Rights: in the same way that people of all colours, beliefs, sizes, and shoe size have the right to go about in public, babies have that right too.  A baby is just a person who is very young.  People have rights.

Selflessness: Babies can be loud or smelly or otherwise disruptive – are you really so special you must not be asked to tolerate some disruption from a tiny being that cannot as yet control itself?  I’m not saying a crying baby on a plane isn’t very unpleasant – I’m saying get over yourself, this is the time for compassion.  Because it’s not always about what feels nicest for you.

Looking to the future: What happens to a baby is enormously important for how they’ll turn out to be as adults.  Babies need to be around other people, experiencing person to person stimulation, in a loving and patient manner.  If it’s not your baby, it might one day be your neighbour or old age home nurse – even selfish people should make nice with babies.  And demonstrating this kind of caring and acceptance to babies is good for their parents too – a supported parent has more resources to do a better job of parenting.

This is not to speak in support of parents who use their kids as accessories and thoughtlessly demand that the world revolve around them (using the baby as justification), but rather to call for a reasonable and sincere attitude of concern and well-wishing to babies, which requires welcoming their presence in the places where people go.

As you know, I never do anything without first reading a book on it.  Yesterday I picked up this book: Fresh Food From Small Spaces: The square inch gardener’s guide to year round growing, fermenting and sprouting.  It’s intended for people in cities who live in apartments, and though I don’t know about the fermenting bit (sounds icky), the rest sounds perfect.

It’s late in the year for planting anything other than lettuces, radishes, and overwinter plants (I have no idea what that means yet) but I’m not letting that stop me.  Lettuces we shall have!  And maybe I can rustle up some mature plants to introduce to my patch now – I was thinking herbs might be good for this.  Do vegetable plants survive transplanting when they are in the middle of, er, producing?  Can you even buy such a thing?

It’s going to be a blast learning about how to make a garden.  And I am feeling very lucky that I live on the sunny side of the building with a big deck with landlord financed planter boxes.  Whee!

JBrydle asked what brought this all on.  Really it’s been a five year or so process, though the tipping point was watching the movie Food Inc. earlier this week.  When I lived in Halifax I got interested in the food industry and started reading books, particularly those by Marion Nestle, about how the food industry works.  I won’t reproduce her arguments here, but basically the idea is that “big food” acts to prevent regulatory oversight that is necessary for disease and death prevention, while unduly influencing consumers away from healthful choices. Other books I was influenced by were Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and more recently Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved.  So I already had some notion of the evils of mass food production as it is currently practiced, yet I never made a move away from that industry.  It wasn’t something I dwelled much on – I never became interested in trying to source local food or avoiding highly processed stuff.  I shopped exclusively at Safeway.  It was just easier I suppose.

And then I watched Food Inc.  As I wrote about earlier, it was hard to watch the animal scenes, and in the midst of feeling grief and anger at the thoughtless treatment of feeling creatures… the rest of the movie happened, and I realized my outrage at factory animal “processing” is no different than outrage and grief at the abuse of impoverished workers,  manipulation and exploitation of farmers at the hands of major buying cartels, and environmental devastation as a result of intensive farming practices.  If I could make a change with veganism, why not with those other things?  Most of that movie was not new information to me, but somehow I had never felt as deeply moved by those issues before.

Become a vegetarian was a huge change in my life and I think it’s made me more comfortable with change, and has also given me a sense of agency and power in the world that I didn’t have before.  I used to eat the way my parents and fellow white Canadians eat, mindlessly.  Then one day I realized I needed to opt out of a system I saw as inexcusably cruel – and while some people say my refusal to eat meat changes nothing, I don’t see it that way.  Not only is there about four hundred pounds of meat no longer being demanded in the market, and a voice spreading the message of compassion and health – but there was a big change inside me.  For the first time I realized I didn’t have to just do what everyone else does simply because it’s what everyone else does.  I can be an active moral agent and make choices, even unpopular ones, that I come to on my own, through my own process of inquiry and self exploration.  I don’t really know how to explain how empowering that has been for me.

And now that I know I can do things like that, I am much more ready to make further “radical” changes for similar reasons.  I don’t want my food to come to me after thousands of miles of fossil fuel burning transport.  I don’t want to have cheap fruit that requires abused immigrant workers to harvest.  I don’t want to encourage Monsanto to make more pesticides that require farmers to use only Monsanto patented seeds (illegal to save season to season) to survive them.   Whereas I do want to encourage small scale farming outfits that retain diversity in the crops.   I want to grow my own produce that supplements my groceries so I spend less, and connect to the earth more.

