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updated: 3/7/17

 

 

 

LYREBIRD SINGING 

https://youtu.be/Q3Sga4MWeVw 

INSPIRATIONS

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)  Mathematical Circles

"...compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.-"

Albert Schweitzer (German medical Missionary, Theologian, Musician and Philosopher. 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, 1875-1965)

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Love alone can unite living beings so as to complete and fulfill them... for it alone joins them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth." 
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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"LOVE AND DO WHAT YOU WILL"  St. Augustine

 

 

LOVE IS LETTING GO OF FEAR 

 

Peaceable Kingdom, Patti Smith

https://youtu.be/KiAKcGPzJU4

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Dass Guided Imagery

ALL GUIDED IMAGERY

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ETHICS GOALS

[2A2] The second goal of the required leadership/ethics flag courses -- learn to make real-life ethical choices -- is closely related to the core purpose of the University of Texas, to transform lives for the benefit of society. It is also one of the basic education requirements of U.T.: “have experience in thinking about moral and ethical problems.”

our primary approach is the oldest: ethics guided by lovingkindness; more specifically, by three nonbinary emotions: biophilia, inner peace, joie de vivre

[2A2f] To practice replacing fear and greed with love, compassion, tolerance, and the sympathetic imagination.

OTHER GOALS

[3C1] To unify the self: our goal is to maximize our potential by cultivating both sides of our brains, developing all our multiple intelligences.

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LOOKING AHEAD: 3-9  P1B DUE  REINDEER'S BIRTHDAY (2-22) BOBCAT's birthday (3/5) TIGER's birthday 3/13 JAGUAR'S BIRTHDAY

Documentaries Mask and Peaceable Kingdom and blog opportunities for more points

3-9  P1B DUE LATE PENALTIES -10 PER CLASS DAY

 

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LOOKING AHEAD further:

Leadership requirement, FIND YOUR NAME, PARTNER, AND SUBJECT BELOW email instructor to change partner or date

3-21 Carnism and Sustainability  3-23, 3-28, 3-30 Carroll, Alice books 4-4 P2a due 4-6 Racism Alice Walker 4-11, 4-13, 4-18 Fowler, Beside Ourselves  4-20 Research Universities and Animals  Carroll, Adams 4-25 Boulle, Kafka  4-27 Paradise Regained Isaiah, Virgil  5-2 Paradise Regained Hicks, Davis 5-4 P2b due

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b&w; quiz, discussion of blogs  Leadership requirement,

ANIMAL AND DIET ETHICS

801-829                 "Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows"

 

PANDA: I also think it goes back to Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment. He discovered that "people will readily conform to the social roles they are expected to play." (Stanford prison experiment, Simply Psychology) It has been socially reinforced that it is acceptable to eat cows but socially demonized to eat dogs in American culture

 

Reindeer: "'If David Irving gets three years for denying the Holocaust, what do the rest of us deserve who live in denial of today's atrocities" (834).. 

 

TIGER: "Patterns of thought and behavior, established long before we were able to act as free agents, become woven into the fabric of our psyche, guiding our choices like an invisible hand." (818) 

 

Cheetah: "An ideology is a shared set of beliefs, as well as the practices that reflect these beliefs", eating animals has become an ideology (806). Carnism is the ideology that promotes people to eat meat with little regard to how the animals are treated. Eating animals is so entrenched in our minds that it is often referred to as "common sense" (806).

 

 

Brionne: "It is impossible to exercise free will as long as we are operating from within the system. Free will requires consciousness, and our pervasive and deep-seated patterns of thought are unconscious; they are outside of our awareness and therefore outside of our control. While we remain in the system, we see the world through the eyes of carnism," (Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, 818). In order to make a decision out of our own free will, we have to understand and know the truth about what is going on. ,,,,

 

Hippo: "When an ideology is entrenched, it is essentially invisible." (806)

I think it is important for us to question the common narratives that run through our society. Ideology can be so entrenched that we become incapable of seeing the world through any other view. When anyone expresses an opinion outside of what we consider the norm, many will condemn that person as radical or crazy. However, it is important to note that some of what we simply hold to be true actually are true. Murder and rape are actually wrong. Not all ideology is bad.

In the movie They Live, the protagonist has glasses that reveal hidden ideology.

 

Nada quickly discovers the sunglasses have unique properties: they reduce the colors of the world around him to black and white and allow him to see that media and advertising hide omnipresent subliminal commands to obey, consume, reproduce, and conform. 

 

Falcon: "We aren't born with our schemas; they are constructed" (802).

