Husband is spending the morning watching American news clips discussing Sarah Palin, which all involve the talking heads getting really heated and shouting at each other.  He finds this hilarious; it really stresses me out.  There’s nothing worse than het-up newsanchors trying to shout each other down over something that, let’s face it, should be so painfully obvious that no discussion is required.

Here is a summary: Palin is underqualified and scary right wing.  The haggling over what her role and abilities are reminds me of all the talking that went on in the wake of 9/11.  Long after the rest of the world had accepted that the US used it as an excuse to wage a war for money, the American news media was still going on and on about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism and the intelligence provided by the CIA, as though there was really any debate - which basically just made them look like asses.  They weren’t fooling anyone but themselves.  Same with Palin.

But I recently read an interesting article that is very relevant here, about why people vote Republican, and why folks like Palin have special appeal.  It’s about moral sense and how people intuitively understand and apply morality.  Of the five dimensions of morality identified by the author throughout his research career, Democrats utilize two: harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity.  Republicans use these two, but also the other three: ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. In short, Republicans hit all our moral receptors - Democrats only hit two, and rely on the application of reason to justify staying away from the other three.  Alas, we are a species driven by its hardware, and reason is often not good enough.

Here are some traditionally Democrat/left values that violate our moral sense: tolerance of all races and genders and sexual orientations violates ingroup/loyalty.  Challenging authority, protesting the government, holding sit-ins and other acts of civil disobedience violates authory/respect.  Keeping religion out of government, “traditional” family values being moved aside in favour of gay adoption, divorce and abortion rights violate purity/sanctity.

If I understand this article correctly, we are all instinctual Republicans.  This is an evolutionary legacy.  It requires quite a lot of difficult work to overcome - compounded because, as Pascal Boyer writes, it further goes against our evoluionary programming to even think scientifically.  Two unnatural acts are required before one can arrive at Democratic principles - none for Republican.

Here is the major problem with doing psychology for a job: everyone thinks they know it all already.  Everyone is a person, everyone has relationships, therefore everyone figures they have inter- and intra-personal dynamics figured out.  This is totally logical and in fact true to a point - we are all amateur psychologists, and we need to be to get through life.  Okay.  But people’s amateur psychological skillz are usually not much more than this: heavily biased heuristics, general guesses, and hypotheses that may (or may not) be right, some or all of the time.  Generally speaking these theories are good enough for folks to get by, with greater or lesser degrees of adaptation, and therefore act as reinforcers.   You have some idea of why people do things, and it’s good enough to let you function in life, so that means you must be right.  Right?  Only sort of.

In some ways it’s really frustrating to be learning a lot about psychology because, by its very nature, people figure they already know it.  It’s not uncommon at all to hear people pull out their pet psychological theories and, while I am by no means an expert, I know a lot more than your average layman.  Some of the stuff people come up with is pretty bad (by which I mean wrong, or misguided, or incomplete, or shamelessly self serving, etc.).  I don’t even bother to say anything most times because as I have learned the hard way, people are attached to their theories and aren’t really interested in what the research says.  That’s fine, I don’t want to go through life teaching people all the time (okay maybe a little), and I am, as I say, not yet an expert.  But sometimes it is hard to swallow when someone goes off with great authority about their theory that is dead wrong and I want to bang my head against a wall that people think they know this field simply because they are in possession of some folk psychological know-how.

It’s hard becoming an expert in a field where most people don’t even realize there can be experts.  I doubt nuclear physicists have this problem.

“What is the evidence that photographs have a diminishing impact, that our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities?

The question turns on a view of the principal medium of the news, television. An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen. Images shown on television are by definition images of which, sooner or later, one tires. What looks like callousness has ts origin in the instability of attention that television is organized to arouse and to satiate by its surfeit of images. Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content. Image-flow precludes a privileged image. The whole point of television is that one can switch channels, that it is normal to switch channels, to become restless, bored. Consumers droop. They need to be stimulated, jump-started, again and again. Content is no more than one of these stimulants. A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness - just what is weakened by the expectations brought to images disseminated by the media, whose leaching out of content contributes most to the deadening of feeling.”

Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador: New York.

About two weeks ago I went to my family doctor.  I reminded her that in two weeks (today), I would be having my three and a half hour MRI, and that I am incredibly claustrophobic.  (I know everyone says this, but in my case it is seriously true.  I didn’t pee in public until I was a late teen due to terror at the tiny size of the washroom stall.  I also wouldn’t sit in the back of two seater cars, and I was in my mid twenties before I ever rode an elevator.  So I’m telling you, I gots the claustrophobia.)