So, while I know nothing about gardening or living more sustainably, I am excited to learn how and start making changes.  I’ll never be perfect, but I could do much better than I currently do.  It feels right to me.

And I have a question.  Some friends and I were discussing this the other night what the benefit of spreading information about Iran’s current crisis is.  One point I thought was very good is that, in general, more information in a crisis is better than less, and on those grounds it’s good that Iran is being Twittered and FaceBooked and blogged about.  Another point I thought was very good is that, so what if it’s popularly known, or that the advent of internet communication means we get this information without having to wait for the 6 o’clock news, what the fuck is anyone doing about it?  Merely spreading information is erroneously conflated with helpful action, in other words.

I agree with both points.  I have often thought that internet chatter gives only a false illusion of participation and dissipates real social energy that might otherwise be spent doing something like… I don’t know, but something more effective than Twittering about it.  But there are probably things I haven’t thought of on this issue, so I wonder what you think.  Is social media helping Iran?  Does spreading information help people, or prompt people to act in such a way that others are truly helped?  Or does it just makes us feel better, feel like we’re participating when really we’re just sitting on our duffs in our comfortable living rooms and offices not doing a fucking thing for Iranians?  (Or Sudanese or etc etc.)

I will be honest, I haven’t done anything for Iran.  I don’t count this blog post as “doing anything” as I truly cannot imagine how this will affect the life of a single Iranian person, for better or worse, in anything more than a hypothetical manner.

This blew my mind.  I haven’t heard this before but Husband tells me it was quite common in his community of Christians back in the day.  To be honest it’s just never a thought that has ever crossed my mind.  For one thing it implies an ongoing belief of God (behaving as a good Christian curbs my good time, so I’m going to reject the restrictions); when I say I don’t believe in God, I really, truly do not – and if there is no belief, it is meaningless to say there is rebellion against the figurehead.

But I certainly don’t just do anything I like, and I never considered atheism as a state which permits that when other states do not.  So I really am not sure what to say to her about this.  To my mind it’s just self evident that you don’t need Christianity to be a moral person – the mere existence of someone like me proves it, but so do the cultures world wide which have not been Christian yet embrace the usual moral precepts.

Which begs the question, what is morality?

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.

-Jonathan Haidt, psychologist, morality researcher

The specifics vary with culture and time, but there are five general categories (“virtues”) of moral emotion/thought that all humans are heir to, according to Haidt:

1. Fairness/reciprocity.  Anyone who studied first year psychology learned about this when they studied Kohlberg, who thought all morality came from these principles.  And they are ubiquitious – but they aren’t the whole story.

2. Harm/care.  Carol Gilligan famously challenged Kohlberg with these additional moral principles.  Her error was attributing them to women, saying this is the basis of a distinctly women’s morality.  Actually they are an intrinsic element of all people’s moral sense.  Even men.

3. Authory/respect.

4. Ingroup/loyalty.

5. Purity/sanctity.  Disgust regularly trumps other feelings on tests of moral reasoning.  We see this element in restrictions on hand washing, eating, sex (and menstruation), and so on.  When someone says, “Sacrilege!” this is the moral sense which has been offended.

Haidt explains:

Virtues are socially constructed and socially learned, but these processes are highly prepared and constrained by the evolved mind. We call these three additional foundations [3, 4 & 5] the binding foundations, because the virtues, practices, and institutions they generate function to bind people together into hierarchically organized interdependent social groups that try to regulate the daily lives and personal habits of their members. We contrast these to the two individualizing foundations (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity), which generate virtues and practices that protect individuals from each other and allow them to live in harmony as autonomous agents who can focus on their own goals.

People who self identify as liberals endorse the first two virtues, whereas people who self identify as conservative (which has huge overlap with religiousity) endorse all five.  Conservatism, in this light, hits more of our moral senses.

In my experience many atheists fall into the “liberal” camp insofar as they consider justice and harm primary considerations for moral thought and behaviour.  Yet what the conservatives, and religious, have on their side is a conception of morality that is broader than mere “right and wrong,” extending also into “community maintenance and building.”

