Humanism and factory farming

I have been a vegetarian most my life. I have written about my reasons quite extensively about 6 years back, and most of these are just as valid today. The objective of this post is to provide a few more points of view on the related topic of factory farming based on more recent reading or conversations. Caveat - naturally, my biases here, given this information.

Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens, speaks at length about what he calls the religion of Humanism, which dictates the ideals of our present times. According to its unwritten diktats, human beings are equated to a god among animals with more rights than any other species. The rest of the world and all other beings exist solely for the benefit of humanity. Accordingly, other living beings have so little rights that it is socially acceptable to farm them in factories so that their meat can be harnessed for our use. The only aim of factory farming is to maximise the output, while minimising the cost involved. As of 2011, factory farms account for 99.9 percent of chickens for meat, 97 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, 95 percent of pigs, and 78 percent of cattle currently sold in the United States. World over, more animal products are factory farmed than raised in free range farms.

One show that I have always enjoyed watching on Discovery channel is How It's Made, which outlines several industrial products ranging from tiny screws to large car radiators. Every one of its episodes are surprising in how many procedures actually go into producing even a paper-clip in a factory. We use these devices with almost no knowledge of the processes that create them. This fact is true of factory farmed animals as well. Harari writes about how hens and chickens who have a complex world of behavioural needs and drivers, are caged in enclosures where they cannot flap their wings or even stand fully erect. He describes how pigs, the most intelligent and inquisitive of mammals apart from the apes, are grown in cramped crates, separated from their piglets soon after birth. Dairy cows who live all their lives in small enclosures, living in their own urine and feces, are reduced to being a mouth to feed and an udder to milk. However, we are completely insulated from knowledge of the assembly lines of carnage that ultimately bring our meat to our tables - just like other industrial products. The factory farming industry thrives on this ignorance of its customers.

So how does one make an informed choice here without being at conflict with one's conscience? I found a heuristic adopted by a friend of mine to be most practical. He was vegetarian because he could eat anything that he could bring himself to kill. He would grapple with the idea of doing this mentally and concluded that he drew the line at vegetarianism. Another alternative is described by Erza Klein, the founder and editor-at-large at Vox.com, who says that eating lesser meat could be more effective than eating no meat at all. Ezra speaks about past instances where he would stay for months on a vegetarian diet, only to succumb to temptation and relapse to "full-on omnivorism" because of one exception that he made. Later, he relaxed these restrictions to turn 'almost vegetarian' - where he would eat meat or fish when he would travel. Today he is almost vegan, while going vegetarian when he travels. Ezra points out that if the world's population as a whole ate 30% lesser meat, it would have a much larger impact than if 5% turned completely vegetarian. Eating lesser meat, especially factory farmed meat could be a more pragmatic approach than turning completely vegetarian.

Ezra also speaks about how someday in the future look back on factory farming of animals just as we did with slavery or gender equality, and ask ourselves how we could willfully let this happen to other sentient beings. The market for organic and free-range products are rising everywhere  which makes it increasingly easier to consume animal products that are not factory farmed. Apart from resting easier on our conscience, this choice has so many other benefits, healthy, environmental or otherwise, that I need not point out. Even as I write the credo of Humanism, one which subordinates all other living beings to the sole benefit of man, it sounds a little ludicrous in present times. The grip of Humanism as we know it is reducing, and though I am not sure if I would live to see the day the production of our meat staples would go back to more 'humane' means than factory farms, we are most certainly headed that way.

Inspiration / Sources:

1. Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
2. The imperfect veganism of Ezra Klein

The systematic corruption of an entire society

How was an abomination like Hitler allowed to walk the face of the earth, with one of the most powerful countries of Europe at his bidding?

How did a party without a majority come to wield so much power? How were Hitler's orders executed in broad daylight, with the endorsement of an educated, conscientious society? How was the transfer of power, authority and the subservience of an entire nation nearly complete in a matter of weeks?

There is more to that than meets the eye, and I am only beginning to scratch the surface. 

A quick breakdown of events as they transpired in the year of 1933. The Nazi party was a minority and did not have a majority vote from the previous elections. In February, a fire broke out in the Reichstag - the German parliament building. The Nazis used this as an opportunity to claim that Germany was facing a communist revolution, but that was merely a trigger for a multitude of political actions and alliances that had happened in the background. The bottom line - Hitler was made the chancellor and granted dictatorial power in March 1933 - the power to issue the most ruthless orders without legal objection.

