As Long as We Are Wallowing in Guilt...

I've been listening to some lectures by Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has made waves of late. He has some interesting things to say about the psychology of the citizens of tyranny. Some of this we know already from Hoffer's True Believer -- the psychological gymnastics needed to justify simply trying to muddle through as a person living under a regime like Stalin's or Hitler's. The Solzhenitsyns are few and far between.

We all believe (but especially lefties!) that, living under such a regime, we'd be proud and brave dissidents. After all, they are resisting Trump -- what could be more courageous?  But Peterson's statement is stark: Bullshit, he says, 99% of us would be exactly the go-along-to-get-along schmucks that did not stand up to Hitler. Germans are not more evil than Americans in general (they just seem that way); in a similar predicament, Americans would behave the same way.

By a kind of tortuous process, this led me to thinking about moral struggles and how we are so often blind to the actual issues that matter. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, eugenics, Japanese internment -- all these travesties had tacit approval from majorities in America.

So what are the issues today? What are we blind to that future generations will condemn us for tolerating? A glance at the news on any given day would lead one to believe that "institutional racism" and "rape culture" are the two glaring failings of America today, the things history will chide us on.

I disagree. I think 50 years from now, those issues will be seen as overblown. We know with some certainty that the scare stats on rape culture are horrifically exaggerated -- a quarter of college women are not sexually assaulted except under a meaningless definition of the term. And as cooler heads have examined the race issue, it seems that black suspects are not more likely to face police violence. That doesn't mean that we have reached perfection. These issues deserve plenty of attention. (What history will remember, I think, is that we gave these issues too much of the wrong kind of attention.)

No, the two issues on which our great-grandchildren will judge us harshly are 1) abortion and 2) the mistreatment of animals.

Look, before we go further, let's get this clear. What has two thumbs and is a pro-choice carnivore? That's right. No fair calling me a tool of the religious right on this one. (If you have a beef, so to speak, you'll have to debate me on the merits.) Moreover, I don't think I'll change my opinion on either issue real soon. I may change my own behavior, but the incursion on freedom needed to change these practices, except by slow social change, would be unacceptable.

First, let's take on abortion -- you know, because it's such a clear-cut issue. I think that the right of a woman to her bodily integrity and self-ownership takes precedence in the situation. But the view that obtains right now, among abortion rights activists, is that abortion is a morally neutral act. I think this is blind and foolish. Now I don't intend to start a guilt campaign against women who choose abortion, but anyone who does choose such shouldn't do so with her head in the sand. I think that time and science will only bear out the idea that the fetus is human, capable of pain, and in a sense conscious. It may not be enough to change the calculus on legality -- at least in my mind. But the "clump of cells" rhetoric will come to seem monstrous in a few generations.

Second, the way we treat animals is clearly callous and in many cases shocking. I think factory farming gets the most attention, but that's just the tip of it. From animal testing to pet ownership to even the humane and Whole Foods-approved ranching practices that simply paper over the barbarity of animal ownership, the root here is the right to determine whether an animal lives or dies. I'll be blunt: if you see a moral difference between shooting your own dog because he soiled the rug and butchering your own cow for steaks, you are lying to yourself. In either case, a human makes a decision to end the animal's life at his own convenience.

Should we criminalize burgers? Should we lay a guilt trip on carnivores who own cute dogs? No. But we should recognize that taking an animal's life is not -- again -- morally neutral. Will I stop eating bacon? Probably not. But if I'm a 90-year-old getting shit from the 2060 answer to millennials, I'd like to think I'll say, "Fair cop, kid."