Iridescent meat and teachable moments

Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The "absent referent" is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our "meat" separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the "moo" or "cluck" or "baa" away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. - Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, KL 186-189

WIRED just posted a series of photos illustrating various optical effects. I was intrigued by one label: “Iridescent Meat.”

[Source]

From the accompanying text:

In this picture of corned beef, the unappetizing colors come from the light waves bouncing off the sliced meat. When cut, the animal muscles of the meat protrude in a regularly spaced array, like a set of stairs, forming what is known as a diffraction grating. (Probably the most familiar diffraction grating is the back of a compact disc, which produces a rainbow pattern.) Light waves reflecting off the meat interfere with one another, giving rise to the odd prismatic colors seen in the image.

The photographer of this picture, John Flyte, was able to turn the unexpected sighting into a lesson for his fifth-grade students:

“It was St. Patrick’s Day 2011 and I wanted a traditional lunch so I ordered some freshly cut corned beef at the deli. When I got home and made a sandwich I saw green and was a little grossed out. Then I saw the reds, pinks, blues, as well as the shades of green. I recognized it as iridescence and only saw it once before at a banquet that had freshly cut roast beef. As a science teacher I was immediately fascinated and took pictures of it in natural light," Flyte wrote in an e-mail.

"When [Les Cowley] printed my picture on his website, I showed my 5th grade classes and we started a great discussion on rainbows, optics, haloes, etc. It was one of those ‘teachable moments’ that teachers dream about. Websites like Mr. Cowley’s are great, and as I try to remind my students, ‘Science is everywhere, and every where there is usually a scientific story about it.’”

In our culture, the dead bodies of nonhuman animals are traditional lunches and optics demonstrations. I’d call this a teachable moment as well, though not just about diffraction grating but about morality and the absent referent.

Recommended: The Lives of Animals and The Sexual Politics of Meat

Several books I've read lately are worth recommending. Here are two.

J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals:



I enjoyed the commentary at the end as much as the fiction itself.

Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat:



I was a little wary of this one for a number of reasons, and this 20th anniversary edition had too many introductory sections, but most of my fears turned out to be unfounded. It seems several of her other books are about religious silliness, so it’s unlikely I’ll be reading them any time soon, but this one is worthwhile. I especially appreciated the discussion of the absent referent and criticisms of both the feminist and the animal rights movements for their lack of attention to intersectionality.

nc blg

Happened upon this blog. I like it.

Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer talk about animal rights and slavery

I just came across this short video:



(When I watch this, I'm again surprised that this is the same person who's refused to acknowledge or apologize for his shabby treatment of Rebecca Watson.)

Interlude - spring farm

It's difficult for me to wake and focus early in the day. On the other hand, I love the light, and the cats' demands to eat give me little choice. :)

Here's a selection of pictures from a farm at sunrise a couple of weeks ago.

Animal rights and the reactionary mind

“When a wretch could no longer attract the notice of a man, woman or child, he must be respectable in the eyes of his dog.” – John Adams, quoted in Robin, p. 226

Recently, I posted a fairly long summary and review of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. In it, I included a quotation from Robin about conservatives historically opposing ultimately successful liberation movements even as their ideological heirs now decline to publicize that fact:

Today’s conservative may have made his peace with some emancipations past; others, like labor unions and reproductive freedom, he still contests. But that does not alter the fact that when those emancipations first arose as a question, whether in the context of revolution or reform, his predecessor was in all likelihood against them.” (p. 27)

I quoted this not because I thought it essential to the review, but primarily because I think it helps in appreciating contemporary struggles and opposition to them in light of the broader sweep of history.

I found it interesting that Robin, who doesn’t discuss animal oppression or liberation, does incidentally refer to conservative thinking about animals on several occasions, as do several other books about human rights I’ve read recently. While it’s been recognized (often critically) that animal rights authors tend to raise parallels with human oppression and the history of opposition to human liberation movements, those writing about human rights movements have been less likely to make this connection, and, on the rare occasions they do, often make it in an entirely negative way: “Here’s why these movements can’t/shouldn’t be considered in the same framework.” This seems very slowly to be changing, and I’d like to contribute to that progress, which I believe will serve to enrich all liberation movements.

As I was mentioning several months ago, the idea of moral progress over time through the expansion of the circle of those given full moral consideration is at least partially valid (though some formulations of it, like Dawkins’, can be problematic), in the sense that it’s largely true of our global ideals if not of actual practice. It wasn’t at the forefront of my mind when I was reading Robin’s book, but, as Dawkins and others suggest, and as some of Robin’s passages themselves point to, we can plausibly recognize the struggle for animal rights as the next major concentric wave in this expansion.

