Repulsion is part of diversity
One thing I have learned from living on a farm is that you are not really experiencing diversity unless you are also experiencing repulsion.
We each have lots of assumptions about what is right and wrong, how the world works, how people should act in a civilized community. When faced with true diversity – that is, diversity of experience — we have to allow our assumptions to be challenged. It’s hard to not feel some repulsion for the person who challenges our core assumptions.
But it’s clear to me that diversity in the workplace is difficult to achieve because we must ask so much of ourselves in order to achieve it. We must allow ourselves to experience repulsion and keep an open mind while doing that.
And now, I will write about cats; specifically, the 150 comments people left on my last post about why I killed my cat. Last week I thought I was not really writing about cats because I was writing about dead cats. And anyway, really I was writing about the moral problem of paid links. But in fact, I still have the problem that I now find myself doing the very worst, low level, terrible job on the internet: writing content about cats.
In the business world, cats are the topic-non-grata. If I go into an investor meeting to discuss business models for online content, it takes only about five minutes before I hear, “I just don't want to see posts about cats.”
But I think we can all be better at thinking in diverse ways, in diverse environments, if I indulge in one more post about cats. So here I go.
1. Don’t shield yourself from complex thinking. If you think killing my cat was absolutely, hands down a terrible decision, then you probably don't have the same moral code I do. So maybe you should just stop reading my blog, but probably you should just not let me take care of your cat. Listening to people who have ideas that are patently different from your own make you think harder. (This is why I read publications like Al-Jazeera and Car & Driver.)
2. Diverse ways of thinking can co-exist only rarely. With an open mind.
Hard-core questions of morality have no right answer. Can a mother kill someone to feed her child? Can a mother kill one child to save another? Have you never heard these questions from college Ethics 101? These are real issues, and behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of the book Predictably Irrational, shows that how we answer these questions has more to do with how we are born—how we were hard-wired to see the world—than what is objectively right and wrong. Some people will say killing is wrong, so you can’t kill anything ever. Other people will see this moment as an exception.
This New Yorker cartoon hits the spot because the intersection of humans and animals is fraught with complex moral systems:
Often there is no right answer – for cats, children or meat-counter decisions – but you challenge yourself more in life if you open your life up to people who are wired differently than you are, without trying to squash those differences.
3. Understanding moral context requires placing oneself in unfamiliar situations. Hey, all you cat commenters, have you lived on a farm? Do you understand the problems with farm cats? Do you understand there is a moral question of whether we should even feed babies who are born in the dead of winter? (We feed them.) Do you understand that most cats cannot be spayed because they can’t be caught?
Our favorite goat broke his leg. The Farmer wanted to slaughter him for meat. He is a little young, but the farm is a business, and financially it makes more sense to take the meat while we can than to bet on that the goat will return to good health. We have a lot of goats, and if they were all pets, we could not afford to feed them. So goat decisions on our farm are often business decisions.
But because our farm is a mix of city people and country people — people with vastly different sets of experiences — moral decisions are often more complex on our farm than other farms. In the end, Melissa decided she wanted to treat the goat as a pet. She loves the goat. So she took responsibility for nursing him back to health. The odds were not good, and the splint is made of two nail files, but she was devoted. And slept with him in the barn.
3. Real diversity is personally challenging. Here are things I thought were patently wrong before I lived on the farm: Drowning cats. Shooting possums. Peeing on the front lawn. Feeding sub-par food to animals. Confining animals in labor. Branding cattle. Notching an animal's ear. I could go on forever.
Whole Foods has a five-tiered program to let customers know where their animal products comes from. There are five hoops farmers can jump through to get rated by Whole Foods. The Farmer — my farmer — absolutely loves his animals and he will spend all night in a rain storm to keep one alive for one more day. But he doesn't even meet the first standard—the bottom rung—with Whole Foods.
Now that I live on a farm, I see both sides of everything. People are not morally depraved. They are living in the context of their own community. We all grow a lot more personally by trying to understand people rather than judging them.
It’s no easy task, though. I know this myself, because I still hate cat people.
Sorry but it's the truth. People who treat animals like humans are people who cannot cope with complexities of human relationships. People who think their cat gives them what they need for companionship are probably right, because they are so underdeveloped emotionally. I am not alone in my thinking. Here is a great parody of a dating video as the perfect illustration of my point:
[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTTwcCVajAc width=549 rel=0 fs=1]
My husband and I are cat people, but we both agreed that Penelope’s situation is her business and her call, and we have no way of knowing all of the circumstances.
