Here’s a fun fact: about three and a half years ago, a significant portion of the current senior class were vegetarians. For our summer reading book, we read "Eating Animals", a horrifying expose of the factory farming industry. While nobody ever did a survey of how many people actually read the book and changed their eating habits, the number was significant enough that there was a running joke that Duke had assigned the book to lower food costs in the Marketplace.
This effect, as far as I can tell, has almost entirely dissipated. Many of my friends soon went back to their old eating habits. I ate meat again the first time I went home, and over the years my eating habits returned to what they were, and I just stopped thinking about it. When I think about this, I know how irrational and wrong my actions are. Realizing that I lack the willpower to take responsibility for a problem, I’ve simply stopped acknowledging its existence.
I’ve watched myself respond like this to other issues, too. I’ll encounter a problem so overwhelming that the only appropriate response to it seems to be to dedicate too big a portion of my life to solving it. I’ll flirt for a while with doing so, but when I can’t, I just let it disappear from my conception of the world.
I know why I do this. Being consistently aware of major issues and doing nothing to solve them feels wrong for two reasons. For one, it really hurts to acknowledge both a major problem and our human weakness not to do the appropriate amount to solve it. And, for another, it’s socially unacceptable. It’s hypocritical. You’re going to feel strongly about animal rights and still eat meat? You’re going to feel that money controlling politics is terrible for the country and then still benefit from that money? You’re going to believe that rampant inequality is a sickness with which our society is plagued, and then spend your whole life trying to get ahead?
Hypocrisy isn’t allowed. We think it feels wrong. Immoral.
But today, I’m defending it.
I think we often forget how essential hypocrisy is to our identity as a country. Remember the good old days? We acknowledged that “all men are created equal” while we declared some men three-fifths of a person. We declared ourselves a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” yet we did not allow the majority of the people to vote. We declared that all men are “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,” among them “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” yet we enslaved over 10% of our population and violently forced indigenous peoples into submission.
Over the course of the past two hundred years, we have come closer to living up to the ideals we created at the nation’s inception. For centuries, hordes of social reformers, armed with nothing but the rights to free speech and assembly, the statements of principle produced during and immediately after the Revolutionary War and their own persuasive skill, have sought to hold America to its principles.
Would it have been preferable if we could have just changed society instantaneously? Certainly. Would it have been plausible? Certainly not—not when consensus was so delicate already. And would we have been better off if we couched our language in order to avoid sounding hypocritical? Of course not.
If I were a better person, I’d never eat another bite of meat—factory farming is bad and eating meat isn’t good for the environment and I don’t know enough about animal nervous systems to know how much they really suffer but I do know enough to be worried and to take their pain seriously. But when my Dad made me my favorite dinner of flank steak when I got home freshman year, I deemed his feelings and my taste buds more important than all of those considerations.
Recently, I’ve allowed my convictions about meat back into my life. Doing so is uncomfortable. It feels wrong to question my behavior so regularly, and it feels uncomfortable to remember the lecture I gave about pig welfare last night and then enjoy the bacon in my salad the next. But now I eat less meat, and I consciously seek out meat that’s responsibly raised. This is doable for me, and it’s doable for society—it’s far more plausible to get everyone to eat 25 percent less meat and seek out better sources for it than to make 25 percent of the population vegetarian. I think it’s a way forward.
My once idealist vegetarian class of 2015 is about to head into the workforce. So many of you, I know, were considering devoting your lives to causes that are important to you, and, at least for now, you’re not. Other considerations came into play, and now you’re doing consulting or banking or working for a corporation whose mission means nothing to you. It’s possible that holding onto those ideas which once seemed so motivating will start to feel uncomfortable, even immoral. Don’t let it.
You’re not doing enough about this messed up world, and I’m not doing enough. But if we remember that and come to live with it, then one day we’ll get the chance to advocate for our corporation to make a more socially responsible choice. We’ll be in a grocery store and feel like we can pay more for responsibly raised meat or choose something else for the night. We’ll find a way. We must not let our fears about not doing enough prevent us from doing anything at all.
Ellie Schaack is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
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