Tag: ethics

On kink, advertising, and climate change.

On kink, advertising, and climate change.

Most Americans believe themselves to be middle class – about 70% of the population. And most people – again, about 70% – believe that they have above-average intelligence. They’re right, of course: most people probably define “average intelligence” as “slightly less intelligent than me,” instead of as a statistical concept.

We are the norms against which we measure the world. To me, my body is normal; my brain is normal; my beliefs are normal. As are yours, to you!

In sexual parlance, kinks are behaviors outside the norm, but what we do is normalized to ourselves. Kink is a horizon, ever receding as we approach.

Some types of touch or activities might never feel enticing to you, just as some don’t feel particularly enticing to me, but as we live and grow, we encompass more within the boundaries of our norms. Until very recently in this country, all homosexuality was considered kinky, and only through numerous acts of bravery – people making their identities known despite living in a culture bent on rejecting them – did the general populace realize that these desires are widespread and normal.

Which is not to say that your increased awareness of the desires held by others, and your ability to recognize shared humanity with the people who hold them, will make the same desires whelm inside of you. I don’t have to want to wield a whip to recognize the sexual ecstasy gleaming from Bartolomeo Manfredi’s painting Cupid Chastised.

In Good Sex, Catherine M. Roach writes that:

Good sex is sex that is good, as in ethically or morally commendable, and good, as in pleasurable.

As to the ethical: good sex is consensual, does no harm, and impacts people’s lives in positive ways.

As to the pleasurable: good sex is hot! Erotic, sexy, stimulating, sensual. It satisfies desire and leads to physical and emotional enjoyment for all partners involved, orgasms all around.

In both senses, sex should do good and feel good. In both senses, sex is good.

This intertwining of the ethical and the pleasurable reflects an ancient and enduring belief that the good life, the life worth living, is a moral one that brings satisfaction to the person living that life. To do good feels good.

Consensual, happy, body-positive, desire-affirming sexuality is a force for moral good. Pleasurable in and of itself, good sex also shields us from advertising, which is designed to sway us toward behaviors that, in aggregate, could cause the collapse of civilization as we know it.

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Commercial advertising often subverts a pent-up desire for sexual novelty. The thrill of new acquisitions can replicate or replace the psychological thrill of discovering shared pleasure with someone new.

Many – not all, but many – humans feel lifelong desire for new romantic, erotic, or sexual experiences, but traditional American culture does not celebrate ethical polyamory – open commitment to lifelong adventurousness, perhaps in conjunction with nested stability to raise a family – and polyamory is scary, both for the adventurer and especially for the partner(s) who fear being left behind.

And so, instead of having sex, we’re encouraged to fulfill our need for adventure by buying things.

In the essay collection Escape Into Meaning, Evan Puschak quotes a speech that Jerry Seinfeld gave while accepting an award intended “to honor excellence in advertising”:

I love advertising because I love lying.

In advertising, everything is the way you wish it was. I don’t care that it won’t be like that when I actually get the product being advertised – because in between seeing the commercial and owning the thing, I’m happy, and that’s all I want.

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We know the product is going to stink. We know that.

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But we are happy in that moment between the commercial and the purchase, and I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy.

Considering this speech, Puschak writes that:

Seinfeld strikes at the essence of advertising, which may be a creative and clever craft, but is exploitative at heart. … They manipulate us in gross ways to generate desire, to make us feel need where it doesn’t exist.

By design, advertising aims to make you feel worse. But it also offers an escape: successful advertising lays the kindling for joy, if you are willing to spend money. And so, Puschak writes:

Seinfeld suggests that there’s something to cherish in the perverted relationship we have with advertising: the small period of joy between the purchase and getting the crappy product.

“A brief moment of happiness is pretty good,” Seinfeld says. “I also think that just focusing on making money and buying stupid things is a good way of life. I believe materialism gets a bad rap … If your things don’t make you happy, you’re not getting the right things.”

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Advertising (and by extension, capitalism) only offers us a superficial happiness, and maybe that’s not the most we could hope for, but it’s not bad, either. Superficial joys are still joys, after all. They’re “pretty good” and pretty good is good enough.

Buying new things will not bring you lasting pleasure. Presumably, most people know this. And advertising is not designed to convince you otherwise. Instead, successful advertising aims to accentuate the interstitial joy: that brief nigh-erotic thrill of acquiring something new.

Indeed, even within the realm of sexuality, the physical sensations we receive from new bodies pressed against our own will resemble physical sensations that we’ve already known. Our minds reside within relatively uncomplicated meat-machines; the physical sensations from most sexual encounters won’t be better than what you could accomplish on your own, masturbating. The greatest difference is in the moments of anticipation and expectation – the mental thrills we share.

Indeed, in Bad Sex, Nona Willis Aronowitz portrays the dull absence of thrill that we reap when we objectify other people (a habit so pervasive in our patriarchal, misogynistic culture that even Aronowitz herself slips into it, like when she describes her partner’s “whirlwind hookup with a young blond French girl”).

Aronowitz hires a sex worker to give her an erotic massage:

Considering the circumstances, I was relaxed and turned on. He took his time “massaging” me, which really meant stroking my butt and breasts and, eventually, between my legs. His pussy-rubbing skills were legitimately advanced, and it was clear he was paying close attention, responding to every little moan I made and every time I pressed into his hand a bit more.

And yet I didn’t come. I knew from the beginning I maybe wouldn’t. My clitoris refused to cooperate, even when he understood (bless his heart) that his bare hand wasn’t working and he employed a few vibrators – including the all-powerful Hitachi Magic Wand.

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His methods were all fine and arousal inducing, but it felt empty, mechanical. The only time my brain fizzed with true excitement was when my arm grazed his hard-on.

Without the emotional thrill of connection – an exquisite moment of anticipation like Seinfeld’s brief happiness “in between seeing the commercial and owning the thing” – Aronowitz couldn’t enjoy herself. Even though the physical sensations were impeccable. In “I’ll Read What She’s Reading,” Toni Bentley’s essay about participating in Clayton Cubitt’s “Hysterical Literature” video project (in which women have orgasms while reading aloud on camera), Bentley writes that:

I told Katie [who would be ensconced beneath a desk and controlling the vibrator for Bentley] that I was a Hitachi virgin—I never really understood the point of vibrators, particularly if there was an able-bodied man around—so she offered to touch the side of my knee with the wand for a moment before filming as a preview.

Good thing she did that. Jesus. I mean Holy Mary Mother of God. Thus I was relieved in five seconds of my concern about not being able to climax, and I quickly had the opposite problem: How would I last long enough to do justice to [a passage from Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady]?

Bentley’s situation was erotic: a sultry mélange of exhibitionism, literature, self-control, submission, and physical sensation. Whereas Aronowitz had only the physical sensation, and it wasn’t enough. She’d purchased a service; she wanted a person. (“Most of the time,” she writes, “a hot one-night stand simply requires being a decent human being.”)

During her erotic massage, Aronowitz didn’t get to linger in “that moment in between the commercial and the purchase” – she understood the pre-arranged boundaries of their encounter, which would not include shared pleasure or mutually-recognized humanity. There was nothing to anticipate. Expecting physical pleasure could have brought her ecstasy; having physical pleasure didn’t.

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Puschak writes that perhaps the momentary thrill of consumerism is enough. Even if capitalism, in repurposing our desires for sexual discovery, “only offers a superficial happiness,” maybe that’s fine. “Superficial joys are still joys, after all.”

And these joys are sometimes more accessible. You can do capitalism all on your own. Earn some money and feel the thrill of buying things. You don’t get to form human connections, but you also don’t have to form human connections with anybody.

In a world of isolated individuals, I might agree. But we are not alone: there are eight billion of us sharing this planet together. We are inherently connected; the choices we make as individuals affect each other.

In If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, Justin Gregg writes that:

Let’s say you wanted to grab a snack right now. Ten thousand years ago, you might’ve walked a few feet into the forest, stuck your hand into a log, and yanked out a handful of tasty termites. Boom. Problem solved. Snack acquired.

These days, you might walk a few feet into the kitchen and grab a banana. Same problem (hunger), same solution (food).

The difference between the two is that the availability of the banana today is shaped entirely by human-made, technological processes that have added unimaginable complexity to the simple act of grabbing a snack. And these processes generate long-term consequences we hadn’t considered.

Our hankering for a snack in the twenty-first century is identical to what it was ten thousand years ago, but our complex cognition allows us to engage in activities (e.g., oil and gas extraction, mechanized farming, soil depletion) on a massive scale, which is transforming this planet into an uninhabitable shithole. Our kitchens are full of foods that come from a global agricultural-industrial complex that is fundamentally problematic to the survival of the human species.

When we seek to sate an instinctual desire for sexual novelty by constantly acquiring new things – robot vacuums and snazzy telephones and single-season clothes – we are making our whole planet less livable.

For human civilization to survive, we’ll have to dampen our lust for consumerism. But we’ll still feel full of all this desire, all this need for novelty. Which is why many people continue to seek out new pornography over the course of their lives, instead of discovering the one ideal fantasy, memory, photography, film or story that excites them perfectly and then having it accompany them ever after in their moments of solitary sexuality. We shouldn’t let Disney movies deceive us into seeking a single destination, a fade-out moment of “happily ever after” – our happiness often depends on continued adventure. As we live, we continue journeying.

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To many of the humans who lived before us, a banana would have seemed so weird! It doesn’t look or taste like anything that grew in Africa, Europe, or Asia.

To us, a banana is a normal snack.

If you and your partner(s) grant yourselves permission to (cautiously, safely, consensually!) adventure, then more of the world is normalized. Toys, lighting, & music; outfits, role-play, & scenes; groups, activities, & settings: the horizon of kink will keep receding.

And in the process, we might quiet the urges that compel us to wreck our planet. As we journey – reclaiming our desires from advertising – with luck, we’ll feel less need for commercial stuff. We’ll be able to, like Seinfeld, “know the product is going to stink” … but, even better, maybe we won’t even buy it!

