It was the day that the news broke from Bucha. I mean it was Tuesday. I went out for lunch to have bún chả. That's a Hanoian dish of white rice noodles (the "bún") with pork meatballs (the "chả") in a sweet and sour broth. I suppose you also had lunch that day.
It was the second time that I had gone to this bún chả place and maybe the third time in 20 years that I had deliberately ordered meat for myself. I had thought little of it the first time but this time I had a whole load of thoughts discharged into me from somewhere. There were no images to accompany them. They were only thoughts. But they had something to do with the news and I don't want to admit it.
The first thought was: "You are wondering what it is you can do; well you can start by not causing further slaughter. Eat something else, not meat." The thought second was: "you are thinking of actual women; actual women who have really-and-not-in-a-story been raped, tortured and killed, and you are somehow putting these human beings in the same bracket as pigs. Real, no-fooling pigs. How can you?" Dull shame.
And then, on the other hand, how can you not? I remembered a snippet of conversation from an evening in London pub: "I suppose there's also a feminist argument against dairy," someone said. It brought me out in a sudden and secret flash of rage: "Yes, yes I suppose there might be a 'feminist argument" I said in my head. "Maybe, just maybe, there's something a little off about selectively breeding a species to have grotesquely over-inflated mammary glands that put them in constant desperation to be suckled by robots because we have constructed a world-spanning system of dropping their babies into blenders to turn said babies into dog food. There are a billion of them, none of whom have the slightest hope of ever winning any fight against us and in fact they won't even start one because we've made them all docile and stupid so that they can more conveniently satisfy our appetites. Maybe we could make some arguments about how that's inappropriate. If another species did it then we'd be using it as evidence for God's non-existence along with Darwin's cats and ichneumons." It's a very eloquent internal rant and has been improved over the years but am I vegan? I am not.
I am ridiculous1. I had dreamed about a strategically motivated military gang-rape and used it as a metaphor for the capture of saola. That looked a lot better, didn't it, when I could think of wartime rape as a thing from ancient history or myth? What was I doing but trying to inflate my self-importance with mythic images and moral philosophy?
And now, should I sully myself with tiny floating hamburgers? Break my precious vegetarian rules. Was it the right thing to do? Hell, I was even playing with the idea that collecting data was, in a sense, a kind of rape. I could get off angsting over that for at least another decade, provided I was warm and clean and fed. Perhaps I could even use it as an excuse to avoid doing any real work at all. I could just sit and mouth off about stuff like this until the world fell down.
And - not to boast - but all of this in a couple of seconds before I went into the restaurant and ordered a bowl of bún chả.
And now I'm back to thinking.
Let's imagine, for the sake of ridiculously spurious argument, that I could, myself now, save the saola.
Let's imagine that I could do this without any horrifically traumatic captures of individual saola.
Let's also imagine I could do this without anyone being arrested and going to prison.
Without supporting the state in severing ties between rural people and their traditional forest land. Without, however, those people continuing to use that land for cruel and wasteful snaring.
Without, in fact, any kind of hunting of animals but somehow also without anything being lost to traditional cultures.
And without the air miles involved in international ecotourism.
Imagine I could heroically achieve all that impossible nonsense all by myself.
Still, the number of animals that I have personally ended up eating while working in Vietnam is already greater than the entire surviving population of the saola. I ate most of them while trying to be polite. I had to talk to people who are less likely to talk to you if you aren't prepared to have dinner together. In the UK, I can be vegetarian and avoid the necessity. So there is no way that what I'm doing is about saving lives.
It might be about saving species if species were real things and had lives, but they're not. Species are just units They're supposedly units of 'biodiversity' which is, of course, a word that makes all our hearts beat faster and brings tears of passion to our eyes. And biodiversity can't be a metric of something else because it's our final goal. Yet it's obviously a metric; the name makes it obvious. It's the name of a measurable quantity and that's why we've argued over how to measure it. No-one argues how to measure love or courage. Or, if they do, nobody listens. I can try and sort it out. I could propose a better metric. I could rail against the use of metrics altogether. Or I could just sit here with the nails in my mouth and watch the sailcloth flapping in the storm. It's a huge moral wildness. I have my ethical calculations within their set bounds and then something huge rolls in from another area of thought and it all makes not the slightest bit of sense any more. It happens all the time.
Maybe all thoughts in response to such events are shameful. Some of us take action when the news comes in and the rest of us have to explain why we carry on with what we were doing before. Is it worth it? How can I answer? Like any non-sociopath, I want to see myself as one of the good guys. I'm confused by a society which assures me that I am one but is entirely unable to explain why.
“Conservation," a senior conservationist told me once, "is sick. Let's face it, it's all about rich people living comfortable lives saying 'ooh aren't tigers cute, aren't elephants majestic' and letting these dangerous animals charge around through poor people's gardens and trample on their crops and eat their children." Well that was the gist of what he said anyway. It was in the early years of the millennium when that was a popular view, if rarely so bluntly expressed.
I don't want to talk about whether he was right or wrong. I am just noting that putting it that way would put him on solid moral ground. Calculation would be possible there, sin would be measurable That is tempting.
Look let's take it as read that I'm going to find some gratification in presenting my particular problems as especially complex and awful. Or, if I can't do that, in adopting some other being's awful problems as my own without having to actually experience them. And without having to change. This could all be just a big angsty game to prevent myself pulling my socks up. Maybe it's actually totally clear what the right thing to do is and I'm just avoiding doing it. What do you think?
There's no other voice in any of this. No land. No dream. No God. Just wheels and wires and rats and bamboo. It's not pretty.
Machado de Oliveira, V. (2021) Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA p53
I think that you communicate very openly and honestly a feeling that I certainly recognise of being overwhelmed by multiple, simultaneous and often contradictory waves of thoughts. It's like being hit by a tsunami of moral complexities which then retreats and sucks the sand from beneath my feet. And I remember feeling it even more keenly when I was working in Sri Lanka, in a culture in which I had not grown up, where I was even less certain of the available moral choices. It's tough. But at least you are trying to grapple with the complexities of it all. If you started spouting absolute moral certainties - then would be the time to be truly worried.