However, since I don’t like having this stupid phobia, I have been working on eliminating it, in much the same way I eliminated my arachnophobia.  This has been a behavioural endeavour, with much exposure until the point of the anxiety extinguishing, and is a side perk of training in psychology - you can do this kind of thing.  So I’m much improved, and will pee in a stall after riding in a back seat which I got to via elevator without much anxiety at all.

But the MRI machine?  I dunno.  I hear it’s pretty small in there.  Not sure how that will go down, and I really cannot afford to fuck up the test by panicking and flailing around.  It took me months to get this appointment, because apparently it’s hard to get such a long block of time in the scanner.  So when I went to my doctor, I said, and I quote, “I’d like to be as stoned as possible for this test.”  She agreed that was a good idea and wrote me a script for the appropriate meds.

I’m about to leave for the test soon, but if I blog later tonight and totally overshare, you’ll know it’s disinhibition due to being stoned on anxiolytic drugs.  Woo!

In other news, I am having small but repeated freak outs that they will find a tumor somewhere in my BRAIN or SPINE.  My neurologist doesn’t seem to think there’s much chance of this, which is why I didn’t get put in for an MRI right away.  But just knowing that the thing they’re looking for is a structural abnormality in my fucking BRAIN or SPINE is pretty fucking freaky.  I know there’s no purpose to preemptive anxiety (after all, I may be fine) but alas, my emotional software does not work that way.  I keep imagining that they’ll pull me out of the machine and some radiologist will say, “Ma’am, you have an enormous tumor in your brainstem and we have to operate right now” and I’ll be too stoned to do anything but cry and ask for snacks.  Gah!

I apologize in advance for the length of this post. (Poop reference excised for Husband’s comfort.) I make a gagillion points (you decide if they’re valid or not), and I can’t promise anything about their organization. All I will say is please, when you comment, make sure you aren’t commenting about something that is already addressed in the post. I get that some times and it really bugs me. I put in the time to write this, please make sure you read it before taking me to task. Of course, if you don’t want to comment or want to just say something like “Lollipops!” then I totally don’t care if you read or skim or light your laptop on fire. Just please don’t make me point you from your comment back to the original text, that’s rude.

On to business. How on earth can I say I’m not judgmental of meat eaters, that pack of jackasses? Juuuuuust kidding! I’d like to take this moment to remind you all that I was raised on the traditional western diet, ate meat and potatoes for dinner for most of my almost thirty years, and still swoon at the smell of bacon. If anyone should be characterized as jackasses it’s the militant vegetarians/vegans. They even piss me off. Also: to shorten things, I’m going to call meat eaters “meaties.” It sounds cute and kind of funny, no? And since I get a label (vegan), you should get one too.

Here is the cheater answer, which is nonetheless true: I say I’m not judgmental because, simply put, I’m not. I’m the one in this skin and this brain and you’re just going to have to take my word for it when I say I simply do not feel anything approaching contempt, superiority, or other synonyms for judgmentalism. The feeling is just absent, end of story.

But that’s not very satisfactory I suppose. It’s entirely lacking in explanation; there’s a what but no why. To be honest, I don’t know how much value there is in coming up with whys – they are by definition presented post hoc and in my opinion are usually rationalizations rather than true explanations of causality. We just don’t have that kind of insight into our mental processes – cognitive psychology has shown us how bad we are at thinking, and explaining our thinking. We are laughably easy to trick and we do it to ourselves constantly. And one of our talents is coming up with reasons for things which are totally rationalizations – many experiments prove this. But having said all that, I still consider it good mental work to explore one’s reasons for choices, because even if they’re post hoc, it helps to have a story. And it can be useful to people thinking about the problem from a logical point of view, which can be how we change our minds.

So why am I not judgmental? I think the biggest and probably truest reason is empathy. I remember very well what it was like to be a meat eater. I had no malice towards my dinner. I was an animal lover who cooed over kittens and piglets. And I was able to engage in a sort of perfectly understandable mental sleight of hand wherein my conception of chicken as dinner was entirely divorced from my conception of chicken as a formerly living creature. This is understandable because it was how I was raised and is a cultural norm. It is also psychologically useful in that it allowed me to maintain a broad range of nutritional options without undue mental conflict and guilt – and this relates to evolutionary utility also, I would guess.

Another reason is that, as I have said before, vegetarianism is something of a farce. Even as a strict vegan who tries to buy personal grooming and household cleaning products that are animal free, I do things every day that negatively impact the lives of animals. Animals are in everything, their parts are used in all kinds of manufacturing that I support with my dollars, they are forced out of habitats that I live in or drive on or buy products from, they suffer from my chemical waste in their waters, and on and on and on. Choosing to not eat meat is a very direct way to avoid harm, but it doesn’t eliminate all or even most of the harm. Who’s to say that my veganism results in greater net good for animals than the actions of a meatie who lives a rural lifestyle and grows their own foodstuffs? I can’t prove that. Given the reality of this state of affairs, it’s hard to feel superior to a meat eater simply because they eat what I won’t.

