Mr Strange Land and I share many things in common, rather fortunately, seeing as we are married. To each other, that is. We are deeply suspicious of religion, in any of its manifestations, and we like argument. Proper argument, full of evidence and reason giving. And of course, that’s something we are trying to pass on to our daughters.
Lately, the girls have been learning environmentalism at school. Don’t waste water, pick up your rubbish, look after the reef, walk to school, and all of that. Nothing that I have a particular problem with, but the mode of its teaching worries me. The girls are being taught environmentalism as religion, so that they accept as true beyond doubt or discussion the need to be green.
So when the elder Miss Six made a declaration at the dinner table, Mr Strange Land and I couldn’t resist.
“We shouldn’t eat whales for dinner,” she said.
I pointed that that we are hardly likely to kill and eat a whale, so she revised her position slightly. “No eating whales you happen to find in the supermarket either.”
“Why not?” I responded.
“Well,” she said, “because they are living creatures, and they have their own lives.”
A good reason, I thought, but vulnerable to counter-argument. “But we eat cows, and cows have their own lives too.”
Flummoxed. However she is nothing if not persistent, so she tried an argument from authority. “But Jenny (her teacher) says we shouldn’t.”
I deployed a standard move against arguments from authority. “Why do you think Jenny says that?”
At this point both Miss Nine and the younger Miss Six were wriggling in their seats with excitement, both ready with reasons. Miss Nine is already an accomplished reason-giver, so Mr Strange Land gave the floor to the younger Miss Six . “Because if we ate the whales, then the animals that eat the whales would have nothing to eat, and they would die, and then the animals that eat them would die, and the whole food chain would die.”
“That’s an excellent reason,” said Mr Strange Land, passing over minor factual errors for the sake of teaching the girls a little rhetoric – not a skill they are likely to acquire at school.
“That’s just what I was going to say,” Miss Nine called out. “It’s the food chain.”
And by then, the elder Miss Six had another reason ready to go.
“Because whales can sing.”
At this point, our parental tactics diverged. Mr Strange Land took this argument very seriously. “Hmmm. I suppose that means that whales have a culture. We shouldn’t kill creatures that have a culture, should we?”
“No,” the girls chorused.
Alas, by then I was a couple of glasses of wine up, so my response to the elder Miss Six was not nearly so constructive.
“But the Nazis could sing!” A complete non sequitur, a useless argument, and an in joke that went completely over the girls’ heads, all rolled into four words. Excellent.
In a fit of Godwin-inspired giggles, Mr Strange Land bubbled a song into his wine glass, I did whale-song impressions at the other end of the table, and the girls looked utterly confounded. Eventually we took a vote about it. The result was unanimous. No eating whales in this house. Not even ones you happen to find at the supermarket.
Sounds pretty close to the Platonic ideal family dinner table.
I have to warn you though, my parents raised two skeptical children with a healthy disregard for argument from authority, only to find those faculties trained on the closest authorities at hand
Gold, gold I tells you! Thanks Deborah
Loved it, especially the comment about lack of rhetoric training in schools.
(The not so entirely deleted yet paranoid web presence AKA merc).
Continue or rather allow your girls to continue down this road and they will become vegetarians
After all birds sing; there go the chicken meals and anything with egg in it
But seriously good work with the girls, I remember our own boys at the same age being taught the logic of argument
It can come back to bite you when they reach their teens but so what you can still talk to them
Excellent! It is so true, we are asked to accept environmental issues without evidence a lot of the time and it does the cause no favours. You’re right schools do not seem to teach rhetoric, let alone scientific debate.
Great stuff. At a recent parent teacher interview the teacher commented on my 5-year-olds “but WHY?” line of questioning
That reminds me toastmasters a couple of weeks ago where we had a ’round robin’ (where you speak for about 15 seconds on a topic) which was on ‘how you’re doing your bit for the environment’. I was sitting there wondering how a lot of the actions people raised were ‘environmentally friendly’ although the guy who said that ‘he has a wood fire, so isn’t using so much electricity’ got a big boo from everyone around the room.
This reminds me of a time a couple of years ago when we went to a Japanese restaurant. The waiter came around and 14 year old my son said, poker faced, “I’ll have the whale.”
I still laugh about it!
I’ve eaten whale in Korea of all places (along with dog). Apparently what they sell is ‘waste.’
Though perhaps a good discussion point would be whether they would eat certain food in cultural situations. That’s how I ended up eating whale, on a date with a local who had purchased my meal!
We’re asked to accept all sorts of things without any kind of evidence. I mean, what would politics be like if evidence was required… government policy would be tricky (no more knee-jerk problem-compounding solutions) but evidence that potential MPs are fit for office would be hard to obtain. Perhaps in itself that’s an argument in favour of citizens juries?
On the other hand, doing nothing and business as usual are also positions (for which evidence is therefore required). In that sense you don’t even have to invoke Singer to justify vegetarianism, utilitarianism is simple to understand and most children grasp it with a minimum of explanation, and that alone can justify vegetarianism (or probably even the specific non-eating of whales)
In retrospect I do greatly appreciate my parents encouraging me by answering questions and showing me how to learn for myself. That’s a hard to measure educational advantage that compounds over time (until it becomes easy to measure
Stef, I avoid that sort of stuff through being mostly vegetarian in a way that pro-meat people find hard to understand (incomprehension as a rhetorical technique
You know when your mother said “don’t eat that you don’t know where it’s been”… well, I don’t eat animals if I don’t know where they’ve been. That argument is based on working for a pathology lab and seeing food poisoning statistics (which most people also don’t want to argue about before dinner) as well as ethical concerns.
That was a great read. Nice argument too.
What about Nazi whales, though?
Moz,
But we are looking through this of a cultural prism of having plenty of food to eat and thus can afford to be choosy. I’ve eaten some funky stuff in my time (snake anyone?), but hearing a North Korean defector talk about eating rats because that was all he could find to eat made my stomach turn. Eating whale in Japan came about largely because they needed protein and the geography isn’t the best for raising cows and vegetables. Now granted we shouldn’t be going out of our way to farm animals to the point of extinction, but if you have a choice between starving and eating *insert icky food here,* you’re going to be chowing down on whatever you can get your hands.
I’m astonished that I am the first person to mention “Springtime for Hitler in Germany” in response to this marvellous post!
Please tell me that’s what Mr Strange Land was bubbling into his wine glass.
It was “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”, which worked surprisingly well through the bubbles.
Oh noes someone mentioned Springtime for Hitler in Germany, now I have it stuck in my head. Again.
Deborah, was it the Dead Kennedys cover or the original?