Is Meat Eating a Religion?

What is the role of motivated ignorance in what we believe?

I’m sure, like me, many of you have heard the expression “motivated reasoning” and seen discussion of its likely role in psychological defenses of meat-eating and other forms of participation in animal abuse by people who think they care about animals.

But, recently, I’ve seen a number of references to “motivated ignorance” and it seems in some ways to better express whatever it is that goes on in many people’s minds when they sit down to a steak.

Most of the references to this term I’ve been seeing don’t have anything to do with food, or animals, but are the latest psychological explanation offered by those who are horrified and unendingly perplexed as to why so many people are considering once again voting for Trump, in spite of the insurrection, the misogyny, Putin, the felonies, etc., etc., etc. It seems so mysterious that Trump voters just seem to be able to come up with reasons to ignore these things, whether it’s that they believe that they didn’t happen, or that they don’t matter, or, perhaps, that they somehow find it possible not to think about them at all.

Then, in thinking about such motivated ignorance when it comes to Trump, it started me also thinking about religion, and whether motivated ignorance plays a role in people’s devotion to their various theories regarding the origin of the universe and the purpose of life and the problem of death. Because, for a lot of people – probably most – religious beliefs aren’t really theories. They are convictions. Even, for some, certainties. The way I learned it during my (relatively benign) Catholic upbringing and it’s emphasis on “faith,” what I was being taught was, quite simply, truth, and if you declined to accept that, terrible, terrible things will happen.

And yet, it seems to be obvious that we just don’t know the answers to any of those questions. It is, I agree, very frustrating to be here on this obscure rock without any emotionally satisfactory explanations of how we got here and what we are supposed to do about it, but there you are. Even atheism, though it probably provides the most logical and scientific answers to these questions, doesn’t feel really certain, or, at least, satisfying. 

Thus enters motivated ignorance. Though our frustrating inability to answer these questions seems obvious, frequently we, as humans, ignore the obvious and, instead, just make stuff up. Essentially, we deliberately remain ignorant about our actual ignorance. But why?

Well, fear, of course. WE DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DIE. It’s essentially terrifying. Even without someone telling us about the threat of hellfire and brimstone, there is still a lot of motivation for maintaining ignorance about the fact that we just don’t know WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DIE and, instead, maintaining that we do know and we actually have some control over it.

But there are other motivations to share in these beliefs aside from fear. Clearly, the need for community – we are primates, after all – is another motivation bringing us together in organized manifestations of belief and divinely ordained rules for proper behavior. (“Everybody else, except some weirdos who no one likes, believes it, so I guess I should too.”)

Also, the desire for imagined superiority, which humans are pretty well known for, certainly seems to enter into it. (“We’re going to heaven and those folks over there aren’t because I have the answers and they don’t.”)

And, even if other thoughts do start to creep in at some point and we start to suspect that what we have been taught seems kind of unlikely and, let’s face it, incredibly archaic, the distaste for having been possibly wrong about something so important undoubtedly plays its part.

Ok, back to meat-eating. It’s all there, right? There are so many similar motivations to remain ignorant of what is happening to animals and that one is participating in it.

Fear? People are literally afraid that they will never enjoy food again and that they will be hated if they stop eating animals. But, perhaps more than that, people who aren’t actual psychopaths are afraid to face what we are doing to animals and having to feel the pain of that.

Need for community? This is a big one. It’s not just that you will eat different foods than your friends and family. I think the greatest problem with adopting ethical (not so much health) veganism is that it is an inherent criticism of others’ behavior. An inherent accusation that they are doing something really, really bad. People do not like that. We are afraid that it will immediately make us be seen as a self-righteous outsider. Our fear of this may be far greater than the reality – I honestly have found that hardly anyone really cares what I eat — but it’s there.

The need to see ourselves as superior? The completely inaccurate picture of vegans in popular media as weedy, unappealing and annoying (ok, occasionally we are annoying) no doubt springs from the desire to see meat eating as better in every way (this seems particularly strong among men).

Another enormous motivator is the natural distaste for having been wrong. This must be particularly strong when it means that one’s wrongness actually made one complicit in participating in such horror. In fact, the worse the horror is, the higher the motivation to believe that one wasn’t, and isn’t, part of it.

I actually assume that we all maintain a lot of motivated ignorance about all sorts of things all the time in order to remain sane. It’s probably a key function of human nature, and a lot of it is probably fine. If you want to believe in some theory about the origin of the universe and you aren’t trying to force it on everyone else or using it to hurt anyone, why not? Sometimes our motivations for maintaining ignorance are pretty legit. Whatever gets you through the night, right?

But sometimes, obviously, humans’ tendency for motivated ignorance causes a lot of harm. And it appears to be pretty tough to tackle. Trump is almost unbelievably falling apart and people still say he’s great and they are voting for him. Religions, even the craziest and most destructive ones, are, by and large, doing fine. Professed animal lovers who are happily and unnecessarily consuming animals who lived in misery and died in agony are everywhere.

But no, not really everywhere. Vegans exist, and they are, by and large, healthy, well-fed, not shunned (by most people), often attractive, and, while many do regret their years of meat eating, able to forgive themselves and move on. For that reason, I’m pretty sure that the more of us there are, the more of us there will be. And it might not even take that long. As Victor Hugo said, there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. And veganism’s moment is long past due.