Moral decisions about eating, pt. 1

Yesterday’s “Science” section in the New York Times has an essay by Carol Kaesuk Yoon on the morality of eating meat as compared to the morality of eating plants. During a period when she was a vegetarian, Yoon said she struggled with the question of why she thought it was moral to eat plants, but not animals:

…I couldn’t actually explain to myself or anyone else why killing an animal was any worse than killing the many plants I was now eating.

Surely, I’d thought, science can defend the obvious, that slaughterhouse carnage is wrong in a way that harvesting a field of lettuces [sic] or, say, mowing the lawn is not. But instead, it began to seem that formulating a truly rational rationale for not eating animals, at least while consuming all sorts of other organisms, was difficult, maybe even impossible.

— “No Face, but Plants Like Life Too,” Carol Kaesuk Yoon, New York Times, 15 March 2011, p. D4.

This is a classic moral problem, and it has been resolved a number of different ways. At an extreme, there are fruitarians, those humans who will eat only ripe fruits, nuts, and seeds that can be used without killing plants; and some fruitarians won’t even eat seeds or nuts since they destroy potential life. Following that, different groups of humans may draw the line in different places. A rough list of moral stands on eating various organisms, in decreasing order of strictness, would look something like this:

  1. Fruitarian — eat only fruits whose harvest won’t damage plants
  2. Vegan — eat no animal products at all (incl. no milk, honey, etc.)
  3. Strict vegetarian — eat no animal flesh or eggs (may eat milk)
  4. Ovo-lacto-vegetarian — eat no animal flesh (eggs and milk OK)
  5. Non-strict vegetarian — “eat nothing with a face”
  6. Omnivore

The above list is based on moral stands against taking life. There are, of course, other moral considerations that may affect food choices. The list below has some of these other moral stands, listed in no particular order:

  • Self-sufficiency — eat as much food raised by self as possible
  • Locavore — eat local foods as much as possible
  • Sustainable foods — eat foods raised organically, biodynamically, or under some other criteria for sustainable production
  • Global food security — eat foods that maximize yield per acre (e.g., Diet for a Small Planet, etc.)
  • Healthful foods — eat so as to maintain the health of one’s own body (e.g., no refined sugar, etc.) (Thanks to Steven.)
  • Unprocessed foods — eat foods that have been processed as little as possible
  • Non-corporate foods — eat foods not produced by the handful of major food processing corporations (i.e., Nestle, Kraft, etc.)

Obviously, being able to take any of the above moral stands presupposes that you are in a position to make decisions about what food you eat — i.e., you have enough income to be able to make choices, you live in a place where you have food choices, etc.

I’d love to hear from you about whether you take any of these moral stands. And let me know if I’ve missed any important moral stands on food. Then in later posts, I’ll look at some moral stands on food more closely.

Spring

Driving over the high point of the Dumbarton Bridge at the end of the day yesterday, I saw the Bay area at its most beautiful. The light rain had stopped. The land was green, and looked greener still because the light was diffused through the cloud cover. The dikes around the old salt ponds were green, and the water they contained ranged from silver to black depending on the thickness of the clouds above. And the hills of the East Bay were incredibly green, their low summits invisible in the low-hanging clouds.

Canceling Sunday services for social justice?

Some acquaintances of Carol’s go to a nearby Christian church that is doing a really interesting social justice program. Next Sunday, they’re canceling worship services at both their campuses and doing a program they’re calling “Love Works.” They will be sending the whole congregation out to do good works in the community — “no strings attached.” Their Love Works programs will involve about a thousand people, and I’m quite impressed by the sophisticated organization of this project. For example, check out the Love Works online sign-up page, where work projects are sorted by categories, and you can look through the projects, pick one that suits you, and sign up online.

Note that there are opportunities for everyone to participate, including a virtual service project of spending an hour in prayer for those who are working that day, and providing refreshments at the closing celebration Sunday afternoon. And having a closing celebration is a nice touch, too.

If you have a moment, take a look at this and tell me what you think. Is it too good to be true? Is this something that liberal congregations should be doing (or maybe already are doing)? Would you participate in this, or would you just skip going to church that day?

Two San Francisco scenes

I took BART into the city, and happened to arrive at the Powell BART station just as the San Francisco St. Patrick’s Day parade was passing by. People in the Bay area make a big deal about how the San Francisco St. Patrick’s Day parade is one of only three in the country to allow GLBTQ people to march. But the big deal for me was that many of the spectators topped off their bright green outfits with orange-and-black Giants baseball caps. Where I come from, you do not wear orange on St. Patty’s Day.

