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Saturday, April 16, 2011

Lincoln would have been ashamed

We've now talked a bit about some health and ethical issues surrounding eating animals. Jonathan Safran Foer's book, Eating Animals, touches on other issues as well, which I'll summarize in the next posts: public health (contaminating ground water with pig effluvium, for example, and creating super-bugs because of the huge amounts of antibiotics that are fed to factory animals and ingested by human carnivores), impact on global warming, and the economics of factory farming. ("The factory farm will come to an end because of its absurd economics someday. It is radically unsustainable. The earth will eventually shake off factory farming like a dog shakes off fleas; the only question is whether we will get shaken off along with it." [Foer, p. 264]

I can't swear that ethical issues won't come up again. In fact, today's thought, also from Foer, illustrates the animal ethics of Abraham Lincoln:
Historians tell a story about Abraham Lincoln, that while returning to Washington from Springfield, he forced his entire party to stop to help some small birds he saw in distress. When chided by the others, he responded, quite plainly, "I could not have slept to-night if I had left those poor creatures on the ground and not restored them to their mother." He did not make (though he might have) a case for the moral value of the birds, their worth to themselves or the ecosystem or God. Instead he observed, quite simply, that once those suffering birds came into his view, a moral burden had been assumed. He could not be himself if he walked away. Lincoln was a hugely inconsistent personality, and of course he ate birds far more often than he aided them. But presented with the suffering of a fellow creature, he responded.
    My own conscience is with Lincoln's, and his sort of appropriate shame was what I was referring to when I wrote Thursday (in an earlier draft) that "a vegetarian president would by counter-example remind most of us, when we are made to think about it, of what we are ashamed we do." [If we eat animals, it is certain that some or all of them are cruelly treated.]
    But I seem to have erred in assuming that others have a similar conscience. One reader even confessed to me, "Certainly I've been made to think about it, and I've had no feelings of shame whatsoever."

6 comments:

  1. The Lincoln story doesn't pass the sniff test. How was he returning to Washington? If by train (most likely), how did he see the baby birds on the ground? If by coach, again, how did he see the birds? He could only have been on horseback, an unthinkable mode of long-distance travel for a president or Congressman. I've seen another version of this story. In it, Lincoln was one of four country lawyers on horseback, traveling to a court appearance. The other three didn't stop. Nice story, but even this credible version sounds apocryphal, in the tradition of Washington and the cherry tree.

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  2. While it is a great story and my conscience too would be with Lincoln's reported act, I have to say I think Ken is probably dead on in his observations on this one. As Ken says it ranks right there with the George Washington apple tree story -- and the more modern urban legend "hit the floor" story of actor Eddie Murphy and his "posse" on the elevator that helped derail his career. If Lincoln really had been so concerned about baby birds maybe he would have tried a lot harder to prevent the Civil War and the horrendous bloodshed that came with it.

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  3. Sadly, Foer failed to include the information that Lincoln saw the birds at a train stop and wouldn't let the train proceed until he'd rescued them.
        You may have noticed on my sidebar the caveat that chewing each mouthful 32 times can be useful when reading items on this blog. The sidebar might have added (but didn't, out of respect for those who comment here) that it can also be useful to chew comments 33 times.

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  4. Nevertheless, Abe Lincoln a was nice guy so I'm going to believe the bird story! But, I also believe that Lincoln's assassination was a high government conspiracy, an attempted coup d'etat
    perpetrated by the Secretary of War thwarted only because assassination attempts on the vice President and the Secretary of State failed. After 146 years we can believe what we want, can we not?

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  5. Yes, after 146 years we can believe what we want, but given the blood on his hands, why do we want to believe Lincoln was a nice guy?

    Why do we Americans instinctively elevate a politician because they start the worst war in our history or give a clever speech after the World Trade Center is blown up on their watch?

    If a policeman, school teacher, doctor or business person fails at an unforgivable level, people are incensed. Why do those same people exalt a politician who fails epically?

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  6. I confess that I myself believed the bird story because of my respect for and confidence in Jonathan Safran Foer. Ken's and Motomynd's comments suggesting that the incident (which "historians tell a story about") may never have happened and Motomynd's questioning how compassionate Lincoln could have been given profound misgivings about his role in the Civil War make me realize that my own assumptions about Lincoln's "being a nice guy" (to slight the reverence with which he is commonly regarded) are not critical but the result of buying into "received opinion." I am open to radically revising that opinion.
        But revising my opinion about Lincoln is not nearly as high among my priorities as raising the question of man's current inhumanity to the creatures with whom we share this planet and our brief experience of life on it.

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