Haidt levels the following criticism of the new atheists, whom he says mount straw man attacks against religion:

a) The new atheists treat religions as sets of beliefs about the world, many of which are demonstrably false. Yet anthropologists and sociologists who study religion stress the role of ritual and community much more than of factual beliefs about the creation of the world or life after death.

b) The new atheists assume that believers, particularly fundamentalists, take their sacred texts literally. Yet ethnographies of fundamentalist communities (such as James Ault’s Spirit and Flesh) show that even when people claim to be biblical literalists, they are in fact quite flexible, drawing on the bible selectively—or ignoring it—to justify humane and often quite modern responses to complex social situations.

This is something I have written about here before.  The arguments against religion are not irrelevant, but they’re only a part of the story.  Husband’s friend who feels in her gut that my atheism is little more than a bid to sidestep responsibility to moral behaviour is expressing something that we can predict from this model of morality.  It’s why the contradictory, nonsensical and unbelievable content of the Bible is really not very important to Christians.  There is something bigger going on, and it is hitting all the moral receptors, and that makes it tremendously urgent and tremendously powerful.  We’re talking about the underpinning of what makes society possible for humans – moral behaviour as so much more than just what is fair and what avoids suffering.  The Bible, in this sense, is carrying a lot more baggage than at first glance it seems to.

I find this interesting because it gives a window into why religion is so important to people.  I don’t believe religion is necessary for the stable functioning of good societies, but the fact that stable, good societies are necessary goes some way to explaining the importance of religion, which satisfies all those related moral senses.

Read Haidt’s article in full.

Religion is a conversation stopper.  As a culture we have agreed that people’s religious beliefs are so precious, and people’s reactions to challenge so powerful, that we cannot openly speak against them.  This is a form of conversational censorship that does not deserve respect.  I’m voicing my opinion in a public forum where everyone, even the faithful, is invited to respond in print.  That’s called free speech and it’s part of democracy.

People identify strongly with their religions.  This means that is is very difficult to discuss religion as an idea without people feeling personally attacked.  But that is for the faithful to manage.  Because in fact you are not your religion.  You are not your Bible.  You are just you!  It is not correct to assume that because I challenge your religion I am therefore attacking or mocking you.  Christians even have a phrase for this: Love the sinner, hate the sin.

When I discuss the Bible and its contents, I am actually using the Bible as my reference.  If the conclusions I reach are upsetting, consider that the problem may lie in the source material.

“When vegetarians grow up they become vegans.”

It’s so true.  All the arguments for vegetarianism apply to dairy and eggs also, particularly from the factory system.  I don’t think ovo-lacto vegetarianism is philosophically coherent.  It  beats meat eating but it’s not quite finished, you know?  And most vegans started at vegetarians who eventually came to realize they were still supporting cruelty and even meat eating (veal calfs are a byproduct of the dairy industry).

Speaking of incoherent philosophy, everyone needs to lay off the governor general.  Yes she ate some seal heart. So what?  You probably ate some cow/pig/chicken recently.  Guess what?  Those animals live way shittier lives than seals, even baby seals clubbed and skinned alive.  You should see what happens to animals in the factory farming system.  Eating some seal is no worse than eating a cow or wearing fur or any of those things that most folks do without batting an eye.  The hypocrisy of this just kills me.

Anyway, I like that line.

1. At class tonight two other students I’ve talked to on occasion kept sidling up together to have whispered, private chats, which transported me back to that miserable prison called high school where life was one big long series of exclusions (mostly, my little circle of geeks excepted), and I asked myself, When the fuck do I stop being neurotic about this?  I am waiting to reach a point where I really and truly do not get anxious about being rejected by my peers but it has not happened yet.

2. But who cares, my god, I have HUGE BOOBS.  (Ha ha, that was a little joke for the folks who followed along for the drama about bra sizing.  Post script: I decided to avoid the issue and keep using the bras I already have.  What’s a little discomfort between friends?)

3. I have noticed a certain defiance activated in me against declaring my status.  It’s a big deal in certain circles to say what your degree is and where you got it.  It’s a pedigree system.  But the more schooling I do, the more I realize that school can be a load of crap.  It has many potential perks but it is by no means necessary to become a thoughtful, intelligent person who can contribute to…whatever.  Some of the best thinkers I know are not academics and some of the shittiest are, so right there you know school is neither necessary nor sufficient for Usefulness As A Person.  All the best learning I’ve had came from people outside the school system and the best practitioners I’ve seen in my field are not massively educated in the formal sense.

