December 28, 2006
An Animal Holocaust?
Regular 3QD contributor Justin E. H. Smith in Dissident Voice:
In his 1954 essay, "The Question concerning Technology," the philosopher and unrepentant Nazi Martin Heidegger wrote: "Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and death camps." The former rector of Freiburg has by now been (almost) universally denounced for his equation of Auschwitz and agribusiness, notwithstanding a few academic disciples who remain convinced that their master could do or say no wrong. Heidegger, it seems, wanted nothing short of peasants in quaint national costumes dirtying their hands to bring viands to his austere Black Forest table (machine-picked cabbage is so inauthentic). Among European philosophers, Heidegger's contemptuous idiocy would remain unrivaled until Jean Baudrillard's quip about the World Trade Center's former workers that "the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horrors of living in them – the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel."
Yet there is one respect in which the comparison of modern farming methods to the mass killing of humans cannot but strike one as fair. To wit, 10 billion cows, pigs, lambs, chickens (and scattered other creatures) are slaughtered per year in the United States alone, bringing a painful end to their short, miserable, lives in squalid and stinking crates. As with what I have written on the death penalty, my inclination is to spare the reader the details. We all know them, after all, and any ignorance at this point is only of the willful variety.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 11:05 AM | Permalink
Comments
Either you are a vegan or you are not. if you eat meat, then the "holocaust" is methodology and should not concern the consumer since it is being done to satisfy his eating habits and needs. Option: raise and kill and dress yhour own meat if you are concerned with the methods used by others to supply you.
Posted by: fred lapides | Dec 28, 2006 11:28:36 AM
The problem lies with the concept of rights. Or rather, with the concept that rights imply inequality. If (some) humans have rights than perhaps some (food)animals have rights.
However, by implication, not everything has rights or you would not have tofu. Have you considered the possibility that a soy plant can experience pain?
If all things in nature have equal rights, there is nothing left to eat.
Simone Weil postulated that rights are limited and Roman in origin. She held, I think correctly, that obligations are universal.
We do indeed, have obligations to all living things - including plants. Nevertheless, we need to eat.
More importantly, we need to know food as something more than an abstraction.
Considerable pain, suffering and inefficient allocation of natural resources are involved in in bringing a vegan plate to an urban dweller.
Posted by: John Bunting | Dec 28, 2006 11:59:30 AM
fred, I disagree. One can be OK with the killing of animals for food but still want them to be humanely treated in their lives. Why do you think it's a black-and-white distinction?
Posted by: Jesse M. | Dec 28, 2006 12:06:00 PM
The statement by Heidegger does not appear in the 1954 essay. He made the remark in a speech given in 1949. The later essay was based upon the speech, but omits the Holocaust comparison.
Posted by: baikonur | Dec 29, 2006 8:44:57 AM
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