I took out a rare book on the Philosophy of Food yesterday with the intent of reading the aesthetics chapters as preparation for my next essay. When I saw that Scruton had a chapter on manners, though, it was inevitable that I’d end up reading that first. It’s available online here. I think it summarises quite well how I find him simultaneously insightful and infuriating. First, the insight:

When manners are forgotten, the meal as a social occasion disappears, as is already happening. People now eat distractedly before a TV screen, replenish their bodies in the street, or walk around the workplace with a sandwich in their hands. When I first taught in America, I was shocked to find students carrying into the lecture hall pizzas and hot dogs, which they proceeded to stuff into their faces while staring in mild curiosity at the dude on the dais. Later, colleagues told me that this behavior didn’t spring from the university ethos; it began at school—it began in the home itself. Already the most important moment of social renewal—on which families depend for their inner self-confidence, and out of which serious friendships grow—was becoming marginal for the young. Eating was shrinking into a function, and it is not surprising if a generation of children brought up in this way should find it difficult or alien to settle down in any relationship other than a provisional and temporary one.

This is hyperbolic, of course, and one can wonder whether it’s an appropriate source of anguish when there are so many other issues in the world competing for our attention. But I don’t feel at all uncomfortable embracing the idea that food is essentially social in its function, and viewing it purely nutritionally is to in some way miss out on key human experiences. One of the more obvious holes in my life since I’ve been single is the loneliness of meal times. On the few days a week when I do have friends over to share over wine whatever it is that I’ve cooked, the experience is inevitably heightened in countless ways. And we shouldn’t shy away from saying that insofar as this happens less often nowadays, that’s a shame and a sad thing for us to be missing.

I also feel that Scruton is spot on when he draws an analogy with manners in the sexual realm:

Even in these days of hasty seductions and brief affairs, sexual partners have a choice between fully human and merely animal relations. The pornography industry is constantly pushing us toward the second option. But culture, morality, and what is left of piety aim at the first. Their most important weapon in this battle is tenderness. Tender feelings do not exist outside a social context. Tenderness grows out of care and courtesy, out of graceful gestures, and out of a quiet, attentive concern. It is something you learn, and politeness is a way of teaching it. Not for nothing do we use the word “rude” to denote both bad manners and obscene behavior. The person whose sexual strategies involve coarse jokes, explicit gestures, and lascivious embraces, who stampedes toward his goal without taking “no” or “maybe” or “not yet” for an answer, is looking for sex of the wrong kind—sex in which the other is a means to excitement, rather than an object of concern. Entered into in this frame of mind, sex is not an accepting but a discarding of the other, a way of maintaining an iron solitude in the midst of union. That is why it is so deeply offensive, and why women, especially, feel violated when men treat them in this way.

I suspect that this sort of talk worries liberals, but look. Nothing here commits one to claiming that casual sex should be outlawed and clamped down upon. It is perfectly consistent with acknowledging freedom to also recognise that certain modes of interaction are more valuable, and Scruton is more charitably read as offering an argument here for the superiority of pleasure delaying. And that doesn’t even have to be moral superiority. I think it suffices for us to agree with his claim that we only believe such sexual relationships end up being more emotionally fulfilling and enriching. Despite the modern world’s comfortable relationship with casual sex, I think it may be surprising how many people even of my generation agree with the thrust of his position here. Very few of my friends consciously affirm the value of one night stands. The majority concede that they only repeat such acts insofar as they forget that they seldom bring real pleasure.

But now for the infuriation:

The rudeness of the glutton and the face stuffer are obvious. Equally ill-mannered—though it is politically incorrect to say so—is the food faddist, who makes a point of announcing, wherever he goes, that just this or this can pass his lips, and all other things must be rejected, even when offered as a gift. I was taught to eat whatever was placed before me, choosiness being a sin against hospitality and a sign of pride. But vegetarians and vegans have now succeeded in policing the dinner table with their non-negotiable demands, ensuring that even when invited into company, they sit down alone.

This is where he loses me. If I’m right in reading the implication here to be that the previous values that I was willing to recognise must always be decisive rather than weighable considerations, so that it’s somehow necessary to preserve the social function of food even if it’s at the cost of eating meat which causes agony to animals and destroys the future of the planet, then this must be the most preposterous proposition Scruton has penned. How could the value of manners and sharing food ever trump avoiding having that kind of evil stacked high on your plate?

His observations are reasonable. He just takes them too far.