The animal rights movement is essentially making the demand that we expand the moral rights circle, which has grown to include more and more human groups over the past centuries, to include nonhuman animals (this does not, of course, mean equal treatment regardless of species, but developing practices founded on the view that animals matter morally – that they have independent moral status). Animal rights arguments resemble those used in earlier struggles, and the tactics are also very similar: consciousness-raising through education about animals and making visible their suffering, calls for people to justify their treatment of animals on moral grounds, efforts in favor of protective legislation, and protest and direct action to interfere in situations in which people believe nonhuman animals are being harmed.

Attitudes toward and practices involving nonhuman animals have changed over time as a result of this activism, just as they have with regard to children, disabled people, and other human groups previously not “granted” rights. Since this wave of moral activism can reasonably be expected to face similar conservative opposition to that directed at previous waves, we can analyze the ideas, actions, and rhetoric of this opposition within the same framework as historical and contemporary opposition to other movements from below.

Robin’s main arguments, as I discussed in the earlier post, concerned conservatives’ celebration of hierarchy, domination, and violence; their resistance to liberation movements from below; and in particular their insistence on the maintenance of private regimes of power. Opposition to animal rights movements can be understood as yet another in this historical chain of reactionary movements.

It’s no mere historical accident that opposition to animal rights is closely aligned with other conservative (including libertarian) values and positions. It falls squarely in the range of conservative visions of hierarchy, domination, and sublimity. And while it might appear superficially as though the rejection of animal rights has human equality and welfare as its basis, in fact the history of the brutal treatment and killing of animals is deeply connected to the history of empire and of human oppression along lines of class, sex (I’ll say more about this in another post shortly), and race. This is evident when we look more closely at contemporary regimes and defenses of animal consumption, industrial animal agriculture, cockfighting, hunting, and so forth.

This is especially evident in that the ideological basis for the subordination of certain groups in the modern era has been the denial of their human status and claims about their specific similarity to the “lower” animals. We see it also in the links between control over and abuse or killing of animals and other hierarchical relations: recreational hunting, habitat control (for destruction or conservation), and eating animals have long been entangled with class relations, imperialism, and patriarchal culture. As several investigators have documented, ours is a system that oppresses both animals and humans. The humans who do the dangerous and traumatic work in this system, or who suffer from it in other ways, are overwhelmingly from the bottom of the human social hierarchy.

Conservative resistance to attempts to expand the circle of rights to include animals is founded on preserving the place of humans in the hierarchy of sentient beings. Just as conservatism generally argues for a natural and necessary hierarchy amongst humans, the conservative vision of humans’ relationship to animals is very much rooted in the contention that humans hold a position above all other animals. Wherever conservatives believe any group of humans falls in the social pyramid, it’s above nonhuman animals. The Christian Right’s rejection of evolution stems in good part from fears of the loss of this status, but the vision characterizes the “caring,” “pastoral” Christian beliefs in our “dominion” over animals as well.

This self-image as divinely placed at the pinnacle of life is difficult to overcome. The conservative attachment to human exceptionalism is expressed plainly when Peter Laufer asks some people involved with cockfighting why they think the practice is acceptable and should be legal:

"We're too politically correct," Paul says in a tone of voice both wounded and disgusted. When I ask him why he thinks cockfighting should be legal, he falls back on the Bible for his argument and launches into a self-righteous soliloquy. (KL 379-380)

"…God gave us the whole deal. He said, 'You have authority over the animals'." (KL 382-383)

We also see this self-flattering hierarchical thinking behind claims concerning humans’ high position in the “food chain,” as apex predators, and so forth. Laufer offers, for example, that

the fish and other animals preach to me that I should observe nature. Animals eat animals and we're top dog. Or at least one of the top dogs. (KL 2502-2503)

(Even if they were true – of course, not all animals, including those humans eat, eat animals - these assertions are of course examples of the naturalistic fallacy when used as attempted moral justifications for animal harm or killing; of concern here primarily is how they function as a variant of standard conservative ideology.) We also see it in the claim that our superior intellect somehow gives us the right to exploit other animals for our purposes. So present-day opposition to animal rights advocacy can be seen as classically reactionary – an attempt to stave off the loss of felt and enacted status and power and preserve humans’ hierarchical position.

