The IHT and the limits of communication
I like the Herald Tribune; I should read it more regularly.
This is the India that I know (and would prefer to enjoy from a distance).
This one's interesting, too. And I say that as a vegetarian. One thing I found fascinating about India was encountering, again and again, conclusions that I endorsed that were arrived at, often problematically, by wholly orthogonal reasoning.
Hence, militant vegetarians who were indifferent to animal suffering. Or people who did profess to care about animals, who refused to euthanize even horribly suffering terminal cases, because to do so would be, ostensibly by definition, cruelty.
The alienness always reminded me of that lovely Borges quote:
...i.e., even within a shared human nature (well, dunno if Borges endorsed that), culture can create a non-shared cognitive environment; your prima facie may not be my prima facie.
Further demonstration for which comes from (and I may have blogged this before), a favorite Thai language textbook of mine, which instructed me to use a certain kind of collective noun marker for "mountains, tires and wheels, root vegetables, etc."
Gotta love that "etc."
This is the India that I know (and would prefer to enjoy from a distance).
This one's interesting, too. And I say that as a vegetarian. One thing I found fascinating about India was encountering, again and again, conclusions that I endorsed that were arrived at, often problematically, by wholly orthogonal reasoning.
Hence, militant vegetarians who were indifferent to animal suffering. Or people who did profess to care about animals, who refused to euthanize even horribly suffering terminal cases, because to do so would be, ostensibly by definition, cruelty.
The alienness always reminded me of that lovely Borges quote:
"On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance."
...i.e., even within a shared human nature (well, dunno if Borges endorsed that), culture can create a non-shared cognitive environment; your prima facie may not be my prima facie.
Further demonstration for which comes from (and I may have blogged this before), a favorite Thai language textbook of mine, which instructed me to use a certain kind of collective noun marker for "mountains, tires and wheels, root vegetables, etc."
Gotta love that "etc."
1 Comments:
-
Anonymous said...
-
- 2:54 AM
Post a CommentIt depresses me that the renunciation of a vegetarian diet (when the environment so needs for more people to adopt eco-friendlier diets like vegetarianism) is associated with adopting Western values.
As if I needed another reminder that Western values, despite some good effects (e.g., greater equality among genders than in many non-Western societies), are more or less responsible for killing the planet.
It's also depressing how many eyes glaze over when I am asked why I became vegetarian in 2003 and my answer is NOT one of the usual ones: animal cruelty, personal health, mad-cow disease, etc.
<< Home