Americans don't put much stock in philosophy — or so I assume. Whenever somebody else makes a sweeping statement like that, I always scowl, thinking: "Really? How do you know? Met 'em all, have you?"
My guess is that most Americans don't consider philosophy — I mean, just look at them. Nor weigh thorny ethical issues. If you asked your average fellow citizen to name a living philosopher, they couldn't. Alex Jones doesn't count.
My guess is that most Americans don't consider philosophy — I mean, just look at them. Nor weigh thorny ethical issues. If you asked your average fellow citizen to name a living philosopher, they couldn't. Alex Jones doesn't count.
This isn't to lord myself above anybody — the only living philosopher I could name unprompted is Peter Singer, and that is only because of the kerfuffle he caused decades ago by posing a thought experiment: that if you have a severely deformed baby, it's morally justifiable to kill it, provided you replace it with another, less afflicted child. Many people, among them disability rights advocates and parents of children with special needs, didn't like that.
To me, Singer's argument is easily refuted by shifting the metaphor, slightly, to this: If you have a neighbor you don't like, it's OK to kill him, provided someone else moves next door. While that might work fine from your perspective, the logic falls apart when you consider the viewpoint of the neighbor being killed. Ditto for that first baby.
Singer is, unsurprisingly, an animal rights advocate. The author of the 1975 book, "Animal Liberation," he's been at the forefront of trying to get society to be less cruel to beasts.
This is a long way of saying that when I noticed Singer has a new book out, "Consider the Turkey," I thought it would be a Thanksgiving treat to read the brief, bright yellow volume. A treat for you, that is.
One standard I use to judge nonfiction is: Did I learn anything interesting? I certainly did here. President John F. Kennedy was the first to pardon a turkey, in an offhand quip, though the practice didn't get going until George H.W. Bush.
Turkey presidential lore is quickly dispatched with, and we get down to the specific abuses turkeys suffer in gigantic farms.
That goes against my personal experience — I once visited the Ho-Ka Turkey Farm in DeKalb County, the largest such operation in Illinois, and while I didn't quite want to join the gobblers pecking at seed in the yard, the place did not strike me as a horror that would change anybody's dietary habits.
Singer shares, in great detail, how commercial turkeys are conceived. He carefully — I almost said "lovingly" — goes over the artificial insemination process which, I admit, I had never previously imagined. Without going into detail, as you might be eating your breakfast, let's just say there are people whose job it is to extract semen from turkeys by masturbating them 10 hours a day. Suddenly being a newspaper columnist doesn't seem such a burden.
With the lack of balance endemic to animal rights sorts, Singer goes on to point out that having sex with an animal is a crime, and treats the insemination as rape, which I imagine humans with experience in that area might take exception to.
To continue reading, click here.
If all turkeys were raised free range, they would be at least $3 a pound instead of 99¢ a pound for Butterballs on sale.
ReplyDeleteThe buying public wouldn't be very happy then!
The first thing I thought of while reading this was the video of Sarah Palin being interviewed while standing in front of a turkey "disassembly" line. You can still find it on Youtube.
ReplyDeleteI think this piece was a bit more thought-provoking than may have been intended. Reminds me of the foie gras debacle from years ago. The philosophical question is "Should we extend empathy to animals?", meaning should we concern ourselves about their suffering and how do we know what is suffering to them? If the answers are "yes" and "we assume it's similar to human suffering" then we should work toward ending commercial animal farming.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the point that “Is a difficult life better than no life at all?” To me, the answer is obviously yes." -- I don't see this as obvious at all. Each year an estimated 700,000 people worldwide decide that their physical and/or emotional pain is just not worth the hassle of existing and end it. Millions more try to. Your sentiment also sounds uncomfortably close to the views of anti-abortionists. Again, for animals the question is how do we know? Would a turkey pick a few weeks of existence in a warehouse in questionable comfort over not existing at all? I don't know.
Clearly, I have thoughts on this :) and they probably exceed the reasonable space for a comment. I'll just add that the fact we (me included) don't know any living philosophers may be one cause of our societal backslide.