These arguments are bound to the element of sublimity Robin talks about, particularly when it comes to “big game” hunting. Like war and (some forms of) capitalism, the control, exploitation, destruction, and consumption of animals have been seen as vehicles for achieving and establishing excellence and achieving sublimity. Hunting, in particular, is seen as a field in which to prove your excellence (read: manhood). In killing, you prove yourself fit for mastery of both animals and humans. This attitude is taken to its tragicomic extreme by people who participate in canned big game hunts and evangelizers of hunting like Ted Nugent. As Laufer reports:

I signed up for Nugent's newsletter and received a warm welcome. "Dear Blood Brother," Nugent's website called to me over his name. "Welcome! The American Dream is not supposed to be a spectator sport. It must be a participatory duty-and we celebrate that in every way right here at TedNugent.com." I was told the newsletter would keep me posted on upcoming hunts, like the opportunity to spend $1,500 on a hog hunt (branded "Porkslam") for two days, one of which would be graced by the Nuge himself. My note ended with this reminder from Nugent: "Call it ego, call it bragging, call it whatever you want, but there's only one alpha male and that's me." (KL 269-273)

These ideas about sublimity, virility, and violence toward animals run throughout the history of empire: conquering and subduing other species has been part and parcel of the process of oppressing native peoples. It has not been merely about regarding animals as resources of conquered lands to be exploited like any other; the domination and killing of animals in conquered lands has been a means of establishing symbolic domination over people in those lands and of grasping for the so-called sublime.

Finally, we see this conservative vision at the base of SeaWorld and other corporate entities that keep captive and display their mastery of dangerous animals for human entertainment. The nature of the performances, which celebrate orcas and other large, powerful, and dangerous animals obeying human commands, reinforces the notion that humans stand at the head of the chain of life and suggests confirmation of the view that we deserve our domination and control over the conditions of life, and the lives themselves, of other species (more generally, of the so-called management of the rest of the natural world).

SeaWorld and the like are also examples of how conservatives defend private regimes of power. Robin puts private relations of domination at the center of his analysis, suggesting that public aspects of power are sometimes ceded in the interest of maintaining the more concrete private realms of control. “Animal enterprises” are not simply profit-making entities, but sites of the exploitation and domination of animals by humans (and of humans by other humans). The idea that humans have proprietary rights to exploit and kill nonhuman animals pervades our culture and structures our laws - which regard animals largely as rightless property - and institutions.

Our conservative culture and institutions remove the treatment of animals from moral consideration by removing it from public sight and defending the “rights” and “freedoms” of proprietors and private individuals to do with animals as they wish. While an endless PR campaign is waged to naturalize and normalize these practices, the secrecy surrounding them, denial of access to outsiders, and prohibitions against disclosing what happens in these spaces are protected by law. Moreover, the conservative defense of animal exploitation and killing rests on the assumption that no one has the right to interfere in these private realms; so even to the extent that people are made aware of the imprisonment, abuse, and killing of nonhuman animals, they face the “a man’s home/enterprise is his castle” defense. (It should be noted that what is being preserved is not the status quo: the scale of human exploitation and killing of animals has grown immensely over the past centuries and especially in the last few decades, reaching staggering proportions. As in the human realm, what conservatives defend are not “traditional” practices but radically transformed and transforming systems; their interest is not in preserving tradition but in preserving and cementing hierarchical social relations – both amongst humans alone and amongst all animals.)

The attempt to maintain hierarchical relations in “the private life of power” (Robin, p. 246) doesn’t just characterize businesses. Conservative opposition to animal rights stressing respect for private hierarchical regimes occurs at the cultural, family, and individual levels. We hear the same sorts of cultural-sovereignty defenses of “traditional” treatment of animals from those claiming to represent cultures as we do from people trying to continue harmful practices towards other humans.

It’s when these local, intimate spheres, these micro-relations of power, are concerned that conservatives are most provoked.* And this backlash, of course, is often framed in terms of victimization, protest, and human freedom. Laufer describes his Louisianan interviewees as representative of the supporters of cockfighting in attributing laws against it to a loss of or hostility toward Cajun culture. They see themselves as cultural defenders and opponents are viewed as outsiders intending to deny Cajun people their cultural traditions.
As Laufer notes, not all Cajun people agree:

She [the Louisiana director of the Humane Society] cites her name: Breaux. "I'm not not Cajun. It's a little offensive to me when people tell me this is part of our heritage. My grandparents never went to cockfights. I've asked them, I've grilled them. My grandfather said, `It's horrible. It's disgusting.' I don't think it's necessarily part of Cajun heritage. It might be what some people did, but it's certainly not what all people did. Not that I'm the Cajun heritage expert, but I have street cred…" (KL 539-542)

The point here, though, isn’t how “authentic” an element of Cajun (or Mexican,…) culture(s) cockfighting is, but how this cultural-rights argument fits within the standard conservative repertoire. A harmful practice is placed within the private - business, family, cultural - sphere; challenges to it are portrayed as encroachments upon the dignity and autonomy of its members; and the practice becomes a cultural weapon, a badge of identity, and a form of “resistance.”