The manner in which the Nazis moved subsequently is revealing. Within two months after March 1933, the national police was taken over, and people at the leading posts were replaced by Nazi officials. The SS was instituted in Bavaria under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler. This period saw the disappearance of extant politicians overnight - any politicians that the Nazis thought would not support their agenda. These politicians were "neutralized". It also saw widespread burning of books across German universities in huge bonfires in the open. 

"Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people" - Heinrich Heine, Jewish German playwright, ca. 1820-21.

Just to reiterate, all this happened in a period of two months. Imagine going off on a long vacation, only to return to your country and not recognize it.

This begs the question - how did the people allow for this to happen? How was there widespread support for the Nazis through all these events? The answer lies in the will of a handful of individuals that were driven by an evil agenda, handpicked for the ruthless manner in which they could further it. A handful of individuals that Adolf Hitler knew intimately well - the likes of Heinrich Himmler, Herman Göring and Joseph Goebbels.

Over the years that succeeding the quick rise of the Nazi party, the whole nation was turned systematically into Nazi sympathizers. People who aligned with the Nazis were rewarded. More importantly,anybody who did not was brutally punished. Families would disappear on mere suspicion. The system rewarded informers, and especially if the victims were Jewish.

This photograph from 1936 is iconic. It shows one man standing with his arms crossed as Hitler passed through a public rally. That man is August Landmesser, a German who fell in love with a Jewish woman. He was sentenced to two years in a labour camp, and his would be bride was sent to a death camp. Today, we remember August Landmesser. We remember him because what he did - not saluting - took so much courage, and that should never be forgotten. 

We must understand that resistance was completely futile. Anybody who opposed the party disappeared. Their lives, and the lives of their loved ones were taken, and there was no trace of martyrdom - one does not turn into a martyr by vanishing. How pointless does it seem to stake one's entire life to making a statement, only to disappear and end up forgotten?

In effect, the German nation - the Volk (the masses), the Wehrmacht (the army) and everybody it contained were turned into pawns. Pawns of a regime of evil men who propagated this evil and brutally punished anyone who could even be suspected of opposing them. Dan Carlin, in his excellent podcast Hardcore History, remarks about the people who rose with Hitler and thrived in his autocratic regime. Ones who could sit in their luxurious Berlin villas and send armies of young Germans to fight in the the Russian plains in winter, to die a painful, pointless death in the name of patriotism. Who could field boys as young as 12 to defend Berlin on its last legs when they hid in their bunkers or sought to escape to Argentina. Who could perpetrate unspeakable atrocities on the psyche of an entire nation. Dan mentions how these Nazi leaders would be out of jobs in a democracy. 

The example of Hitler and the Nazi party isn't one to to be taken in isolation. It is arguably the best documented failing of human civilization, but it is sure as hell not the only failing. The reason it is documented and spoken about in such elaborate tones is so that we know what can happen to civilized, educated, conscientious societies, if we are not guarded. It is documented so that we can never forget.

While the Nazi regime in Germany was an extreme example, we are surrounded even today by systemic corruption in society, where honest public officials are tormented until they either capitulate to the corrupt system or resign. The degree of corruption may vary, but the manner in which it propagates is similar - top down, and corrupt leaders carefully selecting like-minded and often ruthless aides. This corruption trickles all the way down to the common man, who is merely a pawn in this grand scheme. The poorer and more desperate the pawns, the more unlikely they are to disturb the order that exploits them. This corrupt order toils hard to sustain the status quo, and until its viscous propagation is broken, there is no hope for alleviating some of humanity's worst suffering in this day and age. 

Inspiration / Sources:
1. The Ghost of the Ost front series - Harcore History by Dan Carlin
2. Topology des Terror  Museum in Berlin
3. The man who did not salute Hitler

Spread too thin

The fable of the frog in the well illustrates, quite convincingly, the limitations and the narrow-world view one obtains from a lifetime's worth of experience that is confined merely to one's immediate surroundings. The extent to which we travel and have access to different experiences is exponentially greater than any other generation before us. Besides, the internet enables us to gather glimpses of the remotest corners of the planet from the comfort of our armchairs. It is tempting to think that these diverse experiences from several corners of the world, should cause our world-view to expand, making us more broad-minded. Moreover, this exposure is an opportunity for us to enrich our well-springs of human wisdom - allowing us to draw inspiration, and in-turn, translate it into the creation of sublime art and profound philosophy. At the very least, this is the same breath in which evangelists of the digital and information age would pitch its benefits.