When we open our lives to other joys, we can more easily resist capitalist compulsions and perhaps, perhaps, do the right thing regarding climate change. We need to buy fewer things. We also need to still be happy.

On maternal bonds and cruelty.

On maternal bonds and cruelty.

When I was a child, my parents gave me a toy walrus to sleep with. While cuddling this walrus, I’d twist my fingers through a small looped tag on its back, until one day I knotted the tag so thoroughly that I cut off my circulation. I screamed; my finger turned blue; my parents rushed in and wanted to cut off the tag.

“No!” I apparently screamed. “The soft tag is the best part!”

I continued to refuse their help until they offered a compromise, merely slicing the loop in half so we could save my throbbing finger and prevent any future calamity.

I continued to sleep with that toy walrus until I was midway through high school. As I fell asleep, my parents would sometimes peer inside my bedroom and see me lying there, eyes closed, breath slow, my fingers gently stroking that soft tag.

Yes, kids with autism are sometimes quite particular about sensory stimulation. But I am not alone! Baby monkeys also love soft fabric.

So do their mothers.

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After biologist Margaret Livingstone published a research essay, “Triggers for Mother Love,” animal welfare activists and many other scientists were appalled. In the essay, Livingstone casually discusses traumatic ongoing experiments in which hours-old baby monkeys are removed from their mothers. The babies are then raised in environments where they never glimpse anything that resembles a face, either because they’re kept in solitary confinement and fed by masked technicians or because the babies’ eyes are sutured shut.

After the babies are removed from their mothers, Livingstone offers the mothers soft toys. And the mothers appear to bond with these soft toys. When one particular baby was returned to its mother several hours later, Livingstone writes that:

“The mother looked back and forth between the toy she was holding and the wiggling, squeaking infant, and eventually moved to the back of her enclosure with the toy, leaving the lively infant on the shelf.”

Although I dislike this ongoing research, and don’t believe that it should continue, I find Livingstone’s essay to be generally compassionate.

Livingstone discusses parenting advice from the early twentieth century – too much touch or physical affection will make your child weak! – that probably stunted the emotional development of large numbers of children. Livingstone expresses gratitude that the 1950s-era research of Harry Harlow – the first scientist to explore using soft toys to replace a severed maternal bond – revealed how toxic these recommendations really were.

Harlow’s research may have improved the lives of many human children.

Harlow’s research intentionally inflicted severe trauma on research animals.

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To show that the aftereffects of trauma can linger throughout an animal’s life, Harlow used devices that he named “The Rape Rack” and “The Pit of Despair” to harm monkeys (whom he did not name).

Harlow did not justify these acts by denigrating the animals. Indeed, in Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals, research-scientist-turned-animal-activist John Gluck describes working with Harlow as both a student and then professorial collaborator, and believes that Harlow was notable at the time for his respect for monkeys. But this was not enough. Gluck writes that:

“The accepted all-encompassing single ethical principle was simple: if considerations of risk and significant harm blocked the use of human subjects, using animals as experimental surrogates was automatically justified.”

“Harlow showed that monkeys could be emotionally destroyed when opportunities for maternal and peer attachment were withheld. He argued that affectionate relationships in monkeys were worthy of terms like love.”

“In his work on learning in monkeys … [he offered] abundant evidence that monkeys develop and evaluate hypotheses during attempts to develop a solution.”

“Everything that Harlow learned from his research declared that monkeys are self-conscious, emotionally complex, intentional, and capable of substantial levels of suffering.”

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For my own scientific research, I purchased cow’s brains from slaughterhouses. I used antibodies that were made in the bodies of rabbits and mice who lived (poorly) inside industrial facilities. For my spouse’s scientific research, she killed male frogs to take their sperm.

We’re both vegan.

I’d like to believe that we’d find alternative ways to address those same research questions if we were to repeat those projects today. But that’s hypothetical – at the time, we used animals.

And I certainly believe that there are other ways for Livingstone to study, for instance, the developmental ramifications of autistic children rarely making eye contact with the people around them – without blinding baby monkeys. I believe that Livingstone could study the physiological cues for bonding without removing mothers’ babies (especially since Harlow’s work, from the better part of a century ago, already showed how damaging this methodology would be).

Personally, I don’t think the potential gains from these experiments are worth their moral costs.

But also I recognize that, as a person living in the modern world, I’ve benefited from Harlow’s research. I’ve benefited from the research using mice, hamsters, and monkeys that led to the Covid-19 vaccines. I’ve benefited from innumerable experiments that caused harm.

Livingstone’s particular research might not result in any benefits – a lot of scientific research doesn’t – but unfortunately we can’t know in advance what knowledge will be useful and won’t won’t.

And if there’s any benefit, then I will benefit from this, too. It’s very hard to avoid being helped by knowledge that’s out there in the world.

To my mind, this means I have to atone – to find ways to compensate for some of the suffering that’s been afflicted on my behalf – but reparations are never perfect. And no one can force you to recognize a moral debt.

You will have to decide what any of this means to you.

On Roe v. Wade

On Roe v. Wade

The Supreme Court is considering whether to overturn the standing decisions from Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). The majority opinions in those cases guaranteed … um, actually, quite little?

Soon, those opinions might guarantee even less!

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor is worried that the Supreme Court might lose its aura of legitimacy.

Justice Sotomayor said, “Will this institution survive the stench that [overturning Roe v. Wade would create] in the public perception that the Constitution and its readings are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible.”

This is actually a major reason why Roe v. Wade wasn’t overturned previously. In a recent essay on Planned Parenthood v. Casey, ACLU legal director David Cole writes that “As the three then-recently Republican-appointed justices … warned in 1992, overruling Roe would do ‘profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy and to the Nation’s commitment to the rule of law.’ That is only more true today.”

And, look: I’m pro-choice. I would prefer for anti-abortion laws like those recently enacted in Texas and Mississippi to be revoked.

But also: the idea that our Supreme Court might lose some of its power makes me quite pleased!

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In our country, there are ostensibly three equal branches of government to balance each other.

Which sounds like a nifty design! Barstools often have three legs because any three points define a plane (unless they’re all on the same line), so three-legged stools are rarely tippy. Quite helpful when the sitter might be tipsy!

But something’s gone wrong with our government.

The recently-ritualized filibusterer system of our legislative branch that allows any proposal to be passively smothered, often by senators who represent fewer people than live in single neighborhoods of major cities. The post-9/11 domestic spying and drone strike assassinations from our executive branch. These are strange aberrations!

The worst offender, though, is probably our judiciary. Over many years, our Supreme Court justices have steadily commandeered more power, and the system is untenable.

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Unfortunately, our Supreme Court justices are incompetent.

This isn’t really their fault!

And I happen to think that several of them are clever, kind-hearted people. I really liked when Justice Sotomayor’s minority opinion for Utah v. Strieff included a reading list to help people who hadn’t noticed the lingering ramifications of institutional racism in our country.

That was grand!

But for our Supreme Court justices to form meaningful opinions about the whole range of cases that come before them, they should understand computers, artificial intelligence, psychology, sociology, economics, biology, medicine … and, they don’t.

To be nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court, a person instead needs to have specialized in our country’s adversarial system of law. Which means, due to time constraints, that they probably won’t have an adequate understanding of many vital subjects.

Worse, the one subject that they did specialize in – adversarial law – isn’t even helpful! Immersion in this style of thought probably makes people less suited to serve on the Supreme Court. As law professor Sarah A. Seo wrote in a recent essay on public defenders, “Adversarialism is not inherent to justice – it’s simply one way of administering it.”

Even if the adversarial arguments mattered – if, for instance, we lived in an alternate universe where the judges were such flexibly-minded people that they allowed themselves to be persuaded in court, that we couldn’t predict how they were going to vote well before any arguments had been presented – the idea of “justice” arising from competition instead of justice by collaboration is a foolish way to run a country.

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Often, people refer to Roe v. Wade in shorthand, suggesting that the decision guarantees a right to privacy, perhaps, or more specifically a right to abortion.

It doesn’t.

Instead, the majority opinion for Roe v. Wade says that “Though the State cannot override [the right to privacy, including a woman’s qualified right to terminate her pregnancy], it has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman’s health and the potentiality of human life, each of which interests grows and reaches a ‘compelling’ point at various stages of the woman’s approach to term.”

There are two conflicting rights, and the majority opinion is proposing a guideline for their balance. This is quite common. We balance people’s privacy against the state’s interest in preventing crime. We balance manufacturers’ desire to pollute with other people’s desire to breathe clean air or drink clean water.

In Roe v. Wade, the justices were balancing women’s bodily autonomy against the state’s interest in protecting the health of possible future citizens.

The justices concluded that: “For the stage subsequent to [fetal] viability the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life, may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.”

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When conservative commentators describe Roe v. Wade as a terrible ruling, I’m inclined to agree with them.

Yes, the three new Supreme Court justices – the stolen seat, the attempted rapist, & the hypocritical election’s-eve appointment – would like to overturn Roe v. Wade. But they hardly even need to! The existing opinion already does so little to protect women’s rights!

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A large section of the ruling for Roe v. Wade discusses ancient attitudes toward abortion.

This discussion is markedly incomplete. Supreme Court justices simply don’t know enough to make their rulings! And there’s not a great solution to this, since very few possible groupings of nine people would include enough expertise to handle all the cases on a year’s Supreme Court docket.

Abortion has long been a common practice – healers and midwives in many cultures knew which local plants were arbotifacients. And any discussion of ancient attitudes toward abortion should also discuss infanticide.

Infanticide was common during recorded history. Based on studies of surviving hunter-gatherer cultures, we also have reason to suspect that infanticide was even more common in our species’s prehistory. In relatively recent times, if a baby was carried to term and then given up for adoption – perhaps left upon the doorstep or a church or monastery – there was significant risk of death. Amid high childhood mortality, a baby separated from the mother would face especially grim odds.

