What will we do with all those cows?

Whenever people discuss issues like vegetarianism, my tendency is always to think in terms of how one could systematize or universalize it. For instance, granted that veganism is the most desirable diet (due to environmental sustainability, ethical concerns, better health, or whatever other reason), what would it look like if we made it mandatory and redesigned the entire food production system around it?

The first question I have is what ideas people have put forth in terms of “winding down” animal domestication. For instance, there are some breeds of various domesticated animals that simply cannot survive in the wild — they’re bred to produce the maximum amount of meat or milk and they can’t do much else. Would they be subject to further breeding or genetic modification to make them viable in the wild, would that breed be allowed to die out, or what other solution would there be? Similarly, would it be a realistic goal for all of these breeds of animals to return to their pre-human forms and live in the wild, or would we instead be obligated to continue caring for them insofar as we in a certain way “created” them in their current form?

Many readers know much more about these topics and debates than me — what are the basic proposals out there, if any? Do any seem to you to be more workable, desirable, etc.?

The Principle of Sufficient Theology: Some Remarks on “Theology and Non-Philosophy”

My copy of The Non-Philosophy:Project: Essays by François Laruelle arrived in the mail yesterday. Up front I will admit that I have been nervous about this volume, since generally I think it is safe to say I’m part of the inner-circle of some kind of non-philosophy cabal and so tend to hear about projects related to non-philosophy. But, I knew basically nothing about this volume other than one of the editors is a theologian and that it was coming out with Telos Press Publishing and this made me very nervous since I consider Telos essentially a right-wing press, often publishing or supporting right-wing Christian political theologians work.  But that said, I was happy to see that Ray Brassier, nowhere near a right-wing Christian and often quite critical of Laruelle’s work, appears to have had a heavy hand in the volume. That suggests to me that the translations are at least excellent and though many of the essays were previously available on-line or in journals, it is nice to have a set of the occasional essays that have been floating around for a bit now. Some readers will be especially happy to see that a chapter from Introduction au non-marxisme is also included, so that will be a preview of the larger book that I’m translating and which should be out in early 2013.

Spoiler Alert Thursday: Mad Men, Dark Shadows

Remember a couple weeks ago, when dbarber, Adam and Dave noted that this season has been weirdly thematic?

Service Learning

Today in our faculty meeting, we discussed “service learning.” I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that I was deeply skeptical and even cynical about the entire concept. I had a few different objections, and I’m not sure if they add up to a coherent position:

The True Thinking of Artifice: On Simone Weil & Politics

I was reminded yesterday by a friend of Simone Weil’s classic essay “Human Personality,” and was struck by the notion that at some point (perhaps somebody already has) I might write a piece comparing the centrality of her question here, ‘Why am I being hurt,’ to Judith Butler’s more recent question in Precarious Life, ‘Who shall we mourn?’ Both questions attend to supremely significant issues. Indeed, one might argue that Weil & Butler approach the same issues but from different angles. This may be true, but one must be careful in too quickly affirming the sameness at the expense of the important differences.

I am deeply sympathetic–no, make that outright supportive–of Weil’s desire to speak for those who cannot speak–or, more properly, that which cannot be spoken. The impersonality of this unspoken truth is crucial to Weil, and is apprehended, if at all, in the solitariness of one’s humiliation. She offers no concession to consolation in her work, which is often unsettling. I don’t read Weil as a masochist. Suffering, rather, is an inevitability, of life & of life on the way to the truth. If pain must sometimes be handed out as punishment, this is only because the inevitable is often disproportionately distributed and/or dissimulated by the secular appeal to “rights.” 