But are there less obvious, more devious ways in which this abundance of information is affecting our conscious and unconscious interactions with the world around us? For practically the entire year, I have been on a self-imposed information age exile, where my use of the internet for news and social media is less than 5% of what it used to be at the end of 2016. But I do notice that when I read, watch or listen to something good, I pause and reflect upon it to a greater extent, and engage with it more actively. In other words, I try to question, reason and absorb the essence of the content I do consume to a greater extent, because I have the time and space to do this - time and space that is afforded to me because I am not constantly bombarded by an unrelenting flow of information.

However, the powers that be - mostly a bunch of smart engineers cooped up in shiny office buildings in the Bay Area - are working precisely against this tendency. These companies are locked in deadly competition, vying for our attention spans through mechanisms that rely on a stimulating a concoction of feel good hormones in our brain through their user interfaces. The direct consequence of this competition is the whittling down of our attention span. The risk here is that our attention is spread too thin - so thin that it counters the premise that was posed in the beginning of this post. Too much information signifies breadth, that is increasingly coming at the cost of depth.

Bombarded with this barrage of information, it is increasingly relegated to mere and temporary stimulation, rather than as a means for deeper thought or engagement. Its audience is transformed into passive spectators of data, as the world goes by at a dizzying speed. And this is completely understandable, because if we did think deeply about every piece of information that reaches us through these channels, our heads would hurt with the effort. My premise is that our world is reinforcing a generation of shallow minds that skim information off the top, having very limited deep learning. It is best that we stand guarded against this rising trend, whereby, paradoxically as it may seem, increasing exposure to information only makes us shallower.

PS: Sources of inspiration and recommended viewing:
1. Quit Social Media - Cal Newport
2. Do Our Devices Control More Than We Think? - Tristan Harris

Genius and Insanity

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

The quote above belongs to Oscar Levant, an American pianist, comedian and writer. The quote is arguably more famous than the rest of Levant's work, and its first part has been used innumerable times since. This link is rather easy to notice when we examine the personal lives of some of the most creative geniuses have confronted insanity either in the form of drugs or depression - Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Jimi Hendrix and Robin Williams are names that come all too easily to my head.

However, this marriage between prodigal creativity and life-long struggles with physical and mental illness makes for an unsteady concoction. It is easy to come across comments that look at this combination and lead people to discredit, in some measure, the quality and import that the work of an artist carries.

"What is the point of all of his creative genius, if he had to battle chronic depression and addition all his life?"

"We must be guarded from heeding the advice that she gives. After all, she killed herself."

There is another angle to examine here, and we shall do that after a short, but relevant digression.

Nathaniel Ayers was an African American musician who was trained in the prestigious Juilliard school of music in New York, but was roaming the streets of LA as a homeless person. His musical career was tragically cut short by a constant battle with schizophrenia. Nathaniel was playing on the streets of LA with a violin with just two strings, when his talent was recognized by a New York time columnist, Steve Lopez. This eventually led to a movie being made on his life - The Soloist. One incident in Nathaniel's life involved Robert Gupta, a violinist in the LA Philharmonic, who was giving Nathaniel a music lesson. Before they could commence, he saw a glint in Nathaniel's eye and observed that he was staring vacantly into a faraway space - he was having an attack. Nathaniel was known to react violently during his schizophrenic attacks and he refused treatment because of a history of traumatic incidents involving shock therapy. Robert was at a fix as to what he could do at that moment. He picked up his violin and started playing a movement from a Beethoven composition. As he bowed the violin, he noticed calmness return gradually to Nathaniel's eyes. Nathaniel then picked up his own violin and started playing a wide range of pieces from memory, spanning several artists. Robert Gupta's TED talk is a brilliant five minute summary of this incident, where he concludes that music was Nathaniel's solace - a channel through which he could transmute the thoughts and illusions that tortured his mind into mellifluous music in the real world.

Maria Popova, the prolific writer of Brain Pickings, argues this point rather convincingly, in relation to cynical criticisms directed at troubled artists. She opines that these artists who suffered, no doubt, would have only suffered more, but for their artistic expression. In that sense, their art is what salvaged their life and gave it meaning. She points out that there are so many people suffering from mental illness that have not created the Starry Night.