Compared to other primates, human mothers form emotional bonds to a child relatively late in development. Among our evolutionary cousins, it’s rare for a mother to allow any individual (not the baby’s father, not her own mother, not her other children) to even touch her baby. A full year might pass before the mother could bear the sight of her baby in another caregiver’s arms.

There are huge benefits that human mothers are less protective – shared child-rearing cements trust between adults, allows for our babies to be born earlier in biological development (essential given the size of our brains!), and leads to more attentive lifetime care.

Plus, this evolutionary history has made human babies so cute! Our offspring wouldn’t giggle and coo – behaviors that delight a potential caregiver – if they relied only upon irrevocable maternal love in order to survive. Chimpanzees are born cute – in their first few moments, they need to delight their mothers – but their tendency to giggle or mirror facial expressions fades within the first week or so. Unlike human babies, they aren’t constantly prepared to woo a new adult.

But human delay in attachment also made abortion and infanticide more acceptable to our species. In many hunter-gatherer societies, any child who could not be cared for would be abandoned. Other great apes are actually far more likely to care for a developmentally-disabled child than are human hunter gatherers.

In many societies, personhood wasn’t attained until age five or six, at which time a naming ceremony would be held. It was considered bad luck to name a child sooner, or to feel too attached before that date.

Of course, most families probably still did feel attached. There can be a stark difference between private affection and public nonchalance, a play act to ward off bad luck.

In terms of the rights at stake in Roe v. Wade, though, all these historical considerations are mostly irrelevant. Yes, that’s the science – findings from nature. But nature isn’t good or bad. Nature isn’t ethical. The natural world simply is, whereas ethics demands that we think about how the world should be. Reading the majority opinion for Roe v. Wade, it seems like these topics were introduced only to make the conclusion seem scientific or better reasoned.

In the end, the majority opinion is based solely on medical technology: the State can ban abortion at the age when a baby could survive outside a woman’s body.

Could survive.

Not would. And certainly not will.

Could survive.

“For the stage subsequent to viability the State … may proscribe abortion … “

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In Sex Robots and Vegan Meat, journalist Jenny Kleeman investigates several efforts to construct an artificial womb.

In an age when being a good parent means being as attentive as possible even before birth, we want better access to the babies growing inside pregnant women, better ways of measuring them and putting them under surveillance, so we can do the best for them even before they enter the world. Women’s bodies are almost getting in the way.

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Ultrasound images show how much female bodies are already seen as vestigial in reproductive medicine.

“I’ve been arguing for years, don’t show pictures of fucking developing fetuses unless you show the entire woman’s body,” [says Soraya Chemaly.]

“I understand people getting pregnant and being excited, but I’m the terrible feminist killjoy; I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s nice, why don’t we just make it bigger?’ Ultrasound was very deliberately developed to show the fetus as though it were a planet in a void, in a vacuum, in a container, in a jar. A wallpaper of blackness around it. It completely erases the woman whose body is generative.”

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For a human baby to be born, a parent must make an enormous gift. Feeding and protecting and creating the gestating fetus over many months.

Currently, there’s no other way.

Currently, it’s impossible to combine a sperm cell and an egg cell in the laboratory, create an embryo, then provide the necessary nutrients and environment for that embryo to develop into a fetus, a baby, a child.

Currently.

This would be a challenging project!

But not impossible.

Researchers will eventually be able to create a viable human child this way.

An act that would, per Roe v. Wade, instantly erase women’s rights.

Maybe this experiment would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. So what? For Supreme Court rulings, cost is irrelevant. They’ve made this clear in their decisions for many recent cases.

Our Supreme Court decided that anonymously-chartered corporations have as much right to free speech as individuals – as though they weren’t already privileged with more speech, since wealth can be used to purchase expensive advertisements, think tanks, unscrupulous academics.

Our Supreme Court decided that the police can legitimately spy on you with any technologies that are publicly available, even if these technologies – like infrared cameras to visualize your body through the walls of your home, or telescoping lenses to peer into your windows from a distance, or a steady helicopter to linger overhead and watch you from unexpected angles – are far outside the budgets (and therefore expectations) of most private citizens.

It’s quite convenient that the justices so often fail to notice people’s wealth! (Or lack thereof.) Abortion laws were never really intended to target wealthy people, anyway. Wealthy people could either travel out of state or pay off a doctor to certify that an abortion met “appropriate medical judgment for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.”

If researchers spent hundreds of millions of dollars to nurture one embryo into a viable human baby – in a laboratory anywhere around the world – then the principle of fetal viability cited in Roe v. Wade would allow states to outlaw all abortion. Even though the material facts of women’s lives would be unchanged.

This is, after all, the problem with trying to slap scientific justifications onto a philosophical argument. Whether or not women should have bodily autonomy is a philosophical question. I think that they should. Our steadily increasing technological prowess shouldn’t change that.

Image by Charles Edward Miller on flickr.

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Header image by Dwain Currier.

On ‘Among Us’ and honesty.

On ‘Among Us’ and honesty.

How is the mobile game Among Us like Robert Greene’s The Art of Seduction?

I appreciate the premise of both. They’ll help you learn to get what you want.

But I doubt I’ll play again.

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When people write to Pages to Prisoners, they request all kinds of books. Fantasy, thrillers, sci-fi, horror, romance. How to draw, how to start your own business, how to build a home. How to speak Spanish, or French, or Italian. The history of ancient Egypt. UFO books about aliens building the pyramids.

Most people write and tell us a few topics that they’re interested in, then we comb through our collection of donated books and put together a package that the person will (hopefully!) be happy to receive.

Are you interested in self-help and philosophy? Here’s a package with Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist! Are you interested in games and comics? Here’s a package with a Dungeons & Dragons manual and some freaky zombie books!

We try to give people what they want. Nobody should have their entire life defined by their single lowest moment.

When people write to us requesting a specific book, usually it’s the dictionary. Seriously, that’s our top request. Despite their miserable circumstances, a lot of people caught up in our criminal justice system are making a sincere effort to improve themselves. To read more, learn more, and be better.

If I had to guess what our second-most requested book is, though, I’d say Robert Greene’s The Art of Seduction.

Which seems less helpful than a dictionary if your goal is to become a better person.

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I attempted to borrow The Art of Seduction from our local library. We only had an audio version, though, so I can’t quote from it directly. I listened to the first third, I believe.

And Greene made a remark that I appreciated: because so many of us feel unfulfilled in life – our work might be dull, our achievements might fall short of our ambitions – we would enjoy being seduced. After all, we spend buckets of money on booze, movies, and games. We like beautiful illusions.

Perhaps a seducer isn’t the person whom they’re pretending to be – so what? Greene suggests that we’d still enjoy an evening in which we take on a role in that person’s play – we can pretend to be loved by someone dazzling, someone who at least postures as rich, friendly, a scintillating conversationalist.

In my classes at the jail, I’ve met a fair few men who seem to have studied The Art of Seduction and other such pickup guides. Although their conversations are incredibly engaging at first, they quickly become repetitive – they have a few timeworn routines that they trot out again and again, the same slew each week. If you met this person at a party, he’d seem fascinating! Meet him at three parties in a row, you’d be hearing all the same skits.

As long as we anticipate this dissipation, maybe it’s okay. When we drink, we know that sobriety is going to catch up with us in the morning – sobriety, and a headache. We let a film transport us even though we know that the house lights are coming on two hours later.

If I were talking to someone who was playacting as a brilliant conversationalist, and we were both having fun, I don’t think I’d mind that their stories were invented. When guys in jail spin tales about their lives, I always take them at their word – even though I know that much of what people say in there is bullshit.

Sometimes we have to bifurcate our minds to get the most from life. Immerse ourselves fully in a role and enjoy it for what it is. Nobody playing Dungeons & Dragons believes that she’s really a level nine elf wizard, but she can still enjoy the thrill of saving the party with her powerful spells.

The major flaw with The Art of Seduction, from my perspective, is that it discusses the people being seduced as objects. The guide uses the language of battle and conquest, as though pleasure is something that the seducer takes from the seduced.

If, instead, the guide simply wrote about how best to entice others into joining you for mutually-pleasurable roleplay – in which pleasure is shared as you both pretend to be, and thereby become, scintillating lovers – well, then I’d salute Greene for doing his part to make the world a better place. Couldn’t we all use more love, pleasure, and excitement in our lives?

There are lots of ways to dance the dance. To play games. I simply prefer the honest ones – in which everyone is privy to, and pleased by, the illusions.

#

My brother recently gathered a group of ten of us to play the mobile game Among Us.

Among Us is a social deduction game, like Werewolf, Mafia, or Secret Hitler. Each player is assigned a hidden role at the beginning of the round – are you townsfolk or the werewolf? Are you a liberal or a fascist?

In Among Us, you’re an interstellar scientist or an alien.

The two teams have opposed goals. The scientists are trying to complete a set of mundane tasks – dumping the garbage, stabilizing the engines – so that they can return home. The aliens are trying to kill the scientists.

The graphics are charmingly reminiscent of early Nintendo games. And the pace of the game is excellent – at times your character wanders a map, trying to do chores, at other times play is interrupted by a meeting in which everyone tries to solve the mystery of who could’ve killed their teammate. Catch someone without an alibi and you can vote to fling them out the airlock, saving your crew from further tragedy.

Unless you were wrong and you accidentally ejected one of your helpful friends. Then the aliens are that much closer to victory.

#

I’m quite earnest.

Yes, I love the shared illusion of games, and I can appreciate that Among Us asks two players from each group of ten to playact as evil aliens. Those players are required to be deceptive, but it’s within the safe confines of a game that everyone in the group has chosen to play. There’s deceit, and there’s total consent.

But also, I’m terrible at this sort of game.