That’s how many animals are slaughtered to feed global meat-eating, all year round. It amounts to about 60 billion annually. When I became vegetarian last month it was strictly with environmental reasons in mind. Greenhouse gas considerations provided ample support for the conclusion that meat-eating was unjustifiable. It’s only now that I realise just how morally overdetermined my decision was, and how I was blind for years to the equally powerful arguments from animal welfare. And when the number of animals slaughtered annually outnumbers the human population tenfold, and when as Westerners our demand is disproportionately higher than any crude mean figure could convey, it’s clear that the argument that one individual’s demand makes no difference will never gain logical traction. Those eating meat regularly will be responsible for the pain of at least ten animals a year.

These unfathomable numbers only intensify when fish are factored into the equation. Peter Singer explains the findings of a recent report:

The most startling revelation in the report, however, is the staggering number of fish on which humans inflict these deaths. By using the reported tonnages of the various species of fish caught, and dividing by the estimated average weight for each species, Alison Mood, the report’s author, has put together what may well be the first-ever systematic estimate of the size of the annual global capture of wild fish. It is, she calculates, in the order of one trillion, although it could be as high as 2.7tn.

So that’s at least 32,000 fish a second, on top of the 2,000 animals. And Singer adds why this is also a moral issue:

There is no humane slaughter requirement for wild fish caught and killed at sea, nor, in most places, for farmed fish. Fish caught in nets by trawlers are dumped on board the ship and allowed to suffocate.

PETA claim that “scientists who study pain are also in complete agreement that the pain response in fish is basically identical to the pain response in mammals and birds.”

There’s also an interview in The Observer today with PETA’s founder, Ingrid Newkirk. This part stood out to me:

Is it Peta’s strategy to upset everyone, I ask Newkirk. “No,” she says. “Our mission is to provoke thought. People have been taught to disregard what happens to pigs or chickens, to not think about the suffering they go through. Our job is to make them think. We’re not out to be popular.”

Sometimes raw numbers provoke thought best.

Try guessing who it is mapping out the logic here:

If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is “no legitimate state interest” for purposes of proscribing that conduct; and if, as the Court coos (casting aside all pretense of neutrality), “when sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring,” what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising “the liberty protected by the Constitution”?

That was written by none other than Scalia in his dissenting opinion for Lawrence v. Texas.

The reason he doesn’t embrace the conclusion he maps out, of course, is that he doesn’t accept the antecedent in this conditional. Scalia believes the state does have an interest in enforcing morality, and he further believes that homosexuality is an example of immorality.

Interestingly, I think I am with him on the former claim. It’s just the latter that I obviously reject. I’ve just finished a political philosophy essay on the concept of a right to do the wrong thing. My conclusion, roughly, is that contrary to Waldron’s and Dworkin’s claims there is no such thing. If something is wrong, then it is always going to be an open question whether or not the state should interfere with it. But I don’t think this has any illiberal implications because all the things we wish to tolerate are not, upon reflection, genuine examples of wrongdoing.

I’ll link to the paper when I can. I just have to wait a few weeks for the submission deadline to pass.

Here’s a quick question. When we invoke the value of privacy to defend why some law or enforcement procedure is inappropriate, surely we mean to reference the fact that we will feel watched and uncomfortable, and we worry that the power we are granting the state is ripe for abuse and overreach?

I thought so, and I would think Justice Kagan was with me when she claimed that a person’s home is their most “intimate and familiar space”. It’s clear that live CCTV recordings in one’s living room, for instance, could be rejected on these grounds, even if crimes like domestic abuse would consequently decline.

But if that is all true, I wonder how the value of privacy is also supposed to motivate a ban on drug-sniffing dogs and the taking of thermal images. These detect heat and smells as a means of finding crime. They don’t observe us or reasonably intimidate us in any obvious way. What is protected by ruling that the police even need a warrant for these?

If Chief Justice Roberts is to be believed, it’s impossible. Here are his comments this week on Obama’s decision to keep implementing DOMA despite deeming it unconstitutional:

If he has made a determination that executing the law by enforcing the terms is unconstitutional, I don’t see why he doesn’t have the courage of his convictions… rather than saying, ‘Oh, we’ll wait ’til the Supreme Court tells us we have no choice.’

I speculate here, but it doesn’t seem too hard to work out what Obama’s logic will be. Let’s give this a go.

The American political system is built on a divisions of powers such that one body makes laws, another enforces them and another checks that those laws are constitutional. Liberty and prosperity have been built for centuries on those involved with government adhering to these designated roles and respecting the system. The day the President starts picking which laws to enforce, rather than following the decrees of the courts and Congress, is the day the system starts to dismantle. This holds even if the President believes a law is unconstitutional, because the point is that it’s not his place to make such decisions.