An example schema

It might seem strange to consider that our ideologies or psychological schemas are not as biologically based or inherent as one might assume. Although certain aspects of ideology such as politics are more easily identifiable as learned, most would assume that their feelings towards meat or eating animals is an ingrained biological aspect or something that is universally accepted and hence true; their ability to identify a dog as schematically friendly appeals to this understanding of animals. This is the insidiousness of an accepted ideology: the inability to recognize it as something outside of the norm and to overcome it. 

 

 

Hawk:
"'If the problem is invisible…then there will be ethical invisibility.'- Carol J. Adams" (806)

 

 

 

 

Hawk: "Ernest Becker, the author of The Denial of Death (1973), may be right that the greatest denial is of our own inevitable death…" (836)

 

White deer A  

"But if the denial of our own death is the example of the most profound for of denial, the ur-denial we might call it …, then I would nominate another denial as possibly even more ubiquitous: denial of the deaths of other animals for our food." (836)

 

"it is the process of learning not to feel that is the focus of this book"  Cf. Hawk:"Psychic numbing is made up of a complex array of defenses and other mechanisms, mechanisms which are pervasive, powerful and invisible and which operate on both social psychological levels. These mechanisms distort our perception and distance us from our feelings, transforming our empathy into apathy- indeed it is the process of learning to not feel…" (803)

 

 

 

TURTLE: While human beings may have an innate tendency to savor sweet flavor, most of our taste is, in fact made up."(Joy pg.802)

 

I believe that our diet is solely dependent on how we were raised. Humans DO NOT have the innate behavior to eat meat, but were raised due to our cultural background to incorporate meat in our diet. From a historical standpoint, the birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago made humans eat mostly grains,vegetable, and fruits as hunting animals was very costly in energy¹. As civilization progress we began to have better access to meat and ever since meat has became a staple to the human race. A cool fact that I learned is that our stomach pH is not meant for meat, because it cannot kill all of the bacteria in meat, but since we have discovered fire, it has become less of a worry.²

 

ADD VIDEO OF ISRAELI BOY

 

FOX: "But to be fair, we must acknowledge that in fanticide, murder, rape, and cannibalism are at least as old as meat eating, and are therefore arguably "natural"- and yet we don't invoke the history of these acts as a justification for them." (Why We Love Dogs Eat Pigs and Wear Cows p.816).

 

 

 

OWL: "The primary defense of the system is invisibility; invisibility reflects the defenses avoidance and denial and is the foundation on which all other mechanisms stand. Invisibility enables us, for example, to consume beef without envisioning the animal we're eating; it cloaks our thoughts from ourselves." (804)

This quote really stood out to me, as I now realize it is what I do. Whenever I eat meat, I do not even think about the animal I am eating or where it came from. More people should be conscious of what exactly they are eating; the animal that the meat came from should not be "invisible."…..

"It is interesting precisely because the child is noticing what the adult is attempting to disguise, that we are talking about the body parts of an animal who was recently alive. There is betrayal involved here, and the child knows it." (832) 

This quote reminded me of the YouTube video we watched awhile back, when the child realizes that he is eating an animal. The child kept asking his mother questions about where the food came from, and why they ate animals. I think that, overall, children are just so pure of heart compared to adults. They still have empathy for the animals their food comes from, and think that no animal should suffer for them. 

These are photos from a video where a 5 year old discovers where her meal came from.

 

WHITE TAIL DEER 1"Eating meat or animal products is very personal. It is something some people do as often as three times per day, nearly every day of their  lives." p. 837

This is probably the biggest reason meat is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Asking everyone in the world to break this habit, which at this point is more of an addiction, and give up meat cold turkey (no pun intended) is not only unreasonable, it's plain impossible. We hear people all the time talk about how they're craving a burger, or a steak, or numerous other kinds of meat. It takes a lot of willpower to break an addiction, and eating meat is an addiction so ingrained in our society and so widely accepted that most people just don't care enough to change anything about it. "To refuse to eat meat is to make yourself a social outcast." p. 836

 

OTTER "It is odd […] that some people may hurt animals or other people as a way of dealing with their own terror of being hurt, or as a means of running away from their feelings of responsibility and guilt." (840)

I believe that this fear is especially evident in the way that slaughterhouse workers are especially cruel to the animals that they kill. I am only theorizing, but I think that the cruelty in itself is a way for them to confront the conflict between their own natural empathy toward these animals and their duty to perform their masculinity. No person can deal with connecting their food back to a suffering, living creature, and a man especially has no room in mainstream society if he admits such disgust with a practice as common as animal slaughter. Inflicting pain onto helpless creatures allows them to suppress their empathy and continue to prove that they are, in fact, manly enough.