From the very beginning, Pythagoras saw in everyone who eats meat a potential murderer. And not a few vegans today see in a carnivore hardly any difference to a cannibal. There are currently more and more vegans who do not eat meat for ethical reasons, because they judge it immoral to exploit or even kill an animal in order to eat it. A relatively new, but dangerous, movement, anti-speciesism, rejects any discrimination of animals against humans1It is dangerous because there is already a tendency to see in man only an animal. Not to make a difference between animals and humans does not necessarily mean to valorize animals, but can also lead to the total devaluation of humans.. People in Europe partly already do not speak of their dog, which they bought, like a slave, as their slave, but of a dog as a good friend, which already lives with them for quite a while, as if it could also decide freely at any time to choose another master or mistress.
Cuddly toy or farm animal, the big difference
Not all animal lovers are also vegans or vegetarians. They simply divide animals into farm animals and cuddly animals. They often have no problem at all with eating pork, chicken, lamb or beef on a regular basis. But the fact that there are people who eat dogs fills them with horror, as if they were a cannibal. Consuming another individual of the same species as food is on the one hand one of the last taboos, on the other hand in the animal kingdom the most natural thing in the world.
In a German butcher’s shop, you will only find appetizing canapés that perhaps remotely resemble meat. In France, it is currently still possible to see a chef smiling on the cover of a cookbook, holding lamb in his arms that he will soon kill and process for dinner. In French butcher shops, you can still see pigs’ heads on display. In Germany, the normal clientele would be so disgusted that the butcher would lose his customers.
For decades, I argued exactly the same way as Sarah Wiener, a famous German television chef. “If you want to eat meat,” she once said, “you must also be willing to kill an animal.”
In the meantime, this demand no longer goes far enough for me. I now start with:
Whoever wants to eat meat must also be able to eat the meat of an animal that he has loved, to which he has given a name, which he has soothed and stroked while he was slaughtering it.
I love you so much that I could eat you up!
We say this phrase to people who we really love to pieces. If we say it to an animal that we actually want to eat, we are not that far from being a cannibal.
In everyday life, as the corresponding idioms show, we associate a symbolic wish to eat another person, expressed only jokingly, with anything but hatred or uncaring. While we associate the greatest horror with genuinely practiced cannibalism, the jokingly expressed wish to eat one’s loved one, to love him to death, is an expression of the greatest affection and devotion.
What is it that people associate with a cannibal the naked horror? And what is at the core behind veganism or vegetarianism? It is the fear of death.
From the desire to be eaten
A few years ago I wanted to treat our cat, who always had to live only in the apartment, something special and bought her a few mice. My girlfriend and I then observed the typical cat-and-mouse game. If we told friends about it, they didn’t want to hear any details, thought we were perverts. How could we calmly watch our evil cat torture a poor mouse for hours?
But I noticed something disturbing. After some time, the mice no longer ran away from the cat. They even sought her proximity. Were they already so injured that they had lost all orientation? Or were they, in a kind of ecstasy, looking for the continuation of the game? Did they want to be eaten by the cat?
In a spectacular case of voluntary cannibalism in Germany, a man had searched the Internet for another man to fulfill his greatest wish. Finally he found him, the cannibal of Rothenburg. The perpetrator is serving a life sentence in prison. Bizarre: Requests for early release have so far been rejected because of the “extreme risk of repetition”. The public prosecutor’s office fears not only that the cannibal could repeat his crime. But also that he could possibly be overrun with requests for more victims.
Eat my flesh, drink my blood, in remembrance of me
We Cynics know the secret of eternal life. It does not lie in the hereafter, but in the here and now. Jesus tried again and again to teach this to his followers. They never understood him. Heaven, he said, is neither hidden in the sky nor in the sea, but in the midst of us. Yes. He would be a king of the Jews. But everyone could and should follow him and become a king himself.
Surrender as ecstasy
I myself felt for the first time in a drug intoxication such a deep devotion to my girlfriend that I felt the desire to be eaten by her. Jesus, I am convinced, experienced the same deep desire at his last supper, a moment filled with feelings of happiness. We know that Jesus was anything but a food lover. He did not want to fast himself, nor did he want his disciples to do so. He did not miss any invitation to a celebration. He let himself be massaged and kissed on the feet for hours by a prostitute, despite the protests of his disciples. He enjoyed it. His desire, expressed at the Last Supper, to be eaten by his followers was not a contrast to Jesus, the man of pleasure, but the intensification of his desire for absolute surrender. In this, in this readiness for devotion, he found his eternal life. And we can also follow him in this.
Having found the metaphysically understood Eternal Life makes you strong to become a fearless dissident.
Continue reading: Being a dissident
- 1It is dangerous because there is already a tendency to see in man only an animal. Not to make a difference between animals and humans does not necessarily mean to valorize animals, but can also lead to the total devaluation of humans.