We played for several hours – a dozen, maybe two dozen rounds? I was given the role of the evil alien only once. And I attacked my second victim while standing right out in the open. Taylor walked past, saw me, and promptly called a meeting.

“Oh my God,” she said, “I just walked in and Frank totally killed him right in front of me.”

In retrospect, it’s clear what I should have said next. The scientists’ mundane tasks fill up the entire phone screen – I could’ve claimed to be working on one, that I’d been interrupted by this meeting halfway through it and hadn’t seen what happened, but then accurately described the place where I’d been standing. Yes, this would have seemed suspicious – I’d admit to standing right where the body was found – but the other players might think that Taylor had come into the room, killed someone without me noticing, and then tried to frame me.

We played with a team of two evil aliens, so this would’ve been quite helpful to say – even if the other players voted to eject me from the ship, they’d remain suspicious of Taylor and might eject her later, bolstering the chances of my alien ally.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t recall what the nearby chore was supposed to be. I learned that, if you haven’t played Among Us very often but are given the role of the alien, you should slay your victims near chores that you know well. So that you can convincingly describe what you were doing if someone stumbles across your misdeed.

Instead, I laughed and voted myself off the ship.

#

Among Us was fun, but the game has its flaws.

Each round is ten or twenty minutes, but a few people are eliminated right away. If you were playing, you’d definitely want a book nearby or a TV show to watch, just to have something to do during the times when your character gets eliminated first. Except that the players are still expected to complete their vaguely unpleasant chores – clicking a set of buttons at just the right times, or dragging illustrated leaves across the telephone screen to clean an air filter – even after they’re killed and can no longer participate in the discussions or votes.

I’d definitely prefer if a deceased player’s chores were automatically completed at steady rate.

For about a decade, Jonathan Blow, creator of the fantastic puzzle game Braid, has been an outspoken critic of unethical game design. In a 2007 lecture, Blow described his qualms about World of Warcraft – players are forced to complete mundane, unpleasant tasks in order to progress in the game. To balance this unpleasantness, the game keeps players engaged with tiny pulses of dopamine – even though it’s not particularly fun to slay each tiny goblin, the game rewards you with a jingle of dropped gold or a gambler’s rush of wondering whether this unidentified treasure will be a good one.

By forcing players to sink time into mundane tasks, World of Warcraft makes their lives worse. “The meaning of life in World of Warcraft is you’re some schmo that doesn’t have anything better to do than sit around pressing a button.”

The chores in Among Us need to be sufficiently challenging that they introduce a cognitive burden for most players, but there are ways to do that without making them tedious. Simple logic puzzles would accomplish the design requirements of Among Us and help players get more out of each game.

The more dire problem, from my perspective, are the ways that repeat play with the same group shifts your optimal playstyle.

#

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game in which two players choose either to cooperate or defect. Then they’re sent to jail for various lengths of time depending on both players’ choices.

The Prisoners’ Dilemma is a very different sort of “game” from Among Us – I assume nobody would want to download an app for it. Your team wins! You only go to jail for two years each!

If both players cooperate, the pair will be imprisoned for the least total time. But also, no matter what the other player chooses, you can reduce your own time in jail by defecting.

And so the “game theory optimal” play is to defect. When both players do, they both wind up spending more time in jail than if they’d both cooperated.

In Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett discusses ways in which human evolution – which bestowed upon us emotions, a tendency to blush or bluster while lying, and a willingness to endure personal suffering in order to punish non-cooperators – may have solved the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

When evolution gets around to creating agents that can learn, and reflect, and consider rationally what to do next, it confronts these agents with a new version of the commitment problem: how to commit to something and convince others you have done so.

Wearing a cap that says “I’m a cooperator” is not going to take you far in a world of other rational agents on the lookout for ploys.

According to Robert Frank, over evolutionary time we “learned” how to harness our emotions to keep us from being too rational, and – just as important – earning us a reputation for not being too rational.

It is our unwanted excess of myopic rationality, Frank claims, that makes us so vulnerable to temptations and threats, vulnerable to “offers we can’t refuse.” Part of being a good citizen is making oneself into a being that can be relied upon to be relatively impervious to such offers.

Emotions can solve the Prisoners’ Dilemma – cooperating because you’d feel bad about hurting the other person – and so can repeated play.

When you’re faced with the Prisoners’ Dilemma once, the “rational” choice is to betray your partner. But if you’re playing with the same person many times, or with groups of people who know your reputation, the optimal strategy is to be kind. To cooperate unless you have ample evidence that a particular partner will not.

The Prisoners’ Dilemma is a game where playing more makes you a better person.

By way of contrast, Among Us teaches you to behave worse the more you play.

This is a feature common to all social deception games. If you were playing Secret Hitler once – and only once – and were assigned to play as a liberal politician, your optimal strategy would be to be scrupulously earnest and honest. The players assigned to roleplay as fascists must lie to succeed, but the liberal team doesn’t need to.

However, if you plan to play Secret Hitler several times with the same group of friends, your optimal strategy includes a fair bit of caginess and trickery even when you’re playing the role of a liberal. Otherwise, the contrast between your behaviors would make the game impossible to win during the rounds when you’re assigned to roleplay as a fascist.

Similarly, Among Us rewards deception even when you’re assigned the role of a scientist. Otherwise, you won’t be able to win during the rounds when you’re assigned to play as an evil alien.

Although the optimal strategy for the team of scientists might seem to be extreme forthrightness, repeated play cultivates a basal level of dishonesty.

#

In The Biggest Bluff, Maria Konnikova describes her journey from poker novice to professional – the book jacket lauds her $300,000 in winnings.

She frames this journey as a quest to understand the whims of chance – how can an appreciation for randomness buoy her spirits during the hard times of life?

And the biggest bluff of all?

That skill can ever be enough.

That’s the hope that allows us to move forward in those moments when luck is most stacked against us, the useful delusion that lets us push on rather than give up.

We don’t know, we can’t ever know, if we’ll manage or not. But we must convince ourselves that we can. That, in the end, our skill will be enough to carry the day. Because it has to be.

It’s a beautiful message. We let ourselves believe that we’re in control, because if we lost that belief, we might give up.

And yet. Almost unmentioned in the text of The Biggest Bluff are the mechanics of where money comes from in poker. Poker doesn’t produce wealth – instead, a large number of people pay to enter a game, and a small number of people receive the money at the end.

Because Konnikova was fortunate enough to be instructed by experienced players, and wealthy enough to invest a lot of time and money on learning, she was eventually able to deceive and bully other people well enough that she could take their money.

Poker is consensual. Everyone entering a game knows that the other players are attempting to take their money. Some people must play with full understanding that they’ll lose – maybe they think the entry fee is a fair price for the enjoyment of the game. But most people, I’d assume, are hoping to win. And – because poker doesn’t produce anything, instead redistributing wealth from the many to the few – most don’t.

Playing many games of poker would teach you skills that can be used to get ahead in the world. An appreciation for chance. An ability to negotiate. An ability to tamp down or hide your emotional responses to adversity or triumph. An ability to manipulate those around you.

Some of that sounds good, some doesn’t. On the whole, I don’t think I want the traits that poker would help me develop.

Similarly, The Art of Seduction promised to teach valuable skills. I, too, like cuddles! My spouse bought me a cute little “polyamorous” pin to wear on my jacket label. But I wouldn’t want to follow any advice recommending that we deceive potential romantic interests, or treat them as objects.

And I don’t want the traits that Among Us would help me develop, either.

Deception is a valuable skill. More often, we’d get what we want. But at what cost?

#

When I played Among Us, I had fun. I was often laughing during the meetings when we discussed whether we should eject someone from our ship. Sometimes we did, and we felt so sure that we’d eliminated an alien because that person had seemed suspicious the whole game, but then we’d lose and realize that we’d doomed a fellow scientist.

Whoops!

Again, I’d laugh.

But the ability to enjoy Among Us comes from a wellspring of privilege.

My spouse can’t play social deduction games. She grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic mother – in order to stay safe as a child, she learned to lie. For many years, my spouse then lied compulsively. Pervasive lying came close to wrecking her life.

She resolved that she wouldn’t lie anymore. Recognizing that it would be an easy habit for herself to slip back into, she won’t lie even in a game.

Our children know that there’s no Santa Claus. That’s okay – I think that the Santa story is a starter conspiracy theory, and, even if Santa were real, our family would probably be against elf servitude.

Our children know that there’s no Tooth Fairy. My spouse and I dress up fabulously and dance through their bedroom when we replace their teeth with quarters – I wear a glittery skirt, angel wings, and a light-up tiara, all rescued at various times from neighborhood trash.

Another of my close friends joined us to play a single game of Among Us. She hated it. She, too, had a traumatic childhood. For someone who grew up around adults with mercurial swings of violence and rage, it feels awful to be lied to by your friends. Even within the consensual confines of a game.

#

After each game of Among Us, I wanted to play again. Despite the nuisance chores, despite my near-total inability to lie, despite knowing that I might be eliminated from the game within the first minute, I wanted to play again.

And yet, having written this essay, I doubt I ever will.

On noticing.

On noticing.

Midway through dinner, I thought I heard a strange sound.  A faint bleating, maybe, that seemed to be coming from our backyard.  Many musicians studying at the Jacobs School live in the apartment complex behind our house – we can often hear them practicing – but this didn’t sound like a conventional instrument.

I stood up, walked over to the window, and opened it, looking around our yard.  It’s currently grackle mating season – watching a male grackle inflate his plumage to double his size is pretty incredible – and they make a variety of noises.  So I suspected an ardent bird.  I lingered there a moment, looking and listening, trying to determine where the sound had come from.

Those few seconds were too long.

I heard it again, and, with the window open, recognized the distress cry of a young rabbit.

I pulled off my socks, ran outside.  Sprinted around our house to the small fenced enclosure where we have our air conditioning unit.

