks wittily, after speculating on the the connections between imagining eating a domestic animal and imagining oneself as a character in a popular science-fiction film, in this instance, The Matrix. Such fantasies take on a Taoist cast when Carles proclaims a reduction of the many to the Two, with hints that the Two may be unified in a undifferentiated wholeness. "feel like maybe I should think that ‘all animals are the same’, including cows, pigs, fish, chickens, and turkeys (stuff that ppl eat every day)." First all the many different species are harmonized into one master category, which is destined for absorption by the other category, the human, via the digestive tract and the alimentary canal.

This, then, is Carles's answer to the question posed in the title -- we should eat all the animals, that is, absorb them into our consciousness as part of a radical spiritual procedure to attain oneness.