The life in a plant may be less visible but far more intense and durable than the life in an animal. If you put an oyster in a saucer of fresh water and keep it for a week, the result will be quite different.
Why then, if it is immoral to subject an oyster to the degradation of becoming food, is it blameless, even virtuous, to do the same thing to a carrot or a piece of tofu?
“Because the carrot doesn’t suffer,” says the vegan. “Soybeans have no nervous system. They don’t feel pain. Plants have no feelings.”
That is exactly what many people said about animals for millennia, and what many still say about fish. As science has brought us—some of us—back to an awareness of our animality, we have been forced to acknowledge that all higher animals suffer pain and fear at least as intensely as we do. But just as we once misused science to support the claim that animals are mindless machines, so now we misuse science to support the claim of knowing that nonanimal living things—plants—have no feelings.
We know nothing of the sort.
Science has only just begun to investigate plant sensitivity and plant communication. The results are still meager, but positive, fascinating, and strange. The mechanisms and processes, being so very different from the senses and nervous systems of animals, are barely understood,. But so far what science has to say on the subject fails to justify the convenient belief that plants are insensate. We don’t know what the carrot feels.
In fact, we don’t know what the oyster feels. We can’t ask the cow’s opinion on being milked, although we can hypothesize that if her udder was full she might feel relief. The assumptions we make about all other living creatures are mostly self-serving. And perhaps the most deeply entrenched of them is that plants are insensate, irrational, and dumb: thus “inferior to” animals, “here for our use.” This snap judgment allows even the most tenderhearted of us to disrespect plants, to kill vegetables without mercy, to congratulate ourselves on the purity of our conscience while in the very act of callously devouring a young kale stalk or a tender, delicate, curling, living, infant pea tendril.
I believe the only way to avoid such cruel hypocrisy and achieve true clarity of conscience is by becoming an Ogan.
It is a pity that the Ogan movement by its nature and principles is fated to be, in each individual case, rather short-lived. But surely the first martyrs of the cause will inspire multitudes to follow them in forswearing the grossly unnatural practice of supporting life by eating other living beings or their byproducts. Ogans, ingesting only the unsullied purity of the O in the atmosphere and in H2O, will live in true amity with all animals and all vegetables, and will proudly preach their creed for as long as they possibly can. It could be for several weeks, sometimes.
Belief in Belief
February 2014
YOU CAN BUY rocks in which are carved words intended to be inspiring—LOVE, HOPE, DREAM, etc. Some have the word BELIEVE. They puzzle me. Is belief a virtue? Is it desirable in itself? Does it not matter what you believe so long as you believe something? If I believed that horses turned into artichokes on Tuesdays, would that be better than doubting it?
Charles Blow had a fine editorial in the New York Times on January 3, 2014, “Indoctrinating Religious Warriors,” indicting the radical Republicans’ use of religion to confuse opinion on matters of fact and their success in doing so. He used a Pew report from December 30, 2013, to provide this disheartening statistic:
Last year… the percentage of Democrats who believed in evolution inched up to 67 percent, the percentage of Republicans believing so plummeted to 43 percent. Now, more Republicans believe that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time” than believe in evolution.
Now, greatly as I respect Charles Blow’s keen intelligence and reliable compassion, his choice of words here worries me. Four times in this paragraph he uses the verb believe in a way that implies that the credibility of a scientific theory and the credibility of a religious scripture are comparable.
I don’t think they are. And I want to write about it because I agree with him that issues of factual plausibility and spiritual belief or faith are being—cynically or innocently—confused, and need to be disentangled.
I wasn’t able to find the exact wording of the questions asked in the Pew survey.
Their report uses the word think more often than believe—people “think” that human and other beings have evolved over time, or “reject the idea.”
This language reassures me somewhat. For if a poll-taker asked me, “Do you believe in evolution?” my answer would have to be “No.”
I ought to refuse to answer at all, of course, because a meaningless question has only meaningless answers. Asking me if I believe in evolution, in change, makes about as much sense as asking if I believe in Tuesdays, or artichokes. The word evolution means change, something turning into something else. It happens all the time.
The problem here is our use of the word evolution to signify the theory of evolution. This shorthand causes a mental short circuit: it sets up a false parallel between a hypothesis (concerning observed fact) and a revelation (from God, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible)—which is then reinforced by our loose use of the word believe.
I don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn’t a matter of faith, but of evidence.
The whole undertaking of science is to deal, as well as it can, with reality. The reality of actual things and events in time is subject to doubt, to hypothesis, to proof and disproof, to acceptance and rejection—not to belief or disbelief.
Belief has its proper and powerful existence in the domains of magic, religion, fear, and hope.
I see no opposition between accepting the theory of evolution and believing in God. The intellectual acceptance of a scientific theory and the belief in a transcendent deity have little or no overlap: neither can support or contradict the other. They rise from profoundly different ways of looking at the same world—different ways of coming at reality: the material and the spiritual. They can and often do coexist in perfect harmony.
Extreme literalism in reading religious texts makes any kind of thinking hard. Still, even if one believes that God created the universe in six days a few thousand years ago, one can take that as a spiritual truth unaffected by the material evidence that the universe is billions of years old. And vice versa: as Galileo knew, though the Inquisitors didn’t, whether the earth goes round the sun or the sun goes round the earth doesn’t affect one way or the other the belief that God is the spiritual center of all.
The idea that only belief sees the world as wonderful, and the “cold hard facts” of science take all the color and wonder out of it, the idea that scientific understanding automatically threatens and weakens religious or spiritual insight, is just hokum.
Some of the hokum arises from professional jealousy, rivalry, and fear—priest and scientist competing for power and control of human minds. Atheist rant and fundamentalist rant ring alike: passionate, partial, false. My impression is that most working scientists, whether they practice a religion or not, accept the coexistence of religion, its primacy in its own sphere, and go on with what they’re doing. But some scientists hate religion, fear it, and rail against it. And some priests and preachers, wanting their sphere of influence to include everything and everyone, claim the absolute primacy of biblical revelation over material fact.