That’s not my issue. My issue is with the way that Penelope lacks any sort of critical understanding of anyone’s point of view beside her own, cannot process the world beyond the black-and-white, and is not actually interested in doing so. And while we’re to be repulsed by her endless parade of drama and half-baked lies, she rakes in cash by acting as a one-dimensional blowhard, a sort of repetitive puppet caricature, if you will. She may have Aspergers, but she exploits the condition, using it as grounds to offend and repulse anytime, and gives other sufferers a bad name in the process.
If this consistently butt-hurt blowhard isn’t on a podcast pretending she has enough experience in every single career out there to lambaste people who went to grad school (characterising them as “victims of Ponzi schemes”), she’s butt-hurt that other women besides Her Majesty want STEM careers or don’t want kids, or butt-hurt that other mommy bloggers besides her might be getting book deals or writing about more than one topic at a time. Now, she’s butt-hurt that some people don’t agree with her euthanasia decision, so she resorts to the old “My opponents are mentally unstable” gag.
Seek the nearest mirror, my dear.
Perhaps next time you should read the article prior to commenting on it.
Also wanted to add that Penelope does provide a useful function in the career coaching world, though. If you take anything she says and do the exact opposite, you’ll probably succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
Signed,
Crazy gay guy with a cat
I am very entertained by the number of people who read your blog, P, and take time to tell you how much it sucks. What is it that makes them keep wasting their time reading something they don’t agree with and then waste even more time composing a half-literate sounding negative comment?
For some of the people who posted comments earlier, I’d like to point out that Aspergers is not the same as Autism. Also, would any of you negative people have offered to pay for the expensive food for EVERY CAT ON THE FARM so that Penelope would not have to put the cat down? How about volunteering to pay the vet bill? Oh, you could just volunteer to drop by the farm and get the cat…
There are alternatives to sounding like an imbecile on the blog comments. That wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining for me, however!
Alana
“I can type a sentence on the Internet. Ergo, my reading comprehension and critical reasoning skills are stellar.”
I know where that money should go, and it isn’t to Penelope’s cats!
@ Alana – this is the blog people love to hate. Like on tv, The Real Housewives or Jersey Shore. It’s pretentious and trashy at the same time. Pure guilty pleasure.
Yikes. I had a cat who developed crystals in his urine, and he lived (on that special medical food) for another five years. Maybe if you cannot attend to their needs you shouldn’t have a bazillion cats? I realize it’s inconvenient to have a sick pet, but sometimes having a pet (or a wife or a husband) IS inconvenient. You sign on for that when you get one.
And I’m quite capable of having human relationships, thanks.
I’m going to assume by “cat people” you only specifically mean the ones that take it to “a dog is a pig is a boy” level and not anyone else.
Otherwise, you’re an idiot who talks about complexity only to ward off criticism but can’t mentally handle it when it is your turn to be exposed to ideas different from your own.
So many people say they don’t know anyone who treats their pet (cat) like a human and I’m shocked. It seems every time I turn around someone is saying their pet is like “their child” or has a “my doberman is smarter than your honor student” bumper sticker, which isn’t funny, it’s hostile.
As to the notion that we have a higher obligation to cats because they can’t live in the wild without us… they are fabulously able to live in the wild without us and if they get eaten by an owl or coyote or hit by a car it’s no more risk than any other wild animal takes. The smallest bit of care we give them is a bonus.
The larger question of diversity and tolerance is spot on.
Most people who make noise about valuing those things value them only until they are made uncomfortable, which means never actually encountering diversity and never having to practice tolerance.
“…but sometimes having a pet (or a wife or a husband) IS inconvenient.”
And what is that except a blatant equivalency of pet to human?
If you treat your cat like a human, you’ve got a problem. Granted, the problem may be Historically unprecedented wealth and the ability to treat your animals like family members, like humans, like your children or your wife or husband. Count your blessings instead of your virtues.
“Hard-core questions of morality have no right answer.”
So is this one of those examples of repulsion brought on by “diversity of thought” you were talking about? Whatever it is you’d better go ahead and call Randy Godwin, because I need to tell you how your idea played with this big bunch of Europeans from around 70 years ago: they love what you’re saying and want to hire you to do their necro-PR….