A large rabbit fled from the HVAC enclosure when it saw me.  It bolted across the yard and slipped through the back fence.

Yes.  Our yard has a lot of fences.  We have dogs.  The back fence keeps them inside the yard.  The fence around the HVAC unit keeps our dogs from crashing into the various wires and tubing and ripping them from the wall (which our younger dog did last year, necessitating expensive repairs).

The distress call had stopped, but now I knew where to look.  And there, sprawled on the mulch, was a juvenile rabbit, about as big as my hand.  His fur had been ripped from his face, leaving his nose raw and bleeding; he was also bleeding from gaping wounds down his back, and his hind legs were broken.  (I’m assuming gender here because I think that’s what triggered the attack – probably a territorial adult male felt that this juvenile was impinging on his territory.)

The mutilated juvenile sat watching me for a moment, then tried to hop away.  He couldn’t.  His legs kicked back slowly and he toppled.

Prostrate on his side, the wounds looked even worse.  He was breathing heavily, watching me.

My children, still inside the house, called through the window to ask what was happening.  I shook my head.

“There’s a baby rabbit, and he’s very, very hurt.  He’s going to die.”

The kids wanted to come see.  I didn’t really want them to – they are only four and six years old – but we all have to learn about death.  Our elder child visited her grandfather in hospice while he was dying after a stroke, and she understands that her grandmother died after somebody hurt her.  Our younger child is at an age where many of the stories she tells involve death, but I’m not sure she understands the permanence yet.

And the thing I really didn’t want to talk about – but would have to, for them to understand – is the brutality of territorial violence.  I hadn’t known that it was so horrific in rabbits.  This baby bunny had been murdered by an irate elder.

And the violence that we humans use to claim and protect territory is one of the worst aspects of our species.  We are a brilliantly inventive species.  Many – perhaps most – of our inventions sprang from the desire to make better weapons.

The world was here before us, but we pound sticks into the ground and say “This part of the world is mine.”

We’re far too fond of building walls. 

And fences.

I sighed.

The kids joined me outside.  My spouse came out; as soon as she saw the poor rabbit, she cried.  I tried, as gently and non-pedantically as I was able, to explain what had happened.

My younger child clasped her hands in front of her chin.  “I’m sad the baby bunny is going to die.”

The rabbit’s breathing was clearly labored.  I wonder how well he understood that this was the end.

“Yeah,” I said.  “I’m sad, too.”

The sun was setting, and the air was starting to grow chilly.  My spouse went back inside and cut up one of my old socks (I typically wear socks until they disintegrate, and my spouse thinks that any sock missing both the heel and toes is fair game to destroy, so we always have spare fabric on hand) to make a small blanket.

The dying rabbit probably felt scared – I’d asked the kids to keep a respectful distance, but we humans are quite large.  Still, I tried to make myself as small as possible as I reached out to cover the rabbit’s torso with the blanket.  I left my hand there, gently resting over his chest, for warmth.  I could feel his panting breaths rise and fall beneath my palm.

I quietly offered my apologies and said a prayer.  The rabbit watched me.  I tried to smile with no teeth.  I stayed crouching, immobile, until the rabbit’s breathing stopped five minutes later.

Then I went inside and finished eating dinner.

At times, being vegan is a comfort.  All of us, in living, impose harms upon the world – that’s the unfortunate nature of existence.  To grow food crops, we till the soil.  Spray pesticides.  And kill all those plants.

Our lives matter, too.  If we don’t take care of ourselves, and strive to enjoy our time alive – if we don’t place value on our own lives – then how could we value others?

Still, my family tries to minimize the harm we wreck by being here.  We live well, but try to be cognizant of the costs.

I was glad that the meal I returned to was made from only plants.

After I finished eating, I went and sat on our front porch with my children.  We spread a blanket over our laps.  We watched birds flit between the trees.  A chipmunk dashed across the lawn.  Two squirrels chased each other through a neighbors yard.

Our elder child clutched me tightly.  I hugged her back.  We sat silently.  I didn’t know what to say.

Then it was time for the kids to go to bed.

It was my spouse’s turn to read the bedtime stories that night, and our dogs wanted to go outside, so I took them to the back yard. 

I don’t think our dogs would hurt a rabbit – when my father-in-law died, the dwarf rabbit he’d purchased as a love token for his twenty-year-old ladyfriend came to live with us (they’d broken up a few days before his stroke, which is why she didn’t want to adopt the rabbit), and when our dogs dug up a rabbit’s nest two years ago, they gently carried a newborn bunny around the yard (we returned it to the nest and it survived until it was old enough to hop away).

I didn’t want for the dogs to carry the dead rabbit around our yard, though.  Or hide it somewhere for the kids to find.

So I walked over to the HVAC unit, ready to explain to the dogs not to bother it.  But the rabbit was gone.  The sock blanket was still there, but no corpse.

We don’t live in a particularly rural area – we’re in Bloomington, about half a mile south of the Indiana University campus.  Our backyard is shared with a sixty-unit apartment complex.  And yet.  Even here, the natural world is bustling enough that a dead thing can disappear within twenty minutes.  I’ve seen hawks, vultures, crows, raccoons, possums, skunks.  Many deer, and a groundhog, although they wouldn’t eat a rabbit.  One semi-feral cat.  I’ve seen foxes down the street from us, in fields a half mile away, but never in our yard.

And, it’s strange.  The dead rabbit lay in our yard for less than twenty minutes.  If we had been listening to music over dinner – which we often do – I wouldn’t have heard his cries through the glass windowpane.

Scientists often pride ourselves on our powers of observations.  But noticing, this time, only made me sad.  If I hadn’t heard that faint sound, I never would have realized that anything untoward had happened in our yard.  And I could have remained blissfully ignorant of the ruthless violence that rabbits apparently inflict upon young children.

The natural world is not a peaceful place.

Still.  I would rather know.  Understanding the pervasive violence that surrounds us helps me to remember how important it is – since we have a choice – to choose to do better.

On social norms.

On social norms.

I assume that you, personally, have never clear-cut and burned a patch of the Amazon rain forest.  Neither have I.  The number of people who have done the actual cutting is vanishingly small compared to the world’s population.

I also assume that you enjoy living in a world where the Amazon rain forest exists — certainly more than you’d enjoy living in a world where it had all been slashed and burned.  If we lose the Amazon rain forest, climate change might spiral out of control, flooding coastal cities worldwide and causing desertification in much of the interior United States.  If we lose the Amazon rain forest, huge numbers of species will go extinct, including a wide variety of medicinal plants that we’ve only begun to investigate.

And the rain forest is beautiful.  Future generations would feel an ache of want – likely compounded with a mix of jealousy and anger – if they saw photographs of the Amazon rain forest after it were gone.

When I was in elementary school, my third grade class sponsored a patch of the Amazon rain forest.  In retrospect, I’m not sure what this entailed.  We raised money and sent it off in an envelope.  I don’t remember whether we ever saw photographs of “our” forest, whether the arrangement was supposedly akin to a rental or purchase of those trees. 

I have no idea who received our sponsorship money, but the general idea that money should be sent from the U.S. to Brazil is actually correct.  Many of the world’s problems would be easier to address if we used a global wealth tax to fund a guaranteed basic income for everyone.  At the very least, if there are natural resources that benefit all of humanity, then countries that are currently wealthy because they ravaged their environments should pay to encourage other nations not to accrue wealth through extractive industries.

Some people in Brazil would be wealthier if the Amazon rain forest were destroyed.  Everyone in the world would suffer as a result.  If we – everyone outside Brazil – would prefer that the rain forest not be destroyed, we should compensate Brazilians for the foregone short-term economic benefits.

Unless you are fantastically wealthy, you personally will be unable to enact this policy on your own.  If I decided to split my family’s entire annual income among the people of Brazil, each would get 2% of a penny … and my family would be left with nothing.

A guaranteed basic income is the right policy, but it’s not something that I can accomplish as an individual.

In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer discusses how each one of us can help preserve the Amazon rain forest today.  We as a people should strive for political solutions to the world’s problems, but we as individuals shouldn’t make choices that exacerbate those very problems.  It would seem hypocritical to lobby for fines against littering if we continued to blithely toss candy bar wrappers onto the ground.

Foer describes how painful it feels to recognize this hypocrisy in himself.  This sensation grows more intense as he watches his children grow in a world that is becoming increasingly dangerous.

“But what kind of father prioritizes feeling good over doing good?”

Foer knows that he could choose to help.  Each day, he could act in a way that makes his children’s world safer.

He often doesn’t.

“There is a far more pernicious form of science denial than Trump’s: the form that parades as acceptance.  Those of us who know what is happening but do far too little about it are more deserving of the anger.  We should be terrified of ourselves.  We are the ones we have to defy.  … I am the person endangering my children.”

As you read this, the Amazon rain forest is being destroyed.  Why?  To clear space for cows to graze.

Photo by Joelle Hernandez on Flickr, whose caption from this 2007 photograph reads, “On a few occasions Brazilians told me that ‘People thousands of miles away are contributing to our deforestation.'”

Even if the meat or cheese you eat was not imported from Brazil, by choosing to eat it, you are reinforcing the social norm that is causing the Amazon rain forest to be destroyed. 

Eating meat is pleasurable.  A good cheese pizza can be divine.  Humans evolved as omnivores, and the tastes of meat and cheese are particularly delicious.  Choosing not to eat these foods would be a sacrifice.

Foer has tried to be a vegetarian for decades.  He has previously written about the animal welfare arguments against eating meat; now he’s written about the environmental arguments.  He knows that eating meat is immoral – the cow suffered to produce it, and Foer’s own children will suffer a worse climate as a consequence.

But this knowledge isn’t enough.  He still surreptitiously buys cheeseburgers.

“So why hasn’t vegetarianism become any easier after thirty years?  Why has it become harder?  I crave meat more now than I have at any point since I became a vegetarian.”