Overheard in a restaurant: …he wasn’t the best man, but he was going to stand right next to the best man. Well, it turns out he couldn’t hold his liquor. He barfed all over himself five minutes before the wedding started. All down his front. [The best man] took him into the bathroom and cleaned him up, and he looked fine except he had little bits of toilet paper all over him. He smelled pretty funky. But he made it through the ceremony OK.

Spring

One of the houses near where we live is a modest but lovely clapboard house with gingerbread trim, over a hundred years old (that’s really old for a house on the Peninsula), and still occupied by descendants of the family who built it. In front of the house is one of my favorite spring gardens in town; it’s not a formal garden but rather almost looks like the flowers just sprung up on their own; and at the moment, this garden is at its peak.

The garden is attractive from the sidewalk, looking at it over the white picket fence, but then you don’t really see the house. I managed to find a place where I could look down and see both the garden and the house:

“Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates”

Carol and I have finally been reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, the 2000 bestseller that gave a popular account of some scientific research in epidemiology, psychology, and sociology. Like Dr. Johnson, neither one of us has wanted to read the whole book all the way through*, so it lives in the bathroom, and we read bits of it when we’re not looking through the catalogs and magazines that also live there.

But while I haven’t actually read the book, I have been reading the end notes, which are really more informative than the book. In these endnotes I finally came across a reference I have wanted for some time: a reference to the scientific work that helps explain why human organizations with less than about 150 members are qualitatively different than human organizations with more than 150 members. The reference is: Robin I. M. Dunbar, “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates,” Journal of Human Evolution, 1992, vol. 20, pp. 469-493.

And why should we care about the size of primate neocortexes? The neocortex is the part of the brain through which primates keep track of relationships; the larger the neocortex, the more relationships a given species of primate can keep track of; thus the large size of the Homo sapiens neocortex allows us humans to keep track of all the relationships in a group of up to about 150 members. When, however, human organizations are larger than 150 members, individuals can no longer keep track of all the relationships, and the group therefore feels qualitatively different.

This helps explain why congregations often stop growing when their active membership (measured as the average weekly attendance of adults and children) becomes larger than 150. My guess is that because our neocortex can’t handle any more relationships within that group, we literally cannot relate to any newcomers who may arrive. And if the newcomers can’t make connections with the other primates in the congregation, they’re not going to stick around — we primates are social critters who want to make connections with others of our species. This also helps explain why something like three-quarters of all U.S. congregations have an average attendance of fewer than 200 adults and children — we’re just more comfortable in groups with 150 or fewer humans. 

Whether a congregation is growing or not may thus have less to do with the attractiveness of the congregation’s theology than with the neocortex size of the primates who make up that congregation.

* “Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, ‘No, Sir, do you read books through?’” — Boswell, Life of Johnson, Monday 19 April 1773.

Regionalization webinar

This afternoon, I attended a webinar offered by Linda Laskowski, on “regionalization” — that’s the current catchphrase for a jumble of attempts to reorganize the field staff of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). Like most for-profit and non-profit organizations, the UUA has been forced to look for ways to increase efficiency and reduce staff expenditures; personally, I suspect some form of regionalization will eventually be necessary as a way to cut costs and increase efficiency.

Many of the regionalization ideas floating around include shutting down or merging one or more of the 19 districts; districts are the organizations which provide some of the funding for UUA field staff. But Laskowski said that this kind of regionalization is not something with which the UUA Board is concerned, or with which the Board can be concerned. She pointed out that the UUA Board cannot have a plan for shutting down or merging district organizations because they are all 501(c)3 organizations with a separate corporate existence from the UUA.

Laskowski said the UUA’s regionalization initiatives include a couple of instances of helping districts share staff. More importantly, the UUA assigns districts to one of five large geographical regions (see map below), and appoints one district executive to serve as the head district executive for that region (e.g., Ken Brown, district executive for the Pacific Southwest district, serves as the lead district executive for the far western region). Most importantly, the UUA Board will ask General Assembly to reduce the number of its members; currently, each district elects one board member, so a reduction in the number of board members would mean that would no longer be the case.

Regionalization Map

The current UUA regions

Susan Ritchie, Visiting Professor of Unitarian Universalist Heritage and Ministry at the Starr King School for the Ministry, offered historical perspectives on districts and regionalization. She offered a wealth of details which served to demonstrate that much of the current district governance structure within the UUA is a result of historical accidents. Laskowski expressed her opinion that the current organizational structure of the UUA does not work as well as it should, to the point where some kind of reorganization is necessary.