This is possible because the private sphere, including oppression and violence, is constructed in the conservative tradition as a realm of freedom and personal choice and a field for the attainment of mastery and excellence. Because in this vision nonhuman animal victims aren’t seen as having any independent rights, and their acts of rebellion are denied, dismissed, or explained away, the supporters can portray themselves vis-à-vis the animal rights movement as the injured and defiant party. It’s not difficult to see the similarity between this and conservative arguments lying fully within the human realm: violence towards women in some Muslim cultures in response to challenges, slavery and lynching in the US South, discrimination by religious people and organizations… In short: “No one will tell us how to treat our slaves/women/gays/animals.”

Recognizable in these arguments, then, are parallels to conservative resistance to previous liberation movements. Hierarchical thinking (religious, simplistically evolutionary and biological,..) and fears of loss of status frame opposition to animal rights activism, as do efforts to protect and preserve private or sovereign regimes of domination and violence. Appreciating animal rights within this historical framework can maybe help us to see it in a new way.

*I should note again that I don’t believe that in broader human terms the loss of these relationships, of the ability to oppress and exploit humans or nonhuman animals, constitutes a real loss. This is not to say that there is or would be no concrete financial loss or blow to status or privilege, but that the gains to real human thriving would well offset those losses.

Oh, you're led to accept that, are you? On sea kittens and sea carrots

I recently read Peter Laufer's No Animals Were Harmed: The Controversial Line between Entertainment and Abuse (more about which later). I can't say I'd recommend it. It's impressionistic, and not in a good way - there are so many interesting paths he goes down...a few feet. Additionally, he begins the book talking about how he's a vegan and ends it no longer a vegan, but with no good reasons provided for either practice. He mentions thinkers who influenced his decision to become a vegan, but never engages with their arguments, and his rationales for eating meat are, frankly, creationist quality.

His "backsliding" begins with fish, and brings to mind PETA's "Sea Kittens" campaign. The campaign was widely mocked, and played dumbly and cartoonishly to emotions in lieu of making a rational-emotional case about ocean animals, which was entirely possible. But here's some of Laufer's "reasoning":

I've become a vegan backslider. I'm back to "vegish," and I made the change that day back in Florence. Since then I've chowed down on baked wild halibut and halibut burgers, roasted wild salmon and salmon burgers, baked Petrale sole, lox, smoked trout, and cans of Moroccan sardines for quick hits of protein (not to mention those trendy omega-3s). I'm still not completely comfortable eating fish, and not only because of the ghastly scenes in The Cove that are seared into my memory. I anthropomorphize the fish. But I've allowed Sheila's rationalizations, and others whose opinions I respect, to sway my routine. The fish, I'm led to accept, are not sentient. I'm starting to think of them as carrots. (KL 2496-2500; my emphasis)

Does any reasonable person think that halibut, salmon, sole, and trout are not sentient? That merely considering them sentient is anthropomorphizing them? That they're like carrots, or even that they're closer to carrots than to cats? There can be, and needs to be, an honest conversation about sentience and suffering amongst beings, human and nonhuman. If we're going to have this moral conversation, though, we can't allow ourselves to be led to accept claims that are fucking stupid.

Interlude - Mama Tried

Looks like it'll be the theme for the month, so I'll get it out of the way now.

Archives and justice in Guatemala

Over the past few months, the National Security Archive has been posting about developments in the continuing struggle to recover historical truth and obtain justice for past atrocities in Guatemala, including the central role played by archived documents.

They’ve reported, for example, that

On January 26, 2012, a Guatemalan court determined that there is sufficient evidence to formally charge former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt with genocide and crimes against humanity. The ruling marks a dramatic turning point in Guatemalan efforts to redress the worst human rights violations in recent Latin American history perpetrated by the military against indigenous peoples during Ríos Montt’s “scorched earth” counterinsurgency operations in the 1980s.

…Ríos Montt is accused of laying the foundation for the military plans Victoria 82, Firmeza 83, and Plan Sofia in which the military used counterinsurgency operations to “exterminate subversive elements,” including the elderly, women, and children.

Important to the prosecution will be establishing the chain of command, and archives are key. (Plans Victoria 82 and Firmeza 83 have not been disclosed, and the National Security Archive is calling for their release.) For some insight into the complexities involved, see Writing History in International Criminal Trials:



(Not Wilson’s best work, but worthwhile for those interested in these questions.)