Foer wishes that there were a social norm to eat only foods made from plants. 

Eating meat is pleasurable.  Eating cheese is pleasurable. 

Injecting heroin is pleasurable too.  Driving a car while drunk is pleasurable.  Heck, even cruising down the road while everybody else pulls aside for the ambulance behind you would be pleasurable.

In our culture, there’s a social norm to pull aside for ambulances.  Even though it would be more pleasurable to keep driving, most people don’t.

Meats and cheeses are responsible for somewhere between 20% and 50% of all climate-change-causing emissions. 

(There’s a wide range in that estimate because, although it’s incontestable that it takes more land to produce meats and cheeses than it does to make equivalent foods from plants, it’s debatable what would be done with all that extra land if people changed their diets.  If the extra space would be used to restore forests, then animal agriculture is responsible for 50% of climate change.  If the extra space would be kept as grass – setting aside the curious question of why – then animal agriculture causes only 20% of climate change.  Only 20%.  By way of comparison, all the world’s cars, trucks, and airplanes together cause less than 15% of climate change.  You can look at the appendix to We Are the Weather for an explanation of these numbers, or even glance at Donald Trump’s EPA website for some pie charts with identical information.)

The current administration has gutted the EPA, and compelled their staff scientists to restate their findings in the weakest ways possible … and these are the numbers still posted on their website.

If every gasoline-powered car was replaced with a hybrid vehicle – instantly, world-wide – greenhouse gas emissions would be about 96% of what they are currently.  If that was the only change we made, our planet would be toast.

If we all followed a social norm to eat food made from plants, greenhouse gas emissions could be 50% of what they are currently.  With no other changes, humanity would survive.  Our planet would remain habitable for our children, and our grandchildren.

Pleasure matters.  I’m an atheist, and I’m well aware that the eventual heat death of the universe means humanity will go extinct eventually.  I don’t believe you can make a viable philosophical argument for existence based on helpfulness or social connections alone – your life needs to be pleasurable, too.

Your life can be pleasurable without meat or cheese.  I support responsible hedonism.  Good food is a joy, but you can eat well while making only choices that protect our planet.  Most people think that sex is great fun, but we have a social norm that you should enjoy your sexuality only with other consenting adults.  Groping a beautiful stranger might be more fun than eating cheese – in our culture, a social norm restrains us. 

Well, most of us.

Foer wishes that we, as a people, could choose better.  He’s been struggling to eat food made from plants.  But he doesn’t struggle to restrain himself from murder, or theft, or groping his students.  In those instances, our social norms make it easy to do the right thing.

And you can still be a hedonist while eating plants!  If you’re ever in Chicago, you should stop by my dear friend Auntie Ferret’s vegan deep-dish pizza restaurant, or use Happy Cow to find a decadent plant-based restaurant near you.

Deep dish pizza, mac and cheese, nachos and more — all vegan at Kitchen 17.

Feature image by Neil Palmer / CIFOR on Flickr.

On the ethics of eating.

On the ethics of eating.

Every living thing needs energy.  But our world is finite.  Energy has to come from somewhere.

Luckily, there’s a lot of potential energy out there in the universe.  For instance, mass can be converted into energy.  Our sun showers us with energy drawn from the cascade of nuclear explosions that transpire in its core. A tiny difference in mass between merging hydrogen atoms and the resultant helium atom allows our sun to shine.

Our sun radiates about 10^26 joules per second (which is 100,000 times more than the combined yearly energy usage from everyone on Earth), but only a fraction of that reaches our planet.  Photons radiate outward from our sun in all directions, so our planet intercepts only a small sliver of the beam.  Everything living here is fueled by those photons.

When living things use the sun’s energy, we create order – a tree converts disordered air into rigid trunk, a mouse converts a pile of seeds into more mouse, a human might convert mud and straw into a house.  As we create order, we give off heat.  Warming the air, we radiate infrared photons.  That’s what night vision goggles are designed to see.  The net effect is that the Earth absorbs high-energy photons that were traveling in a straight beam outward from the sun … and we convert those photons into a larger number of low-energy photons that fly off every which way.

Image by Dr.Marek Roland on Wikimedia Commons.

We the living are chaos machines.  We make the universe messier.  Indeed, that’s the only way anything can live.  According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the only processes that are sufficiently probable so as to occur are those that make the world more random.

We’re lucky that the universe started out as such a bland, orderly place – otherwise we might not even be able to tell “before” from “later,” let alone extract enough energy to live.

Dog!

The earliest living things took energy from the sun indirectly – they used heat, and so they were fueled by each photon’s delivery of warmth to the Earth.  (Please allow me this little hedge – although it’s true that the earliest life was fueled only by warmth, that warmth might not have come from the sun.  Even today, some thermophilic bacteria live in deep sea vents and bask in the energy that leaks from our Earth’s molten core.  The earliest life might have lived in similar nooks far from the surface of the Earth.  But early life that resided near the surface of the seas seems more likely. Complicated chemical reactions were necessary to form molecules like RNA.  Nucleic acids were probably first found in shallow, murky pools pulsed with lightning or ultraviolet radiation.)

Over time, life changed.  Organisms create copies of themselves through chemical processes that have imperfect fidelity, after all.  Each copy is slightly different than the original.  Most differences make an organism worse than its forebears, but, sometimes, through sheer chance, an organism might be better at surviving or at creating new copies of itself.

When that happens, the new version will become more common. 

Over many, many generations, this process can make organisms very different from their forebears.  When a genome is copied prior to cell division, sometimes the polymerase will slip up and duplicate a stretch of code.  These duplication events are incredibly important for evolution – usually, the instructions for proteins can’t drift too far because any change might eliminate essential functions for that cell.  If there’s a second copy, though, the duplicate can mutate and eventually gain some new function.

Image by Smedlib on Wikimedia Commons.

About two billion years ago, some organisms developed a rudimentary form of photosynthesis.  They could turn sunlight into self!  The energy from our sun’s photons was used to combine carbon dioxide and water into sugar. And sugar can be used to store energy, and to build new types of structures.

Photosynthesis also releases oxygen as a biproduct.  From the perspective of the organisms living then, photosynthesis poisoned the entire atmosphere – a sudden rise in our atmosphere’s oxygen concentration caused many species to go extinct.  But we humans never could have come about without all that oxygen.

Perhaps that’s a small consolation, given that major corporations are currently poisoning our atmosphere with carbon dioxide.  Huge numbers of species might go extinct – including, possibly, ourselves – but something else would have a chance to live here after we have passed.

In addition to poisoning the atmosphere, photosynthesis introduced a new form of competition.  Warmth spreads diffusely – on the early Earth, it was often sheer chance whether one organism would have an advantage over any other.  If you can photosynthesize, though, you want to be the highest organism around.  If you’re closer to the sun, you get the first chance to nab incoming photons.

That’s the evolutionary pressure that induced plants to evolve.  Plants combined sugars into rigid structures so that they could grow upwards.  Height helps when your main goal in life is to snatch sunlight.

Animation by At09kg on Wikipedia.

Nothing can live without curtailing the chances of other living things.  Whenever a plant absorbs a photon, it reduces the energy available for other plants growing below.

Plants created the soil by trapping dirt and dust, and soil lets them store water for later use.  But there is only so much desalinated water.  Roots reach outward: “I drink your milkshake!”, each could exclaim.

For a heterotroph, the brutality of our world is even more clear.  Our kind – including amoebas, fungi, and all animals – can only survive by eating others.  We are carbon recyclers.  Sugar and protein refurbishers.  We take the molecular machines made by photosynthesizing organisms … chop them apart … and use the pieces to create ourselves.

Some heterotrophs are saprophages – eaters of the dead.  But most survive only by destroying the lives of others.

Image by Mikael Häggström on Wikimedia Commons, using originals by Laghi l, BorgQueen, Benjah-bmm27, Rkitko, Bobisbob, Jacek FH, Laghi L and Jynto.

For the earliest heterotrophs, to eat was to kill.  But, why worry?  Why, after all, is life special?  Each photosynthesizing organism was already churning through our universe’s finite quantity of order in its attempt to grow.  They took in material from their environment and rearranged it.  So did the heterotrophs – they ingested and rearranged. Like all living things, they consumed order and excreted chaos.

The heterotrophs were extinguishing life, but life is just a pattern that repeats itself.  A living thing is a metabolic machine that self-copies.  From a thermodynamic perspective, only the energetics of the process distinguish life from a crystal.  Both are patterns that grow, but when a crystal grows, it makes matter more stable than its environment – life makes matter less stable as it’s incorporated into the pattern.

Your ability to read this essay is a legacy of the heterotrophs’ more violent descendants.  The earliest multicellular heterotrophs were filter feeders – they passively consumed whatever came near.

But then, between 500 and 600 million years ago, animals began to hunt and kill.  They would actively seek life to extinguish.  To do this, they needed to think – neurons first arose among these hunters.

Not coincidentally, this is also the time that animals first developed hard shells, sharp spines, armored plates – defenses to stop others from eating them.

The rigid molecules that allow plants to grow tall, like cellulose, are hard to digest.  So the earliest hunters probably began by killing other animals.

With every meal, you join the long legacy of animals that survived only by extinguishing the lives of others.  With every thought, you draw upon the legacy of our forebear’s ruthless hunt.

Even if you’re vegan, your meals kill.  Like us, plants have goals.  It’s a matter of controversy whether they can perceive – perhaps they don’t know that they have goals – but plants will constantly strive to grow, to collect sunlight and water while they can, and many will actively resist being eaten.

But it makes no sense to value the world if you don’t value yourself.  Maybe you feel sad that you can’t photosynthesize … maybe you’d search out a patch of barren, rocky ground so that you’d absorb only photons that would otherwise be “wasted” … but, in this lifetime, you have to eat.  Otherwise you’d die.  And I personally think that any moral philosophy that advocates suicide is untenable.  That’s a major flaw with utilitarianism – rigid devotion to the idea of maximizing happiness for all would suggest that you, as another organism that’s taking up space, constantly killing, and sapping our universe’s limited supply of order, simply shouldn’t be here.

