Dreaming the Future Closer

I’m thinking of this as a ‘throat-clearing’ post.   There’s a lot that I have been thinking about, but it seems to be all running together in my head.  What I want to do is think through the issues that define the blockage and untangle them a bit.  If you, dear readers, come away with a clearer picture of my goals, all the better.  It will probably take more than one post.  First. before I forget, the cut.

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Just something I ran across last night:  

The Dahomean believes, and will say with conviction, that each narrative “history” is fixed and unique, both in form and content.  We tried the experiment of reading to a cult head two different versions of the myth giving the quarrel of the two brothers, Sogbo, the Thunder, and Sagbata, the Earth….The unhesitating reply was that the gods do not reveal the same things to everyone, and that each narrator was telling “true history” according to the way the vodun have given it to him.—Melville J. & Frances S. Herskovits, Dahomean Narrative (18)

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Okay, so I usually don’t do the commenting on the news thing, but I’m making a special exception in this case.  Maybe it’s that I have just seen this, too.  But I want to dissect this one for a moment.  This won’t make a lot of sense if you don’t follow that first link. 

Maybe it’s just my general despair at how politicians so easily mouth ideas of republican and democratic virtues without the hard choices that would back them up when it includes treating people different than you according to those values.

First, let’s bracket the most obvious question which has not been quite entirely settled, namely as to whether this is, in fact, actual santeria ritual or something else.

Now, let’s follow out the logic of the situation a little.  The Supreme Court has established that animal sacrifice is legal and protected like other forms of religious action.  Which means that Mr. Valdez has no real legal footing here.  So, what he’s doing suggests he’s making a political statement, relying on the fact that nothing will likely come of the investigation into who left the remains. 

He gets to take a stand about “how things are in Texas” (i.e. not like everywhere else), which is a favorite posture for Texan politicians.  Score.  He gets to satisfy the conservative-ish Christians (we don’t tolerate those heathens here).  Score.  He even, if he plays his cards right, gets to satisfy the meat squeamish and vegetarian.  Score.

Hmm.  Interesting.  Now, let’s place some bets.  Will he broaden his concern about animal cruelty to target the meat production industry?  Will he make moves to put an end to it entirely?  Because if the sacrifice of chickens constitutes animal cruelty, wow, he is going to be a busy, busy man dealing with the far more inhumane situations that arise in the meat industry. 

I wonder, does he support the Texas cattle ranchers?  They slaughter animals, too.* 

What all this talk obscures is that sacrifice in general occurs humanely, with an eye to the animal suffering as little distress as possible.  Sacrifice is an inherently small-scale production with the participants putting a lot more attention on the individual animal, so it’s far easier to be humane than it is in large-scale meat production. 

If it’s the waste of those particular chickens that constitutes cruelty, well, again, Mr. Valdez will be terribly busy dealing with the waste of the meat industry.

What’s frustrating, then, is it starts to look like Mr. Valdez isn’t really concerned about the animals, but about a political opportunity out of the event.  Politicians have to do that from time to time, sure, but he’s doing so at the expense of those santeria practitioners, who are also part of his constituency. 

He’s making implied threats to them, discouraging them from the practice of their religion.  He is also, thereby, implying that they are to certain extent outside his protection, suggesting they might be more free to ridicule than others, or worse.  He has an obligation to his constituency, not just to those he imagined voted for him or who will vote for him.  He has a civic duty in which he is failing. 

I’m not saying he’s not in a hard place, but that’s why politicians used to be admired, because they stood up and did their duty even when it was hard.  They took hold of their civic duty and bore it as nobly as they could, even when that meant taking some flack from those around them.

I really don’t want this to come across as sarcastic, because this story raises some very important issues about how we treat the animals that compose our food chain.  It raises questions about how we relate to them and the obligations that we owe them.  I don’t want that to disappear beneath my frustration for how this case is being handled.

At the same time, it just feels like a knee-jerk accusation of animal cruelty is just plain wrong-headed.  The treatment of these chickens was likely significantly better than the treatment of many other chickens before slaughter. 

The accusation conceals the real problems with our (non) relation to the animals that become our food by shifting the focus away from that toward these rituals.  It projects the real ethical challenges with our food consumption onto them, merely because we have had to see these animals while we can safely ignore the other animals we eat. 

*And, to be clear here, too, I don’t think Texas cattle ranchers deserve blanket criticism, either.  While there are problems with the meat industry as a whole, blanket criticisms won’t really get us that far in making it better.  It accuses the innocent with the guilty, allows us to forget that people who raise livestock can (and often do) actually care a good deal for those animals.

So there is this beautiful passage in Plato’s Phaedrus in which he describes the orbits of the gods about the Good, each accompanied in train by the souls they have chosen for their retinue.  It’s a beautiful passage and, sadly, I don’t have a copy of the work ready to hand to quote. 

But I was always struck by how that seemed to parallel the notion in many African diaspora faiths that the orisha or loa chose heads.  The metaphor seemed nearly identical, right up to the notion that the orsha/loa were in turn oriented toward Olodumare or Bon Dieu, the greater Good.

So, let me share this little bit I came across in Simone Weil’s Intimation of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks:

The image of the man as a plant whose root penetrates heaven is linked in the Timaeus to a theory of chastity….This plant is sprinkled by celestial water, a divine semen, which enters the head.  In that man who continually exercises the spiritual and the intellectual part of himself…in him the whole contents of the head, including the divine semen, is propelled by circular movements like those which govern the rotation of the heavens, the stars and sun.  This divine semen is what Plato calls the divine being lodged with us, in us, and whom we must serve. (98-99)

How well this parallels the whole notion of initiation and worship in many of the African diaspora faiths!  It’s interesting to think of that in evolutionary terms, as indication perhaps that the two share a common ancestor.  If naught else, it’s interesting to consider in terms of parallel development.