"Van Gogh's art did not take his life, it redeemed it. Without it he would have just been an average, unkempt, mentally ill man, who died miserable in a small village. With it, he was able to experience moments of transcendent joy and meaning, which also happened to produce some of the greatest and most lasting works of art of all time."

While all the examples presented here are extreme and anecdotal, the true relationship between creativity and mental illness is far more complex than a couple of arguments that can be made using mere conjecture. (Maria herself points out to that here). Nevertheless, I find myself agreeing with Maria's assertion that art and creative expression saved artistic geniuses from insanity to the extent that it salvaged and added meaning to their otherwise miserable lives. Their art led their lives to be a beacon that spans across the annals of time and reaches us, rather than a candle's flicker that insignificantly dies out. There is, therefore, vastly more that we can learn from the lives and messages of artistic geniuses than cynics would have us believe.

Death, as a punctuation mark.

Death is very likely the single best invention of life - Steve Jobs. 

Jobs is not alone in portraying death as an unmistakeable source of clairvoyance. Phil Koeghan's (long-standing host of The Amazing Race) fantastic podcast episode on the Tim Ferriss Show got me thinking on these lines, where he describes how an incident as a 19 year old, where he nearly drowned, changed his perspective on life for the better. Josh Waitzkin, the chess prodigy and master of learning, describes a similar incident, where he almost drowns. The same can be said about Randy Pausch, whose battle with cancer in his last few days led to his illustrious life's seminal work - The Last Lecture. 

The common thread that runs through this perspective on death is that it is steeped in western philosophy. This is not a new thought. Seneca, the Greek stoic, has expounded at length on the Shortness of Life and the need to live as though every unfolding moment is one's very last.

"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing" - Seneca on the Shortness of Life

Along similar lines on a theme covered in another post, I was mulling the idea of visualizing death as a practice, in order to connect with a compass deep within. Morbid as this sounds, there can be few ways of making the most of life without acknowledging its fleeting shortness. But just as I pen down these lines, an argument wells up within.

A diametrically opposite, albeit older philosophy exists that deals very differently with death - vedic philosophy. Death is not seen to be an end, but rather, a checkpoint before the beginning of another journey. It is attachment to the mind and the body, temporary vessels that hold thoughts, memories and a conscious identity of one lifetime, that causes a rift in a continuum spanning several lifetimes. With the same conviction that western philosophy eulogizes death as a clairvoyant that emphasizes the urgency of the present moment, vedic philosophy dismisses it as a frivolous illusion that distorts reality.

"Arjuna, the wise know that you and I and the rest existed before this event, and will continue to exist after this event. The resident of this body experiences its childhood, youth and old age before moving on to the next. This body gets attached to the world around it, and so fears death...."  - Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 2, verse 12 to 16 (paraphrased), Quoted from Devdutt Pattanaik's My Gita 

Interestingly, these two poles - oriental and occidental, do converge upon a common ground. As disparate as they are in describing what death is, they seem to agree upon how fear must not be the dominant response. Both schools emphasize on understanding life and death for what they are, and living in the present moment with this understanding. Fear is seen as an inherent tendency that seeks to always distort this understanding, and must be overcome. The same quote above from the Gita continues

"... But the wise, aware of the inner resident's immortality, aware that the flesh goes through cycles of birth and death, do not fear change, or death. They know that what matters is the immortal, not the mortal. - Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 2, verse 12 to 16 (paraphrased)

And Seneca says -

"And so, however small the amount of it [life], it is abundantly sufficient, and therefore, whenever his last day shall come, the wise man will not hesitate to go to meet death with steady step." - Seneca on the Shortness of Life

I am often confused as to which idea of death I subscribe to, as I feel my own self caught in the swirls where these worlds intersect. As a child, the essence of Hindu philosophy has left an indelible impression on me - one that I continue to respect even if I do not understand it wholly. My education and world-view for the most part is now Western, which makes occidental concepts easier to understand and grasp. While I grapple with this dilemma, there is always solace in knowing that there is convergence somewhere in a middle-ground, which appeals to my sensibilities.  