Okay.  So when people ask what I do, I say I’m in school – not grad school, not an MA – just school.  Or if someone asks if I am working, I just say no.  No explanations, no justifications.  Whenever I sense the question comes from someone trying to sort me by status rather than just expressing interest and curiosity, I absolutely – and defiantly! – provide as little information as I can, knowing it defaults me into a lower status setting than they would use if they had all the facts.  So what?  Fuck ‘em.

Anyway, I started noticing this in myself about 6 months ago and so far I’m pretty okay with it.  Ego syntonic defense: it’s what’s for dinner!

(Aside: I was going to link to the Wikipedia article on “ego syntonic” to define it for those who are curious but it is a TERRIBLE article so I won’t.  I clicked around but didn’t find any good online definitions but if anyone asks I could write something up.)

4. Finally, Jane Austen is worth reading.  I know, I am the only woman on planet earth who doesn’t looooove Pride and Prejudice, but frankly, the scheming of a bunch of immature socialites just can’t hold my interest… Unless they are under constant threat of attack by the walking dead!  In which case it becomes pure butterfat.

5. Oh bother, I could go on but Puck tells me my posts are too long anyway, and there is a nice hot tub to lounge in with my book so this is it for tonight.  Zombies here I come…

I don’t know anything about this issue but it seems to be a hot one.  Any readers have babies or thoughts on breast/bottle after reading this?  I assume we all agree we think that baby should get the best and we all love little babies, which strikes me as a good place to start a discussion.

That is if you’re interested – are you?

Sure, funerals are for the survivors.  After all, the deceased is, in fact, dead.  But there’s a reason we call it paying respects: it’s respectful to give a final goodbye to the person who has gone, and doing it in the manner they would have wished is a part of it.  He should have had a secular service in keeping with his wishes. Also, only one family member (the one who pushed through the changes) is religious.  He was raised secular.  All but one sibling is either an atheist or a totally non-participant theist (or so I assume – none of them ever mentions religion but based on their age I wouldn’t be suprised if there was some sort of unquestioned belief, mainly to do with culture rather than practice).  There is no religious family tradition.  This was the agenda of one person who said the only “proper” funeral is a religious one.  How narrow minded and self absorbed and infuriating!

Husband has been apprised of my wishes and he’s definitely enough of a terrier that should I predecease him I know he’ll make sure I get the sort of service I would approve of: non-religious.  After they take as many of my organs and other bits as are useful to other people, they should cremate the rest and after that I don’t care what happens to my remains.  My funeral should be called a funeral and not a celebration of life, and there should be no religious talk unless it’s someone I actually personally know who happens to be religious and would like to offer a prayer or something like that – I consider that a very thoughtful and considerate offering of affection and comfort to the living, and am fine with that.  But some paint-by-numbers religious ceremony from someone who never met me but feels qualified to speak about my spiritual life?  No thanks. I have no doubt that I am going absolutely nowhere after my death – death is the end.  Lots of talk about my soul and my afterlife is just silly and I would be scoffing at it if I could be present, which of course I won’t be because if you’re at my funeral it’s because I’m dead.  But as long as those cognitive modules to do with me as a living agent are firing, it would be respectful to my memory to give me a secular service.

Aside: what is up with celebrations of life?  Why are we not supposed to just face the terrible tragedy of loss and bloody well mourn it? Death is hard and it fucking hurts and that is the truth.  We are already very insulated from death in this culture, and the only thing we really have left is the service.  It is my firm belief that people need to be given permission to experience that loss and mourn in the presence of other people who loved the one who is gone – and calling it a celebration of life does not help the process.  If you want to celebrate someone’s life, spend time with them when they are alive.  After death is not the time to celebrate, it is the time to mourn.

I feel incredible anger at these people.  I hope they rot in jail.  Actually, I hope they get run over by a bus and then treated only with homeopathic remedies while infections ravage their bodies and they suffer intensely before they die – but I will settle for the justice system.

If you’ve ever had an baby or lived with one or otherwise spent time with a little infant, you know how completely helpless and dependent they are.  I just can’t understand how this baby’s parents could watch over her, because surely they loved her, and allow her to die.  To me that is monstrous.  And while I generally figure adults should be free to make whatever choice they want, you just can’t make choices that kill infants.  That is wrong.  And evil, if anything is evil.

Fuck!