They’ve also reported on the discovery of the remains of two men who were death-squad victims in 1983:

The National Security Archive recently published an electronic briefing book detailing the discovery of the remains of two victims listed in the famous “death squad diary.” The Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala, a non-profit based out of Guatemala City, was able to identify the remains using DNA, as reported in their press statement on November 22.

The remains of Amancio Samuel Villatoro (death squad diary entry number 74) and Sergio Saúl Linares Morales (death squad diary entry number 55) were found in a mass grave at the former military detachment in Comalapa, Chimaltenango.

These two men were abducted by security forces in early 1983; their families never heard from them again. Their fates were not known until 1999 when the National Security Archive publicly released the death squad diary which recorded the disappearance of 183 people, including Villatoro and Linares. The handwriting at the bottom of their entries in the log book records the date they were murdered, March 29, 1984, and indicates their murder with the code “300.”

Here is a more detailed description of their lives and deaths.

Finally, there is the full public digitized release of the archives of the Guatemalan National Police, covering its entire century of existence.

In a public event held in Guatemala City today, Friday, December 9, the Guatemalan Historical Archive of the National Police (Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional—AHPN) and the University of Texas at Austin unveiled an extraordinary collaboration by making 10 million pages of digitalized police records available to researchers on a special Web site hosted by the university….

The project permits researchers from anywhere in the world to examine the entire digitalized collection of Guatemalan police documents via the Internet, without having to travel physically to Guatemala to see them in the archive’s reading room. Following the guidelines established by the AHPN, access is wholly unrestricted, and the collection will continue to grow as the police archive digitalizes additional records and makes the images available to UT Austin.

This is unprecedented, but not without ethical problems:

The decision on the part of the Guatemalan Police Archive to provide unrestricted digital access to records that contain countless references to private individuals – many of them entrapped by a security system designed to identify suspected subversives and kidnap or kill them solely on the basis of those suspicions – is highly controversial within the archiving world. Even in countries with no formal privacy or archive laws such as Guatemala, standard archival practice strives to protect the privacy of the victims of repression – whether by withholding entire records or selectively deleting individual names and other identifying information.

I remember reading about the elaborate protocol people had to follow to have access to their own files in post-Communist East Germany.



Those responsible in Guatemala went in an entirely different direction:

Citing several legal instruments, including Guatemala’s Constitution and an article in the country’s freedom of information law that prohibits the denial of records relating to gross human rights violations, the report, From Silence to Memory: Revelations from the Historical Archive of the National Police, found: “The armed internal conflict and repressive practices characterized a recent historic period in Guatemala that affected and continues to affect society enormously. In the face of this reality, the conclusion is inevitable that the political events that took place between 1960 and 1996 form part of the collective history of the Nation. This should be understood in its fullest dimension, so that no one has the right to hide information that comes from the actions by the State and its officials.” (See pp. 37-39)

I haven’t yet read this report, don’t know if the conversation and debate about going ahead was inclusive enough, and am unsure as to whether the right to truth so fully outweighs the protection of victims’ privacy, but this is a significant development.

AGW denialism on Wikipedia

Someone needs to fix this....

I’m writing about a documentary film I saw the other day, and came across the “Propaganda Film” Wikipedia entry. Here’s how the section on “Climate Politics” currently reads:

Climate politics

The use of propaganda films continues to the present day. One of the most prolific genres of recent propaganda films is that covering alleged climate change and the associated political incentives to control anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions.

An Inconvenient Truth (2006) poses a somewhat sensational approach to climate change oftentimes relying on emotional appeals rather than scientific data.

The Age of Stupid (2009), although a fictitious story, may also be considered propaganda in that it projects an emotional and reactionary view of present-day environmental issues intended to bias the viewer's beliefs on such matters.

The BBC is known to have produced television documentaries of this character and style, which amount to propaganda films. One such is Frozen Planet (2011), the seventh section of which has been described as propaganda.

Only the latter two statements have citations, and what it would mean for them to support the assertions they accompany I have no idea.

There’s also an ad for An Inconvenient Truth with the caption: “Fabricated images of chimneys discharging 'carbon pollution' often feature in this genre.”

Thinking about vegan cooking as an art form

My previous post mentioned that I was launching myself into new waters with a raft of recipe substitutes and a vegan cookbook. Fortunately, some meals I enjoy – especially Mexican and Indian dishes - are already “accidentally” vegan or could fairly easily be made so. But it appears to me that vegan cuisine (if it can even be called that) in the US is still in its infancy. While there are exceptions, vegan cooking and eating are still associated with poor imitations and denial rather than celebration, pleasure, flavor, and art. (I could be missing some important exceptions, and if I am I hope people lead me to the right places.) There's still little place for the champagne vegan.

