Puritans are Boring

Gawker, which is rapidly moving up on my list of Blogs I Read Instead of Writing My Dissertation (on some days even topping Wonkette, which has somehow become less funny recently? Or perhaps I just prefer the pop-culture breadth of Gawker at the moment) recently had a post which was merely a title: Jonathan Safran Foer Was Right About Everything. Since I sincerely doubted that, I clicked the clicky and found another discussion of his recent book: How You All Should Think and Eat, about which there has been much chatter among the liberal twitterati. The point of the post was that those of us who have limited our consumption of meat to humanely raised, grass fed, $25.99/lb at Whole Foods meat are just fooling ourselves. Because only 1% of animals are raised and slaughtered this way (the argument ran) there will never be enough animals raised this way to satisfy the current demands for meat, therefore (it follows as the night the day) we should all be vegans.

I admit to being deeply conflicted about eating meat. And I am one of those self-deluding people who limits my meat consumption to the above-mentioned criteria, which means, since I make very little money, that I don't eat that much meat. I understand, and agree with, the arguments against eating meat, so I have no defense, really, just a liking for the occasional really rare steak.

Yet this is another example of generally agreeing with a left-y argument about something, but being deeply irritated by the people making it, all the same. Jonathan Pretentious Three Names Foer is exactly that kind of chunky-glasses-wearing, Brooklyn-brownstone-living, over-self-analyzing, postmodern-masculinist-writing, type of person that makes Real America hate the Left. As an added bonus, he is also the type of person who makes the Left hate the Left.

I fail to see why puritanism and self-righteousness on the Left are any more appealing than the same things on the Right, e.g.: "People shouldn't have premarital sex/eat meat. It's immoral and causes harm to people who do it and to the society as whole. Because people have sex/eat meat, the world is going to end, and it will be All Your Fault for having sex/eating meat. God/The Planet is displeased with you, and since I do not have sex/eat meat, I am better than you."

When someone from the Concerned Christian Women of America or whatever says something like the first phrases, Leftists line up en masse to point out that, in fact, people like sex, have sex, and are going to continue to have sex until Iran gets the bomb and blows us all to Kingdom Come. But when someone from Brooklyn or PETA say things along the line of the second, this is not seen as imposing an irrational worldview on others (as the CCWA ladies attempt to do) in order to placate a famously temperamental deity, but rather as rationally deduced moral precepts for the betterment of humanity.

And one more thing these two threads have in common: they are totally lacking a sense of humor about their own ideological position. Because this is SERIOUS, people, THE WORLD IS GOING TO END, chickenlittle * infinity.