The most shocking thing is that the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice is apparently incapable of seeing the value of respecting law and power separations. Instead, he implies that the President is cowardly for fulfilling his constitutional duties.

This Bill Keller column on Bradley Manning is a few weeks old now, but I found it saved and unread on my iPad yesterday. I was struck how, on the one hand, Keller naturally suggests The Times greatly appreciates the work of whistleblowers, and would always be open to publishing their leaks if they contained information of public interest. And yet Keller also quotes The Times’s Max Frankel on a past scenario analogous to Manning’s:

When the government moved to prosecute Ellsberg, we felt no obligation to assist him… He was committing an act of civil disobedience and presumably knew that required accepting the punishment. We were privately pleased that the prosecution overreached and failed, but we did not consider ourselves his partner in any way.

This position strikes me as insufferably schizophrenic, and possibly not even coherent. Yes, First Amendment rights may apply to the press in a way that they don’t to government officials, but if you recognise the strong reasons for and value of political transparency, it’s hard to see how you can defend your own right to be free from prosecution whilst thinking the source essential to your work can fairly face the full wrath of the law. How can a crucial part of a valuable and legal activity itself be rightly illegal? If you have no obligation to assist a source and their punishment is required, why would one be ‘privately pleased’ when prosecution failed? Any reason for punishment of the whistleblower will also be a reason counting strongly against The Times’s recognised right to air such information. It worries me greatly that the paper views their relationship with sources in this way.

Roger Scruton has a typically conservative column in the NYT warning against the dangers of sweeping social and institutional changes, which were often well-intentioned but brought misery. World War One, Afghanistan and maybe even the Arab Spring seem like arguably reasonable examples. But he ludicrously adds to this gloomy list the movement for marriage equality:

What could be more sensible than to extend marriage to homosexuals, granting them the security of an institution devoted to lifelong partnership? The result will be improvements all around – not just improved toleration of homosexuals, but improvement in the lives of gay couples, as they adapt to established norms. Optimists have therefore united to promote this cause, and, as is so often the case, have turned persecuting stares on those who dissent from it, dismissing them as intolerant, “homophobic,” “bigoted,” offenders against the principles of liberal democracy. Of course the optimists may be right. The important fact, however, is that hope is more important to them than truth.

People interested in truth seek out those who disagree with them. They look for rival opinions, awkward facts and the grounds that might engender hesitation.

I can tolerate and even often embrace a conservatism which urges caution when pushing for progressive values without concern for their likely consequences. And I’d even go further than most in strongly defending Scruton against the allegation that his position is built on bigotry. But it does become very hard to take his objections to marriage equality sincerely when he implicitly compares it to the Bolshevik Revolution. The failure of his argument lies in his own claim that the movement is built on hope whilst being blind to truth. The reason marriage reform differs so drastically from all the catastrophic social projects he highlights is that we do have evidence that it won’t cause harm. And that means that the weight of the liberal arguments should even convince conservatives, unless they insist on the sort of implausibly severe skepticism that Scruton seems to support.

I think David Frum’s transformation on this issue captures the point best:

[T]he case against same-sex marriage has been tested against reality. The case has not passed its test.

Since 1997, same-sex marriage has evolved from talk to fact.

If people like me had been right, we should have seen the American family become radically more unstable over the subsequent decade and a half.

Instead — while American family stability has continued to deteriorate — it has deteriorated much more slowly than it did in the 1970s and 1980s before same-sex marriage was ever seriously thought of.

What is Scruton’s response to this? How is it that marriage equality’s defenders do not care about the truth? As Ezra Klein noted this week, opponents cannot even rely on the lack of a sociological consensus about the impact gay couples adopting has on children. This is from the American Sociological Association’s amicus curiae brief, submitted to the Supreme Court:

The claim that same-sex parents produce less positive child outcomes than opposite-sex parents—either because such families lack both a male and female parent or because both parents are not the biological parents of their children—contradicts abundant social science research. Decades of methodologically sound social science research, especially multiple nationally representative studies and the expert evidence introduced in the district courts below, confirm that positive child wellbeing is the product of stability in the relationship between the two parents, stability in the relationship between the parents and child, and greater parental socioeconomic resources. Whether a child is raised by same-sex or opposite-sex parents has no bearing on a child’s wellbeing.

The clear and consistent consensus in the social science profession is that across a wide range of indicators, children fare just as well when they are raised by same-sex parents when compared to children raised by opposite-sex parent.

(Video: a Dish reader asks Andrew Sullivan if any empirical evidence would change his mind about marriage equality.)