But all of this makes it exciting - like a new art form! Cuttlefish wrote yesterday that he would and should never be NPR’s NewsPoet* because his respect for verse forms is absolute:

And that, in a nutshell, is why I am not a poet. My villanelle does repeat the lines, and does rhyme, and I could no more bend the rules of the form than I could fly. For me, the metric form, the rhymes, the feet, of specific verse forms, is to be obsessively followed. The specific constraints force us to write creatively; breaking the rules is the easy way out. Mind you, there’s plenty of unconstrained poetry forms out there; there is no need to deconstruct a highly structured form simply for expression’s sake.

I am not a poet, firstly, because I lack the skill or the will (or both) to unshackle myself from my forms. I am not a poet, secondly, because (or so it seems to me) those who decide who are real poets do not accept those who accept the shackles.

I think the constraints of vegan cooking also (can) push people to work creatively. Of course, vegan cooking differs from adherence to verse forms in that the primary motivation is ethical rather than artistic, which means that there is no parallel to unconstrained poetry forms that would be acceptable. But it doesn’t mean that the formal requirements of vegan cooking can’t similarly inspire creativity, and I submit that they can.

I might chart my attempts at vegan cooking here, as well as my requests to friends who are serious cooks to prepare vegan dishes….

*I disagree, and think he would be outstanding in that role.

On eating cheese, and not

In the past, I was perplexed by people who didn’t eat eggs or cheese. I thought the only reason was the belief that the use of any animal products is inherently abusive, and that is in fact a belief held by many vegans. I’ve done a lot of reading about farmed animals, though, and I know that more than once I came across descriptions of the treatment of animals (cows and chickens, at least) whose milk and eggs we use. But given my love of some of these foods, particularly cheese, and the beliefs and behaviors my culture normalizes and naturalizes, the information and objections never quite sank in, and didn’t take root in my conscious memory.*



(That, Karla McLaren, is what a polemic looks like.**)

At long last, it has, and I’m doing something about it. I’ve searched for cruelty-free cheese, and found it to be elusive if not nonexistent. It’s far more complicated than I’d thought. I’m going to keep searching (including for cruelty-free milk that I could use to make my own cheese), and begin asking around at local farms. Meanwhile, I can get eggs from the happy chickens at my friends’, and I’m now armed with a vegan cookbook, a list of dairy substitutes for baking, and a gift card for Whole Foods where I can find the better vegan cheese substitutes.

*I didn’t, though, to the best of my recollection, respond by eating a hunk of cheese or talking about doing so in front of them out of spite. That would have been idiotic.

**Actually, I don’t think McLaren, with her talk of terror and despair, has a clue what a polemic is in the first place, or read all of the books she wrote about, so it’s neither here nor there.

Apropos of not much...Thomas Paine, a cautionary tale

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times elsewhere, the story of Thomas Paine in the late 18th century provides some lessons for the present.

Paine was a popular and influential pamphleteer in the American Revolution whose radical writings were controversial but convincing and attracted a great number of allies. But with his publication of The Age of Reason, many turned their backs on him. Although the political battle over religion and public life Paine’s work touched off in his era redounded to the benefit of the Republicans, its favorable settlement rested on Paine’s ostracism and an exclusion of more radical voices, with effects that arguably we’re still dealing with.

Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers and Marcus Daniel’s Scandal & Civility



both discuss “the transformation of Paine from revered patriot into devil’s spawn in little more than twenty years” (Jacoby, p. 36). Both argue that the impetus was The Age of Reason. “Although Paine’s economic and political ideas were too radical for some of his contemporaries,” Jacoby remarks, “his jaundiced view of religion proved the primary cause of his fall from American grace” (p. 36).

