There is a certain kind of bug that on a day like today one month ago I would be digging up from the French soil. The weather is cool, and rainclouds hover above the purview of gravity. The air and the soil are damp and musky, but this is from old rain, days old but still lingering like perfume. I am bent over on dirty hands and knees, clawing potatoes out of the soft, upturned earth. Occasionally I come across an earthworm, incised into two squirming halves by Luc’s motoculture, the machine with one subterranean claw that parts the soil like a biblical trench. I scramble after the machine, plucking up the yellow or rose nuggets and leveling out the beveled earth. I break open harder clumps with both hands, and sift through the soil with my fingers. It’s like sifting for gold, we say.
There is a certain kind of insect, orange, or perhaps blood-orange, four connected bulbs including the head with the largest at the back. Its carapace is lined with black stripes so dense that on its rotund posterior it seems perhaps black with orange stripes rather than the reverse. The joints of its six legs are black, as are its delicately hooked, ballerina feet. Where the motoculture has passed it lies with legs folded against its belly, constricted or as if asphyxiated, with a dozen of its cousins beside. At first I think we have killed it, but slowly it unfolds, wriggles furiously, tips absurdly over the broad lip of its shell, and crawls the slope of the trench we have created for it as lazily determined as a Steinbeck-ian land turtle. In a snap it has oriented itself perfectly, knows out-of-the-trench from in- as easily as it knows up from down. I bury it in dirt.
I bury it in dirt as I will all its dozen cousins when my cracked and thumbed hands sift through the soil. I think, perhaps it will suffocate, or I think, perhaps it will dig its way out. I find a large black beetle, long and its carapace rainbow-shiny like oil or soapy water. It meets the same fate. I think, perhaps it will eat the half an earthworm I found earlier, grow fat. The next chitinous creature I grasp between two fingers and, delicately, guiltily, toss away. I have encountered the Jain dilemma.
Jainism is, roughly speaking, a radical vegetarian sect of Hinduism. South Asian philosophy has never been my area of specialization, but I do have a special sympathy for Jains and an as yet un-tested interest in Jainism. Jainism takes the too oft-forgotten Hindu aversion to the consumption of meat and applies it down to the microcosm, where beetles and microbes could as easily be your reincarnated mother as any sacred cow or Bengal tiger. When Jains walk the streets they carry a broom before them, the better to sweep away the earthworms in their path. I am told Jains drink through filtered straws, it being unfilial to swallow your dead, and returned, microbial relative. And most inconveniently, Jains cannot be farmers – after all, to plough the soil is to kill what lives beneath it.
I spent seven weeks on an organic farm in Burgundy. I am a vegetarian, and more importantly I am a vegetarian not primarily for health or eco-friendly reasons, but because I consider the consumption of meat an unnecessary kind of slaughter. There are as many kinds of vegetarians as there are varieties of heirloom tomatoes, but my line is this – if it flees in terror from my knife, I won’t kill it. And yet over seven weeks I must have squashed, squished, buried and drowned untold thousands of creepy crawlies. A duck has an obvious right to life, but now I realize that so does my orange critter with dense, black striping. What’s less obvious to me, is a solution.
I can’t simply stop eating. I find moral dilemmas solved by self-sacrifice aesthetically distasteful, but there’s more to it than that. The whole basis of my three-year-old conversion to vegetarianism was a satori that no thinking being is less deserving of life than any other. A pig has an obvious right to life? Me too!
But if I am to keep eating, is the Jain solution enough? Wouldn’t it be easy for me to never set foot on a farm, organic or otherwise, again? Of course, this is more of a rhetorical trick than an actual solution. No amount of humility before reincarnation has regularly stopped Jains from buying into an agricultural system. One must eat to live, especially if the alternative is to be yourself gulped down along with your younger brother’s mango lassi. But it makes no difference if it is your muscle or your money that provides the force behind the plough. I don’t eat meat, but nor would I buy a steak and then throw it away. A step removed is not a step in the other direction.
Is it enough simply to minimize the amount of death that goes into keeping me hale and healthy? If I was starving on the verge of death I might kill a cow and eat it, but eating two cows would be excessive. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced there’s a discernible moral difference between killing one million insects, and killing one million insects and one mammal.* The big numbers make the small ones insignificant. Which brings me to a terrifying option – choosing an omnivorous lifestyle. Death is a part of life, Matthew, deal with it. Let’s just accept it and go out for some surf ‘n turf.
Here’s another option, the one I find most difficult to accept. Somehow, someway, life on six legs or none at all is worth less than life on four. Bugs don’t count for nuthin. I say I don’t eat “thinking beings” and its obvious that bugs don’t think. But this reeks too much of pesca-vegetarian relativism for me. Suddenly I’m unable to find a line at all. I might as well embrace 12 year old girl vegetarianism (“cows are cute, but I eat fish, they’re icky”) or better yet, Albertan-brand diets (“beef is good vittles, but a dog is a man’s best friend”). Watch as the line preventing me from eating someone less intelligent than myself slowly evaporates.
Perhaps I’m being unfair to myself. Jainism, after all, is a religion founded on very specific metaphysical principles, ones I don’t subscribe to. It’s probably just too much to hope for guiding principles to help orient secular me. It was foolish to calculate how many powers of tens of insects must perish for my organic squash and zucchini autumn soup, versus how many end up in my belly with a steak. The questions are too large, and my range of experience too small. Is there a wiser being out there, a wrinkled sage, a supercomputer’s supercomputer, or an entire race of ancient extraterrestrials, who can tear this problem apart? I like to think that there can be such a thing as a secular morality, derivable from first principles.
But maybe I’m just being naive. Help?
*I’m admittedly ignoring the prospect of simply minimizing the amount of food I intake overall, but I’m not sure I’m prepared psychologically to deal with the question.
Traveling Hat 