Also, I am not hard on the meaties because I think they believe, at least in relation to their eating habits, that they aren’t doing anything wrong. I doubt there is any in depth thought about their eating at all – they just eat what they were raised on, without any trouble, because, hey, isn’t this what everybody eats? It’s normal. I get that. I used to be that. And I have a lot of empathy for that. It’s hard to get all judgmental on people you feel you have an emotional, empathetic connection to, whose actions you understand.

Related to this is the idea of a plurality of values. It’s not for me to say what other people do (i.e., what they eat). Animal rights is one value; freedom of choice and autonomy of individuals is another. I value humans above animals and think the right of people to choose to eat meat trumps the rights of animals to not be eaten. This is hard to justify, and the best explanation that matches my belief that I’ve read is in Douglas Hofstadters’s book “I am a Strange Loop,” wherein he discusses a concept he calls Hunekers. In short, a Huneker is a measure of your relative value and worth. A cat has more Hunekers than a fly, a human has more Hunekers than a cat. You can check out the book for more detail but basically, it’s related to sentience and cognition and other very subjective measures of a thing’s intrinsic value. This probably isn’t possible to justify in a strictly logical-proof sort of way, but lucky me, I’m a person and not a logic machine, so I can hold this belief nonetheless.

Which brings me to another point: no one is a logic machine. This is why most explanations are little more than rationalizations. We try to make sense of the world but in fact most of our beliefs and behaviours defy logic. It’s just the way we’re built, and it has evolutionary value which I won’t go into here. Just keep in mind that people are not machines. They certainly are not logical, and their decisions are overwhelmingly not based on a logic-algorithm. They constantly act against their beliefs and best intentions (think of overeaters, homo-haters who are closeted gays, women who pick abusive boyfriends, etc.). This is because in addition to our logical faculties, we come packaged with a bunch of hard wired instinctual responses, and a big suite of emotional programs that nearly always override the logic part of us. We need to always keep in mind the difference between how people should think/feel/behave and how they actually do.

But still, isn’t logic fun? Let’s engage with it, shall we? Simply because we aren’t logical is not good enough reason for us to abandon our attempts to aspire to logic!

Recall the proof presented by Incognito, which I paraphrase as follows: meat eating is unethical, I should not be unethical, therefore I should not eat meat. Anyone who eats meat is unethical, therefore when I see meat eaters I JUDGE THEM HARSHLY. In general, I think this is a reasonable proof. I accept the premises and think the conclusion follows. But still, it’s not valid from either point of view (meatie or veg), because the suite of premises is too limited. Up to this point I have been explaining why I don’t judge the meaties despite what could be considered a necessity of logic. I’m actually still acting on logic, but we would need to add more premises to the proof (such as some kind of accounting for and ranking of additional ethical concerns) to see it.

Now I’ll switch to my hypothesis about why the meaties aren’t reacting out of response to the logical proof. Here is a totally unscientific observation: people react very strongly to the idea of veganism. It’s far out of proportion to the stimulus. When I think of all the ways I disagree with people, there is no doubt at all that eating no meat pisses them off the most. Why? Why is it easier for people to accept that I don’t believe in God, say, than that I don’t eat meat? Surely to a religious person that could be a much huger trigger. After all, in that case I’m not only going to burn in hell, I’m going to take society down with me (corrupt children, act without morals, destroy marriages, and all that stuff). But you know what? I have never gotten even an ounce of hassle related to atheism. But bring up something as relatively inconsequential as my personal dietary habits and BOOM, the freak out is on. It even happens on this blog. There is more going on here than meets the eye.

So what does happen when my eating habits come up (which, by the way, I try not to draw attention to)? The reaction typically involves the meatie getting loud and saying something like: “Well I would never do that! I love meat! I could never give it up! It’s perfectly healthy and there’s no reason to give it up!” In other words, they respond as though the stimulus statement was “Eating meat is wrong” rather than “I eat a plant based diet.” I don’t accept that these are synonymous statements, though our logical proof suggests that the latter leads to the former. In order to make that leap from “I eat plants” to “you’re bad” there is an intermediate step that is necessary. We could call that step “therefore.” So what we get is, in truncated form: “I eat plants” – “therefore” – “you are bad.”