Paine wasn’t an atheist but a deist, and a number of American Protestants were quite fine with attacks on the Catholic Church in France. But The Age of Reason indicted not just Catholicism but Christianity, and in fact all revealed religion:

With the publication of the Age of Reason, Paine’s revolutionary deism parted company with radical Protestantism. Paine’s previous religious pluralism had been based on his belief that all religions were originally ‘kind and benign, and united with principles of morality’ but became corrupted by their entanglement with political power. Now, he argued that all forms of revealed religion were inherently corrupt and oppressive and that the only reliable source of religious knowledge was the natural world – the ‘Bible of the Deist’ – and the only reliable interpreter of this source was the individual consciousness. (Daniel, p. 242)

For many, this went too far:

The revolution’s greatest publicist was greeted in the press – especially the Federalist press… – by admonitions to shut up, return to the Old World, or prepare to endure his just punishment in the next world. (Jacoby, pp. 36-7)

His assault on Christianity completed the alienation of middle-class dissenters like Joseph Priestley* and moderate Whigs like Richard Watson, the Anglican bishop of Llandaff, who believed that Paine’s ‘extraordinary performance’ had ‘unsettled the faith of thousands’ and spread its ‘poison through all the classes of the community’. (Daniel, p. 243)

The Federalists and their papers used Paine’s radical writings about religion to go after the Republicans, Jefferson in particular, and seized upon the controversy to put religion front and center and to try to defeat Jefferson’s presidential bid by linking him and the Republicans to Paine’s radical religious views:

Although the Age of Reason did not transform the religious landscape of the United States, it politicized the issue of religion itself, giving the clergy an opportunity to reassert their traditional role as guardians of public virtue. It also gave Federalists a chance to portray republicans as agents of infidelity and themselves as defenders of Christian orthodoxy and to make belief in Christianity a litmus test for holding public office. (Daniel, p. 248)

In some momentous ways, of course, the Federalists failed. As Daniel notes,

The Federalist crusade against infidelity made religion a central political issue in the late 1790s. But rather than discrediting and dividing Republicans, the Federalist campaign ignited a fierce public debate about the relationship between religion and politics that ultimately benefited and united them. (Daniel, p. 251)

But we can see in Daniel’s description of the Republican response hints of a loss:

While Federalist clergymen believed that religion should play a central role in public life and that civic engagement was an important part of religious life, Republican commentators argued exactly the opposite: religion had no legitimate role to play in public life, and politics had no legitimate part to play in religious life. Religious belief was a matter of private conscience, not public morality, they argued, and just as the state had no right to regulate religious belief (or any other expression of private conscience), so personal religious belief had no place in the regulation of an impersonal, secular public sphere. Clergy should restrict themselves to the spiritual needs of their congregations and stay out of public life. Religious and political freedom required a sharp separation of church and state, an idea that received its classic formulation in Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, the touchstone of Republican religious policy in the 1790s. While Federalists tried to identify Republicans with Paine’s radical deism and French infidelity, Republicans insisted that their commitment to Jeffersonian ideas of religious freedom made them the true guardians of American Christianity. (p. 251)

This position, this moment, continues justifiably to be celebrated as a cornerstone of secularism. But set in the context of the attacks on Paine, we can appreciate something that was lost. Christianity as a valued and guarded set of beliefs was preserved. With religion removed from the secular sphere entirely in this vision of secularism, public challenges to religion based on reason and evidence came to be viewed as uncivil and unwelcome.

This led not fully to an age of reason but to some extent to an age of deference, in which religious belief was politely cordoned off and reason often treated as an intruder in the public sphere. In the Republican community, unity was preserved, but at the expense of muting more radical voices. And at the expense of…Paine.

“The shunning of Paine” (Jacoby, p. 36) went beyond the ultimate-fighting ring that was the late 18th-century press. He was snubbed by people in everyday life, including former friends. Jacoby reports:

In the early 1800s, the author of “Common Sense” – which had sold some 500,000 copies in the mid-1770s – would be castigated as a Judas, reptile, hog, mad dog, souse, louse, archbeast, brute, liar, and of course infidel. (pp. 35-6)**

This affected Paine personally, and resulted in a spiral of anger and mutual resentment. “The story of Paine’s last years in America is a painful one,” Jacoby writes. “Most of Paine’s old friends, embarrassed by his anti-Christian writings, deserted him – Jefferson once again being a notable exception” (p. 60). (Jefferson’s support came at a political cost to him.)

There is no doubt that the constant Federalist attacks on Paine, and his abandonment by many old friends, took a considerable emotional toll in his final years. Many of his writings in the press during this period were saturated with a bitterness and personal venom that he had once reserved for George III. (Jacoby, p. 63)

When Paine died in 1809, fewer than a dozen people attended his funeral.

*Speaking of whom, The Invention of Air is not a book I would recommend.

**It’s noteworthy how many of the insults to Paine, and how much of the political language in general in this era, was animal-based.

Wegman "reprimanded" by George Mason

Dan Vergano reports.

...Wegman will receive an "official letter of reprimand", [provost Peter] Stearns said, as sanction for the plagiarism.

