On August 31, 2007 my wife took me out for dinner at a Japanese steakhouse where I ate my last beefsteak — for a year, if not for the rest of my life. This occurred on the heels of a reasonably obnoxious George Dvorsky essay on why we should have all already given up eating meat and why meat-eaters are (George’s words) “bad people.” Dvorsky’s essay led to an interesting discussion about the merits of the case vs. his in-your-face rhetorical approach. I tend to think that there is a lot to be said for the former, and not much to be said for the latter.
On the subject of the former, I wrote:
I’ve written more than once on my belief that the world will one day be a meatless — although not necessarily vegetarian — place. I agree that it’s wrong to cause animals undue pain. I agree that our current industrialized livestock management practices are abhorrent. And, from a purely practical standpoint, I think we’ll have a much stronger moral footing with our AI descendants if they see us treating weaker / arguably inferior life forms with as much kindness as possible. In short, I think I’m just about ready to be persuaded that I should give up eating dead animals altogether.
On the subject of the latter, I wrote:
Here we have a world-class futurist taking an “I’m good; you’re bad: be like ME” approach that even the most backward fundamentalists dropped decades ago. You see a lot of this kind of thing among “progressive” thinkers when dealing with the great unwashed who haven’t yet achieved their level of enlightenment. (An example — for whatever reason, atheists seem particularly prone to these excesses when arguing against belief in God. This could be a reverse application of the old adage that “converts are the worst.” Which would also apply to George, I suppose, what with his five-year tenure as a morally superior being.)
But then Dvorsky fired back with what I think was a fairly sound defense of his approach:
Let’s imagine for a moment that I had written an article titled ‘Racists are bad people,’ or ‘Homophobes are bad people.’ Do you think I would have received the same kind of negative response? Hardly. Aside from a few anachronistic and unenlightened perspectives I’d get a slew of comments saying, ‘right on, brother.’
But the fact that I didn’t get these sorts of supportive comments, aside from a small minority, indicates to me that our transition to a mostly meat-free society is a process still in its infancy.
Years ago I remember reading a book by Isaac Asimov (one of his many collections of essays) in which — if I recall correctly — he provided answers to questions that he had never addressed before, or that wouldn’t have been a good fit for any of his other books. One of these questions was, “What lies beyond the universe?”
The idea that our universe sprang from one much like it puts me in mind of Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of 