This webinar was offered to ministers of the Pacific Central District (PCD). A couple of webinar participants pointed out that one significant barrier to regionalization in the PCD will be the negative feelings that have resulted from the UUA’s decision to withdraw from co-employing Cilla Raughley, PCD District Executive; because of the way Raughley’s contract was written, that led to her termination. Laskowski reminded webinar participants that the Pacific Central District is a separate corporate entity, and that regionalization cannot be imposed by the UUA; it will be up to the PCD to decide whether or not to participate in any regionalization efforts that may happen.

A brief footnote: I attended the webinar on site at the Starr King School for Ministry, along with half a dozen other PCD ministers. After the webinar was over, some of us chatted briefly. Susan Ritchie said that it’s remarkable how many people continue to believe that UUA Board has some kind of plot to take over the districts, when that is clearly impossible and clearly is not on the Board’s long-range agenda. I said the UUA needed to pass out tin-foil hats. You know, to protect us all from the evil rays that the UUA is beaming into our heads to convince us to give up our individual identity and become part of the UUA Borg. In fact, I’m wearing mine now:

Tin Foil Hat

Me in my tin-foil hat. Look, you can see the evil rays coming in at me from the skylight behind me.

The power of habit

Increasingly, I’ve come to be convinced that one of the chief reasons many people stay with a congregation is habit. Human beings really are creatures of habit. This is why weekly services, and annual holidays, are so important:— If you are in the habit of attending a weekly service, you will be more likely to stay with a congregation in spite of dissatisfaction and annoyance. If you are in the habit of attending an annual holiday observance (e.g., Christmas eve candlelight service, etc.), you will likely attend year after year in spite of the quality of the service or theology of the congregation.

This implies that anything that might cause people to break their habits will lead to some people drifting away from a congregation. If you have no Sunday services during the summer, at least a few people will get out of the habit of showing up, and they will drift away from the congregation. If you have two worship services during most of the year, but only one during the summer, you will lose at least a few people over the summer (I watched that happen at the Palo Alto church over the past summer — we lost at least a couple of newcomers). If your minister disappears for two months during the summer, and instead you have guest preachers or lay leaders, I would be willing to bet that at least a few people will drift away from your congregation, for you have broken their habit.

It seems to me that if we are looking for ways to get newcomers to stick with our congregations, one of the main things to do is not to get people to think about theology, but rather it’s to get people to develop the habit of congregational life.

Down with Rome!

I’ve been reading apocalypses recently: Revelation, an ancient Christian apocalypse, and Joel, an ancient Hebrew apocalypse, to be specific. As a Transcendentalist, I have a soft spot in my heart for Joel’s insistence that everyone is going to have transcendent visions: “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit.” (Joel 2.28-29)

Politically, however, I’m more interested in Revelation, which rails against the oppression of the Romans, and longs for the destruction of the Roman Empire. It’s the vivid expression of an oppressed people’s longing for the destruction of their foreign oppressors, filled with extravagant imagery. I know conventional Christians see Revelation as the coming of the End Times when they all will get raptured up to heaven; but to me it reads more like political hate mail for the Roman overlords.

To better understand Revelation, I’ve been reading bits of a non-canonical apocalyptic book, the Sibylline Oracles, written somewhere around the same time as Revelation, give or take a century or two. This passage from Book VIII makes the political content quite clear:

God’s declarations of great wrath to come
In the last age upon the faithless world
I make known, prophesying to all men
According to their cities. From the time
When the great tower fell and the tongues of men
Were parted into many languages
Of mortals, first was Egypt’s royal power
Established, that of Persians and of Medes
And also of the Ethiopians
And of Assyria and Babylon,
Then the great pride of boasting Macedon,
Then, fifth, the famous lawless kingdom last
Of the Italians shall show many evils
Unto all mortals and shall spend the toils
Of men of every land….
There shall come to thee sometime from above
A heavenly stroke deserved, O haughty Rome.
And thou shalt be the first to bend thy neck
And be razed to the ground, and thee shall fire
Destructive utterly consume, cast down
Upon thy pavements, and thy wealth shall perish,
And wolves and foxes dwell in thy foundations.
And then shalt thou be wholly desolate,
As if not born….
The Sibylline Oracles, trans. Milton S. Terry, 1899, Book VIII, ll. 1-15, 47-55; pp. 161-163.

Nothing about the Rapture here, just straightforward hate mail for Rome. In my reading, Revelation is also hate mail for Rome; it makes more sense that way. Yes, it is a lot less straightforward than the above passage from the Sibylline Oracles; yes, it is filled with bizarre imagery; but it makes a lot more sense as an ancient religio-political tract predicting the downfall of Rome than as a onto-theological text predicting — um, from a theological point of view, I’m not sure exactly what Revelation is supposed to predict.