..."We took these charges very seriously," Stearns said, in a telephone interview, adding that the university will forward the investigation reports to federal authorities. The National Institutes of Health and the Department of the Army supported the 2008 study.

Why was the 60 Minutes report on antidepressants "explosive"?

I’ve read some more responses to the 60 Minutes report on antidepressants. Several have mentioned surprise at the presentation of the story as shocking and novel, both in terms of Leslie Stahl’s amazed reactions to some of the statements made and in terms of her repeated suggestion that this was all revelatory. (It seems to have become a cycle: challenging articles or books appear, journalists and others are shocked by the radical news, those who’ve been following the issue express surprise and dismay at the treatment of these arguments as new, and then things return to normal, with the companies raking in their billions off of these drugs, until the next round.)

In her article “'60 Minutes' antidepressants report may be 'explosive,' but it's not 'new',” Susan Perry writes:

Explosive? Well, yes,…

But new? Hardly. Studies linking the placebo effect to antidepressants have been around for more than a decade….

It’s not as though the antidepressant/placebo story hasn’t received press coverage in the past….

All this history made me wonder why Stahl seemed so astonished during her interview with Kirsch. She seemed to be unaware of the decade-long controversy surrounding antidepressants.

Howard Brody, who makes the crucial point that the story didn’t say nearly enough about the adverse effects of the drugs, remarks:

As seems typical, the news program featured as "gosh golly gee whiz" news stuff that we've been over in this blog many times before:…

To some extent, I think this is just Stahl’s shtick: she often reacts to interviewees’ remarks with that wide-eyed, almost giddy I-can’t-believe-I’m-hearing-this expression. But I think there’s something else going on as well. Surely she had to have read several of the materials (I’m honestly not sure whether or not she read Kirsch’s book) in preparing the report, so on the one hand it does seem strange for her to respond with such surprise to these arguments, although it might lend the report more excitement. On the other, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that she was unaware – or not fully aware - of these challenges until very recently. And given how entrenched the neurotransmitter-fixing model is in our consciousness, she could at some level have been genuinely stunned to hear someone saying the actual words, and responding as most people would.

It seems to me, as someone comparatively new to this discussion, that when you’ve been investigating or writing about it for some time you can to some extent lose sight of just how many people believe these notions. In the US, we’ve had decades of corporate propaganda pushing the idea that “psychological problems like depression are caused by neurotransmitter imbalances and psychotropic drugs work effectively to correct them.” We’ve had decades of doctors (some who sincerely believe themselves and some who don’t) and other educated people spreading this message both privately and publicly. Those in leadership positions who’ve acknowledged problems haven't tended to do so in the most public forums, or to go out of their way to correct the misinformation being spread by others. The very fact that the drugs have long been approved and that their manufacturers have been allowed by the FDA to use advertisements making this suggestion leads many people, quite naturally, to assume that the claim is well established scientifically.

Since I’ve been talking about this with people I know – admittedly not a representative sample, but I don’t think unrepresentative in any important way in this particular case – I’ve found that every single person with whom I’ve brought up the subject, without exception, accepts the neurotransmitter-fixing story. They take for granted that it’s true, as I did until fairly recently. It would be quite different if those challenging the claim entered a neutral context. In a neutral (scientific) context, those making the original claims would be required to demonstrate their truth, which in this case they couldn’t. But because the claims have now become so widely accepted, we have a reversal of the burden of evidence, in which the assertions of those challenging them meet with shock and suspicion and they are from the start put on the defensive, expected to defend their skepticism (which they have) while those making the original substantive claims are given a relative pass. So there is real resistance at the cultural level to engaging with these challenges or taking them seriously, and it affects, I would suppose, even those who don't have a strong personal stake in the validity of the original claims.

Even when we don’t actively resist the challenges, they often don’t register with us or tend to fall out of our consciousness or memory because they don’t fit with the cultural schemas so embedded in our minds. In the absence of sustained discussion and demands that the original claimants provide supporting evidence and fully address challenges and problems, and in a context saturated with the message of the original claimants, there’s nowhere to “put” these criticisms on and after the occasions in which we’re briefly exposed to them. So, many people watching the report likely had the same shocked response as Stahl, despite the challenges having been made and reported in the media earlier.

If we look at scientific claims that are widely accepted, we can recognize that if they were being made for the first time today, they could be supported on the basis of the existing evidence. This isn’t the case with this psychiatric model. It hasn’t established itself scientifically; in fact, it’s proven a failure. But it has been established culturally, through the work of powerful organizations relying on cultural inertia. That does seem to be changing, finally, and I hope we won’t be seeing the same “explosive” reports five years from now.