At its illogical extreme, utilitarianism suggests that either you conquer the world (if you’re the best at feeling happy) or kill yourself (if you’re not).

We humans are descended from carnivores.  Our ancestors were able to maintain such large brains only by cooking and eating meat.  Our bodies lack an herbivore’s compliment of enzymes that would allow us to convert grass and leaves into the full compliment of proteins that we need.

And we owe the very existence of our brains to the hunts carried out by even more ancient ancestors.  If they hadn’t killed, we couldn’t think.

Just because we were blessed by a legacy of violence, though, doesn’t mean we have to perpetuate that violence.  We can benefit from past harms and resolve to harm less in the present and future.

Writing was first developed by professional scribes.  Scientific progress was the province of wealthy artisans.  None of the progress of our culture would have been possible if huge numbers of people weren’t oppressed – food that those people grew was taken from them and distributed by kings to a small number of privileged scribes, artisans, philosophers, and layabouts. 

When humans lived as hunters and gatherers, their societies were generally equitable.  People might die young from bacterial infections, dehydration, or starvation, but their lives were probably much better than the lives of the earliest farmers.  After we discovered agriculture, our diets became less varied and our lives less interesting.  Plus, it’s easier to oppress a land-bound farmer than a nomadic hunter.  Stationary people paid tribute to self-appointed kings.

This misery befell the vast majority of our world’s population, and persisted for thousands of years.  But the world we have now couldn’t have come about any other way.  It’s horrific, but, for humans to reach our current technologies, we needed oppression.  Food was taken from those who toiled and given to those who hadn’t. 

Mostly those others created nothing of value … but some of them made writing, and mathematics, and rocket ships.

Although the development of writing required oppression, it’s wrong to oppress people now.  It was wrong then, too … but we can’t go back and fix things.

Although the origin of your brain required violence, I likewise think we ought to minimize the violence we enact today.  We can’t help all the animals who were hurt in the long journey that made our world the place it is now.  And we can’t stop killing – there’s no other way for heterotrophs like us to live.

To be vegan, though, is to reckon with those costs.  To feel a sense of wonder at all the world pays for us to be here.  And, in gratitude, to refrain from asking that it pay more than we need.

On re-watching The Matrix, twenty years later.

On re-watching The Matrix, twenty years later.

The Matrix is an incredible film.  The cinematography is gorgeous. The major themes – mind control, the nature of free will, and what it means to reject the system – are no less relevant today than when the Wachowski sisters first made their masterpiece.

The Matrix also features many, many guns.

Graffiti in a tunnel in London. Photograph by Duncan C. on Flickr.

I recently read many of Grant Morrison’s comics.  After The Invisibles, which was rumored to have a major impact on the visual style of The Matrix, I felt inspired to re-watch the film. 

For the most part, I still loved it.  But the action scenes were, for me, a person whose spouse is a school teacher, viscerally unpleasant.

On my spouse’s second day of student teaching in northern California, a child arrived at her school with an assortment of lethal weapons that included a chain saw and several pipe bombs.  The child was tackled; the bombs did not explode; nobody died.  Media coverage was minimal, even in the local news.

On multiple occasions, classes at her schools have been canceled due to credible threats of violence.  A few years ago, a student lingered after the bell, wanting to talk.  “I have a friend who I’m a little worried about …”  Later, after this kid had unspooled more details to a guidance counselor, police officers came.  The troubled student was sent away for treatment.  Once again, nobody died.  Media coverage was, to the best of my knowledge, nonexistent, even in the local paper.

Crisis averted, right?  No need to alarm everyone with a write-up, a terrifying enumeration of the arsenal retrieved from a student’s locker.  Although, in a town this small (population: one hundred thousand), plenty of people heard rumors through the whisper network.

Students today are growing up with far more stress than I experienced.  Among top students, more emphasis is placed on applying for college, and the process of getting accepted to the “best” schools is more arduous.  There are more AP classes, more clubs to join, more service projects to undertake, plus the pressure of having some uniquely-honed skill that marks the possessor as somehow deserving of a spot at schools like Harvard, Stanford, or Yale.

That’s rough. 

Only a subset of students are subject to those particular torments, though.

But also, simply existing has grown more stressful for kids.  For every single student inside the building.

Growing up in a house where the parents are seething with rage, slowly and arduously divorcing, is pretty hard on children.  That is now a burden that all students have to bear.  The political atmosphere of the United States is like a nation-wide divorce, with the two dominant political parties unwilling to agree on common norms, or even facts. 

When individual people argue, they often cloister their perceptions inside bubbles of internally-consistent narration.  It’s quite common for each parent to sincerely believe that the other is doing less than a fair share of the housework.  There obviously is an objective truth, and you could probably figure out what it is – by installing security cameras throughout their home, a couple could calculate exactly how many chores were being done by each person.  But in the moment, they just shout.  “Well, I unloaded the dishwasher five times this week, and I was cooking dinner!”

I have a pretty extreme political bias – I’m against regulating behaviors that don’t seem to hurt anyone else (which adult(s) a person marries, what drugs a person consumes), and I’m in favor of regulating behaviors that endanger a person’s neighbors (dumping pollutants, possessing weaponry).  But I also talk to a lot of different folks, and I live in the Midwest.  It’s pretty easy to see why a person with different religious beliefs than mine would find my political stance immoral, if not downright nonsensical.

The Republican Party – which by and large espouses political beliefs that I disagree with vehemently – is correct that the United States was originally founded as a Christian nation.  The underlying philosophy of our constitution draws upon the Bible.  And the Bible does not promote gendered or racial equality.  In the Old Testament, the Bible tells the story of a people who were chosen by God for greatness.  In the New Testament, the story is revised such that all people, by accepting Jesus as lord and savior, can join the elect; still, the New Testament draws a stark contrast between us and them.

From a Biblical point of view, it’s reasonable to subject outsiders to harm in order to improve the circumstances of your own people.  Indeed, it would be immoral to do otherwise. 

It’s like Alan Greenspan’s devotion to the concept of Pareto Optimality, in a way (“Pareto Optimality” is the idea that a distribution of goods and resources, no matter how unequal, is “optimal” if there is no way to improve anyone’s circumstances without making at least one other person worse off.  Even a situation in which one person owns the world and no one else has anything is Pareto Optimal, because you can’t help the masses without taking something from that singular world owner). 

Using an expensive jar of oil to anoint Jesus’s feet is fine: she was helping the elect.  It was be worse to sell that oil and use the money to aid non-Christians, because then your actions only reduce the well-being of God’s people.  (Within a New Testament worldview, the possibility for future conversion complicates things somewhat, but if you knew that someone would never embrace the Lord, then you’d be wrong to help that person at the expense of your fellow Christians.)

And so it’s perfectly reasonable that people who vote for the Republican Party support policies that I abhor.  I wouldn’t want to be married to those people … but, by virtue of the social contract that we were born into, we are constitutionally bound together.  And we’re bickering.  Endlessly, maliciously, in ways that are damaging our children.

Worse, kids at school are subject to the constant fear that they’ll be murdered at their desks.  Horrific stories are routinely broadcast on the national news … and, as I’ve realized from my spouse’s teaching career, the stories we’ve all heard about are only a fraction of the terrifying incidents that students live in dread of.

Student protest at the White House to protest gun laws. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

It’s not the fault of The Matrix.  But this film sculpted the initial style for school shootings.  The Matrix was released on March 31st, 1999.  Twenty days later, on the day celebrated both by potheads (based on the police code for marijuana) and white nationalists (because it’s Hitler’s birthday), a pair of students murdered many classmates at Colombine High School.

In The Matrix, a character named Morpheus explains:

The Matrix is a system, Neo.  That system is our enemy.  But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see?  Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters.  The very minds of the people we are trying to save.  But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemies.

The murderers saw their classmates as enemies.

You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged.  And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

Within the world of the film, this mutability is made explicit: any character who has not joined the heavily-armed heroes could blur and become an Agent.  The beautiful woman in red, an unhoused alcoholic man bundled in blankets – either might suddenly mutate into a threat. 

And so Neo kills.  He and Trinity acquire military-grade weaponry; they stroll into a government building and murder everyone inside.

Anyone willing to complacently work there is, after all, the enemy.

I teach poetry classes inside a jail.  Through Pages to Prisoners, I send free books to people throughout the country.  I think that the criminal justice system in the United States is pretty abhorrent.

But that doesn’t mean the people who work within that system as corrections officers are bad. They have families to feed.  And many are surely aware that if too few people worked as corrections officers, leading the facilities to be understaffed, the people incarcerated inside would be much less safe.

Experience lets me appreciate nuance.  I am an ethical vegan; good people choose to become butchers.  I don’t like our criminal justice system; good people work inside.

When I was a teenager, though, I felt moral certitude.  I didn’t like school.  And so, if you were the sort of drone who could sit contentedly at your desk, I didn’t like you.  And, yes, I too had notebooks where I’d written the sort of vitriolic short stories about leveling the place with a Golden-Eye-(the N64 game, not the movie)-style grenade launcher, an onscreen point counter tracking deaths.  Yes, my friends and I made short films with BB gun props full of senseless killings.

One of my old notebooks that I must have deemed sufficiently innocuous to save.

I remember one of the films we made as being pretty good.  But after Colombine, we destroyed the video tapes.  I threw my notebooks away.

And I was pissed to be called so often to the principal’s office.  I understand now why they were worried.  Moral certainty is dangerous; it lets you consider people who disagree as the enemy.

Twenty years later, my body stiffened and my heart sank when I watched The Matrix.  I loved that movie; I’m not sure I’ll ever see it again.

And, glory be, I am now blessed to live in a nation led by a president who feels nothing if not moral certainty.