Eat, Pray, Kill

I’m posting a link, here, to a piece that I just published with Religion Dispatches magazine. It’s not a philosophically astute essay, so I’m not sure readers here will find it interesting for that reason. I’m reflecting, mostly, on the violence of eating. The violence of eating meat, of course… but also the violence of eating more broadly. The occasion for the reflection is the recent ethical essay contest at the NY Times: to come up with a morally defensible reason to eat meat. But also in the background is a recent graduate student conference at Columbia, where religion and meat was a hot topic of discussion. Mark C. Taylor opened the conference with a line from A River Runs Through It: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion & fly-fishing.” His charge, as I heard it, was that recent thinking about animals hasn’t dealt enough with blood sacrifice. Wendy Doniger, in her keynote, meditated on a rather endless series of lists from (mostly) The Laws of Manu, developing all kinds of prohibitions against violent forms of consumption, including an injunction that we maintain awareness of the “screaming silence” of vegetables. I was kind of taken by her claim that these lists (of prohibitions) are a way of rationalizing (and thus, controlling and regulating) the moral ambivalence that’s attached to our violent consumption of fellow creatures. This seems right to me. I’m more confused about how effective this is, or should be. Readers: what do you eat? And how? Do you make/keep lists? Are they, in even a loose sense, inspired by any creedal codes or regulations?

Ada Marìa Isasi-Díaz: RIP

I’m traveling right now so not on top of all of the news but just learned that Ada Marìa Isasi-Díaz, influential Drew theologian, has passed away.  Here’s the announcement from her blog.  And here is the obituary:

Dr. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz died on May 13, 2012 at age 69 after having received the Holy Sacraments.

The Political Theology of Lincoln and Melville

It’s hard to think of any historical moment that more deserves political theological reflection than the American Civil War, yet a very quick Google Scholar search turns up only one book (Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis) that uses the phrase “political theology” (once, in passing) in its discussion of the event. Why is the Civil War so richly deserving of entering the ranks of privileged political theological points of reference (along with Schmitt’s and Benjamin’s focus on the European Baroque with its doctrine of absolute sovereignty, or Agamben’s camp and the Musselman, or Hardt and Negri’s Empire, to name a few)? Consider the constellation of factors: the crisis of sovereignty, the friend-foe decision, the state of emergency, the status of the human reduced to bare life, and, not the least significant factor, the claim made by North and South to be waging a battle for the future of Christendom. And there are two texts from the period that I think deserve a place in the canon of political theological thought from Paul to Augustine, and from Hobbes to Arendt (I rank her Human Condition as one of the 20^th century’s top political theological works). The great thing is that they are both short, even shorter than Epistle to the Romans. One of them is amazingly short: Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. The other is a little longer: Herman Melville’s Supplement to his Civil War poetry collection, Battle Pieces. (Here is a PDF link to Melville’s collection; the Supplement begins on pg. 178.) I want to talk a little bit about both texts, starting with the second.

What is atonement theory?

Recently I’ve had the occasion to tell a few different people who were not theologically educated what my dissertation was about. “Atonement theory” is not a very intuitive term, obviously, and people are often taken by surprise that arguably the central question of Christianity — why was Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection the necessary means of salvation? — has never received the same kind of “official” answer that questions about Christ’s precise relationship to God have. Thus telling someone about the topic in a more casual setting can easily lead to more detailed explanation than is appropriate.

Thinking it through over the last few days, however, I believe I have finally come up with an elegant and economical way to introduce the topic to a generally educated audience: “As you may be able to tell, Jesus has always been something of a solution in search of a problem…”

Monday Movies Can Tell You This: If You Build It, It Will Fall

If you’re ever toodling around southern Colorado on a Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday, anywhere between Durango and I-25, you could do worse than to stop in to the Ryus Avenue Bakery in La Veta. Tell my Aunt Adrienne I sent you. She’s owned the place, with her partner Mary, for the last 21 years, and she’s been in the area since 1970. That was when the band she played drums in, the Anonymous Artists of America, who used to open for the Grateful Dead at Kesey’s acid tests (they merit a mention in Tom Wolfe’s book) decided instead of being a band they’d rather be a commune, and so they found some land in Huerfano County, not too far for from the Great Sand Dunes. The AAA Ranch made it through the first winter in teepees, and then they built permanent structures, and in some fashion they remain there today, as do several other communes.

The documentary Huerfano Valley picks up with three of the veterans of the Huerfano commune scene — George, who still lives at the AAA (and whom I’m going to join for dinner after I write this on Sunday afternoon); Dean, who lives at Libre; and Muffin, who left Libre and works as a veterinarian in Huerfano County. Each reflects a certain flavor of sadness about this very American god that failed.