Most people have lost virtually all understanding of virtue. There is a lingering awareness, sure, perhaps captured best in the tired mother’s admonishment, “Patience is a virtue!” But largely, our culture has abandoned a robust comprehension, even implicit, of human virtue.
Blogs less amateurish and more sophisticated than this humble place expound on the fullness of virtue illuminated by the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas, who in turn gained much from Aristotle. It’s capital stuff. But we’ll save understanding those masters for another day. Today, we are only seeking a hint of virtue, a gesture and outline of what the thing might be.
The unlikely messenger of virtue in the 21st century is writer Jonathan Safran Foer. After a few acclaimed novels, Foer wrote about the meat industry in his 2009 non-fiction work Eating Animals. In 2019, he applied his extensive study of meat production to the “climate crisis” and produced the interesting book We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. The term “interesting” is applied in a general sense. Actually reading this tome sounds about as fun as a dental hygiene exam, but what Foer disclosed about the book in many interviews offers a most unexpected gesture toward virtue.
You are what you eat
The general premise of Foer’s book is that we cannot rely on sweeping, bureaucratic sea change to solve global problems. Here, Foer, of course, means literal global problems, but it could be applied metaphorically. He suggests that individual action affects global outcomes.
Now, that is the inconvenient truth. It’s much more pleasant to suppose that we are passengers aboard a cruise ship idling away the hours on deck while the crew scrambles to chart the course and avoid the icebergs. The trouble is the real world, as Foer rightly sees, is not a big cruise ship and we are not automatons going in the same direction. We are all continually going in different directions of our own accord. Dictates from on high have a terrible habit of falling on deaf ears or of failing in implementation. What is a tyrant to do?
Foer suggests that concerned citizens should stop eating so much meat in order to reduce man’s pernicious climate effects. He says its not enough to demand a radical overhaul of the economy through government demand but that we, the individual people running about the world eating and living, should do something.
Foer’s insight
He seems sincere, and Foer really tries to sell people on it. In his earnestness, Foer seems to honestly examine himself and his own motives. Confronted with the pesky limitations of individuality, Foer does not propose a sweeping mandate but instead suggests, ever so modestly, that people only eat meat after the sun goes down. Foer knows himself and the temptations of the flesh. Knowing that people are bound to slip up with an uncompromising mandate, Foer begs the reader to forego meat at breakfast and lunch.
Foer is adamant that he is not advocating all-vegan, all-the-time. He explained, “What we’re talking about is eating less. No, no. It’s really an important distinction. We’re not saying, like, reverse your identity or give up your culture. We’re saying eat less of a certain kind of food.”
Is giving up meat for two meals a day really a form of virtue? Yes! This is the path. Dramatic change is unlikely to stick but altering habits in a small but meaningful way is likely to yield great progress. These faltering steps mean there is a long way to go. Foer confessed his climate sins with bitter sorrow in one interview explaining that despite his solid plan for meat-eating, he did not have a “plan” for travel. Thankfully, he rectified his life and made the modest and attainable plan not to fly on an airplane for vacation but instead to vacation in a place he could reach by train from his home in Brooklyn. It seems laughable, really, but Foer is right that this is the extent of what most men are capable: small but meaningful change.
Backsliding into totalitarianism
The interviewer asked Foer to respond to the accusation that “the needle will not move an iota through the force of another member of the intelligentsia telling people the truth in a variety of ways, convincing them of the veracity and holiness of his positions and waiting for the light bulb to go on.” Foer responded, “And we need to take on some responsibility not because individuals can solve this problem – we cannot solve this problem alone – but because when we act and when we act collectively, we’re going to push corporations and legislators to behave differently.”
In this response, the member of the intelligentsia returns to his ivory tower of abstraction and fails to take into account what people are really like. Foer spent an entire book trying to convince people of the possibility of changing what they eat for two meals yet suddenly the corporations and legislators are going to really shake things up? Firstly, there’s not a great likelihood for everyone to get onboard with the perpetual climate Ramadan in the first place. Secondly, if it takes this much effort to make such a small change in the lives of men, how will the powers that be manage to force anyone to a desired course of action?
We exist under the strange illusion that while we struggle at the most basic points of self-mastery, we assume it possible to make sweeping changes in the lives of those around us. Even Foer, who cares deeply enough about the “climate crisis” to write an entire book on it, struggles to get all his plans lined up. The reality is that if conforming our own will to what we know to be Good is difficult, then forcing the hand of another can only occur through the most brutal coercion.
