Martin’s post last week describing the first slaughter (and I use the word “slaughter” advisedly) in our new endeavor as purveyors of bison meat elicited a comment that urged us to consider the ethical fault line (presumably) running through every conscience, that unsteady place where we find ourselves rationalizing our actions to ourselves or to whatever audience our imaginations conjure up.

Martin tried to make his/our unease clear with the post’s title: Bloody Hands. So I’m wondering once again about the ethics of carnivorocity, as visible and treacherous a fault line as abortion, euthanasia, gun control, climate change, or cloning: when you stand on one side of the fault line, it’s easy to think that the earth itself will justify you when it opens up and swallows the dummies over there, proving that you were on the right side, at which point you can stop worrying all the time, for heaven’s sake, and go on your merry way without thinking about the issue ever again.

As usual, diving into the conversations available on the internet just sucked me deeper into the murk. A defense is available for every possible position and offered with wildly varying degrees of civility: meat-eaters supporting vegans and trashing vegetarians; meat-eaters sneering at any thought of self-restriction; vegetarians and vegans calling meat-eaters all sorts of names; vegetarians acknowledging that some meat-eating is environmentally acceptable; meat-eaters acknowledging that American meat production and consumption is for the most part grotesque. What’s a utopian-minded bison rancher to think?

Serendipity, as usual, is my guide: in chasing internet rabbits down their holes, I found a momentary resting place in a review of Maggie Kozel’s book The Color of Atmosphere: One Doctor’s Journey In and Out of Medicine. After describing a flummoxing patient she had as a second-year medical student, Kozel said, “[I] devoured the answers without asking the right questions.”

Of course, if you’re obsessive the way I am, then you’ll immediately begin worrying about what the right questions are, as in, if I’m “right” then others must be “wrong.” One of the hallmarks of the debate about meat-eating and its impact on the environment or the individual soul is the array of statistics and science that each side has amassed to prove the objective superiority of its argument. I’ve been persuaded by both sides and neither side, depending on the time of day, what I’ve just read, the weather, my most recent meal, and/or the health of my family, among other random criteria.

In other words, I don’t think science and statistics by themselves allow us to ask the right questions, since apparently convincing evidence can be found to shore up either side. Eating is one of those human activities rich with multiple levels of meaning; expecting questions directed at a specific level to adequately address the full range is a little like expecting a monoculture to support the diversity a polyculture allows. Although science poses some vitally important questions when it examines the issue of meat-eating, the nature of its inquiry must ignore other equally pressing but less quantifiable questions, such as, what conditions allow a multi-species community to flourish? Does eating meat (by humans) contribute or detract from our community’s flourishment (a word coined by our friend Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison)?

I hear the howls of protest even before I finish typing this sentence: how do you measure flourishment? Who decides the standards? Invalid! Too subjective! Well, yes. That’s what makes this a fault-line issue: it addresses the limits of our humanity and so necessarily includes subjective experience. To be honest, I don’t know how to measure flourishment; I suspect you just know it when you see it. And when you see it, you’re moved to describe it, knowing that the urge will be frustrated to at least some degree because flourishment, like all fruit, is the result of such a complex interaction of elements in space and time that any description will be incomplete. And of course it’s not a steady state; it waxes and wanes as circumstances change and sometimes double back on themselves.

In this context, the question of whether meat-eating is ethical can be answered unequivocally: it depends. One of the preconditions for flourishment is a sense of justice, a perspective that includes but also rises above the immediate tit-for-tat concerns of fairness. The scope of justice includes not just humanity but the earth itself—and perhaps the cosmos. It unrolls over the course of history, recognizing that particular injustices sometimes take generations, centuries, or millennia to wither, even with the powerful witness and effort of prophets and their followers. As I said in an earlier post, it may be that vegetarians and vegans are living forward into a time where justice is more fully realized. At the same time, issues of fairness and justice press at us every moment in this world where the lion and the lamb cannot yet lie down together, where predators are a vital part of an ecosystem that has developed in sync with domesticated animals.

Can meat be produced and consumed in a way that encourages justice and, hence, flourishment? I think it can. There are multiple instances of communities and societies that eat meat and live within that delicate balance that looks to the long-term well-being and dignity of the system as a whole, places like Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, although there are many, many others. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.) There are multiple instances of communities and cultures flourishing without eating meat, most notably for the purposes of this post the Hindu cultures whose vegetarian cuisines I eat with great pleasure. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.)

Likewise, there are communities and cultures that eat meat without flourishing, including most of the industrialized world, where concern for short-term profits and their consequent incitement of unrestrained appetite smother any hope of flourishment under mountains of animal excrement and anguish. Those places that encourage us (in the industrialized world) to measure the value of food in one way only—cheap is best—smother flourishment. Food is at the center of family, of community, of myth, of life. To reduce its essence to a single component is to denature its multivalent nutritional value.

Back to the ethical fault line, that place we stand uneasily, knowing that we may be swallowed: may those of us who recognize the fault line join hands—bloody or not—across the chasm and help each other seek the firmer footing of justice as our foundation. Flourishment will surely follow.

What we’re reading
Heather: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (still!)
Martin: Rodney Crowell, Chinaberry Sidewalks

Recently, like many Americans, I’ve been thinking about the issue of guns in civil society. The tragic shooting in Tucson certainly focused attention on the topic, as did a story on National Public Radio that identified the United States as the source of most of the guns being used by cartels in the Mexican drug wars, a story that aired days before we visited friends whose ranch is just a few miles from the Rio Grande. But other, more personal circumstances also got me thinking, like the three different episodes of gun violence, or the threat of gun violence, occurred during the past semester on the college campuses (2,000 miles apart) where two of our children are students. And all this happened before our first bison harvest at Madroño Ranch this past Monday, in which two 1,500-pound animals were felled by single shots from a .270 rifle.