What happens in “therefore”? This is what psychology and, most particularly, psychotherapy is all about! There is nothing in “I eat plants” that requires “therefore” to lead to “you are bad.” It is definitely an option, and clearly it’s the option most people are taking. But in my case, it is simply wrong. In my case, the chain should look more like: “I eat plants” – “therefore” – “I am concerned about my own role in animal rights and also my personal health over the long term.” Or, “IAP” – “T” – “I understand that these ethical issues are more important to me than to other people, but I understand those other people, and think their choice is fine. After all, it’s their choice to make.”

So I hope we agree that there are a multiplicity of statements that could follow “therefore” (this requires us to accept that there are more premises than simply “eating meat is unethical” and “people shouldn’t be unethical”). The logical necessity of judgment is predicated upon a limited set of initial premises which do not reflect the actual state of affairs. The interesting question is, why do people jump to those simple premises? Why are the others not included or even considered?

One reason maybe is the militant stance taken by some vegans and vegetarians. Maybe the meaties assume I’m getting all judgy on their ass because that’s happened to them before when dealing with a vegan. In this case their reaction makes sense even if it’s unfair; I shouldn’t be stereotyped. Actually I find this reaction very inconvenient because it sets up an us-them dichotomy that interferes with my ability to discuss my choices in a reasonable manner. There is a lot of good that comes of a vegan diet, but often I don’t even bother going there because I know that anything I say will be perceived as an attack, and I am acutely sensitive to not being one of those militant vegans. From a purely selfish and functional point of view, I have nothing to gain by making meaties feel bad (i.e, judged). Hassling them will not make them go veg! I am also placed in the rather uncomfortable position of having to take the defensive reaction of the meatie (“Well you’re not going to talk me out of eating meat!”) without rebuttal, because any rebuttal I try to make presents as proof of the initial attack. Which wasn’t an attack, it was just a statement of my personal dietary choice. But try to say that and see what happens!

I have another hypothesis about why there is such a powerful kneejerk reaction to vegetarianism, but it’s not going to be very popular with you meaties. In this case, I get to be the one who presents an unassailable position because anything you say will only make my case look stronger. And I totally accept that in most senses this is not a falsifiable hypothesis. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, only that it’s not provable using standard methods (psychotherapy is one method that might prove it on a case by case basis). So please know that I know this isn’t necessarily the case, it’s just an idea of mine, and I don’t assume it’s correct all the time or even any of the time, I’m just throwing out my thoughts because that’s what blogs are for. Quite the preamble, eh? I just really, really want to make sure you know that I’m not presenting this as THE FACTS, just as an idea. Keep an open mind; I try to.

Here it is: I think meat eaters get so darned defensive about eating meat because on some level, they know it’s wrong. Actually, that’s not quite right – when we work at the level of defenses, we’re not at the level of logic but rather at the level of deep emotion. The defensiveness is a result of my position triggering deeply buried feelings of shame and guilt.

Short interlude to explain, in simplified form, defenses: When people have uncomfortable emotions (guilt, shame and sadness are major ones), they may either experience the emotion, or trigger some psychological dynamics that protect them from experiencing the emotion. The mechanism of protection varies – there are probably around two dozen commonly accepted defenses. A simple defense is denial, wherein the person simply denies reality in some way. A classic example is the person who is told their wife has just been killed – he may say, “That’s impossible! No!” Denial in action. Rationalization is also a defense, in the same category as denial, disavowals, which function by keeping unpleasant or unacceptable stressors, impulses, ideas, affects, or responsibility out of awareness with or without misattribution of these to external causes (DSM-IV-TR, pp. 809).

So what is going on when I say “I eat plants!” and a meat eater launches into an angry, elaborate explanation of why they will keep eating meat? I hypothesize that two defenses are operating here. The first step happens in “therefore”: a defense called projection. In projection, unacceptable impulses and their attendant feelings that you have are put – projected – onto someone else as a way of disavowing the unacceptable stuff. You attribute them to someone else. Examples I found online here include:

I do not like another person. But I have a value that says I should like everyone. So I project onto them that they do not like me. This allows me to avoid them and also to handle my own feelings of dislike.

An unfaithful husband suspects his wife of infidelity.

A woman who is attracted to a fellow worker accuses the person of sexual advances.

In the case of me and my plants, the projection could be this: “I have a value that says killing is wrong. But here is someone who proves that my diet involved unnecessary killing. My unacceptable feelings are guilt and shame, and anger at this person for making me feel them. I project my rage onto them, and now I act as though they are the angry ones, which allows me to believe that I’m not the one with the problem.”

Given that projection, it makes perfect sense that meat eaters react to “I eat plants” in a hostile manner. The reality of their experience is that I am attacking them, because they have projected anger onto me. Up there is just one example of the specific terms of the projection – there are several others I can think of, but you get the idea.