I also feel that my thoughts on this topic "probably exceed the reasonable space for a comment," so I probably wouldn't have chimed in. But I'll just say that I'm largely in agreement with what you posted, Mark.
DeleteAlmost all the philosophers I studied in school were dead ones, so was feeling some shame at the start of your column. Then I decided I wasn't missing much by not knowing about Peter Singer.
ReplyDeleteThere was a turkey farm down the street from my college campus. Students took pride in bringing home a fresh turkey for the Thanksgiving feast. The turkeys there were treated well, but I was always struck by their distorted appearance and waddling walk. The reason turkeys can't mate on their own and require artificial insemination is they've been bred to develop (obstructing) large breasts... Human intervention done specifically to cater to our preference for breast meat.
We used to buy our turkeys from farmers and pay the free range premium. They have all dropped out of the business because turkeys are hard to raise.
ReplyDeleteCalvin Trillin has been promoting spaghetti carbonara as the Thanksgiving dish. I don't cook much but my spaghetti carbonara is better than stuffing and mashed potatoes.
I've often thought about the role philosophy plays in society.
ReplyDeleteFor a very long time I didn't get philosophy. Grade school run-ins with philosophy fall into the attempt to spoon-feed empathy and deeper meaning into trivial matters. I think of classics like little red hen and Aesop's fables as told through Rocky and Bullwinkle. High school had to compete with the craziness that is teenage kids trying to balance everything and nothing... i doubt i was ready for much more than prepping my mind for increased educational expansion. And my college years were filled with the continual pounding of what freedom means and how we are better than the animals. I figure we're probably not. I was never sold on the ideas that the professors were teaching.
Then came life.
Slowly as I aged and read and experienced and heard, I began to understand what philosophy (at least as I see it) is and how important it is to society. Philosophy has never truly been about the answers. While the answers are important and can have enormous ramifications, the most important aspects of philosophy are asking questions, having discussions, and having a society that allows for an entire class of individuals to make a living doing it.
Bertram Russel changed how we thought about a lot of things. A major shift in how we viewed religion and being a steward of society was rethought (at least, I like to think that's the case). It seems to me that the height of a civilization can be measured by the quality and quantity of quality philosophers. Greece, Rome, Europe, England, many of their golden ages are filled with great philosophers who challenge the status quo of thinking. Some were called heretics, others created schools, some even redefined the church. Think of the role philosophy took in splitting the atom and the nuclear age.
Today's lack of philosophers in the main stream -- to me -- bodes poorly. Americans seem more simple and vapid than ever. Unable to express even the simplest disagreements with anything other than name-calling and canceling. I've always said the key to beating propaganda is education, and now more than ever, I think philosophy needs to play a role in that education. Though maybe not the incessant argument about what free will is. It's clear my dog has more free will than me or anyone i know.
Perhaps we should lean into TBWA\Chiat\Day's Apple slogan, Think different.
or maybe modify it slightly to just Think.
I saw a flock of wild turkeys in the middle of a residential area in Sacramento. They roost on houses, fences and cars. The residents consider them pests, like giagantic pigeons.
ReplyDeleteYou see them all over Southwest Michigan. People hunt and eat them in the Spring but they are nothing like commercial farmed Turkeys. Much less meat and they taste a little gamey.
DeleteI don’t know why their hunting season is in the Spring instead of the Fall when they are fattened up. Maybe to avoid conflict with the deere hunters or protect the profits of the big turkey producers.
Since Trump is pushing the envelope by nominating seemingly unqualified people for cabinet positions,…..what makes anyone a Philosopher? A Phd in Philosophy? A BA in Philosophy? Having taken fewer than 4 college courses in Philosophy? Having no background, but being a celebrity? The guy at the end of the bar?
ReplyDeleteUnrelated—- today is the anniversary of the killing of JFK. What a sad chapter in the history of an idealistic high school kid.
ReplyDeleteI was in HS when the principal came on the intercom & announced that he had been shot & a half hour later that he was dead.
DeleteHe never should've gone to Texas, the loons there were just as crazy as they are today & they were actually threatening him before the visit!
If he's at least had the bubble top on the car, he'd have lived.
To expand on my first comment, this is from today's Dallas Morning news:
Delete"A month before Kennedy’s visit, Time magazine had already labeled Dallas “A City Disgraced.” This followed the ugly incident at Adlai Stevenson’s Dallas appearance and recalled the embarrassing 1960 “Mink Coat Mob” incident, where Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson were jostled and spat upon.
By 1963, Dallas had proved itself, in the eyes of the rest of America, as a hotbed of virulent Red Scare paranoia that could not tolerate civil debate. Kennedy’s advisers warned him not to visit Dallas because of the likelihood of violence. Kennedy himself explained to his staff as he made his final approach to Dallas: “We’re heading into nut country today.”"
I think many of us here were teen-agers that day, so we were in our high school classrooms. I was sixteen, and a junior. My geometry teacher went across the hall to have a smoke in the principal's office, during a test. He heard the news on the radio. Came back with a terrible look on his face, and told us.
DeleteWe thought he was just telling us another of his sick jokes. He was a young rookie teacher from southern IL, and sometimes he cracked anti-Kennedy jokes that would probably get him in trouble today. So of course we didn't believe him, and we began to mock him and jeer at him, Soon after, the principal got on the P. A. and told the whole school...3,000 silent kids...that JFK was dead.
My next class was biology. Our teacher was from North Carolina, and he had a kind of smirk on his face. He didn't look sad at all. I hated his guts for the rest of the school year, and that smirk made me hate all Southerners for a long time. Nobody who was old enough will ever forget that day. (SG)
My grade-school was dismissed early on the day Kennedy was assassinated. I remember being baffled and frightened because teachers were crying, and when I arrived at home, my aunt was there and both my mom and aunt were crying, too. I had never seen adults cry before that day. My aunt said she had been shopping and passed a store front window with a TV in it, with the breaking news being broadcast on the TV. A crowd had gathered in front of the storefront window.
DeleteI would guess that most people (if they think of it at all) assume that Philosophy is a clever game of semantics designed to demonstrate how much smarter than the average bear the Philosopher is.
ReplyDeletejohn
One problem is that for most (non-grad-school) students, the study of philosophy is the study of the history of philosophy. Notions of inquiry, of meaning, of the value of asking the next question, are set aside in favor of something more akin to a "who said what when" curriculum.
ReplyDeleteIn college we were required to take a number of philosophy courses. 4-5 if I remember. Not happy about that but did enjoy one or two seminars. As I aged, I began to realize how helpful those classes were to deal with many of the moral and ethical issues of today.
ReplyDeleteWent to NIU, and lived in DeKalb for almost six years. Waterman is only about a dozen miles to the south, so I knew a few folks, year-round students and town residents like me, who took jobs at the Ho-Ka Turkey Farm. They would bring home the unused cardboard boxes with the name on them, and store all kinds of things in them. I had a few myself, so the name immediately brought back memories of my DeKalb days.
ReplyDeleteThe work was seasonal, and a few people also worked down there in the good old summertime. They had some interesting stories to tell. But nobody ever worked at Ho-Ka for very long. And they would paraphrase an old Steely Dan tune with: "I'm a fool to do your turkey work...oh, yeah...I don't wanna do your turkey work...no more..." Always got a laugh or two.
The Del Monte canning plant was a much more tolerable environment, and they gave the workers free T-shirts that said clever things "Be a human bean!" and "Where have you bean all my life?" Hard to believe that over fifty years have passed since I lived in DeKalb, and last saw one.
Yes, good old DeKalb. Journalism major 69-73. Fifty years indeed. One of my favorite courses was Philosophy 101 with Dr. Brown. Opened my eyes. What a time to be in college.
DeleteAh, so you, too, experienced May, 1970, and the rioting that followed the Kent shootings. I was working for the school paper, the Northern Star, and was beaten and jailed by state troopers. Had to go to the hospital as well. Also had a state civil service job (dishwasher in a high-rise dorm), and was fired. My boss said: "I don't want any Commies working for me."
DeleteTransferred to NIU from a tiny ultra-conservative private school in '66, graduated four years later, and hung around, on and off, until '73. Those were the days, my friend. Thought they'd never end. But they eventually did, with a jolt and a thud, when the war ended.