People are still kicking this around? Didn’t anybody here see “Old Yeller” when they were a kid? Saddest movie ever, and it neatly encapsulates every point under discussion here.
A couple of weeks ago, I hit a dog with my truck. The damn thing wandered into my path of travel on a highway in the dead of night. Had I swerved to miss it, I could have placed my wife’s life as well as my own in jeopardy.
I felt bad about it – the poor animal never had a chance, it was somebody’s pet, and it’s not coming home – but on the other hand, part of responsible pet ownership is to keep your dog fenced or leashed (or for that matter, keep your cat indoors if you live in town).
Some things in life suck. You deal with it, and keep going.
Hey, I have no problem with someone hating cat-people. I’m puzzled by people’s love of dogs, too. But what I do have a problem with is I’m pretty Penelope does not know the meaning of the word ‘repulsion’.
Penelope is not the only person on this earth who lives on a farm. Her assertions about feral cats, for example, are patently false. For example, she says they have 20 farm cats. And yet, they are not spayed and neutered because she says it is impossible to catch them. No, it’s not impossible, it’ just hard, and if she is feeding kittens born in the winter, it would be a simple chore to pick those kittens up, take them in to a low-cost spay and neuter clinic and do what should be done.
I don’t have any feral cats at my farm. If one shows up, we catch it, have it neutered or spayed and make sure it has its rabies shots (I cannot imagine having cats without rabies shots running around on our farm, can not imagine the utter irresponsibility of risking all your animals because of that kind of laziness) and then bring it home with us where they always become pretty tame.
I don’t like Penelope. She makes stuff up so she can be controversial.
And if “farmer” cannot even manage to get to level one of Whole Foods animal welfare ratings, I’m incredibly unimpressed with his animal management skills, and I bet she’s lying about that, too.
Phooey. She puts words on a page and they are nearly meaningless.
If the cat didn’t matter, you wouldn’t have blogged about it.
If you hadn’t engaged in a lot of introspection, you would have said “we had him put to sleep” rather than the painfully brutal and confrontational “I killed the cat”.
“But, I’ve lived with someone who didn’t share any of my values and it did repulse me. I ended up finding him despicable, moronic and full of too much privilege to know anything about anything. I can’t imagine forcing myself to experience this on a daily basis, as I am a rather judgmental person.” — Tatiana
So is everyone. And I do mean _everyone_.
Everyone has things they believe in, and are not prepared to compromise on, no matter what. Things we believe are true and that we consider anyone who disagrees with to be wrong _by definition_ about. We don’t always realize what those beliefs are, often they’re subconscious, sometimes they’re totally different than what we think we believe in, and we only find out in some crunch moment.
Penelope’s point about repulsion being an inevitable part of diversity is on-target. The more diversity, the more repulsion, the greater the degree of diversity (in belief, outlook, attitude, faith, etc), the greater the repulsion.
Her point about trying to put ourselves in the other shoes is good, but there’s a flip side.
A work place can’t _function_ with more than a certain amount of tension and hostility. A marriage can’t hold together if husband and wife disagree on everythng they care about. A society can’t _function_ above a certain level of diversity, the tension and repulsion will tear it apart, often violently.
Nor is ‘live and let live’ sufficient as a guideline, because _everyone_ has some beliefs they believe are so vital, so basic, so _obviously_ true that they not only have the right but the _duty_ to enforce them (assuming they have the power) on those who defy them. People often find it unacceptable even to have these beliefs questioned, much less openly defied.
When a majority of the society (or family, or whatever group) holds such a belief, dissenters must either hide dissent or leave (if allowed).
It’s always going to be dangerous to be different, and moral and ethical arguments are always going to have losers who have to endure things they find loathesome. Pretending otherwise makes it worse.
@ HC:
I wonder if the degree of diversity that we can tolerate is proportional to how “close” we are/are meant to be.
In a family, there is uber-intimacy. You go in to a marriage having discovered beforehand what yours and my values are and how compatible they are. And there has to be a preponderance of shared values between/among the adults, I think. And yes, you discover some of your values as you go along and are confronted with new realities and experiences.
Then is when compromise must come in to play, I think. There will be some deal breakers–some values conflicts that cannot be compromised.
But, unlike you, HC, I hope that we all bind ourselves to compromise. Additionally, if we never learned it in our homes or schools or workplaces, I hope some opportunity such as this post on diversity (or our many diversity-in-the-workplace inservices) eventually gives us a chance to explore what is diversity and what is the fine art of compromise. Why? Because we cannot stop at repulsion. I think someone who may be your polar opposite in one or another value, at home, at school or in the workplace, always has a right to say or imply “Hey, work with me, would you?” I think we should always strive to compromise as a form of openness.
And we haven’t mentioned partisanship. Left and right political parties seem to have no clue. Tearing apart with no hope of knitting together; one-up-manship; slander; dissing–all part of the national sport? (I live in Wisconsin, where we have toxic partisanship.)
Remember Reb Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof? Three daughters, each wishing to marry a boy, farther and farther removed from the traditions? Each daughter wanting her father’s blessing?
I suppose I am making YOUR point, HC–because Tevye turned away from his last daughter . . . he couldn’t accept her choice of a husband–too far from his own values.
I think we may, at times, create false dichotomies–false diversities that are so strong as to demand a disconnect.
I think we are mostly the same, and the differences are petty. And certainly compromise-able.
“I still hate cat people.”
So there we have it! I’m sure everyone on this random list of famous cat lovers would feel the same about you – or maybe not; most of them didn’t have the word “hate” in their personal vocabulary:
Albert Schweitzer, Alexandre Dumas, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Frank, Beatrix Potter, Brigitte Bardot, Cardinal Richelieu, Charles Dickens, Charles Pierre Baudelaire, Claude Monet, Diego Giacometti, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Edward Lear, Emily Bronte, Ernest Hemingway, Ernst Kirchner, Florence Nightingale, Francesco Petrarch, Frank Zappa, Frederic Chopin, Georges Sand, Greta Garbo, Gustav Klimpt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Honoré de Balzac, Jean Cocteau, John Lennon, Jorge Luis Borges, Leonardo da Vinci, Lord Byron, Michel de Montaigne, Pablo Picasso, Patti Smith, Paul Klee, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope John Paul II, President Abraham Lincoln, President Rutherford B. Hayes, Prophet Mohammed, Robert Heinlein, Ruyard Kipling, Samuel Beckett, Saul Steinberg, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Winston Churchill, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Tina Fey, Truman Capote, Victor Hugo, William Burroughs, William Wordsworth.
Mark Twain wrote, “Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.”
“People who treat animals like humans are people who cannot cope with complexities of human relationships.”
When you make a blanket statement like this, you should probably organize your thought(s?) better. Try throwing in something like “in my opinion” or something else to better clarify who or whom you are truly trying to insult with this. What do you define as treating an animal like a human? Taking it to the doctor, naming it, feeding it, putting it to sleep? You yourself treat your animals like humans if that is the case… please explain what you mean, because I think I might like you Penelope! I know you like to stir shit and get reactions out of people but there are other ways to get people talking without making yourself look like a damaged person (unless this is who you truly are).
And on a side note, can you stop with all the “you live on a farm, so your experiences are just so much more valid than mine and you’re a goddamn expert on life/animals.” If you lived in Germany in the 1940’s, I’m sure you’d be blogging about how awesome Hitler is and how much you hate Jews and how anyone who treats Jews like humans can’t cope with the complexities of human relationships. We’re all shaped by our environment but it doesn’t have to define you…
I’m wondering about your take on these ideas: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/books/review/im-ok-youre-a-psychopath.html
Lol you learned absolutely nothing from the cat incident. It was a domestic cat not a farm animal. You can wave the “I am a farmer flag” all you want. It doesn’t change that basic fact. If letting it run loose meant it would eat the other cats’ food you could have had the operation most commonly done for that ailment. You could have tried to foster it out. You could have tried something constructive.
In medical problem assessment people ask questions like: what are the treatment options, what are the pros and cons of each treatment, what’s the cost of each treatment etc etc. Based on your last post you didn’t ask any of those questions. You took the easiest solution. THAT was the crux of the message that animal lovers were trying to help you understand. So NOW you have a goat that IS a farm animal and Melissa is sleeping in the barn with it nursing it back to health. There is no logic in any of this.
And for what it’s worth the vast majority of animal lovers that I know are pretty well-adjusted and involved in relationships with other human beings. Dating, marriage, grand parenting you name it.
Thanks for a great post Penelope. It’s easy for many to criticize, much harder for you to be honest.
