Characteristic Form of Life.

Today I learned this little piece of information:

"Land is developing seven times faster than the population is increasing, and by 2050 it is thought that 307 million Americans will live in 8 supercities."

Now, I'm not for sure if this is a startling fact or not, given that in 2050 I will be about 69. Yeah, I'm not really looking forward to that, but what did strike me is that a majority of the people will be living in cities, and who's to say, but maybe the people still living in the rural or what is left of the rural areas will be the ones with power. Maybe they will be the ones that are keeping the place running by planting food and trees and keeping the rest of the population alive because of their "sacrifice" of living in the "bush". I don't know, it just all seems so strange to hear people projecting what is going to happen in years to come when we really have no idea what-so-ever what is going to happen this year. I'm tired of hear things like "if current trends..." or "today in Iraq".

Apparently, there are about 10 million vegetarians in the U.S. today. That number seems small, when you think about all 300 million of us. Gross. That's a lot of beef, pork and chicken being consumed. I don't eat meat, and as one of the 10 million people, I suppose I am always looking for a reason why that I can use to explain to people why. I have yet to come up with anything that seems to hit the mark, and today I also read this little piece of information that didn't seem to help my case:

" The notion of granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal, amoral world of eater and eaten -- of predation -- but along the way it will entail the sacrifice, or sublimation, of part of our identity -- of our own animality. (This is one of the odder ironies of animal rights: it asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way.) Not that the sacrifice of our animality is necessarily regrettable; no one regrets our giving up raping and pillaging, also part of our inheritance. But we should at least acknowledge that the human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token we might call sex -- also now technically unnecessary for reproduction -- a mere recreational preference. Rather, our meat eating is something very deep indeed."

So, I ask myself, "am i not eating animals for a moral reason?" I don't know. I can't deny the evolutionary changes our bodies have went through, and the purposes of certain sets of teeth, etc. The ways in which people crave meat and sweets (also evolutionary because sugar = energy.) I kept reading and found this:

" Morality is an artifact of human culture devised to help humans negotiate human social relations. It's very good at that. But just as we recognize that nature doesn't provide a very good guide for human social conduct, isn't it anthropocentric of us to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for what should happen in nature? Is the individual the crucial moral entity in nature as we've decided it should be in human society?"

I say no. I say that maybe human are adapting, evolving to eat less meat because people now recognize that with a more leisurely life style, eating lots of red meat is not that great for us. As we become more dependent on machines, our bodies might become more dependent on plants. Just a thought.

I think it was Descartes that said something like "animals can't feel pain because they have no soul." Well, I'm not sure we can prove that or not, given that the soul is kind of hard to define in humans, let alone in animals, which we can't communicate with. Its interesting to think about the ways in which we have given in to so many things in society, in life that might just not be so. The way in which we give in to shopping centres, food, etc. might actually be killing us all slowly.

Ok, let me get to my point. We all seem to have some kind of focus in life. Something, someone, some place that we can't not have. We need it to live. We don't just need food and water, but apparently, these other things as well. Those things are killing us instead of helping us live. They are driving us to places we don't want to go and making us do things we don't want to do. They are forcing our minds to give into our bodies, and I always think it should be the other way around. We are humans, and yes, we are adapting as I write this, but we also have to realize what it is that we are adapting to. Is it something that we can go on living with, or is it something that we need to stop, stand back and take a look at? Maybe both. Maybe it is sustainable, maybe it will turn out, in the end to be good, or maybe not. Who's to say. Again, predicting the future out of current trends is dangerous I feel, but then again, so are a lot of things in life.

In the end, I want to say it all comes down to love. But then again, that would be kind of anthropocentric of me, wouldn't it.