Step two of the process, which happens after “you are bad”, is rationalization. The meat eater is sensing emotionally that I am attacking, and now they respond verbally with all kinds of explanations as to why they must keep eating meat. They really feel they must defend themselves because I am attacking, and the method chosen is another defense (rationalization). There is of course no reason why they must stay carnivorous, which I prove simply by my existence, but they’re giving it a good try, marshalling all kinds of excuses.

And I want to say here, that I think it’s totally valid for someone to say, “Well, I eat meat because I like it, and I don’t want to change.” It’s true, it’s no bullshit and I respect that. No meat eater is answerable to me – I’m simply not the boss of you. There is no need to prove to me why you should keep eating meat – and the very fact that some meat eaters feel compelled to try suggests defenses in operation. Keep in mind that we agreed there is no necessity to move from “I eat plants” to “you are bad”. The mental work of getting there is done by the meat eater. I am fascinated by what that mental work is, and above is one hypothesis about how it could be explained. I find that hypothesis rather convincing, but of course I would because it supports my position, and because it fits into a paradigm of psychological function that I ascribe to. And as I say, it’s next to impossible for anyone to prove it wrong, but it may nonetheless be wrong.

A final point: I do believe in certain moral absolutes. Human slavery is wrong, for everyone, at all times, forever. Post modernism can kiss my ass – wrong is wrong. Violation of a body’s integrity is also wrong, such as by murder or rape. In cases like these I believe that it doesn’t matter what your beliefs are, you must act in accordance with the higher moral principle. But I am not yet convinced that animal rights belong in that pantheon of absolutes. There may come a day when we must act as though animal rights are an absolute, for example if the environmental devastation of farming combined with the wastefulness of producing meat creates a situation where starvation and planetary ruin threaten to kill us all. But going back to the Hunekers, I just can’t see my way to considering animals a top tier priority in an abstract sort of way. Us humans have bigger fish to fry, ha ha.

Yet that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. In the wealthy west, there is no need beyond emotional and cultural ones to eat meat. Those are important things – each person must decide for themselves whether they place emotion and culture above cruelty and suffering in lesser species. These days there is also the added saliency of the environmental argument – the single biggest thing you can do for the environment, after living in an apartment, is to go veg. But again, I leave it to each individual to make the call. (Of course I would be thrilled if everyone went veg.)

And that is why I’m not judgmental about meat eating, in a nutshell. There’s more we could get into but at some point you (I) just have to stop typing, so I’m going to publish and call it good. If you got this far, hooray, you have made my day.

Occasional commenter Innominate posted a very good response to yesterday’s post, in short calling me out for my alleged non-judgmentalism. I excerpt the comment here, which you can read in full in the previous post:

Vex,

I think the reason that people get so up in arms is because they feel that by making a choice in your personal diet, you are tacitly condemning their choice to eat meat.

I think they have a point.

Your internal dialogue presumably goes something like this… “Making animals suffer so one can eat meat is unethical” and “One should not be unethical” ergo, “I shouldn’t eat meat”, which, if the premises hold true, seems logical and true.Coming out of the same syllogism, we could also see “If ‘Joe Blow’ eats meat, he is acting unethically” which, is of course a judgment of Joe’s character.

As a woman who seems quite confident in her beliefs, I wonder why you don’t just call meat eaters on the carpet, and boldly proclaim them unethical. You seem to have little problem painting religious folk as wrongheaded, why not carnivores?

Regards,

~I.

This bears careful response, because he has an excellent point, but before we even talk about meat we need to talk about something he attributes to me which is incorrect: I don’t consider religious people wrong headed. It is entirely true to say that I’m not religious - but that doesn’t mean I believe religious people are wrong. This probably requires some clarification, because as he says with regards to meat, following a logical path suggests that the equation should be something like: “I am satisfied that the evidence and logic strongly support the hypothesis that there is no god. Therefore, one should not believe in god. Therefore, people who do are wrong-headed.”

Alas, it is nowhere near so simple. To begin, I didn’t choose to be an atheist. For whatever reason, I’ve been one by nature my whole life. I went to church as a little gaffer and remember clearly trying to believe, and failing. It was always an exercise in pretend for me; I have never believed God exists. But I must repeat this, though I (and many other smarter people) have said it before: belief is not a policy decision. Either you do, or you don’t, and in arenas like this it is not the norm that the side you side with is arrived at through logical discourse. One cannot simply decide to believe in God (though one can certainly decide to say so, and to engage in behaviours associated with belief such as attending church services). But the core, the truth of actual belief? It’s either there or it isn’t. Whether you like it or not.

So first of all, it would be incorrect to say that I don’t believe in God because I have all kinds of great reasons for it. I do have loads of reasons to be an atheist, but they are very post hoc. My atheism predates my ability to read philosophy and science, though my justifications and explanations have gotten quite a boost since that time! The important part here is that my atheism, regardless of where it came from, is nothing more or less than a true statement about myself.  It doesn’t matter if I’m right or wrong, only that I with total honesty proclaim what I really think: there is no God.

I am therefore quite prepared to accept that people who are religious do so in the total absence of wrong-headedness; in fact, I believe this state of acceptance is nothing more than a necessary outcome of understanding how beliefs work. Put another way, rationality is not a necessary element for belief or, as in my case, non-belief. One can be religious (or atheist) without having to prove why – all that is necessary to assert is a sincere and true belief. So it is nonsensical to discuss religious beliefs as wrongheaded, because they are simply nonheaded. Asking people to defend their religious beliefs does little more than demonstrate in the questioner a lack of understanding of how belief functions.

But of course there are further layers that complicate things. For example, people can lose their faith through a process of critical inquiry which leads them to the logically based (i.e., based on philosophical arguments or some evidence provided by the sciences) conclusion that God must not exist, and their belief in God evaporates. It is my opinion that this sort of evidence is so enormously weighted in favour of atheism that, if religious belief were predicated on logic, the only logical choice would be atheism. But that’s not the case. It is entirely possible – in fact common – for people of faith to hear what I consider to be rock solid arguments against faith, and retain their faith. This does not mean they are illogical. It means they are honest about the state of their faith, which does not answer to rationality (so we can talk about non-rationality, as versus irrationality).

Some atheists who are poor logicians cannot adequately defend their atheism to a person of faith who can marshal better arguments for his side, and this does not invalidate their atheism or necessarily cause them to become believers. In this sense atheism can function in the same way as faith, though it is a different thing entirely to assert something (such as the existence of God) than to not believe, which is itself not a belief. Just keep in mind that atheism is not impervious to belief-type mechanisms (like non-rationality) simply because it is not itself a belief, and may be based on logic. We’re talking about how human minds actually work, not how they should work.

But here is where judgments come in: I don’t believe people’s faiths excuse or permit them to, for example, infringe upon the rights of others. In this sense I consider some of the behaviours of religious people to be reprehensible and abhorrent. While you cannot control what you believe, you most certainly must control how you act.

So it would be more correct to say that I take issue with things like the consequents of the large scale institutionalization of faith. That, to me, can be wrong headed. And I believe that religion by its nature has great potential to slide into the encouragement of terrible behaviours. But simply being religious? How can I attack people for something they do not control?

The discussion gets really interesting when you start talking about what anthropologists and other scholars have to say about why we as a species are so prone to religiosity, but that’s a topic for another morning. The purpose of this post is to make clear why I think a more sophisticated approach to religion than the usual atheist one (“religious people are stupid”) is required. Religion may itself be blameless, but the things it inspires can be terrible, and we need useful ways of discussing and dealing with these. This post is also intended to make clear why I am tolerant and accepting of religiosity in all people. I may joke about religion (such as when I herald Easter with “Happy zombie Jesus day”), but I don’t intend that to be an indictment of religious folks’ religion… though it is something of a jibe against those who are uptight about it.

The world doesn’t need more sectarianism.

Having just suffered an attack of “somehow they’ll know it’s me!”, I just removed my post about making a report to child services.  It probably could have stayed up here, since my panic has passed and I remember again that I kept anything even sort of confidential out of the post, but now it’s deleted, so there you go.

Anyway, I have something different to entertain you instead: the care and feeding of introverts.

This article describes me absolutely perfectly, except that I like talking about myself, particularly on this blog.   Okay, it’s not perfect.  But it is pretty close, especially the parts about liking socializing but being crappy at small talk, and needing a long period of recharge after contact with other humans.

I experience a lot of needless anxiety trying to think of things to say because I know most folks think you should be saying something, and it’s embarrassing to find yourself without some kind of smooth transitional comment that both acknowledges the current topic and advances things to the next fascinating topic.  Like you extroverts seem to know how to do purely by instinct.  Which I am envious of.  And try to fake, with a success rate that only people who know me can report on - I’m too nervous to make a good assessment during the heat of the moment.

But anyway, there you have it.  I’m off to bed to stew on the day and hopefully have a good night of rest.  I hope you are all doing well tonight.

You know how everyone learned ten years ago that fighting on the internet is stupid?  Yeah… missed that one.  Got to learn it the hard way today.  I am such a dope.

It started innocently enough.  I came across a vegan podcast which was full of interesting facts and arguments, but hosted by these two incredible jerks who just trash talked everyone who disagrees with them, and actually cackled on the air about how stupid other people are.  Even Husband and I, who are vegans, found it unbearable.  I’m close enough to meat eating to take offense when people call carnivores retards.  And besides, if you want to get more people eating in an environmentally friendly, cruelty free manner, surely shaming and mocking  them is not the way.

