Last night, I was at a networking social with the Olympic Opening Ceremony on an enormous screen. But I was there strictly to socialize and catch up with good friends. I could not bring myself to enjoy the opening ceremony, flamboyant and ostentatious as it was, in light of the appalling abuses of human and animal rights in a country where, at the very least, all this money could have been put to much worthier use in improving the human condition!
People might say that it's my loss for missing this magnificent display of oneness and splendor. But I don't see it. Fortunately for me, there is no dearth of interesting alternatives in today's world that can equally well and guiltlessly take up my time. Fortunately, I suffer the ancient Chinese curse. I live in interesting times. I must boycott the Olympics to protest in what little way I can against such appalling cruelty as PeTA exposes.
No doubt there is much cruelty elsewhere too. Even here on American free soil, most would have seen PeTAs shocking expose of KFC's red bird syndrome that shows millions of birds end up being scalded to death:
But the anti-fur video took it to a whole new level for me. I tried not to blog on this topic a second time, but I could not help it. I am still distressed by my memory of the PeTA video.
That a sentient being, much less a human, is even capable of something like this is deeply disturbing. Despite endless intellectualization that natural variation in neural circuitry is bound to produce innate predispositions to this kind of behavior uncontainable by ethical rationalization, the cold reality of the video scares the shits out of me. For want of a better word, let me call this deanimization. The way I see it, deanimization, the ability to train oneself to see sentient creatures as unable to feel, is a necessary first step to dehumanization. It is no stretch to the Auschwitz, genocide on a massive scale, to Saddam and his likes, to atrocities of Vlad the impaler and worse. One small step to revert to the horrors of the past that we believed were mostly behind us. Gives me the shits indeed.
Being the skeptic that I am, I cannot seek solace in the infinite compassion of a claimed superior being. But I do have hope. One day we will be able to engineer precision genes. We will have genes for compassion, and for voluntary self-extinction at a time of one's own choosing, despite their evolutionary disvalue and non-viability. Maybe I'll say more about this if I ever complete the article I have tentatively titled "The Jesus quality and the Bhishma faculty."
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