Teaching empathy

A saying that can be traced back to the Cherokee Indian tribe is something that sounds quite familiar - Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins. Lessons and sermons in empathy abound us to the extent that these are dubbed cliches. Ironically, it is because empathy could so easily be taken for granted that the understanding of its full import is prevented. On the day following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Jane Elliot, a third grade teacher in a small town in Iowa, decided to change that with her class. She did so with a powerful and bold social experiment that changed their lives. 

Elliot had her class of all-white third graders identified as blue-eyed people and brown-eyed people. On the first day, she proclaimed that the blue-eyed children were superior to their brown-eyed peers and offered them special privileges - a few extra minutes at recess, exclusive access to the playground equipment etc. She had the brown-eyed children wear collars and praised their blue-eyed classmates at every opportunity, while often taking a dig at their expense. This treatment went on for a whole day, and was reversed the next day to ensure that the shoe was on the other foot. These children in Elliot's class in Iowa, felt for a day, what marginalized groups of people - Native Americans and Blacks in the context of their country, felt the whole of their lives. During the course of the experiment, Elliot describes how she saw sweet little third-graders who were the best of friends turn against each other in a mere span of 15 minutes.  Elliot's experiment is plausibly the only way these children would have learnt true empathy for these cultures, with even an iota of authenticity. 2 decades after this experience, the children of that classroom met for a reunion, where they attested to this fact in unequivocal terms. All of this is beautifully captured in a mind-expanding Frontline documentary, which I simply cannot recommend enough (hat-tip to David McCrany's excellent podcast for guiding me to this).

The relevance of this study bears true to this day, and will continue to do so as long as I feel, sadly as it may seem, innate human mind tendency to discriminate against the other. I often wonder (and I am almost sure of undocumented cases) where an Indian teacher may have replicated this experience in our society, where barriers of caste, creed and religion have always been simmering under the surface. My own experience in our educational institutions has been one where peers who are a little differently wired are socially marginalized by their adolescent classmates - an age where friendships can be the only solace. While this quality is common among teenagers in almost every culture, I have observed sadly, that this is as applicable for a class of "mature" Indian 25-year-olds - a rot that festers deep in the roots of our society. As I recollect these rather unfortunate experiences in my own life with a twinge of guilt, I find myself awestruck by the impact that Elliot's lesson had on the impressionable minds in an Iowa classroom. 

More accurate predictions, in hindsight

I was always aware of hindsight bias - how we as humans seem wiser in hindsight about events that have already transpired in a certain way. However, I was not aware of the extent to which society quietly and ignorantly practised this vice. As I read Daniel Kanheman's explanations on this phenomenon in his seminal book Thinking Fast and Slow, I was taken aback by how substantial its impact could be. 

Kanheman cites a couple of experiments that were conducted on test subjects. The first set were political commentators in Jerusalem, where the task was to predict the outcome of the meeting between Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong. The initial observations were recorded before the meeting took place, and the participants were asked to state probabilities of certain outcomes. After the meeting occurred and they became aware of the results of the meeting, the same participants were asked to remember the initial values of probabilities for events that they had already assessed. Surprisingly, the participants changed their memories to cite increased probabilities for events that did take place, and reduced probabilities for events that did not, from their initial values.

The other experiment involves a bridge in a US city, Duluth Minnesota, where two groups were polled on the importance of hiring a dedicated public official, to lookout for debris clogging the flow of water. In the absence of any information about 24% of the first group thought that such an official was necessary. The second group were informed of events where debris had clogged the flow of water, and they were similarly asked about what their prediction would have been in the absence of this information. The group polled an average of about 56%, even after specifically being asked to not get influenced by the information they now knew about the bridge. 

It turns out that several professions, where outcomes are uncertain, are harshly judged by society. The example of doctors and physicians really jumped out at me here, because of the unfavourable view that I harbour about that practice, where endless tests are prescribed to seemingly healthy people, almost to indicate a nexus between doctors and labs. However, society is harsh, unfairly so, in its judgement of the failings of a doctor. Because that is how we are naturally disposed.

It is alarming to notice that human beings make so many errors of judgements because we are completely blinded to how their behaviour is shaped. There stems also a realization that I am as guilty (or ignorant) as anybody else in this regard, and I must observe greater caution while forming each and every one of the beliefs and judgements that shape my world-view  This heightened mental vigilance ought to be a lifelong endeavour, and the outset, it is tiring to think of how much effort this would demand!