On power and species.

On power and species.

At track practice, a pair of high school runners were arguing.  Knowing that I’ve completed twenty-two years of schooling, they figured I could resolve their debate.

“Coach Brown, who would win in a fight, Superman or The Hulk?”

I stared at them blankly.  I knew a bit about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which helps to understand The Hulk, but I’d never read a Superman comic.  Superman didn’t sound like an interesting hero: he seemed too powerful.  Even The Hulk is more interesting within the context of a complex campaign, when he might become enraged and wreck his own plans, than in a single fight.

I failed to provide an answer, and the kids went back to arguing.  (“Superman could just turn back time to before The Hulk got enraged, then smash him!”) 

And I resolved to read a Superman book, to shore up this gap in my education.  Astounding, isn’t it, that Stanford would allow me to graduate without knowing anything about the paragon of the DC universe?

I chose Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman.  And was pleasantly surprised – although Superman is indeed too powerful for the risk of danger to provide narrative tension, he’s still sad.  He doesn’t get the recognition that he feels he’s due; his powers leave him feeling isolated and alone; during the 24-hours when his girlfriend becomes his equal due to a magic serum, she spends her time flirting with other heroes. 

Doing great work can feel hollow if nobody appreciates it.

Midway through the series, Superman meets two other survivors from his native Krypton.  He expects that they’ll congratulate him on how well he’s kept his adopted planet safe.  Instead, they’re disgusted by his complacency.

Superman, in turn, feels disappointed by his brethren.  Within the world of comic books, characters who view their powers as conferring a responsibility are heroes; those who think that power gives them the right to do whatever they want are villains.

Homo sapiens are not as intelligent as the new arrivals from Krypton.  We are smaller, slower, and weaker.  Our tools are less technologically advanced.  If they chose to cull our kind, we could do nothing to resist.

#

I recently had the opportunity to read Luke Dittrich’s New York Times Magazine article on the Puerto Rican macaque colony that was traumatized by Hurricane Maria.  (I’ve written previously about Dittrich’s investigation into the history of “Patient H.M.” and unethical behavior among MIT memory researchers.)

This particular colony of macaques has been studied closely for years.  Researchers have voluminous observational data from both before and after the hurricane; they’ve stored many tissue samples as well.  The hope is that this dataset could unveil the biochemical consequences of trauma, and elucidate traits that allow some people to weather trauma more effectively than others.

With clear insights into the specific pathways affected by trauma, we might even be able to develop drugs that would allow humans to stave off PTSD.  Or cure it.

Macaques have long been used as subjects for medical research.  We’ve developed several vaccines that prevent AIDS in macaques, but unfortunately the differences between SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus) and HIV meant that some of these vaccines increased human susceptibility to the disease.  Whoops.

An image attributed to the Primate Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and disseminated in 1992.

Macaques are highly intelligent, social animals with approximately 93% the same DNA sequences as us humans.  For immunology research, they’re kept in wire cages.  They can’t touch, don’t really get to move around.  But that’s not so bad compared to the nightmarish psychological studies that have been conducted on macaques in the past.  Dittrich’s article summarizes a few of Dr. Harry Harlow’s experiments.  Harlow named several pieces of his research equipment, such as “The Pit of Despair,” a small box devoid of light or sound in which children could be trapped for months on end, or “The Rape Rack,” which shouldn’t be described.

“[Harlow] found that the females who had endured the trauma of both the Pit of Despair and the Rape Rack tended to become neglectful or even severely abusive mothers.”

#

We’ve conducted studies on humans who have been traumatized.  By surveying hurricane survivors, we’ve found that many suffer from PTSD.  But one drawback of these investigations, Dittrich writes, is that “the humans in these studies … almost never become experimental subjects until after the traumatic events in question, which makes it hard to gauge how the events actually changed them.”

“If a researcher interested in how trauma affects individuals or societies were to dream up an ideal natural laboratory, she might imagine a discrete landmass populated by a multigenerational community that has been extensively and meticulously studied for many decades before the traumatizing event.  Even better, it would be a population to which researchers would have unfettered access – not only to their minds, but also to their bodies, and even their brains.”

We are to macaques as Superman is to us.  We are stronger, smarter, technologically superior.  We can fly into space; macaques have done so only at our whims.

In “St. Francis Visits the Research Macaques of Modern Science” by John-Michael Bloomquist, we eavesdrop on a conversation between the saint and Miss Able, the first primate to leave our planet.  St. Francis asks about her experience of the voyage; she tells him “The Gods did not let me see anything, the damn cone didn’t have a window.”

The capsule and couch used by one of America’s first spacefarers, a rhesus monkey named Able, is displayed at the National Air and Space Museum. Able and a companion squirrel monkey named Miss Baker were placed inside a Jupiter missile nose cone and launched on a test flight in May 1959.

We are indeed like gods among macaques, but we have not elected to be heroes.  Instead, we’ve ravaged their ancestral lands.  We’ve wracked their children with twisted nightmares that they could not wake from. 

Even the Puerto Rican macaque colony that Dittrich writes about – some individuals are permitted to live out their days in relative peace, but this is a breeding center.  If you’re developing an HIV vaccine, your lab’s macaques will die; for a few thousand dollars each, this colony will furnish replacements.  According to their website, they maintain “an available pool of rhesus macaques in optimal condition for research.”

We humans are like gods, but, unlike Superman, we’ve chosen to be villains.

On extraction.

On extraction.

The womb-suckers are trying to eat your children. Poke a soda straw into the future and sluuurp, away they go.  Hopes and dreams, metabolized today into so many dollar bills.

I spend a fair bit of time with drug dealers. Most are ethical people – they wanted to ingest drugs, and they knew some other people who wanted to ingest drugs, so they started selling.

But there’s an unethical way to push – some dealers focus on getting new users hooked.  That way they’ll have a steady income stream.  Most of the guys in my poetry class, if somebody talks about getting clean, congratulate and encourage the dude.  But some dealers would see rehab as a threat to their own livelihoods.

The future-eaters are like the second type of dealer.  They’re trying to kill babies – including babies who haven’t even been conceived yet – while proffering incredibly cynical rationalizations.


Yup, you’re right, kid.  Earth is beautiful. 
I’m sorry the grown-ups aren’t trying very hard to keep Earth beautiful.

Here’s the deal: regions of the Earth’s crust that lie beneath territories claimed by the United States contain rich deposits of hydrocarbons.  These could be dug up and combusted to power our factories, our automobiles, our giant arrays of computer servers that enable the internet.  The average person’s lifestyle in the U.S.gobbles energy, and deep below our lands is solar energy that photosynthesizing plants captured millions of years ago.

But we now know that there is only a limited amount of ancient stored sunlight beneath us.  The world’s oil reserves will eventually be depleted.  And so a smart investor, even if that investor believed that all the hydrocarbons beneath us should be combusted, bringing our planet closer to the hellhole that runaway climate change allowed Venus to become, would decide to wait.  Right now, the price of oil is low.  The total supply of oil is decreasing.  The population is rising.  If oil really is the best energy source, then the price will obviously rise. 


Venus was habitable once, but after atmospheric carbon dioxide levels got too high, climate change spiraled out of control.  I certainly wouldn’t want to live there now. Artist rendition from NASA.

I believe this relationship, lower supply = higher price, is taught within the first two lectures of any undergraduate economics course.

Since we’re rich enough to do it, we would make more money by buying oil now from those foolish countries who need cash right away and are currently selling their buried wealth, then extracting our own oil later when the total supply is lower and each barrel is worth more money.

The womb-suckers love money.  So why isn’t this their plan?

After all, we as a nation are wealthy enough to invest.  Throughout the ages, that’s what people blessed with current prosperity have done. By socking away money now – maybe by lending it to a neighbor and charging interest – you gain a constant source of income for the future.

The usual stereotype is that it’s foolish poor people who eat the future.  When you’re starving, you might eat seeds from the granary.  That’ll help you survive another winter, but next year the famine will hit even worse.  Methamphetamines let you trade away future health to do more today.  So do cigarettes.

The womb-suckers rarely pull drags of nicotine into their own bodies.  But they’ll happily light one for our planet.

The president of the U.S. wants to drill for oil beneath the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  The president of Brazil wants to cut down the Amazon rain forest for gold mines and hamburgers.

But there is a framework in which their urgency to eat the future is rational.  If people will notice what’s happening and stop them later, they need to get it done now. The window for personal gain is closing: slash and burn while you can.

And there is, of course, the comparison to an unethical drug dealer.  You have to keep selling even when the heat is closing in because otherwise your customers could get clean and then you can’t make money off your product anymore.

We’ve reached a point where many people have realized that the future is in peril –most people who get their news from any source other than the state-endorsed propaganda network – but, let’s face it, people are lazy.  I’m lazy too.  Even though I know that disposable diapers are wasteful to manufacture and then ship off to landfills, my family resorts to them during weeks when we’re too overwhelmed to wash another load of excrement-encrusted rags.

Similarly, everyone knows that a vegan diet is better for the planet. But most people still eat meat. The Republican party’s big-government subsidies make hamburgers cheap … and those burgers are already cooked, waiting at the drive through, chock full of delicious fat, salt, and MSG. Being vegan takes more effort.

But we’re well-meaning, most of us.  And lazy, well-meaning people just need a little nudge to start doing the right thing.

The womb-suckers are justifiably worried that a small hiccup in the rate of extraction now might be the final nudge necessary to get the world to change.  Switch to renewable energy.  Recycle and re-use more of what we’ve already dug from the ground.

The womb-suckers need to flood the market, get what money they can before the rest of us sober up.  It’s the best thing for a murderous hedonist to do; with enough money, they can soar the skies in gold-plated airplanes.  With enough money, even boorish, ugly men have a shot at having sex with pornographic film stars.

The future eaters see no contradiction, calling themselves “pro-life” while they frantically strive to make billions of unborn children die.