Phyllis Rose, Tools of Torture
Gaston Havandjian Professor Hubbell English Comp I Essay Four 11/13/12 Human Nature: Another Tool For Torture? Driving your car to a dinner with friends you go by hundreds of advertisement slogans at the side of the road. Reading them seems to be a good way to entertain your mind with all those miles ahead and since you didn’t decide what are you going to order yet you think that maybe some of them will give you an idea. One of them captures your attention in a special way, it shows the image of a laughing sheep and below it says: “Meat is real food”. Eureka!
Now you have a guess of what your order will be, but as long as you keep thinking in this phrase you wonder what they meant with the word “real”. If they are stating such a thing it means that they also believe that there is other food that is not real or not as real as meat. A second thought crosses your mind when you remember a column you read in the newspaper a few days ago which was titled as followed: “Studies have found that the consumption of meat and animal products increase the development of chronic diseases including high blood pressure, diabetes, coronary heart disease, obesity, kidney failure, osteoporosis and cancer”.
What if the advertisement was aimed to convince us that meat is good for you when it’s actually not? What if after those studies were revealed the owners of the meat industry felt their businesses threatened and ignoring the facts are still poisoning our bodies and killing thousands of animals a day just for a profit? Vegetables, fruits and grains are not real enough and healthier perhaps? When you arrive to the restaurant you bring up the theme and one of your friends provides a fact which supports the studies credibility, and from your point of view, it gives the whole discussion a clear ending.
He tells you something you didn’t know, that health insurance companies offer discount rates to vegetarians and vegans. Every company’s goal is to make money. Insurance companies determine a person’s risk of death by analyzing his habits and based on these results they charge a fee. In today’s world, where money is more powerful than any religion, government or social institution, there is no better evidence than this to prove that the ingestion of meat is actually not good for humans. For hundreds of years we have been persuaded of the opposite and still are.
What about the people working in the slaughter houses, what would they do if they knew that the blood they spill every day is contributing to reduce our life expectation? Animals are not just being killed for food; they are also being used for the manufacture of products such as milk, cheese, eggs and many other more. Clothing, sport hunting and fishing, entertainment (Circuses, zoos and aquariums) and product experimentation are other examples of how animals are exploited for the “benefit” of man.
The conditions were these creatures live are detrimental. Cages and chains, metal and fire, artificial breeding and separation from their cubs, a life of captivity and a slow and painful death are just a few examples of how they live a life of torture and agony until the day they become a steak on your table or a coat to provide warmth. So, what moves a person to desire working in a place where killing becomes a routine and suffering and fear is perceived by every single sense?
Of course that making a living and the lack of jobs would be one of the reasonable answers, but there should be something else that pushes someone to do such terrible things to these innocent living beings unable to even defend or speak for themselves. Is it something ingrained in our “human nature” or perhaps external agents, such as institutions and industries, convince them that they are working for a great goal? In order to answer these questions we are going to use some ideas taken from a text written by Phyllis Rose titled “Tools of Torture”.
Rose published many books and contributes frequently to periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times Book Review. Rose situates us in an art gallery in Paris where an exhibition of medieval torture instruments takes place. The high number of different tools that she sees, and the many uses someone can give them, makes her think that “pain must be as great a challenge to the human imagination as pleasure” (Rose 175). This idea is reinforced after she shares her experience of a facial treatment in a dark booth of a beauty salon where she was exposed to ointments and electrodes.
By associating the electrodes with what happened in Algeria and the ointments with masks dipped in acid, she concludes that the aesthetician and the torturer share the same area of expertise; pain, and that “Should that loving attention to the body turn malevolent, you have torture. (Rose 177) The author believes that “The secret of torture, like the secret of French cuisine, is that nothing is unthinkable” (Rose 176) and to illustrate this she uses an analogy where a man is tortured with a wheel and a snail is baked in its own shell.
There are no limits in the world of torture and this fact may be a reason to believe that humans use their imaginary to accomplish the most horrifying things, but “torture didn’t come into existence to give vent to human sadism. It is not always private and perverse but sometimes social and institutional, vetted by the government and, of course, the Church” (Rose 177). Religions are probably the most influential institutions in our societies. They proclaim that the values and norms they promote are the only true and that not living according to them will bring a life of sin and shame and an afterlife of suffering and torture.
Even if we don’t believe in any religion we still live under their rules. Christianity for example, by introducing the Ten Commandments, offered the basis for establishing the moral and legal laws; the institution of marriage is also an exemplar of how we organize our societies based in biblical patterns. It is not the intention of this discussion to analyze if basing our lives according these doctrines is a force for good or not; what seems relevant here is that sometimes the most heinous and aberrant things are justified by uttering these words for the benefit of a certain group of people.
Usually the objective is to persuade a bigger group of people to work for their own causes convincing them that they are doing it for the common good, and the most effective tool to accomplish this seems to be manipulating people’s faith. If we take a look back about five hundred years ago we can see how the biggest genocide in the history of humanity was perpetrated in the name of god. The continent where we live today witnessed how the same people who came to these lands to convert the natives into Christianity broke every single of the rules they believed in.
The main goal of the promoters of this campaign was taking all the gold, silver and riches to Europe and stealing the land, but somehow they managed to make people believe that their true intention was to save the souls of the natives, considered as animals, by making them adopt the true and only religion because that was god’s command. Under these commands it is amazing to see how people can, among other things, “overcome their repugnance to the task of causing physical pain to other” (Rose 177).
Christianity also makes us believe that man is the ruler of this world and that all the other living creatures are at our service. The meat industry, in their many ways to legitimate their business, tries to persuade us that animals don’t feel pain and that ingesting their meat is good for us. In their efforts to keep selling their products they even have paid doctors and nutritionists supporting their cause.
With these powerful institutions favoring the supposed benefits of animal products there is no wonder why we keep using them in our diets with a blind conviction that they are good for us. This seems to be also the main reasons why the workers in the animal industry are able to do their jobs without remorse. Just as “there aren’t squads of sadists beating down the doors to the torture chambers begging for jobs” (Rose 177) there aren’t squads of animal murderers beating down the doors to the slaughter houses begging for jobs.
In hundreds of years of research there’s still no evidence that a human nature exists, and let alone that it coerces us to perform the most atrocious acts. The only thing we share as human beings are our human needs. No matter in which part of the world a person lives all he needs is food, water, air, a shelter and a social group where he feels valued and contented. It is in the interests of certain groups of the society to make us believe just the opposite even if it causes death, suffering and pain.
The more informed we are, the less vulnerable we are to their lies. The author believes that “If taking one’s goals too seriously is the danger, the best discouragement of torture may be a radical hedonism that denies that any goal is worth the mean, that refuses to allow the nobly abstract to seduce us from the sweetness of the concrete” (Rose 178). Hedonism is a school of thought that argues that pleasure is the only intrinsic good but what people finds pleasurable could be rather more personal than social.
This philosophy doesn’t seem to be the answer for the eradication of torture, war or a diet that brings disease and death since it pursues an arbitrary goal. The common goal is not actually a bad path to walk through; the problem appears when what it is believed to be as common is just the goal of a few. Make that goal the fulfilling of the needs of every person in this world and feed them also with the truth so they can make their own decisions and in a few years after that we could be looking into a much more optimistic panorama.
