Monday, 14 February 2011

Is hypocrisy better than the alternative?

Is being a hypocrite always such a bad thing? Or could it sometimes be better than the alternative?

I reckon that being a hypocrite has got a petty bad press. The notion that we might think and do conflicting things has been given pretty short shrift. It's been taken as a demonstration of 'falseness' - a cardinal sin when you believe in the idea of a single united self. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a hypocrite.

In a recent interview with Jonathan Safran Foer - the author of Eating Animals - he makes this point in relation to vegetarianism.

The food industry is the single biggest contributor of climate change gases, bigger even than transport. The head of the IPCC -Rajendra Pachauri - has recommended cutting back on meat intakeas the one action that everybody could take to personally mitigate their own contribution. Not to mention the inhumane conditions in which most animals are kept in order to keep costs down. This at a time when we are starting to appreciate that animals aren't the 'soul-less automatons' that we have for so long assumed them to be.

The more you know about the story behind how our meat is produced and the consequences of it, the harder it becomes to justify eating so much of it. Eating meat is increasingly a moral choice.

That puts a lot of people - me included - in a difficult situation. We like eating meat. We've been doing it pretty much guilt free for years. Everybody else eats meat. And now we're being told the rules are changing?!

It can feel like we're left with two choices. Stop eating meat entirely. Or continue as we always have done.

There is of course a third choice - to cut back on meat - but this involves thinking of ourselves as hypocrites. We need to agree that eating meat is no longer really something we should be doing but continue doing it anyway for our own pleasure.

I agree with Foer here, that this is not something that we generally like to do. It involves an acknowledgment that we're not living up to our own standards. We would rather bury our head in the sands and carry on as normal. Or make up all kind of justifications about why we can't do it. We're too busy. We don't like vegetarian food. Meat is just too damn tasty.

So I for one am now proud to be a hypocrite on this issue. Each time I eat meat, on some level I feel like I'm making a bad choice. With that acknowledged, perhaps it'll help my behaviour to catch up with my conscience.

Because it's true what they say... nobody likes to think of themselves as a hypocrite.

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