Essays and Musings on Animals and Society

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Meat-Eating as a Psychological Disorder 

Today, in this part of the world, with the presence of healthy vegans everywhere, it is abundantly clear that eating meat is unnecessary. Furthermore, most people have some inkling that animals suffer on their way to becoming meat. Meat eating is therefore, discretionary cruelty. So why do people still eat meat?

In this eye-opening essay, psychologist Melanie Joy explains how various personal and societal mechanisms conspire to make meat-eating--despite its dubious ethics and dubious health value--the norm:

"Carnism is the word I began using several years ago to denote the ideology of meat consumption. Ideologies are social belief systems that have enormous power to shape people's attitudes and behaviors. Ideologies are often so embedded in society that their influence is mostly unconscious-and therefore unquestioned. Typically, ideologies are only recognized when are an exception to the 'normal' way of thinking (what we call the 'dominant ideology'). This is why there is a name, vegetarianism, for the ideology that considers the consumption of other animals inappropriate or unethical. The dominant ideology in our society maintains that eating other animals is normal and even necessary. However, there is no name for this ideology. We therefore tend to view eating animals not as a choice, but as a given. This way of thinking makes society view the consumption of animals as normal, natural, and legitimate.

Ideologies can hide contradictions between people's behaviors and their values. They allow people to make exceptions to what they would normally consider ethical, without even realizing it. This is how we can understand carnism. If we consider carnism to be an ideology, then we can explain why it is possible to love some animals and eat others. We have been so socialized to believe in the legitimacy and necessity of carnism that most people do not even think of their meat as having once been an animal. Indeed, most people begin eating meat before they can even talk, and the process of maintaining the invisibility of the animals who become food continues for the rest of our lives."

Dr. Joy then discusses:
I like how Dr. Joy closes out the essay:

"What may be one of the most important points to remember as vegetarians is that mental health comes not from unquestioningly participating in what we have learned is normal (consider the average German in Nazi Germany), but from practicing we believe is right. It comes from living in accordance with our deepest values, values such as personal authenticity, integrity, empathy, and compassion for all beings. What better model for a peaceful planet? What better lesson to teach our children?"

The carnism concept puts modern meat-eating in a proper perspective: it's an arbitrary, malleable, and ultimately replaceable norm. To my mind, carnism goes even beyond a choice or ideology. To willingly cause pain, suffering, and death in other living beings even though it is unnecessary, and to make excuses for it, is an emotional disorder.

People who manage to disengage themselves from carnism can see plainly that the multitude of reasons given for carnism are unconvincing, and sometimes bizarre—much in the way we shake our heads when listening to an addict's contorted justifications for his or her habit. But when everyone's doing something that from the outside is strange or immoral, on the inside it may have the illusion of being normal and acceptable. Ideologies are like enablers. They can enable cruelties such as slavery, exterminations, and factory farms to perpetuate. One day we'll look back in horror at the mass misery and slaughter of farm animals. But for now the population is mostly trapped in present-day carnism, kept alive by advertising, inertia, government subsidies, profit, "myth-information" about happy farm animals, and fear: fear of confronting one's complicity in causing animals to be suffer and be killed; fear of switching from the comfortable and mainstream ideology to the new and relatively unknown, though ultimately most humane one.


Update: You can hear an interview with Dr. Joy on the Vegan Freak podcast, number 29.
Posted by: Gary / 10:49 AM
Comments:
a very interesing post, gary. I hope you don't mind if i include it in the first edition of the Carnival of Empty Cages, which will be published on April 1. Thanks for this, i hope it will generate some discussion
# posted by Anonymous vegankid : 2:36 AM
 
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