Being able to think about diversity without getting angry or prejudiced, now that’s being civilized.
but then people would say you’re soft to be fine with people’s (often) different, new, uncomfortable point of view, method etc.
civilized people often are, it’s called diplomacy.
just like the workplace, is it better to assimilate into the culture or stand up for what you believe in without the fear of having to live up to it against your co-workers daily? sometimes for the sake of foreseen harmony in future work, people usually blend in.
maybe that’s why a ceo who bucks the trend once said he would hire people who disrupt the company, because it was uncomfortable for the tribe, but usually right in the end, and therefore good, for the company.
A cat is a cat is a meat eating animal. They look fuzzy and cute, but know absolutely nothing about human emotions, respect or appreciation. It might purr and cuddle with you, but that’s just what they do, not because you need it or because you clean his shit box. When you are sick, your cat ain’t going to comfort you and bring you food and medicine. When you need someone to talk to, your cat won’t give a damn what you think or feel. If you’re dead in the house by yourself, your cat will probably eat your meat. Imagine yourself shrink to the size of a mice, your cat will for sure rip your head off because that’s just what they do, your cat won’t have any mercy for you even though you are just a small human.
I am not saying it’s right to abuse animals. But I just don’t think they deserve the same respect and moral standard as humans.
I have my highest respect for people who choose to be vegan, the rest who criticize are really just hypocrites in my opinion. When you chow down that juicy beef steak, you can choose to be blind or be aware of the fact that you are really just paying other people to murder a cow. When you go fishing, think about how it feels to have a metal hooked through your mouth. When you buying that cute leather shoes, think about how it feels like to get skinned.
Like it or not, life is suffering. Everybody is trying to do the best they can. Judging does not solve any real problems.
Check out the film the Secret Life of Cats.
http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/secret_life_of_cats/
Thanks for a great post. Keep up the good work.
Very good post. I am an originally city person and animal lover who worked with pigs for about 8 years and has a farm degree. The moral complexity is very real in the countryside. At the end of the day the responsibility is about taking the decisions that are most likely to result in a good outcome o the bottom line after counting all positives and negatives.
I don’t mean bottom line in a narrow business sense. There is a moral bottom line, a health bottom line, a time bottom line and so on… excessive focus on the personality and life story of individual animals is immature and irresponsible when it leads to decisions that are based on emotions and not on regard for the bigger picture.
I don’t know the story of the cat, animals should of course always be treated humanely and respectfully, however there is nothing wrong with putting down surplus cats on a farm or in other environments where they can develop into pests.
@ Anna:
I want to make a sharp right turn here (pardon the pun that is coming). You write:
I don’t mean bottom line in a narrow business sense. There is a moral bottom
line, a health bottom line, a time bottom line and so on…
I only wish that the two political parties could seriously consider your statement. The debt ceiling crisis and the budget crisis is “the bottom line in a narrow business sense,” IMO.
But you also make the point, a well-made point, that there is a time bottom line and a health bottom line and might I add, a
common-good bottom line, as well . . .
What is it that prevents us from looking at these current crises from all angles??!!
nice one you have here. this is really interesting.
Very interesting post. I grew up in what at the time was a lesser developed country and the morals were very different. It was common to drown litters of kittens right after they were born as to prevent cat overpopulation. My uncle would drive on the town roads and run over stray dogs that happened to be in the way or crossing the road. He claimed that it would have been more dangerous to swerve, because in that case there is a possibility that you could get severely injured as well.
I didn’t hold any of these values and could never accept them myself. Even with everyone around doing it, I could NEVER drown or approve of drowning kittens. I also had a major nervous breakdown every time I would be riding in the car with my uncle and he wouldn’t swerve for a dog.
However, even though I never accepted it, I never really hated people with different moral values either. The country was pretty poor and people’s lives were very rough. Drowning kittens might not seem so cruel when you’re struggling to feed five kids all of whom are having to start working at age of 12 to support the family. I think it’s all about various realities and perceptions. You don’t have to advocate certain moral values.However, you don’t have to hate those with opposing values either. You don’t know what life is like in their shoes.
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Touche. Sound arguments. Keep up the good spirit.
People who treat animals like humans are people who cannot cope with complexities of human relationships. People who think their cat gives them what they need for companionship are probably right, because they are so underdeveloped emotionally.
I’m always nervous around people who hold onto a superiority of being simply because they are human. Projection is a powerful human defense mechanism, Penelope. You know nothing about another’s experience.
Superb redistribution having absorbing records. You might want to successive to the present matter!?!