So, from the best of intentions, I wrote to the hosts of the show.  I was careful to let them know I’m a vegan, that I support their work, that I agree with basically all their points, but I made two of my own: one, are they aware of how they come across on the air, and two, would they consider a change if it meant reaching more people?  If the show is by vegans for vegans, then fine, go nuts.  But if you want to reach meat eaters, you’re going about it in a way that will surely result in more alientation than anything else.

Well.  I got a total hostile response in which I was called superior, mocked for my beliefs (conversion through respect and niceness, as well as utilitarianism as an intermediate step), and shamed for not having a weekly audience of six thousand.  Oh, and anyone who can’t handle being mocked and harassed (like me) has no sense of humour.

I forwarded that to Husband, and appended my own commentary, which was that I was sad at the response, wanted to reply but didn’t know how to do it without sparking more hostility and a fight, but come on, it’s not that I’m too insensitive, EVERYONE is too sensitive for that crap, except other self congratulatory assholes.

Which is pretty much a quotation… and here we enter the dark world of my unconscious, which prompted me to not send that email to Husband, but RIGHT BACK to the asshole.  D’oh!  I’m convinced it was a parapraxis.  I have never accidentally hit reply instead of forward, or reply to all, or whatever.  I’m aware of it and very careful.  But I think this one can be unraveled in a single simple interpretation, which is that I wanted to tell him what I really think (asshole) without culpability.  Viola - accidental email, which is a beautiful ego compromise between shameful urge and my knowledge of what is right and proper to do.

So of course he emailed me back making fun of me for not knowing how to use email (which I guess I deserved), then said I’m incredibly smug and need to reflect on that.  Oh and it was a waste of his time to even reply to my first comment because I’m obviously such an idiot.

Here I indulge in a huge sigh.  Because, in all seriousness, I approached him respectfully and with good intentions.  And he was a total dick from message one.  Clearly he has a lot invested in being right, in putting others down to feel good, in deriving narcissistic satisfaction from his superiority.  I knew that from his podcasts.  But somehow I magically thought he would be approachable with a critique.  And no surprise, it ended up with me looking stupid, and unable to even really call him on his bullshit without a) perpetuating the stupidity of an internet fight and b) looking totally defensive myself.  My mis-sent email just clinched it.

So I did what I could to undo the damage.  I apologized sincerely for my insult, agreed it was stupid to send and admitted embarrassment.  I explained that the source of my frustration was feeling unheard - I never intended to come across as superior (undoing the projection) and that my main interest was in how to reach an audience in an effective way, and in how people of differing philosophical stances can work together for a single movement (challenging his contradiction wherein he espouses acceptance for differing approaches to advocacy but also shit on me for utilitarianism).  Of course he didn’t reply.

Why!  Why did I do that!  Stupid!  Stupid!

Thank you for the thoughtful comments.

Last night I presented one of my cases to my supervisor at school, and a lot of those issues came up for discussion.  I feel much better now, having focused more on doing what I can in the moment without tormenting myself about what might be.  I guess part of my problem is that I’m hoping for a dramatic change - I’m hoping for these kids to suddenly become little enlightened beings who are impervious to negative influences.  Talk about setting yourself up for disappointment!  I am in the process of thinking on the topic and reorienting myself to value smaller changes, even invisible ones.

This is in no small part influence by a book I’m reading - one of those classics of psychology that everyone knows they should read but often don’t get around to.  Kind of like Moby Dick (which I have not finished, I confess).  The book is Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl, who was a Viennese psychoanalyst and Jew who was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps during the war.  His book is primarily a series of reflections upon that time, and an exploration of why some people survived while others didn’t.  One of the factors he observed was meaning - those who managed to find meaning in their existence in the camps, or meaning in survival, seemed to have a better chance (understanding of course that in general your life was not under your own control; Frankl does not suggest that meaning could save you from murder if you were selected for gassing).  Anyway, that’s a major simplification and I don’t pretend to have a full understanding of even this little book, nevermind logotherapy in total - but it has me thinking about how I draw meaning from my life, how I create it.  I’m still sifting it in my mind so I don’t have too much to say right now but I will say I’m finding this helpful for my work worries.

