At least vegetarians try to put their money where their mouths are! All of this fuss about the suffering of the oppressed, weak, and poor, as we buy our weekly cuts from the butcher, consume products made in deplorable conditions by workers paid a pittance, and enjoy the fruits of our economy on the backs of worse-off nations. Everywhere, these actions betray a clear hierarchy of who deserves suffering.
What, you think this is—hypocrisy? Only from the perspective of today’s ahistorical human beings. In every moment of Western civilization, and in nearly every moment of the history of life, one being or group has benefited from the suffering of another. Ask any ecologist: the antagonistic relationship (where one organism benefits at the expense of another) is one of the six fundamental types of ecological relationships (amongst mutualism, competition, commensalism, amensalism, neutralism).
From a historical and affective perspective, the rank order of suffering has been an omnipresent value of human civilization and its expressions of life. If our values are expressed not in what we superficially believe but in the way we act in the world, over and over again, I don’t think we can avoid this conclusion.
How little does belief matter, here? How little does reason, how little do reasons matter against the scale of the evidence? Humans have done this, are doing this, and by all indications will keep doing this. We do not know how to stop.
Our truths, beliefs, and reasons are what led us into this mess to begin with! Why should we believe that repeating them, but with less confidence and passion this time around, will point to the path that leads us out? As ever, we have the truths that we deserve and the reasons to forget why we deserve them. Harrumph!
We seldom reason our way into things. Looking to the experience of reasoning, when I reason before making a decision, I am trying to fill my cup with reasons for a choice. I will look everywhere for evidence, arguments, and perspectives to support my case. But as our most existential decisions betray, the cup never gets filled to the top. To decide in the moment is to take the Kierkegaardian leap. There is something in the blink-and-you-miss-it instant of decision that is founded on nothing, that does not appear in consciousness, that is motivated by a force outside of my conscious agency. Some force in my body that I am not directly aware of is the real site of most, if not all, decisions.
People assume reason is like an information scout, but it functions more like a defense attorney. When you “fill your cup," you rationalize. You do not move toward a conclusion; you anchor yourself to a desire and then build a ladder of reasons back up the cliffside to justify why you are suddenly lying there on the shore. (I wanted a day on the beach!)
Most of the time, reason is put in the service of retroactive explanation—that is, we are quite good at reasoning our way out of things! Consciousness, after all, has implicit biases, too.
Consciousness needs to feel itself to be the seat and center of selfhood; it “wants” to believe that it is the one making decisions! Thus, it has developed a tendency to cover over the body’s activity with reasons that retroactively explain the action from the perspective of consciousness. Consciousness looks at what the body has done and creates a rational narrative, essentially claiming the body’s actions for itself. I did this, and had good reasons for it.
Evidence supporting that each of us has our own personal rank order of suffering: consciousness takes credit for the body’s work.