Full disclosure: I don’t own a gun myself, although we have a gun safe well stocked with rifles and shotguns at the ranch. (They mostly belong to our son.) My grandfather taught me to shoot with a pellet gun, an activity which he oversaw carefully and I enjoyed mightily. I still take pleasure in target practice and found, the one time I tried it, that shooting skeet was a fine way to while away an afternoon. I don’t hunt and don’t expect that I ever will, although I have no objection to ethical hunting. I’ve thought that it might be wise to have a pistol when I wander around the ranch, in case one of the dogs riles up a pack of feral hogs and brings them back to me. My fear of shooting my own dog is sharper than my fear of rampaging pigs, however, and I remain pistol-less.

While there’s been no change in the number of guns I own, my thinking about guns has changed considerably over the last few years, to wit: I’ve concluded that there’s a difference between urban guns and rural guns. (Yes, yes, hold your applause.) A gun is a necessary tool on a ranch or farm. I’m very grateful that Robert, the ranch’s redoubtable manager, is an excellent shot. If the bulls we harvested this week felt any pain, it was less than momentary; they were dead quite literally within a couple of seconds.

And then there’s the issue of self-defense. A friend recently told me about an encounter he’d had on his remote South Texas ranch with an armed and heavily tattooed non-English-speaking trespasser he suspected of being a member of the fearsome MS-13 gang. My friend didn’t have a firearm at hand, but fortunately, after a tense exchange, the trespasser left. “I’ve never felt so naked,” my friend said. I understand: I, too, would have wanted some clothing in that situation.

And yet, and yet… we recently saw and thoroughly enjoyed the Coen brothers’ adaptation of True Grit. That is, Martin saw it; I had my hands over my eyes during several violent scenes. Even so, I loved the movie. At the same time, I made a new connection: imbedded in the myth of the American West is the image of the lone gunman, meting out swift and violent justice. No amount of regulation is going to smother the breathe from that compelling image.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for intelligent gun control. I’ve never felt so naked as the day that a student opened fire on the UT Austin campus a block from the room where our son Tito was in class. But I emphatically would not have felt more clothed if, as a bill passed by the Texas Senate in 2009 proposed, his fellow students been permitted to carry concealed handguns. Guns do not belong on campuses. Or in the hands of the mentally ill. Anyone who wants to own a gun has a responsibility to register, and law enforcement agencies should be able to trace every gun to its owner. Anyone who wants to buy an automatic or semi-automatic weapon should have to jump through a lot more hoops than a weekend hunter does. Gun shows should be heavily regulated. But the image of that lone, justice-seeking gunman is more powerful than any regulation. Did I walk out of True Grit disgusted by its glorification of violence? Of course not: I loved it, even as I was distressed by some of it. The story is part of my identity as a westerner, as a Texan.

On Wednesday, as I was wrestling with this post, Martin received a membership solicitation from the NRA. I suspect that the trigger for this unlikely offer must be the fact that he recently purchased from Amazon.com a copy of Jose Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting, the introduction of which was written by a visiting professor of environmental perception at Dartmouth College—not exactly a rip-roarin’ shoot-’em-up. If I’m correct, the NRA’s tracking mechanisms qualify as spooky at best, and maybe terrifying, but also revelatory of a mentality that refuses to see any kind of subtlety or gradation of perception.

Here’s the opening salvo of that membership solicitation: “Your constitutional right to own a gun is under attack by hundreds of anti-gun politicians, global gun ban diplomats at the U.N., militant anti-hunting extremists, radical billionaires and the freedom-hating Hollywood elite.”

The letter consistently associates freedom with gun ownership; restricting gun ownership equals restricting personal freedom. “Remember: the NRA is the one firewall that stands between our Second Amendment rights and those who would take our freedoms away.” Freedom, in this view, has nothing to do with national service, with love of country and fellow-citizens, with restraint or knowledge or self-discipline.

I visited the NRA website and found it even more appalling than its fear-mongering letter. Of the assault in Tucson, it says: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of this senseless tragedy, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and their families during this difficult time. We join the rest of the country in praying for the quick recovery of those injured.” There was no condemnation of the gunman who perpetrated the senseless tragedy. There was no call for self-examination. There was no exhortation to the faithful to adhere to any code of responsibility or ethics. I found nothing that encouraged gun-owner restraint or training, or an acknowledgment of the enormous social responsibility that comes with owning a gun.

I did find a persistent paranoia that encourages NRA members and sympathizers to view strangers as threatening and potentially aggressive. I did find—even as someone with a sympathetic view of some gun use—a willful and destructive distortion of that figure so many Americans love: Rooster Cogburn, the courageous gunman who takes the law into his own hands and then rides off into the empty landscape. Many of us love Rooster, yes, but his place is in the mythic past, not in the increasingly urban present.

I know and respect—and even love—individual members of the NRA; my grandfather was one of them. I went to its site in hopes of finding something to change my mind about gun control. But I left loathing the rhetoric the NRA has adopted in recent years. (In this regard, I highly recommend Jill Lepore’s excellent article “The Commandments,” about the way various groups, including the NRA, have sought to interpret the Constitution, in the January 17 issue of The New Yorker, and thank our daughter Elizabeth for bringing it to my attention.) To encourage people to think that their fellow citizens are their enemies is surely to unravel the careful work of the Constitution, which recognizes the precarious balance inherent in a federalist system, a balance requiring trust, self-restraint, and mutual good will among its participants. So while calls for legislation are important in curbing American’s extravagant gun violence, they aren’t enough: we need to call the NRA’s violent distortions of the Constitution to account. Maybe guns don’t kill people: maybe it’s NRA rhetoric that kills people.

What we’re reading
Heather: Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ
Martin: Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption