Rites and Credos and Carnivores

First of all, I would like to offer a conditional apology. When I presented Joseph Campbell's sprawling 12-page discourse on The Importance of Rites, I began the discussion with an unsympathetic "So suck it up." I know that many of you actually enjoyed it, and that several of you usually take the time to re-read essays to gain a better understanding of them. This is an essay that all but demands multiple readings, and you only had one night with it. I retract the coolness of my reaction insofar as I am able; I made it in jest because I had no idea how you were going to react.

I bring up The Importance of Rites again because it is very directly related to "A Carnivore's Credo", the essay on vegetarianism we read for class last Thursday. Roger Scruton dissects the sense of moral guilt we as humans feel toward eating meat, and proposes that for many thousands of years we have relieved this in how we care for animals and respect them in death.

This is exactly the kind of rite Joseph Campbell was talking about.

A key concept in Campbell's argument is the idea of the "great mystery," the thing which is inaccessible and incomprehensible to humans and therefore transcendent of mortal life. He discusses how different cultures have different focuses on the mystery due to different ways of life--the farming culture hallows the fertile earth, the culture of discovery (e.g. rising Mesopotamia or Renaissance Europe) has a fascination with the heavens.

The fundamental purpose of religion, the "deeper meaning", is not moral in nature. Morality becomes an important part of religion because religion is a very effective way to communicate cultural values (the "payload" in the essay "Lies We Tell Kids"), but by this same function morality in religion is extremely relative to time and place. Religion's deepest meaning, the one for which it probably arose, is linked to the great mystery. What religion is about, or should be about, or has been intended to be about, is simply how to live; how to survive as a human, even in the presence of the unknown and overwhelming. The primary function of religion is to transform the great mystery and the powerful fear we experience at being left in the dark into reverence and certainty.

The earliest human cultures were hunters and gatherers, so our fascination with the animals that die to sustain us is the mystery at the heart of the oldest spiritual systems. Our relationship to animals is crucial to the understanding of our own nature. We condemn human murder, so why is it OK to kill animals? How are we different from them? As humans, we possess self-consciousness, and that gives us the obligation to reflect on our actions and take responsibility for them. We can recognize the gravity of death and killing, yet we kill living things to physically survive. (Animals have always been more worrysome to us than plants because we ourselves are animals.)

We can't deal with it ethically; we have developed evolutionarily to eat meat, and that is outside of the control granted by our self-consciousness. (Yes, now we can make the choice not to eat animals, but most early humans depended on meat as a source of food, and even today we cannot change the fact that our bodies are suited to it.) We can't deal with it or understand it morally, so we philosophized and created myths and rites to reinforce it and integrate it into our culture. The ethical treatment of animals and the gratitude and honor we show at meals of their flesh is a recognition of the ethical discrepancy. By treating their remains with respect, almost as we would our own, by affirming the value of a life that has passed and not merely been lost, we retain our human dignity.