And in other news, I am refocusing on veganism.  So far I’ve been pretty slack about it.  If I find myself at a restaurant with nothing vegan, I’ll eat things with cheese, say.  Or if I’m at someone’s house I’ll eat what they serve as long as it’s vegetarian.  At the last poker night Jim brought Clodhoppers, which are delicious, and though they contain something like five different types of dairy product I still had a couple clusters.  At home I’m a total vegan (Jim’s Clodhoppers aside), but I am still eating more junk food than I should (pretzels are vegan).  So my nutrition could be better.  Husband is, as usual, an inhuman robot who cares not for personal needs, and is a total vegan everywhere and at all times… so if he can do it, I can certainly improve.  My knowledge of its benefits and intention to be vegan has not changed, it’s just a matter of sticking to my goals more closely.

My plan now is to really work at staying vegan and eating, as much as possible, whole foods.  Plus condiments.  God knows I won’t give up on hot sauce.  My major exception is, as you know, caesars, which include clams and anchovies.  I also still intent to partake of celebratory vegetarian sweets at places like family parties (pumpkin pie at thanksgiving, birthday cake, butter tarts at christmas).  And when a guest at someone’s home, I will do my best but allow some flexibility because in addition to concern for my health, I have deep respect and value for the meaning of hosting and feeding others.  I would never turn up my nose at a meal in someone’s home just because it has some milk in it.

My hard line is still meat - I don’t eat meat products and am perfectly comfortable sticking to that.  But feeding vegans is hard for most people and part of my life task is to not make veganism look atrocious and strict and nasty.  It does the movement no good to have its representatives behave like superior weenies.  So, a small amount of flex for what are, to me, well thought out reasons, is acceptable.

Now I will work on the whole foods thing.  Today got off to a good start: I had a smoothie made of soy milk, blueberries, a little sugar, and some ground flax meal.  The flax made it a bit gritty but it’s a good source of omega-3, which is tricky for vegans to get without planning.  Also fiber.  Fiber is still my hero, as I have not forgotten my years and years of chronic constipation.  I have things to do today so lunch will probably be purchased, but I’ll get a Subway foot long veggie (hold the cheese) with lots of mustard and hot sauce.  Big, filling, full of nutrients, and clocking in at about 450 calories.  I’ll have some nuts and seeds for snacks today if I get hungry, and I still have a couple tomatoes to grill.  Dinner will be an ambitious affair, as I am going to make a Thai vegan spread including coconut tofu soup, mushroom fried rice, and a vegetable tofu curry.  Husband is bringing home the Singha.

And now it’s time for Law and Order, which I watch on weekday mornings at 10 to entertain me while I clean the house and get ready for the day.

Work has been trying lately.  I am discovering something rather unpleasant about working with kids, and it is this: my one hour a week with them doesn’t even come close to making up for it if they have crappy parents.  I know, I know - I shouldn’t call parents crappy.  I should call them traumatized, or dealing with unresolved mourning, or experiencing domestic abuse, or something.  Which is all almost certainly true.  But what is also true is that they are crappy parents, and they are messing up their kids, and their kids are coming to me and I haven’t got a hope of fixing them when they spend the other 98% of their time in the vat of emotional poison known as home.

Because this is the reality, which I declare before god and you all: it really is your parents’ fault.

Part two of the declaration is that as an adult, you are free to decide to try and make a change and fix your fucked up self and not repeat the mistakes of previous generations.  As Esan and Husband patiently explained to me one night over beer, determinism is not the same as fatalism (did I get my terms right?).  The past explains the present; it does not determine the future.  But when you are six, you are not in fact free to so much as choose what to eat for lunch, never mind anything as serious as deciding to fix your mental health.  And here I am, watching these family dynamics that are, as I said, poisonous - and these kids, who you can just see have so much potential in them, are being crushed by the weight of it all.  They can’t help it.  Resiliency only carries you so far.  And I know I’m looking at the future fuckups of America, and it makes me sad.

I hate this: people who work with kids often say, Kids are so resilient!  They can recover, you just need to never give up on them!  That drives me bugshit, as I may have said on this blog before.  It implies that it doesn’t matter what terrible, nasty, cruel thing you do to a child, they can get over it.  This quite simply isn’t true.  Kids who experience neglect and abuse are different from other kids, and they grow up to be different adults.  And when I say different I mean really, really messed up.

Of course, going back to part two, I must add the disclaimer that, of course, not all abused kids end up as junkies and petty thieves.  Some come through it.  And your abusive childhood doesn’t give you carte blanche to mistreat other people.  It explains it without excusing it.  But the odds are, if you have a rough childhood, you’re going to really struggle as an adult.  And because you are a social animal, others will struggle right along with you.

So what am I saying… I don’t feel much optimism about my work with kids.  It hurts me to see them walk out of my office sometimes, knowing where they’re going.  I tell myself that maybe all I’m doing is giving them hope: maybe one day when they are adults they’ll remember this time they spent in my office and they’ll say to themselves, I can be treated with respect and care, someone valued me, and I should have that now too.

But maybe it’s all a waste of time.